SYS-CON Events announced today that MangoApps will exhibit at the 19th International Cloud Expo, which will take place on November 1–3, 2016, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
MangoApps provides modern company intranets and team collaboration software, allowing workers to stay connected and productive from anywhere in the world and from any device.
What Is Real Hyperconverged Infrastructure? | @CloudExpo #Cloud #Storage #Virtualization
You’ve probably heard a multitude of things around hyperconvergence or hyperconverged infrastructure as these are becoming hot new industry buzzwords, but what do these terms really mean? Are vendors that say they have hyperconverged infrastructure really living up to the promises of true hyperconvergence or is it just marketing hype?
Test, test, then test again: Analysing the latest cloud DR strategies
(c)iStock.com/XtockImages
In September, we hosted a roundtable with fifteen business leaders to discuss and debate the findings from our The State of IT Disaster Recovery Amongst UK Businesses survey. The debate was chaired by Chris Francis, techUK board member. Customers Wavex and Bluestone also participated in the discussion as did our partner Zerto and industry influencers Ray Bricknell from Behind Every Cloud and analyst, Peter Roe from TechMarketView. The event was lively and thought provoking.
Outages definitely happen more frequently than we think. We ran through the scale of outages that had been reported in the press in just the last month including organisations like British Airways, ING Bank and Glasgow City Council.British Airways lost its check in facility due to a largely unexplained ‘IT glitch’, ING Bank’s regional data centre went offline due to a fire drill gone wrong (reports suggest that more than one million customers were affected by the downtime), and Glasgow City Council lost its email for three days after a fire system blew in the Council’s data centre.
Our survey backed up the high frequency of outages showing that 95% of companies surveyed had faced an IT outage in the past 12 months. Interestingly four fifths, or 87% of that 95% who suffered outages, considered them severe enough to trigger a failover. We looked at some of the reasons for those outages and top of the list were system failure and human error. So, it is often not the big headlines we see such as environmental threats, storms or even a terrorist threat that brings our systems down, but more day-to-day mundane issues. The group also suggested that often it was at the application level that the issues occur rather than the entire infrastructure being taken down.
We also discussed the importance of managing expectations and how disaster recovery should be baked in rather than seen as an add on. Most businesses have a complex environment with legacy systems so they can’t really expect there to be 100% availability all of the time. That said, the term disaster recovery can scare people so those around the table felt that we should really talk more about maintaining ‘Business as Usual’ and resilience. DR isn’t about failing over an entire site anymore, it’s actually about pre-empting issues, for example testing and making sure that everything is going to work before you make changes to a system.
The discussion moved on to the impact of downtime. The survey found that every second really does count. When we asked respondents about the impact of downtime and how catastrophic this was, 42% said near seconds would have a big impact. This statistic rose to nearly 70% when it came to minutes. The group’s advice was that businesses really need to focus on recovery times when looking at a DR solution. We also talked about how much budget is spent on meeting recovery goals. The reality is that you can’t pay enough to compensate for downtime, but for most businesses there will always be some kind of trade-off between budget and downtime.
The group discussed whether business decision makers really understand the financial impact of downtime. Is more education needed about recovery times, what can be recovered, and prioritising different systems so the business understands what will happen when outages take place?
We then moved on to look at overconfidence in DR solutions. The survey found that 58% had issues when failing over despite 40% being confident that their disaster recovery plans would work. Only 32% executed a failover and were confident and it all worked well. 10% did not failover but were confident that it would work well. We talked to the group about this misplaced confidence and that while IT leaders know the importance of having a DR solution and taking measures to implement one, there appears to be a gap between believing your business is protected in a disaster and having that translate to a successful failover.
The bottom line is that DR strategies are prone to failure unless failover systems are thoroughly and robustly tested. Confidence in failover comes down to the frequency that IT teams actually perform testing, and whether they are testing the aspects that are really important, such as at the application level. Equally are they testing network access, performance, security and so on? We certainly believe that testing needs to be done frequently to build evidence and a proven strategy. If testing only takes place once a year or once every few years then how confident can organisations be?
The group agreed that the complex web of interlocking IT systems is one of the biggest inhibitors to successful testing. While testing may be conducted on one part of a system in isolation, if that fell over this can often trigger a chain of events in other systems that the organisation wouldn’t be able to control.
The group agreed that there is an intrinsic disconnect between what management wants to hear in terms of DR recovery times and what management wants to spend.
