Why Such a Stampede to The Cloud?

You can hardly turn around these days without hearing something about “the cloud.” Is it true that there is a mass migration under way from local data centers to cloud service companies? For those who make the move, why are they doing it and what do they hope to achieve?

The Cloud You Don’t Know
Cloud storage is the big app that’s getting all the press, but unlimited server capacity is also a strong draw. One application that you may not be thinking of is Hosted PBX or Hosted VoIP. This is a replacement for your in-house telephone system. Yes, you still have phones, but they plug into your data network rather than their own telephone wiring. There is no switching system in-house. That’s in the cloud.

Why Hosted PBX?
You get rid of all the headaches associated with buying and maintaining the in-house system, including all of those moves, adds and changes. Plus, you pay only for what you need. Add phones as you need them and pay by the month for each one in service. Don’t need them anymore due to downsizing or change of business direction? Get rid of ‘em. Some providers will even give you the phones so you don’t have to buy them yourself. It’s a pretty sweet deal.

How can the cloud help your business?
Get the latest on competitive cloud services available for your business operations.

Private Cloud In a Kit

The benefits of cloud computing are being widely touted as the next generation of Information Technology. You’ve read a lot about this, but are still somewhat apprehensive about moving your valuable proprietary applications into a public multi-tenant cloud. With security somewhat unproven, you’d really like to keep everything privately under your control. Does this mean abandoning the competitive advantages offered by the cloud?

Not at all. Remember that there are actually 3 types of clouds readily available. The public cloud is the most talked about and the pioneer in popularizing cloud computing. The other clouds are the private cloud and the hybrid cloud. A hybrid cloud is a combination of public and private, with some applications running in a private cloud and other, less sensitive, applications running in the public cloud.

Even if you are cloud savvy, there is still the question of cost. Public cloud cost savings are well documented and promoted. They’re based on premise that a large special purpose data center operator serving thousands of simultaneous clients can offer IT services at lower cost that each of those clients running their own data centers. But what about the private clouds? Can they really save you anything?

You can build your own private cloud right in your data center. It’s a matter of virtualizing all those servers and disk drives so that act as a pooled resource. This prevents the utilization problems of many low demand applications owning expensive hardware resources while high demand applications run out of capacity under peak loads.

Now you can also rent private clouds offered by major cloud service providers. These providers have acknowledged that the public cloud isn’t for everyone and that it makes sense to include private clouds within their data centers. The private cloud consists of a set of servers, disks, racks and so on for the exclusive use of a single client. Whatever capacity you aren’t using at the moment idles. In a way, this is very similar to using dedicated private lines for communication instead of shared bandwidth consumer-oriented connections.

What’s the advantage of renting private cloud services over building and running your own facilities? It comes down to capital and operating expenses. Renting instead of buying lets you avoid the capital investment needed to acquire expensive servers and peripherals. Operational costs may also be lower because the technical staff at the cloud provider can support your equipment as well as many others. Small companies might not even be able to justify 24/7 technical staffing for their data centers. The cloud service provider has multiple experts on duty at all times.

Another advantage common to all cloud services is that you pay as you go for only the resources you actually use. The size of the cloud data center guarantees that there are more resources than you can possibly use yourself. Contrast this to running out of processing power and having to wait for more equipment to be delivered or over-provisioning and paying way too much for the capacity that is in daily use.

CenturyLink, a major telecom and cloud services provider, has created an affordable and easy to use private cloud environment that is suitable for small as well as large businesses. Smaller companies may have avoided the migration to the cloud simply because they lack the understanding and expertise to make it all run effectively. Century’s savvisdirect AppGrid is the answer to this dilemma. It lets you get up and running in less than two business days, select the CPU, RAM , storage space, management & reporting tools, firewalls, load balancers, switches and databases you need. You configure all of this with an online graphical interface to make cloud setup almost trivially easy.

