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Articles by Xander Uyleman
as-a-service - Cisco Blogs
Cisco Blogs / as-a-service as-a-service Welcome to the Age of the Partner It’s pretty clear that we’re moving to a world where managed services and as-a-service begin to merge. This calls for an entirely new customer engagement model, one that revolves around partnerships. How IT organizations are thinking about Network as a Service Cisco’s 2022 Global Networking Trends Report explores recent research on how IT leaders and network professionals are thinking about network-as-a-service models.
Are You Part of the 3% Who Have Optimized Cloud Strategies?
Change is essential if you want your business to be able to meet the evolving needs of your customers. To succeed, you need to be able to innovate faster than your competitors. At the same time, however, rapid change and rising complexity can disrupt your operations and slow your business down. The cloud offers organizations many ways to address change and complexity.
Bringing the Benefits of Big Data to Businesses
As our world becomes more connected, we have access to an increasing volume of data. This is exciting for organizations of all types. For example, retailers can begin to correlate customer data across multiple sources to identity shopping patterns. Utility companies can track usage throughout regions to optimize availability and avoid blackouts.
Managed Cloud: Your Best Cloud Native Choice
Today, organizations have many choices in how they architect their data centers and network. Innovative companies are increasingly taking a bimodal approach to IT. A bimodal approach combines Mode 1—Traditional IT focused on “doing IT right” and optimizing price-for-performance with Mode 2—Agile IT that supports “doing IT fast” for rapid prototyping, iterative development, and rapid delivery of services.
Meeting the Challenge of Reselling Cloud Services
Today’s Guest Blog comes to us courtesy of Steve Vicinanza, CEO of Cirrity. As a reseller, your customers depend on you to fully qualify and carefully select the products and services you recommend. This is especially true when you resell cloud computing services, which establish a dependency between the customer and the cloud provider. If the cloud provider fails to live up to the customer’s expectations, your relationship with the customer can be irreparably damaged.
Cloud: The Great Equalizer
IT is at the foundation of many of today’s businesses and organizations. When done right, IT can vitalize a business’ day-to-day operations from the inside. Employees can achieve more with less, bringing greater value to your customer base. Certainly, doing IT right can be complicated. Beyond performance, there are many important factors to manage: security, reliability, cost, capacity, and scaling, among many others.
Accelerate your Business with SAP HANA in the Cloud
Today’s Guest Blog comes to us courtesy of Anthony Brown, Director of Application Cloud Alliances and Program Development at Sungard Availability Services. Today’s businesses face the challenge of maximizing their agility to meet rapidly changing market opportunities. At the same time, they need a reliable infrastructure for their day-to-day operational workloads. To meet both these sets of needs, many organizations are adopting a “Bimodal IT” approach.
Ten Disaster Recovery Mistakes You Can Avoid
Today’s Guest Blog comes to us courtesy of David Alvarado, Regional Director of Service Delivery at Peak10. Over the last 15 years, I’ve supported companies through over 700 disasters. One of the unforgiving truths of disaster recovery I’ve learned is that the success of your recovery depends upon how well you plan – and test – your disaster strategy. Consider preparing for a disaster like getting ready for the Big Game. If you don’t know the rules, how can you play?
The Secret to Getting the Most Out of Your Network
Today’s Guest Blog comes to us courtesy of Adam Burke, Vice President of Partnerships at Quest. Technology is here to help you run your company. But as that technology becomes more complex, it’s easy to lose sight of what you’re trying to achieve as a business. So what’s the secret to getting the most out of your network? This is possible with hybrid networks that leverage on-premise equipment and public cloud resources.
Guest Blog: Never Over or Underestimate Cloud Security, Integration or APIs
Today’s Guest Blog comes to us courtesy of Dante Orsini, SVP of Business Development at iland. Taking advantage of all that the cloud has to offer is no small order. That’s because extending your on-premise data center resources into the cloud completely changes how you scale performance, assure reliability, secure data and applications, and manage the costs of your day-to-day operations.
Taking Customer Experience to the Next Level
According to a study by Accenture, price is not the primary reason for customer churn: 66% of respondents stated they have switched companies due to poor customer service. But what makes this number even more relevant is that 82% of these respondents felt the company could have done something to prevent them from switching. When calling customer service, customers are often already frustrated.
Not All Clouds Are Created Equal
Does the idea of building out your own data center make you pause? Remember, the cloud enables you to leverage the investment service providers have made in cloud to reduce your own CAPEX and OPEX spending. You can literally transform how you do business with a wide range of infrastructure, collaboration, security, and recovery services delivered through the cloud. Just the way your organization is different from other organizations, cloud services differ from each other.
Cisco Powered: You’ve Come a Long Way
The cloud is no longer the disruptive technology of tomorrow. Today, it plays an essential role in day-to-day business operations of an increasing number of organizations worldwide. With the expanding number of services available, cloud represents an important opportunity for cloud providers. However, with this expansion also comes greater competition. In the early days of cloud, Cisco recognized the need for businesses to identify cloud providers who offer enterprise-class services.
