Category Archives: Cloud Hosting

Capital One to pay $80M penalty over 2019 data breach – Banking Dive

Dive Brief:

Capital One will pay an $80 million penalty for last years data breach involving more than 106 million accounts, regulators said Thursday.

The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) said its consent order is based on the bank's "failure to establish effective risk assessment processes prior to migrating significant information technology operations to the public cloud environment and the bank's failure to correct the deficiencies in a timely manner."

Capital Ones data breach was one of the largest to hit a financial services company, affecting about 100 million people in the U.S. and another 6 million in Canada, the bank announcedlast year.

That hack occurred after a former employee of Capital Ones cloud hosting company, Amazon Web Services, gained access to the banks customer data by exploiting a misconfigured web application firewall.

The data, connected to credit card applications filed between 2005 and 2019, included names, postal codes, birth dates and self-reported income. The breach also exposed credit scores, credit limits, balances, payment history and fragmented transaction history from 2016 to 2018.

In its consent order, the OCC said the McLean, Virginia-based bank "failed to establish appropriate risk management"and "failed to identify numerous control weaknesses and gaps in the cloud operating environment."

The regulator said the banks board "failed to take effective actions to hold management accountable"and said the bank "engaged in unsafe or unsound practices that were part of a pattern of misconduct."

The OCC, however, said it "positively considered"the bank's customer notification and remediation efforts following the hack.

"Safeguarding our customers information is essential to our role as a financial institution," a Capital One spokesperson said. "The controls we put in place before last years incident enabled us to secure our data before any customer information could be used or disseminated and helped authorities quickly arrest the hacker.

"In the year since the incident, we have invested significant additional resources into further strengthening our cyber defenses, and have made substantial progress in addressing the requirements of these orders," the spokesperson added. "We appreciate our regulators recognition of our positive customer notification and remediation efforts, and remain committed to working closely with them to ensure that we meet the highest standards of protection for our customers."

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Capital One to pay $80M penalty over 2019 data breach - Banking Dive

16 reasons why you should move your backup to a NZ-hosted solution – IT Brief New Zealand

A core tenet of enterprise IT wisdom is thatenterprise backups should be kept in several locations typically a combination of on-premise, cloud, and remote site backups.

Many enterprises usecloud hosting for their backups but where are those backups really being kept?

1. Low latency. With the equipment being physically closer, your backups and recovery are simply faster with less latency.

2.Sovereignty. Your data is stored in New Zealand and protected under New Zealand law. This is particularly important with recent changes in Australia and the United States which give authorities permission to access data for a variety of reasons.

3. Lower cost of data transfer. Transferring data nationally is cheaper than international data transfer.

4. New Zealand generates almost 100% of its electricity from renewable sources, while Australia, Singapore and the United States still use fossil fuels. By using New Zealand hosting, you are quite literally saving the planet.

Companies that provide New Zealand-based hosting include Actifio, Catalyst Cloud, and Katana Technologies. The three companies collaborated on a solution called Actifio Multi-Cloud Data Management by Katana Technologies - Powered by Catalyst Cloud.

"This is an exciting time to be supporting a true local cloudwith Catalyst Cloud," Katana Technologies founder Steve Rielly says, "and to combine that with a clear market leader such as Actifio, with the local team of Joe Hassell and Kosala Atapattu who have been amazing with their guidance and support to make this a reality.

"Partners and clients will be able to ensure their critical information, including intellectual property and personally identifiable information will be safe and secure residing on New Zealand shores, on top of the already proven performance and cost benefits.

Find out more about how Actifio, Catalyst Cloud & Katana Technologies protect New Zealand's data here.

5. Only pay for what you use - unlike other options that make a customer commit to a specific compute or storage requirement in advance (no need to allocate a block)

6. No charge for API access - Unlike foreign public cloud options there is no charge for API usage. This can add up significantly when keeping backups up to date

7. No additional costs for data retrieval over and above the internet data traffic charges and no inbound data traffic charges

8. Cheaper total cost of operation than AWS. Also, Catalyst Cloud prices its services in New Zealand dollars so unlike foreign service fees, Catalyst Cloud prices dont fluctuate with the exchange rate

9. Greener energy than Australia - Catalyst Cloud only buys power for their three local data centres from power providers who generate renewable energy

10. Catalyst Cloud is 100% New Zealand owned and operated - so your data is fully protected byNew Zealand data and privacy laws and all profits remain in New Zealand so you are supporting the local economy.

