October 26, 2018 Off

Mission Announces Partnership with CloudCheckr to Instantly Bolster the Cloud Service Provider’s Cloud Intelligence Platform

By David
Grazed from Mission and CloudCheckr

Mission, a nationwide managed services and consulting company for cloud platforms including Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure, announced a partnership with CloudCheckr – the leading cloud management platform – that will help drive deeper insights and increased automation for customers leveraging Mission’s managed Cloud Intelligence Platform. The partnership comes shortly after the Mission brand launched following the 2018 mergers of managed cloud service providers Reliam, Stratalux, and G2 Tech Group.

Mission harnesses best-of-breed, purpose-built tools and solutions as part of its Cloud Intelligence Platform. This includes Mission’s popular Cloud Optimization capability, which uses technologies like CloudCheckr – fully managed by Mission – to thoroughly uncover new ways of improving customers’ cloud performance while strategically reducing spend wherever possible. Through this platform, customers can take advantage of Mission’s complete application performance management instrumentation, security instrumentation, automated maintenance, automated backups, and active monitoring. With today’s partnership, Mission will now leverage CloudCheckr’s powerful cloud management features and insights as a critical new input to the Cloud Intelligence Platform, enhancing Mission’s managed service and yielding even more cloud optimization results for customers across industries.

 
October 26, 2018 Off

A10 Networks Delivers Major Automation, Analytics and Multi-Cloud Management Advancements to Its Application Delivery Solution

By David
Grazed from A10 Networks

A10 Networks announced availability of major advancements to its Thunder Application Delivery Controllers (ADCs) with Harmony Controller support for centralized, multi-cloud management, rich per-app analytics and DevOps tool integration. Numerous new enhancements also enable integration with Kubernetes, enhanced Ansible Playbooks and simplified ADC policy configuration with expanded Application Centric Template (ACT) support.

Organizations are striving to become more agile as the role of IT and software becomes paramount. Fast roll-out, control and optimization of applications drive revenue, competitive advantage and customer satisfaction. Apps must be secured and quickly delivered regardless of where they reside.

A10’s ADCs with their tight coupling to the Harmony Controller lead the industry in enabling administrators to intelligently manage, control and automate the deployment of application delivery services to maximize agility, provide actionable insights and ensure app availability and security while simplifying operations with lower TCO. Augmentations to A10’s Thunder ADC with Harmony Controller intelligent automation capabilities include:

October 26, 2018 Off

SolarWinds Gives MSPs Better Visibility into Customer Environments with Network Device Monitoring

By David
Grazed from SolarWinds MSP

SolarWinds MSP, a leader in delivering comprehensive, scalable IT service management solutions to IT solution providers and managed service providers (MSPs), today announced it has expanded its SolarWinds® RMM capabilities by launching the Network Device Monitoring feature. 

Network Device Monitoring is built to give MSPs the visibility they need to monitor customer switches, printers, routers, and firewalls-in addition to servers and workstations-from a single pane of glass. With greater visibility into the complete network, MSPs can proactively maintain network devices by getting information on hardware health, performance, and utilization. 

October 26, 2018 Off

12 Tips To Help You Improve Your New IT Business

By David
Running your own business is a big accomplishment, and you should be proud of how far you’ve come. However, there’s always room for improvement, and being a new IT business means you’re having to continue innovating your business processes, products and/or services.

The following tips will help you advance your company so you can continue to grow and expand. When you put your time and energy into focusing on what’s most important, you’ll be able to succeed over the long-term. Keep in mind that change is difficult and it could take some time before you see your adjustments truly making a difference in how you operate your business.

1.   Set Goals

It’s imperative you take the time to sit down and set goals for what you want to achieve. You need this roadmap in place early so you know where you’re heading and can communicate these objectives to your leadership team and staff. Be specific in your approach and write down exactly what you’re going to do differently to ensure your goals are being met in a timely manner. Be diligent about tracking your progress, so you know what’s working and what areas will require you to go back to the drawing board.

October 25, 2018 Off

Scale Computing Raises $34.8 Million in Strategic Funding

By David
Scale Computing today announced $34.8 million in Series F funding. Lenovo, being the largest investor in the round, announced last week a global partnership with Scale. The partnership was called  to bring intelligent edge computing to global retailers, distributed enterprises, and SMBs. New along with existing financial investors also participated in the round.

“We have experienced tremendous growth over the past two years, driven by our unique capability to completely automate the administration of a fully converged platform,” said Jeff Ready, CEO of Scale Computing. “This round of funding, combined with our new partnership with Lenovo, enables us to instantly reach customers at a global scale.”

Scale’s patented HyperCore™ technology identifies, mitigates, and corrects infrastructure problems in both hardware and software in real time, using machine intelligence and automation to keep applications running without human intervention. This capability is especially critical in distributed enterprise edge computing, retail, and SMB deployments, where onsite IT staff may be very limited or non-existent. As such, Scale’s HC3 Edge platform has emerged as the leading platform for running mission critical applications in these environments.

