Authored by Sridhar Pinnapureddy, Chairman, CtrlS & Cloud4C

12 billion connected devices. Over 8000 LEO satellites.6 billion internet users.65% digitization of Global GDP. Over $6 trillion investments Can we truly comprehend where the digital age is headed?

If 2021heralded the digital resilience age post the largest catastrophe in recent history, 2022 would be marked for revivalism and action.Billions of consumers across the world have grown habituated to the online lifestyle and enterprises across verticals have well responded to the e-fire;imbibingdigital-first business strategies.But the larger question remains: Do organizationsperceive tech as evolution enablement for global servicing or the key chauffeur to theirvisions of tomorrow? The above statistical reflection would answer the conundrum crystal clear.

Digital Twin for Everything: The Inevitable Evolution

Lets face it. Humanity isgalloping towardsan unfathomable transformation: a digitally connected, holistic, and intelligent planet. While that mightread like aleaf straight outofa science fiction book, reality speaks otherwise.Silicon Valley and its contemporaries are already betting hundreds of billions of dollars on the next generation of the internet (Web 3.0, Internet of Everything) and thatcertainly wont be limited to the fancy devices on your palms or desktops.The internet would graduate out of 2D boxes to assume a more immersive, 3-D avatar where our lives are embedded,connectedwithin immersive experiences.Embedded learning, Mixed Reality,Telehealth,decentralized services, satellite-powereddigital services,Smart Living via Automation and AI, connectedsmartdevices; the list is a never-ending one.As much as that soundsfascinating, theres a massive IT drillbrewingindoors; fundamental essentiality to conform to theaboveneo-digital era.

Does your IT landscape have what it takes?

Hardware manufacturers, digital infra giants, solution providers, application builders are relying on revolutionary technologies powered by agile cloud platforms to design, build, deliver, and manage cutting-edge digital innovations across the globe without a hitch. Behind those uninterrupteddatastreams,zero delay order fulfillments, undisrupted online communications, super-fastproduct launches, and peaceful remote workflowslie the magic of cloud and the perseverance of millions of ingenious developersacross boundaries and cultures.

Resilience and Revolutions: Designed and Delivered through Hybrid andMulti-cloud at Edge

In essence, the global digital connectivity age would bebred, innovated, and disbursed via cloud storage, networking, compute, and software ecosystems running not only in gargantuan centralized datacenters but increasingly towards the edge.Termed as the Business Everywhere Hybrid cloud revolution, 2022 would witness an enhanced inclination tothemuch-awaited paradigm shift: distributed cloud computing. Simply put, the explosive influx of high-fidelity dataflowspaired with exponentially enhanced computing needs right down to the Tier-3 and 4 regions would necessitate a new mandate of delivering cloud IT platformsright at the source of traffic for maximum availability, high-speed experiences.Enterprises offering digital services to firms or consumers alike would deployhybrid cloud architectures packaged in specialized solutions right at those edge hotspots,seamlessly connected to the central whole. Yournew cloud could beincommunity centers, local hubs, smart city complexes,orevenwithintheEVyou might be driving today!

Being the worlds leading application-focusedCloud MSP, we have partnered with Hyperscalers, Datacenter Providers, Hardware Infra Architects, and ISVs across the globeto accelerate the Edge-drivenHybrid and Multi-cloud revolution. Under a single SLA, we promise enterprises end-to-end migration, modernization, and management paired with 4-way Disaster Recovery, Intelligent Security, and Hyperautomationsolutions.Our award-winning, proprietary Self-Healing Operations Platform sets the bar even higher, integratingall IT andCloudOpsplatforms across global locations or edge environments into a universal pane of glass paired with Intelligent Threat Prediction and Auto-remediation. Filtering the jargon, an enterprise basically can architect, operate, and manageitsentire IT stack anywhere and everywhere from a single pane of glass at utmost security.Heading into 2022, we are fullycommitted to empowering millions of enterprises and their billions of consumers across the globe with the true realization of afully connected, intelligent digital era.

Sustainable Transformation: A Need for Humanity and the Planet

However,every evolution has its own expenses and thats where lurks the most significant IT trend of 2022 and beyond; Sustainable Computing. Faster data speeds, agile delivery, 24/7 uninterrupted experiences deserve colossal amounts ofcomputing prowess and hence electricity,severely impacting energy and water reserves.Last year, 62% of global energy demands weremet through fossil fuels, renewables accounting for only 20%.Thats an unfortunate lot of carbon footprint spilling extra horrors when considered the Connected Everywhere dream,hencered-flaggingtheneed tomass-adopt green IT measuresright from the root infra till the frontend application layer.

