Prior to launching a recurring revenue initiative, it’s best to take a step back and assess areas of the business to ensure you’re ready for implementation. If you want the competitive advantage, you have to give your customers what they want, when they want it, the way they want it. Successfully delivering a customer experience that meet those expectations challenges your business capabilities, from customer engagement to security and compliance.
A successful recurring revenue setup requires proficiency in a set of core business and operational capabilities, including: customer engagement, responsiveness, service delivery, customer service, invoice and payment, scalability, channel management, analytics, and agility. And because data fragmentation can be amplified by the scale and pace of recurring revenue, compliance and security concerns should be identified and mitigated early in the initiative.

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Disaster recovery – the IT industry’s latest buzz words. Although a popular subject, many of the articles out there are not providing accurate or enough information to demystify the concept. How does one explain disaster recovery to a SMB owner or an organisation’s president without confusing them more than clarifying? Or without boring the hell out of them? Here’s my attempt.

First, there are a few terms you’ll need to acquaint yourself with. Like RTO and RPO. Common slang for us IT experts, but nonsense to non IT professionals.

RTO: Recovery time objective. Simply put: how much time between the moment of the disaster and the time users can work again?

RPO: Recovery point objective. How far back in time are you willing to go in case of a disaster? How much work and/or transactions can be lost without hindering business continuity?

Both of these are counted in minutes, hours or days, and are directly related to the criticality of your IT processes and data. The lower the number is for RTO and RPO, the higher the cost will be for a disaster recovery solution.

Usually, it’s mostly core business applications and data that are included in the scope of a disaster recovery plan. If you think about it, what data is your business dealing with that is not business critical? Usually most of it is, but because disaster recovery can get pricey, some organizations choose to only include a certain percentage of their data in the plan. This, of course, means that you won’t access the data you didn’t include in the plan should a disaster occur.

Before I paint you a broader picture, here are other important terms you should know. Here are the 3 types of recovery sites. An important thought to keep in mind: there is not wrong or right here. The key is to find a disaster recovery plan that meets your organization’s specific needs.

Cold site: A cold site is a datacenter with sleeping servers (virtual or physical) where regular offsite backups can be restored to the sleeping servers. For example, backups for mission critical systems could be done every six hours. This is the most affordable and common type of disaster recovery for SMBs. Usually this scheme is chosen for longer RTO/RPO values.

Warm site: Warm sites require better infrastructure, but they can bring down RTO and RPO to minutes. It all depends on internet link speed, latency, etc. Because they require active licenses, warm sites have about the same total cost of ownership as the original datacenter they are duplicating. Sometimes, they can even cost a little more because of the costs for synchronizing tools for servers and data.

Geographically dispersed high availability: This type of site offers almost instant backups of the duplicated environment in real-time. It is achieved through applicative and network load balancing, and requires advanced Domain Name System (DNS) servers management process.

Cold and warm sites have been the most common disaster recovery options for larger corporations as their data processing defines their business continuity capabilities. Nowadays, the widespread adoption of cloud services allows eased implementation and cost reduction like never before.

Most companies now use virtual servers to handle their daily computing requirements. Virtual server infrastructures are inherently more resilient and easier to replicate across internet and WAN links. Cloud hosting providers can help companies setup a warm site with reduced capabilities through a synchronization procedure that respects the target RPO/TRO. 

One the main features of a cloud infrastructure is elasticity. This means that in the advent of a disaster, one simply allocates the required resources to the synchronized servers and move the operations to the cloud hosted infrastructure. This type of set up wasn’t possible before the advent of public clouds from reputable cloud hosting providers like Amazon or SherWeb.

Of course, these setups still require planning and the expertise of IT architects/business specialists to address the specificities of each company. These experts can assess with accuracy the companies’ mission critical needs and thus evaluate feasibility to properly set the requirements of a disaster recovery plan. Cloud technology has made disaster recovery solutions within reach of most SMBs that rely on IT to thrive.

The post Disaster Recovery in a Nutshell: How Does It Work? appeared first on SherWeb.

An IPO and a billion dollar valuation sounds like your company made it. Trust me, building a company from scratch and eventually selling it for a good deal of money, feels great. However, it also changes the game completely. We became a public company and after successfully growing and evolving our vision for how we could best continue to reshape the future of application performance, we decided to come full-circle and become private again. The experience we created with ruxit was a key driver for this decision. Here is why.

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On a recent flight home after meeting with a large bank, I started reflecting on how the conversations about cloud computing with clients have changed over the last 12 to 24 months. In 2012 and 2013, a lot of the conversations where focused on “what is cloud computing,” “help us build a cloud strategy” or “how do we automate our infrastructure.” As we near the end of 2014 these conversations have changed drastically.

