A blog reader asked me how I set everything to run multiple browsers simultaneously. Here’s how I configured my Mac® to use five different versions of Internet Explorer at the same time. Step 1: Your Mac To store all the VMs, you will need about 60–90 GB of free space on your Mac. A Mac […]
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Salesforce has announced the acquisition of application network platform provider MuleSoft for $6.5 billion, making it the largest acquisition in the company's history.
MuleSoft – which went public last year – offers a platform which connects SaaS and enterprise applications whether on-premise or in the cloud.
The company's role within Salesforce will be to 'power the new Salesforce Integration Cloud, which will enable all enterprises to surface any data – regardless of where it resides – to drive deep and intelligent customer experiences throughout a personalised 1:1 journey', in the words of the company.
MuleSoft's more than 1,200 customers include Coca-Cola, Barclays and Unilever. Naturally, these companies cited in the press materials are also key Salesforce clients. Unilever announced in July that it was combining with Salesforce and Accenture, as well as being a long-term customer of Salesforce Marketing Cloud, while Coca-Cola has used Salesforce for building custom apps on the Salesforce1 platform and Barclays utilises Salesforce Communities.
"Together, Salesforce and MuleSoft will enable customers to connect all of the information throughout their enterprise across all public and private clouds and data sources – radically enhancing innovation," said Marc Benioff, Salesforce CEO. "I am thrilled to welcome MuleSoft to the Salesforce Ohana." Greg Schott, MuleSoft CEO, added: "Together, Salesforce and MuleSoft will accelerate our customers' digital transformations enabling them to unlock their data across any application or endpoint."
The largest acquisition from Salesforce previously, where monetary details were disclosed, was ExactTarget in 2013 for $2.5bn. Shares in MuleSoft rose significantly by 27.2% at close.
Andrew Keys is Co-Founder of ConsenSys Enterprise. He comes to ConsenSys Enterprise with capital markets, technology and entrepreneurial experience. Previously, he worked for UBS investment bank in equities analysis. Later, he was responsible for the creation and distribution of life settlement products to hedge funds and investment banks. After, he co-founded a revenue cycle management company where he learned about Bitcoin and eventually Ethereal. Andrew’s role at ConsenSys Enterprise is a multi-faceted approach of strategy and enterprise business development. Andrew graduated from Loyola University in Maryland and University of Auckland with degrees in economics and international finance.
Organisations are taking a more sophisticated approach to cloud vendor selection and management with multi-cloud at the heart of this change, according to industry research firm Cloud Spectator.
The company has released its latest price-performance analysis for public cloud infrastructure as a service (IaaS) providers in North America, and found again that behemoths Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform struggle in the rankings against smaller players.
Hosting provider 1and1 topped the list with the benchmark score of 100, with French provider OVH (75) and CenturyLink (74) picking up the silver and bronze medals respectively. 1and1 came first because of its especially strong performance in VMs – on which the figures are calculated, alongside block storage performance – and the most inexpensive pricing of the firms studied.
In contrast, Google achieved an overall score of only 37, but still ahead of AWS (31) and Azure (30). DimensionData, with a score of 20, finished bottom of the pile.
The report sets its stall out straight away with its hypothesis. “A lack of transparency in the public cloud IaaS marketplace for cloud services performance often leads to misinformation or false assumptions,” the report notes. “Users and potential users may be led to view cloud computing as a commodity, differentiated mostly by variety of services. In reality, cloud performance is impacted by a variety of factors from provider to provider, involving everything from the physical hardware to the cost of the virtualised resources.
“By evaluating cloud services based on performance rather than solely price or VM configurations, users are able to maximise value in the cloud.”
This is by no means the first study from Cloud Spectator which comes to this conclusion. As far back as January 2016, this publication reported the ascent of 1and1 as the best value IaaS provider as a ‘surprising’ finding. Today, however, the news comes as less of a surprise – and led by multi-cloud implementations, organisations are becoming savvier in terms of cloudy value for money.
