Archive of posts with category 'cloud computing'

According to recent data from analyst firm Atos, banks can increase their operating profits by 30 percent through 2020 by embracing more digital workflows. In particular, hybrid cloud is proving to be the preferred avenue for digital transformation in the finance world, as hybrid helps level the playing field between traditional banks and a slew of digital disruptors. When discussing...

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The financial sector has been notoriously averse to embracing the scale of digital transformation that has transformed other industries from the top-down (think Industry 4.0, IoT in Healthcare, virtual dressing rooms, etc.). While banks of all sizes have adopted cloud computing for non-core functions, many still rely on legacy, hardware-defined workflows when it comes to business-critical operations and customer transactions....

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Last week, the AppNeta team traveled down to Dallas for ONUG Spring 2019, where we met with other leaders in the enterprise networking space to discuss the challenges and solutions organizations face as they put connected technologies front-and-center. The agenda for the event zeroed in on Digital Transformation in particular, which, as a concept, can be loaded. As we’ve discussed...

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The 2019 State of IT Report from Spiceworks is out, and, as we could’ve predicted, upgrading outdated network infrastructure is the leading enterprise IT investment for the next year among leaders surveyed. Eighty-nine percent of those polled (which included IT execs across North America and Europe) expect their IT budgets to grow over the next 12 months. Stateside, many leaders...

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In an age when “appointment television” is a nearly-dead concept (outside of Game of Thrones at least), people still go out of their way to make sure they catch their favorite team or player live. We’ve seen it firsthand here at AppNeta. Take the latest Masters Tournament: Ahead of Tiger Woods taking home his first title trophy in over a...

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Last week, the AppNeta team took to the Great White North to host an industry luncheon and panel in Toronto, looking at the challenges of network management as cloud takes on a bigger role in the enterprise space. Moderated by our own Chief Customer Officer Adam Edwards, the panel also included John Menezes, President & CEO of Stratejm, Alfred Ng,...

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Buckle up, IT pros, and move over SDN: Intent-based networking (IBN) is the latest approach to network management that’s buzzing in the enterprise space. While this acronym may not be as familiar as others that have come to define IT ops and digital transformation (think SD-WAN and SaaS), it’s not actually an entirely new approach. In fact, IBN shares a...

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For years, the center of gravity within the tech sector has been squarely located in Silicon Valley, the storied West Coast home of Apple, Alphabet, and pretty much every other tech behemoth you can imagine (with a few notable exceptions like Amazon). As a result, tech workers have notoriously fled competing job markets in the hopes of landing gigs in...

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A new report from EMA, a leading IT and data management research group, found that roughly 75 percent of network managers polled think their network performance monitoring (NPM) tools are “insufficient” when it comes to the public cloud. Barely a quarter of those polled believe the tools they currently use fully address their monitoring needs where cloud monitoring is concerned,...

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IPv4, the previous and still prevalent generation of the Internet Protocol, was designed to support roughly 4.3 billion devices. While this was plenty of capacity for the connected world of 1980, it’s tiny by 2019 standards. While it’s not yet true that every one of the planet’s 7 billion people is armed with their own connected devices, it’s increasingly true...

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Enterprise IT and network ops teams may not appear to have much in common with the names on your NCAA March Madness bracket. But in both arenas, teams need to be masters of strategy, cooperation, and fast thinking in order to succeed. That’s because just like college basketball, network monitoring and management requires having both a strong offense and defense....

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The World Wide Web turned 30 years old this month, and like any Millennial entering their third decade, there were plenty of cringeworthy moments along the way. While the growth of widespread connectivity has undoubtedly helped change our day-to-day reality since it was invented in 1989, even the Web’s “parents” are uneasy about some of the changes. In an open...

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It’s not just enterprise networks that are feeling the impact of digital transformation. From government agencies to higher education, cloud migration and SaaS adoption are changing networking from the top-down, and putting unprecedented strain on IT departments as a result. One recent incident at Amherst College in Massachusetts illustrated perfectly what can happen when IT gets buried under an avalanche...

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There’s no denying that the SD-WAN market is having a moment. After sliding into the Trough of Disillusionment on the 2017 Gartner Hype Cycle, SD-WAN was firmly on the Slope of Enlightenment for 2018, and continues to build both momentum and advocacy as the decade comes to a close. What’s attractive about SD-WAN is that it doesn’t force teams to...

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While you’d be hard pressed to find a contemporary networking pro who still refers to the Internet as the “Information Superhighway,” the metaphor isn’t totally off-base. The Internet as we know it, after all, is a massive dynamic network of pathways that connect a global collection of enterprise- or ISP-owned Autonomous Systems (AS). Data travels over the Internet like cars...

