Worldnet Technology Solutions

Convergence Is Cloud Computing

Ask the Right Questions to Make the Right Cloud Choice

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Tapping into the benefits of the cloud is a popular business move in today’s fast-paced environment. But getting the most out of a cloud deployment depends on asking the right questions from the start. Not all offerings are created equal, and not all types of files, applications, and data are suited for the cloud.

Failing to ask key questions can lead to implementation mistakes. Taking careful consideration of enterprise requirements and finding appropriate services to fit those needs is key to a successful cloud migration. Following are important questions to ask before making a purchase.

What existing capabilities and knowledge does the IT department currently have that will aid in a deployment?

As with most IT processes, the devil is in the details. Most companies understand that there are efficiencies to be gained by implementing cloud tools, but they also realize there is much they don’t know. This can lead to fear and reluctance to go forward with a cloud migration. Fears often center on compliance and security concerns.

Education is an effective counter to cloud fears. If the company has an in-house IT team, take stock of what knowledge and skills they bring to the table. Strategize about how the team will be used during and after migration. Plan ahead to provide training for in-house personnel or tap into third-party providers to fill in any knowledge gaps.

What services does the company need?

To avoid taking a potentially costly and time-consuming misstep, start off by understanding as much as possible about how the company will use the cloud. Consider how much data the company needs to store, what features are needed to enhance business processes, and what types of tasks the company needs the cloud service to support. Also take into account privacy and security requirements as well as any regulations or compliance issues that must be met.

What cloud service model makes the most sense for the company?

Cloud services come in three primary models — private, public, and hybrid — each with its own pros and cons. Private services are usually hosted in-house, which increases security but at a higher cost than shared services. Public cloud services, on the other hand, share resources and costs across multiple users, providing a cost-effective solution — but in a shared environment that some enterprises might deem too risky.

Hybrid models attempt to mesh the best of both worlds, providing the cost savings and shared advantages of the public cloud while maintaining private options for certain data and applications that require a high level of security and privacy.

Cloud services offer the potential for enormous efficiencies and business advantages, but choosing the wrong service could quickly nullify those benefits.

Asking a few key questions can yield answers the enterprise can use to shop for and ultimately buy the best cloud value for their investment. Contact Worldnet to learn more about implementing business cloud services.

The IT Challenges Faced by SMBs Today

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Small to mid-sized businesses (SMBs) face a unique set of challenges on a daily basis. These businesses must be creative and resourceful with their technology spending in order to continue to grow and flourish despite financial and human resource constraints. Following are a few of the main areas of concern experienced by SMBs.

Keeping Data Intact

Losing data can bring an SMB to its knees and, quite often, out of business altogether. Without a data integrity specialist on staff, it can be quite difficult to manage the complexities of data flow, storage, and security. Failing to have a solid backup process in place makes the situation worse by creating an unnecessary risk of business collapse should a loss occur.

Managing Outages

Downtime is an expensive problem, costing hundreds to thousands of dollars per minute. SMBs are much more vulnerable to such a large financial loss than are bigger companies, especially when faced with prolonged outages. In addition, these smaller organizations typically lack the IT resources usually committed to system administration and maintenance. Those running the business without these critical resources are often unsure of how systems should be built and integrated, so may construct them in a less than stable architecture, leading to frequent downtime.

Antiquated Solutions

A wide variety of robust technologies exist today. Unfortunately, many SMB teams have limited knowledge of these new systems and fail to take advantage of their power, which can limit efficiency and productivity. As smaller companies must do more with less, this is an unfortunate obstacle to growth.

Using the Wrong Tools for Sales

Sales can be particularly challenging for SMBs, as they need both the right pitch and the right clientele. Lacking tools that can provide valuable information may mean that the sales staff is misdirecting its efforts. Modern data analytics can show trends, insights, and results in an extremely timely manner, but SMBs may not be capitalizing on these tools.

Enterprise-Sized Solutions Do Not Fit All

So many useful tools in the marketplace have been constructed to serve the big money forum: enterprises and major corporations. These applications and systems are complex and costly, which makes them out of range for most SMBs. Businesses of all sizes need workflow solutions, and SMBs must scour the landscape for affordable ways to handle everything from sales to HR, purchasing, and compliance.

SMBs have a particular set of needs since they may be limited by available resources. Acquiring affordable and easily managed IT solutions will help these smaller businesses succeed in an increasingly technical world.

Maximizing Corporate Efficiency With the Help of the IT Department

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As technology continues to develop in the business world, more companies are turning to their IT departments for ways to make operations more efficient by using technology wisely. There are multiple aspects that IT departments can assist with to help a business run more smoothly.

Effective Management of Mobile Users

A majority of businesses in the U.S. today allow for bring your own device (BYOD), giving employees the ability to access corporate data and tools on their personal smartphones and tablets. However, BYOD can put companies at risk if security is inadvertently or intentionally compromised, which is why it’s important to effectively manage all mobile users in the company. Strict policies should be developed that prevent the compromise of sensitive data. Some software actually allows employers to alter security levels when employees are on the corporate network.

Make the Transition to Cloud Technology

Although some business owners have preconceived notions that cloud technology isn’t secure, cloud service providers have proven that they can keep data more secure than companies relying on in-house data storage. Add to this the lowered operating costs associated with storing data off-site, and it becomes clear that moving applications to the cloud is ideal to help maximize efficiency.

