All posts by GreenPages Blog

Cloud computing, Featured, Microsoft, Windows Server 2003

Upcoming Live Events – Windows Server 2003…Does the Cloud Make Sense for Your Migration?

I just wanted to take a quick minute to let the readers of our blog know that GreenPages is holding a series of live events around migrating Windows Server 2003 Workloads. The events are free and will be held in Cambridge, MA, Portland, ME, Tampa, FL, and Alpharetta, GA. David Barter, our Practice Manager of Microsoft Technologies, will be hosting the events.

We decided to put these events together because of the impact Windows Server 2003 End-of-Life is having on IT professionals across the globe. As you are probably already aware, the End-of-Life date is July 14th. Needless to say, that is coming up pretty quickly. There are perceived, and often real, challenges involved in upgrading applications. However, there are some serious drawbacks if you do not migrate. First, no new updates will be developed or released after end of support. Not migrating could also cause compliance issues for various regulatory and industry standards. Furthermore, staying put will cost more in the end. Maintenance costs for outdated hardware will increase and there will be additional costs for security measures that need to be taken.

On the flip side, benefits of migrating include reducing operational costs and increasing efficiencies, improving employee productivity, the ability to be cloud ready, and increasing business agility. There are different paths you can take, such as migrating to Windows Server 2012, Azure, or Office 365 as an individual product or as a Platform as a Service.

During the events, David will cover:

  • Developing an action plan and ways Azure and Office 365 can be part of it.
  • Potential migration pitfalls
  • Determining which applications will run “as is” on new platforms and which won’t
  • The areas of your infrastructure that will be affected by End of Life.
  • Examples of GreenPages’ customers going to the cloud, including how they approached the decision process and what their experiences were like.

You can register here. If there isn’t an event near you but you’re interested in learning more on the topic, I would highly recommend downloading David’s whitepaper.  These should be great events (plus you get a free lunch and entered to win an Xbox One)! Below is some more information on event locations.

Portland, Maine

  • March 26th from 10am-11am at the Portland Harbor Hotel

Tampa, Florida

  • April 1st from 10am-2pm at the Microsoft Campus

Alpharetta, Georgia

  • April 2nd from 10am-2pm at the Microsoft Campus

Cambridge, Massachusetts

  • April 7th from 10am-2pm at the Microsoft Campus

 

If you have any specific questions about event logistics, feel free to reach out to Kelsey Barrett, our Marketing and Event Coordinator.

 

By Ben Stephenson, Emerging Media Specialist

 

Featured, Miscellaneous IT, Tech News Recap

Tech News Recap for the Week of 3/9/2015

Were you busy last week? Here’s a quick tech news recap of articles you may have missed from the week of 3/9/2015.

tech news recapThe State Department shut down its email servers last November because of a bad hack. Hilary Clinton didn’t use the State Department’s on-prem email servers, which wasn’t considered secure. The ironic thing is her email address is probably one of the few that hackers didn’t have access to. News also came out that the CIA has been trying to break Apple’s encryption system. A group of hackers that had been unbeatable for a decade were brought down. VMware vSphere with Operations Management 6.0 was released. It has some good features such as multicore FT, long distance vMotion and virtual volumes. Microsoft Azure has met FBI security requirements for the California Department of Justice. This should open doors for deployments in other cities and agencies.

Tech News Recap

Are you looking for more information around migration options for Windows Server 2003 End of Life? Download our whitepaper or register for one of our upcoming events in Cambridge, MA/Portland, ME/Tampa, FL/Alpharetta, GA.

 

By Ben Stephenson, Emerging Media Specialist

Featured, Hacking

The Hacking Industry isn’t Just Getting Bigger, it’s Getting Smarter

In this video, Solutions Architect Dan Allen talks about the growth and evolving sophistication of the hacking industry. There was a large uptick in data breaches in late 2013 and throughout 2014. Dan discusses the importance of having visibility into your environment to address breaches as quickly as possible and to make sure they got resolved properly.

