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IT management software provider Autotask has announced a partnership with Microsoft’s Cloud Solution Provider (CSP) programme and MessageOps to launch CSP Boss.

The product is aimed at Autotask customers looking to “maximise the cloud services opportunity”. Service providers can automate management, billing and support of Microsoft’s cloud portfolio, including Office 365, Azure, and SharePoint, while value added services can also be provided in the form of an integrated help desk and knowledge base. According to the dedicated page for CSP Boss, 20% gross profit margins are promised for resellers.

“Microsoft is excited to see the strategic partnership between Autotask and MessageOps,” said Brent Combest, Microsoft director of partner profitability and compete in a statement. “This combined offering furthers our vision to provide a platform through CSP from which members of the Microsoft channel can create operational efficiencies and ultimately increase profitability via the sale of our online services.”

Elsewhere, Microsoft announced a series of new cloudy and machine learning features to its Office 365 apps. Outlook will be offering @mentions, while Word will incorporate new editing and researching features. “As a cloud-based service, Editor will get better with time,” wrote Kirk Koenigsbauer, Office corporate vice president. “It will expand upon Word’s current spelling and grammar tools to inform you why words or phrases may not be accurate – teaching at the same time it is correcting.”

Earlier this month, Microsoft announced its latest financial results, with Azure revenue growing 102%, and compute usage more than doubling year on year.

You can find out more about CSP Boss here.

With 15% of enterprises adopting a hybrid IT strategy, you need to set a plan to integrate hybrid cloud throughout your infrastructure.
In his session at 18th Cloud Expo, Steven Dreher, Director of Solutions Architecture at Green House Data, discussed how to plan for shifting resource requirements, overcome challenges, and implement hybrid IT alongside your existing data center assets. Highlights included anticipating workload, cost and resource calculations, integrating services on both sides of the firewall, self-service, monitoring, and workload prioritization.

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As the Big Data marketplace moves closer to a point of mass-maturity, business leaders have begun to take new approaches to implementation and utilization. Advanced analytics solutions have made their way into a range of industries and regions, and companies that successfully align these investments with core goals and requirements will enjoy more progressive improvements to operational sustainability, intelligence and general performance.
However, there is some housekeeping that must be addressed as organizations embark on Big Data and analytics initiatives. Data preparation, information governance and security are three fundamental elements of effective analytics strategies, yet, ironically, each has been largely ignored by many organizations in the rush to realize the promise of Big Data.

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In his session at 18th Cloud Expo, Sagi Brody, Chief Technology Officer at Webair Internet Development Inc., and Logan Best, Infrastructure & Network Engineer at Webair, focused on real world deployments of DDoS mitigation strategies in every layer of the network. He gave an overview of methods to prevent these attacks and best practices on how to provide protection in complex cloud platforms. He also outlined what we have found in our experience managing and running thousands of Linux and Unix managed service platforms and what specifically can be done to offer protection at every layer. He offered insight and examples from both a business and technical perspective.

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There’s a lot of things we do to improve the performance of web and mobile applications. We use caching. We use compression. We offload security (SSL and TLS) to a proxy with greater compute capacity.
We apply image optimization and minification to content.
We do all that because performance is king. Failure to perform can be, for many businesses, equivalent to an outage with increased abandonment rates and angry customers taking to the Internet to express their extreme displeasure.

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Companies are exploiting technology advances in procurement and finance services to produce new types of productivity benefits.
We’ll now hear from a procurement expert on how companies can better manage their finances and have tighter control over procurement processes and their supply chain networks. This business process innovation exchange comes to you in conjunction with the Tradeshift Innovation Day held in New York on June 22, 2016.

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Infrastructure complexity is not unique to enterprise datacenters. Just because a business or organization is small does not mean it is exempt from the feature needs of big enterprise datacenters. Small and mid-size organizations require fault tolerance, high availability, mobility, and flexibility as much as anyone. Unfortunately, the complexity of traditional datacenter and virtualization architecture hit the SMB the hardest.

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This is the second in a two part series of posts pertaining to using some common server storage I/O benchmark tools and workload scripts. View part I here which includes overview, background and information about the tools used and related topics.

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