SYS-CON Events announced today that Pulzze Systems 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.
Pulzze Systems, Inc. provides infrastructure products for the Internet of Things to enable any connected device and system to carry out matched operations without programming.
For more information, visit http://www.pulzzesystems.com.

read more

(c)iStock.com/fazon1

Slack has been ranked as the number one private company leading cloud computing in 2016, according to research conducted by Forbes.

The messaging app provider, which was noted by Netskope in recent research to be among the top 20 cloud apps used by businesses for the first time, finished ahead of cloud storage firm Dropbox (#2) and electronic signature provider DocuSign (#3). Payments infrastructure company Stripe and data management platform provider Cloudera rounded off the top five.

The research was produced alongside Bessemer Venture Partners and Salesforce Ventures, which aims to ‘recognise cloud companies for the financial health and growth of their business’. The hundreds of submissions were presented to 27 public cloud CEO judges who made their verdict for the inaugural report.

Naturally, plenty of companies have been putting forward their acknowledgement of being placed in the top 100. Zuora, a subscription billing and commerce provider, issued a statement arguing the importance of this validation not just for the company but for the market in general.

“As the standard subscription finance platform for the cloud computing industry, we’re honoured to be included,” said CEO Tien Tzuo. “It’s a huge validation for Zuora, as well as the subscription economy. While we have lots of clients on this list, we’re looking forward to helping many more amazing cloud companies turn their customers into subscribers.”

Fuze – formerly ThinkingPhones – finished just inside the top 20, and was recently named as a leader in the Gartner unified communications as a service (UCaaS) Magic Quadrant. “On behalf of Fuzers worldwide, we are thrilled to be named to the inaugural Forbes 2016 Cloud 100,” said Steve Kokinos, Fuze CEO in a statement. “Our mobile-first user experience is designed to delight today’s digitally empowered workforce, while our powerful suite of business analytics integrates with other cloud services to make our solution an indispensable tool for business and technology leaders.”

“The Forbes Cloud 100 companies represent the very best private companies in cloud computing,” said Byron Deeter, partner at Bessemer Venture Partners. “We will see big IPOs and category killers emerge from this list as cloud computing continues to propel the trillion-dollar software industry.”

This report represents an interesting examination of which privately held cloud companies are leading the charge in their respective fields; yet related research from Glassdoor and Battery Ventures released last month paints a different picture. Taking into account employees’ verdicts on their CEO, as well as a ‘positive business outlook’, seven companies came out on top, including Chef Software, which scored 100% in both categories, and Asana, a productivity app led by Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskowitz.

Of the companies which led the way in the Forbes research, Dropbox and Zuora only scored 71% and 77% respectively in terms of business outlook, while DocuSign fared a little better, with 90% positive outlook rating and 97% approval for CEO Keith Krach.

There are some enterprise applications that were born to be in the cloud. Customer relationship management (CRM) applications were an early favorite because salespeople (the primary consumers of CRM) are decentralized and mobile. Web applications and personal data storage are also ideal cloud applications because they allow enterprises to scale up easily while driving down costs. Enterprises have held on to their communications, however, making it one of the last applications to move into the cloud.

read more

(c)iStock.com/RyanKing999

Editor’s note: This is the second part of a two-part series following up on the July piece ‘How the public cloud can benefit the global economy’, which drills down into two of the four areas outlined – better coordination of efforts between international entities, and increased speed of international transactions. The below is an image created by Chef Software which outlines the four towers. You can read part one, focusing on new business models and data sharing and collaboration, here.

Better coordination of efforts between international entities

In my July article on the cloud and the global economy, I used an example of international security entities scrambling to track threats across borders.

In the past, when these and other governmental entities agreed to coordinate data efforts, multi-billion dollar projects taking many years were commissioned. These projects would try to standardise application development efforts and data access methods.

The overriding attitude was that by standardising everything, the security could be strengthened. Unfortunately, this gave rise to two major problems. The first was the extremely high cost – in both development and time – of developments and changes. The second issue was that once any one of the systems accessing the data was breached, all other systems could be accessed.

Enter the public cloud. Once access and security standards have been agreed upon, a big data, unstructured service can be hosted in the cloud. The participating governments – or for that matter, corporations – can then responsibly access the data through the use of their own methods and data science-based applications, without the need for huge coordination efforts.

Another benefit of this looser style of coordination is the global accessibility of public cloud resources. Wherever in the world the entities (governmental, corporate, NGO, and so on) are located, they can gain access to the data. So for example if an NGO employee needs to get information on a given topic – assuming that he or she has proper credentials to view that data – that access is then available from wherever they find themselves.

Increased speed of international transactions

Volume of financial transactions is critical to the economic growth. The more financial activity generated by a particular country, the more capital is in play with which to grow the economy. If this is relevant to a single country, it should be even more so when speaking of global economic growth. The faster international financial and corporate entities can move money and complete transactions, the greater global economic volume.