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For capabilities that are not a core competency of an enterprise, today’s IT teams are hard pressed to justify why the needs of the business could not be met with a leading SaaS solution.

Here’s the truth.

Check out my latest whitepaper that I coauthored for Bulger Partners.

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2015 is being billed by many in the industry as the “Year of the Hybrid Cloud.” In fact, more than 65 percent of enterprise IT organizations will commit to hybrid cloud technologies before 2016, vastly driving the rate and pace of change in IT organizations, according to IDC FutureScape for Cloud. The reason hybrid cloud is so attractive is that organizations believe they can achieve greater levels of scalability and cost-effectiveness by using a combination of in-house IT resources and public cloud environments tailored to their unique needs.

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Users of Dropbox can take advantage of 100GB of free OneDrive cloud storage though a Microsoft promotional deal.

This latest storage giveaway from Microsoft appears available for all, unlike the US-only Bing Rewards scheme announced earlier in February. Yet it’s an interesting play to get more users to sign up for OneDrive, which is already free and unlimited to Office 365 subscribers.

Dropbox users can verify they have an account by saving a PDF file entitled “Get Started With OneDrive” into their Dropbox folder.

The partnership between Dropbox and Microsoft, first announced in November, has been interesting to say the least. At the time, Dropbox’s perceived weaknesses in enterprise and mobile was addressed by moving in with Microsoft and gaining greater ground on Windows Mobile, with an updated version released earlier in February.

Previous announcements from either vendor were all relatively equal, yet this release certainly gives more power to Microsoft, which over the past 12 months has been ramping up access to OneDrive. It’s clearly part of CEO Satya Nadella’s strategy to give cloud storage to as many users as possible; as he put it in March 2014 when unveiling Office 365 for iPads: “Cloud that is not connected to devices is latent potential. A device which is not connected to the cloud just cannot complete the scenarios.”

The typical mindset, when comparing companies such as Microsoft handing out cloud storage like confetti, is to compare against the likes of Dropbox and Box, traditional standalone storage vendors. This isn’t the case now, of course, as Box has a litany of collaboration tools up its sleeve – Aaron Levie, the Box CEO, went as far to note that increasingly commoditised storage benefits his company’s infrastructure costs, calling it “one of the misunderstood dynamics” of his business.

The offer is limited to the first 10 million Dropbox users, and can be found here.

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Slowly but surely, capital markets and investment companies are clearly understanding the benefits of cloud computing, with infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and data management as the most popular options.

That’s the verdict of a report from TABB Group, based on data from 66 buy-side and sell-side firms. The adoption figures are relatively low – only 23% of companies questioned say they’re comfortable using the public cloud, while two thirds said security concerns such as compliance, security and data control  worried them – yet six in 10 firms polled said they plan to increase spending on public cloud over the next 12 months.

Data management (23%) was most frequently cited by respondents as a key use case, followed by analytics (14%), algorithm development (14%) and regulatory reporting (8%).

Shagun Bali, TABB research analyst and author of the report ‘Public Cloud for Capital Markets: Trends and Uptake’, argues the report’s findings are a step in the right direction, if not a total paradigm shift.

“Although the market at large is still not ready to leverage the public cloud for mission-critical operations and proprietary data it considers competitive differentiators, institutions have opened up to the greater possibility of utilising the cloud to maintain commoditised operations in a cost-effective and timely manner,” she said.

The investment market is an interesting one – it can be put in a similar category to the legal profession, healthcare and financial institutions. All data sets are equal, but some are more equal than others; and it’s these professions which need to be a little more risk averse regarding where their data sits.

A January study from investment firm Piper Jaffray found general dissatisfaction among CIOs with their public cloud solutions, with Google taking the brunt of the criticism. 35% of those polled said security fears of public cloud was the primary reason for keeping data on-premise.

The full report, which will set you back $3,000, can be found here.

When implementing a cloud-based file-sharing solution, the user experience will play a major role in its adoption and overall success. It will be important for you to gather input from your employees and customers and regularly collect feedback to identify ways to better meet their needs.
Here are some questions to ask before implementing a cloud-based file-sharing solution.

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The cloud is now a fact of life but generating recurring revenues that are driven by solutions and services on a consumption model have been hard to implement, until now.
In their session at 16th Cloud Expo, Ermanno Bonifazi, CEO & Founder of Solgenia, and Ian Khan, Global Strategic Positioning & Brand Manager at Solgenia, will discuss how a top European telco has leveraged the innovative recurring revenue generating capability of the consumption cloud to enable a unique cloud monetization model to drive results.

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