Datacenters need to increasingly operate on renewable energies, run power-efficient serversand cores, inspire lesser water wastage for coolant systems, and prevent usage overloads. Platformand software solutionsmustbe optimized for maximum power efficiency while running just as they are architected for scalability, agility, and performance. Recycling measures for hardware infra materials should be encouraged with additional time, resources, and finances. Client enterprises, regardless of industry vertical, shouldopt for green IT vendors even if that necessitates slightly higher budget allocations.End consumers should be aware of their own digital carbon footprints and equally vocalize for sustainable services.CtrlS progressive vision and aggressive steps towards 100% renewal energy-powered data centers by 2025, and zero carbon footprint by 2030 has won many accolades worldwide.

Only when all factionseffectively collaborate, can we realize the everywhere connected, intelligent age in full harmony with natural existence. Thatsthe vision we at Cloud4C truly dream to empower.

If you have an interesting article / experience / case study to share, please get in touch with us at [emailprotected]

Original post:
Connectivity is Empowerment: Where are IT Leaders headed in 2022 and beyond? - CRN - India - CRN.in

Here are Computer Weeklys top 10 stories on cloud storage, disaster recovery and the pandemic in 2021.

Theses are apparently disparate areas, but very much connected. The rise of the cloud has seen it emerge as a key site for disaster recovery, and even more so during the pandemic, which has pushed cloud adoption in a general sense. But there is also the sense that the cloud solves everything, and thats not the case, as we see here, and there are effects from the pandemic and Brexit on compliance.

Articles here also highlight key ways that disaster recovery (DR) has changed during the pandemic, as well as the devil in the detail of recovery from disaster using cloud DR. We also look at another key cloud workload namely archiving but there are drawbacks too, and we look at one organisation that brought backup and archiving back in-house.

There were also articles that drill down into the key considerations for SMEs when it comes to cloud disaster recovery and whos best at what in DR among the hyperscalers.

And lastly, we look at customer deployments of storage technologies in-house that are still very strongly represented, despite moves towards the cloud, with flash storage at the Scottish agricultural ministry and an oil and gas firm that ditched storage and servers for hyper-converged infrastructure.

Covid-19 has changed IT. Previously, working remotely was a business continuity measure, but now it is the norm. That means disaster recovery has to adapt to new risks and new ways to respond.

We look at cloud disaster recovery and the potential complexities that can result from partial outages and restores as well as challenges around reconfiguring network and security.

The advantages of cloud archiving are ease of use and being well-suited to potential latency issues, but IT teams need to be aware of costs and issues around moving data from and between clouds.

France Tlvisions Publicit couldnt always get to critical data, so decided to repatriate backup and archiving from the cloud to on-site locations, with help from a managed service.

We look at the key areas of cloud storage compliance that can trip you up, with shared responsibility with cloud providers and data residency among the most important.

We look at key disaster recovery considerations for SMEs, including why backup is not enough, how to create a disaster recovery plan, best-practice DR testing and DR as a service.

We look at cloud disaster recovery from AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google to see which is best for provision of turnkey solutions, breadth of portfolio and modular building blocks.

IG Design Group gains a modern backup regime with data held on disk, in the cloud and long-term on tape in a move that has helped it to slash backup and restore times.

Summit E&P made a strategic move to Nutanix hyper-converged and away from NetApp and VMware and wanted backup that could handle virtual machines and physical servers.

Rural directorate ditched hybrid flash EMC SAN for Pure all-flash storage and cut developer time in half, while beta testing Cloud Block Store and planning container project.

More:
Top 10 cloud storage, DR and datacentre storage stories of 2021 - ComputerWeekly.com

By Cameron Bahar, Senior Vice President, Storage and Data Management, Oracle

As the world now knows, cloud computing with its scale-up-and-down resources and pay-as-you-go model is a flexible and cost-efficient way to deploy IT infrastructure, databases and applications, especially compared to footing the high fixed costs and complexity of running your own data center. Despite these obvious advantages, the architectures of Gen 1 clouds left much to be desired.

Take block storage, for example. As higher performance options for block storage emerged on cloud platforms, most clouds introduced new, disparate volume types, tiers, and pricing models. That trend among those providers still applies today as they continue to offer and expand a complex set of volume types and tiers that need cumbersome and careful planning and conversion processes to provision storage properly or to move between tiers. This is certainly not simple and is the antithesis to the value an elastic cloud service should provide.

Weve learned from that trend and avoided this complexity with Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) Gen2 Block Volume service since its inception. We offer one flexible volume type with a simple slider to control its performance. Customers can configure and dynamically adjust volume performance on demand for existing or new volumes without any impact to their applications.