“Various research inputs show that a multi-cloud approach is the preferred strategy,” Ken Balazs, Cloud Spectator CEO, tells CloudTech. “This approach helps organisations create competition, avoid vendor lock-in, provide service alternatives for applications, and ensure functionally equivalent services for pricing optimisation.”
Balazs added that the majority of clients Cloud Spectator works with have multi-cloud and hybrid cloud initiatives. “We almost always see AWS, Microsoft and Google under consideration, but I don’t think that cloud is a one size fits all proposition,” says Balazs. “There are a number of excellent providers, so vendor selection needs to start with identifying the client’s needs, aligning them to the services and offerings of providers, and matching these to budgets.”
You can read the full report here (registration required).
It’s the same old story for Oracle as its Q318 financial results were announced; strong cloud revenues, but what about the rest of the portfolio?
Oracle announced total revenues of $9.8 billion (£7bn) over the past three months, with total cloud revenues contributing 16% of the overall figure at $1.6bn. Cloud revenues have gone up 32% year over year; cloud software as a service, the much larger bucket, saw revenues of $1.15bn at a yearly increase of 33%, while cloud platform as a service and infrastructure as a service went up 28% year on year to $415m.
Total on-premise software revenues went up 4% to $6.4bn, while new software licenses, hardware revenues and services revenues all saw a small decline.
The majority of the company’s recent news updates came at CloudWorld in New York back in February. This included the launch of 12 new data centres regions, across Asia, Europe and the Americas, as well as updates to Oracle’s Internet of Things Cloud and to enterprise service level agreements.
The big kahuna, however, was around new features with Oracle’s autonomous database cloud, the company’s big bet. To help make all Oracle Cloud Platform services ‘self-driving, self-securing and self-repairing’, the company explained, would include such features as automated code generation, self-learning chatbots, and security remediation for application development.
Speaking to analysts after the announcement was made, CTO Larry Ellison promised more of the same. “Over the next few months, we expect to deliver autonomous analytics, autonomous mobility, autonomous application development and autonomous integration services,” he said, as transcribed by Seeking Alpha.
“Oracle’s new suite of autonomous PaaS services delivers an unprecedented level of automation and cost savings to our customers,” Ellison added. “Our highly automated suite of autonomous PaaS services reduces cost by reducing human labour and improves reliability and security by reducing human error.
“No other cloud provider has anything like it.”
You can read the full earnings report here.
Just 16% of enterprises use just one cloud, with two-thirds having a strategy in place for a hybrid approach, according to a new report.
Companies in the early stages of cloud adoption are likely to be using one cloud as they assess operational challenges of migrating, or if they’re only pushing a few workloads into the cloud as they keep sensitive data on-premise, an investigation by 451 Research has revealed.
But the vast majority of firms – 84% – are using multiple clouds for improved speed and agility, the analyst house’s survey of 1,500 CIOs and IT managers at large enterprises, conducted in association with NTT Com and Dell EMC, found.
“Over 80% of the respondents to this study currently use multiple cloud environments, with varying amounts of integration, migration and interaction between them,” said Liam Eagle, 451’s research manager for cloud, hosting and managed services.
“Perhaps most significant is that approximately a quarter of companies already use some form of hybrid cloud – using the definition of seamless delivery of a single business function across multiple environments.”
For those firms looking at hybrid cloud, security is the biggest factor, but 451 warned that traditional measures like firewalls and access controls will need to be re-tooled for hybrid environments, which require integrated tools designed for the cloud.
However, security is also the biggest barrier to adopting hybrid cloud, giving IT security teams a headache in having to track and monitor different workloads in different states, and protect them in transit and at rest. With multiple environments – both on-premise and cloud – access control is also more difficult, 451 said.
Innovation is a lesser driver pushing companies down a hybrid route, and the report said that hybrid cloud only indirectly leads to this “as part of a wider business strategy”.
