Article Written by Adnan Raja, Vice President of Marketing, Atlantic.Net

When you look at the statistics for information technology worldwide, you can understand why getting infrastructure costs down is such a key concern. IT spending worldwide was projected at $3.41 trillion for 2016 by industry analyst Gartner. Computers have simply become increasingly important business tools, and that is backed up by different buying patterns over time. In 1990, 15 million computers were shipped; in 2015, 65 million computers shipped per quarter.

While technology is critical to your success, your organization may still be spending too much on its backend. In this article, we look at the cost of not using cloud, why managed services make sense in 2017, and – most importantly – security as a critical factor in cost-containment.

Cost of not using cloud

The introduction of cloud computing played a gigantic role in changing the business computing landscape. Being a Project Manager, one should be well aware of this evolution and be capable of recognizing the scope of Cloud Computing in the near future.

What does a Project Management Software do?

A Project management software is basically a software used by Managers in general for planning and scheduling of the Project and also for resource allocation. One additional feature which the software give is change management.

"Alert Logic threat intelligence researchers and content engineers secure applications for more than 4,000 customers"

Marketing

Your marketing campaign may be partly based on local advertising but more than likely using your website, but there are other avenues open to you that can get your reach even further. Although social media platforms are the favored method of reaching audience, do not dismiss e-mails as a way of targeting your audience by sending personalized messages that appeal to their likes and preferences. If you start an email list with your existing customers, you can send them regular updates with your latest offers and products. E-mails that are personalized are more likely to be read and acted upon.

Ensono, a leading hybrid IT services provider, selected CloudCheckr for the development of a new cost and inventory portal, providing Ensono clients robust cost optimization, inventory tracking and governance capabilities in the cloud.

"We are committed to bringing our clients the most trusted resources for their digital transformation journey, which is why we chose CloudCheckr for the Ensono cost and inventory portal," said Brett Moss, SVP and general manager, hyperscale cloud at Ensono. "CloudCheckr is a market leader, and their cost management portal met the requirements we were looking for in our service offering. With the additional insights, clients will gain a better understanding of what’s running on their IT infrastructure, enabling them to make smarter business decisions."

Today at AWS re:Invent, Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), announced two new arrivals to complement its existing popular Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) and make it easier than ever to deploy, manage, and scale container workloads on AWS. Amazon Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes (Amazon EKS) brings Kubernetes to AWS as a fully managed service, making it easy for customers to run Kubernetes applications on AWS without the need to become experts in operating Kubernetes clusters. AWS also introduced a new capability called AWS Fargate that allows customers to launch and run containers without provisioning or managing servers or clusters. To learn more about Amazon EKS and AWS Fargate visit: https://aws.amazon.com/containers/.

"While we have over a hundred thousand active Amazon ECS clusters running on AWS and more customers running Kubernetes on AWS than on any other cloud, customers have also asked us to build a managed Kubernetes service like we have with Amazon ECS," said Deepak Singh, GM of Containers and High Performance Computing Services, AWS. "Not only have we delivered on this request with Amazon EKS, but we’ve also made managed containers easier to use than ever before by launching AWS Fargate to allow developers to run containers at the task level rather than having to think about servers or clusters."

Today at AWS re:Invent, Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), announced that customers can now use AWS PrivateLink to access third-party SaaS applications from their Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) without exposing their VPC to the public Internet. Customers can also use AWS PrivateLink to connect services across different accounts and VPCs within their own organizations, significantly simplifying their internal network architecture. To get started with AWS PrivateLink visit: https://aws.amazon.com/vpc/details/.

Since the introduction of Amazon VPC in 2009, AWS customers have been able to define and control private, secure networks without having to invest in and manage a VPN infrastructure. The vast majority of Amazon EC2 instances now run in Amazon VPCs, and many customers rely on the ability to limit access to their VPC from the Internet as a critical component of their security. However, this presents a challenge when using third-party SaaS applications, as customers often have to make a choice between allowing Internet access from their VPC in order to access these SaaS applications, or not using them at all. With AWS PrivateLink, customers can now connect their VPCs to third-party services in a secure and scalable manner. Earlier this month, AWS introduced the ability for customers to access AWS services over AWS PrivateLink. Now, AWS has extended AWS PrivateLink to support non-AWS services so that customers no longer have to choose between using a third-party SaaS offering or exposing their critical data to the Internet. Traffic between a customer’s VPC and a AWS PrivateLink-powered service stays within the AWS network and doesn’t traverse the Internet, reducing threat vectors such as "brute force" and distributed-denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks. Services supported on AWS PrivateLink are delivered using private IP connectivity and security groups, and function like services that are hosted directly on a customer’s private network.

Today at AWS re:Invent, Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), announced a new Bare Metal instance offering for Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), and introduced a new Storage Optimized instance family (H1 instances). The new H1 Storage Optimized instances are designed for data-intensive workloads such as MapReduce, distributed file systems, network file systems, log or data processing, and big data clusters. AWS also launched the next generation of General Purpose instances, M5, which have up to 50 percent more vCPUs, 50 percent more memory, and 25 percent more network bandwidth than previous generation M4 instances. To get started with the new Amazon EC2 instances, visit https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/.

"AWS continues to expand and enhance what was already the cloud’s broadest and most capable compute service," said Matt Garman, Vice President, AWS Compute Services, AWS. "Most of our customers have diverse computing needs, and they’ve told us having the right instance for the right workload really matters. Today, we expand the options we give customers across three dimensions, introducing a brand new capability with Bare Metal instances for the I3 High I/O family, launching a new family of Storage Optimized instances designed for big data workloads with H1, and providing higher performance and lower prices for general purpose workloads with the launch of M5."

"The new integrations make it even easier for Splunk users from IT, marketing, sales, operations and beyond to access and turn AWS data into answers in Splunk Enterprise and Splunk Cloud," said Richard Campione, chief product officer, Splunk. "Splunk is committed to providing a holistic set of AWS integrations that scale to meet our customers’ requirements across every use case in IT, Security, Big Data and IoT. The ultimate goal is to provide our joint customers with end-to-end visibility across their entire infrastructure to empower them to make timely, data-driven business decisions."