by united admin | Oct 26, 2020 | Cloud Computing
Cloud computing has gone from being the new kid on the block to being the seasoned expert that has revamped current IT and business strategies. From being a tool that aided digital businesses, cloud computing now helps organizations enhance their applications across the board. Cloud computing is a necessity; indeed, it is so commonplace that businesses of all sizes are adopting a cloud-first or a cloud-only approach. Gartner estimates that less than one-third of enterprises have a documented cloud strategy, which shows the extent to which such a powerful tool is being underutilized. Cloud computing helps organizations heavily reduce their capital expenditure, but it also reduces management, monitoring, and governance efforts. It is the one-stop solution for companies to simplify their ever-growing overcomplicated IT.
Cloud providers help you simplify your IT resources and ensure that you have cloud experts expediting deployment, operations, and troubleshooting. It means that your data is as secure as possible, especially with a private cloud deployment. Besides the cost savings on hosting your IT on the cloud, it eliminates the hassles associated with scaling the data center as your business grows. Data is much more mobile with the cloud that optimizes collaboration like never before. Contingency plans need to be put in place for eventualities that can disrupt the business and the workplace, as cloud computing offers a robust Business Continuity plan—the extent of observability and monitoring that cloud offers organizations is a competitive advantage like no other.
Gartner states that through 2024, 80% of companies that do not adequately operate and utilize their cloud resources will overspend by 20 to 50%. Implementing a cloud strategy requires organizations to effectively utilize their resources by clearly demarcating the resources as per the requirements of the applications and business departments. Organizations can follow some best practices that use their cloud resources effectively. Organizations need to align the priorities of cloud adoption effectively. A standard guideline ensures that any misaligned objectives can prevent delays in any deployment, hinders the scaling of cloud resources effectively. The lesson that most organizations need to learn is this: what makes cloud the right solution for your company is the way you adapt to it.
Several strategies can help companies test the waters, a cloud-first or a cloud-only strategy needs to be assessed and tested; it makes a world of difference in the way that your business can adapt to it. When it comes to cloud computing, there is only one key differentiator: Strategy. Identifying the right candidate workloads for testing or deployment is often the first step that most organizations consider. While it is vital to ensure that companies pick the right cloud service provider, it is essential to understand that cloud is not just a technical tool, it aids management directly and should be assessed as such. The business value of your cloud workloads, figure out which of your workloads are ready for the cloud. It saves more time and money in migration and reduces additional efforts on behalf of companies. You can have one size that kind of fits all or a customized approach that solves all your IT hassles. There is only one way to achieve this; you guessed it. Strategy.
Visit the United Private Cloud website today, to get a complete IT Estate Assessment that helps you navigate a seamless cloud adoption strategy.
by united admin | Oct 25, 2020 | Edge Cloud
Cloud computing in the past has been so limited by centralization that it has compromised speed and availability to its users. Data was required to be gathered from the outermost regions and sent back to the central servers to be processed. Devices at the outermost edges lacked the computation power to process large amounts of data or even store it, which was the basis for the centralized server. However, this has radically changed in the last couple of years. As more devices are connecting to networks that can help transmit data speedily via cellular or WiFi networks. So what was the hurdle in speeding up endpoints? The answer is the essential component: Hardware.
What does Edge computing bring to the table?
In the last ten years, devices have miniaturized processing and storage technology, slowly eliminating the problem of storing and computing edge data. IoT devices have become so powerful that they are a self-sustained computation unit. Edge computing helps consumers then perform analytics and apply data right where it is gathered, at the network edge. It opens up so many avenues. Specifically, it addressed the real-time application of collected data to its intended users. Reducing latency as data does not have to travel back to a central server, enhancing performance like never before.
United Private Cloud is here to help you take full advantage of the exciting implications of Edge Computing. UnitedEdge is a Fully Managed Edge Cloud Service that enables you to connect to your private cloud and becomes a seamless extension to your on-prem private cloud. UnitedEdge can seamlessly integrate your leading public cloud solutions like Amazon, Azure, Google. The hybrid cloud configurations that UnitedEdge executes are comparable to those provided by Google Anthos and Amazon Outpost. We provide a Software as a Service Solution (SaaS) that works on Low-Cost Commodity Hardware and delivers both High-Performance Virtual Machines and Containers as a Service.