“Innovation is not inherently linked to operational efficiency per se, unless it involves for example energy savings, the realization of new products or services or significant transformation,” the report read.
Another minor reason to move to hybrid was to avoid vendor lock-in with a single cloud, with large enterprises used to dealing with a wide variety of suppliers looking to replicate this approach in the cloud.
Other barriers include operational complexity in managing different environments, where cloud is a seamless extension of on-premise, and a difficulty in migrating workloads like applications and databases in the cloud.
Where these “cannot be migrated, there is inherent cost in re-development and delay in implementation”, 451 warned.
Does backup get your back up? It shouldn’t. A robust backup routine ought to be fuss-free and transparent – because if it isn’t, you’re far less likely to keep your archives updated. That means that when things go wrong and you need to recover a lost file, the crucial documents you’ve been working on may not have been backed up.
Even if you’re trying to do everything right, your chosen backup method might not be as comprehensive or bulletproof as you thought. And that should be a big concern: small businesses can’t afford to have things go wrong when it comes to backup, and home users stand to lose irreplaceable documents, photos and videos if their backup system lets them down.
Let’s clear one thing up right away: synchronisation isn’t backup. Cloud-syncing services are an easy, effective way to keep vital files updated across several machines. But if you’re relying on a service like this to save your skin in the case of an IT emergency, you’re running a serious risk.
Take Dropbox as an example. Not only does Dropbox duplicate your files onto every computer you own, it also keeps its own set of backups – so you can roll back to an earlier version of a file, or bring deleted items back from oblivion. This feature can be a real life-saver: to recover a deleted file, you can just log in through the browser, click Files, then click Deleted files in the sidebar. Find the file you want to resurrect and click restore.
Dropbox keeps copies of deleted files for 30 days as standard and 120 days in the Professional version
The catch is that changes and deleted files are only stored for 30 days, after which they’re purged. So while Dropbox can rescue you from short-term problems, it’s no use when you need to restore a document that was changed or deleted a few months ago. You can extend the window to 120 days by upgrading to a Dropbox professional account, but it’s expensive: it costs £199 annually, or £19.99 per month.
It also still doesn’t count as a proper backup solution. A dedicated backup service should allow you to recover files that were deleted years ago, or step back through a complete history of changes to a document, from its original creation to the present day. Not only is this essential for data security, it also provides a helpful audit trail so you can track the development of your projects. Some backup services even offer an authentication service that can be used to prove that a certain file was created or edited on a certain date.
Although we’ve picked on Dropbox here, it’s by no means an outlier. Similar issues apply to Google Drive, iCloud, OneDrive and so forth. Syncing services should be used for just that – syncing – and backup left to tools designed with that task in mind.
When it comes to backup, the standard advice is that you should keep three copies of anything that matters, in two different formats, with at least one of them off-site – an approach known as the 3-2-1 strategy. The last point is particularly important: no matter how diligently you backup your system, if you store your media right next to your PC then it will be equally susceptible to fire, flood and theft – another reason why your backups might not be as safe as you’d hope.
The good news is that offsite backup is easy: there are plenty of cloud-based backup providers who will, for a modest subscription, handle everything for you. However, this is normally on a “best-effort” basis; for safety, speed and convenience it’s a good idea to keep local backups as well.
At least one of your backup destinations should be off-site
Ideally, you want your local backups to be updated in real time, so that every time you update a file the backup gets updated too. You can get close to this using Windows’ File History feature, as we discuss below (or Time Machine on macOS), with a NAS or a USB drive as your destination.
If you’re serious about backups then ideally you should also keep a second regularly updated set, to provide an extra layer of robustness against glitches and disasters. Ideally, this would be on a different medium to your primary backups: using a pair of hard drives is much safer than using two folders on one drive.
