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According to the latest research from cloud security provider Netskope, almost 44% of malware found in cloud apps have delivered ransomware, while almost 56% of malware-infected files in cloud apps are shared publicly.

The study, which appears in the company’s latest Netskope Cloud Report, found that the number of cloud apps keep going up in enterprises; 824 on average, up from 777 during the last quarter. Microsoft continues to beat Google as the most popular cloud app, with Microsoft productivity apps usurping Facebook from the number one spot, and Office 365, Outlook, and OneDrive beating their competitors in terms of session volume.

Elsewhere, productivity app Slack has entered the top 20 overall apps, while the company was also placed at the top spot in Forbes’ top 100 leading private cloud companies in 2016. Netskope notes that with the rise of such applications, the security element needs to be noted. “Security teams will need to prioritise this trend and pay close attention to sensitive information being shared within collaboration apps, and prioritise visibility into and control over the apps with which Slack is integrated and sharing data,” the press material notes.

Elsewhere, the research also notes that cloud storage apps dominate cloud data loss prevention (DLP) violations, accounting for 76.5% of them. Looking at the various industries, manufacturing-focused enterprises had the largest proportion of DLP violating files with 24%, followed by technology and IT services (15%), and healthcare and life sciences (11%). Not surprisingly, technology and IT featured the most cloud apps on average, with 855, followed by healthcare (836), retail and hospitality (787) and financial services (714).

“With the rise of ransomware, the cloud threat landscape is now increasingly complicated,” said Sanjay Beri, founder and CEO of Netskope. “IT teams need deeper intelligence, protection, and remediation that can help them stop malware and ransomware in their tracks and prevent them from spreading.”

The age of digital disruption is upon us, as the last decade alone has proven in terms of technology and disruption with the progression of organizations like Uber, Airbnb, and Netflix. We are also on the brink of new disruptions in industry, including banking or payments, insurance, healthcare, construction, packaging, and many more. These not only come from startups disrupting a sector, but companies being able to shift from their existing focus areas to build on new opportunities. They’re driven internally or by creating a new spinoff company into additional areas.

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By Mary McCoy

If you’re looking to capture additional monthly recurring revenue (MRR) by selling your backup and disaster recovery (BDR) solution to more clients, you have to understand the overall sales process and particularly, the discovery phase, which is meant to help you identify the best candidates for your BDR solution.

To identify those small and medium sized businesses with the highest probability of adopting your solution, begin by getting to know them. Uncover their needs by asking the following 10 questions.

Preliminary information

This first set of questions helps you establish a baseline regarding data management needs. Before you can begin qualifying, you need to know what kind of IT environment you’re working with. Are there any constraints? What’s the SMB’s attitude toward BDR solutions, and do they have a history of backing up data?

• What type of customer records are you storing? Examples: sales receipts/billing, contact information, private/confidential records
• How are you currently storing that data? Examples: physical copies, local laptop/desktop, local server, off-site storage 
• What regulations do you need to comply with? Examples: HIPAA, PCI DSS, SOX, HITECH
• What additional, non-customer related data are you storing on your machines? Examples: proprietary information/documentation, marketing materials, primary research, competitive data, vendor contracts

Gauge their disaster readiness

At this point in the sales conversation, you should begin asking questions to qualify the prospect. Getting the right answers is all about asking the right questions. What are the right answers? The ones that indicate whether or not the prospect is the right fit for your IT services. You want to weed out any unhealthy candidates that may stall your sales cycle or be «noisy,» unprofitable clients down the line. To do this, evaluate their level of disaster preparedness by asking questions that identify whether the prospect needs a business continuity solution. 

Often, these questions are ones prospects haven’t even thought to ask and trigger that «aha!» moment you’re looking for in order to close them into clients later.