In conclusion, we discussed the need to balance downtime versus cost as no one has an unlimited budget. A lot of the issues raised in the survey are challenges that can be traced directly back to simply not testing enough or not doing enough high quality testing. The overall advice that iland recommends from the survey is to test, test and test again – and, importantly, to make sure that DR testing can be performed non-intrusively so that production applications are not affected, is cost-effective and does not place a large administrative burden on IT teams.
Editor’s note: You can download a copy of the survey results here.
Transparent Cloud Computing Consortium to Exhibit at @CloudExpo Silicon Valley | #IoT #Cloud #BigData
SYS-CON Events announced today that Transparent Cloud Computing (T-Cloud) Consortium will exhibit at the 19th International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on November 1–3, 2016, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
The Transparent Cloud Computing Consortium (T-Cloud Consortium) will conduct research activities into changes in the computing model as a result of collaboration between «device» and «cloud» and the creation of new value and markets through organic data processing High speed and high quality networks, and dramatic improvements in computer processing capabilities, have greatly changed the nature of applications and made the storing and processing of data on the network commonplace.
The Dangers of Cloud Storage | @CloudExpo #BigData #SDN #DataCenter
Today nearly all of us have our information stored on the cloud. It’s a very easy solution that allows users to seamlessly create back-ups of photos, contacts and other personal information, giving users access to their accounts anywhere from any device. Perhaps its most prized feature is that it has no storage limits, unlike mobile devices and PCs.
There is, however, a downside to cloud services. Although it is useful in storing data, it could be the reason data is lost. Recently, the celebrity iCloud hack went to trial. The hacker admitted he acquired the credentials by spear phishing his victims and once he had them, all the data they stored on the cloud, whether intentionally or not, was exposed and later posted online.
[session] Organizational Agility for Digital Transformation | @CloudExpo #Cloud #DigitalTransformation
Successful digital transformation requires new organizational competencies and capabilities. Research tells us that the biggest impediment to successful transformation is human; consequently, the biggest enabler is a properly skilled and empowered workforce. In the digital age, new individual and collective competencies are required.
In his session at 19th Cloud Expo, Bob Newhouse, CEO and founder of Agilitiv, will draw together recent research and lessons learned from emerging and established companies, providing a road map for engaging our organizations in the creation and support of digital value chains.
Five ways to humanise your MSP marketing
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MSPs planning a marketing strategy today will find an overwhelming array of technologies and tactics at their disposal. But those that adopt technology- and data-driven marketing while maintaining a consistent human touch will stand the best chance of success.
Here are five practices we often recommend for MSPs looking to humanise their brand and make stronger connections with prospects:
Lead with your people
Business owners looking to outsource their IT support want to know that you’ll provide technical expertise and reliable customer service. A great way to demonstrate both attributes is to lead with real people and real stories in your marketing. Examples of this include video interviews with your engineers and support team, frequent client case studies and team bios featured prominently on your website.
Deliver on-point content for every question and objection
A comprehensive, buyer-centric content library is a key building block of a good IT marketing strategy. You can build this by first holding an internal workshop to understand the common stages of the decision process for each of your services, then creating a piece of content that addresses the typical questions and concerns a prospect has at each stage.
Once built, this library can fuel nearly every aspect of your marketing—from lead generation to social media to sales calls.
Avoid marketing buzzwords
Contempt for marketing buzzwords and generally empty language is universal among IT pros. When you build your website and content library, try doing it without using phrases like “world-class,” “end-to-end,” “best of breed,” or “industry-leading.”
Instead, try to convey your true identity and differentiators in a direct, simple and transparent voice. Tell them what you do, tell them what youdon’t do, and have a clear and painless call to action for starting a conversation.
See also: Why Jargon is a Disaster for Your IT Marketing (and How to Recover)
Build email lists organically
Particularly for new MSPs starting from zero in marketing, the temptation to purchase an email list can be strong. But the serious drawbacks of this tactic have been well documented by popular platforms like Convince & Convert, AWeber, HubSpot and MailChimp®. Simply put, you risk brand damage and compromise your future email deliverability while likely seeing poor returns.
The good news: When you build your email list through slow and steady inbound marketing (drawing people in with useful content and getting them to subscribe) you will likely see much higher engagement levels and ultimately better leads. It’s quality over quantity.