Catalyst Cloud chief growth officer Igor Portugal, says, Our low-cost object storage gives New Zealand businesses a much cheaper way to store their data safely in New Zealand and eliminates the price as the reason to take their data offshore.

If geo-replication isnt as important to you, but youre looking for a cost-efficient and safe way to store and retrieve your data within New Zealand, then our single-region object storage service could be for you. Actifio makes this affordable service even more accessible for any enterprise by simplifying both the backup and the recovery.

Find out more about Actifio Multi-Cloud Data Management by Katana Technologies - Powered by Catalyst Cloudhere.

11. Infrastructure & application agnostic: any application, any platform, any cloud

12. Comprehensive, single pane of glass platform for multi-cloud data management, resiliency, agility and mobility.

13. Instant recovery from any tier of storage, including object

14. Rich application integration with most databases, hypervisors, filesystems and cloud platforms

15. API based integration with data masking to ensure secure test data management throughout the data lifecycle

16. Easy setup, monitoring and maintenance.

"Actifio is excited to extend support for our Virtual Data Pipeline solution to Catalyst Cloud alongside Katana Technologies. With Actifio, enabling a locally based cloud vendor allows NZ businesses to leverage a true multi-cloud strategy for their data and ensure data and workloads are suitably located, says Actifios NZ sales director Joe Hassell.

With subscription pricing and scalable modular architecture, this solution can be used to deliver everything from small test data management projects to meeting petabyte-scale long term cloud backup and archive requirements.

Find out more about Actifio's Virtual Data Pipeline here.

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16 reasons why you should move your backup to a NZ-hosted solution - IT Brief New Zealand

All PMS Platforms Have Advantages, But Which One is Right for Your Hotel? | – Hotel Technology News

All platforms have advantages, including self-hosted, private cloud and on-premise solutions that leverage the latest mobile, contact free and web-based technologies.By Warren Dehan, President of Maestro - 8.4.2020

A great deal has been written over the years about the viability of moving a hotels property-management system (PMS) to the cloud to take advantage of the latest technologies, but hoteliers need to realize that its not the only viable option. All platforms have advantages, including self-hosted, private cloud and on-premise solutions that leverage the latest mobile, contact free and web-based technologies. Independent operators can still enhance the digital guest experience, support personalized and mobile check-in, deploy contact free technologies, and secure hotel/guest data even if their PMS does not reside in the cloud. It should not be a question of Cloud or On Premise? but rather Does the PMS solve your business objectives in both technology and service?

A hotel can invest in the latest software on the market with the most attractive user interface, but if the solution doesnt do what that property needs it to do to run the business, its not a wise or practical investment. Some high-end luxury full-service hotels and resorts are in the middle of nowhere. Internet connectivity is spotty at best, and hoteliers are often plagued with constant outages. For those operating in remote areas, the cloud is the wrong platform for that environment. Furthermore, for properties that want their own autonomy on when and how version upgrades to the software are deployed or have their own IT teams to take ownership of the system, self-hosted or private cloud may be the better option.

Contrary to popular belief, a hotel can do anything on premise or self-hosted that it can do in the cloud; data can still be backed-up on site (and simultaneously in the cloud if desired), and the same level of contactless and mobile capabilities, along with integration to third-party cloud services, can be achieved regardless of the hosting platform. Whether the server is in the cloud, in a private cloud, a managed data center, or in the hotels IT room, as long as it has a connection to the Internet (generally firewall secured between an internal and external network) it can support a web browser based PMS with touchless, contact free, mobile, and third-party technologies.