• What problems have you faced in the past related to data loss or corruption? Asking this question gives you historical context that can help you judge a prospect’s disaster readiness. It introduces any problems you may be walking into if you sign the client, and helps you later cater your sales pitch or presentation toward real-life scenarios that the prospect can relate to.
• What percentage of your standard business operations would be impacted if your records/data were temporarily unavailable or deleted? Asking hypothetical questions like this is a useful MSP sales tactic. By asking this question, you should hope to have your prospect recognise the value of their data. At the same time, the answer they provide can help you judge whether the SMB has a need you can fill and is therefore worth pursuing.
• How long could you keep your business running without access to your data? Again, the benefit here is twofold. You get the qualifying answer in discovering if the SMB will benefit from your solution. And at the same time, you gain an opportunity to explain the typical, severe repercussions of prolongeddowntime after a disaster.
• What is your current plan for protecting the integrity and security of your data? Like the previous sales discovery question, this one helps you position your value proposition as your clients’ virtual CIO (vCIO). More often than not, the SMBs you talk to won’t have any kind of business continuity plan or disaster response procedure in place. They don’t have the time or in-house expertise to compile and manage such a framework. This is where you can really shine as their advisor. If the prospect has no business continuity plan, you can explain the reasons for developing one, walking them through the initial steps of creating and testing it. If the prospect has already implemented a disaster recovery (DR) plan, listen as they provide the details. Don’t discount prospects that claim they already have a DR plan. They may be mistaken, it may not be in use or it may require significant improvement that you can provide as their vCIO. 
• What are your top priorities as far as data backup and disaster recovery is concerned? This is a general catch-all to help you understand a prospect’s general mindset about the value of BDR and what they think you can provide. It’s also a more direct question that can help you determine whether a prospect has benefited from having a BDR solution in the past. Perhaps in expressing their priorities, the prospect expresses dissatisfaction with a competitive service. This not only gives you a leg up, but helps you tailor your proposal and eventual onboarding process to best serve the SMB. 

Steer the conversation back toward purchase intent

The best way to do this is to first ask the prospect what their previous purchases were and what the return was. Notice the subtle difference between asking «Are you interested in buying from me?» and this last, better question:

• What investments have you made in hardware/storage over the last four to five years? If the prospect has made recent investments in hardware or physical storage, this should signal to you that they likely understand the value of data integrity/security and are willing to make investments (such as cloud storage) to ensure that their data is safe. If they have not made recent investments in this area, the SMB likely needs your BDR services. Now, while this is also a favourable outcome, understand that they may need more convincing to see the overall value of your business continuity services. As a result, your sales cycle may be extended. 

When selling BDR, you have to get to know the prospect and their business needs first. Modern, client-centric sales involves talking with, not talking at, SMBs. The ten discovery questions shared in this post should help you start that dialogue, pinpoint worthwhile, high-close prospects and move them further along through the MSP sales journey. Once you know who to target your sales presentation and proposal to, you’ll have all of the necessary information to personalise your offering to their individual needs.

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Microsoft has announced its UK data centres are open for business for both Azure and Office 365, with the Ministry of Defence (MoD) and the South London & Maudsley NHS Trust among the first customers.

The move was first mooted in November last year, alongside expansions in the Netherlands and Ireland. At the time Microsoft promised the UK regions, in London, Durham, and Cardiff, would arrive by late 2016, so is bang on time in that regard.

“Today, we’ve taken a significant step forward to empower businesses to achieve more with the first complete cloud offering delivered from a global provider within the UK,” Takeshi Numoto, Microsoft cloud and enterprise corporate vice president wrote in a blog post announcing the launch.   

Mike Stone, chief digital and information officer at the MoD, said in a statement: “Microsoft’s secure and transparent cloud service in the UK fits perfectly with the MoD’s digital transformation agenda. This agreement, which is based on Microsoft’s world class reliability and performance, will allow us to deliver cost-effective, modern and flexible information capabilities.

“It will ensure we are better placed in our ever-changing, digital-first world.”

The launch takes the number of data centre regions up to 28, with six more being promised. Microsoft is naturally touting this as the highest among its cloudy competitors, although it can be a question of semantics. Google has 15 global locations for its data centres, with Belgium, Finland, Ireland, and the Netherlands as its European centres, while Amazon Web Services (AWS) has 13 locations with four in the pipeline, but 35 ‘availability zones’ – data centres within those locations.