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pM4vw_Tyzjg

 

 

Interested in learning more? Reach out to us!

Featured, IT Management

7 Habits of Highly Effective IT Departments

Guest post from Azmi Jafarey. Azmi was named 2013 CIO of the year by Boston Business Journal and Mass High Tech. You can hear more from Azmi on his blog.

IT DepartmentHow many business books do you know that 26 years later can claim to be fully relevant? Stephen Covey’s “7 Habits of Highly Effective People” remains just such a potent landmark. Re-reading it, I was struck by how useful the 7 habits can be for IT Departments.  Here is how to fit the habits into behaviors that lead to success for IT and the business.

 

1. Be Proactive

  • Anticipate what your network and systems may do, and plan for it. This is a broad call to arms – preparing for malware threats, doing back-ups, having an automated system for managing patches, doing capacity planning, knowing your baseline behaviors to detect anomalies, etc.

2. Begin with the End in Mind

  • Don’t just start projects – have targets with timelines and plans to hit them. Work backwards from business deliverables. The vectors of tasks should all add up to the resultant value you are after.

3. Put First Things First

  • Don’t guess – develop plans, use checklists, test. Brush up on your project management and take the time to approach new projects in the right sequence of first getting and understanding the business requirements, then looking at timing needs, available skills sets and dollars, and then commencing with your planning.

4. Think Win-Win

  • Business and IT have to be true partners working jointly towards competitive advantage for the business. This means that IT has to have a deep understanding of business goals and business processes. The business has to be cognizant of IT’s limitations and policy needs such as those around security.

5. Seek First to Understand and Then To Be Understood

  • The role of IT is to enable business outcomes. Thus, the first thing is for IT to understand what the business objectives are for a project, and then to understand the specific business requirements. Technology comes much later – and there the task of IT is to have the business understand exactly what they will be getting, how it will function and what the limitations are. Establish this to-and-fro and you have the basis for fruitful collaboration and results.

6. Synergize

  • Covey is clear about the benefits of positive teamwork – and IT should be, too. What is important is for the team work not only to exist within IT but to extend to the business. Shared ownership, supplemented with collaborative problem solving and clear communications, develops the IT-Business synergy that translates to results and competitive advantage.

7. Sharpen the Saw

  • There is the old adage of the woodcutter who says that he is too busy cutting down trees to sharpen the saw. Stop! Sharpen the saw. We are in an age of technological acceleration. The quality of your decisions is a direct function of how much you know. For IT this means vigilance, reading, training and trying as the pre-requisites for success.

 

Clarity and commitment are what the 7 habits are all about.  Follow them and you have effective IT!

 

Featured, Miscellaneous IT, Tech New Recap

Tech News Recap for the Week of 3/2/2015

Were you busy last week? Here’s a quick tech news recap of articles you may have missed from the week of 2/23/2015!

tech news recapHP acquired Aruba Networks, Chef and Microsoft are teaming up to enhance Azure’s automation capabilities, Chinese company Alibaba opened a data center in Silicon Valley, and Google wants to be a wireless carrier. VMware announced the availability of EVO:Rail for the Indian Market. Apple topped Samsung in quarterly smartphone sales for the first time since 2011. Google Wallet will soon come pre-installed on Verizon, T-Mobile & ATt&T Android phones. Volvo is using cloud connected cars to help notify other drivers about road conditions, mobile fingerprint apps are on the rise, and voice biometrics could be a game-changer in authentication. Remember, if you want to keep up with the most important industry news throughout the week, follow GreenPages on Twitter!

Tech News Recap

Are you looking for more information around migration options for Windows Server 2003 End of Life? Download our whitepaper or register for one of our upcoming events in Cambridge, MA/Portland, ME/Tampa, FL/Alpharetta, GA.

 

By Ben Stephenson, Emerging Media Specialist

App Dev, CIO Focus Interview, Featured, hybrid cloud, IT Management

CIO Focus Interview: Kevin Hall, GreenPages-LogicsOne

CIO Focus InterviewFor this segment of our CIO Focus Interview Series, I sat down with our CIO and Managing Director, Kevin Hall. Kevin has an extremely unique perspective as he serves as GreenPages’ CIO as well as the Managing Director of our customer facing Professional Services and Managed Services divisions.

