Top Technology Trends for 2013

May 20th, 2013 Richa

blog5

 

Enterprises have started to explore the benefits of cloud to their advantage as far as business intelligence (BI) in big data is concerned. In spite of doubts and questions with compliance and cloud computing security, this year 2013 is witnessing cloud computing as a vehicle for big data analytics.

Big Data and Cloud computing- Top Technology trends for 2013

Gartner, Inc. has listed big data and cloud technologies as trends that will be strategic for most organizations in 2013. A strategic technology according to Gartner is one with a significant impact on the enterprise or a high potential of impacting the IT or the businesses in the next three years. Businesses are producing enormous amount of data on a daily business. Big Data is complex set of databases which could be researched and analyzed for making market predictions, business intelligence and development. But the process of extracting business information from complex set of data is a complicated process and requires highly efficient computing power. Opportunities of extracting business value from big data could be efficiently implemented by leveraging cloud computing solutions. Cloud Computing accelerates the analysis of Big Data and formulating decisions and facts as access to high computing resources is quite natural with cloud computing.

Personal Computer (PC) to Personal Cloud (PC)

The PC will be replaced by the Personal Cloud and individuals would keep their data in it, accessing their services and personal preferences. It will host a unique collection of services, web destinations and connectivity and be the hub through which they will connect to other digital devices. The personal cloud will definitely shift the focus to cloud-based services that are delivered across devices.

Hybrid IT and Cloud Computing

The general diktat to IT staff across many enterprises has been to do more with less. This has resulted in concerned departments playing multiple roles in IT-related activities, and cloud computing has taken that change to another level. Another recent survey conducted by Gartner shows internal CSB (cloud services brokerage) role as an emerging trend in the organizations.  There is an increased responsibility on IT organizations to help improve the provisioning and consumption of complex cloud services for both internal users and external business partners. Big Data has gradually started influencing on enterprises’ strategic information architecture by dealing with volume, variety, and complexity of data thus forcing changes to existing approaches. This present approach of single enterprise data warehouse containing all the information needed is being gradually replaced by multiple systems that include content management and data warehouses which is the logical (cloud) enterprise data warehouse.

IT managers should watch out for the following cloud computing trends for the remaining part of 2013, as they plan for the coming year:

Backing up data to the public cloud:

IT departments have been looking at private cloud solutions as an extension of their virtual infrastructures. Here the VMware environment works with a local backup solution. This challenge of backing up your data when it is in the public cloud, on which you have no control, needs to be addressed.

Disaster recovery as a service:

Using the public cloud storage for backup and Disaster Recovery, is viable as a best practice for a wide range of companies and this area is gaining traction as organizations look for cost-effective ways to implement a Disaster Recovery strategy.

Putting de-duplication with cloud data protection:

Data needs to be de-duplicated before it is sent to cloud storage as it results in saving costs and time. Therefore the services that aren’t designed to optimize de-duplication will find it hard to compete this year.

 

 

  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • LinkedIn
  • StumbleUpon

Benefits of white label cloud computing for VARs and MSPs

May 10th, 2013 Richa

Possibilities of cloud computing business without the capital expenditure for cloud infrastructure and related requirements could be very beneficial for Value added resellers, Managed Service Providers, IT support and service companies. Let’s explore what benefits you could have as a white label cloud partner of Egocentrix. First we will discuss how cloud computing could affect you as a VAR or MSP. Then we would explore the benefits of our unique partnership opportunities and how it would enable you to establish new revenue streams in cloud messaging and collaboration.

Businesses are shifting from traditional IT to cloud and SaaS . As per current IT market trends, the SaaS will reach over $40 billion in revenues by 2014.  This is an exciting figure.  As per a recent IDC study, SaaS  is expected to grow six times faster than traditional software and licenses market. These research and statistics are very close to actual future scenario and it is evident from the fact that IT giants like IBM, Accenture, Oracle etc. are continuously innovating regarding the best ways and strategies to incorporate cloud in their portfolio.

