All posts by Kris Price

Linking Mobile Devices for Data Consolidation

December 8, 2015 Kris Price

Data is becoming increasingly unstructured. While data is reproduced through several means, including in devices such as laptops, desktops, and smartphones and other devices, data consolidation and definition has become challenging. However, such data should be merged, defined and even made available to the people that need the information for the purpose of decision making. So far, data consolidation either never happened or happened very infrequently among all verticals. This has forced decision markers to guess at trends and reach at conclusions based on the available data. However, today things are different and data consolidation and definition can be handled rightly.

There can be changes in the face of computing around your company due to the incorporation of cloud computing. There are also possible things you can do with your data banks which include, centralizing them and linking your mobile devices to the data banks for the main purpose of either downloading of uploading information on the go. You can easily define polices of your enterprise for the mobile employees and automate the process of data backup from plethora of systems online. This is to make it easy for collection of data, categorization, indexing and presentation of data notwithstanding the fact that it is generated or even within a short period of time.

Loss of mobile devices should not be disastrous. There are ways you can prevent data breaches. For instance, you can run your entire mobile devices data on a very “thin” client; and and also store all your information in an Internet based repository. As a result, there will be no impact due to the loss of your mobile device, as it will just be a loss of a piece of hardware instead of a loss of hardware and important information. Encrypting all of the data on the device will give you an added security; and crooks or unauthorized persons that get hold of your mobile device will not be able to gain access to the data in the device or even in your Internet based storage vaults without having necessary authentication.

Mobile access and computing has brought a paradigm shift in the manner in which businesses are being carried. Thus far, there are still people that are still questioning whether mobile computing is necessarily “ready” when it comes to anchoring data that are mission-critical. No doubt about the fact that there are lots of unchartered and unexploited areas available today. Before deciding to take up the leap, you will need to consider and evaluate the possible risks that could cause your enterprise. In addition, mobile computing architectures need to reach its maturity stage, and the applications are what you need to scrutinize before going ahead to approve that it is risk-free to increase your application platform and migrate to mobile computing. Application developers and system architects could face glitches and confidential expectations when it comes to compliance with statutory privacy requirements.

Hopefully, the above discussion has made you aware about the facts when it comes to anchoring data that are generated on mobile services.

“Asigra Partner” Engagement Levels

November 23, 2015 Kris Price

Asigra is recognised in the cloud backup and data storage industry as one of the most reliable software to protect data. It is impressive that Asigra gives respect to its resellers and declares them “Partners” of Asigra. Asigra understands well that fact that business environment demands effective partnerships that can support and expand its wings. It is the reason why partners of Asigra are given responsibility to understand business needs of clients and provide them the relevant services. It provides support its partners without discrimination and help them in providing managed services to customers. Partners are given the opportunity to sell Asigra software along with its supportive tools.

Partners of Asigra have made it easy to provide data backup and recovery services across all platforms. Channel partners are fascinated by the Asigra Assurance Partner Program and are fully engaged to sell the Asigra software. All partners, who have signed up to this assurance program are able to sell services to customers without any competition from Asigra, as it only leases the software on a seat basis. Partners can get the support they need from Asigra and offer data backup and storage service with recurring revenue based on amount of data calculated on a per GB.

Partner program developed by Asigra has covered the gap that was noticed in the market. Partners are able to avoid huge expenses of software development and maintenance by simply signing up as a partner. Such partners are given the opportunity to use or add Asigra’s centralised online backup and recovery system to entertain their customers. With the help of Asigra, partners are able to gain confidence of clients without investing great amount of resources.

Asigra offers friendly environment to partners. It does not interfere in dealings of partners. This means, Asigra does not compete with its partners and never sells actual backup services and does not have a data centre. Asigra makes certain that its partners are given the possibility to market their services in the market. Asigra gives favour to partners and assists them from start to finish. It gives training, guideline, advise, and required material so that they know the product before marketing.

Luckily, Asigra partners have all the tools to provide high tech services. Customers interested in cloud backup and recovery services develop internal local cloud, multi-tenant public cloud or a hybrid cloud that offers both public and private clouds. Asigra’s partners have competence to fulfil requirements of customers accordingly. Customers develop trust when they are given options to select involvement level according to their business demands.

It is true that partners of Asigra get high payouts and profits. There are various partner levels and intensive commission programs. Asigra gives authority to Named Partners. Partner levels include:
• VAR Hybrid Partners – partners can resell software;
• MSP Hybrid Partners – these are able to resell software and manage their own vaults;
• 3D Hybrid Partners – these are given the authority to resell platform, supervise wholesale vault, and improve cloud infrastructure.
Partners can select one or more program to enlist their business plan in.