True to the promise of cloud, they can start anywhere on the performance slider and change it anytime and as often as required. There is no need to carefully study, understand, optimize, plan, and select performance tiers and prices, thus freeing our customers from that complexity. All application workloads get the same predictable and steady performance backed by a performance SLA that is offered only by Oracle; from read-heavy workloads such as streaming applications, write-heavy IOT applications, sensory and log data collection, to mixed read/write workloads typical of enterprise transactional database systems.

Retail customers, for example, would benefit greatly from such simple and flexible block storage infrastructure. During peak holiday seasons when site traffic and transactions surge, the OCI Block Volume service performance slider helps dynamically address these load spikes without impacting applications. This agility allows our customers to only pay for the performance they use when they need it.

Furthermore, when volumes are detached and not used, their cost can be automatically tuned down to a lower cost option for additional savings. And there is more to come, as Oracle is planning to add a performance-based autotune feature that will automatically adjust volume performance and cost as needed without human intervention.

In tech, there is always a lot of talk about first mover advantage. But sometimes big benefits lie in entering a market later. OCI joined the cloud fray after large cloud rivals but because it did so, it could apply lessons learned from those attemptsand also Oracles own earlier cloud effortand could deploy newer technology from the get-go.

OCIs block and file storage systems, for example, were built using only NVMe SSDs (Solid State Drives) from day one. Its timing enabled OCI to skip a whole generation of slower spinning disk hard drives that still store important customer data at legacy cloud platforms. Other cloud providers have been adding SSDs as an option, but still field lots of hard drives for customer use. OCI Block Volume service today offers high performance NVMe SSD storage at prices that other providers typically offer for hard drive options.

Naturally, OCI does use hard drives for some storage offerings such as Object Storage where speed of access is not a top priority, but for critical live data most enterprises want fast access and OCI is NVMe SSD all the way.

Unlike earlier cloud entrants, which built their respective infrastructure with small startup customers in mind, Oracle focused on large Fortune 1000-type companies because enterprises comprised the bulk of its existing customer base. The company knew it needed to first build a public cloud that suited the unique demands of organizations already running Oracle databases and applications in-house.

For example, one principal characteristic of object storage is its ability to offer high availability and durability via replication across multiple availability domains (ADs), also known as Zones. There is a challenging tradeoff between response time and consistency when designing such distributed systems. Some cloud object stores opted for eventual consistency and chose to sometimes return inconsistent data across ADs in order to be able to provide satisfactory response times. Enterprise customers are used to and require strong consistency, meaning each update is synchronously committed across ADs and read after write semantics are honored.

Our engineers took up this challenge and found a way to achieve both strong consistency and excellent response times and raised the bar in the industry. This in turn forced competitors to reconsider their designs and follow suit. Job one for OCI engineers here was to build a solution that reduces the impedance mismatch between on-prem enterprise systems and our cloud solutions.

Businesses also need to be able to run the same services on-premises as they do in the cloud. Thus, all the storage services offered in the OCI public regions are also available in a smaller form factor that can run in customer-controlled data centers which is not something legacy cloud providers were built to do.

Especially for companies in financial services, healthcare, and other industries, the ability to keep key data under their own control remains a key requirement for regulatory and privacy reasons.

That flexibility is available to them via Oracle Dedicated Region Cloud@Customer (DRCC). DRCC includes all the services and capabilities that are available in OCI public regions. Since the same technology runs both DRCC and OCI public regions, DRCC customers are assured that should some workloads need to run in the public cloud, they can do so, while other data remains segregated.

Given what Ive said about OCI services, that they use the latest hardware and highly optimized software, you might think that they would not be price competitive with the older public clouds. But, in fact, our use of the most modern hardware and software written to wring the most out of available resources, also means the resulting services are extremely performant and that we can offer them at a surprisingly low price.

For example, OCIs highly reliable ultra-high-performance block storage service offers a whopping 300K IOPs (input/output operations per second) per volume with sub-millisecond latencies at a small fraction of the price of rival clouds. High performance is prohibitively expensive on other clouds, but not on OCI. OCI block storage, depending on volume size and performance levels, can be 15- to 25-times less expensive than the most comparable block storage option offered by one public cloud giant, for example.

But this is not the case of a provider offering services at or below cost to gain ground. Our technology choices, system architecture, and distributed software optimizations allow us to be efficient and pass these savings on to our customers.