So the question is how VARs and MSPs would get affected by this fundamental structural shift. As expected they could lose their existing client base to cloud computing providers. The demand of traditional IT support and maintenance would be decreasing with the cloud shift and hence these channel revenue sources would become less effective. On the positive note, VARs and channel partners are trusted source for end users and SMBs because of the past relationships. When traditional on-premise infrastructure and IT maintenance was the only option, SMBs and other customers were dependent on channel partners only. VARs and MSPs could utilize this as their advantage and as our white label cloud partner could introduce cloud computing to their clientele.

What are the benefits of partnership with Egocentrix? You probably have evaluated reseller partnership with other providers too and you must be wondering what is unique with Egocentrix. As a white label cloud partner of Egocentrix you get full technical support from us to ensure the painless migration of your customers in the cloud. As you are already aware of your client processes, with your experience we aim to provide seamless transition to the clients. In case of new customers, we provide you our experience of handling cloud computing clients and help you to retain the customer. Increasing your customer satisfaction and developing an honest partnership is our aim.

We don’t tie you in any contract or minimum numbers and you own your customers. You are free to rebrand our services and control the pricing too. With our cloud computing model, if you shift one on-premise client to cloud, you are generating ongoing revenue stream for yourself. As our white label cloud partner, you get access to our rich suite of cloud computing products. Depending upon the customer requirements and market trends you can offer the customized solution to your customers and grow your business.

With diverse range of products and innovative services, you could project yourself as a much larger organization without any capital expenditure and that’s too in the shortest possible time frame.

 

 

 

  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • LinkedIn
  • StumbleUpon

Egocentrix launches Cloud Computing reseller and Affiliate Programs

May 6th, 2013 Richa

Are you looking to empower your business by offering cloud computing programs to your customers? Are you looking for new and reliable sources of revenue? Are you looking to explore new services for client retention and engagement? Here is great news for you.  Egocentrix has launched exciting business cloud computing opportunities and full-service partner programs. Joining Egocentrix cloud computing reseller program, enables you to build your cloud business and attract new revenue channels.

Cloud computing market is rapidly building up. Delivering efficient and cost effective cloud services to your clients helps you to grow and establish your business in the fastest developing technology market. With Egocentrix cloud computing reseller program you get an ethical and established partner to start your cloud business in minutes.

Cloud Computing Reseller Program

With Egocentrix’s cloud computing reseller program, it is very easy to deliver industry-best cloud services to your existing customers and attract new customers. At the same time you can sell our services under your own brand and billing maintaining your corporate identity. You would be in the front-end and service provider for the customer. You can set your pricing, billing and technical support procedures. At the backend, you would receive market best discounts (wholesale rates) on our cloud services. So you have an excellent and regular source of new profits.  For your customers you are the point of contact for technical support so you would support your customers and we would provide full technical support to you to ensure smooth migration for your customers and any other issues. With our 24X7 phone and email support you could be sure of serving your customers and resolving their queries in best possible time-frame and excellent quality.

Partners already serving to SMBs can take their business to newer heights with Egocentrix partner programs. As a certified partner of Microsoft and Hosting Controller, Egocentrix products - Hosted Exchange, Hosted SharePoint, Virtual Private Server etc. are reliable and effective to meet the demanding requirements of SMBs.

The process to become cloud reseller partner is very simple:

1)  Visit http://www.egocentrix.com/reseller.html. Joining Egocentrix Cloud Computing Reseller program costs nothing to the partner and also there are no tie-ins or minimum numbers.

2) Choose the Reseller Program as a plan and click on JOIN NOW.

3) Fill the PARTNER CONTACT INFORMATION form and PARTNER COMPANY INFORMATION forms. Review the terms and conditions also and click on PROCEED.

4) You are all set to rock. You would be able to see “Thank You” message and our team would contact you on the specified email or phone regarding further process.