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It’s a foregone conclusion that the future of enterprise business rests in the cloud. This is especially true when considering what a huge role cloud migration has played within the enterprise space over just the past few years: Spending on cloud computing has grown at 4.5 times the rate of IT spending since 2009, and is expected to grow at...

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Imagine an Internet of Things (IoT)-enabled smart shoe that has the capability for workers to send or receive alerts while working in dangerous areas. The possibilities are just incredible. What we once dreamed of as future technology is now at our fingertips to create opportunities across workplaces and at home. As we see a proliferation of IoT devices, it’s time...

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Back in 2011, the average company spent just $6,300 on cloud computing. That’s a drop in the bucket for all but the smallest IT budgets. Things have changed in the intervening years. At the beginning of the decade, companies were just beginning to dip their toes into the cloud. Now they’re completely submerged. Out of companies with more than 1,000...

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“Cloud-native” technology has likely come across your radar screen at some point in the last few years, but what does it mean, exactly? There’s a good explainer here on cloud-native computing, a concept that runs through any cloud service. Any applications, architectures, platforms and processes that work toward increasing IT’s ability to change and reduce unpredictability can be described as...

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The complexity of choosing and managing cloud long-term leads to tough decisions for most modern enterprises. One industry expert notes that choosing cloud doesn’t have to be the default for enterprise IT teams. Some applications just aren’t cloud-compatible and may never be. An on-premises virtual environment might be a better fit for a mission-critical application. Cloud platforms depend on the...

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Public internet access has little appeal when it comes to mission-critical cloud connections. High latency, low bandwidth and patchy speeds depending on location are just a few hurdles that companies must endure. Here are a few ways you can troubleshoot your public cloud connections and improve cloud access for business applications: 1. Just Build a WAN! Most enterprises don’t connect...

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For at least the last couple of years, IT has been pressured to put everything into the cloud. Whether it’s new startup operating entirely in the cloud or a large, established enterprise trying to migrate, cloud computing has been positioned as the obvious evolution of IT. Everywhere you turned, someone was calling for the death of on-premises infrastructure. While hybrid...

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Managing security and performance in the cloud is a tradeoff. On the one hand, your traditional applications will certainly break—they’ll be unable to monitor the data flaws that occur in the cloud, as there’s no analogue in a traditional data center. On the other hand, you’ll have undreamed-of visibility—something that no traditional data center can match. This visibility is a...

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Subscription-based options just keep growing, as music, movies and TV, along with your business-critical SaaS apps, are all available now with various monthly payment methods. IT continues to move in this direction too, with network subscription packages the latest trend. Unlike software applications, networking still requires physical parts. But the idea of SDN and a pay-as-you-go, network as a service...

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As the GDPR go-live date approaches in late May, we’ve heard some buzz as companies examine their data to see if they’ll be in line with the new EU requirements. It’s such an interconnected global world now that most businesses, even American ones, need to be ready for any GDPR fallout. Fines will be stiff for noncompliance. For most companies,...

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The next internet-crashing botnet is slowly starting to wake up. Since late December, a botnet known as Satori has been infecting new endpoints and generally showing the signs of a disaster waiting to happen. How should you brace yourself for the next large-scale DDoS attack? A Dormant Botnet Reawakens The last time we saw the Satori botnet was in 2016—back...

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For a long time, the Internet of Things (IoT) was considered over-hyped. The promises of widespread data collection, transmission and analysis all sounded pretty great, and business leaders across all functions were ready to buy in. But as we enter 2018, IoT is actually here. Deployments have become practical enough to warrant the rise of a new multi-billion-dollar product segment—IoT...

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The cloud/SaaS honeymoon usually ends pretty quickly for IT teams supporting various cloud and SaaS applications. The loss of control over SaaS apps can be a surprise for IT, even as it also frees up time. IT team members are now at the mercy of SaaS application providers, which decide when upgrades will happen and when maintenance windows and planned...

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When you talk about public cloud in IT today, you’re likely talking about Amazon Web Services (AWS). As noted by CloudPro, it’s not even a contest right now: Second-place Azure has gotten to 7.1% of the market, but AWS dominates with more than 44% market share. What’s the secret? Part of Amazon’s impact comes from being first-to-market. Follow that up...

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Software as a service (SaaS) tools and applications are now ubiquitous. Research firm Forrester puts it simply: “If you aren’t using SaaS broadly, you’re falling behind.” Why? Because data shows that SaaS “is increasingly the foundation for business opportunities.” Sounds like the perfect solution. But SaaS comes with a unique challenge: The rapid rise of on-demand software services has created...

