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There’s no denying it: the cloud industry has reached maturity. And businesses are lining up to make a move to the cloud. According to Gartner, organizations will store 36% of their content in the cloud by 2016, a big jump from the meagre 7% they stored in 2011.

Managed service providers (MSPs) who want to tap into this growing market will have to decide how to approach the cloud. They’ll have to assess their customers’ needs, what kind of offering they can deliver and what kind of strategy will ensure their success. What kind of MSP are you? Here are three common profiles.

The Risk-Taker

This type of MSP likes to be in control. To make sure he has complete ownership of the infrastructure, he won’t go with any public cloud provider. He’ll build his own cloud. The biggest benefit? 100% control. Guaranteed. From the infrastructure’s components to updates and maintenance, everything will be in the hands of the service provider.

But at what cost?

If you’re thinking about deploying your own cloud, consider these facts:

• The initial investment is high.
• It’ll take about three years before you see a Return on Investment (ROI).
• Competition in the market is fierce and your cloud cost won’t be able to match what the big providers are offering.

You should also account for time spent on maintenance and updates. MSPs who take this route should also know that it can’t be sustained forever.

The Conventional

Next is the conventional MSP. Unlike the risk-taker, this guy will trust another provider for his cloud needs. And that provider will be a big brand that everyone knows: Amazon, Google, Microsoft…

This route has some benefits. The MSP will be able to build his own bundle to resell. He’ll also find it easier to convince customers to move to the cloud. After all, who doesn’t know Amazon or Microsoft? The risk? Almost non-existent.

What’s the catch? Well, competition in this market is brutal. There are a lot of other players out there reselling the same cloud. Your customers can get cloud offerings from almost anyone, and probably at a lower cost!

Can you make a lot of money? If you want to sell, you’ll have to go cheap. Or, you’ll have to develop a value proposition that will be unique in your market.

The Trailblazer

Last but not least, we have the trailblazer. This type of MSP will be looking for a white-label provider to get the best of both worlds.

Relying on a white-label provider will help the MSP build his credibility. He can offer an enterprise-grade infrastructure without investing a lot of money to deploy his own cloud. And he can benefit from the latest hardware updates and maintenance and still be in control of server usage. Scalability will never be an issue. Adding or removing servers can be done quickly, ensuring that you pay only for what you use.

The best part of this model? You can sell it as your cloud to your customers. It gives you all the flexibility you need to tailor your offer and sell services that cater to your customers’ specific needs. The end result? A boost in your credibility.

The only thing you’re not getting from this model is a hands-on approach to the hardware. But since you can choose and configure your servers, this shouldn’t be a deal breaker for someone who wants to increase profits in the IaaS market.

What’s your strategy for 2015?

The post MSPs and IaaS: What to Do in 2015? appeared first on SherWeb.

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The majority of Microsoft’s service errors in the first quarter of 2014 were advisory, while there were significantly more service interruptions in the following three quarters, according to analysis carried out by CloudEndure.

The figures, taken from Azure’s Service Health Dashboard across last year, saw three full service interruptions in Q1, a whopping 28 in Q2, 16 in Q3 and zero in the final quarter. The highest number of errors came in Q1 (259), yet also produced the lowest number of partial service interruptions (88), compared to 134, 129 and 127 for the other three quarters.

The analysis came about after Azure suffered two debilitating outages last year; one in August, and one in November, which was caused by storage blob front ends going into an infinite loop – a process which went undetected during testing.

Picture credit: CloudEndure

John Dinsdale, chief analyst at Synergy Research, told CloudTech the outage was “really not good”, and Microsoft’s response was “an awful lot less than stellar.” This came after research which found Microsoft had taken the clear second place – behind AWS, naturally – in the global cloud infrastructure market.

Not surprisingly, Americas West had the most outages overall (114), followed by Americas East (98) and Europe West (91), although Europe West and Americas North Central had the most full service interruptions (5). By service, compute had by far the most errors (135), followed by SQL databases (124), virtual machines (64), websites (61) and storage (55).