A Promise From A Cloud Provider That Means Something
There’s a lot that goes on behind the scenes in cloud. This makes it difficult to know how reliable a provider’s cloud is going to be. Many are best-effort implementations, meaning you only have the provider’s word for it that their cloud is reliable. These providers also often employ a white-box infrastructure so you don’t know what kind of equipment your data is running over or how well integrated that infrastructure is. You have no guarantees, not even an SLA.
Beginning Your Hybrid Cloud Digital Transformation
Moving to cloud has compelling value to organizations of all types and sizes. With benefits such as lower CAPEX, flexible scalability, and global access to enterprise-class IT resources, many businesses are able to increase their agility with public cloud services. As a consequence, they can act upon market opportunities faster and with great efficiency. The cloud, however, is evolving just as fast as the organizations taking advantage of it are.
The 3-Level Approach to Availability
Availability is essential to smooth business operation. Many organizations think of availability in terms of network access. After all, if you can’t access your servers, you can’t do business. Availability in this sense is measured by how long the network is down per year. The cost of such downtime can be measured in millions of dollars per hour for some companies. To be enterprise-class, availability needs to be four or five 9s, meaning the network is up 99.99% or 99.999% of the time.
You Are Not Alone
On the surface, moving your operations to the cloud sounds relatively straightforward. With IaaS, for example, you simply migrate workloads to run on a server in your service provider’s data center instead of your own. In some respects, it is this easy. It is when they need to select which workloads to move that many companies begin to realize how challenging migrating to the cloud can be. For many companies, the move to cloud is a transition. It begins with a toe-in-the-water approach, so to speak.
#CiscoChat: Discover Intercloud with Peak 10 and Cisco
There are numerous reasons organizations look to extend their data centers. More dynamic and flexible computing needs and increasing storage capabilities are just a couple. And while this can sometimes prove a challenge for organizations, our Intercloud solution has given customers the freedom to expand their data centers, without compromising security, established user policies or workload control.
Carrier-Class Cloud
When evaluating cloud services, many organizations make the mistake of focusing largely on a service’s contracted price. While this takes into account the initial outlay and operational cost of a cloud service, it fails to consider the potential losses a business can incur when a service that does not accurately meet all of its specific needs. As Philip T. Kiser details in “Deciding Between Public Cloud and Managed Services”, you have many options when building out your cloud.
The Contact Center as a Profit Center
The role of the contact center is making a major shift. In the past, the goal of the contact center was to handle customer calls as quickly as possible. Time spent on the phone was time paying for an agent. Today’s customer calls are being recognized as a powerful opportunity for businesses to turn a negative customer experience into a positive one.
The Three Levels of Trust
Hybrid cloud is about flexibility. It’s about having access to the extra capacity you need, when you need it. It’s about paying only for what you use. And it’s about being able to quickly extend your IT capabilities so you can address new opportunities as they arise. Hybrid cloud is also about saving money. And to lock in the best rates, you’ll need to sign a commitment with a cloud provider. The question is, how do you know how much capacity to sign up for?
Verizon Enables Collaboration Around the World
The announcement that Verizon is offering global unified communication cloud service is good news for companies all over the world. Large organizations tend to be slower to adopt new technology, and the cloud is no exception. Such wariness has its logic: with their scale, a wrong decision implemented across a large organization can be crippling. However, too much prudence can undermine a company’s competitive position and ability to innovate, risking market share.
Colocation for a Smooth Transition to Cloud
When choosing your path to cloud, it’s important to remember why you are making this transition in the first place. For many companies, the cloud is about increasing agility and optimizing your IT assets to your company’s best advantage. Every company has unique requirements, so every path to cloud is unique as well. In “Moving to Cloud is a Journey,” Andrew Mametz at Peak 10 describes how colocation can help smooth your transition to cloud. With colocation, you keep ownership of your IT assets.
The Power of Endorsement
In his blog, “5 Traits to Look for in a Successful Cloud Reseller”, Carmen Sorice, SVP Channels at Sungard Availability Services offers valuable advice, both to resellers looking to move to cloud as well as to service providers. Specific traits such as executive leadership, relationship with customers, trust, give to get, and taking an integrated approach provide a useful way to measure the character of a reseller before any paperwork is signed.
Verizon Enables Collaboration Around the World
The announcement that Verizon is offering global unified communication cloud service is good news for companies all over the world. Large organizations tend to be slower to adopt new technology, and the cloud is no exception. Such wariness has its logic: implementing a solution with an unexpected quality issue across a large organization can be crippling. However, too much prudence can undermine a company’s competitive position and ability to innovate, risking market share.
Building Confidence in the Cloud
Confidence is an important ingredient in selling cloud services. In Deliver Cloud Services Meeting the Highest Standard, cloud provider Cirrity shares how fragile customer confidence can be. Reliability is the foundation for establishing and maintaining a customer’s confidence and trust. Reliability begins with the architecture of services and builds upon how services are put deployed.
