What Businesses are looking for in Their Website (and Hosting Provider)


According to Frost & Sullivan’s September 2012 report “Australian Infrastructure as a Service Market (IaaS)”, many organizations see beyond the initial cost savings of cloud-based solutions and are attracted by the promised increased agility and scalability that adoption offers.

However despite the benefits of cloud, many IT departments are still reluctant to move with common barriers including perceived loss of control, data sovereignty and security concerns when they move their workload and infrastructure to cloud. This explains why for those with concerns, hosting of non-critical systems is the common testing ground in the search for the right cloud computing strategy.

Cloud hosting services offers full remote access to the virtual machine (VM) in much the same way as the physical server. Some cloud hosting services also allow on the fly configuration of resources, such as RAM and CPU resources, to match variations in the activity of the website or VM. Just to be clear, this may require a couple of minutes of reboot time of the VM for the new configuration to kick in. Businesses that run business-critical systems like online retailing would do well to bear this in mind.

Many companies that have pre-existing systems they want to move into a cloud based hosting environment wish it were possible to convert their hardware-based server into a virtual machine and host this VM out in the cloud. The hope is to be able to keep all essential fancy configurations and permission settings as the VM gets migrated into the cloud. In reality this doesn’t always happen for a number of reasons, security settings being one of them.  

For businesses using a content management system (CMS) for their websites, migration to cloud-based hosting is relatively simple. Hosting providers have ready-made packages of the most common CMSs and it’s just a matter of choosing from one of these. After importing a backup from the current system, including the database, the SMB will have a copy of the website up and running within hours of the migration. After making a final backup of the old database and restoring it to the new CMS, all that needs to be done is to make changes to the DNS so that the domain now points to the new website. The final step is to put a simple redirect on the old website to catch visitors whose DNS records may be cached and still have the old site settings.

It can sound very technical and complicated. In reality, website administrators and web hosters use a control panel to automate a lot of these processes. In web hosting a control panel is a web-based user interface provided by the hosting company that allows users to manage their various hosted services in a single place.

One such control panel is Parallels Plesk Panel which allows a server administrator to set up new websites, reseller accounts, e-mail accounts, and DNS entries through a web-based interface. The administrator can create client and site templates, which predetermine resource-allocation parameters for the domains and clients.

The recently released Parallels Plesk Panel 11 features 80 improvements that give users more control over their sites. With Parallels Web Presence Builder add-on, Plesk directly addresses SMB needs for social media integration with faster website performance, in dedicated or virtualized environments.

The 2012 Web Server Survey by Netcraft found NGINX to be the third most widely used web server across all domains (11.53% of surveyed sites) and the second most widely used web server for all “active” sites (12.31% of surveyed sites).

With the combination of NGINX and Parallels Plesk Panel 11, users can automatically install and configure an NGINX web proxy in front of a standard Apache web server. This configuration will speed up delivery of clients’ website contents and result in faster and more predictable performance by offloading concurrency and latency processing from Apache to NGINX.

For website owners, whether SMBs and large enterprise, the benefits of fast and predictable performance can translate to higher customer satisfaction and the much sought after stickiness.

Cloud is rapidly becoming the delivery model of choice for many companies. With significant upfront savings and low or zero maintenance costs, the commercial case for any business to adopt cloud is strong. Cloud computing gives every business, particularly SMBs, access to computing resources, including applications and services, previously only available to large enterprises.

With Parallels Plesk control panel the administration of any website has never been easier, more affordable and manageable. At the end of the day, this is what all business owners want of their website. 


Anthony Banek
CEO for OzHosting.com

 

Basware Launches Enhanced Mobile App for Purchase-to-Pay

Basware, a provider of e-invoicing and purchase-to-pay solutions, has today announced the availability of Basware Mobile 1.2, bringing the processing of purchase requisitions into its native apps for iOS and Android powered smartphones and tablets.

As workers become increasingly mobile and accustomed to social collaboration, employees expect to be able to access and interact with core business processes and data on the move in order to maximize productivity. Basware Mobile 1.2 delivers a comprehensive purchase-to-pay mobile application to enable users to review, approve and reject invoices and purchase requisitions while on the move. Basware helps businesses further speed up the review and approval cycles of invoice and requisition processing, through the full automation of procurement and accounts payable processes, coupled with the delivery of anywhere, anytime access to processes and data through browser, tablet and smartphone apps.

On 29th February 2012, Basware launched Alusta, a cloud-based platform for business-to-business transaction collaboration. Basware Mobile 1.2 is an enhancement to the mobility function of Alusta, adding purchase requisitions to invoices already supported within in the mobile app. Basware Mobile is fully optimized for all smartphone and tablet devices including mobile web, Android and iOS platforms. It is also designed to allow social collaboration in an enterprise solution.


Code 42 Software Expands Endpoint Backup Solutions Ease-of-Use

Code 42 Software Inc., developers of cloud-based endpoint backup solutions for consumers, businesses and the enterprise, today announced at Cloud Expo West 2012 expanded capabilities for its entire family of CrashPlan endpoint backup solutions. This new version of CrashPlan expands the company’s recognized dedication to ease-of-use by both end users and data backup administrators, and provides powerful new enterprise functionality for managing private clouds.

