With the digital revolution, you can monitor market trends, order products you want and pay for them online, and a customer is always a click away. Technology has transformed the way we do business today.

Seamless transactions

The era when you had to stand in long queues is long gone. There is now online and mobile banking which has made it easier to buy and purchase goods and to pay bills. Through mobile payments platforms, it is now cheaper, more efficient and convenient for businesses to make transactions whether it is business to business or other third parties like banks.

SolarWinds, a leading provider of powerful and affordable IT management software, today marked World Backup Day a few days early by introducing its first backup solution targeted for direct use by end-user customers. SolarWinds Backup is a cloud-first backup service developed to protect virtual and physical servers. It is built upon the company’s own proven technology already used by Managed Services Providers (MSPs) to securely and efficiently protect the data assets of thousands of organizations worldwide. The product has been designed from the ground up to reduce cost and complexity without sacrificing speed or reliability.

With many backup alternatives to choose from in a competitive marketplace, almost half of IT professionals are marginally satisfied or dissatisfied with their current backup products, according to findings from a recent survey of SolarWinds’ 145,000-member THWACK user community. Almost 10 percent of respondents admitted to being dissatisfied and actively looking to switch products. Forty-two percent cited cost, and 31 percent chose complexity as their most significant pain points.

INFINIDAT announced four new products aimed at enterprises seeking to accelerate digital transformation and drive cost out of their IT infrastructure. 

InfiniSync

InfiniSync is a 450 pound, ballistically hardened data bunker appliance that is the world’s first solution for zero RPO synchronous data mirroring over virtually infinite distance, with zero latency impact.

"Traditional mission-critical computing requires synchronous mirroring, perhaps from lower Manhattan to a data bunker in northern New Jersey, and then asynchronous mirroring from the bunker to a disaster recovery site in Texas," said Jacob Broido, Chief Product Officer at INFINIDAT. "InfiniSync eliminates the need for the New Jersey data center while ensuring all transactions make it to Texas under every imaginable scenario, including power and network failures and regional and rolling disasters."

InfiniSync will be generally available on April 2, 2018.

Pivot3, the hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) technology and performance leader, today announced Pivot3 Cloud Edition on Amazon Web Services (AWS), which enables customers to simplify, optimize and automate their use of multi-cloud environments to better address business challenges. This extension of Pivot3’s HCI software platform to the public cloud is part of the company’s strategy to unify on-premises and public cloud infrastructures with its innovations in policy-based management and automated resource orchestration technologies. By extending these capabilities, Pivot3 is addressing the many challenges IT faces in reducing costs while improving agility from a hybrid and multi-cloud environment.

"Advancements in public cloud services brought the promise of reduced complexity and improved economics. However, to this point, IT has been held back by management and cost complexities along with lack of seamless, end-to-end control," said John Spiers, executive vice president of strategy, Pivot3. "Pivot3 Cloud Edition features our Intelligent Cloud Engine that brings unprecedented simplicity, intelligence and automation to multi-cloud environments. This intelligence engine features our market-leading policy-based management and resource orchestration capabilities that were designed to span on-premises infrastructure and public clouds as tiers of resources."

Crowd Research Partners today released the 2018 Cloud Security Report revealing that security concerns are on the rise, exacerbated by a lack of qualified security staff and outdated security tools – while data breaches are at an all-time high.

Download the complete 2018 Cloud Security Report here.

"While workloads continue to move into the cloud, the study reveals that cloud security concerns are on the rise again, reversing a multi-year trend," said Holger Schulze, CEO of Cybersecurity Insiders and founder of the 400,000-member Information Security Community on LinkedIn which commissioned the study. "With half of organizations predicting a rise in cloud security budgets, protecting today’s cloud environments require more and better trained security professionals and innovative, cloud-native security solutions to address the concerns of unauthorized access, data and privacy loss, and compliance in the cloud."

Key takeaways from the report include:

Step One: Identify a Niche

Before you consider launching a business online, you need to identify where your business will fit in the industry, and you’ll need to find the right products to fill a gap in the market and complement your branding. To do so, research the different niches in your industry and aim to identify potential problem areas so you can find the best solution for your customers.

SonicWall, the trusted security partner protecting more than 1 million networks worldwide, announces the company’s new managed security service provider (MSSP) program. The SonicWall SecureFirst MSSP Program helps partners with new or mature managed security practices fill their customers’ widening security skills gap by building and scaling their managed security service offerings to deliver optimal security outcomes.

"The swift rise and sophistication of data breaches and network threats is forcing well-intentioned organizations to outsource network and data protection to MSSPs," said SonicWall Senior Vice President and Chief Revenue Officer Steve Pataky. "This opens many opportunities for SecureFirst Partners to deliver or resell expert 24/7 managed security services – backed by SonicWall’s automated real-time breach detection and prevention – to provide ongoing protection from cyber attacks. This means incredible growth for our SecureFirst partners, so we want to accelerate their managed security services in every way possible."

Avi Networks, the next-gen application delivery platform, launched new features today that make it easy for enterprises to automate the deployment and scaling of applications in hybrid and multi-cloud environments. Enhancements to Avi’s integration with datacenter management platforms, Ansible and Terraform, paired with Avi’s machine learning capabilities let IT teams provision infrastructure resources and application services without the need to code complex logic. This solution can be deployed across the largest cloud providers, including AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform, as well as private data centers.

Until now, enterprises had to manually configure applications and use custom scripts to provision resources within their environments. The architectural innovations in Avi’s platform remove this hurdle to deliver best-in-class automation, elasticity, and self-service. As demand increases for an application, Avi can automatically spin up additional servers, cloud infrastructure, network resources, and application services for the application.

Creating environments for data to thrive, Western Digital Corporation today announced that it is relieving big data pressures on IT managers by offering enterprises a cost-effective and scalable backup and recovery solution for on-premises and hybrid cloud environments. Two powerful technologies, ActiveScale object storage system and StorReduce deduplication software, provide petabyte-scale storage that protects data efficiently, and facilitates a data forever architecture, saving companies up to 70% compared to traditional backup appliances. With this modern approach, protected data is stored in an open format so customers can analyze and extract hidden value from the data to help transform businesses or achieve new breakthroughs faster.

There’s no doubt that data is growing rapidly. This is putting multiple pressures on IT managers to optimize budgets and resources, reduce backup and restore times, design for regulatory and security mandates, and more efficiently balance workloads and applications on-premises and in the cloud. Today, traditional backup methods such as expensive backup appliances, or magnetic tape for long-term retention, are rendering themselves ineffective due to the volume, velocity and variety of data.

Likewise, an increasing number of businesses are migrating their data systems from hardware to these providers. No matter what industry you are a part of, whether it’s a unique graphic design firm or a large manufacturing operation, the cloud is here to stay and getting on board now will save you time, money and resources. So, what are the ways you can use it to the best of your ability? Below are three ways.