Cloud computing is at the forefront for many organizations across the world. Experts believe it is the future of IT. Considering all the benefits offered by the cloud, making the transition may appear inevitable to enterprises. But just like any major technology, it also comes with certain caveats – security and privacy of business data and legal compliance among others. While these concerns are now well known, the most obvious disaster that can befall a business depending on cloud computing is still largely overlooked – what happens when the cloud provider shuts shop?
Consumers have already woken up to this scenario when Google shut down its popular RSS aggregator Reader. A cloud service provider may close its doors for any number of reasons: bankruptcy, business failure, breach of contract, being acquired by a bigger company or even regulatory problems. If the provider is located in another country or is privately held, the risks are even higher.
Monthly Archives: September 2013
Beyond the BRICs: Who Inspires Tech Confidence?
Today’s announcement by the US Federal Reserve Bank that it will continue to buy $85 billion in commercial bonds per month will no doubt ease a lot of minds in developing countries. A nice story in The New York Times focused on this topic, noting the recent currency weakness in several of the current darlings of international investment: India, Indonesia, Brazil, South Africa, and Turkey.
No offense intended to anyone, but can we be a little more creative in the countries we cover? This group of countries is in the “BRICS+” group that routinely come up in conversations about investing in developing nations. They are all large economies, with various signs of strong growth in recent years.
But none of them score particularly well in our research, which looks at national ICT commitments and ranks 102 nations on how they are doing on a relative basis, ie, how well they do with the resources they have. Our research indicates that most of the international darlings have under-committed to their information technology infrastructure, and will disappoint a lot of investors and other backers along the way.
Travel to those places, and you’ll find a still-horrendous lack of physical infrastructure here, a large but weakly monetized economy there, enormous social problems here and there, and a boom driven almost singly by real estate over that away.
We encourage the business and government leaders of all the above-named countries to think about ICT and think about how better Internet access, faster Internet speeds, and higher IT budgets will lead to less income disparity and better lives for their people.
In our opinion, investors and companies looking for stronger places to put their money and people include several other places that we’ve identified as regional leaders: to name just a few, Morocco, Ghana, and Kenya in Africa; Malaysia and Philippines in Asia; Chile and Uruguay in South America; Bulgaria and Jordan in Southeast Europe & the Middle East.
Contact me to find out more and learn why we feel this way.
World’s Biggest Data Breaches [Infographic]
Cool and disturbing at the same time. A fully interactive version can be found here where you can click each circle to get more information. I thought about adding all the numbers but stopped at 140,621,000 between 2012 and 2013.
World’s Biggest Data Breaches [Infographic]
Cool and disturbing at the same time. A fully interactive version can be found here where you can click each circle to get more information. I thought about adding all the numbers but stopped at 140,621,000 between 2012 and 2013.
Riverbed Upgrades Storage Appliances, Seeks to Leverage Amazon Glacier Backup
Riverbed Technology today announced it has expanded its Whitewater cloud storage appliance family with the addition of new hardware models and upgrades to its operating system. The new Riverbed Whitewater appliances and OS provide more capacity, faster ingest speeds and more replication options. These features and capabilities make the new Whitewater appliances a critical component for enterprises wishing to leverage the economical price and reliability of cloud storage options such as Amazon Glacier.
Enhancements include new Whitewater model appliances with up to triple the cache of previous models and support of up to 14.4 petabytes of logical data. The Whitewater Operating System (WWOS) 3.0 also offers new features, including pairwise replication that enable enterprises to replicate to an additional Whitewater appliance at a secondary location. In addition, enterprises can now leverage the 10 gigabit networking interface that dramatically improves ingest performance.
Customers that deploy the Whitewater 3030 model appliance can save more than $750,000 over a three year period when backing up to Amazon Glacier. With varying requirements for recovery time objectives (RTO) of certain data sets, the ability to recover certain data sets locally and immediately has also become increasingly important.
The new WWOS 3.0 offers support for pairwise replication for Whitewater appliances that allows enterprises greater flexibility to choose the appropriate recovery option to meet their RTO based on their business continuity plans. For the fastest RTO, a Whitewater appliance can recover at disk speed to a secondary site. In addition, the new OS offers a pinning feature that allows enterprises to tier and choose which backup data sets are available on the Whitewater appliance cache for immediate access, while less critical backup data sets can be recovered from the cloud.
The three new Whitewater model (730, 2030, 3030) appliances offer between 8 to 96 TB usable cache capacity. The largest model, WWA-3030, can cache up to three times the amount of data as the previous largest model (3010) and can support backup & archive datasets of up to 14.4 petabytes[1] before it is compressed and deduplicated onto the local cache.
For faster performance, enterprises can also choose to use 10 gigabit networking interfaces to get up to 2.5 terabytes per hour ingest performance, a 40 percent increase over previous models. The 10 gigabit networking interface also enables enterprises to transfer to Amazon Glacier cloud storage leveraging Amazon Direct Connect.