AppGrid is Platform as a Service (PaaS) that lets you develop your cloud applications and then put them into production without having to move to a different infrastructure. If your needs change, you can easily reconfigure your private cloud to meet those new requirements.

Are you interested in learning more about the merits of cloud services and the tradeoffs among the various types of clouds? Get free consultation, features and pricing for cloud services that meet your business needs.

Will 2013 Be Your Year of the Cloud?

Cloud computing has been the hot topic of 2012. There are more vendors with more solutions than ever before. You no longer need the power of a super computer to justify using cloud services. The evolution of the cloud has progressed to the point where even commonly used resources may make more sense hosted remotely than in-house. So, is 2013 the year that you make the move to the cloud?

For many companies, that answer will be a resounding “Yes.” It’s a matter of economics, support and access. Doing everything yourself has the lure of being totally in control of your destiny. In return, you have to come up with the capital investment in new equipment, the staff to run everything and the ongoing cost of maintenance. Often, that means giving up the ability to respond quickly to a changing business environment. It’s just too expensive to have personnel and equipment on standby, “just in case.”

Another strong selling point of many cloud providers is that they can afford to keep with the very latest technology trends. You may have to wait until your equipment is fully depreciated or until you can come up with the funding in order to get all the latest features available on the newest models of equipment. Hotly competing cloud companies have no choice but to stay at the cutting edge of technology or risk being put out of business by other more nimble providers.

Disaster recovery can be much easier with a cloud-based system. The cloud operator builds in the necessary redundancies, including geographical diversity so that no single event can knock out the whole system. All you need is access. That’s a lot easier to come by than having to reorder an entire data center’s worth of equipment and software and getting it up and running. Even with remote or cloud backup, it can take days or weeks to fully download and restore your business database. With everything in the cloud, the data is online at all times and unaffected by situations that cut off your connectivity or destroy your local offices.

Some companies have unusually high bandwidth requirements. Content providers who stream video over the Internet or provide programming to Internet Service Providers require massive amounts of bandwidth. It’s not uncommon to need 1 Gbps, 10 Gbps or even 40 Gbps to support live streaming of multiple HD video programs. That kind of bandwidth is readily available in cloud data centers, but might not be available locally. You may be faced with moving your operation in order to get the fiber optic connections you need to conduct business. If your servers are in the cloud with high speed connections it takes the pressure off the line speed requirements from your office to the cloud.

What’s available now in the cloud? It’s pretty much everything you need to run a small, medium or large scale business. Virtual servers with virtual storage give you all the computing power and disk space that you’ll ever need. You can ramp these resources up and down using a desktop control panel in real time. This is Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS).

Along with the infrastructure, you are going to need software. Software as a Service (SaaS) complements IaaS so that you pay by the month by usage for all your software and hardware. A related component, Platform as a Service (PaaS) is the cloud version of a development system where you get things customized and working. You only buy this as you need to do development. Security as a Service is a add-on feature that protects your network from intrusion. Once again, it is running from within the cloud.

Even the telephone system has a cloud equivalent. This is called Hosted PBX or Hosted VoIP. The switching system and connection to the public telephone network is all done by the cloud service provider. You install SIP telephones that connect to your network and use a special line called a SIP trunk to connect with the provider. You no longer need to buy and maintain an in-house PBX. Some vendors will even include free SIP phones with your service.

Have you been watching cloud developments but hesitant to get involved? This is a great time to get competitive prices and features on cloud computing and communications appropriate for your size business. If you like the answers, you can easily sign up for service and enjoy the new features and cost savings for all of 2013.

Top Enterprise Cloud Solutions

To cloud or not to cloud? That is the question for most businesses, including mid-level and large enterprise organizations. Let’s take a look at the most popular cloud solutions and what they can do for your company.

