Citrix Web Plugin is an online plugin offered by Citrix that enables users to access remotely published desktops and applications from a web browser. Users that are running Microsoft Windows can quickly access VDI networks using web browsers, such as Internet Explorer and Firefox. Designed to work with virtual desktops, this web plugin allows Citrix […]
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The competitive landscape of the global cloud computing market in the healthcare industry is crowded due to the presence of a large number of players. The large number of participants has led to the fragmented nature of the market. Some of the major players operating in the global cloud computing market in the healthcare industry are Cisco Systems Inc., Carestream Health Inc., Carecloud Corp., AGFA Healthcare, IBM Corp., Cleardata Networks, Merge Healthcare Inc., Microsoft Corp., Intel Corp., and Oracle Corp.
Enterprise networks are complex. Moreover, they were designed and deployed to meet a specific set of business requirements at a specific point in time. But, the adoption of cloud services, new business applications and intensifying security policies, among other factors, require IT organizations to continuously deploy configuration changes. Therefore, enterprises are looking for better ways to automate the management of their networks while still leveraging existing capabilities, optimizing performance and reducing operational risk through standardization and best-practice architectures.
Enterprise networks are complex. Moreover, they were designed and deployed to meet a specific set of business requirements at a specific point in time. But, the adoption of cloud services, new business applications and intensifying security policies, among other factors, require IT organizations to continuously deploy configuration changes. Therefore, enterprises are looking for better ways to automate the management of their networks while still leveraging existing capabilities, optimizing performance and reducing operational risk through standardization and best-practice architectures.
(c)iStock.com/ratch0013
Cloud maturity is on the rise, although plenty of problems remain, according to the latest survey data from service management technology provider Fruition Partners.
The study, which was undertaken by Vanson Bourne and polled 400 CIOs from the UK and US, found that for almost three quarters (73%) of respondents, “significant” financial waste is occurring with cloud adoption without IT insight. Yet 85% of CIOs polled believe cloud is reducing their organisations’ control over IT.
“The maturity of cloud services has started to improve, but it is still leagues away from where it needs to be,” said Paul Cash, Fruition Partners UK managing partner. “There has to be a recognition that the need for rigorous management is greater, not less, in the cloud.”
The numbers continue to be worryingly high. 62% of respondents say there are cloud applications being used in the business without IT’s knowledge – otherwise known as shadow IT – while CIOs say more than two thirds of their colleagues (68%) do not feel the need to consult IT when procuring cloud services.
Comparing these figures with 2015’s findings, there is certainly a change afoot. Last year’s analysis found that CIOs were not applying traditional IT service management (ITSM) processes to cloud technologies. One eye-opening example was of a construction firm which had 300 copies of a cloud-based project management tool for only 200 project managers. This time around, in-house IT is on average managed by a combination of six processes; cloud, in contrast, has on average four.
Yet the knock-on effect of the infiltration of cloud applications is that while employees move cloud services into the business, the CIO will end up getting the flak. “CIOs cannot blindly trust that public cloud services will work flawlessly and be delivered perfectly at all times,” said Cash. “The more responsibility CIOs hand over to providers, without ensuring that established ITSM principles are applied, the more they open themselves up to blame if one of those services fails.
“CIOs should still be managing cloud services internally, rather than abdicating responsibility to the provider,” he added. “Otherwise they risk losing control, and increasing both cost and risk to themselves and the business.”
Fruition, which was bought was CSC in 2015, put together three steps for CIOs to, as they put it, ‘bring the cloud under control’ for last year’s report. Focus on the user to provide a better service, focus on business needs and collaborate across functions, and focus on IT strategy and how to make better use of ITSM. Perhaps worryingly, the company feels that not enough has changed for it to alter its message this year.
Hostway Services, Inc. and WSM International have partnered to deliver trouble free migration services for any organization that wishes to bring their IT infrastructure to Hostway’s Azure managed cloud services.
WSM is the leader in providing turn-key IT migration services since 2003 and is now the preferred provider to any Hostway customer that is seeking to move its computer infrastructure to the Hostway Azure-based cloud.
Hostway Services, Inc. and WSM International have partnered to deliver trouble free migration services for any organization that wishes to bring their IT infrastructure to Hostway’s Azure managed cloud services.