Heres a quick comparison of the most common types of PMS platforms:

Any computer infrastructure will have associated costs. While a cloud solution generally has a lower cost of entry, there can be higher long-term costs over the life of the solution (when comparing like for like products). After all, the company providing the hosting is expecting to turn a profit. Self-hosted and on-premise systems will have higher upfront costs due to direct hosting and/or hardware related fees and the staff expense for IT administrators to manage the infrastructure, but costs will be lower in the long term if the property can use its own IT staff. If this role is served by the same inhouse group that is providing local network management at the property for all the local IT needs of the hotel, there may only be a small incremental cost to manage this inhouse, which may be a consideration for those property groups interested in securing their own data and maintaining system ownership.

One of the biggest arguments for moving PMS to the cloud centers around system maintenance and security. While hotels will always have to maintain their local network and equipment on site regardless of whether they use a cloud-based or on-premise PMS, operating in the cloud will enable them to avoid dealing with application and database server equipment renewal and upgrades as this is generally done, and costs absorbed, by the hosting provider. A cloud solution also affords the hotel the ability to focus on their operation and not worry about data center servers, firewalls, load balancers, database servers etc., but that comes at a higher operational cost over an inhouse system. For some clients, they have additional concerns over where their data resides, how secure it is and how accessible it is to the property group.

Since prior to and during the onset of COVID-19, my team has been fielding calls from independent hoteliers who are frustrated because they are being pushed by their PMS provider to migrate to their latest cloud versions purportedly in order to take advantage of the latest web based and contact free technologies. Imposing a PMS change to the cloud often motivated by providers sunsetting their legacy software does not provide hoteliers with the ability to choose what is best for their operation.

Today, operations are in flux, and leaders need to be reactive to their guests needs. A one-size-fits-all or cloud-first mentality isnt right for everyone; nor should they be forced into incurring additional expense to go to market for a new system just to get the latest tools to keep them current. Its important to work with a PMS partner who gives you options in deployment, offers the latest innovations, secures your investment with included upgrades and services, and whos offering ultimately meets your hotels business objectives.

Also, verify that the platform can support todays in-demand touchless integration tools, and that the PMS solution is backed by proven customer service. Look for a provider that offers 24/7 call center support; free version upgrades; on demand live one-on-one training; in application live chat and direct email support, an online e-learning center, complimentary live webinars; and professional productivity audits to maximize your investment.

Regardless of which implementation model a hotel chooses to support its business objectives today, management should be able to switch to a different option tomorrow without going to market for a new system provider and incurring additional licensing fees. Migrating from on premise to cloud hosted or vice versa should be a painless transition with the right PMS partner. The takeaway is to choose a deployment option that provides a sophisticated solution with the right feature set and the latest innovations to keep hoteliers competitive with the freedom to move to any new environment as future business demands dictate.

Having ones head in the clouds isnt a bad thing if you take advantage of the inspiration you find while youre there. But putting ones system in the cloud just because everyone is doing it or because your PMS provider says you should, can be a costly mistake, especially if guest satisfaction and business goals suffer.

Warren Dehan is the President of Maestro, the preferred cloud and on-premises PMS solution for independent hotels, luxury resorts, conference centers, vacation rentals, and multi-property groups. Maestro was first to market with a fully integrated Windows PMS and Sales & Catering solution and is continuing that trend with leading edge web and mobile based solutions. Platform and deployment independence present Maestro as an investment that will continue to grow and adapt as new technologies emerge.

Are you an industry thought leader with a point of view on hotel technology that you would like to share with our readers? If so, we invite you toreview our editorial guidelines and submit your article for publishing consideration.

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All PMS Platforms Have Advantages, But Which One is Right for Your Hotel? | - Hotel Technology News

Bare metal vs dedicated servers: which is the better web hosting option? – ITProPortal

If youre trying to get the best performance out of your dedicated server hosting, you will have to choose between traditional dedicated servers and modern bare metal options. But whats the best way to choose, and what should you base your choice on? In this article, weve aimed to clarify the difference between the two options, touching on a few common industry myths at the same time.

Technically speaking, theres a lot of similarities between bare metal and dedicated servers. For example, they are both physical machines, rather than virtualized servers composed of a collection of resources.