When we think of cloud computing, the first thing that comes to mind is Amazon Web Services (AWS). Would you be surprised to know that Amazon launched this suite of services nearly a decade ago? Amazon was early in recognizing that it had developed enormous data center resources to power its own ecommerce applications, and that it could generate additional revenue by renting out underutilized resources to other companies. It’s an attractive proposition to companies that haven’t made a similar investment and cringe at the thought of the amount of capital investment involved.

The two most popular AWS services are Amazon EC2 and S3. Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) offers scalable virtualized private servers. Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) complements the servers with online storage. These services typify what is known in the cloud industry as IaaS or Infrastructure as a Service. This infrastructure represents the physical servers, disk drives, operating system software, interconnections, power and environmental controls that you would normally install in your own data center facility. Instead of buying, operating and maintaining all of this hardware, you rent it from Amazon or another cloud service provider.

A major difference between cloud solutions and other ways of getting the job done is that the cloud is sold on a pay-as-you-go basis. There is no up-front capital commitment nor a standard monthly rental fee for a particular set of hardware. That differentiates moving to the cloud from simply packing up your equipment and moving it to a colocation center or renting the necessary assets from the colocation provider. The cloud isn’t about physical resources, it’s about virtualization. Mind you, the cloud service provider does, indeed, have massive physical resources in the form of racks and racks of servers and disk drives as far as the eye can see. What they do is divvy up these resources using virtualization software so that you seem to have one or more servers to yourself and all the storage you need.

Virtualization is what makes the cloud so nimble. Instead of having to make a month by month commitment to a physical server, you can deploy virtual servers as fast as you can set them up using a browser-based control panel. If business slumps or you are simply moving into a lower demand time of the year, you can release some of those servers and watch your charges go down. You pay for each server by the hour or number of CPU cycles used. Likewise, you buy storage by the MB or GB without concern for what drive is going to hold your data.

Like infrastructure, software can also be rented using the cloud model. In this case, the service provider has their own private cloud and has virtualized the software packages to support as many or few users as you have available. A very popular SaaS application is Salesforce.com for Customer Relationship Management (CRM). Other SaaS business applications include accounting, collaboration, enterprise resource planning (ERP) and human resource management (HRM) services in the cloud.

Another function that has been virtualized and moved to the cloud is the PBX telephone system. Instead of investing in an in-house telephone switching system and the trunk lines that connect it to the telephone company, you can pay by the seat for a hosted PBX. This is also known as hosted VoIP, since VoIP technology easily lends itself to a cloud solution. All you keep in-house are SIP telephones that connect to your converged voice and data network. Some hosted VoIP providers can integrate your smartphones into the same virtual PBX as your desk phones to create a completely converged solution.

Are you considering a move to the cloud as a potentially more flexible and less costly approach to your IT and business telephony needs? Get competitive quotes for enterprise cloud solutions to compare with your current business model in order to make an informed decision. Quotations and expert consultation are available without charge for serious business users.

Cloud Hosting Providers For Converged Networks

Cloud computing services are growing geometrically. If you haven’t gotten on-board yet, it’s probably because you aren’t convinced of the cost savings, security or the ability of the cloud to cover all bases for your IT needs. That picture is changing rapidly. Let’s take a snapshot of what’s available now for SMB users.

When we think of cloud computing, the picture that comes to mind is one of a giant brain in the sky that runs operations for hundreds or thousands of companies. That’s the approach that gets all the press, but it’s far from the entirety of the market. Indeed, there are many other providers out there who can deliver the virtual services you need on a less grand scale. You may not be able to get everything from one service provider, but the building blocks are out there to handle your voice and data needs.

That’s important, because enterprise VoIP solutions are driving a trend toward converged networks. If you only consider moving traditional data center servers to the cloud, you’ll be missing a big piece of the puzzle. The other trend that’s important is fixed mobile convergence that integrates cell phones into your telecom infrastructure. Mobility can be the link that makes or breaks your productivity in the future.

