A strategy is a planning document that sets a direction for future work to ensure that you end up where you want to be. A strategy allows you to see the wood, despite the trees. A strategy is often used as a management tool for securing the resources needed to get there.
IT is now part of the business and forward looking organisations will have senior IT people responsible for helping devise the Corporate Business Strategy

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When it comes to using a public cloud, there are incredible advantages – for a price. But what are you really paying for?

While the flat rate you see advertised may be appealing, there are several details that can raise or lower your cloud storage bill. Could you be paying for something you don’t need, and how can you lower your expenses by factoring in certain specifics before you choose a provider? Get a closer look at your cloud storage bill:

Itemising your bill

1.Price per GB: Most cloud providers price based on the amount of gigabytes used. Ones like Amazon reduce their rates per GB if you require a massive amount of storage, and others keep it steady despite your level of data. In either case, this rate is affected by how redundant or active your data is – or, in other words, whether it just sits there or is often interacted with. The idea behind this is to reward businesses that use their cloud as the primary point of storage rather than branching out over several.

2.Storage actions: To put it simply, storage actions are all the changes, adjustments, and deletions of the data within your cloud storage. If you move something to a new file within, get rid of it entirely, or post it, these are all considered actions which your cloud provider will track, tally up, and then charge a price for hosting these actions. Some providers, such as Amazon S3, don’t charge for storage actions. This can catch businesses off guard when they go to a provider that does.

3.Transfer costs: When you work within the cloud, whether public or hybrid cloud, it’s free. However, some providers charge a fee for removing data for their storage. While most will allow companies to transfer data in at no cost, when it comes to migrating to a separate cloud, removing data for edits and then replacing it, or sharing data across multiple clouds, this can incur a high level of expense.

How to choose the best option: Consider employee fluency

Ultimately, it’s your employees that will be interacting with the cloud. How easy their process is made will affect the rates you have to pay them, the amount of tech support required to help them navigate the new platform, and how efficiently the data is being used – which affects your profits.

If your employees aren’t as fluent with the cloud, they may trial and error with managing the data and boost the price of your storage actions. This makes an option with lower prices on action fees – or one that is free – the best option. On the flipside, while it may be more cost-effective to choose a specific option, shelling out the budget for a platform with particular features could help your employees complete work more efficiently, boosting profits in the end. 

How redundant or active is your storage?

For businesses that don’t work mainly online, data storage can be a way to safeguard data that’s not used often. This makes it redundant data. However, for online companies or larger corporations, data sharing and online collaboration is a chief part of their work. This makes it active data. Having a cloud option that offers cost effective deals depending on how often the data is interacted with is a key to cutting out the extra expenses you may be subjected to without knowing. Consider how much interaction your data will get on a regular basis, and then be sure to check options that accommodate your active or redundant data.

How important is storage transfer?

If you’re not sure you’ll stick with your current cloud option, need to transfer data in and out regularly, or like to spread your data across many clouds for better accessibility, choosing a cloud option with the lowest fee – or no fee at all – for transfers is crucial to shave off your expenses. However, if you intend on staying put for the future and working within the cloud, then you can save money over other options by taking advantage of their added features.

The cloud provider you choose and the actions you take with your storage all depend on those fine details not many businesses know about their real cloud bill. To save money and improve your data storage, keep this in mind.

Virtualization over the past years has become a key strategy for IT to acquire multi-tenancy, increase utilization, develop elasticity and improve security. And virtual machines (VMs) are quickly becoming a main vehicle for developing and deploying applications. The introduction of containers seems to be bringing another and perhaps overlapped solution for achieving the same above-mentioned benefits. Are a container and a virtual machine fundamentally the same or different? And how? Is one technically superior to the other? What about performance and security? Does IT need either one, or both?

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Electric utility companies promoting power conservation programs discovered that simply informing consumers of their electricity usage relative to neighbors lowered overall consumption. This type of normative social comparison has produced the same effects in other domains. Why does this work? How can the idea be used in Customer Success?

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One important organizational point of Agile API delivery is the concept of a team producing a usable version – which should result in the improved alignment of development, QA, and technical operations teams. Perhaps an even larger benefit of Agile is that it allows teams to effectively manage change in both external and software functionality, while simultaneously accelerating the development of quality software. Part of the challenge with managing this change, however, is providing quick feedback on when the change in software happens, and its resulting impact.

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Deep learning has been very successful in social sciences and specially areas where there is a lot of data. Trading is another field that can be viewed as social science with a lot of data. With the advent of Deep Learning and Big Data technologies for efficient computation, we are finally able to use the same methods in investment management as we would in face recognition or in making chat-bots. In his session at 20th Cloud Expo, Gaurav Chakravorty, co-founder and Head of Strategy Development at qplum, will discuss the transformational impact of Artificial Intelligence and Deep Learning in making trading a scientific process. This focus on learning a hierarchical set of concepts is truly making investing a scientific process, a utility.