 

Ben: Can you give me some background on your IT experience?

Kevin: I’ve been a CIO for 17+ years holding roles in both consulting organizations and roles overseeing internal IT. The position I have at GreenPages is very interesting because I am both a Managing Partner of our services business and the CIO of our organization. This is the first time I have held both jobs at the same time in one company

Ben: What are your primary responsibilities for each part of your role then?

Kevin: As CIO, I’m responsible for all aspects of information services. This includes both traditional data center functions, engineering functions, operations functions, and app dev functions. As Managing Director I am responsible for our Professional Services and Managed Services divisions. These divisions provide help to our customers on the same sorts of projects that I am undertaking as CIO.

Ben: Does it help you being in this unique position? Does it allow you to get a better understanding of what GreenPages’ customers are looking for since you experience the same challenges as CIO?

Kevin: Yes, I think it is definitely an advantage. The CIO role is crucial in this era. It has certainly been a challenging job for a long time, and that has magnified in recent years because of the fundamental shift and explosion of the capabilities available to modern day CIOs. Because I am in this rather crazy position, it does help me understand the needs of our customers better. If I was just on the consulting side of the house, I’m not sure I could fully understand or appreciate how difficult some of the choices CIOs are faced with are. I can relate to that feeling of being blocked or trapped because I’ve experienced it. The good news is our CTO and Architects provide real world lessons right here at home for both myself and our IT Director.

Interestingly enough, on the services side of my role, in both the Professional Services and Managed Services division, we are entering our 3rd year of effort to realign those divisions in a way that helps CIOs solve those same demanding needs that I am facing. We’re currently helping companies with pure cloud, hybrid cloud and traditional approaches to information services. I’m both a provider of our services to other organizations as well as a customer of those services. Our internal IT team is actually a customer of our Professional and Managed Services division. We use our CMaaS platform to manage and operate our computing platforms internally. We also use the same help desk team our customers do. Furthermore, we use various architects and engineers that serve our customers to help us with internal projects. For example, we have recently engaged our client-facing App Dev team to help GreenPages reimagine our internal Business Intelligence systems and are underway on developing our next generation BI tools and capabilities. Another example would be a project we recently completed to look at our networking and security infrastructure in order to be prepared to move workloads from on-prem or colo facilities to the cloud. We had to add additional capabilities to our network and went out and got the SOC 2 Type 2 certification which really speaks to the importance we place on security. What I love about working here is that we don’t just talk about hybrid cloud; we are actively and successfully using those models for our own business.

Ben: What are some of your goals for 2015?

Kevin: On the internal IT side, I’m engaged, like many of my colleagues around the globe, on assessing what the new computing paradigm means for our organization. We’re embarked in looking at every aspect of our environment along with our ability to deliver services to the GreenPages’ organization. Our goal is to figure out a way to do this in a cost effective, scalable, and flexible way that meets the needs of our organization.

Ben: Any interesting projects you have going on right now?

Kevin: As we assess our workloads and start trying to understand what the best execution venues for those workloads are, it’s become pretty clear that we are going to be using more than a single venue. For example, one big execution venue for us is VMware’s vCloud Air. We have some workloads that are excellent candidates for that venue. Other workloads are great fits for Microsoft Azure. We have some initiatives, like the BI project, that are going to be an open source project. We’ll be utilizing things like Docker and Hadoop that are most likely going to be highly optimized around Amazon’s capabilities. This is giving me insight into the notion that there are many different capabilities between clouds. The important thing is to make sure every workload is optimized for the right cloud. This is an important ongoing exercise for us in 2015.

Ben: Which area of IT would you say interests you the most?

Kevin: What interests me most about IT is the organizational aspect. How do you organize in a way that creates value for the company? How do you prioritize in terms of people, process and technology? For me, it’s not about one particular aspect; it’s about the entire program and how it all functions.