So the program is easy to implement and you have the customer ownership as you are free to manage your pricing, billing and support. Egocentrix cloud reseller program is 100% white labelled and you are free to market and rebrand as you own it.

Cloud Computing Affiliate Program

Along with cloud computing reseller program another way to enter our partner programs is Affiliate Program.  The affiliate program allows leveraging the branding, technical support and billing solutions of Egocentrix. Once a client is acquired you don’t need to worry about the technical support and other general operations as we would be handling that. Also you would be earning market best, one-time as well as recurring monthly commissions for referring to qualified clients. Affiliate program is very quick and simplest way to earn income from your existing client list and prospects. You can reach new clients and prospects too as Egocentrix affiliate and introduce our cloud services. Egocentrix provides you sales support and information needed to acquire new client as a Egocentrix cloud affiliate.

The steps to become our affiliate are listed below:

1) Visit http://www.egocentrix.com/reseller.html. Joining Egocentrix Cloud Computing Affiliate program costs nothing to the partner and also there are no tie-ins.

2) Choose the Affiliate Program as a plan and click on JOIN NOW.

3) Fill the PARTNER CONTACT INFORMATION form. Review the terms and conditions also and click on PROCEED.

4) All done. Once form is sent by clicking PROCEED button, you would be able to see “Thank You” message and our team would contact you on the specified email or phone regarding further process.

With 19 years of technology expertise, Egocentrix is successfully serving businesses from various verticals and we are proud of our excellent hosting infrastructure. We believe in energy conservation and green IT standards.  To ensure the quality of our services to clients and partners, we maintain six datacenters worldwide. With our honest and full supported partner programs, you could be sure of your business and revenue expansion, increasing customer satisfaction and retention.

 

  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • LinkedIn
  • StumbleUpon

Email Encryption process in Hosted Exchange

April 24th, 2013 Richa

Email policies are meant to provide security to an organization. The general policies may not necessarily be suited for use in your organization. Policies must be created with the requirements and daily email use of a company in mind. Normally in case of attachments all office communication should be filtered with a regular expression. All messages with an attachment should be tracked, logged and encrypted. Messages with attachments sent to un-trusted or unrelated domains must be blocked. Apart from these any mails that contain account numbers, credit card numbers, sensitive numbers or passwords, communication between partners etc need to be encrypted. Creating a policy depends on how well you interpret the rules.

A lot of organizations are choosing hosted exchange 2010 and recently released hosted exchange 2013 over in-house deployments, because it allows organizations to get rid of initial investment associated with traditional hardware and licensing. A hosted exchange service provider takes care of licenses, installs and upgrades the application when required.

Exchange Server and email encryption can be challenging for small businesses or enterprises to support in-house, so hosted Exchange has become a cost-effective option.

Exchange Hosted Encryption

Exchange hosted email encryption ensures delivery of confidential communications through email directly from their desktops and laptops. One need not purchase expensive and complex hardware and software, install, configure and maintain them. It not only reduces capital investment, but also frees up IT resources, and reduces messaging risks. Email should be always encrypted with secure email services. Outlook encryption add-In can be installed to implement encryption on messages at the user’s discretion. Thereafter all email activity of that particular user account is monitored and can be later reviewed through the reporting sections.

Features of Email encryption in Hosted Exchange

Hosted Exchange encryption offers security to send and receive encrypted messages to people regardless of the recipient’s system configuration, protecting your information. Automated encryption is provided with a cost-effective infrastructure. It uses a recipient’s email address as the public key and therefore eliminates the need for certificates. Message security is further enhanced by transport layer security enabled network. Policy based encryption is applied to messages at the gateway, consistently and automatically, and you can keep your data safe, while having full control over your environment.

Most importantly hosted exchange helps manage compliance with security and privacy requirements such as HIPAA.

The Encryption Process with Hosted Exchange

  • Encrypted email is directly delivered to the recipients instead of a Web service.
  • Client software is not needed and encrypted messages can be decrypted with confidence.
  • No need of certificate maintenance
  • Sender can simply send or receive message and the entire encryption process is transparent.