WSM is the leader in providing turn-key IT migration services since 2003 and is now the preferred provider to any Hostway customer that is seeking to move its computer infrastructure to the Hostway Azure-based cloud.
Below is a guest post from Geoff Fancher, Vice President, Americas Channels at SimpliVity Corporation
Have you ever woken up in the middle of the night, sweating profusely, scared half to death, and terrified that your data center was infected with ransomware? If so, you’ve had an IT nightmare. Just be thankful it was all just a dream and your data isn’t lost.
Though IT nightmares come in all forms, one thing all IT pros fear nowadays is ransomware. That’s because ransomware is becoming increasingly commonplace and is evolving to become even more vicious and hard to stop once it has entered an IT environment. The cost to business productivity can be crippling, and the data loss that can occur can set a company back for days.
According to Ponemon Institute, the average cost of IT downtime is $7900 per minute. Per minute! The reason recovering from ransomware attacks can be so costly is that backing up from restores can take a long time, typically measured in hours or days depending on where and how backups were stored. Also, depending on when the most recent backup took place, a lot of data could be lost once the backup is recovered.
With the cost of downtime due to ransomware being so high because quick restores aren’t an option, many organizations are choosing to pay the ransom to get their data back. The most notable example comes from Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center. The hackers infected the hospital’s computer systems, shutting down all communication between the systems, and demanded $17,000 to unlock them. The hospital, being in an a high-pressure situation without the correct resources to be able to quickly shut down its systems and restore from a recent backup, was forced to pay the ransom to receive the decryption key and get back online.
The fundamental piece, then, to avoiding paying the ransom demanded by cyber criminals is to have a disaster recovery plan in place. You should know what to do if a ransomware attack happens. As the old adage goes, “Hope for the best. Prepare for the worst.” That’s the attitude to take and the way to do it is to have a plan.
One company that instituted a solid disaster recovery plan just in the nick of time was an enterprise manufacturing company based in the Netherlands. The company was infected with ransomware while its IT partner was in the process of migrating VMs to a new hyperconverged infrastructure environment that had built-in data protection. Most of the infected folders were already on the new solution, which was lucky because they were able to use the solution’s backup to restore within fifteen minutes, when just a day before, on the previous infrastructure, it would have taken about three hours to restore to the most recent backup. The partner was also performing hourly backups on the new solution, so they lost less than an hour’s worth of data during the restore. Before deploying hyperconverged infrastructure, the partner was backing up to tape every 12 hours, so they saved the company about 11 hours of data loss on the new hyperconverged solution. What a difference a day makes.
For a disaster recovery plan to be successful, the IT team needs to define recovery time objectives (RTOs) – how long it takes to restore the backup – and recovery point objectives (RPOs) – the nearest backup they can restore from. Basically, businesses have to ask themselves two questions: How long can the business shut down while waiting for the restore to take place? And, how many hours of business-critical data can the company afford to lose? There are data protection plans for every size of company and for every budget. The first step to a data protection plan is defining the organization’s requirements.
Hyperconverged infrastructure, for example, can dramatically cut down the hours it takes for businesses to recover from IT downtime. By making data efficient from the start of its lifecycle, businesses are able to quickly recover from a previous backup.
With SimpliVity hyperconverged infrastructure, companies are able to backup quickly and efficiently with minimal data loss because SimpliVity’s solution is designed to meet even the most stringent RTOs and RPOs to ensure businesses functions aren’t interrupted for long in case of a disaster or ransomware attack. If you’re heading to GreenPages’ Summit Event next week, definitely swing by the SimpliVity booth to chat!
“Avere Systems is a hybrid cloud solution provider. We have customers that want to use cloud storage and we have customers that want to take advantage of cloud compute,” explained Rebecca Thompson, VP of Marketing at Avere 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.
(c)iStock.com/JohannesK
Cloud computing is transforming modern business. Through the cloud, new digital-centric businesses are emerging that are more agile and innovative than anything seen before. Whether a new, ‘upstart’ business like Uber, with its compelling approach to city transport; or an established company breaking into new markets, like General Motors with its investment into Lyft, businesses are pioneering new customer services and business models that are disrupting entire industries and changing the way we work and play.