Cloud promises many advantages, flexibility and cost-efficiency dominant among them. But it also offers the promise of continuous innovation and the reduction of technical debt for businesses. Oracle Cloud Infrastructure has been a beneficiary of this continuous innovation, and as opposed to passing down technical debt, it is passing innovation along to its customers in the form of a lucrative technical inheritance as well as thought leadership in the cloud.

Read this article:
Sponsored post: Oracle's modern take on storage makes cloud more flexible and affordable than ever - TechCrunch

The biggest shopping season of the year is here, although the internet has fundamentally changed the way most of us approach it. Online retail has become the main way to buy Christmas presents or take advantage of a great deal, but there are serious risks associated with it.

Many sites actively track user behaviour in order to provide a more optimised experience, while cybercriminals are primed to exploit any security weaknesses and access your personal data. This is far from limited to web browsing; emails, online banking and gaming are all targeted on a regular basis. Its no coincidence that these are tools many of us use every single day.

Individual websites, apps and operating systems all take steps to reduce this threat, but this is often not enough. Its vital to bolster your online security with dedicated software Norton 360 Deluxe is an excellent option, delivering a comprehensive solution to protect all your devices.

A single subscription gets you access to a wide range of security features, but Norton is probably best known for its antivirus. It consistently ranks as one of the very best services of its type, protecting against 100% of malware according to independent research from AV-Test.

You can help reduce the chances of this happening with other key Norton 360 Deluxe features. The built-in Secure VPN (virtual private network) encrypts the connection between your device and a server on the internet, making it much harder for your online activity to be tracked. This is crucial while using public Wi-Fi, where weak security can leave you vulnerable to attacks.

Cybercriminals often turn to the so-called dark web to make money from the personal information they acquire, as it cant be found using regular search engines. Nortons Dark Web Monitoring constantly checks this area of the internet, alerting you if anything is found that could be used to identify. This can be customised to your liking, ranging from email addresses and phone numbers to physical addresses and official ID.

On PC and Mac, Nortons Smart Firewall helps provide protection at the source. Any time youre connected to the internet, itll keep tabs on all the network traffic your device sends and receives. Should anything suspicious be detected, itll be blocked before you can even access it. This is an effective way to protect your personal files and data, and its rare for a safe website to be mistakenly blocked.

Youve probably heard about the dangers of hackers spying on you via your webcam. Using software known as spyware, cybercriminals can take photos of you without you ever knowing. On Windows, Norton 360s SafeCam feature provides a crucial line of defence against this activity any unauthorised access to your built-in webcam is blocked by default.

The importance of a password manager is also well documented. All Norton subscriptions have an effective included in the cost, providing an easy way to generate, store and enter unique passwords that are almost impossible to guess. These are securely located within an encrypted vault, which just one master password required to access them all.

Norton 360 provides you with a comprehensive set of tools to help you stay safe online. But its security features extend far beyond this. If youre using a Windows machine, you can take advantage of PC Cloud Backup, which securely stores your files in the cloud for remote access from anywhere.

There are also a range of Parental Control tools, which help you monitor and manage childrens screen time. This works alongside a School Time feature, which enables more focused remote work by blocking distractions during usual school hours.

This is an excellent level of functionality within a single subscription, with many features available across all your devices. Norton 360 supports all recent Windows and macOS devices, alongside well as dedicated apps for Android and iOS (known here as Norton Mobile Security). This works alongside a range of browser extensions for the likes of Chrome, Safari, Firefox and Edge.

Apple devices are often considered to be more secure than their Windows or Android counterparts, but effective security software is still vital to stay protected against the wide range of modern security threats.

Norton 360 Deluxe can be installed on up to 5 devices and includes 50GB of cloud storage, while the Premium tier increases this to 10 and 75GB respectively. As well as being limited to 2 devices and 25GB of storage, the Standard plan also misses out on the Parental Control, School Time and Dark Web Monitoring features.

Whichever you choose, Norton 360 is the best way to stay secure online this holiday season and beyond. However, the Deluxe plan hits the sweet spot in terms of features and price for most people. A one-year plan is currently available for just 24.99 (34.99 thereafter), representing excellent value for money.

Get Norton 360 Deluxe from the Norton website now.

Excerpt from:
Norton 360 Deluxe is the best way to stay secure this holiday season - Tech Advisor

By Owen Morris, Operations Director at Doherty Associates, experts in building cloud-based modern workplaces for the finance industry

Before the first UK lockdown, 43% of companies had no intention of migrating to the cloud completely, although many if not most had migrated some services to the cloud. However, spurred on by the rapid digital transformation throughout the pandemic, half of businesses including those in the finance sector, are now streamlining their migration plans amid the growing hybrid workforce, rising cyber-attacks, and the need to drive employee engagement and collaboration.