Pros of hosted Exchange Server
Apart from email encryption other benefits of hosted Exchange are that the responsibility of associated servers, software, configuration, monitoring, maintenance, upgrades, backups, services like malware protection, compliance and archiving, and mobile device access as well as other services like disaster planning rests on the service provider.

  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • LinkedIn
  • StumbleUpon

Roadmap of SMB success in cloud computing

April 17th, 2013 Richa

Small businesses are companies with fewer than 100 employees whereas medium businesses employ 100 to 1000 people and SMBs have a lot to gain from cloud-computing solutions. Cloud technology offers SMBs the opportunities to access reliable and scalable infrastructure resources and to enhance or improve IT capabilities in a way they previously could not. Cloud computing offers SMBs to integrate business with vendors and applications and can be paid for on an ongoing basis making it very affordable.

Difficult and uncertain economic conditions make it all the more difficult for small and medium businesses than for enterprise companies to keep pace with virtualization and desktop delivery. Cloud computing solutions help them improve the way their business delivers results and make the most of limited budgets and move the enterprise forward with technologies such as server virtualization. SMBs like all other enterprises constantly try to improve efficiency, provide 99.999 percent of application up-time provide security, protect data, and easy access to data, and scalability, and more with limited budget and resources.

 SMBs Leveraging Technologies such as Virtualization

According to a research 68% of SMB organizations started spending on cloud computing in the year 2012, particularly for software-as-a-service and infrastructure as-a-service. SMBs are leveraging cloud technologies such as virtualization to consume cloud-based resources. Virtualization is a tool that has levelled the playing field for many SMBs and they have begun moving toward managed virtual private server (VPS hosting) primarily to ensure security and efficiency.

Security and assurance are two factors that have encouraged the SMBs to invest in VPS hosting. Due to limited budget and lack of experienced personnel they cannot maintain their own virtual private servers. Cloud service providers take care of software and updates proactively giving you ‘hands off’ approach option thus turning virtual server hosting into one of the most common new assets in IT.

SMBs and Hosted Exchange

For messaging and mailing solutions you need to invest in expert IT resources and infrastructure such as email servers. Again it would take a team of 2 or 3 people to deploy and maintain these servers and software associated with it. All of these may seem prohibitive in terms of costs to a SMB. Whereas Hosted Exchange is an email-based collaboration solution hosted off-site that gives the power to an SMB of sharing email, calendar, contact information, accessing email from anywhere, advanced email, collaboration and mobility features at a fraction of the cost of operating an in-house system. Added to this they get increased security, reliability, scalability, performance and uptime by leveraging the advanced cloud enterprise infrastructure and expertise.

The biggest advantage is that solutions like Hosted Exchange 2010 or Hosted Exchange 2013  deliver performance and security without adding administrative burden. It comes with built-in productivity tools and features such as scalability where more storage can be easily added. The intuitive and user-friendly control panel simplifies complex functions such as setting up of user accounts, managing subscribed services and password policies and so on by non-technical personnel.

Being a experienced toronto hosted exchange company we have seen companies saving huge dollars with cloud. In short cloud computing is a boon for SMBs as it provides business agility, is cost effective, efficient, flexible, scalable and has an option of pay as you use. With top-end IT capabilities they can focus on core competencies and chart a roadmap for success in cloud computing.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • LinkedIn
  • StumbleUpon

Strategy to address email compliance with hosted exchange

April 9th, 2013 Richa

 

Compliance requirements for e-mail and messaging

Email compliance and regulations is one of the top concerns for all industries especially with financial services and healthcare. Messaging stores and mailboxes hold valuable data and therefore it is vital for organizations to come with messaging policies that determine the use of their messaging systems. They need to provide guidelines and details about the types of communication that may or may not be allowed. The government and industry regulatory demands with mandates such as the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) have burdened the enterprises often with conflicting regulatory requirements which are further modified every now and then. Though the strategy adopted by different organizations to address email compliance may vary they all agree on one theme and that is copying emails to a secure archive.