So what cloud technologies, or more specifically public cloud technologies, can be used to improve financial performance? The answer: microservices application architectures, rapid scaling, and globalised service and data accessibility.

Microservices architectures and services, such as AWS Lambda, allow for new data to be processed rapidly, through serverless infrastructure models that scale up or down to meet performance needs. Microservices also allow for the secure transfer of information from the public cloud back to an on-premise data service. This allows sensitive data to be securely accessible through cloud-based services while keeping them under secure lock and key.

Other than the scaling available through microservices, the very nature of public cloud infrastructure services is geared towards automated and rapid scaling of cloud infrastructure to meet demand. Data and application services in the cloud are easily globally distributed and globally accessible. When public cloud content distribution services, such as AWS Cloudfront, are utilised, the services and data associated with them can be made accessible globally with predictable performance characteristics.

Conclusion

Advances in technology have always had an impact on economic conditions. With the increase in flexibility, elasticity, scalability and resilience in cloud technologies, the public and hybrid cloud can continually enable a positive impact on the global economy.

(c)iStock.com/DundStock

According to the latest research from cloud security provider Netskope, almost 44% of malware found in cloud apps have delivered ransomware, while almost 56% of malware-infected files in cloud apps are shared publicly.

The study, which appears in the company’s latest Netskope Cloud Report, found that the number of cloud apps keep going up in enterprises; 824 on average, up from 777 during the last quarter. Microsoft continues to beat Google as the most popular cloud app, with Microsoft productivity apps usurping Facebook from the number one spot, and Office 365, Outlook, and OneDrive beating their competitors in terms of session volume.

Elsewhere, productivity app Slack has entered the top 20 overall apps, while the company was also placed at the top spot in Forbes’ top 100 leading private cloud companies in 2016. Netskope notes that with the rise of such applications, the security element needs to be noted. “Security teams will need to prioritise this trend and pay close attention to sensitive information being shared within collaboration apps, and prioritise visibility into and control over the apps with which Slack is integrated and sharing data,” the press material notes.

Elsewhere, the research also notes that cloud storage apps dominate cloud data loss prevention (DLP) violations, accounting for 76.5% of them. Looking at the various industries, manufacturing-focused enterprises had the largest proportion of DLP violating files with 24%, followed by technology and IT services (15%), and healthcare and life sciences (11%). Not surprisingly, technology and IT featured the most cloud apps on average, with 855, followed by healthcare (836), retail and hospitality (787) and financial services (714).

“With the rise of ransomware, the cloud threat landscape is now increasingly complicated,” said Sanjay Beri, founder and CEO of Netskope. “IT teams need deeper intelligence, protection, and remediation that can help them stop malware and ransomware in their tracks and prevent them from spreading.”

The age of digital disruption is upon us, as the last decade alone has proven in terms of technology and disruption with the progression of organizations like Uber, Airbnb, and Netflix. We are also on the brink of new disruptions in industry, including banking or payments, insurance, healthcare, construction, packaging, and many more. These not only come from startups disrupting a sector, but companies being able to shift from their existing focus areas to build on new opportunities. They’re driven internally or by creating a new spinoff company into additional areas.

read more

(c)iStock.com/tioloco

By Mary McCoy

If you’re looking to capture additional monthly recurring revenue (MRR) by selling your backup and disaster recovery (BDR) solution to more clients, you have to understand the overall sales process and particularly, the discovery phase, which is meant to help you identify the best candidates for your BDR solution.

To identify those small and medium sized businesses with the highest probability of adopting your solution, begin by getting to know them. Uncover their needs by asking the following 10 questions.

Preliminary information

This first set of questions helps you establish a baseline regarding data management needs. Before you can begin qualifying, you need to know what kind of IT environment you’re working with. Are there any constraints? What’s the SMB’s attitude toward BDR solutions, and do they have a history of backing up data?

• What type of customer records are you storing? Examples: sales receipts/billing, contact information, private/confidential records
• How are you currently storing that data? Examples: physical copies, local laptop/desktop, local server, off-site storage 
• What regulations do you need to comply with? Examples: HIPAA, PCI DSS, SOX, HITECH
• What additional, non-customer related data are you storing on your machines? Examples: proprietary information/documentation, marketing materials, primary research, competitive data, vendor contracts

Gauge their disaster readiness

At this point in the sales conversation, you should begin asking questions to qualify the prospect. Getting the right answers is all about asking the right questions. What are the right answers? The ones that indicate whether or not the prospect is the right fit for your IT services. You want to weed out any unhealthy candidates that may stall your sales cycle or be «noisy,» unprofitable clients down the line. To do this, evaluate their level of disaster preparedness by asking questions that identify whether the prospect needs a business continuity solution. 

Often, these questions are ones prospects haven’t even thought to ask and trigger that «aha!» moment you’re looking for in order to close them into clients later.