AWS is also putting together a UK data centre zone of its own, confirming at its AWS Summit in July that the Brexit EU referendum vote will not affect the company’s plans.

According to the most recent cloud infrastructure figures from Synergy Research, Microsoft continues to grow more quickly than AWS, albeit with just over 10% market share compared to more than 30% for AWS. The four main players – AWS, Microsoft, IBM and Google – are growing faster than their smaller competitors and between them own more than half of the global market.

Read more: AWS vs Azure: IT pros weigh the pros and cons

Companies are migrating infrastructure to the cloud in order to achieve advantages and agility that they need to remain competitive. However, they may have difficulty achieving one extremely important benefit of cloud computing as they attempt to run their MySQL databases in the cloud – scalability in true utility fashion. Similar to the power utilities we are all familiar with, this entails the ability to get what you need, when you need it and pay for only what you use, even during peak demand.

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When it comes to infrastructure as a service (IaaS), some organisations struggle between the choice of Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services. They’re both solid IaaS platforms that give organisations access to vast computing resources around the world, but deciding which one is best for you depends on many factors.

At a quick glance, both offerings might look similar on paper, but there are key differences between them that you might not discover until you try them out or talk to someone who has. Luckily, IT pro users of both platforms have been vocal about their preferences and the pros and cons of each.

What sets AWS and Azure apart?

While AWS was the first major player in the cloud computing game, IT pros generally agree Azure has largely closed the gap. However, it’s still a commonly-held belief that AWS maintains a lead for organisations that need to run “web scale” applications that support a lot of users. Famously, popular services such as Netflix and Airbnb use AWS EC2 to provide their services to their customers across the globe.

On the other hand, many IT pros say Azure is easier to use out-of-the-box and more user-friendly, especially for Windows admins in smaller organisations that use cloud servers to replace their local machines and don’t need to host highly scalable apps. And the ease of setup and integration of Azure virtual machines with other Microsoft products makes the transition to cloud infrastructure smoother for many.

That said, both providers continually improve their offerings, adding new capabilities and lowering prices all the time, so comparing one versus the other is somewhat of a moving target. So to get the latest on AWS vs Azure, we talked to IT professionals in Spiceworks, who ultimately set up and manage IaaS cloud services, to share the merits of each platform and their opinions on the Microsoft and Amazon IaaS offerings. Here’s what they had to say.

Cost: Both providers offer a variety of differently-sized instances at relatively comparable price points to fit the needs of organisations of all sizes. Azure instances each include a fixed amount of storage, but with AWS, you’ll need to purchase storage separately at an additional cost. That said, many IT pros agree that AWS storage is highly customisable to their needs which is a plus, but the pricing is not as straightforward as Azure.

Costs on both platforms vary depending on the performance, capacity, amount of data you need to transfer, and whether you need advanced features such as load balancing and auto-scaling. How often you use your cloud instances also figures into cost, with one big pricing difference between Azure and AWS being that Microsoft charges for usage by rounding up to the nearest minute, while Amazon rounds up to the nearest hour.

Support Plans: Microsoft and Amazon both offer different levels of tech support depending on how quickly you need issues resolved and if you need a dedicated account manager or tech support for integrations with third-party plugins if something goes wrong. One big difference is that Azure support plans are billed using a flat monthly fee, but AWS support fees vary on a sliding scale tied to monthly usage, so support costs can grow quickly if you are a very heavy user.

Reliability and uptime: Both Azure and AWS strive for greater than 99.95% service availability, with each provider giving credit back to customers if uptime drops below that figure. While both services have been reliable, both have experienced periodic outages that affected popular services like Netflix, Office 365, and more.

Setup and user-friendliness: Azure is known for being convenient for Windows admins because they don’t have to learn a new platform. Azure also makes it simple to integrate on-premises Windows servers with cloud instances to create a hybrid cloud environment. Additionally, Azure instances work seamlessly with Microsoft cloud services such as Azure Active Directory and Azure SQL Database.

On the other hand, AWS is known for providing a more highly configurable, feature-rich offering that has a bit of an initial learning curve. However, once you learn the platform, IT pros agree that AWS offers a lot of power, flexibility, and room for customisation with support for a huge number of third party integrations. Additionally, if you aren’t a heavy Windows Server user, AWS is known for being a great platform for hosting Linux instances.