What Users Want
For most users, the network is as mysterious as what’s under the hood of their car. When the engine starts to sputter, the average driver has no idea of whether there’s a problem with the carburetor or injection system. They just want their car to work. It’s the same with networks for many organizations. Users don’t want to get bogged down in the details of network performance and efficiency.
Innovating Beyond Technology
When people talk about innovation, they typically refer to the underlying technology and its benefits to users. For example, articles on innovation in the cloud often describe the new features and applications organizations can now access and the ways these will transform how they do they business. Innovation, however, can go far beyond technology. Sometimes, how technology is delivered is as important as the technology itself. There can even be innovation in how a customer pays for services.
Security in the Hybrid Cloud
Security is a primary concern for many organizations making the transition to cloud. In the blog, “Taking a Hybrid Cloud Approach to Security”, cloud provider Presidio shares how building a hybrid cloud enables you to maximize security while maximizing flexibility at the same time. Security in this instance can be thought of in terms of risk. For example, sensitive data and mission-critical applications need a higher level of security than a devops test environment.
Evolving Your Organization with Software Defined Networking
Software Defined Networking (SDN) is an exciting evolution in IT. Today, connections throughout a network are made by directly connecting to routers to control them. This is a process that can be time-consuming and prone to error, depending upon the size of the network being managed. Furthermore, the effort involved in making changes across large networks can slow the pace of innovation within an organization. SDN moves control to the application layer.
Why Shadow IT is Dangerous to Your Organization
Moving to cloud offers many benefits to organizations. However, these benefits come with a corresponding range of new challenges for IT to address. One of these challenges is what is known as “Shadow IT.” Shadow IT refers to activities of members within an organization to secure their own IT resources without going through a company’s IT department.
What’s Inside Your Cloud?
One of the key benefits of moving to the cloud is that someone else–your service provider–takes care of the day-to-day management of your technology. You can focus on adding value at a higher level. Scale capacity and increase your company’s productivity by introducing new capabilities such as collaboration applications or desktop-as-a-service. Unfortunately, not all clouds are created equal. The success of your business relies upon the quality of the services you choose.
Using the Cloud Strategically
A recent blog from Sungard AS, Stretch Your IT Dollar with Cloud Computing Services, offers more than just ideas on how cloud can extend your IT budget. It also covers ways organizations of all sizes can use cloud services strategically to meet their goals, as well as provides a link to materials useful for companies considering the move to cloud. A key part of Cisco’s cloud strategy is to enable service providers like Sungard AS to offer a wide range of cloud-based services.
The New IT: How Cloud Changes Everything
The move to cloud can be daunting. In their blog, Overcoming the Organizational Challenges of Moving to Cloud, Presidio describes one of the barriers organizations face when transitioning to cloud. Building a hybrid cloud – one based on private on-premises resources extended through the public cloud network – requires many shifts in thinking for IT. In short, IT is becoming the cloud services broker within their own company.
Disaster Recovery Oversights
It can be challenging and expensive to design an efficient network and data center that minimizes downtime. Yet, even if you’ve put together a bulletproof solution, there’s always the possibility of disaster to consider. Developing a robust disaster recovery plan involves much more than just installing redundant resources. There are so many factors to consider, and so many that are easily overlooked.
The Time for Desktop as a Service is Now
A new whitepaper from IDC, “The Workspace-as-a-Service Opportunity: Why Now is the Time for Desktop as a Service” is a must-read for any organization facing the challenge of delivering applications and services to employees on mobile devices. According to IDC, corporate-liable smartphone shipments will reach 110 million units in 2014. In comparison, employee-liable smartphone shipments will exceed 220 million in 2014.
Enabling BYOD for your Organization
Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) technology promises many benefits to organizations. For example, increased productivity results when users can access data with any device, anywhere, anytime. By both simplifying and automating security and policy management, IT management costs can also be reduced. There are equipment savings as well, since organizations can leverage the use of personal electronics that their employees already own. There’s a lot to enabling BYOD.
Take Out the Stress of Choosing the Right Cloud Provider
For many organizations, buying cloud services can be stressful. After all, as your business moves more and more into the cloud, you need to know your services and cloud provider are as reliable or better than if these services originated from within your own data center. Buying cloud services can feel a lot like buying a car. How many of us really know what’s going on under the hood? We look at a few key stats like gas mileage and drive it around the block. Yeah, it accelerates and brakes.
Rob Llyod on Hybrid Cloud
Recently, Cisco’s Rob Llyod sat down with Sungard AS to discuss how hybrid cloud services are changing the way organizations use the cloud. As the president of development and sales, Rob understands many different sides of the hybrid cloud equation. He talks with businesses about how they want to use the cloud to grow, as well as about their concerns regarding security, cost, and complexity.
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