In actual fact, the bare metal name originates from the absence of any virtualization or a hypervisor layer. Basically, bare metal servers provide full access to the machines hardware, allowing you to configure things as required.

Both dedicated and bare metal servers only host one client at a time. In short, this means that you will have full access to your processor, storage, and memory without having to worry about it being impacted by other users. With both options, you, and only you will be able to draw on your machines power, and your performance wont ever be affected by other users.

Now, understand that both traditional and bare metal servers offer a form of dedicated hosting. When compared side-by-side, bare metal servers tend to have more advanced hardware than their traditional alternatives. Usually, they include the latest in computing technology, such as Intel Xeon CPUs and DDR4 RAM.

Similarly, bare metal servers tend to use the best in storage technology, often featuring NVMe SSD storage thats miles ahead of traditional HDD and SATA SSD storage options. Connectivity is another major consideration, and both options are equally capable here with high-speed connections up to 1GB per second.

The chances are that if youre looking for a high-quality server that will deliver maximum performance, you already know exactly what youre going to use it for. The performance of dedicated physical servers (both traditional options and bare metal servers) is unbeatable, which means that they are often the only viable choice for high-traffic sites, complex portals, and specific applications such as video rendering, VoIP, online gaming, SaaS, and more.

On top of this, all dedicated servers can handle extremely high visitor numbers, transaction processing, and more when using an enterprise-level eCommerce CMS (such as Magento or WooCommerce). Similarly, they can be configured to provide extremely low latency for online gaming and other applications where speed is a priority. And compared to shared hosting, which can be unreliable at times, you can rest assured that you will always have full access to the hardware resources that youve paid for.

Finally, traditional and bare metal dedicated servers offer unparalleled security and control. Theres little to differentiate the two here, as both options allow you to select an operating system, install server-wide applications, and deploy your own hypervisors. You will also have full root access so you can customize the hosting experience as required.

The primary difference between traditional and bare metal dedicated servers is their price structures. In general, bare metal servers offer the same or better performance than traditional alternatives and are billed using a flexible, hourly-billed model. With a traditional server, you will usually have to pay for a monthly or yearly contract, while a bare metal server can be run for as long or as short a time as you want without being locked into any contract. This means that they are a great choice for sites or apps that experience traffic spikes at specific timesfor example, during sales or on certain holidays.

As youre probably beginning to realize, bare metal and traditional dedicated servers are therefore designed for different use cases. The traditional option is designed to be used over the long-term, while bare metal servers are a great choice for situations where such a high level of performance is only required for a short time.

In general, its possible to integrate both types of dedicated server with other types of hosting. For example, many companies host their main website on a cloud or VPS server, re-routing traffic through a dedicated server when their main hosting cant handle it. Similarly, many applications are first tested on virtual machines without the need for high-end performance specs before being transferred to a dedicated server.

In these and other similar cases, bare metal servers are almost always the best option. Since they are designed both to operate individually and as nodes in a larger network of servers, they come with additional tools to make configuration and network linking that much easier. Its extremely easy to connect dedicated bare metal hardware with VPS or VMs, and management is often possible through a single cloud-based control panel.

And whats more, things have advanced significantly when it comes to deployment of dedicated servers. In the past, they were manually provisioned, which often took some time. Nowadays, most providers use automated provisioning, allowing you to get online much faster and with significantly fewer delays.

In general, traditional and bare metal dedicated servers are much more similar than they are different. Neither option is clearly better than the other in all situations, which means you should make your choice based on your needs and deployment goals.

Overall, the things youre planning to use your server for and your overall budget will largely dictate which option you go for. In most cases, bare metal servers are the best option for running alongside other hosting services. They can be integrated together using any one of a range of tools.

Finally, you should always go for a bare metal server if you need top-of-the-range hardware. They usually come with the absolute latest and greatest technology, with the best memory, storage, CPU, control, and connectivity possible. If you need the fastest, most flexible, and most powerful hosting option possible, go for a bare metal server.