Ben: What are you looking forward to in 2015 from a technology perspective?

Kevin: I’m really looking forward to our annual Summit event in August. I think it is going to be the best one yet. If you look back several years ago, very few attendees raised their hand when asked if they thought the cloud was real. Last year, most of the hands in the room went up. What will make it especially interesting this year is that we have many customers deeply involved with these types of projects. Four years ago the only option was to sit and listen to presentations, but now our customers will have the opportunity to talk to their peers about how they are actually going about doing cloud. It will be a great event and a fantastic learning opportunity.

Are you looking for more information around the transformation of corporate IT? Download this eBook from our Director of Cloud Services John Dixon to learn more!

 

By Ben Stephenson, Emerging Media Specialist

Featured, Miscellaneous IT, Project management

5 Tips for Effective Communication with IT Stakeholders

project managersThere is often a business cultural dynamic and belief that because Project Managers (PMs) don’t perform the work, they don’t understand the work; that if a PM supports multiple con-current projects across various disciplines, they’re unable to comprehend the inner workings of the technology design or implementation.  When it comes to technology, a Project Manager’s goal is the same as the engineer’s: to exceed customer expectations and enable organizations to compete successfully and efficiently. Effective communication between the engineering team and the PM team is key. Here are five “Be’s” to keep in mind:

 

1) Be a Comrade: Some engineers may view PMs as micromanagers who get in the way of getting the job done.  Keep in mind that each team’s goal is to meet the needs of the client and the project stakeholders.

2) Be Honest: It’s true that Project Managers aren’t the absolute technology experts but effective Project Managers should understand the solution the engineers are solving. A well-informed and knowledgeable PM takes the time to request in-depth overviews of specific initiatives so they can better address any issues or concerns that may arise if a project hits a snag.  (As all project do!)

3) Be Consistent: Engineers have scheduled deadlines to deliver on task. Effective Project Managers make sure they’re working collaboratively to ensure timely delivery. For instance, tracking project plans with engineers before updating clients, touching base with engineers on a scheduled basis (e.g., daily, weekly), or consistent follow-up with internal staff, as well as the external client. These are all critical to managing a successful project.

4) Be a Client Champion: Every project, no matter how meticulously planned or designed, can sometimes hit a rough patch., Effective Project Managers anticipate these speedbumps and work to coordinate the necessary support needed to successfully overcome any challenges.  Being a client champion is one of GreenPages’ most important corporate values. The strength of the team comes from everyone working cohesively to resolve problems in the best interest of the client.

5) Be an Active Listener:  Effective Project Managers ensure they’re clear on direction and feedback from both engineers and clients. By striving to nurture mutually-beneficial relationships with frequent, honest, and open communication, overall project success (from scope to closure) is ensured.

When a group of engineers, client stakeholders, and project managers achieve true working synergy, the team becomes more than just a collection of people; the results achieved together are greater than the results any of us could achieve alone.

By Stacy Robinson, Project Manager

Featured, Miscellaneous IT, Tech New Recap

Tech News Recap for the Week of 2/23/2015

Were you busy last week? Here’s a quick tech news recap of articles you may have missed from the week of 2/23/2015!

tech news recapNorthern Arizona University embraces software defined storage, California Firefighters are using cloud computing to analyze data to help battle blazes, and cloud computing for marketing and collaboration is having an impact on SMBs. Apple is building two data centers in Europe. Google is testing mobile app ads in the Google Play Store and is making it easier to search for flights online. In the past 6 months, the White House has replaced its top IT leaders. Below, there is also a list of the top ten wearable technologies you can buy right now.

 

Tech News Recap

 

Are you looking for more information around migration options for Windows Server 2003 End of Life? Download our whitepaper or register for one of our upcoming events in Cambridge, MA/Portland, ME/Tampa, FL/Alpharetta, GA.

