New Zealand’s national census delivers valuable lessons about cloud services

Kevin Noonan, Research Director, Public Sector

Although there is general acceptance that cloud services are here to stay, a number of enterprises are still skeptical about whether cloud computing is really up to the job when it comes to delivering big and complicated government services. Against this backdrop, the New Zealand government’s successful national census provides valuable lessons about how to drive a large-scale cloud implementation, as we explain in our recent report Driving Government Innovation Through Cloud Services.

The national census has always been a big and complex undertaking

The national census is one of the oldest and most complicated peacetime activities that a country can undertake. The sheer logistics of the exercise has confounded many governments over the centuries, and even now it is just as complex. In many developed economies, the scope of each census has continued to expand as countries try to gain an even …

Why Service Provider Dashboards Fall Short for Enterprise IT

In September, Google experienced a services disruption that affected nearly a third of Gmail users. As you’d expect, it generated quite a bit of news. Such outages are fairly infrequent, but even Google struggled to resolve it. The Google status dashboard during that outage simply said “indicates some type of issue.”
Imagine yourself, now, in the shoes of an IT administrator relaying the status of a widespread email outage to your boss. How satisfied do you think your boss would be with the statement that “something’s wrong and we’re looking into it,” if that’s all the information you could provide? Worse yet, what if you didn’t even provide that information until after your boss spent the last hour trying to figure out why email wasn’t getting through?

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Two Data Centers Are Better Than One

We want to take this time to talk about Cloud-based Disaster Recovery Solutions. Getting it out of the way, Solar VPS offers our clients with Cloud based disaster recovery services which provide: 20GB to 200GB Backup Capacity Full Server Backups New Data Backed Up Incrementally Backups Stored for Three Days Newest Backup Replaces Oldest Multiple Points of Restore Backups Kept in a Redundant Offsite Data Center Facility To learn more about Solar VPS SolarSystem Disaster Recovery options, follow this link, SolarSystem DR. That said, we want to use this space to talk about Cloud Disaster Recovery Solutions and why they are so important. Geo-Redundant Offsite Data Center Facility We bolded, Backups Kept in a Redundant Offsite Data Center Facility, for a reason. Without question, the most important and vital aspect of a great Cloud based disaster recovery plan is the providers ability to supply Geo-Diverse Redundant Data Center Facilities for backing up a clients vital data. But what is a Geo-Diverse Redundant Data Center Facility? A Geo-Diverse Redundant Data Center Facility refers to a provider who operates at least two data centers. The first data center is their main web hosting, colocation, Cloud hosting facility which houses and stores your critical business/personal data. The second data center facility is the data center which your colocation or Cloud hosting provider uses to backup all of your existing services. While this sounds easy enough to understand and accomplish, it’s a bit more complicated than operating two data centers around the corner from one another. Geo-Diverse Redundant Data Center Facility Requirements Geographical Separation – The major need of all Geo-Diverse Redundant Data Center Facilities comes in the form of operating two differing data centers located hundreds, if not thousands of miles, apart. The reason for this is simple. Natural disasters, power outages and generally bad things happen all the time. When Hurricane Sandy made landfall on the North Eastern Shore of the United States, multiple data centers located in lower Manhattan flooded with the Hudson River. This flooding caused those data centers to experience massive amount of downtime and thus cost their clients nearly $8 billion in lost revenues. This is the reason for Geo-Diverse Redundant Data Center Facilities located miles and miles apart. Natural disasters do happen but they rarely, if ever, happen spanning from New York City to Austin, Texas. Point in case, always having a backup data center up and running is a must for Cloud disaster recovery. Data Center Tier – Let’s say your provider either owns or operates their Cloud hosting firm out of a Tier 3 data center. As that facility supplies your critical solutions with highly redundant power and cooling along with top of the line security and IT management systems, their backup facility should supply your critical solutions with the same level of service. The truth is, we have no idea when the next strong storm is going to hit and we have no idea how long the next downtime of services will be. … Continue

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Two Data Centers Are Better Than One