 
October 25, 2018 Off

Google’s Mobile-First Search Algorithm & the Cloud

By David

Article Written by Avery Phillips

For the past few years, business owners have been scrambling to rework their websites to fit mobile technology. If you don’t keep up, you will be left behind. Right now, mobile is king and Google sets the pace. 

Late in 2017, Google decided to redesign their algorithm to prioritize mobile-optimized pages. Since more people (63 percent) now search using mobile devices, and almost 75 percent of all online searches run through Google, this is news that you cannot ignore. As of June of this year, websites that run quickly on mobile now rank higher than those that load slowly. 

Unfortunately, this puts a lot of businesses in a bind. If previously your website came up on top of a Google search, you may now find yourself buried beneath a lot of responsive, mobile-ready, dynamic loading websites. So what can you do about it?

October 25, 2018 Off

Webinar: Cleaning Up After the Cloud Migration Party

By David

 

This webinar, featuring Forrester Principal Analyst Lauren E. Nelson and Trent Fitz Solution Strategist at Zenoss, will discuss the pre-party and post-party requirements for facilitating a well executed cloud migration and the importance of having the right technologies in place to manage and support a hybrid environment.

Pre-Party Prep: Understand What You Have

Applications not built for the cloud often suffer from performance issues due to their monolithic architecture, which is unfit for horizontal scaling. Before beginning your cloud migration journey, it’s important to understand how suitable each application is for a cloud environment.

Party with the Lights On

During a cloud migration, it’s critical to ensure minimal service disruption. Proper care must be taken to manage the chaos among all IT systems and applications. It’s important to understand the proper tools and processes for seamless cloud transitions.

The Clean-Up: Manage Your Hybrid World

For most enterprises, a cloud migration isn’t like flipping a light switch. It is a journey, and one that usually ends with hybrid IT environments. It’s extremely important to have the right technologies in place to manage that hybrid environment.

WHEN? Thursday, November 08, 2018 @ 11:00 AM Central Standard Time 

 

October 23, 2018 Off

Limelight Networks and Ericsson to Accelerate Content Delivery and Edge Cloud Adoption

By David
Grazed from Limelight Networks and Ericsson

Limelight Networks and Ericsson have signed an agreement to collaborate on content delivery and edge cloud services.

As more traffic shifts to the public internet from private networks, the need for high performance networks and distributed infrastructure is required to maintain a high-quality user experience. A key solution to this is edge cloud computing. Providing computing capabilities close to the user or device gives a superior quality of service. For new low latency applications such as IoT, gaming, and virtual reality, robust computing capabilities at the edge of the network are needed. Communications service providers and technology companies will play a pivotal role in scaling the next wave of internet traffic.

Ericsson is partnering with service providers globally to build the Ericsson Unified Delivery Network (UDN) Edge Cloud Platform – a web-scale edge delivery network, driving performance benefits and cost efficiencies. Content delivery is the first application built on the UDN platform. Under the agreement, Limelight’s content delivery technology will be deployed on the Ericsson UDN Edge Cloud Platform to expand its global delivery capabilities and increase delivery capacities.

October 23, 2018 Off

Ubuntu 18.10: Multi-cloud, new desktop theme and enhanced desktop snap integration

By David
Grazed from Canonical

Canonical announced the release of Ubuntu 18.10, focused on multi-cloud deployments, AI software development, a new community desktop theme and richer snap desktop integration.

"Ubuntu is now the world’s reference platform for AI engineering and analytics" said Mark Shuttleworth, CEO of Canonical. "We accelerate developer productivity and help enterprises operate at speed and at scale, across multiple clouds and diverse edge appliances."

This year, the financial services industry has engaged significantly with Canonical and Ubuntu for infrastructure efficiency on premise and to accelerate their move to the cloud. The push for machine learning analytics and of fintech efforts around blockchain, distributed ledger applications and cryptocurrencies are current drivers of Ubuntu investments and deployments.

October 23, 2018 Off

Alibaba Cloud Expands European Presence With UK Data Centres

By David
Grazed from Alibaba Cloud

Alibaba Cloud, the cloud computing arm of Alibaba Group, has today announced the opening of two availability zones in the UK, in addition to its Frankfurt and Dubai data centres launched in 2016.

This expansion not only extends Alibaba Cloud’s capabilities within Europe, but also serves to highlight the provider’s ongoing commitment to the region. Alibaba Cloud’s local footprint is steadily increasing, with data centres across three EMEA locations: Frankfurt, Dubai, and now London.

Answering an increase in demand for Alibaba Cloud services across the EMEA region, the pair of high performance availability zones will enable organisations in the region to accelerate the upgrade of their digital infrastructure enabling more efficient digital transformation initiatives. Business continuity is also a clear focus, with dual availability zones offering stronger disaster recovery capabilities.

The London location also boasts 24/7 on-site support – including both security and engineering – as well as real-time monitoring and a ticketing system with SLA guarantees. The new data centres offer a wide range of Alibaba Cloud product lines, including: Elastic Computing, Storage, Database, Network, Application Services and Big Data Analytics.