UnitedEdge delivers 99.999% availability enhancing performance like never before, only requiring that the customer’s data center infrastructure (power and cooling) is redundant. UnitedEdge is pre-configured with SD-WAN Optimized High Availability Network and multicloud connectivity with leading cloud providers such as AWS, Google, and Azure and comes along with remote management and 24×7 enterprise-grade support. Managed services and optimized performance to help your company exceed performance benchmarks and grow like never before.
Visit the United Private Cloud’s website today to discover how United Private Cloud can help you in your IT Transformation Journey.
by united admin | Oct 25, 2020 | Security
Cybercrime has boomed in recent years, taking on complexity like any other well-executed IT project. As technology ramps up to help companies achieve peak performance and productivity, the same revolution also assists the disastrous impacts of cybercrime. Cybercriminals have access to low cost, highly sophisticated tools that have increased the frequency and impact of cyberattacks in recent years. A lack of security skills and investment leads to organizations falling behind when dealing with such attacks. Ransomware attacks are essentially like any other hostage situation; something valuable is taken away from you and returned for a price. Cloud resources, more often than not, could be protected by investing in IT and cloud security measures. Companies need to take proactive steps to predict and mitigate the threat of ransomware.
Cybersecurity Ventures predicts that by 2021, global ransomware damage costs will increase up to 20 Billion USD, a steep jump from 11.5. Billion USD in 2019. New Year’s Eve 2020 was marred by a ransomware attack on Travelex, taking down its websites across 30 countries. Foreign exchange transactions were chaotic worldwide for the company in January. The ransom was estimated to around $6M. The myth associated with ransomware is that the financial impacts are limited to the ransom amount. Still, it goes so much deeper than that; you incur the downtime costs that your business incurs during the period you do not have access to data. More often than not, the key that lets organizations access their data corrupts or erases at least some of the data.
Data recovery costs and customer dissatisfaction can deliver a major blow to the organization. There is no guarantee that the hacker will upload their end of the bargain on receiving the ransom amount. Ransomware can infect the cloud when an affected local device is synced to the cloud. Encrypted files spread corruption from the device to the cloud. An entire company’s cloud – sharing system can be brought down if such attacks persist and are not dealt with in time. Phishing attacks are another way where attackers can gain access to a user’s email account. These can cause damage by encrypting important email messages and spreading the malware to other email contacts. Recently, ransomware was being spread through COVID-19-themed phishing emails that exploit existing vulnerabilities or when users unknowingly visited an infected website.
As they say, “Prevention is better than cure.”
Our experts at United Private Cloud can help protect your cloud resources. We offer an unbiased risk assessment by assessing your infrastructure, application, data, and security posture to create a comprehensive risk analysis profile. We provide a compliance report by conducting a detailed analysis of your IT footprint to identify gaps that could prevent you from achieving compliance.
With our manual and tool-based penetration testing and vulnerability scanning, we proactively test and identify network vulnerabilities before hackers find them. We create a remediation and security planning roadmap by providing a prioritized, structured, and proactive plan for resolving risk and security vulnerabilities. Our experts offer proficient remediation by working side-by-side with your team to execute remediation efforts while sharing the responsibility for their successful delivery.
Visit the United Private Cloud’s website today to discover the right private cloud partner for your organization and avail of managed security services that provide comprehensive protection.
by united admin | Oct 15, 2020 | Private Cloud
In today’s world, one can confidently conclude that enterprise computing’s future lies in the cloud. Cloud offers much-needed mobility for IT operations, thus cutting hardware and development expenses. The innovation brought together by the public cloud providers in terms of serverless computing, low-cost storage, flexible billing models, scalability, elasticity, enterprise-grade security, and a range of purpose-designed services has pushed many companies around the world to rethink their IT environment so that they can utilize the cloud to accelerate and maintain their digital transformation.
Migrating to cloud destinations brings with it a multitude of challenges that enable you to learn about service providers and how they vary. Organizations find it challenging to develop skills and expertise to switch to only one platform, resulting in the need to replace or eliminate certain team members and upgrade the current staff with cloud skills that can be expensive and disruptive. It is no wonder that the thought of doing so can be overwhelming across several private cloud platforms.