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Bare metal vs dedicated servers: which is the better web hosting option? - ITProPortal

Help For Caregivers Coming to St Cloud VA – KNSI Radio

Jennifer Lewerenz | Aug 6, 2020 AT 6:30 pm

(KNSI) - The St Cloud VA Health Care System has announced that they will be hosting a virtual Caregiver Support Resource Fair on August 24th, from 9 a.m. to noon, and a Caregiver Support Summit and Training seminar, scheduled on the same day from 1 to 4 p.m. Participants are invited to join these seminars via phone, computer or most hand-held devices.

The Veteran Caregiver Resource Fair will include the following topics:

9 a.m. Welcome and Caregiver Support Introductions

9:15 a.m. VA Local Recovery Coordinator

9:45 a.m. Veterans Justice Outreach

10:15 a.m. Intimate Partner Violence & Military Sexual Trauma Programs

10:45 a.m. Spinal Cord Injury & Disorder Clinic

11:00 a.m. Vision Impairment Services Team

11:15 a.m. Minnesota Senior Linkage Line

To register for the Caregiver Support Resource Fair go to https://tinyurl.com/yyltstco or contact Alicia at 320-255-6323 for assistance.

Then in afternoon, the Caregiver Support Summit and Training seminar is offered to help increase awareness of VA Caregiver Support services, while providing education on critical caregiver issues. Training times and topics include:

1 p.m. Leadership welcome

1:15 p.m. Overview and updates for VAs Caregiver Support Program

2 to 4 p.m. Education Offering: Suicide Prevention for Caregivers

To register for the Summit & Training go to: https://tinyurl.com/yx9gh18 or contact Alicia at 320-255-6323 for assistance.

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Help For Caregivers Coming to St Cloud VA - KNSI Radio

[Webinar] eDiscovery In The Age of Cloud Applications: How To Collect From Slack – August 20th, 1:00 pm – 2:00 pm ET – JD Supra

August 20th, 2020

1:00 PM - 2:00 PM ET

With workplaces becoming digitalized with an increase in remote work, organizations are relying more heavily than ever before on cloud tools like Slack to get work done efficiently. As a result, legal teams want to know how to proactively prepare for eDiscovery.

Onna helps organizations collect, process, and store their Slack data for eDiscovery, compliance, and information governance. Curious to find out how? Register for our upcoming webinar today. Bring your questions - well be hosting a live Q&A session.

In 60 minutes, well talk about:

Speakers:

Adam SeitzmanAccount ExecutiveOnna

Adam Seitzman is on the Enterprise Solutions team at Onna. He helps clients evaluate how to improve and streamline their eDiscovery and Compliance workflows. Prior to Onna, Adam was on the enterprise solution teams at Dropbox and Oracle. Adam holds a BA in History from the University of Texas at Austin.

Allison KeaneEnterprise Success LeadOnna

Allison Keaneis an Enterprise Success Lead at Onna. She acts as a trusted advisor to her clients, helping plan and implement Onnas software for eDiscovery, Compliance, and more.Prior to Onna, Allison was leading a Client Onboarding Team at software company, Updater.Allison holds a BA in Communications from Fordham University.

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[Webinar] eDiscovery In The Age of Cloud Applications: How To Collect From Slack - August 20th, 1:00 pm - 2:00 pm ET - JD Supra

Army transitions from Industrial Age to Information Age Fort Carson Mountaineer – fortcarsonmountaineer.com

By U.S. Army Chief Information Officer/G-6

What is it?

The Army Data and Cloud Migration Initiatives are two key components required to transition the Army from the Industrial Age to the Information Age. Access to data in a secure cloud-hosting environment is essential to the success of each of the Armys priorities (people first, readiness, modernization and reform). In the Era of Great Power Competition, speed will be essential. The ability to orient, decide and act faster than peer adversaries in multi domain operations (MDO) and joint all domain operations (JADO) environments will rely heavily on trusted data.

What are the current and past efforts of the Army?

The Army is taking proactive steps as an institution to leverage data as a strategic asset. The intent of this effort is to increase the speed of data informed decision-making, while delivering cloud enabled next generation capabilities in a fundamentally different way.