Cost of compliance and Penalty for non-compliance

Tens of Billions of dollars are spent on complying with the HIPAA privacy rule. To comply with current mandates, organizations must be able to track, monitor, manage, secure, and retrieve business communications data and in case of non compliance the penalties are severe and range from fines to prison terms to de-listing from stock exchanges.

Challenges of ensuring compliance

The greatest roadblock in ensuring email compliance is the complexity of it followed closely by the cost factor. Challenge is to add compliance capabilities to existing e-mail and messaging systems. With the option of Exchange Hosted Services companies with limited IT capabilities can bring their e-mail into compliance. Many enterprises have formulated their own policies to manage email life-cycle. Different businesses require varying email record preserving periods for litigation and investigation purposes. Most importantly personally identifiable information handled by your organization must also be protected and sensitive information such as intellectual property and trade secrets should not be leaked.

Hosted Exchange Services

One strategy to address email compliance is implementing Hosted Exchange Services. Hosted Exchange 2010 and  Hosted Exchange 2013 are available cloud SaaS solutions for communication. These help enterprises in secure messaging and managing compliance and business continuity requirements. These services are ideal especially for small and medium size organizations with budget limitations or lack of technical expertise in taking care of compliance issues; Hosted Exchange operates “in the cloud” and therefore do not need any additional software or hardware to be installed on-site. Apart from other capabilities, it addresses archiving and encryption compliance requirements placed especially on financial organizations and healthcare sectors.

With the growth in business the database also grows, requiring Tera Bytes of space that cannot be afforded by smaller organizations. Also retention requirements needs lots of records to be retained which can be taken care of by services such as Hosted Exchange Archive, without investing in an on-premise infrastructure.

Another area where small and medium businesses find it difficult in complying is when it comes to retention and destruction of e-mail and instant message communications. Hosted Exchange service helps comply with regulations such as SEC- 17A and NASD 3010. Using Hosted Exchange Archive, a copy of each message is made and stored in a security-enhanced repository while instant messages and other communications are directly copied to the archive.

 

  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • LinkedIn
  • StumbleUpon

How To Reduce IT Costs and Increase Productivity in tough economy

April 2nd, 2013 Richa

 

Cloud computing solutions are simple and easy to use as they are structured to reduce the complexities of information technology. The basic concept is sharing of services and infrastructure leading to reduction in costs. Also cloud customers need not to have much technical knowledge or skills to work on their systems.

The three fundamental Service Models

The three fundamental service models are IaaS, PaaS and SaaS. Infrastructure as a service (eg. Virtual Private Server) includes security mechanisms such as anti-virus, firewalls and load balancers and virtual private networks. Platform as a service is another model that provides computing platforms including operating system, programming language, database and so on. The third model is software as a service model (eg. Hosted Exchange, Hosted Sharepoint) that is all about the application program or required software.

Cloud technology has evolved into an effective, efficient and strategic data management platform helping reduce IT costs and also increasing the value of businesses. In fact the cloud technology does more with less. Let’s figure out how.

Significant Reduction of Costs

Cloud technology can significantly reduce computing expenses by making available an array of services at shared costs. Since the costs of installation, management and other services are shared with other cloud customers, it results in a great cost-saving for your company. You may forego investments in expensive hardware or software and instead use the cloud to enhance your internal computing resources.

Instead of you spending time and effort in maintaining hardware, software, and other day to day functions you can entrust it to a cloud service provider and better focus on productivity goals. This is one way to achieve more with fewer costs. Another advantage with cloud technology is that, additional computing resources and services can be easily accessed or made available at minimal costs. Elimination of additional hardware or software also results in elimination of staff leading to expenses that can hinder the company’s potential for growth and affect profitability.