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For some time, there’s been a quiet war going on between the top three providers of enterprise ERP software—SAP, Oracle and Microsoft. Lately, that war has been taking place on a new front: the cloud. All three major players have pushed out cloud versions of their flagship ERP software within the last few years, with varying degrees of success. Let’s...

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By the end of 2019, 60% of business will have moved their operations primarily to a SaaS model and away from on-premises, according to a recent 451 Research survey. Amazon and Microsoft have traction in the cloud market for these businesses, of course. 35% say that Microsoft will become their most strategic cloud partner, while 17% name Amazon. That’s a...

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Some people are always called upon to fix things. It’s true in families (Hi Mom. Yes, I can fix your computer), and it’s also true in businesses. There are plenty of instances in which people who aren’t necessarily trained for the job might find themselves in charge of a company’s EC2 implementation, for example. If you happen to be one...

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As networking hardware gets cheaper, it’s having an effect on how data centers are connecting to each other. As big providers like Amazon, Google and the rest start using SDN and SD-WAN more widely, the hardware costs are coming down. Those hardware costs used to be the biggest consideration when building and provisioning data centers, but that’s not the case...

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The cloud changes things, and not always in a good way. A recent survey from the security vendor AlgoSec shows that 30% of companies find that their applications don't work as expected after a cloud migration. ERP is no exception to that rule. Those using cloud ERP solutions increasingly find that once their vendors finish porting their applications to the...

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Imagine being under the microscope, while also shouldering the responsibility of company-wide productivity. That’s IT in a nutshell, with the help desk as the front line for any dissatisfaction or service interruptions that end users experience. In the past, with on-premises solutions, being the enterprise hero who could solve a problem quickly was difficult. Now, as organizations shift to modern,...

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 For companies choosing a hosted productivity solution, there are two obvious options—Office 365 and G Suite. At first glance, they seem fairly similar. Both offer email, storage and a range of productivity tools like word processing, spreadsheets and presentation applications. But what you might not notice with one of the options is a little problem that could ruin your collaboration...

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Happy New Year! Do you have a resolution to declutter this year? If you’re hoping to declutter the SaaS application sprawl in your organization, try to stay realistic on that front. Most companies, according to these cloud experts, know they’re spending too much on disparate SaaS and web apps, but don’t have the time or know how to fix the...

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G Suite is still the underdog compared to Microsoft Office 365. What’s keeping enterprises away? With Google dominating the consumer space, introducing it into the workplace seems like a natural fit for employee experience and productivity. The problem is, enterprises are ingrained in the Microsoft stack, and have been building entire workflows around Office products for years now. Even cavemen...

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Here’s a philosophical question for network engineers everywhere: What does stability mean, anyway? The inimitable Ethan Banks offers some time-tested, practical tips on what makes for lasting network stability today. One important piece of advice is to control your impulses to play around with network features and functionality. Don’t experiment in a production environment, and don’t go rogue just for...

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From the earliest days of online-dating services, “love algorithms” searched almost exclusively on what clients deemed to be their ideal characteristics in a partner. Singles would check boxes on hair color, religion, location, and interests, and wait for the results. Undoubtedly, what came out didn’t really align with the kind of partner they were actually attracted to. Algorithms had to...

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When companies move ahead on implementing ServiceNow, it's not just for a better ticketing system. The SaaS application claims to replace unstructured work patterns with intelligent workflows, improve service levels, energize employees and enable enterprises to work at light speed. That’s a tall order, even for a powerful platform that automates and connects workflows and disconnected databases. While the appeal...

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Gmail is an unquestionable titan. 20% of all emails sent worldwide are sent using the Gmail platform, and a total of 1.2 billion users. This email dominance is reflected in the enterprise versions of its applications, known collectively as G Suite. Gmail and the other G Suite apps are now gaining ground for business use. Over three million business customers...

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The annual AWS re:invent conference wrapped up this week, with more than 43,000 attendees gathering. Some hot topics included AI and machine learning, but the bigger picture revolved around Amazon’s work to continue its public cloud dominance, according to this account. Microsoft and Google continue to work to take market share away, though AWS had a lot of announcements to...

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IT ROLE: Steve Aichelmann, senior director of IT infrastructure NEEDS: Improving internal end-user experience, especially for VoIP RESULTS: Proactive issue resolution, view of performance at 31 global locations As a leading data center provider to just under 1,000 customers globally—including 175 of the Fortune 1000—CyrusOne is known for its excellent customer service, enduring customer relationships and high customer satisfaction levels. It manages data...