Enabling High-Efficiency Storage Solutions
Increasing the I/O performance of next-generation data centers and cloud computing environments is essential for supporting enterprise e-commerce, database and email applications. To successfully deploy high-performance storage, it’s essential for storage appliance software to be flash-aware and maximize solid-state drives (SSDs) for performance and hard disk drives (HDDs) for capacity, enabling an optimum price-performance storage solution.
With the explosive growth in and demand for information, next-generation data centers and cloud deployments require cost-effective storage solutions that provide end users with a high quality of service (QoS) in accessing and manipulating data. Usually, data centers – either corporate or cloud-based – run specific applications, such as database indexing and email exchanges. To provide a top QoS, these applications typically run on servers with high input/output operations per second (IOPS) and in turn provide access to data stored within the storage system.
Breaking Through the SaaS Ceiling
It’s the dream of every Internet entrepreneur to build a business that goes viral. Yet the sad truth is that most do not. It’s hard to think of any other industry with such a winner-take-all mentality as Internet software. The volatile combination of small market entry costs and big network effects creates wave after wave of disruption and consolidation, and quite a few millionaires along the way. Alas, virality is an elusive goal, particularly in SaaS. For this reason, SaaS Don’t #10 insists that you should not depend on network effects. Instead you should focus first and foremost on satisfying each and every single customer. But, if you’ve done that…bring on the hockey stick!
This is the fourth post in a series that paves the path to sustainable SaaS growth. The first post in this SaaS growth series introduced the concept of the SaaS growth ceiling, as well as the three fundamental SaaS marketing levers for breaking through it: customer acquisition, customer lifetime value and viral customer network effects. This installment explores the third, final and most funnest SaaS marketing lever: network effects, offering three proven SaaS marketing strategies to drive SaaS growth by getting your customers to sell themselves.
Breaking Through the SaaS Ceiling
It’s the dream of every Internet entrepreneur to build a business that goes viral. Yet the sad truth is that most do not. It’s hard to think of any other industry with such a winner-take-all mentality as Internet software. The volatile combination of small market entry costs and big network effects creates wave after wave of disruption and consolidation, and quite a few millionaires along the way. Alas, virality is an elusive goal, particularly in SaaS. For this reason, SaaS Don’t #10 insists that you should not depend on network effects. Instead you should focus first and foremost on satisfying each and every single customer. But, if you’ve done that…bring on the hockey stick!
This is the fourth post in a series that paves the path to sustainable SaaS growth. The first post in this SaaS growth series introduced the concept of the SaaS growth ceiling, as well as the three fundamental SaaS marketing levers for breaking through it: customer acquisition, customer lifetime value and viral customer network effects. This installment explores the third, final and most funnest SaaS marketing lever: network effects, offering three proven SaaS marketing strategies to drive SaaS growth by getting your customers to sell themselves.
Cloud PBX Services Poised to Take Off
by John McMillan, Director, Partner Business Consulting, Parallels
SMBs make up 99% of businesses worldwide, and they are adopting cloud services. According to Parallels SMB Cloud Insights™ research, the most commonly adopted cloud services include: web hosting, security add-ons, and a wide range of SMB-focused SaaS applications. Parallels research predicts that, on average, SMBs will have seven cloud services by end of 2016, growing from four services consumed today.
One service that will enjoy broad SMB adoption is cloud PBX. Cloud PBX services are a classic example of the cloud’s transformational impact on the SMB segment, allowing SMBs to have access to an enterprise-class communications experience without the overhead cost and maintenance of a traditional in-house PBX system. Cloud PBX typically includes mobile integrations, an automated attendant, and web conferencing – all packaged and priced for SMBs.
In the US, up to 50% of SMBs who have an existing in-house PBX system today and up to 30% who have regular land-lines are interested in switching to cloud PBX services. It is easy to see why – cloud PBX services are a good solution for the following key SMB needs:
1) Projecting a professional, enterprise-like image by providing a single phone number for the business, extensions for employees, and simple call routing.
2) Increasing customer intimacy by quickly connecting clients to the right resource using an automated attendant.
3) Increasing worker productivity by extending cloud PBX features to mobile devices, providing anytime, anywhere communications with customers, partners and employees.
In conclusion, cloud PBX services are poised to gain broad adoption in the SMB segment, as more cloud service providers add them to their SaaS portfolios, and SMBs widely recognize the impact that cloud PBX can have on their business and customer experience.
Beware of the Accidental Cloud Architecture
Prior to service-oriented architecture (SOA), many companies suffered from the infamous “accidental architecture” which evolved as a result of accumulating a large number of point-to-point application integration connections. Unless IT takes a strong role ensuring Software as a Service (SaaS) purchases by lines of business (LOB) integrate easily with the existing infrastructure, history is likely to repeat itself by reversing the benefits of SOA with a new form of chaos called the “accidental cloud architecture”
In this Q&A, Oracle’s Bruce Tierney, a director of Oracle SOA Suite, will outline a number of best practices businesses can adopt to avoid creating the accidental cloud architecture. Bruce will also explain how organizations can best leverage SOA and BPM technologies to create an optimal hybrid on-premise/private/public cloud infrastructure.