The Armys data and cloud migration initiatives take the enterprise from a hardware and technology-based IT infrastructure to a data-centric organization aligning sensors, shooters and decision-makers to the same information.

In 2019, the Army established the Enterprise Cloud Management Office (ECMO), a centralized resource to establish Armys cloud environment, to synchronize and integrate cloud efforts across the Army. In 2020, the ECMO is setting conditions for a global, cloud-hosting environment, making data available for all authorized users when they need it and where they need it. Included among the ECMOs fiscal 2020 priorities:

What continued efforts does the Army have planned?

The Army is building a cloud environment that will provide seamless access to data, advanced analytic tools, and modern software development processes that accelerate deployment timelines. The cloud environment will allow:

Why is this important to the Army?

The Armys ability to compete and win below the level of armed conflict relies heavily on its ability to make data-informed decisions at the speed of operational relevance. Data and cloud migration is also a critical step toward optimizing interoperability within the mission partner environment.

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Army transitions from Industrial Age to Information Age Fort Carson Mountaineer - fortcarsonmountaineer.com

Adobe Partners With Red Hat, Google Updates AI Offering and More CX News – CMSWire

PHOTO:Shutterstock

Adobe and Red Hat, an IBM company, have announced a strategic partnership to that includes cloud hosting under Red Hat, Adobe joining IBM's partner ecosystem and IBM extending services across Adobe's core enterprise applications. Company officials say the partnership will strengthen real-time data security for enterprises, focusing on regulated industries, and enable companies to deliver more personalized experiences across the customer journey.

The partnership will initially focus on:

As part of the partnership, IBM has named Adobe its "Global Partner for Experience" and will begin adopting Adobe Experience Cloud and its enterprise applications.

IBM once competed with Adobe in customer experience and marketing software offerings. But it sold off the former to HCL in 2018 and then six months later dumped its marketing software to a private-equity investor.

In other customer experience and marketing software news ...

Microsoft has released Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Voicein a move to help organizations collect and distribute feedback from customers across teams. Company officials said the software comes in the form of ready-to-use templates with default questions designed to fit feedback scenarios: periodic customer feedback, post-delivery, post-visit and post-support call. Users can customize questions in the templates to fit specific product or service needs.

Dynamics 365 Customer Voice includes built-in integrations with all Microsoft business applications including Microsoft Dynamics 365, Microsoft Power Apps and integrations to external third-party applications through Microsoft Power Automate.

Users can send a survey to customers while using integrated data from other applications, such as open rates, marketing channel preferences and product and service preferences. Survey results integrate back into business applications and are available to anyone who engages with the customer. This information can then be used to enhance customer profiles in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights.

Users can also define their customer satisfaction (CSAT) metric and map that score to a new survey to use that metric to collect feedback periodically and track trends over time on the dashboard. Users can also set alerts on metrics to notify relevant business users when they receive poor feedback.

Google has made Recommendations AI, which is designed to help organizations drive personalized product recommendations to their customers, publicly availableto all customers in beta. Recommendations AI helps piece together the history of a customers shopping journey and serve them with personalized product recommendations. Recommendations AI also handles recommendations in scenarios with long-tail products and cold-start users and items.

It uses deep learning models and user metadata to draw insights across millions of items at scale and iterate on those insights. Recommendations AI also delivers model management experience in a managed service. Users can start using the product by creating a Google Cloud project and integrating and backfilling catalog and user events data with tools such as Merchant Center, Google Tag Manager, Google Analytics 360, Cloud Storage and BigQuery.

Qubit, which offers AI-led merchandising and personalized experiences, announced it has furthered its partnership with Google Cloud, making Recommendations AI available for ecommerce teams. The product recommendations solution is integrated within Qubits new product interface for merchandising.

Terminus, a provider of Account-Based Marketing (ABM) software, has announced its July product release and Terminus Engagement Hub. Its offerings Advertising Experiences, Email Experiences, Web Experiences and Chat Experiences are all now available in The Terminus Engagement Hub. Terminus Chat Experiences are now fully integrated into the Terminus Engagement Hub.