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 With Cisco moving to acquire BroadSoft, Unified Communications as a Service platforms are about to seriously streamline. Well, unless you’re Skype for Business. Unlike competing platforms, Skype for Business relies on a myriad of technologies, from a range of vendors, which can make the ecosystem complex to integrate, monitor and manage. The task doesn’t have to be daunting, though. IT...

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Happy December! First up, a recent survey finds that IaaS use nearly doubled from 2014 to 2016, and that enterprises are continuing to charge ahead with all kinds of cloud use. Multicloud use is already pretty well-established, with 72% of companies using between two and five cloud providers. We predict that staying on top of all these cloud instances and...

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Skype for Business has an uptime guarantee of 99.9%, which is just about as good as you can ask for in this era of SaaS and cloud apps, right? Dealing with about 8 hours of downtime a year doesn’t seem terrible. However, designing your Skype for Business deployment specifically to meet the minimum network requirements to achieve uptime isn’t the...

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There are a staggering number of businesses building their core applications around Amazon Web Services’ cloud offerings, such as their Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). In 2010, Amazon reported an EC2 growth rate of 35%. It has been used for everything from creating an on-demand supercomputing cluster for pharma research to reinforcing the backend for music-recognition app Shazam. EC2 is extremely...

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 It’s conventional wisdom that nothing worthwhile in life comes cheap and easy. With regards to unified communications and collaboration, that’s pretty true. One frequent promise of SaaS applications has been cost savings compared to on-premises tools. But that only happens when IT is vigilant about SaaS pricing, and savvy about which apps cost more and why. This is a common...

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When you use Amazon Web Services (AWS), you offload a lot of the responsibility for managing those services to the cloud provider. However, you still need to monitor those services and for two main reasons: First, you need to make sure the cloud provider is delivering the level of service you're paying for. Second, you need to make sure the...

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It’s usually a great sign for a business if IT needs to scale up a particular technology quickly—maybe sales are growing, or new employees are coming on board, or a new product shows a lot of promise in the market. It could be a combination of all three. Expectations are usually pretty high from the business side that IT can...

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The internal help desk can be a very busy place for a business. IT is under pressure from users to fix any application or network problems quickly, and now also has to depend on the providers of those apps and networks to get problems solved. So how do you measure how your help desk is performing? Figure out the metrics...

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In these days of SaaS applications, the help desk has to be efficient, knowledgeable and able to close tickets fast. Nobody likes waiting, and when your users are experiencing a technology problem, they like waiting even less. You can do a lot proactively to make sure that users spend as little time on hold as possible, but that’s only one...

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APIs build bridges between applications. Now that companies are moving quickly to cloud-based and SaaS applications, these APIs are a lifesaver. Just one application can have any number of APIs connecting into it, creating a web of communication among important business-critical applications. This API economy has become another facet of modern infrastructure that IT teams has to manage. An EMA...

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As predicted, it’s prediction time for 2018! The year ahead will bring more technology advancements, and also advancements for the people using that technology as they figure out what will work best for their users. Cloud infrastructures come in a lot of different flavors these days, but they all need to perform well and consistently if they're going to succeed....

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Long, long ago, when computer systems of the old glass house-encased Big Iron variety failed, the situation was often cryptically described as an “abend”—a word derived from an IBM error message meaning “ABnormal END.” While the abend was usually accompanied by other codes or messages, it was not much to go on. Data center operators had to do a lot...

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When you're using the cloud, the network is a crucial part of every application. There isn't anything local; all access is over either the public internet or a direct connection to the cloud. While the cloud provider can ensure adequate resources for performance on their backend, they have no control over the rest of the application delivery path, let alone...

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 Cloud application adoption is a force that can’t be stopped. And honestly, do any IT leaders really want to stop it? There are a lot of benefits to using cloud and SaaS applications. When you move your apps from on-premises to the cloud, life in IT is supposed to get a lot easier. You enjoy faster user adoption, minimize performance...

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Lots of SaaS applications come with their own dashboard to show the metrics they think you in IT might want to see. But like GPS systems in cars, most people choose to use their own phones for driving directions because the built-in system's controls are too complicated. When you’re monitoring a SaaS application like Office 365, you’ll see the dashboard...

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Service-level agreements (SLAs) are becoming increasingly familiar territory for the average IT leader. Unfortunately, the number of SaaS SLAs is sprawling across IT organizations to the point that it’s nearly impossible to manage them all. Business-critical applications are increasingly moving to the cloud and it’s only a matter of time before bandwidth resources start to succumb to the pressure—if yours...

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Salesforce is an integral part of many companies’ sales organizations. It’s a SaaS application that’s billed per head, but the selling point for businesses  is the time savings that sales reps can achieve with the organization and optimization of account data. Alas, in a world of app integrations, time savings is not guaranteed, and a business-critical application like Salesforce comes with...