This is another place where it’s tempting to rely on cloud services, but here’s a cautionary tale: Apify founder Jan Čurn lost 8,000 photos after he uploaded them to Dropbox, then tried to remove them from his local hard disk, to free up space. In theory, he should have been fine. He used Dropbox’s Smart Sync feature (only available on Professional accounts), which is supposed to store your files in the cloud, and download them on demand.
However, writing on Medium, Čurn recalled that the Dropbox client crashed during the initial sync operation, so he unsynced his photo folders by hand. “Everything worked well, the directories disappeared from the local hard drive, but they were still available on Dropbox’s website. All good,” he wrote.
But all wasn’t good. Two months later, Čurn discovered that the photo folders were empty on the server, too. “[It] seems that the Dropbox client first deletes files locally before it informs the server about the new selective sync settings,” he noted. “Consequently, if the client crashes or is killed before the server is contacted, the files remain deleted without any trace. After the client restarts again, it only sees there are some files missing and syncs this new state with the server.”
Dropbox’s engineering team managed to recover 1,463 of Čurn’s files, but the rest were lost for good. It’s a reminder of another important principle: a backup is a copy. If you only have one copy of something, it’s not a backup.
If your backup routine relies on you remembering to update your archives then it’s liable to fail; dedicated backup tools either run continuously, or update your backups at regular intervals. Most backup tools take an incremental approach, so only new and updated files are stored, which saves time, and keeps storage demands down. It can also save you money, by postponing the day when you need to invest in a larger repository for your backups.
Set the smallest practical interval for each incremental backup. Hourly is by no means too often: ask yourself whether you could afford to lose a morning’s work if a lunchtime power cut corrupted your drive and wiped out several hours of productivity. However, if you’re working with a capped broadband connection, it makes sense to limit your cloud backups to run during unmetered hours (typically overnight), so long as you also have local backups running throughout the day.
Don’t rely exclusively on incremental backups, though. Taking periodic full backups allows you to quickly and easily restore your complete system to a recent state; mixing incremental and full backups is just as important as storing them in several locations.
Windows’ built-in backup tools can archive your data on either an external drive or a NAS location
Windows’ integrated tools make it very easy to maintain local backups. Start by enabling the File History tool, which uses a connected drive or NAS as a repository for key files, including your Libraries, Desktop, contacts and favourites. To find it, open Settings’ Update & Security pane, and click Backup in the sidebar (or just search Cortana for Backup). Click “+” beside ‘Add a drive’ and select a connected storage device. This only searches for USB drives; if you want to use a NAS, wait for it to fail, then click Show all network connections and select the volume you want to use.
You can manually specify what folders Windows backs up, how often it backs them up and how long it keeps them
It may look like nothing has happened, but click out and back into Backup and you’ll see that the Add drive button has been replaced by a switch, toggled to On to activate the backup. Click More options below this to specify what’s included in the backup set, how frequently you want it to back up (between every 10 minutes, and daily) and how long the backup set should be kept. You can also invoke an immediate backup.
With this done, Windows will start quietly and continuously backing up your modified files. If you need to recover a file or folder, simply navigate to it in Explorer and click the History button in the ribbon to view and restore old versions and deleted files.
As we’ve mentioned above, entrusting your files in a cloud-syncing service doesn’t guarantee their safety – so you should make sure your local folders are included in your backup sets, so that files stored on sync services like Dropbox, OneDrive and iCloud should be backed up automatically. Simply keep their client apps are running the whole time your PC is active to keep the copies updated.
With Google Drive, things are a bit more complicated. Google prefers that you work through the browser, and the documents it stores on your local machine are only web links that launch each file in a web app. This means that the files on the server are your only copy – which is, of course, a dangerous situation to be in.
The solution is a tool called InSync, which downloads the files themselves, not just the links – including files others have shared with you – and converts them to Microsoft Office or OpenDocument formats so you can open them locally. The synchronisation and translation works both ways, too, so any edits you make on your PC will be sent back to the server, effectively giving Google Drive the same offline features as Office 365 enjoys through its association with the offline Office apps. It’s not free, but a lifetime licence can be had for a very reasonable $30.