• What problems have you faced in the past related to data loss or corruption? Asking this question gives you historical context that can help you judge a prospect’s disaster readiness. It introduces any problems you may be walking into if you sign the client, and helps you later cater your sales pitch or presentation toward real-life scenarios that the prospect can relate to.
• What percentage of your standard business operations would be impacted if your records/data were temporarily unavailable or deleted? Asking hypothetical questions like this is a useful MSP sales tactic. By asking this question, you should hope to have your prospect recognise the value of their data. At the same time, the answer they provide can help you judge whether the SMB has a need you can fill and is therefore worth pursuing.
• How long could you keep your business running without access to your data? Again, the benefit here is twofold. You get the qualifying answer in discovering if the SMB will benefit from your solution. And at the same time, you gain an opportunity to explain the typical, severe repercussions of prolongeddowntime after a disaster.
• What is your current plan for protecting the integrity and security of your data? Like the previous sales discovery question, this one helps you position your value proposition as your clients’ virtual CIO (vCIO). More often than not, the SMBs you talk to won’t have any kind of business continuity plan or disaster response procedure in place. They don’t have the time or in-house expertise to compile and manage such a framework. This is where you can really shine as their advisor. If the prospect has no business continuity plan, you can explain the reasons for developing one, walking them through the initial steps of creating and testing it. If the prospect has already implemented a disaster recovery (DR) plan, listen as they provide the details. Don’t discount prospects that claim they already have a DR plan. They may be mistaken, it may not be in use or it may require significant improvement that you can provide as their vCIO. 
• What are your top priorities as far as data backup and disaster recovery is concerned? This is a general catch-all to help you understand a prospect’s general mindset about the value of BDR and what they think you can provide. It’s also a more direct question that can help you determine whether a prospect has benefited from having a BDR solution in the past. Perhaps in expressing their priorities, the prospect expresses dissatisfaction with a competitive service. This not only gives you a leg up, but helps you tailor your proposal and eventual onboarding process to best serve the SMB. 

Steer the conversation back toward purchase intent

The best way to do this is to first ask the prospect what their previous purchases were and what the return was. Notice the subtle difference between asking «Are you interested in buying from me?» and this last, better question:

• What investments have you made in hardware/storage over the last four to five years? If the prospect has made recent investments in hardware or physical storage, this should signal to you that they likely understand the value of data integrity/security and are willing to make investments (such as cloud storage) to ensure that their data is safe. If they have not made recent investments in this area, the SMB likely needs your BDR services. Now, while this is also a favourable outcome, understand that they may need more convincing to see the overall value of your business continuity services. As a result, your sales cycle may be extended. 

When selling BDR, you have to get to know the prospect and their business needs first. Modern, client-centric sales involves talking with, not talking at, SMBs. The ten discovery questions shared in this post should help you start that dialogue, pinpoint worthwhile, high-close prospects and move them further along through the MSP sales journey. Once you know who to target your sales presentation and proposal to, you’ll have all of the necessary information to personalise your offering to their individual needs.

(c)iStock.com/BrianAJackson

Microsoft has announced its UK data centres are open for business for both Azure and Office 365, with the Ministry of Defence (MoD) and the South London & Maudsley NHS Trust among the first customers.

The move was first mooted in November last year, alongside expansions in the Netherlands and Ireland. At the time Microsoft promised the UK regions, in London, Durham, and Cardiff, would arrive by late 2016, so is bang on time in that regard.

“Today, we’ve taken a significant step forward to empower businesses to achieve more with the first complete cloud offering delivered from a global provider within the UK,” Takeshi Numoto, Microsoft cloud and enterprise corporate vice president wrote in a blog post announcing the launch.   

Mike Stone, chief digital and information officer at the MoD, said in a statement: “Microsoft’s secure and transparent cloud service in the UK fits perfectly with the MoD’s digital transformation agenda. This agreement, which is based on Microsoft’s world class reliability and performance, will allow us to deliver cost-effective, modern and flexible information capabilities.

“It will ensure we are better placed in our ever-changing, digital-first world.”

The launch takes the number of data centre regions up to 28, with six more being promised. Microsoft is naturally touting this as the highest among its cloudy competitors, although it can be a question of semantics. Google has 15 global locations for its data centres, with Belgium, Finland, Ireland, and the Netherlands as its European centres, while Amazon Web Services (AWS) has 13 locations with four in the pipeline, but 35 ‘availability zones’ – data centres within those locations.

AWS is also putting together a UK data centre zone of its own, confirming at its AWS Summit in July that the Brexit EU referendum vote will not affect the company’s plans.

According to the most recent cloud infrastructure figures from Synergy Research, Microsoft continues to grow more quickly than AWS, albeit with just over 10% market share compared to more than 30% for AWS. The four main players – AWS, Microsoft, IBM and Google – are growing faster than their smaller competitors and between them own more than half of the global market.

Read more: AWS vs Azure: IT pros weigh the pros and cons