Increase in Business Value

Efficiency is greatly enhanced by computing technology resulting in better overall organizational performance. Cloud computing is fast, reliable, flexibility, when compared to dated computing platforms with complex and rigid unresponsive functions. Whenever a business expands, they need additional storage which in turn means additional costs and delays. With the cloud there is virtually no limit and businesses with a limited budget can also go for additional storage as cloud storage is lot cheaper and affordable. There are many reliable cloud technology providers who offer services that are stable, continuous and flexible and are equipped to meet contingencies.

You can create a strategic road map for your organization to include the cloud technology and add value to your business. Many small and medium-sized businesses have started migrating toward managed virtual private servers to ensure that the technology operates securely and efficiently. Small organizations lack IT resources and this has turned out to be the major contributing factor making them opt for VPS hosting. Also the security and assurance offered by technology experts lead to the latest trend of small and medium businesses investing in virtual private server hosting.

  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • LinkedIn
  • StumbleUpon

Do you think cloud computing is latest IT outsourcing model?

March 25th, 2013 Richa

 

Cloud is a utility model for computing capacity, business functionality and software. The organizations, service providers and the outsourcing companies are redefining the way they operate and serve their customers.

The big question: Will the cloud be the latest IT outsourcing model?

Let’s not guess the answer as yes and no but explore some facts by virtue of which cloud computing is compared to IT outsourcing.

It seems that an easy access to cloud computing is a natural evolution of the IT outsourcing services. All you have to do is to provide a credit card number to a cloud computing service provider and access the computing capacity almost immediately. A software-as-a-service provider will grant access to cloud-based capabilities such as sales and finance. Now, do you need a traditional outsourcing partner anymore?

Some kinds of services provided by the cloud are actually as easy as turning on the lights whereas others require professional help leading to different levels of services resulting in a range of providers offering various value propositions at different price points.

Complex IT models and environments

The cloud model means that enterprises have to manage complex, hybrid environment that includes, externally provided cloud services and their own internal systems. Integration points between these two need to be well managed apart from facing several challenges such as security, data integrity and service availability. The integration role played by some outsourcing providers has become all the more important. The technical knowhow and the ability to advise enterprises on the appropriate design of their business models based on multiple service providers is gradually establishing itself. This seems to be the new era of outsourcing—for cloud service providers.

Categories of Outsourcing Services and Providers:

According to a projection, this year will see a lot of companies increasingly relying on the cloud for information processing and business services. Also cloud will be responsible for the emergence of primarily three categories of outsourcing services and providers.

1)      Basic business functionality providers-

The value proposition for this category will focus primarily on efficiency and cost. The essential capabilities of this category are driven by primary concerns pertaining to the availability of services. Some success factors for such providers are 99.999 percent available time, recoverability and security.

2)      Niche business functionality providers-

Outsourcing companies with lot of experience and deep expertise in functions such as sales and customer support, enable them to command a premium for their services. For such functionality providers, the value proposition will be to make sure your company gets a business function configured for your needs.

3)      Aggregator, Integrators and business designers-

This type of outsourcing provider acts as a business design consultants in addition to serving as an aggregator and integrator of critical services. Such a company must have the capability to integrate its own and other services and manage them seamlessly helping its clients become cloud enterprises.

Conclusion

The cloud as a utility model extends the benefits of outsourcing to a range of organizations making it accessible, affordable and quicker to provide. For smaller enterprises the cloud can deliver remarkable results since software-as-a-service applications like Hosted Exchange 2010 and Hosted Sharepoint are more expensive to own by a company than to implement and maintain in the cloud.  IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) from cloud providers (Virtual Private Server) is a huge competitor to IT outsourcing. Hence it seems that the new cloud environment is most likely to propel outsourcers and integrators into becoming a high-performance business.

 

  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • LinkedIn
  • StumbleUpon

Risk and Compliance – what does it means in cloud computing scenario?