“Code 42 is committed to giving enterprise administrators the private cloud management capabilities they demand,” said Matthew Dornquast, chief executive officer, Code 42 Software. “Our new functionalities make our solution unique and give admins what we believe is the best private cloud management solution on the market today. In addition, a key differentiator of all our CrashPlan offerings is our ability to support a variety of platforms – Mac or Windows, Linux or Solaris. We give users the powerful, trusted backup solutions they need, on the platforms they want to use; and Windows 8 upgraders will be happy to know that CrashPlan is already fully compatible.”

Available today are a variety of additional capabilities for Code 42’s enterprise solution CrashPlan PROe which extend the solution’s ease-of-use for administrators, such as:

  • Single-point upgrades of private clouds – With this new version
    comes automatic upgrade functionality for storage servers, which makes
    managing private clouds easier and less time-consuming. Once all
    servers are individually upgraded to the current version,
    administrators can upgrade their entire private cloud with a
    single-point upgrade for future releases.
  • Support for Security Assertion Markup Language 2.0 (SAML 2.0) –
    This version of the SAML
    OASIS
    standard for exchanging authentication
    and authorization
    data between security
    domains enables web-based authentication and authorization
    scenarios including single
    sign-on (SSO). Organizations utilizing SAML 2.0-based SSO
    technologies (such as Shibboleth) can now integrate CrashPlan PROe
    with those systems, which simplifies the authentication process by
    delegating all authorization to the organization’s identity provider.

CrashPlan PROe is lauded by global organizations such as Google, Adobe, Netflix, LinkedIn and Salesforce.com for its reliability, performance and invisible nature. In addition to its new capabilities, PROe gives the enterprise:

  • Continuous, silent backup – Works quietly, continuously in the
    background to unobtrusively protect data according to admin or user
    settings.
  • Self-service restore – When a restore is required, users can
    initiate it themselves – with only a few clicks – and without needing
    IT intervention.
  • End-to-end security – Encrypts data on the device and again
    during transit, and keeps it encrypted during data storage.
  • Flexible data storage options – Offers both public and private
    cloud data storage across multiple physical locations via a hybrid
    architecture.
  • Superb performance – Innovative compression and multi-threading
    technologies provide superior performance; a byte-level differential
    only transmits and stores new information.
  • Dynamic data balancing – Provides optimum use of available
    storage and bandwidth within and between servers and data centers.
  • Easy monitoring and administration – Gives admins a real-time
    view of the entire system and an easy way to control every aspect of
    the backups whether for 200 users or two million – via an
    intuitive admin dashboard and console.
  • Easy, trusted access to data while on-the-go – Gives users
    secure access to all their data from anywhere via mobile apps for
    Apple iOS, Android or Windows Phone; apps feature one-touch update and
    the same industry-leading security as the PROe desktop applications.
  • Customizable backup sets – Provides an easy way to back up
    different groups of files and folders on different schedules and/or to
    different destinations.


How did the cloud prevent #Sandy from getting worse?

As the hurricane raged over the US East Coast this week the world shivered at the thought of a possible disaster.

Sandy, the Frankenstorm, slowly withdrew leaving irreparable damage and chaos behind.

The citizens of the areas affected will definitely need considerable time (and money) to take everything back as it once was. However, in some aspects it could have been worse.

As Sandy came closer it cut the power supplies and caused a collapse of communication channels. Major datacentres located in the East Coast suffered considerable impacts and many web services were taken down.

This is why many wondered what would have happened if there wasn’t the cloud – this is the place where so much important data is, after all.

Cloud providers scatter user data across different datacentres and this is often considered to be a great disaster plan. Sandy was in a way a final test for …

Cloud Expo Silicon Valley: Brocade Acquires Vyatta

Cloud Expo Silicon Valley: Brocade today announced that it will acquire privately held Vyatta in an all-cash transaction. Vyatta is based in Belmont, Calif. and is a networking industry innovator through its software-based network operating system that is highly relevant for multiple applications in network virtualization, software-defined networking (SDN) and private/public cloud computing platforms.

Brocade expects to close the acquisition by the end of the calendar year.

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Cloud & Big Data Move Center Stage This Week in Silicon Valley

What does Cisco’s Cloud CTO have in common with the CTOs of Rackspace, Progress Software, Eucalyptus Systems, SOA Software, and the Cloud CTO of Symantec, as well as the CEOs of Nebula, Cordys, Adaptive Computing, and Virtustream, and the Executive Director of the OpenStack Foundation?

The answer is that they are all speaking here in Silicon Valley from today, at 11th Cloud Expo | Cloud Expo Silicon Valley – are you joining them?

The high-energy event is a must-attend for senior technologists from CEOs on down. The surest way to get yourself and your company fully “Cloud-ready” and to understand why Big Data is going mainstream is by joining the thousands of others who are attending Cloud Expo this week!

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