Despite these figures, CloudEndure is quick to point out that statistics should be taken with a pinch of salt. “Planning the location of your app based on the historical number of errors and performance issues is probably not the best approach”, a blog post reads. “While cloud provider issues are important, you should keep in mind that the top reason for application downtime remains human error.”

It’s certainly the reason Joyent’s servers unexpectedly went down back in May – and it’s good advice to follow here.

SYS-CON Events announced today that Solgenia will exhibit at SYS-CON’s 16th International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on June 9-11, 2015, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY, and the 17th International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on November 3–5, 2015, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
Solgenia is the global market leader in Cloud Collaboration and Cloud Infrastructure software solutions. Designed to “Bridge the Gap” between Personal and Professional Social, Mobile and Cloud user experiences, our solutions help large and medium-sized organizations dramatically improve productivity, reduce collaboration costs, and increase the overall enterprise value by bringing collaboration and infrastructure solutions to the Cloud. Based on innovative patented technologies that support Private, Public and Hybrid Cloud models, all our products offer ease of use, platform neutrality and mobile ubiquity. Solgenia products and solutions are used by 3500 plus companies worldwide.

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SYS-CON Events announced today that Tufin, the market-leading provider of Security Policy Orchestration Solutions, will exhibit at SYS-CON’s 16th International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on June 9-11, 2015, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY.
As the market leader of Security Policy Orchestration, Tufin automates and accelerates network configuration changes while maintaining security and compliance. Tufin’s award-winning Orchestration Suite™ gives IT organizations the power and agility to enforce security policy across complex, multi-vendor enterprise networks. With more than 1,400 customers worldwide, Tufin enables IT to positively impact the entire business by reducing the time and cost to implement network changes by up to 80 percent.

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It is important that operations be in the loop when it comes to planning any software deployment. They need to know when the project starts, not at the last minute about your new deployment. Ensure that operations is aware of any infrastructure changes needed well in advance. If the operations team is your front-line defense for monitoring and troubleshooting your app, help them help you by collaborating on how best to monitor the app and discuss early warning signs of trouble to be alerted to. If you’re thinking of setting up DevOp team you should probably read this

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In this demo at 15th Cloud Expo, Mirko Fellner, Senior Vice President and Head of Marketing & Sales at In Mind Computing, shows the Insight Selling Suite, a cloud-based solution that makes the sales process better and more reasonable. It runs in the SAP HANA Cloud, so it brings the best of both worlds together – Cloud and Big Data. Get all these questions and hundreds more like them answered at the 2015 Cloud Expo and @ThingsExpo June 9-11, 2015, at the Javits Center in New York City, and November 3-5, 2015, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, California.

Our upcoming June 9-11, 2015, event in New York City will present a total of 10 simultaneous tracks (the largest conference content in the world) by an all-star faculty, over three days, plus the popular two-day “Cloud Computing Bootcamp” presented by Janakiram MSV, an analyst with the Gigaom Research analyst network where he covers the Cloud Services landscape.

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Log data provides the most granular view into what is happening across your systems, applications, and end users. Logs can show you where the issues are in real-time, andprovide a historical trending view over time. Logs give you the whole picture.
Yesterday we announced a new Community Pack for our friends at Fastly. I’m a big fan of Fastly. Not only do they have a compelling mission of changing the way people experience the Internet, but I like their simple assertion that slow is unacceptable.

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Dell Foglight has been named to IT Central Station’s ‘Top 10 Most Popular APM – 2015 Edition.’ IT Central Station is a dynamic community site with reviews, recommendations, and other expert advice for technology buyers.
Foglight, Dell’s application performance monitoring (APM) solution, blends business context with deep technical insight, unifying all users and data within a structured model built around transactions – leveraging patent-pending TransactionDNA technology.

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How much risk do you have of someone stealing disks from your datacenter? Take the average life span of a hard drive. The enterprise class hard drive is designed to last a minimum of 5 years. During that 5 years a SAN or NAS filled with hard disks is expected to have at least 99.999 percent uptime or better. So if you take the same approach to securing data in your datacenter as you did with your laptop, what risk have you really mitigated? None. 99.999% of the time, as that disk is up and running in the datacenter you have provided ZERO additional protection for your data. Just because it says encryption on the label does not mean security.

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