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We hear from prospects and customers a lot that they didn’t realize they could monitor their entire infrastructure. That infrastructure today is complicated: The mix of cloud providers, SaaS apps and remote offices, along with tech-savvy, distributed users, can be pretty daunting. It’s not surprising that monitoring it all seems hard—it’s a concept that doesn’t seem possible for many in...

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The partnership between VMware and AWS is good for both VMware and AWS—but it’s also good for IT. Any IT team managing a virtualized environment with VMware, which is a solid majority of IT teams, can move those virtual workloads to the AWS cloud without reengineering anything. Previously, VMware-heavy IT shops were locked into their complex virtualized environments, and locked...

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Team members are not always in the same office, or they may be on the road at customer or supplier sites. Companies are dealing with a shortage of critical skills, so they hire people regardless of their location. Businesses overall are increasing their number of remote offices and locations, taking advantage of modern technology that makes it easier to be...

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The cloud offers many attractive alternatives for businesses and their IT teams looking for flexibility and quick deployment of all kinds of applications, large and small. But existing budget patterns—with a strong bias toward ownership (capex) rather than consumption-as-needed (opex)—means IT is stuck shopping for tools in an old-school way. Old habits and work styles have left organizations with enlarged...

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 “The edge will eat the cloud. And this is perhaps as important as the cloud computing trend ever was.”—Tom Bittman, Vice President and Distinguished Analyst at Gartner Research If you’re one of the many IT pros still finding your footing with cloud computing, this statement from Tom Bittman might sting a little. It sounds like you might be spending time...

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This week, Cisco announced products built using intent-based networking for the end-to-end network. Intent-based networking takes the decision-making of how a network will do a task away from administrators, who only need to tell the network what needs to be done. This type of network is also more flexible and predictive to respond quickly to changes. Intent-based networking may come...

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As summertime approaches here on the east coast, we’re dreaming of time away from work to recharge. How much of your daily work in IT can be automated while you’re away from the office? This recent IT Pro piece notes that we all tend toward keeping the status quo, even if it’s clear it’s not working well. IT, still, is...

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There was certainly a period of skepticism for cloud computing, but at this point companies have almost universally adopted some form of cloud computing. Without a doubt, cost efficiency is one of the most frequently cited motivations for cloud migration. But be careful—there’s danger in blindly trusting the cost-savings promises that come with moves to SaaS, IaaS, and PaaS. Don’t...

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Both vendors and cloud users continue to push cloud adoption strategy ever further. This week in Building More Data Centers, Google Cloud Platform announced its third availability zone in its Oregon region. With the new zone, Google Cloud also added new services for users—CloudSQL and regional Managed Instance Groups, which can be used to spread VMs across multiple zones for business...

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One of the less obvious aspects of the fantastic growth of the cloud has been the substantial role played by virtual private cloud (VPC). Those are chunks of public cloud capacity reserved in varying degrees for specific organizations. Cloud has captured the imagination of business and IT. It’s a spending stampede. And a big portion of the move to the...

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When you’re making a cloud move, ask the right questions before you spend the money. This list is a good rundown of what to ask internally, including business function priorities, which applications to move to the cloud and when, and what type of integrations you might choose. Plus, asking the hard questions before moving apps off-site will lead you to...

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 What’s the end goal of digital transformation? You’re updating business processes and internal applications, but for most business leaders, the ultimate focus is becoming more agile to meet the changing demands of customers. Unfortunately, legacy-laden call centers are often lost in the mix, or are low on the digital transformation priority list. The problem is that call centers are seen...

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It’s always nice to hear the stories about a company’s entire IT infrastructure journey, and what may have changed along the way. These stories of shifting cloud adoption trends and plans are useful for anyone on a similar IT path. For the state of Kansas, private cloud initially seemed like the best fit. Costs quickly grew, though, from an estimated...

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In today’s increasingly mobile workplace, organizations need to consider productivity, operational efficiency, and business continuity when migrating their employees, data centers and critical applications to the cloud. As new collaboration technologies make productive, remote teamwork possible, businesses can expect their roster of off-site employees to continue to grow. Along with employees working remotely, companies today are often supporting a remote...

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Organizations of all sizes are choosing to conduct at least part of their business in the cloud, and choosing which cloud provider to work with is an important part of that process. The provider can mean the difference between a cloud migration that goes off without a hitch, and one that causes delays, additional expenses and ongoing headaches down the road....