We want to take this time to talk about Cloud-based Disaster Recovery Solutions. Getting it out of the way, Solar VPS offers our clients with Cloud based disaster recovery services which provide: 20GB to 200GB Backup Capacity Full Server Backups New Data Backed Up Incrementally Backups Stored for Three Days Newest Backup Replaces Oldest Multiple Points of Restore Backups Kept in a Redundant Offsite Data Center Facility To learn more about Solar VPS SolarSystem Disaster Recovery options, follow this link, SolarSystem DR. That said, we want to use this space to talk about Cloud Disaster Recovery Solutions and why they are so important. Geo-Redundant Offsite Data Center Facility We bolded, Backups Kept in a Redundant Offsite Data Center Facility, for a reason. Without question, the most important and vital aspect of a great Cloud based disaster recovery plan is the providers ability to supply Geo-Diverse Redundant Data Center Facilities for backing up a clients vital data. But what is a Geo-Diverse Redundant Data Center Facility? A Geo-Diverse Redundant Data Center Facility refers to a provider who operates at least two data centers. The first data center is their main web hosting, colocation, Cloud hosting facility which houses and stores your critical business/personal data. The second data center facility is the data center which your colocation or Cloud hosting provider uses to backup all of your existing services. While this sounds easy enough to understand and accomplish, it’s a bit more complicated than operating two data centers around the corner from one another. Geo-Diverse Redundant Data Center Facility Requirements Geographical Separation – The major need of all Geo-Diverse Redundant Data Center Facilities comes in the form of operating two differing data centers located hundreds, if not thousands of miles, apart. The reason for this is simple. Natural disasters, power outages and generally bad things happen all the time. When Hurricane Sandy made landfall on the North Eastern Shore of the United States, multiple data centers located in lower Manhattan flooded with the Hudson River. This flooding caused those data centers to experience massive amount of downtime and thus cost their clients nearly $8 billion in lost revenues. This is the reason for Geo-Diverse Redundant Data Center Facilities located miles and miles apart. Natural disasters do happen but they rarely, if ever, happen spanning from New York City to Austin, Texas. Point in case, always having a backup data center up and running is a must for Cloud disaster recovery. Data Center Tier – Let’s say your provider either owns or operates their Cloud hosting firm out of a Tier 3 data center. As that facility supplies your critical solutions with highly redundant power and cooling along with top of the line security and IT management systems, their backup facility should supply your critical solutions with the same level of service. The truth is, we have no idea when the next strong storm is going to hit and we have no idea how long the next downtime of services will be. … Continue

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Virtual Machine Backup and Recovery: Five Critical Decisions

This whitepaper explores the five critical decisions organizations must adhere to when building a backup and recovery plan to prevent the complexity of virtualization that complicates IT services and the day-to-day of IT professionals across industries. It covers complete backup and recovery solutions, purpose built for organizations with specific virtualization requirements.

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John Sims: SAP Targets Operators for Cloud-Based Mobile IP Service

SAP AG has introduced a cloud-based service offering for telecommunication carriers to interconnect rich communication services on any mobile device or network.
The company designed an Internet Protocol multimedia subsystem to support its mobile services and allow end users to share videos, messages and files anywhere, SAP said Tuesday.
“As today’s mobile consumers persistently seek out the latest innovation and best possible user experience, operators must support cutting edge IP-based services to remain competitive,” said John Sims, president of SAP Mobile Services.
Sims added the business intends for its IMS hub to help operators test RCS and voice over LTE interworking systems.

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Microsoft & AppZero Present: Migrate from WS03 to WS12 or Windows Azure

With Windows Server 2003 end of extended support approaching, companies are faced with moving large numbers of enterprise applications. Join Microsoft and AppZero for an informative webinar on upgrading production applications from WS2003 to WS2012 or Windows Azure. AppZero’s one-step application migration lets you modernize your applications and move to the cloud in one step.
Hear firsthand from Microsoft’s Todd Furst and AppZero’s Greg O’Connor everything you need to know about WS2003 end of extended support and options for migrating. We will take questions live at the end of the presentation. This webinar will be of particular interest to enterprise IT pros tasked with modernizing and System Integrators looking to expand their practice from virtualization to cloud migration.

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OpenNebula Enhances Its Support for Cloud Bursting to Amazon

As you may know, OpenNebula’s approach to cloud bursting (that is, its hybrid cloud model) is quite unique. The reason behind this uniqueness is the transparency to both end users and cloud administrators to use and maintain the cloud bursting functionality.

The transparency to cloud administrators comes from the fact that a an AWS EC2 region is modelled as any other host (albeit of potentially a much bigger capacity), so the scheduler can place VMs in EC2 as it will do in any other local host. Of course, the scheduler algorithm can be tuned so the EC2 host (or hosts, more on this below) is picked last, so it will be only used only if there is a real need (ie, the local infrastructure cannot cope with the demand). On the other hand, the transparency to end users is offered through the hybrid template functionality: the same VM template in OpenNebula can describe the VM if it is deployed locally and also if it gets deployed in Amazon EC2. So users just have to instantiate the template, and OpenNebula will transparently chose if that is executed locally or remotely. Very convenient, isn’t it?

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