Users can see their target accounts and segments flow automatically into Chat Experiences; personal greetings and chats for visitors are automatically routed to the appropriate outbound rep on mobile or desktop. Chat Views is designed to helps sales and marketing teams identify qualified inbound leads and real-time sales conversations on websites with target accounts.

Salesforce has announced new Marketing Cloud innovations, including integrations with the acquired Evergage technology. New Interaction Studio innovations leverage Einstein and technology integrated from Evergage. They include:

The enterprise edition of the Salesforce Pardot marketing automation now includes new features to support complex B2B marketing teams:

Salesforce also announced a Datorama integration with Tableau to help marketers optimize their budget and data with features that include:

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Adobe Partners With Red Hat, Google Updates AI Offering and More CX News - CMSWire

Cloud Migration – COVID Effect – Story of Future

Scalability, improved performance, faster deployment, accessibility and disaster recovery are the key reasons for the shift to the cloud. Many businesses give their customers cloud disaster recovery tools to help them grow their business. For its real time functionality, market features and connectivity to the on-site records, cloud migration is gaining momentum. This technology also allows to create growing business divisions in a minimum of time..

The rising numbers and reduction in conventional outsourcing of cloud and automated services (TICs) reflect a major move to digital network services. If the typical DCO sector declines, colocation and hosting expenses along with network services are increasingly growing. The transition to cloud IaaS and hosting is expected to be driven. Migration is becoming increasingly important in recent years for PaaS, IaaS and SaaS. Companies also use DevOps and infrastructure capabilities and are therefore becoming ever more important in order to achieve the technological and business benefits of cloud adoption.

Over recent years, the transformation of the hybrid cloud in comparison to other cloud services has seen significant overall growth. The use of a hybrid cloud enables companies to scale down computer resources and avoids huge capital demands to deal with short-term demand surges. Many cloud providers can rapidly expand infrastructure at various locations around the globe, allowing a company to expand quickly. According to RightScale 2019, 84% of companies have a multi-cloud strategy and 58% of companies have a hybrid approach, while organizations with a multi-public or multi-public cloud plan have slightly increased.

However, with the ongoing outbreak of COVID-19 worldwide, businesses operating with IT systems on site have been greatly restricted. Most of the companies have now chosen to move rapidly to the cloud. Microsoft mentioned that the companys post-pandemic demand for cloud services grew more than 775 percent. A start-up named Bunnyshell has announced that free cloud migration to companies suffering due to the COVID 19 pandemic has increased to US$1 Mn in financing in 2018. This is one of the robust marketing strategies adopted by startups worldwide to profit from several companies ongoing mode of operation.

Study of COVID Effect

Most CXOs are driven to adopt new technologies and strategies, with cloud transformation witnessed substantial development in Covid-19, where companies face organizational challenges. Many big companies and small and medium-sized organizations were inclined to provide cloud-based managed service providers (MSPs), which have accelerated the transformation, scaled up existing services, modernized legacy applications, allowed and coordinated Hybrid Cloud environments, and yet leveraged different cloud-natives. In fact, several cloud service providers have launched various lucrative cloud transformation approaches that help small and medium-sized businesses particularly in efficiently embracing these technologies, with lower financial costs that generate multiple business opportunities.

Editor-in-Chief

20+ years of diverse and extensive experience in higher education including teaching, research, and university and community service in overseas universities and colleges.Associate Editor, and publications in international refereed journals and presented most of them in international conferences in the fields of Applied Multivariate Statistics, Mortality, Social Science, Economics.

Mail: globalqyresearch@gmail.com

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Cloud Migration - COVID Effect - Story of Future

Pandemic shockwave shatters cultural barriers to cloud adoption – Daily Trust

We all know about the inertia associated with starting something new, about comfort in the known, and about resistance to change.

We have inertia in starting something, and when we finally start, we have inertia in stopping what we have started, and are unwilling do something different. Great physicists recognize this tendency of humans and nature, motivating Isaac Newton to create his First Law of Motion back in the days at Cambridge University in the United Kingdom. Yet change is inevitable, and the most successful leaders and businesspeople might as well be those who welcome change with open arms, as an integral part of human experience.