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A recent survey found that 85% of enterprise decision makers feel they have just two years to execute digital transformation before they start falling behind the competition. And who do you think they’ll turn to for support in this endeavor? The IT department, of course. Because the cloud is such a critical component of digital transformation, you’ll need to develop...

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For the next few days, AppNeta has set up camp here at the Gartner IOSS show. This summit is a place for us to hear about others’ visions for the IT future. We’re surrounded by analysts, speakers and the attendees who are taking on IT challenges every day at work. We know what our AppNeta vision is: Giving IT back...

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Here’s another cloud adoption survey to add to your market research data, this one conducted late last year by Intel Security. Some new and interesting data points in here are on software-defined data centers: 73% of enterprises surveyed are moving to that model within two years. And while hybrid cloud adoption is growing rapidly, almost half of respondents say they’re...

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Cloud challenges are escalating for IT leaders. First, you just wanted visibility into the different cloud services your employees were signing up for so you weren’t blindsided by shadow IT. Now, suddenly you’re being inundated with cloud management demands. But the idea of cloud management seems fairly simple. If you’re monitoring the availability of SaaS applications and public cloud instances...

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Synthetic monitoring is a modern way to see the performance of today’s SaaS and web applications and networks. It uses scripting to emulate the paths that end users take as they experience an application. Why We Need Best Practices for Synthetics Synthetic monitoring provides IT staff with performance context for business-critical SaaS and web apps. Except for company-wide deployments, IT...

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Have you ever had the feeling of Silicon Valley envy? Think of a company like Airbnb experiencing exponential growth by making the most of AWS cloud computing. It would be nice if we could all just leave our legacy-laden on-premises data centers behind and go all-in on the cloud. Traditional businesses are moving more and more workloads to the cloud,...

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Google’s Cloud team this week discussed multicloud integration with their own platform and AWS using Google Cloud Endpoints and AWS’ Lambda. The Cloud Endpoints let you develop open APIs, and you can then call those APIs up from Lambda. This may be the way forward for businesses eager to get their multiple public cloud providers integrated. We’re interested in the...

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Talk of IT disasters can spark equal amounts of fear of them happening to us, and gratitude that the big one hasn’t happened to us yet. Network World offers some tips on what not to do when migrating to the cloud to avoid disasters—or, at the very least, grumbling users. They recommend splitting apps into two groups: those that will...

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We’re slowly getting used to cloud and SaaS applications in every area of our lives—including at work. Even huge enterprises are starting to move important business apps to the cloud, like Office 365 and Google Docs. That shift affects IT and end users a lot, as both adjust to using and supporting new, cloud-based tools. Sometimes those SaaS applications lack...

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The first step to solving a problem is recognizing that it actually exists. And whether you’ve realized it or not, cloud services are a problem for your IT department. Even if you feel like you have a solid grasp of cloud technology and the nuances of making a cloud purchase, business leaders don’t share the same confidence. Nearly 80% feel...

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This recent research on cloud computing from the Register delves a little deeper than many of the “We’re all adopting cloud!” surveys we’ve seen. They found that meaningful cloud adoption and the idea of the cloud-first enterprise are still not reality for many businesses. The Register’s stats also show a more gradual cloud deployment trend over the past five years,...

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In this brave new world of running businesses with cloud and SaaS technology, who’s buying hardware anymore? Well, cloud providers, that’s who. Financial filings from AWS, Microsoft and Google show they spent a combined $31.54 billion on capital expenditures and capital leases in 2016. Amazon is building a new cloud region in Sweden, and analysts say one region alone can...

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We launched AppNeta Performance Manager recently, and after all our excitement over letting the world know about it, we’re getting down to business here with some more details. The best part about our product (yes, we’re biased) is that it truly does cloud application monitoring. It’s what you’ll need in the stage after the excitement of finding and deploying cloud,...

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We’d all like to fulfill that “find a job you love and you’ll never work a day in your life” cliché. But in reality, every job (even if it’s our dream job) comes with its downsides. For you, the constant fight against shadow IT might get on your last nerves. For your developer coworkers, infrastructure management is the roadblock that...

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As your business grows, your technology requirements—and likely your physical footprint—will grow along with it. Improving infrastructure often means increased expenses due to additional physical data centers, expanded network capacity and improved server efficiency. Many organizations turn to the cloud as a less costly way to get better technology. Whether you've already made the leap to the cloud or you’re...

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Your business leaders are in search of a cloud expert to help them navigate the increasingly complicated world of cloud applications. But if you read our recent post defining cloud brokers, you might still be wondering why you can’t be the in-house cloud expert your company needs. There’s nothing stopping you from becoming an internal cloud broker for your business—but...