This digital transformation (DX) will affect all businesses. According to IDC, one third of the top 20 companies in every industry will have been disrupted by such digitally transformed companies by 2018. The message to businesses is clear: disrupt or be disrupted.
Enterprises are now on an accelerated modernisation path, trying to maintain, and even extend, their lead as other digital and data driven organisations challenge their status. For established enterprises, this is a particular challenge: they are not start ups that can live exclusively in the clouds. They have legacy systems and applications that cannot be virtualised and migrated to the cloud and customers who rely upon the flawless and ceaseless delivery of their digital services. Furthermore, due to governance, compliance, and regulatory (GRC) requirements some of the digital assets have to stay on premise. Therefore, the road ahead is more complicated than simply migrating infrastructure and applications to the cloud.
The cloud provides enterprises with the agility to increase the infrastructure capacity with no capital expenses and quickly deploy new services as mandated by the business needs. However in the process the enterprises may lose visibility and control over the data and the quality of service delivery. It is the role of the CIO to ensure that a business maintains control of its digital assets to ensure continuity of service for its customers.
Cloud-based assets should be treated like any other IT resource; they will be deployed to support enterprise functions and mission critical systems so they need to be closely monitored. If an organisation becomes dependent on the cloud to support key aspects of the business then the CIO needs to have complete visibility across all cloud-based systems. CIOs can implement dashboards that provide real-time analysis of the operational impact of cloud services and applications.
Apart from changes to core infrastructure, lines of business (LOBs) will independently utilise third party cloud based services; regularly introducing new applications to drive new workflows and efficiencies. The CIO should also have the power to veto initiatives that do not comply with the overall corporate IT quality assurance strategy.
Successful cloud-based disruption is not only about delivering transformational customer and business services; it is about delivering them well. The reliable delivery of business services is directly tied to customer experience, satisfaction, loyalty and ultimately corporate performance. In the connected world, assuring the quality of the enterprise service delivery infrastructure – supporting as it does the services that enable DX – becomes a mission-critical business activity.
However, this entails assuring these services end-to-end across edge, core and cloud both physical, virtual, and hybrid environments. The challenge is how to monitor activity continuously across the entire infrastructure in real-time, in particular to identify and diagnose service issues. There is increased pressure on IT to reap the benefits of external cloud services, but there is rarely a plan to assure performance and secure the data stored in the cloud, beyond relying on the cloud providers. While such providers advertise that they have integrated control, management, and security of respective cloud offerings, businesses should be reluctant to depend nothing more than trusting this is the case. It is far better for the CIO to be able to verify that data is safe and to do this, they need visibility of the entire system.
The challenge facing businesses has become more acute because now, companies rely on a mix of public cloud services providers, private cloud and on-premises legacy technology. With more and more systems relying on the performance of external services, it’s a challenge to pin down the root cause of a service interruption when it occurs, as it relies on the consistent performance of multiple elements both on and off of your premises.
Despite the benefits of this hybrid environment the reality is that it can cause an enterprise to lose sight of service vulnerabilities. What is needed is a holistic end-to-end view of the entire service delivery infrastructure. Without this visibility, service failure and even criminal activities, such as hacking and Denial of Service (DoS) attacks, can go unnoticed. With so much of modern business activity reliant on the effective operation of the network, it is vital to be able to identify and address issues quickly and effectively.
The right approach to service assurance overcomes this challenge by providing a holistic visibility across the entire service delivery infrastructure from the wireless Edge to the Core and in the Cloud. This is achieved by continuous end-to-end monitoring and analysis of the traffic data flowing over hybrid cloud networks. This enables enterprises to spot and isolate any anomalies that may present a hindrance to business performance. Translating real-time smart data into actionable insights is of huge strategic value to the enterprise both in terms of productivity and revenue.
Cloud will play a central role in the DX transformation of the large majority – if not all – enterprises over the next decade. The CIO needs to be able to confidently manage the quality of each new cloud service and application that is adopted across the business. Every new system must be accounted for and be aligned with the overall DX cloud initiative and enterprise-wide DX strategy. Digital transformation can be a perilous journey for a business, however, with the right tools and approach, a business can emerge able to compete in an increasingly connected world.