For most banking and finance firms, we believe that hybrid working is here to stay, and the most common state will be users working partly from home and partly from the office driven both by hard-won experience of this way of working during the pandemic and a realisation that productivity can be maintained or even grown through digital initiatives.

In order to achieve the same employee experience wherever the person physically is, applications and data need to be available identically whether in the office or at home. In many ways, the home worker was treated in the past as a second-class citizen, with those able to contact servers across local networks getting a much better experience to those without. Achieving parity of experience requires solutions that take connectivity to resources away from the office or datacentre. A great way to do this is to move them to the cloud.

It may sound counterintuitive to start with users and devices when reading an article all about getting rid of servers, but the location of our users or those of our partners and suppliers has been the biggest change brought about by the pandemic and the subsequent move to hybrid working. It has been a long while since finance professionals only accessed systems from offices, but we must now assume that our applications and data will mostly be accessed from devices located in insecure locations such as employees homes, while travelling and at public locations without the benefit of corporate firewalls, and at great risk from theft or data loss.

Fortunately, cloud management software and next-generation antivirus products can help finance firms implement strong controls so that we can know that the people accessing our data are who they say they are and are accessing from devices that meet our compliance goals.

Virtual Desktop environments can sometimes provide a more managed experience and can be heavily locked down but do rely on a network connection and will not support offline scenarios (such as travel).

By controlling the device and user we can implement controls that ensure that finance professionals have the right level of access to systems wherever they are. For example, we can mandate that users are using multi-factor authentication, so we can be sure they are the actual person, are running the most recent patches to avoid drive-by attacks or have encrypted disks so that we can be sure our data is safe on the machines.

Different systems and data can also have different sets of controls applied for example, highly sensitive information might be restricted to corporately provided devices, from specific known locations or for a restricted access period with logged actions.

The quickest win for firms in terms of ease of use is often getting unstructured data into cloud storage this means the files and documents that we all generate day to day hosted in cloud storage. Doing this means that employees always have access to the data they need immediately, from financial models to merger and acquisition contracts, across multiple devices and can share and work collaboratively with colleagues no matter where they are through features like multi-user editing. Being able to search quickly across your company data through the platforms search engine is a real productivity benefit.

We find that many finance firms accumulate data such as information about companies, market intelligence and their previous work for clients, without really considering what use the data could be put to later. A cloud migration can be a good opportunity to decide what data should be kept and what is important to the business. When migrating data, consider your retention policies defined under GDPR and enforce them using the capabilities of your cloud storage platform. For cost reasons, think about what data might need to be retained but accessed infrequently and consider whether this could move to a second, cheaper storage platform in the public cloud.

The flip side of the coin to data is the systems and applications in use. A review of the application landscape is a good place to start when looking at these types of projects. A 22 matrix based on the age and business criticality of the system can be a good place to start. Old and business critical applications are often resistant to transformation, and it may be worth looking to make few changes to how the system operates when looking to migrate them to the cloud. Non-critical applications might instead be replaced cost-effectively with commercial Software-as-a-Service systems.

Migrating existing systems to SaaS cloud hosted versions of the same application can be a good method of achieving a quick migration and vendors will often offer a migration as a paid engagement.

Legacy applications are often difficult to transform so one very successful approach is to migrate the applications wholesale into the cloud, using migration tools to quickly setup identical resources in the cloud. This can also be a quick way to add extra resiliency through removing single points of failure for example, replicating servers or databases to standby systems in other locations using public cloud technologies.

Once the application is migrated, there are often ways to improve the way users connect to the application. This can allow the same set of security controls (such as enforcing multi-factor authentication, allow connection from trusted devices, etc) to be applied to older applications that would not support these controls. One common way is by putting an appliance between the user and the application that applies these controls before passing the traffic through (for example a proxy server or using remote desktop technologies).

Once applications are in the cloud, they can be exposed to a wider range of capabilities that are present in cloud platforms or through public cloud services. One example is the use of cloud integration tools can be used to connect seamlessly to the data and move it between systems in order to produce combined data sets. Cloud based data can be extracted and exposed to manage, self-service visualisation products. This allows financial executives to get better insight into how their businesses are working. Lastly, business users (Citizen Developers) can use low-code tools to create new applications operating on the data.

Following these steps will not only ensure that you finance firm can reap the rewards of a serverless office but transition safely, securely and cost effectively to a continuously available and equal employee experience whether working in the office, remotely or a blend of both.

Read more from the original source:
Why the serverless office is the next phase of cloud computing for banking and finance - Global Banking And Finance Review