If you cold call, be armed with knowledge
Cold calling can turn off busy business decision makers, but sometimes it feels like a necessary evil to build a pipeline. If you must do it, be sure your sales reps have the depth of knowledge to lead a meaningful conversation with the few people that do want to engage. Our own research as well as that of others has shown that IT pros don’t care much for cold calls, but they really don’t like getting them from people who can’t answer their questions.
Lauchlan is sponsoring Continuum’s upcoming user conference and SOLD-OUT industry event, Navigate 2016, taking place in Boston, MA from September 28-30. Visit us at booth #108, and learn more about the humanised approach to MSP marketing. We look forward to meeting you and talking about your marketing challenges!
The article ‘5 Ways To Humanize MSP Marketing’ first appeared on Continuum Blog.
[session] Moving Fast with Microservices By @Mies | @CloudExpo #Cloud #Containers #Microservices
As software becomes more and more complex, we, as software developers, have been splitting up our code into smaller and smaller components.
This is also true for the environment in which we run our code: going from bare metal, to VMs to the modern-day Cloud Native world of containers, schedulers and microservices.
While we have figured out how to run containerized applications in the cloud using schedulers, we’ve yet to come up with a good solution to bridge the gap between getting your containers from your laptop to the cloud.
How do we build software for containers? How do we ship containers? How do we do all of it without shooting ourselves in the foot?
Egnyte Makes Microsoft’s Azure as its Preferred Storage Choice
In another strategic alliance deal, Egnyte, an enterprise file-sharing and collaboration provider, has partnered with Microsoft to make Azure cloud platform the preferred storage choice for its customers. However, a company statement says that if a customer already has a license with a different cloud provider such as Hewlett-Packard, Amazon, IBM, or Google Cloud, Egnyte will still honor these licenses.
With this deal, users can open any Egnyte file directly on Microsoft Office Online for viewing and editing, and the changes are automatically saved back to Egnyte. Also, users can remotely edit and access Egnyte files from any native Office Mobile app. With this option, Egnyte plans to offer end-to-end integration services for its corporate customers to help them tackle a growing mix of documents, apps, images, and other data that are stored in employees’ personal devices.
Currently, younger employees prefer to bring their own devices for work, and tend to use the apps they feel most comfortable with. Though this flexibility is good for employees, it makes life harder for IT managers, as they have to stay on top of security and integration aspects for these different devices. Though some companies prefer to block users from bringing their own devices, it’s not seen as a viable option. Instead, many companies are turning to file synchronization and sharing providers like Egnyte, Dropbox, and Box to address this problem.
In fact, a research by Gartner shows that corporate customers tend to turn to companies that specialize in file synchronization and sharing, rather than using content management and storage tools offered by larger providers like Microsoft and Google. However, the downside with choosing smaller companies is that they focus only on a niche area, and this means, clients still have to turn to larger vendors for integrations.
To overcome this downside, many file sharing and cloud storage companies are collaborating with cloud vendors to offer a comprehensive service. Already, Dropbox has partnered with Hewlett-Packard, and Box teamed up with IBM to offer cloud storage services. Hence, it’s no surprise that Egnyte also chose this path, to stay on top of competition.
Also, Microsoft was a natural partner for Egnyte, as the two companies have been tapping into each other’s capabilities for more than a year now. In mid-2015, Egnyte and Microsoft entered into an agreement under which, business users can seamlessly access and manage all of their Windows files over a network. This partnership was a big success for both the companies, especially Egnyte, as it helped to expand the latter’s customer base.
Since then, both the companies have developed many integrations such as Azure Key Vault, Azure AD, Microsoft Office Mobile and Microsoft Sharepoint Online, and these tools have been beneficial for both the companies to reach out to a wider customer base and to take on competition in their respective segments. More importantly, users have gained immensely from these collaborations, thereby making the above agreements a win-win situation for everyone involved.
This new agreement too is expected to give Egnyte a big boost, both on the apps and IT infrastructure markets as Azure has become an important platform for enterprise integrations today.
The post Egnyte Makes Microsoft’s Azure as its Preferred Storage Choice appeared first on Cloud News Daily.
Enterprise #DevOps Model | @CloudExpo #APM #Docker #Microservices
It’s surprisingly difficult to find a concise proper definition of just what exactly DevOps entails. However, I did come across this quote that seems to do a decent job, “DevOps is a culture, movement or practice that emphasizes the collaboration and communication of both software developers and other information-technology (IT) professionals while automating the process of software delivery and infrastructure changes.”