The foundation of cloud computing is cloud hosting that incorporates Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Software as a Service (SaaS). Cloud infrastructure is virtualization on steroids. IT departments have found that virtualizing servers ups the efficiency of the physical server hardware. What cloud computing does is greatly expand the virtualization to include huge racks of high performance servers plus storage and bandwidth. It differs from the virtualization that you would do yourself or the virtual servers you’d rent from a colocation center in that it is sold incrementally on-demand. You pay by the minute, by the hour or by the number of CPU cycles used.

Another characteristic of cloud hosting is that it is highly elastic or scalable. If you start to run out of capacity, you simply order up more virtual servers. The cloud operating system takes care of how these resources work in concert to provide the capacity you need. At no point do you have to purchase, install or maintain any equipment. The cloud service provider takes care of this with a 24/7 technical staff.

There are actually three types of clouds to choose from. The one that first comes to mind is the public cloud that serves many users simultaneously. You gain access via a private line or dedicated Internet service. Companies that have highly sensitive applications, unique requirements or simply want more control go with a private cloud. That is a similar infrastructure to the public cloud but on a scale suitable for one company. The hybrid cloud is a combination of the two. Public facing or non-critical applications run on the public cloud, while a separate private cloud handles very sensitive applications.

While cloud computing is thought of a data processing service, there is also a voice cloud known as cloud communications or hosted PBX. In this case, the computing resources are specific to telephony needs and the connectivity is by SIP trunk from your location and to the public switched telephone network from the provider. You no longer need a PBX phone system in-house or any telephone trunk lines. What you have is SIP telephones connected to your network and a converged SIP trunk from your business location or locations to the service provider. Some hosted PBX systems integrate cell phones into the system so that you have the same capabilities while mobile as at your desk.

Some of the cloud services you can readily get include cloud hosting, hosted PBX, unified communications, enterprise cloud security, private/public clouds, cloud storage, hosted Exchange, SharePoint, disaster recovery, anti-spam and anti-virus, hosted firewalls, and dedicated cloud access connections.

Are you feeling that you may be missing out on productivity improvements, cost savings, agility of scaling your business, or advanced features available in the cloud? This would be a good time to explore options with multiple cloud hosting providers. You can start small and grow or make a step-change relocation to the cloud, depending on what works best for your company.

Cloud Computing For Disaster Recovery

It’s been quite a year for natural disasters. Fires scorching thousands of acres at a time, rivers overflowing their banks, torrential rainfall, tornadoes everywhere. Are you feeling a little nervous that your business could be taken out at any time?

Sadly, an unfortunate twist of fate can hit anyone at any time. You probably already have some protections in place, such as property insurance, tape or disk file backups and maybe even offsite storage of important files. Ask yourself this, however. How will you get your business back running immediately after a catastrophic local disaster?

While having copies of critical documents and customer files may prevent you from going out of business permanently if disaster strikes, they aren’t enough to keep you running without a hiccup. For that you need backup infrastructure as well as files. A generation ago, that meant duplicate data centers that were located far apart. The idea is that the kind of disaster that wipes out your facilities is unlikely to hit two geographically separated areas simultaneously. If you are prone to earthquakes, one data center can be local but the other must be in an earthquake free zone. The same thing applies to hurricanes. If you are on the coast, your backup must be far inland.

Today’s disaster recovery solution of choice is the cloud. With infrastructure, platform and software as a service, you can do anything in the cloud that you would do in-house. The advantage is that the cloud is often far, far away.

Why choose a cloud solution over doing it all yourself? Avoidance of enormous capital investment is a very good reason. It’s not hard to spend millions creating the environmentally controlled and secure facilities with robust backup power and multiple diverse bandwidth connections, not to mention the racks and racks of equipment inside. This is one reason why many businesses decide that regular system backups are good enough. If the worst happens, they’ll simply get an insurance settlement and order replacement equipment. Oh? How long will that take? Just what is your income stream going to look line in the ensuing days, weeks or months?