If you keep a blog, or use a CMS to manage your website, it’s important to think about backing that up too. Even if you’re using managed hosting or a shared server, it’s asking for trouble to keep all your data in one place: hosts can – and do – go bankrupt, disappear or suffer DDOS and malware attacks.
Automattic’s VaultPress is a comprehensive backup tool for WordPress blogs, which backs up not only your database, but your themes, settings, system files and uploads, too. It starts at $39 per year for daily backups with a 30-day archive, uptime monitoring, and protection against brute force attacks, comment and pingback spam.
If you don’t need something quite so heavyweight, check out the free BackWPup WordPress extension, which can back up your site to Dropbox, S3 or an FTP server. To install it, hover over Plugins in your WordPress Dashboard, click Add New, and type BackWPup into the search box at the top of the following screen.
With the right tool, such as VaultPress, you can even back up a WordPress installation
Similar backup tools are available for other CMS platforms, and many hosting control panels feature backup tools for flat-form or non-managed sites. Parallels Plesk lets you schedule both incremental and full backups of your data and configuration; by default the destination is a folder on the same server, which isn’t ideal, but you can send it to a separate FTP server and password-protect the resulting archive.
Backup isn’t exactly an exciting topic, but we’ve seen how easy it can be using Windows’ built-in tools, and user-friendly software like O&O DiskImage Professional and Paragon Backup & Recovery. Throw in a dedicated off-site backup service like Backblaze or Carbonite and you’ve easily satisfied the requirements of a dependable 3-2-1 backup strategy.
There’s just one more thing to say: once you’ve set up your system, make sure you thoroughly test your ability to restore files, before you need to rely on it for real. A subtle configuration error could mean you’re not backing up all the files you thought you were, or you could discover that your connection to the cloud storage server is too slow to bring you back online in an acceptable time frame. If you do find any issues, you’ll be glad you ironed them out while the going is good.
Image: Shutterstock
Need to run AutoDesk Revit but have a Mac® computer? Architects, structural engineers, designers, and contractors alike utilize Revit, a powerful computer-aided design (CAD) software for building information modeling. CAD software enables users to visualize design, create photorealistic drawings, and even future-proof models for environmental factors. According to AutoDesk’s knowledge network, the system requirements to […]
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Having been focused in the cloud sector for more than 12 years now, I have experienced much fast paced change and continued assumptions, misunderstanding and over-promising of cloud as the saviour of all ills.
Cloud is used as a generic term and yet covers a wide plethora of sub form factors (SaaS – software as a service, PaaS – platform as a service and IaaS – infrastructure as a service) and delivery mechanisms (private, public and hybrid clouds). Within these you then have a growing breadth of vendors with offerings, either born in the cloud or developed from former traditional on network server led models; each being architected differently from physical infrastructure components through to functionality, hosting locations, pricing and security models.
For the dispersed needs of a business, there is not one cloud vendor that can or does provide a total end-to-end solution fit for all and nor should there be, with cloud being a highly innovative and agile market sector that is driving change and disruption. The right fit for each project needs to be assimilated from the business needs, the technical mix, the security requirements the businesses skill set and future predicted needs and the commonality sought by the business (meaning a possible focus on reducing the breadth of vendors, perhaps choosing one PaaS platform as the standard to be used whenever PaaS is applicable).
There are five key focal reasons for driving your business to a multi-cloud infrastructure:
Cloud has driven aggressive innovation and disruption; with new providers replacing both old and newer approaches, commoditisation reducing the cost of compute and varying cloud providers offering a range of different capabilities and functions.
Multi-cloud allows you to select the best of each on offer for your needs at that window of time, some being medium to long time commitments – such as an ERP or CRM re-platforming – and some being short term tactical options such as spinning up IaaS or PaaS for testing or project-based DevOps work. Multi-cloud allows you to pick and choose from a growing range of services on offer to create a customised portfolio that fits the needs of your organisation.
