Talk of IT disasters can spark equal amounts of fear of them happening to us, and gratitude that the big one hasn’t happened to us yet. Network World offers some tips on what not to do when migrating to the cloud to avoid disasters-or, at the very least, grumbling users. They recommend splitting apps into two groups: those that will be migrated and those that will be replaced. Counting up all the costs of a cloud migration is also a necessary task before moving apps. There can be hidden people costs involved in moving data to the cloud, even though moving that data will save money over the long run.

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SYS-CON Events announced today that Progress, a global leader in application development, has been named “Bronze Sponsor” of SYS-CON’s 20th International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on June 6-8, 2017, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY. Enterprises today are rapidly adopting the cloud, while continuing to retain business-critical/sensitive data inside the firewall. This is creating two separate data silos – one inside the firewall and the other outside the firewall. Cloud ISVs often get requests to connect these silos using technologies such as VPN; however, these tend to be difficult to manage and are not engineered for accessing business data from the cloud.

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SYS-CON Events announced today that Carbonite, the leading online backup service for Windows and Mac users, will exhibit at SYS-CON’s 20th International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on June 6-8, 2017, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY. Carbonite is an online backup service, available to Windows and Mac users, that backs up documents, e-mails, music, photos, and settings.

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Adopting the right Digital Transformation strategy for your enterprise is crucial to keep up with rapid growth, customers’ demands, and technological disruptions while remaining ahead of your market competition. Digital Transformation is no longer an option, it’s a requirement. Are you ready for tomorrow’s challenges? In his session at 20th Cloud Expo, William Morrish, VP of Commercial Operations at Interoute, will discuss these key takeaways.

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Next month will mark the 155th anniversary of a piece of legislation that President John F. Kennedy once described as “the single greatest stimulus to national development ever enacted.” It was the Homestead Act of 1862. By 1862 the United States had grown from approximately 500 million acres of land to almost 2 billion (with a B) acres, a majority of which was in the public domain. Under the act, over 1 billion acres were made available to settlers. An individual could obtain 160 acres of land. If they lived on, cultivated, and improved that land over a 5-year period, the land was theirs. This led to the explosive growth of the west in the United States. Many of the western territories worked hard to entice the settlers to their public lands. Increased population, cultivated land, resources, all increased the territories influence with the U.S. government and provided the path toward eventual statehood.

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For executives, transforming an enterprise is always difficult, but when an enterprise is highly profitable – digital transformation is even harder. The temptation to follow the maxim, “Don’t fix what isn’t broken,” is just too compelling. «When you average 8% same-store sales [growth] for 35 years, it can breed a sense of, ‘Why do we need to change? Things are working,'» John Mackey, CEO of Whole Foods, said in a recent interview with The Wall Street Journal. Today, however, Whole Foods is struggling to compete with other lower priced grocery stores that have embraced organics and healthier foods. If you take your eye off the game for a second, consumers will change directions on you.

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Have you ever had the feeling of Silicon Valley envy? Think of a company like Airbnb experiencing exponential growth by making the most of AWS cloud computing. It would be nice if we could all just leave our legacy-laden on-premises data centers behind and go all-in on the cloud.
Traditional businesses are moving more and more workloads to the cloud, but there’s one important distinction to keep in mind when comparing yourself to companies that have avoided on-premises infrastructure.

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The financial services sector is one of the prime markets that stands to gain many benefits from cloud computing but, to date, this has proved rather difficult. This is hardly surprising when one considers the heavy regulation within this industry. On top of this there is also a lot of fear from organisations pertaining to potential security risks with the control of data still very much a primary concern. Barely a day goes by without the announcement of the latest outage and no-one wants to be next in the firing line.

The potential benefits that come from the growth of cloud computing in this sector are vast, allowing for real-time execution of business critical activities such as fraud detection, instant lending decisions and extensive risk calculations. Cloud computing has also been a key driver in helping lenders achieve scalability quickly while also helping lower IT costs. When implemented properly, moving to the cloud can drastically reduce the operations and maintenance cost of IT, whilst ensuring that organisational agility is not slowed down by infrastructure. Many providers of financing solutions operate across multiple regions so this agility becomes vital when looking to innovate, launch products and structure deals quickly; they cannot afford to be beholden to legacy technology.

The dynamic nature of cloud however necessitates security and compliance controls that, granted, can be daunting. Issues around mobility and multi-tenancy, identity and access management, data protection and incident response and assessment all need to be addressed. And with multiple modes – SaaS, PaaS, IaaS, public, private, hybrid – creating added complexity in how security and compliance is carried out and by whom, I can certainly understand why IT leaders in the financial services sector may initially think twice about leveraging cloud. 

