Tunisie Electronique, a Tunisian IT services provider, improved their IT service management offerings and capabilities leveraging cloud-based services.
To learn more about better IT control and efficiency using the latest ITSM tools and services, we are joined by Fadoua Ouerdiane, IT Projects Director at SMS and Tunisie Electronique in Tunis, Tunisia. The discussion is moderated by me, Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions.

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PubNub on Monday has announced that it is partnering with IBM to bring its sophisticated real-time data streaming and messaging capabilities to Bluemix, IBM’s cloud development platform.
“Today’s app and connected devices require an always-on connection, but building a secure, scalable solution from the ground up is time consuming, resource intensive, and error-prone,” said Todd Greene, CEO of PubNub. “PubNub enables web, mobile and IoT developers building apps on IBM Bluemix to quickly add scalable realtime functionality with minimal effort and cost.”

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​I had the chance to sit down with Lee Slaughter, Skytap’s Manager of Information Security, to discuss security in the cloud, the efforts that make up a thorough due diligence when choosing a cloud provider, and how to keep up with external and internal threats to your business.
Noel: Last year, Charles Babcock wrote a piece for InformationWeek on the list of the top 9 worst cloud security threats that was put out by the Cloud Security Alliance. As I read through them, I noticed that the threats were predominantly related to malicious insiders and outsiders, data breaches, denial of service attacks, etc.

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Prior to launching a recurring revenue initiative, it’s best to take a step back and assess areas of the business to ensure you’re ready for implementation. If you want the competitive advantage, you have to give your customers what they want, when they want it, the way they want it. Successfully delivering a customer experience that meet those expectations challenges your business capabilities, from customer engagement to security and compliance.
A successful recurring revenue setup requires proficiency in a set of core business and operational capabilities, including: customer engagement, responsiveness, service delivery, customer service, invoice and payment, scalability, channel management, analytics, and agility. And because data fragmentation can be amplified by the scale and pace of recurring revenue, compliance and security concerns should be identified and mitigated early in the initiative.

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Disaster recovery – the IT industry’s latest buzz words. Although a popular subject, many of the articles out there are not providing accurate or enough information to demystify the concept. How does one explain disaster recovery to a SMB owner or an organisation’s president without confusing them more than clarifying? Or without boring the hell out of them? Here’s my attempt.

First, there are a few terms you’ll need to acquaint yourself with. Like RTO and RPO. Common slang for us IT experts, but nonsense to non IT professionals.

RTO: Recovery time objective. Simply put: how much time between the moment of the disaster and the time users can work again?

RPO: Recovery point objective. How far back in time are you willing to go in case of a disaster? How much work and/or transactions can be lost without hindering business continuity?

Both of these are counted in minutes, hours or days, and are directly related to the criticality of your IT processes and data. The lower the number is for RTO and RPO, the higher the cost will be for a disaster recovery solution.

Usually, it’s mostly core business applications and data that are included in the scope of a disaster recovery plan. If you think about it, what data is your business dealing with that is not business critical? Usually most of it is, but because disaster recovery can get pricey, some organizations choose to only include a certain percentage of their data in the plan. This, of course, means that you won’t access the data you didn’t include in the plan should a disaster occur.

Before I paint you a broader picture, here are other important terms you should know. Here are the 3 types of recovery sites. An important thought to keep in mind: there is not wrong or right here. The key is to find a disaster recovery plan that meets your organization’s specific needs.

Cold site: A cold site is a datacenter with sleeping servers (virtual or physical) where regular offsite backups can be restored to the sleeping servers. For example, backups for mission critical systems could be done every six hours. This is the most affordable and common type of disaster recovery for SMBs. Usually this scheme is chosen for longer RTO/RPO values.

Warm site: Warm sites require better infrastructure, but they can bring down RTO and RPO to minutes. It all depends on internet link speed, latency, etc. Because they require active licenses, warm sites have about the same total cost of ownership as the original datacenter they are duplicating. Sometimes, they can even cost a little more because of the costs for synchronizing tools for servers and data.

Geographically dispersed high availability: This type of site offers almost instant backups of the duplicated environment in real-time. It is achieved through applicative and network load balancing, and requires advanced Domain Name System (DNS) servers management process.

Cold and warm sites have been the most common disaster recovery options for larger corporations as their data processing defines their business continuity capabilities. Nowadays, the widespread adoption of cloud services allows eased implementation and cost reduction like never before.

Most companies now use virtual servers to handle their daily computing requirements. Virtual server infrastructures are inherently more resilient and easier to replicate across internet and WAN links. Cloud hosting providers can help companies setup a warm site with reduced capabilities through a synchronization procedure that respects the target RPO/TRO. 

One the main features of a cloud infrastructure is elasticity. This means that in the advent of a disaster, one simply allocates the required resources to the synchronized servers and move the operations to the cloud hosted infrastructure. This type of set up wasn’t possible before the advent of public clouds from reputable cloud hosting providers like Amazon or SherWeb.

Of course, these setups still require planning and the expertise of IT architects/business specialists to address the specificities of each company. These experts can assess with accuracy the companies’ mission critical needs and thus evaluate feasibility to properly set the requirements of a disaster recovery plan. Cloud technology has made disaster recovery solutions within reach of most SMBs that rely on IT to thrive.

The post Disaster Recovery in a Nutshell: How Does It Work? appeared first on SherWeb.

An IPO and a billion dollar valuation sounds like your company made it. Trust me, building a company from scratch and eventually selling it for a good deal of money, feels great. However, it also changes the game completely. We became a public company and after successfully growing and evolving our vision for how we could best continue to reshape the future of application performance, we decided to come full-circle and become private again. The experience we created with ruxit was a key driver for this decision. Here is why.

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On a recent flight home after meeting with a large bank, I started reflecting on how the conversations about cloud computing with clients have changed over the last 12 to 24 months. In 2012 and 2013, a lot of the conversations where focused on “what is cloud computing,” “help us build a cloud strategy” or “how do we automate our infrastructure.” As we near the end of 2014 these conversations have changed drastically.

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For capabilities that are not a core competency of an enterprise, today’s IT teams are hard pressed to justify why the needs of the business could not be met with a leading SaaS solution.

Here’s the truth.

Check out my latest whitepaper that I coauthored for Bulger Partners.

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2015 is being billed by many in the industry as the “Year of the Hybrid Cloud.” In fact, more than 65 percent of enterprise IT organizations will commit to hybrid cloud technologies before 2016, vastly driving the rate and pace of change in IT organizations, according to IDC FutureScape for Cloud. The reason hybrid cloud is so attractive is that organizations believe they can achieve greater levels of scalability and cost-effectiveness by using a combination of in-house IT resources and public cloud environments tailored to their unique needs.

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