Implement Certification for IT Processes

One of the best ways to make sure an IT department is in compliance with company guidelines is to add certification that helps IT processes remain efficient, allowing the company to save time and reduce internal costs. Certification will allow business owners to see more clearly how well their IT departments are performing, and determine if there’s anything else that they can do to improve.

Consider Remote IT Teams

Another way to save money and improve efficiency in IT operations is to hire an IT company that can perform on-site functions from a remote location, specifically a central data center. Using this strategy can save both time and money for those remaining on-site. Cloud technology makes this easy to do, and as cloud technology continues to develop, it will only become easier.

With these ideas in mind, a business can benefit from increased overall efficiency and reduced costs and redirect focus and expenses to core aspects of the company. Working with IT teams can ultimately improve business drastically, which is something more and more businesses are beginning to realize.

Unified Communications: Making the Mobile Workforce Workable

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Millenials are now the single largest group in the American workforce – that’s more than 55 million working people who have never known a world without the Internet. As a group, they are ready and willing to work long, and even irregular, hours – but in exchange for that they expect a certain amount of freedom and mobility.

Employees want to be mobile, and companies can benefit from providing that ability. A robust and workable mobile workplace solution can be extremely complicated to set up and run, and there is great potential for less than stellar results. Unified communications (UC) is an integral piece of the mobile puzzle and can make all the difference in successful implementation.

Device Independence

One of the biggest weaknesses of non-UC mobile solutions is that they depend on devices that are often out of the control of IT. UC, by comparison, allows an employee on the go to securely access the communications system from almost any connected device.

Availability Indicators

One of the often under-appreciated features of a UC system is “presence” functionality. Ranging in complexity from simple, self-selected availability statuses to signals automatically calculated by the communications system itself, this function allows workers to determine the availability of anyone on the network and avoid interrupting them unnecessarily.

Seeing Is Believing

One of the major drawbacks of traditional telecommuting is that, no matter how much employees attempt to stay connected to the office, they tend to be left out of the loop from time to time. UC‘s robust video conferencing capabilities allow mobile employees to virtually present from any location.

Transparent Medium

With the ability to seamlessly switch between numerous communications channels at will, the medium no longer gets in the way of the message. Employees can jump from text, to voice, to video as the demands of the conversation dictate.

Find and Follow

Mobile employees tend not to follow the strict work/break schedules of their office-bound brethren. This can make it difficult to synchronize between mobile and non-mobile employees.

Find me/follow me functionality makes it possible for calls to a particular employee to be automatically routed to the device that employee is using, to bounce from device to device until a connection is made, or to be routed to another employee if the original recipient is unavailable.

The Internet made mobile work possible. UC is the missing puzzle piece that makes a mobile workforce workable.

How to Improve Disaster Recovery Performance

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shutterstock_52421020As the use of and dependence upon technology grows, network attacks have become more sophisticated. Indeed, perimeter defenses like firewalls and antivirus, no matter how layered, offer little protection against savvy cyber criminals intent on breaching network security. Anticipating an attack has become an inevitability for most companies. Building an effective disaster recovery (DR) strategy is necessary for operating securely in today’s connected marketplace.

An effective DR solution includes comprehensive risk management policies and incident response performances that are designed to mitigate the severity of an attack. By examining some common incident response failures, companies can better orchestrate their DR policies and meet the security challenges of tomorrow.

Poor Network Visibility

Without a clear understanding of the current IT environment, it’s impossible to adequately prepare a DR plan. The most important aspect of security involves knowing exactly what traffic is moving through the business network, where it originated, and which hardware it contacts. Without complete visibility, there’s no way to respond to possible threats.

Many DR plans call for the immediate isolation of an affected machine. However, unless the business is able to clearly identify lateral movement within the network, an eventual data breach could be forthcoming.

In order to proactively prevent an attack from escalating, companies must deploy web proxies and advanced firewalls that are designed to log, collect, analyze, and store interactions. Essentially, these technologies create an audit trail that can be utilized to address the threat and provide long-term actionable information.

Understaffing

Companies need a dedicated IT staff of experienced, competent personnel who can interpret and identify the information generated by these technologies. The advantage of employing IT professionals who understand the specific business network intimately is significant. Disaster response personnel should be able to communicate appropriate incident responses with each business department while keeping their attention solely dedicated to DR.

Budgeting Constraints

In many cases, an underfunded DR plan isn’t the result of a lack of available funding; it’s due to a lack of communication. DR personnel must be able to express their needs in a way that is relevant to the business’s success and profitability, stressing statistical information concerning repercussions created by a massive data breach (including both tangible and intangible consequences).

A business should develop standard IT security reports that can be delivered to various department managers and executives. These reports should include areas that are satisfactory as well as those that represent serious gaps in security that need to be addressed.

Comprehensive Risk Assessment

Any DR plan should address critical aspects first. The best way to ascertain specific business risks is to generate a comprehensive risk assessment and then use it to orchestrate explicit incident response levels. Companies should tailor responder access in relation to the risk management assessment so that key personnel have the ability to make infrastructure alterations without having to wait for authorization.

Companies can improve their DR performances by examining previous incident responses and equipping their internal IT support with the tools required to mitigate threats. Moreover, conducting a complete incident investigation in the wake of a disaster often helps illuminate gaps and provide key intelligence for future responses.

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