ISO 27001 is a widely adopted global security standard and framework that sets out requirements and best practices for a comprehensive approach to managing company and customer information. As all companies, including those in the financial sector, race to combat security threats and address evolving compliance requirements, they often struggle to implement and demonstrate the consistent security management that is core to ISO 27001. Proving IT security practices is also key to satisfying the new European Union General Data Protection Regulation before it goes into effect in 2018.

We can look to one of iland’s own customers in the sector, Bluestone, to exemplify the importance of regulation when trying to implement a cloud computing strategy. The multi-national financial services company leverages iland’s Disaster-Recovery-as-a-Service (DRaaS) with advanced security to ensure IT resiliency as it transitions towards its ‘cloud-first’ strategy.  According to Bluestone’s global head of IT operations: “Having a cloud-based disaster recovery solution that helps Bluestone to meet Financial Conduct Authority regulations and ISO 27001 standard requirements is essential. iland supports us with advanced security and compliance reporting that speeds up and significantly simplifies our compliance processes.”

The fact of the matter is, in today’s world, compliance isn’t just about satisfying regulations – it’s about staying ahead of threats and assuring end-customers that their data is safe. And this is never more important than when individuals’ money is at stake.

As well as simplifying industry compliance, cloud services also provide Bluestone with a number of other tangible business benefits that include:

• The avoidance of downtime and simplified DR management – The organisation can quickly recover from any IT incident, achieving recovery time objectives measured in minutes and recovery point objectives measured in seconds. iland’s intuitive cloud management console enables Bluestone to execute failovers and view and manage DR resources, delivering all performance, security and costing information within a single interface. Further to this, the Bluestone team can perform full, non-intrusive testing of the DR solution on demand via the console with no impact on operations.
• The protection of customer data with integrated advanced security – In the event of a failover, Bluestone’s workloads are protected against emerging IT threats with advanced security integrated into iland’s DRaaS offering. Features include antivirus and malware detection, vulnerability scanning, whole disk encryption, SSL-VPN, intrusion detection and prevention, event logging, deep packet inspection and other advanced capabilities. The Bluestone team also accesses on-demand security reports at the touch of a button through the iland cloud console.
• Reduction in IT resiliency costs by 40 percent – Thanks to iland’s straightforward pricing model, Bluestone only pays for compute resources when it requires a failover. As a result, the company has achieved a reduction of 40 percent in the overall cost model of its DR solution.

Cloud services clearly have the potential to help companies within the financial services sector to protect essential IT systems and innovate in the digital age. However, it is often the case that these companies simply don’t have the resources to be experts in all things IT. The key is in choosing a strong and trusted service provider that will be able to work alongside the organisation to ensure its needs are being met, whether that is in relation to security, compliance, backup or costs, so that it may focus on continuing to delight customers with innovative financial services.

Read more: Four nines and failure rates: Will the cloud ever cut it for transactional banking?

Verizon has announced it is selling its cloud and managed hosting service to IBM, alongside working with the Armonk giant on a ‘number of strategic initiatives involving networking and cloud services’.

“This is a unique cooperation between two tech leaders to support global organisations as they look to fully realise the benefits of their cloud computing investments,” said George Fischer, SVP and group president of Verizon Enterprise Solutions (VES) in a statement.

Last February, Verizon told customers in an email that it was shutting down ‘any virtual servers running on Public Cloud or Reserved Performance Cloud Spaces’ on April 12. The company clarified in a statement to CloudTech that it was ‘discontinuing its cloud service that accepts credit card payments’, however John Dinsdale, a chief analyst at Synergy Research, saw things differently.

“Telcos generally are having to take a back seat on cloud and especially on public cloud services,” he told this publication last year. “They do not have the focus and the data centre footprint to compete effectively with the hyperscale cloud providers, so they are tending to drop back into subsidiary roles as partners or on-ramps to the leading cloud companies.”

How prescient that statement is now. IBM would certainly be classified as one of the hyperscale operators; alongside Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft and Google, the four leading players continue to grow more quickly than the overall market, according to Synergy’s figures.

What’s more, various links between the two companies means this move makes sense. John Considine, general manager at IBM Cloud Infrastructure Services, was previously CTO of Verizon Terremark. The companies have also partnered on various initiatives, including in the creation of Verizon’s cognitive customer experience platform, built using IBM’s cloud and infrastructure as a service offerings.

“Our customers want to improve application performance while streamlining operations and securing information in the cloud,” Fischer added. “VES is now well positioned to provide those solutions through intelligent networking, managed IT services and business communications.”

Verizon said it was notifying affected customers directly, though adding it did not expect any immediate impact to their services. The transaction is expected to close later this year.