Asigra software is agentless and is responsible to provide all inclusive cloud backup and storage services for databases, desktops, servers, mobile devices and email. Asigra handles all mobile devices such as Android, iPad, tablets and iPhone. Partners of Asigra can resell data protection services that customers demand for hot databases, virtual servers, email and more.

Reduce Operational Costs by Modernising your Data Centre

November 9, 2015 Kris Price

An increase in energy cost, outdated data centre infrastructure, and lack of responsiveness to current business requirements are some of the reasons that contribute to the decision to modernise a data centre. Administrators of data centre evaluate long-established approaches and come to a decision on how to restructure, update and organise data centres to meet business requirements. Moreover, data centre modernisation help in providing high-tech services to clients for business continuity, data recovery, regulatory compliance and disaster recovery. Data centre administrators need to pay attention on various ways of overcoming operating costs to gain competitive position in the market.

Plans and strategies are the backbone of data centre modernisation. Process starts with an appraisal of existing IT realities and updated vision of the future. Efforts are made in the direction of standardising, consolidating, automating, virtualising infrastructure, migrating, supporting tools and architectural frameworks. Deep associations among business units, application development, and IT infrastructure operations will help in finding in-house problems and solutions to pressing issues.

Data centre need to plan a way out by finding where investments are achievable in the network infrastructure, storage and server area. In addition, modified service levels are conveyed to accomplish performance metrics that are associated with transformational activities and intermittent reassessment to form business strategy.

It is the job of data centre admin to choose and put into practise most up-to-date technologies. Returns on Investments (ROI) are determined by the optimisation level of server. Modernised data centres are need to do their best to improve protocols for policy management, operational reliability and competitive position in market. Data centre are interested to increase their savings by working on reducing system downtime, and human errors. They also need to work on improving success rates for patch rollouts and applications.

For contemporary data centres, agility is the hallmark, as these are designed for long-term growth. Provision of latest servers and immediate response to change requests are features of the modern data centre. They are capable to accomplish resources immediately through designing flexible and effective computing model.

In data centres, power is considered one of the significant factors in increasing operational costs. Thermal assessment determines the temperature in various areas to find out hot and over cooled areas. In order to keep the temperature in balancing positions, optimal equipment and raised floor approach is used.

Data centres need to operate and develop by checking energy efficiency. Reliable data centres give guarantee that they are following green computing while reducing carbon footprints. It is possible for data centres to decrease energy use, Carbon Dioxide emission by combining storage units, processors, and storage sites, data centres can save maximum energy and operational cost. To reduce cooling cost, arctic locations are much favourable where the environment is much cooler and will be easier on the cooling fans and help with maintaining an optimal temperature.

Asigra, the Best Cloud Backup Software, Powers BTL

October 28, 2015 Kris Price

In case you have not heard about Asigra, a disk to disk (D2D) data backup and vaulting solution, this article will introduce you. Asigra solution has been designed to address lots of serious compliance needs and provide data protection that is cost-effective. Its effortless software manages data life cycles, as well as allows a speedy recovery of data. Organizations may need to change their remote site backup or recovery procedures that based on legacy tape with high-tech and innovative backup systems that focus mainly on security of data in flight and at rest. Among the things that make Asigra software exceptional cloud backup solution include: hard coded security, agentless solution, and WAN optimization techniques.

The unique selling proposition (USP) for Asigra is its FIPS 140 certified cryptographic model. For refined security, Asigra encrypts data on the fly and stores it in the vaults in an encrypted format. Since Asigra’s launch in 1986, data stored under its software have never had any breach. In addition, there are no open firewall ports in Asigra and that is why is has never been hacked. Among the strengths of Asigra include: user authentication, encryption, role based access, secure offsite storage, as well as the granular level reports.

Asigra handles security and data privacy with second to none technology and provides protection for the major concerns of laws like: Data Protection Act, Sarbanes-Oxley Act, and HIPAA. Asigra makes sure that data is captured properly and accurately. It ensures that data is processed lawfully and access is limited to only authorized personnel in the organization. There is also definition of data process that does not go against the rights of the data owner. In order to ensure that all stipulations and provisions are adhered to, this disk to disk data vaulting solution enables data protection officers to speedily and simply answer to queries of data owners and establish periodic checks.

It important for you to know that Asigra Televaulting solution flawlessly protects and combines local, remote or branch office data to meet the terms on all the aforementioned legal mandates. In order to make it easy for organizations to comply with the regulatory acts that have long-term retention periods, such as the OSHA*, Asigra offers secure long-term data retention. For legal discovery and compliance, Asigra allows a much faster data access and recovery. Really, Asigra’s data lifecycle management technology makes sure that data that need to be destroyed is dealt with swiftly using proper controls of primary data preservation policies.