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Lots of cloud technology predictions and analysis are still dealing with future spending and planning, but there are plenty of real-world cloud use cases and implementations happening now. One approach, taken by stalwart GE, is to use SaaS applications for non-differentiated uses. For them, that means moving functions like HR, finance, taxes and scheduling to SaaS, while spending their software development...

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These days, organizations of all sizes are struggling to balance the constant demands of users with the ever-pressing need to keep technology and business operations running smoothly. Most businesses are undertaking some form of migration to the cloud. Done properly, cloud can offer high availability and help businesses avoid the potentially disastrous costs of downtime and negative publicity that can...

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In an environment powered primarily by SaaS applications and cloud services, the devil is in the details. Cloud and SaaS licensing is one detail that often torments IT teams. Here’s how it works and how to make managing licenses easier. How Do SaaS and Cloud Licenses Work? In the old days of IT, software licensing was part of the software...

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The IT industry is undergoing a significant evolution to keep up with cloud application demand. We see this happening as a mindset shift, from traditional IT teams to more well-rounded, cloud-focused job roles. The IT industry has become so cloud-minded that Gartner predicts that by 2020, this cloud shift will impact more than $1 trillion of global IT spending. This...

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So, what did we all take away from this week’s AWS outage? Depends who you ask. Plenty of us in IT think it was a good reminder to consider multicloud and hybrid cloud environments—basically, do not put all your cloud workload eggs in one AWS basket. The S3 storage outage affected about 150,000 websites hosted in Amazon’s US-EAST-1 region data...

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So you’ve decided to take the infrastructure as a service (IaaS) approach to cloud migration. That’s great—you’re on your way to realizing the cost savings and flexibility of cloud computing. But the decisions don’t stop when you choose between SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS. Choosing your public cloud provider—Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, or Google Cloud Platform (GCP)—is the next...

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This week’s news brings us further reminders that if you’re betting on cloud, you’re headed in the right direction. The cloud is growing seven times faster than the rest of IT, according to IDC, with a 25% spending increase just from 2016 to 2017. Cloud adoption in the form of SaaS still leads the pack, with an estimated two-thirds of...

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On the topic of cloud finances, we’ve got some good news and bad news for you. First, the good news: IT teams are poised to become in-house cloud brokers and experts, with a stake in big business decisions. The bad news, however, is that you, as an IT team member, have to learn more about finances than you likely have...

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Can you believe it’s only been 4 years since cloud computing really went mainstream? It feels like our businesses have been relying on the cloud for so much longer. However, companies still aren’t 100% in the cloud, and hybrid and multicloud deployments are becoming popular, so choosing the right cloud technology is a constant consideration for IT. When you look...

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SaaS has become the way of the world for enterprise application delivery. The vast majority of enterprises now trust the software-as-a-service model for everything from niche applications to mission-critical tools. However, SaaS applications are a bit of a double-edged sword. The cloud-based model offers the agility necessary to stay ahead of digital demands, with improved reliability and security vs. years...

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When choosing a cloud provider, you can look at brand recognition, security and storage features and other items. But cloud providers depend on networks just like the rest of us, and they’re not all created or configured equal. In general, for those considering the cloud, it’s important to match up the location of your end users and the cloud location...

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SaaS use is growing in enterprises all the time, with the ease of consumer apps meeting the full-featured nature of typical business software. Google added new tools earlier this week to G Suite that are designed for enterprise IT. The announced features include additions to security and archiving capabilities, plus more big data analytics for Gmail. As we transition into...

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It wasn’t too long ago that cloud computing had more detractors than supporters. Companies (especially in the enterprise world) just weren’t ready to relinquish control of applications and business processes. And yet, the light of cloud benefits has slowly drawn the business world in as SaaS apps and cloud infrastructure become entrenched in IT. The benefits of cloud migration are...

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For your weekly dose of industry numbers, let’s start with this: Just 1% of cloud survey respondents will use no cloud services at all in the next two years. That’s according to the Interop ITX/InformationWeek survey on the state of cloud computing. We’re curious how even that 1% is managing to avoid the rapid rise of SaaS apps and public...

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Just when you thought you’d heard every cloud-related term out there, here’s a new(ish) one: multicloud. This one, at least, is pretty straightforward. It refers to businesses using more than one public cloud provider at a time. Now that there’s more than one mature public cloud option (sorry, AWS), you can actually take a best-of-breed approach to cloud computing. Multicloud...

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It’s the holiday season, and one IT wish list item may be cloud control and confidence. There’s a whole new crop of companies offering cloud management and governance services to ease the adoption and maintenance of cloud. There are a lot of challenges to getting the best value out of cloud, like security, multi-cloud management and end-to-end visibility. This time of...