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Peak 10 has announced that it has completed a 20,000 square foot expansion of its Cincinnati-area data center, a 6,000 square foot expansion of its data center campus in Charlotte’s University Research Park, and added a pair of seasoned executives to its leadership team. This further propels the company on its aggressive growth trajectory to meet the rising demand for flexible hybrid IT strategies and solutions across its enterprise customer base.
Cincinnati is home to companies like Kroger, Proctor & Gamble, and GE. The expansion of Peak 10’s facility, located in West Chester, OH, was driven by the increasing demand for its IT infrastructure solutions. Since first entering the Cincinnati market in 2008, Peak 10 has seen steady customer growth, primarily in the industries of healthcare, manufacturing and technology. The company serves hundreds of area customers, including Gorilla Glue, CareStar and Aero Fulfillment Services.

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If you attended Mobile World Congress (MWC) last month you would have heard a lot of buzz about 5G and the Internet of Things (IoT) with many vendors like HPE, IBM, VMware and others talking about their role in 5G and IoT.  As iland is a V-Cloud partner, I was particularly interested to hear about the VMware IoT theatre sessions which went on throughout the show during which VMware talked about their IoT strategy and how it was helping organisations to harness IoT devices.

As you would expect there was a lot on show. There was everything from IoT-enabled safety jackets to keep people safe at sea or in the mountains to connected cars showing the latest innovations in vehicle-to-vehicle communications and autonomous driving. Sierra Wireless demonstrated a live LTE CAT-M network for smart water solutions while Huawei put the spotlight on its connected drone.

Moving away from all the hype of Mobile World Congress, I believe that 2017 will be the year where the focus turns to real deployments and the monetisation of IoT.  It is fair to say that in 2016 IoT was still in its infancy in terms of revenue and deployments. Now however I think we will start to see some real live systems that increase productivity, increase customer satisfaction and develop new revenue streams.

At MWC we heard that 5G will be the panacea for IoT. However 5G is still a number of years from being realised in any meaningful way. In the meantime, telcos will have to deal with new IoT models using alternative technologies today. Telecom operators’ strategies and business models for generating revenues from IoT will continue to develop through 2017 and I think we will continue to see the battle between NB-IoT and LTE-M play out.

Regulation and standardisation will also come into focus more in 2017. On the regulatory front, I have to admit we haven’t seen much come through yet but I expect to see more government interest as IoT becomes more pervasive in smart cities, the public sector and energy.

Smart cities will lead the charge in IoT deployments. The awareness of what ‘smart city’ means is now beginning to capture the attention of residents. They value safety (smart lighting), convenience (transportation, parking) and the potential cost savings that cities can deliver (smart metres, on-demand waste pickup and so on).  That said, cities will continue to be strained by the need for money to support the deployment of sensors to gather data and the integration of city-wide systems.

As business investment in cloud technologies continues, so IoT moves up the agenda. IoT data tends to be heterogeneous and stored across multiple systems. As such, the market is calling for analytical tools that seamlessly connect to and combine all those cloud-hosted data sources, enabling businesses to explore and visualise any type of data stored anywhere in order maximise the value of their IoT investment.

Equally organisations across the world will be deploying flexible business intelligence solutions that allow them to analyse data from multiple sources of varying formats. Joining together incongruent IoT data into a single pane of glass, companies can have a more holistic view of the business, which means they can more easily identify problems and respond quickly. In other words we need to extract the data from IoT devices then figure out what it all means. With the solution to the ‘last-mile’ of IoT data organisations can then start to increase efficiencies and optimise their business offering.

While the possibilities for IoT to improve our world seem endless, concerns over security are very real. As we put more and more critical applications and functions into the realm of IoT it increases the opportunity for breaches.  In 2016, the market finally began to take security seriously, largely because of the increase in IoT hacks. Incidents such as the big denial-of-service attack in October and even the potential of a drone injecting a malicious virus via lights (from outside a building) caused great concern throughout the industry. As a result, we saw some solid announcements such as the Industrial Internet Consortium releasing its security framework. With all the new vulnerable devices now being put into service, hackers will continue to exploit IoT systems. I think we can certainly expect to see more large scale breaches as hackers look for newly connected devices, especially in the energy and transportation areas.

Many of iland’s top customers are working in the IoT space and they are looking to iland to provide the most secure and top of the line environments to host their applications in the cloud. Here at iland we take this very seriously and we are constantly improving, upgrading and fortifying our platform to meet the growing needs of the IoT market.  This means applying on-premise levels of IT security to cloud workloads. For example two factor authentication, role based access control, encryption and vulnerability scanning which enables a protective shield for the cloud to scan all incoming and outgoing data for malicious code, regardless of the device being used.  Additionally, we have just introduced our Secure Cloud Services designed to foster strategic, self-sufficient visibility and control of a cloud environment.