No one of these delivery mechanisms is best for all customers in every instance. For example, you may have a customer CRM application that has specific value to your business through a lot of prior investment done to align to your specific business processes. You have the choice to switch to a robust, industry common SaaS based CRM and invest in re-building the processes and specific aligned customisations (a quick switch on of the generic and longer investment in the configuration) or to re-platform your proprietary setup to a cloud based platform to increase the robustness of the underlying infrastructure, add flexibility and reduce ongoing costs. A multi-cloud strategy allows you the what if capability to weigh up a wider option base for each new and existing application and do the right thing for you and your business in each individual case.
There has always been a panacea target of 100% uptime and availability (excluding scheduled maintenance) and no matter what the guarantee offered by any cloud vendor and regardless how mission critical they are, there will always be risk for failure as has been demonstrated by some very global performance and outage issues from brand name vendors. The comparative however should be with traditional methods of delivery and the efficiency scaling of costs delivered through cloud.
We pay far less now per compute/storage for far greater resilience than we have had previously. In choosing packaged cloud applications the level of redundancy delivered by the cloud provider will outweigh that you could afford or choose to provide yourself. When spinning up your own apps into the cloud, you can now build greater hot standby resiliency at a price lower than older cold redundancies would have been. By spreading your workloads across multiple cloud providers, the possibility of simultaneous downtime reduces exponentially.
Historically vendor selection led to lock-in, which led to costlier, prolonged and risk averse proof of concepts, delayed decisions and in the case of a mistaken decision a situation where good was often thrown after bad as the cost to change was too extreme. With cloud, whilst the full panacea of switch on and switch off has not been achieved across all form factors and vendors, it is invariably easier to switch onto a cloud service and switch onto another if required than it has ever been with network server installed products.
With IaaS / PaaS workloads, if platformed more generically (not utilising vendor-specific APIs) then the workloads can be shifted quiet easily from one vendor offering to another, leaving the customer with the ability to run the app regardless of the chosen underlying infrastructure provider. As we progress the ability to move cloud vendor will become easier giving increased autonomy to the client for performance, security and cost reasons. This will lead to the advantage of reducing dependency further on any single cloud vendor and allow the negotiation of more favourable pricing and agreements.
Cloud platforms, regardless of form factor or delivery method, are not all interoperable with each other or with legacy systems. There is often an assumption that all will play and talk nicely together and push and pull data easily; this is not the case. Therefore, the ability to mix and choose between offerings in a multi-cloud environment is key in today’s world where data is king. For example, if a key business requirement is to link a legacy on network system to a new cloud offering and bi-directional data flow is a key aspect, then having the flexibility to choose a cloud solution that is strongest for that need and not be forced down a particular avenue is key.
One cloud may be better suited than another for a specific task; for example utilising a public cloud for services extendable to your ecosystem of workers and partners and a private cloud to host a more focused internally critical system. High security workloads may be determined to run in private clouds whilst regular generic business applications and data can leverage cost effective public cloud offerings. With a multi-cloud option on offer you can spin up resources and options more easily than in the old world where selecting a vendor led you into far longer tie ins and more costly and complex deployments. With mixed clouds, you can elect to choose a richer set of options to solve a wider set of business functional needs.
Today’s cloud services are resilient, secure and delivered using multiple regions and data centres to form a single cloud network. Multi-cloud takes cloud to the next level and allows businesses to build sophisticated inter cloud services encompassing an ecosystem of large and small, niche and broad, PaaS, SaaS and IaaS providers.
With increasing focus on security and data regulations evolving quickly, such as GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation), the ability to choose a provider where needed, that has the most stringent alignment with your data security needs is also key.
Multi-cloud capabilities and options make the case for cloud stronger and the ability to adapt to changing business needs easier.