 

By Ben Stephenson, Emerging Media Specialist

Featured, Miscellaneous IT, Tech New Recap

Tech News Recap for the Week of 2/9/2015

Were you busy last week? Here’s a quick tech news recap of articles you may have missed from the week of 2/9/2015!

tech news recapThere was some good information around announcements made by VMware at its Partner Exchange event around vSphere 6, vSAN 6, and the partnership between VMware and Google. Tony Scott was named Federal CIO. President Obama, Apple CEO Tim Cook and others debated the topic of sharing cyber security data. Apple is working on an electric car design and Google is shutting down its expert video chat service, Google Hangouts.

Tech News Recap

Register for this Thursday’s webinar “How to Approach a Windows Server 2003 Migration: Key Steps for a Better Transition” to make sure you’re prepared for the upcoming July 14th end of life date.

 

By Ben Stephenson, Emerging Media Specialist

Cloud computing, Featured, vCloud Air, VMware

VMware’s Partnership with Google: vCloud Air & the Google Cloud Platform

 

vCloud AirFollowing on from Chris Ward’s excellent blog coming out of VMware PEX 2015, I wanted to add some details to the recent VMware announcement (January 29, 2015) to partner with Google to “deliver greater enterprise access to public cloud services” via a combination of VMware vCloud Air and the Google Cloud Platform.

For those who are unfamiliar, vCloud Air (formally VMware vCloud Hybrid Service or vCHS) is a public Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud platform built on the same traditional VMware vSphere we are all used to but managed 24/7 by VMware and their public cloud partners.  vCloud Air offers services such as infrastructure, disaster recovery and backups, and allows you to extend both your network and workloads from traditional on-premise to the cloud with relative ease.

For some time now, Google has offered broad cloud platform services in the following categories, but as part of the first wave of integration into the vCloud Air space, only the highlighted sub-set of (4) Google Cloud Platform services will be made available to existing VMware vCloud Air customers, using a PAYG consumption model:

 

  • Compute (no current/planned integration points)
  • Storage
    • Cloud Storage – Google’s distributed low-cost object storage service
    • Cloud Datastore – Google’s schema-less, document-based NoSQL database service with automatic scale and full transactional integrity.
  • Networking
    • Cloud DNS – A globally distributed low-latency DNS service
  • Big Data
    • BigQuery – A real-time big data analytics service suitable for running ad-hoc BI queries across billions of data points in seconds.
  • Services (no current/planned integration points)
  • Management (no current/planned integration points)

 

Additionally, while Google offers their own management framework, there are some rumors that the partnership could eventually mature to include integration with VMware’s own vRealize Operations management solution.  This will most likely be offered via VMware’s vRealize Air platform (in beta), which currently offers both Automation and Compliance programs.  To quote our CTO, Chris Ward, “VMware vRealize Air checks a lot of boxes for customers of all sizes seeking multi-vendor, multi-cloud provisioning and management of their infrastructure services.

Industry experts, including GreenPages, Forrester and Gartner, are calling this partnership a big “win” for VMware customers, especially enterprise customers.  This relationship will help to truly legitimize not only the cloud, but also the place of the enterprise customer in the cloud.  Specifically, it will allow enterprise customers who are looking for broader database, analytics, and storage options and support, beyond the current vCloud Air portfolio, to find a suitable and scalable landing place for their applications and workloads.  This will build on vCloud Air’s current support for over 5,000 applications and over 90 operating systems.

This is also a strong move for both VMware and Google.  This relationship will give Google much needed enterprise IT exposure, something that VMware has deep roots in, and accelerates VMware’s ability to offer tools to manage a public cloud, an area in which Google has developed a global dominate position.

As with the vSphere 6 announcement, there is no “official” release date, but rumors are suggesting everything from the “first half of 2015” to availability “later this year.”  Additionally, VMware had no details to share around pricing, but as soon as we know more and have had a chance to sample the integration ourselves, we will share more details.  However, if history is anything to go by we should likely expect something in place by VMworld 2015.

If you have any questions or would like any additional details around this new partnership, email us at socialmedia@greenpages.com

By Tim Cook, Practice Manager, Advanced Virtualization