«We are an outsourcing company, offering sysadmin and DevOps services mostly for managed service providers, cloud providers and hosting providers,» stated Nikola Trajkovic, Business Development Manager at SuperAdmins, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at 18th Cloud Expo, held June 7-9, 2016, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY.

read more

Human interaction has long been altered by the introduction of new technology. In the world of today those alterations have been rapidly accelerated by technology that incubates the creation of new and innovative applications that interconnect people. Specifically, properly secured cloud technology that can leverage mobile devices has allowed for inventors and innovators alike to permeate their ideas into everyday human technology at a faster rate than can be seen anywhere in history.

read more

(c)iStock.com/Keith Kiska

The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) has issued a series of guidelines on how financial firms can migrate to the cloud and provisionally giving the green light to them.

“We see no fundamental reason why cloud services (including public cloud services) cannot be implemented, with appropriate consideration, in a manner that complies with our rules,” the report notes.

The authority notes that they have successfully supported many firms to use cloud and other IT service solutions, yet the updated guidelines come after concern from organisations over how the term ‘cloud’ should be defined and how it applies to them, as well as operational and supply chain risks.

The FCA insists firms need to review the contract with their outsourcing provider to ensure it meets their standards; in terms of regulations, organisations need to ensure their operational risk is not worsened by cloud migration, as well as identifying all service providers in the supply chain and ensuring compliance through all those steps. The finalised guidance insists that it is keeping in line with these guidelines despite concerns over the supply chain being ‘impractical’ and ‘unduly burdensome’.

Regarding data security, the FCA argues firms should agree a data residency policy with their chosen provider, understand the provider’s data loss and breach processes, as well as comply with the eight principles of the Data Protection Act (DPA). Similarly, the importance of continuity planning – “appropriate arrangements to ensure that it can continue to function and meet its regulatory obligations in the event of an unforeseen interruption of the outsourced services” – and an exit strategy were also highly emphasised.

Alongside this, the FCA insists the report, which can be viewed in full here (via FinExtra), should not be read in isolation – citing the Prudential Regulation Authority (PRA) as another important body – nor is exhaustive. “We expect firms to take note of the guidance and, where appropriate, use it to inform their systems and controls on outsourcing,” the report notes.

While industries such as finance, healthcare and manufacturing have been traditional laggards in moving to the cloud, this view, backed up by the FCA paper, is changing. Tony Connor of Datapipe, writing for this publication back in March, argued the shifting view on cloud security but insisted trust was key. “With a trusted partner and careful planning, even the most complex IT ecosystems in a financial institution can be moved to the cloud and start reaping its numerous benefits,” he wrote.

(c)iStock.com/Leslie Achtymichuk

Beware of the fast-talking salesperson with the “simple” solutions. If you’re being told that the solution to your business problems is as easy as 1-2-3, there’s a good chance it’s not. That common principle applies to most tech products, and a Customer Relationship Management tool (CRM) is no exception.

While the cloud has standardised software use by removing what is often the most complicated part of the process — the installation on the server – this doesn’t mean that everything is just ready to go. Definitely not for a CRM.

How much do you know about using a CRM? A lot of people are discouraged because they think a CRM is too difficult to use and deploy. We thought we’d set the record straight. Here are 3 common pitfalls of CRM deployment and how you can avoid them.

Failing to plan your deployment

CRM applications are even more affordable these days, thanks in large part to the SaaS model and the price drop in cloud infrastructure. But that doesn’t mean you should just run out and buy one without having a good plan in place.

Before you start to analyse which CRM you want, you should ask yourself some basic questions:

• What do we want to improve in our customer’s journey?
• Who will be using the tool and what are they going to be using it for?
• Is this strictly for sales or will we extend it to marketing, customer service and/or stock management capabilities?

By developing a clear vision about why you need a CRM, how it will help your sales processes and who will be the active users of the platform, you’ll have all the information in hand to start analyzing the different CRM solutions on the market. Don’t be surprised — or overwhelmed — there are a lots of applications out there. You just have to choose the one that best suits your needs.

Not customising your CRM for your business

As we already mentioned, beware of the easy route. Do you think your business is unique? Does it have its own value proposition, its own mission statement?