March 20th, 2013 Richa

Highly competitive market has pushed organizations in operations environment which are rapidly changing and require constant innovation. Cloud computing plays a vital role in enabling companies to cope up with these demands. Still there are few interfering things regarding cloud computing like Risk and Compliance. Let’s discuss few risks and compliance scenarios in Cloud computing.

Prevent Unauthorized cloud activity-  Enforce Cloud policies

Confidential information stored outside your organization’s internal computing environment should have policies to establish controls to prevent and detect the unauthorized use of cloud services. You can mitigate the risk by having a clear cut cloud usage policy supported by cloud computing solutions and making available the list of people and vendors who are authorized to procure cloud computing services.

Lack of transparency-Assess the CSP control environment

A thorough risk assessment of a CSP environment is challenging as in most cases internal control environment is not transparent to its customers. To overcome the challenges of gaining insight into a CSP’s operations and controls, enterprises should attempt to include a right-to-audit clause in the contract and find out how the CSP would address certain risk events. Request for Attestation Engagements 16 (SSAE16) and the Service Organization Control 2 (SOC 2) reports that include integrity, security, confidentiality, availability, or privacy are also of some use.

 Reliability and  performance– Incident management

CSPs should be able to provide adequate incident response in addition to its own  response procedures in case of system disruption, cyber attack and data theft scenarios. When system failure or security breach occurs, the CSP’s initial efforts will be towards resolving the cloud environment issue rather addressing the issues of each tenant. Therefore the management’s incident response should not rely on its CSP alone. To reduce the damage caused by System failure, maintain copies of your data so that it can easily be deployed for backing up. You may also review SLAs to find out the response times in the event of system failures.

Security, compliance, data leakage, and data jurisdiction-Data classification policies and processes

Moving to cloud computing solutions might change current locations of data storage, transaction processing, and control structures. These changes will most likely have an impact on the enterprise’s compliance with applicable laws and regulations. Look for clear definitions in the contract about the CSP’s responsibilities regarding meeting the compliance.

As the cloud environments have multiple tenants the resources are reused and dynamically allocated to cloud customers resulting in an inability to identify the specific locations of data storage. You should understand the regulatory implications and legal jurisdiction responsibilities with respect to its organization’s data in advance of moving to a third-party hosted cloud solution.

Transparency and relinquishing direct control-Management oversight and operations monitoring:

In the cloud model, management transfers partial or complete control to the CSP which are not likely to satisfy every need of the cloud customer. Therefore the responsibility lies with the management to implement additional controls. This will ensure that the CSP’s cloud solution meets all of the organization’s requirements.

Risk of cyber-attacks

You can mitigate the risks by hosting non sensitive data on the cloud and deploy encryption over data hosted on cloud solutions. In addition to this, it is important to figure out private Cloud solutions for your sensitive data and applications.

Today cloud services like Hosted Exchange 2010, Hosted Sharepoint and IaaS like Virtual Private Server are being evaluated by most of the companies. While evaluating, Risk and Compliance are the major focus because whether it is Hosted Exchange or VPS Hosting, a major portion of your data related to business and communications is going to be in the cloud.

 

  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • LinkedIn
  • StumbleUpon

Tips for understanding complex cloud SLAs

March 12th, 2013 Richa

The SLA signed between your organization and the cloud service provider is the key constituent in concluding the deal. Since SLAs are critical for working with cloud infrastructure, let’s first examine some of the basic points that a cloud SLA should include. We may then proceed to understand details of cloud SLAs.

 SLA’s  terms common to all cloud service providers: 

  • List of parameters and minimum levels required for each element of the service they provide. For e.g., availability, performance, location of data and so on.
  • Outline the alternatives in case of a failure in meeting  service committment.
  • Detailed information about the system infrastructure.
  • List of security standards maintained by the cloud service provider.
  • Provision that allows you to audit their compliance.
  • Indications about your rights and ownership of applications, data and content including intellectual property and proprietary rights.
  • Specification regarding fee structure and the rights to continue or discontinue the service.