I believe that 2017 will be the ‘Year of IoT’ and at iland we are focused on making sure that we provide the most secure and compliant environment for our customers so that they can take advantage of the opportunities that IoT presents. Making sure your IT systems are compliant and having the reporting mechanisms so that you can prove your data is secure will be a critical success factor in order to leverage IoT devices.  

Editor’s note: if you are interested in finding out more about the iland Secure Cloud™ or iland Secure Cloud Services please visit here.

If you attended Mobile World Congress (MWC) last month you would have heard a lot of buzz about 5G and the Internet of Things (IoT) with many vendors like HPE, IBM, VMware and others talking about their role in 5G and IoT.  As iland is a V-Cloud partner, I was particularly interested to hear about the VMware IoT theatre sessions which went on throughout the show during which VMware talked about their IoT strategy and how it was helping organisations to harness IoT devices.

As you would expect there was a lot on show. There was everything from IoT-enabled safety jackets to keep people safe at sea or in the mountains to connected cars showing the latest innovations in vehicle-to-vehicle communications and autonomous driving. Sierra Wireless demonstrated a live LTE CAT-M network for smart water solutions while Huawei put the spotlight on its connected drone.

Moving away from all the hype of Mobile World Congress, I believe that 2017 will be the year where the focus turns to real deployments and the monetisation of IoT.  It is fair to say that in 2016 IoT was still in its infancy in terms of revenue and deployments. Now however I think we will start to see some real live systems that increase productivity, increase customer satisfaction and develop new revenue streams.

At MWC we heard that 5G will be the panacea for IoT. However 5G is still a number of years from being realised in any meaningful way. In the meantime, telcos will have to deal with new IoT models using alternative technologies today. Telecom operators’ strategies and business models for generating revenues from IoT will continue to develop through 2017 and I think we will continue to see the battle between NB-IoT and LTE-M play out.

Regulation and standardisation will also come into focus more in 2017. On the regulatory front, I have to admit we haven’t seen much come through yet but I expect to see more government interest as IoT becomes more pervasive in smart cities, the public sector and energy.

Smart cities will lead the charge in IoT deployments. The awareness of what ‘smart city’ means is now beginning to capture the attention of residents. They value safety (smart lighting), convenience (transportation, parking) and the potential cost savings that cities can deliver (smart metres, on-demand waste pickup and so on).  That said, cities will continue to be strained by the need for money to support the deployment of sensors to gather data and the integration of city-wide systems.

As business investment in cloud technologies continues, so IoT moves up the agenda. IoT data tends to be heterogeneous and stored across multiple systems. As such, the market is calling for analytical tools that seamlessly connect to and combine all those cloud-hosted data sources, enabling businesses to explore and visualise any type of data stored anywhere in order maximise the value of their IoT investment.

Equally organisations across the world will be deploying flexible business intelligence solutions that allow them to analyse data from multiple sources of varying formats. Joining together incongruent IoT data into a single pane of glass, companies can have a more holistic view of the business, which means they can more easily identify problems and respond quickly. In other words we need to extract the data from IoT devices then figure out what it all means. With the solution to the ‘last-mile’ of IoT data organisations can then start to increase efficiencies and optimise their business offering.

While the possibilities for IoT to improve our world seem endless, concerns over security are very real. As we put more and more critical applications and functions into the realm of IoT it increases the opportunity for breaches.  In 2016, the market finally began to take security seriously, largely because of the increase in IoT hacks. Incidents such as the big denial-of-service attack in October and even the potential of a drone injecting a malicious virus via lights (from outside a building) caused great concern throughout the industry. As a result, we saw some solid announcements such as the Industrial Internet Consortium releasing its security framework. With all the new vulnerable devices now being put into service, hackers will continue to exploit IoT systems. I think we can certainly expect to see more large scale breaches as hackers look for newly connected devices, especially in the energy and transportation areas.

Many of iland’s top customers are working in the IoT space and they are looking to iland to provide the most secure and top of the line environments to host their applications in the cloud. Here at iland we take this very seriously and we are constantly improving, upgrading and fortifying our platform to meet the growing needs of the IoT market.  This means applying on-premise levels of IT security to cloud workloads. For example two factor authentication, role based access control, encryption and vulnerability scanning which enables a protective shield for the cloud to scan all incoming and outgoing data for malicious code, regardless of the device being used.  Additionally, we have just introduced our Secure Cloud Services designed to foster strategic, self-sufficient visibility and control of a cloud environment.

I believe that 2017 will be the ‘Year of IoT’ and at iland we are focused on making sure that we provide the most secure and compliant environment for our customers so that they can take advantage of the opportunities that IoT presents. Making sure your IT systems are compliant and having the reporting mechanisms so that you can prove your data is secure will be a critical success factor in order to leverage IoT devices.  

Editor’s note: if you are interested in finding out more about the iland Secure Cloud™ or iland Secure Cloud Services please visit here.