Asigra architecture has been recognized by industry experts as a leading cloud backup and storage solution with many industry-firsts in the areas of computerization, efficiency and security. This helps to reduce boring backup jobs and puts onsite and offsite data capture in place easily, migrate data from local servers to cloud based servers, and formation of backup strategies that are compliant. Asigra also provides the user with absolute control over backed up data, and also accommodates changes in strategies.

We, at Backup Technology Limited (BTL), are proud to be a 3D Hybrid Partner of Asigra since 2010. Please visit Asigra’s website for more information – www.asigra.com.

* http://goo.gl/wBJLbU

Cloud Computing Compliance and Industry Standards

October 12, 2015 Kris Price

Though cloud computing is known as a trendy technology, it is not in any way new in the computer networking field. The truth is that telecommunication companies were the first cloud service providers and they established some expectations for customers as well as industry standards for the past decades. Fast forward to 2015, the expectations remain unchanged; the standards of the cloud computing industry has been similarly modelled as in the Telcos, with some additions that are triggered by nature of operations and the transaction types that occur in the new cloud applications.

Definition of standard may be linked to the type of cloud computing in use. The cloud may be public, hybrid or private clouds. Also, the mandate around the private clouds requires loyalty to defined process and well established control frameworks. Documentation, backup controls, and Service Level Agreements (SLAs), as well as infrastructure libraries for service management and business integration must be made available. In the public cloud, there must be adherence to established frameworks as well provision for audits under various compliance acts.

Standards adopted may be determined based on the type of industry. The industrial standard may be dictated by the country or segment of operation and industrial vertical. For instance, the health care industry will be governed by HIPAA, while Sarbanes Oxley governs the financial industry in the USA and Canada. There may be sets of requirements and regulation by the industry itself for access control, security, protection of data, segregation of duties and lots more. The requirements for SLA may differ from one segment to another based on the amount of data processed, company size, and the kind of data. The regulation of the country, where the the company (or industry and/or service provided) is located may have an influence on the kind of standards adopted. Current tools and the available processes will also affect the standards adopted for the cloud. Implemented standards. You will need to consider customers and/or industry practises inside and outside the company / industry at the same time to refine the standards that should be implemented.

The current standards or requirements already established by vendors globally will have a huge impact on the standardisations and expectations. This is always obvious when software usage and licensing is involved. Industries need to always be mindful of the restrictions as well as the components that are not defined clearly; and also create practises that will not lead to unforeseen expenses, any kind of violations or breaches. For the fact that cloud is a combination of variety of technologies, standards need to be followed strictly, along with integrated compliance standards that may come up in the context.

In fact, cloud computing service providers must always investigate important areas for compliance and determine the minimum expectations from the regulatory authorities, clients, and competitors within the industry vertical.

The Role of Telco Companies in the Cloud

September 30, 2015 Kris Price

It has been observed that Telecommunication companies are now moving to the cloud. The Telecom companies are now being driven to the cloud revolution by economic necessity. These companies are putting themselves into the cloud in such as way that shows their network assets as well as other network related capabilities. In addition, Telecom companies have been observed to be taking their place in the cloud and ceasing the opportunity to provide oodles of services including retail services for organizations, software developers that based on consumer applications and also in building network controlled services. These processes help the companies to enhance their business models making it easy for them to play vital roles in supply chain of cloud services.

Then, you may like to ask about the roles Telecom companies do play in the cloud — data backup and cloud computing services. You may like to know whether they are not just providing themselves opportunity to get their own share of the profit or they have important contribution to make in the cloud network. Telecom companies are the major providers of cloud service. These companies were said to have been in the cloudspace for many years through their sheer tenant which they normally use to render their services like: network enabling services and dial tone for both intra and inter switching, as we as other routings that make connection between point to multipoint connectivity possible, IP telephoning, Audio conferencing and others. For that reason, you should not be surprised to see them transforming the the network from just wires and cables to a globally optimized applications.

There are lots of benefits which telecom brought into the cloud revolution and some of the benefits include: High availability and scalability services based on inexpensive models. In addition, these companies normally make use of anchored data centres to manage functionality of users, and centralize services using a service delivery model known as front-end cloud. Really, Telecom companies define quality levels, optimize on the use of resources, as well as provide multiple services to multiple customers.

Telcos have definite contributions in the cloudscapes categorically. Telco’s can anchor themselves in either Infrastructure as a service (IaaS) or Platform as a Service (PaaS) and they have the ability to monetize their network by selling on wholesale. These telecommunication companies can come up as full service telecommunication companies using a data centre footprints. With the use of data center footprints, service delivery platform Telco’s can handle oodles of services, including creation, distribution, as well as management of the infrastructure and other application-oriented capabilities of organizations, consumers, SMBs, prosumers and partners. In fact, there are more to what Telecommunication brought to the cloudscpace than listed on this article. Therefore, the cloud is expected to provide Telco’s with both opportunities and challenges.