If you answered no to these questions, you have a problem. And believe us, you won’t solve it by using a CRM. But just as your business has its own mission and values, it also has its own way of doing things. You know why your company is unique and how your business is different from your next door neighbor’s or even your biggest competitor.

Before your users can even begin to use your CRM instance, you should customize the data entry fields for your accounts, contacts, leads and opportunities to reflect the information you really want to capture.

You should also take a look at your various processes: from taking a lead to an opportunity and then to a paying customer. How do those processes play out? How can you make your CRM adapt to your organization’s sales cycle?

There are several ways to approach this.

First off is the do it yourself method. Going this route implies you’re a technically-savvy individual with some prior knowledge of the CRM tool you’re using and that you can develop around it. If this isn’t the case, you might find yourself investing a lot of time in a project that produces disappointing results.

Another option is to bring in a CRM integrator. These are experts who will be able to bend the actual CRM platform to fit your exact needs. You’ll get the results you envisioned, and your fully customised CRM will fit your business needs. On the downside, the deployment costs could escalate quickly. CRM Integrators usually charge by the hour and it’s often difficult to accurately predict the time needed to customize your CRM.

And finally, there’s what we’ll call semi-automated deployment. What does this mean? In this case, a tool is used to configure your CRM to fit your needs. It requires very little human involvement and the result is a CRM instance that answers all your organisation’s needs.

Here’s a concrete example. At SherWeb, we sell Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online. To help our customers get started as soon as possible, we offer the RapidStart CRM deployment package as an add-on. This means that, for a fixed cost, our customers can get a customized environment in a short time. We work with them to make sure everything is deployed to fit their needs and that customer data is imported to the CRM instance. This ensures their team is ready to get to work on day one.

Not training staff to use the platform

Another common pitfall: users rarely get the necessary training. Here, it’s not only about power users. Trainings should be done accordingly to the user’s specific role and how he will use the CRM tool.

There’s no need to show a user features that he won’t have the rights or permission to use. It’ll just create more confusion. On the other hand, if you don’t do a deep-dive training with power users, they’ll be left guessing how CRM works and more importantly, what your company’s CRM processes are.

And this is an important point. As much as technical/practical training is needed to succeed in CRM, the pitfalls we’ve covered in this article cannot be resolved if your organization doesn’t provide your staff information about how you want to handle processes such as creating a lead, closing an opportunity, etc.

These are business processes, and they’re unique to every organisation. Make sure you communicate them clearly. This will improve the adoption rate of your CRM with your staff and ensure a successful CRM deployment.

We understand that deploying a CRM is a big business decision. But it’s one that will help your organization reap amazing benefits… provided it’s done properly.

The post 3 Common Pitfalls of a CRM Deployment appeared first on SherWeb.

In the world of DevOps there are ‘known good practices’ – aka ‘patterns’ – and ‘known bad practices’ – aka ‘anti-patterns.’ Many of these patterns and anti-patterns have been developed from real world experience, especially by the early adopters of DevOps theory; but many are more feasible in theory than in practice, especially for more recent entrants to the DevOps scene.
In this power panel at @DevOpsSummit at 18th Cloud Expo, moderated by DevOps Conference Chair Andi Mann, panelists discussed the patterns and anti-patterns of DevOps, and what it means to ‘do the right thing’ in a DevOps way, but in the real world.

read more

«There’s a growing demand from users for things to be faster. When you think about all the transactions or interactions users will have with your product and everything that is between those transactions and interactions – what drives us at Catchpoint Systems is the idea to measure that and to analyze it,» explained Leo Vasiliou, Director of Web Performance Engineering at Catchpoint Systems, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at 18th Cloud Expo, held June 7-9, 2016, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY.

read more

Basho Technologies has announced the latest release of Basho Riak TS, version 1.3. Riak TS is an enterprise-grade NoSQL database optimized for Internet of Things (IoT). The open source version enables developers to download the software for free and use it in production as well as make contributions to the code and develop applications around Riak TS. Enhancements to Riak TS make it quick, easy and cost-effective to spin up an instance to test new ideas and build IoT applications. In addition to making Riak TS available as open source software, version 1.3 expands support for SQL commands, enhances API support and provides support for shell commands. Riak TS Enterprise 1.3 also includes Multi-cluster Replication.

read more