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Your work doesn’t end after you’ve signed the dotted line of a well-negotiated cloud services SLA. Even after you’ve settled on an SLA with your service provider, it’s your job to make sure you’re getting what you pay for. This is why service-level agreements are coming under fire as they’re applied to cloud application services. Because SLAs set a minimum...

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‘Tis the season for technology predictions in 2017. This one goes in-depth on the job skills that will be most important in the year ahead. There’s nothing too extreme (we’re not actually hiring robots yet) but mobile and big data jobs, two trends a few years back, are at the bottom of this top ten list. Programmers and help desk...

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As the network has moved from a physical entity to a more abstract one, IT has valiantly kept pace by researching and deploying new network devices and functionality. IT teams have had to shift workloads and mindsets to the cloud and to SaaS providers, while remaining responsible for end-user experience—which is ever more important. But which network metrics can convey...

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How many cloud services SLAs do you have in place today? As cloud services continue to drive your business, the number will grow and you might become numb to SLA fine print. However, it’s important to ensure each SLA has your best interests in mind. Don’t settle for just any cloud services SLA. Know what should be included in the...

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We’ve come across a lot of talk about “cloud-native” apps lately. (They even have their own foundation!) Developers build these apps specifically to run on a cloud-based infrastructure, with the kind of user interface we all expect from our apps now. Cloud-native applications are scalable, usable and flexible, usually packaged using containers. It’s a step further in the cloud computing journey,...

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Watch out for lock-in, and consider a cloud broker. These are some tips on using public cloud that came out of discussions with a group of reps from large enterprises who have been working with the Open Networking User Group. There are some concrete tips on negotiating pricing and ensuring security—all very useful advice now that cloud is here to...

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Cloud adoption just keeps increasing, with more to come, according to this recent IDG cloud survey. They found that the average company has 45% of their IT environment in the cloud, and that by the end of 2017, the average company expects it’ll be closer to 59%. With all those numbers in hand and other signs that cloud computing is...

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This week, we came across some nice hard numbers on cloud infrastructure spending, based on IDC research. They expect that spending on cloud infrastructure will pull even with spending on traditional IT infrastructure within five years. That’s a pretty amazing shift when we look back over the past decade or so in IT. With all the talk and hype about...

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I just had to write an Olympic-themed headline, since today is the first day of the 2016 Summer Games! I love the Olympics. It’s so much fun watching athletes do what they’re best at. Plus, they have the extra challenge this year of swimming or boating in polluted, mucky water—so it’s even more impressive for the winners, I suppose. Technology...

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Happy Friday, all, and thanks for voting on the name of this weekly roundup blog post. The big winner was “Weekly Packet,” so let’s get started on volume two. AWS and other cloud adoption could rise in the wake of the Brexit decision over in Europe, as a Forbes contributor reports. I find this fascinating, since strict data regulations had...

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As the cloud takes over, enterprise IT Ops teams are losing visibility into the infrastructure and business-critical applications their employees rely on. Here at AppNeta, we are continually seeking to make our platform more flexible because we know how hard it can be for IT Ops teams to manage these cloud challenges quickly. Here’s a look at what we focus...

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I’m often guilty of sticking my head in the sand, ignoring very small details that could turn into big problems later on. Like when Netflix told me my credit card was about to expire, but it seemed like such a boring task, so I ignored them…till the day Netflix stopped working. I grumbled at the TV for awhile, then wasted...

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Many businesses these days are migrating to Office 365. It is important that when implementing a migration, they make sure the user experience is optimized both during the migration and afterwards. Gartner recently released a study indicating that, by 2017, 33% of all users will be on cloud-based business office systems such as Office 365. That’s because business cloud applications...

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At AppNeta, we focus on meeting the needs of technology professionals who build and operate custom web apps, as well as those who support the end-users of SaaS-based external applications. Our SaaS Application Monitoring (SAM) solution was developed to provide technology professionals with visibility into the end-user experience for critical SaaS and cloud-based business apps. SAM measures the performance, availability,...

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In theory, since PaaS applications can be built using common standards and tools, it should be the same for building capabilities to monitor those applications. With less customization there should be easier monitoring, right? Well, if the content of the article, “Study: PaaS Market to Top $6.94B by 2018,” written by Chris Talbot in Talkin’ Cloud holds true, companies would...

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We’re always keeping watch for the latest analyst report on the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) market and few have caught our eye more than the report recently released by Gigaom Research entitled “Sector Roadmap: Application-management solutions for distributed and cloud environments.” Written by well-known APM expert, author and analyst, Bernd Harzog, the report delves into the numerous current challenges for...

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