Understanding complex cloud SLAs:                           

To understand complex SLAs you need to decode them. Once you understand you can negotiate the SLAs so that you can extract the most out of cloud computing services. These services are flexible and predictable with an assurance of 99.9% up-time and a flawless service. What if the assurances are not met? What remedial steps do provider take in case of failure to meet the service levels? This is where the need and importance of studying the SLAs arises. Cloud services can be considered as an extension of your organization’s IT department.  You should familiarize yourself with some of the SLA definitions mentioned below for a deeper understanding of cloud SLAs.

  • Downtime:   During this period the cloud service does not operate. The reasons may be a malfunction or a natural disaster.
  • Downtime Period: This period is ten consecutive minutes of downtime for a domain. Less than ten minutes will not be counted as Downtime Periods.
  • Availability – The time a system is fully functional.
  • Latency – Time delay experienced in a system.
  • Throughput - The information that travels between two systems in a period of time.
  • Time-to-response – The time interval between the moments a person enters the request and the instant at which the first characters appear.
  • Monthly Uptime Percentage: Total number of minutes in a month minus the total number of minutes of downtime in the same month, divided by the total number of minutes in that month.
  • Scheduled Downtime: A maximum of twelve hours of Scheduled Downtime per calendar year.

Vital points to consider in SLAs

Your IT manager who is responsible for signing the deal should study the SLAs carefully and be very specific on the following crucial terms and conditions.

 Performance, Uptime and Downtime: Most providers assure permanent uptime, but in situations like a natural disaster, you need to know your vendor’s preparedness and what the SLA says about their role in supporting your IT operations in case of a disaster. You should be aware of the response times and resolution timeframe in case of an outage. Generally weekly maintenance periods are not included in the calculated downtimes by vendors so you need to include that time too for your internal downtime calculations. Zero downtime is an ideal situation and SLA should define an outage in clear terms. Let’s take a look at the variations offered by cloud service providers.

  • 99% uptime implies  7.5 hours of downtime per month
  • 99.5% uptime implies 3.5 hours of downtime per month
  • 99.9% uptime implies less than 45 minutes of downtime per month

Many SLAs make provisions for at least an hour’s scheduled maintenance time per week. Ensure that it is scheduled at a convenient time for your users . It is necessary to discuss worst case scenarios extensively and include details of tools that are used to clear outage, the number of staff deployed and incident reporting systems. 

Security: For every business security is a top priority and when you hire a cloud service provider you entrust activities related to email, applications or data to them. The SLA should list specific details about their technical staff handling their data and the measures taken to protect their data. Though SLAs may not include such clauses, it is for you to claim the ultimate authority over the data and measures for settling security breaches and vendor responsibilities.

 Cost: SLAs broadly define the basic fee structure with external fees as additional costs. It is these external fees that are hidden costs. License, upgrading, taxes and additional cost for exceeding storage limits may be a part of external fees. It is for you to dig deep and gain clarity before you strike a deal.

Conclusion

Why we are emphasizing so much on cloud computing SLA? Well, in past few years cloud has proved its potential and hence there are numerous vendors selling and reselling cloud services. Searching cloud solutions with the product related keywords like hosted exchange , hosted Sharepoint or VPS Hosting yields millions of results. How to find the efficient vendor? Here comes the need to evaluate SLA with cloud vendors. You can always have the basic idea of the services and reliability from the SLA . To summarize, cloud computing comes with its own challenges such as security, networks, storage, processing capabilities, software availability, and legislation changes and therefore it affects productivity, costs and growth of the organization. In such a scenario it is all the more important for to find a cloud service provider with SLAs that effectively addresses these challenges. You may always negotiate if you feel that a particular service level does meet your expectations. Use your resources in vendor management to address the risks and your organization’s relationship with the service provider.

 

  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • LinkedIn
  • StumbleUpon
« Older Entries
Twitter Delicious Facebook Digg Stumbleupon Favorites More