Cloud migration services offered by United Private Cloud can seamlessly migrate your applications, data, and infrastructure to the cloud. Our experts can help you build your migration strategy, evaluate your portfolio of applications, review your cost structure, and identify the best cloud platform for your needs.
United Private Cloud’s G3 IaaS Private Cloud Platform is its 3rd generation private cloud solution, developed, hardened, and perfected over a period of 15 years while serving many hundreds of enterprises and governments across the globe. G3 IaaS delivers high performance, 99.999% availability, locked-down security, and software-defined agility and scalability while delivering greater than 30% cost savings versus leading public clouds and greater than 70% cost savings versus other leading private clouds.
The process of cloud migration is divided into three phases – the pre-migration planning, execution, and testing phases. We evaluate your current IT infrastructure and determine which applications to migrate. Customized migration solutions are provided based on customer requirements, ensuring minimal interruption of business operations for customers. The migration architecture and data need to be migrated after determination, executing the migration process to the cloud, and ensuring minimal disruption to normal operations. We also provide post-migration support with real-time monitoring of application performance in the new environment, access data security to ensure it meets all regulatory requirements, and update OS drivers to match the new environment.
Organizations should look to monitoring performance not as a post-migration afterthought but as an integral part of their digital transformation and cloud journey. Monitoring should be incorporated into benchmarking KPIs at every step of the way, track user experience, understand performance deviations, forecast capability requirements, and ensure a seamless transition and benefit from actionable insight for scaling and cloud expansion.
With our systematic account management paradigm, we perform continuous operational tuning and weekly follow-up with the customers to ensure that they optimize and use the solution’s full potential. It’s a consultative approach and a continuous process of serving our customers better.
Visit the United Private Cloud to interact with experts to guide you to the right solution!
by united admin | Oct 15, 2020 | Containers, Virtual Machines
According to Gartner’s new forecast, worldwide container management revenue will grow from $465.8 million in 2020 to $944 million in 2024. Cloud container orchestration and serverless container offerings are experiencing significant growth and industry-wide acceptance because they ease application deployment and support production environments. To keep pace with the evolving technological environment, there is a demand for application development to be more agile, portable and ensure faster delivery, modernization, and life cycle management. It is necessary to virtualize computing resources. Getting the most out of your hardware is imperative for optimal performance. Both Virtual Machines and Containers can help DevOps get the most out of available computer hardware and software resources.
While containers are relatively new technology, VMs are and continue to be tremendously popular in data centers of all sizes. A virtual machine essentially emulates a computer system, which means that although the hardware is segregated and represents separate computers, it can be run as a single computational unit. This technology’s implications sped up computation and made virtualization easier, making hardware so much easier to handle. The Operating Systems and applications share resources from a single server or a pool of host servers. The VMs virtualize the hardware and require their OS each. The link between the VM and the hardware is a hypervisor, software, firmware, or hardware. The hypervisor is the element that creates and runs VMs.
Companies have primarily embraced VMs to increase efficiency and reduce expenditure. The catch that comes with using VMs, however, is that they take up many system resources. As stated earlier, the VM runs its own OS, but it also has to run a virtual copy of the hardware. It is essential to the smooth performance of the underlying OS. While this can be reasonably economical when compared to traditional computing, it is still fairly overwhelming. That is where containers come in. Containers virtualize the OS rather than the underlying computer hardware. They require a physical server and a host OS. Containers share the host OS kernel; these shared components are read-only but significantly reduce the OS code’s reproduction.
By using containers, servers can run multiple workloads while installing a single OS. They are only a few megabytes in seconds and take just a few seconds to start. VMs take longer to initialize and start in the order of a few minutes and are significantly larger in size than containers.
Containers need a functional OS that supports the resources necessary to run the programs required. This means organizations can now host two to three times as many as applications on a single server using containers than with a VM. Containers create a portable, consistent operating environment for developing, testing, and deploying your applications. Containers are a revolutionary technology that can save time and reduce costs, and it is here to stay.
Visit the United Private Cloud to interact with experts to guide you to the right solution!