One advantage of the cloud is that it scales fast. You could decide to have a minimal cloud solution implemented right now for the monthly fee it takes for storage and limited server capacity. If you get knocked out where are, you can log-into the cloud from wherever you can get a broadband connection and scale up in minutes or hours. When the crises is over, you can back off from all the virtual servers and go into a standby mode.

By the way, that cloud storage makes an excellent backup for your local files. Cloud storage is robust and almost infinitely scalable. This alone can be the justification for having a backup operation in the cloud.

What if you are in the cloud already? It’s not unknown for cloud systems to suffer outages just like anything else technical. In this case you may want to have a minimal backup system locally, in a colocation facility or set up as a private cloud in a different data center.

Hosted PBX phone systems can also keep you running after a disaster, almost like nothing ever happened. At least that’s the way your customers will perceive. it. You only need a network bandwidth connection and a few SIP phones to get your calls and voicemail. Being a network voice system, those SIP phones can be located just about anywhere... even somewhere else in the country.

Are you apprehensive that your business may not be protected from shutdown as much as you’d like? It may not be that expensive to have backup computing and telephone service in the cloud. Check options and prices now and rest easier that you have a recovery solution.

Infrastructure as a Service Providers

Cloud computing is generally acknowledged to comprise three levels. These are Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Software as a Service (SaaS). The most basic of these and the foundation of the others is infrastructure in the cloud.

Infrastructure is pretty much what it sounds like. This the basic hardware and operating system software to make it work. Competition for infrastructure in the cloud is that same infrastructure in your own data center. So, why would you want to up and move to the cloud?

There are good business reasons for IaaS. Infrastructure is expensive to buy, it requires constant attention and frequent maintenance, and it starts going obsolete almost as soon as you have it installed. Computing infrastructure is also finicky. It needs a special temperature and humidity controlled environment, physical security and fire protection, and large amounts of both operating and backup power.

There’s also the matter of how much to buy. You certainly need enough resources to accommodate your anticipated daily activities. How about the unforeseen? It’s not that unusual for a company’s product to catch on suddenly, resulting in a flurry of unexpected orders. The same is true for any content that goes viral. One day you’re coasting along at a modest level of activity. The next day the word is out and your servers are brought to their knees by a sudden flurry of new users. All of the social networking sites have experienced this phenomenon at one time or another.

Cloud service providers offer a way to address the limitations of local data centers, often with a considerable cost advantage. Cloud infrastructure providers build a business on scale. They create a large data center with racks full of virtualized and dedicated servers. These are connected with pools of disk storage, security appliances, and multiple diverse network connectivity. All of this is housed in a high security, environmentally controlled facility with both battery and generator backup power.

Doesn’t this sound like what you’d find at a colocation center? Indeed, there are many similarities between colos and cloud service providers. One major difference is in elasticity. An elastic resource is one that can grow and shrink at will. When you install your equipment in a colocation facility or rent equipment and services from them, it is on a well defined contract. Certainly, you have the ability to change your requirements as business conditions improve or degrade. But there’s going to be a time lag of days, weeks or longer to make the necessary changes.

Cloud services are based on a model of utility computing. You don’t need to ask your electric company to give you more or less power. You simply turn equipment on and off. Only when your requirements exceed the maximum capacity you have installed, do you need to ask for a different level of service.

Infrastructure as a Service is based on a pay for what you use basis. The cloud service provider has far more servers, disk drives, Gbps of bandwidth and other resources that you can possibly use. Their economy of scale dictates that they serve many customers, each of whom has no awareness of the presence of the others. Your services are partitioned so that no other user will take your resources or interfere with your operation.

The advantage to business users is that IaaS gives them the resources they need, when they need them, at a cost that reflects actual usage and not spare installed capacity. Capital investments and perhaps difficult to obtain financing are not required. Staffing levels are reduced because the service provider takes care of operations and maintenance on a 24/7/365 basis.

Could your business benefit from using some or many cloud services? You can have a good basis to compare with what you are doing now by getting prices and services from cloud computing providers now.