Cloud computing is fast becoming a mature technology with more growth expected. Gartner believes that by 2020, a ‘no-cloud’ policy will be as rare as a ‘no-internet’ policy is today. Over the last five years in particular, businesses have recognised that cloud computing reduces spending on data centres and on premise equipment, and enables them to be way more flexible and efficient, as employees are able to access company data however and wherever they want.
Though most large organisations have or are developing a cloud strategy, many aren’t turning the key overnight. The move is more gradual so they need to contend with a hybrid approach – managing on premises and cloud environments – for the foreseeable future. If done right, this enables them to continue to keep the lights on while embracing cloud for ease of growth, such as mergers and acquisitions, better facilitating mobile workers and ensuring virtual teams can communicate and collaborate more freely. Many of the companies we speak with are trying to move more workloads to the cloud so they’re in both a hybrid and migration state.
Moving more workloads to the cloud means less investment in infrastructure management and maintenance – this allows IT to focus on innovation and staying competitive. The quicker they move their communication and collaboration workloads to the cloud, the easier it is for them to adapt to change and centralise accounts, data and audit logs, thus making compliance mandates easier to comply with.
Managing cloud workloads via software as a service (SaaS) has distinct advantages. As companies move to more cloud-based services, they will want to extend this model to their management tools as well and for the same reasons: license flexibility, mobility, audit ready.
But what other benefits are there for companies born in the cloud, and how can businesses built upon legacy systems keep pace?
Legacy businesses will be constantly catching up with companies born in the cloud, who will be faster to adapt to modern ways of working in a much safer way. For example, those born in the cloud can easily adopt policies across their unified communications platform to ensure better compliance with corporate and industry mandates as well as have a better handle on mobile device policies and have them dynamically enabled. They also have better visibility into where data is stored and how, so issues related to compliance and auditing can be avoided.
Cloud services often rely on restful APIs to enable quick and easy integration. As such, for organisations that have adopted cloud solutions, this opens a wealth of opportunities to better leverage their business data and build more intelligent systems. If proper security guidelines are established from the beginning, then organic growth can happen quickly and seamlessly – with no need for heavy infrastructure investment.
As the cloud footprint expands, the risk and complexity of securing, managing and ensuring compliance for multiple environments increases. Businesses today face significant security challenges, such as protecting against data loss, threats to data privacy and breaches of confidentiality. All such threats are made more serious by the imminent arrival of GDPR, with the associated risk of public backlash from breaches and substantial fines for those companies failing to secure their data and ensure quick restore.
Many security threats (about 70%) originate from an insider. This means that companies need to implement dynamic management of be vigilant in applying policies for employee access to ensure they are secure and compliant with data protection legislation. They also need to ensure they have extended their disaster recovery solutions to cover all cloud objects and they can be implemented quickly in response to a threat.
One notable advantage of cloud is also the speed of recovery if users or groups are deleted. Such an occurrence can be a heavy risk in today’s environment where hackers attempt to gain access to privileged users accounts and infiltrate the environment that way. It is difficult to roll back if you don’t have a way to compare changes made at definitive times. Being able to view changes between known good backups and live Azure AD, then quickly being able to restore only the unwanted changes can save you hours of investigation and the cost of downtime. Businesses can easily achieve all this through simple SaaS solutions. Again, the design of the cloud environment should encompass smart storage and back up plans for recreating the business environment no matter what happens to physical devices.
Cloud computing already has an important place in business and it will go on to dominate the discussion. Fundamentally, if there is no cloud plan, then companies face falling behind competition and hindering their own growth.
To stay competitive, companies will navigate to cloud-hosted productivity platforms, due to their cost saving and practical advantages in handling fast, dynamic work-loads. In addition, businesses will be putting a larger emphasis on simplified SaaS based cloud backup, and recovery and policy management solutions that are able to dynamically keep abreast of the business as it grows – meaning less lost hours in managing and fixing. Collecting and processing data to achieve better business and financial intelligence is what makes cloud computing far superior to traditional systems, and why organisations yet to make the leap must do so now.