But why do people fear change? I am sure psychologists have fine theories, but for the rest of us, fear of consequences is usually the reason for our unwillingness to change. The fear that the change might create problems for us and make our lives less comfortable. Why fix it when its not broken is a common refrain. As a result, we wait until rapid and formidable disruptions of our lives happen before we enact change. These disruptions could come in the form of massive illness, near-death experience, or even the death of a loved one. For example, I cannot begin to tell you the changes I made in my life following the death of my mother 18 years ago. Some of the changes were things I should have been doing in the first place before my mom died. But when the shockwave of her death arrived, I had no more excuses and nowhere to hide! This is one reason why perfectionism can be very undesirable it does not allow for nimbleness.

My generation essentially started the business of applying hardcore computer simulations to solve engineering problems about 35 or so years ago. Since the 1990s, I have been part of the development and/or management team of a few commercial software packages that solve engineering problems in the mechanical and aerospace engineering field. A significant part of our challenge a few decades ago is the unwillingness of folks to try out the new technologies that we had introduced. Engineering is too risky, and folks would rather opt for physical experiments than vaporware. That is, until they cannot no longer sit on the fence. This is certainly the story of cloud computing today. People dragged their feet until COVID-19 landed. Kurt Marko puts this nicely in his 30 April 2020 article in diginomica.com: disruptive events (of COIVD-19) cut through personal and bureaucratic inertia to catalyze changes at a rate seemingly impossible during placid times. Indeed, the DXC survey documents such behavioral friction in the form of employee foot-dragging and management indecisiveness as prime impediments to digital transformation strategies.

Obviously, the COVID-19 pandemic represents a massive disruption in the lives of virtually every person on earth: sudden deaths by the hundreds of thousands as weve never seen in this generation; and airlines, oil companies, hotel chains, and the recreation enterprise seeing their businesses decimated and stocks dumped. But the pandemic has also created business opportunities in other areas, for people who are positioned to, and are adept at, cashing in.

The pandemic lockdowns have caused people to find alternatives to in-person learning, which invariably implies online learning. Well, people also work from home during the pandemic lockdowns. Of course, there are the digital native companies (such as Microsoft, Google, Amazon), for whom the shift to remote working is relatively seamless well, provided they are set up to use cloud facilities. For the everyday business, sustaining operations in the age of the pandemic could represent nightmare that could test the survivability of the entity. The successful ones will probably be those who have been able to expeditiously adapt their operations via accelerated cloud adoption. Managers may need to upskill in crisis management, and cloud-first model may be unavoidable for some businesses. Companies simply must enable an increasingly mobile workforce. In the words of Emil Sayegh on 6 March 2020 in forbes.com, A widespread epidemic validates the need for the maintenance of corporate functionality based on cloud technologies.

Of course, this column in Daily Trust has covered a lot on Cloud Computing since its inception in 2011. In fact, the maiden article, which is based on cloud computing, was written at a time when Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsofts Azure, and Google Cloud Platform (GCP) were at infancy. In terms of the market share of cloud infrastructure, AWS, Azure, GCP and Alibaba are the leaders, with respective percentage shares of 32.4, 17.6, 6, and 5.4.

The prospect of cloud deployment in the age of the COVID19 pandemic has been summarized in cloudcomputing-new.com on 17 April 2020: Stores that still use traditional web hosting are likely to experience downtimes as they run out of network resources to handle the drastic increases in traffic. Cloud hosting solutions are highly scalable, so a sudden rise in traffic is unlikely to disrupt business. Additionally, cloud hosting providers are more equipped and experienced in dealing with cyber-attacks. They can protect their servers from DDoS, hacking, and other threats better than organizations that operate on-site servers. This means that cloud solutions help minimize instances of downtimes brought about by cyber-attacks. (DDoS stands for distributed denial of service.)

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Excerpt from:
Pandemic shockwave shatters cultural barriers to cloud adoption - Daily Trust