Making the choice between AWS and Azure

Decidingwhich cloud provider is right for you all comes down to your needs. Perhaps the best way to figure out which one you prefer is to start a free trial with both providers to experience what each platform is like hands-on.

And if the cost of using IaaS is a big concern, you can use cloud calculators online that can help estimate how much you’ll spend on IaaS each month so you know what you’re getting into. Additionally, cloud cost monitoring tools can help track your actual IaaS usage and alert you if cloud costs are getting out of control so you can better regulate your monthly spending.

In the end, IT professionals generally agree that Azure or AWS are both great choices for IaaS providers. Now it’s up to you to figure out which works best for your organisation.

Editor’s note: The verdicts were an aggregate of 160 IT professionals’ opinions on Azure and AWS taken from product reviews within Spiceworks.

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A new survey from memory and storage providers Crucial argues almost half (47%) of IT professionals are planning to upgrade their server memory in the next 12 months as virtualisation workloads bite.

Given who is providing the survey data, the results aren’t exactly a surprise. But some of the statistics are illuminating.

Taking its findings from 350 IT decision makers in the US and central Europe, on average IT professionals are running 29 virtual machines per physical server. Yet – and here’s the rub – if they needed to run more virtual machines, two thirds (66%0 would need to add more memory, compared to 42% who would need more servers.

Almost three quarters (73%) of IT managers are using at least 64 gigabytes for big data and analytics applications in their organisation, the most of anyone surveyed. More than half said similarly for databases (58%), content hosting (55%), email (55%), file sharing (51%), and content creation (50%). Going up to the next step of 128GB, the trends are broadly the same. Again, big data and analytics topped the list (44%), ahead of email (33%), databases (32%), and file sharing (31%).

Around half (48%) of respondents said unexpected issues, such as unpredictable workload demands or rapid user base growth, is one of the biggest challenges they face when dealing with server workload constraints.

Michael Moreland, worldwide product manager at Crucial, argues the need for future-proofing when it comes to workloads. “It’s possible for IT professionals to get the most out of their IT budget by identifying high growth, business critical applications and then installing future-proofed 32GB modules to deliver optimal quality of server and scalability at a typically lower price than that of multiple lower-density modules,” he said.

“By installing enough memory, IT professionals can deliver optimal quality of service today and for the foreseeable future. Server memory is a long-term investment that’s never just about the here and now, it’s about predicting future workloads,” he added.

If you want to find out more, Crucial has put together an infographic around the issues surrounding memory and virtualised apps, which can be found here.

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Cloud services platform provider Interoute has launched a new virtual data centre zone in Stockholm, following the launch of similar zones in Istanbul and Singapore earlier this year.

The move represents the “growing regional demand for fast local cloud services” in the Nordics, with Interoute already employing 100 workers in the region with offices in Copenhagen, Gothenburg, Helsinki, Oslo and Stockholm.

One Interoute customer looking to reap the benefits of better and quicker access to data is Stockholm-based medial application services provider MedSciNet. Andrius Preibys, MedSciNet CTO, explained how having a data centre in Stockholm ensures performance with compliance. “Our online software as a service allows customers to access their data in real-time, and begin data analytics almost immediately after the last patient has been included”, said Preibys. “Therefore, control over data and where it is located is critical to us for compliance purposes.”

With the new Stockholm build, Interoute currently has 17 virtual data centres across three continents; two in Asia (Hong Kong and Singapore), two in North America (Los Angeles and New York) and the remainder in Europe. Speaking to this reporter at the Cloud and DevOps World Forum in June, Interoute CTO Matthew Finnie discussed the reasons for moving to Istanbul and Singapore in particular.

“We’ve got lots of bigger customers who are European based, but global – a lot of them will have an Asian presence,” said Finnie. “They’ll want to run services natively in a region, and so [the move] is to support that, but also we’ve now got a model on this digital platform approach that will combine network and cloud, and those are very portable. It’s much lighter in terms of putting a full service set into a region.”