1. Omni-Cloud instead of Multi-Cloud

Using multi-cloud computing services under heterogeneous architecture has now become an old story. As with the increase in demand, many of the businesses have started migrating their workload to the infrastructure-as-a-service providers. But along with that following demands arise:

• Application Portability
• Easy procurement of compute cycles in real-time
• Streamlined connectivity in data integration problems
• Cross-platform alliances by vendors

As a result, multi-cloud is transforming into an Omni cloud with the architecture becoming homogeneous. For example, if a company has a gazillion business under its hood, adopting an Omni-cloud computing services cloud gives it a sharper competitive edge.

2.Serverless Computing

This one is being hailed as an evolutionary part of modern-day cloud computing. It is rising in popularity. However, very few enterprises have implemented in reality. Technically serverless computing is not devoid of servers, rather the applications till run on them. But the cloud service provider is responsible for managing the code execution only.

This a major improvement in the world and technology of cloud computing, challenging the paradigm of technology innovation and restructuring the infrastructure.

3.Quantum Computing

Technology is something that is always evolving and is futuristic. Needless, to say that the performance of computers is also expected to improve with the passage of time. This where Quantum Computing comes into the picture.

Hardware development using superposition, entanglement, and similar-quantum mechanical phenomena is the key to robust computers. With the help of Quantum Computing servers and computers can be built to process information at the jet speed.

Quantum computing also has the capacity to limit energy consumption. It requires lesser consumption of electricity while generating massive amounts of computing energy. Best of all, quantum computing can have a positive effect on the environment and the economy.

4.Cloud to Edge

Cloud computing and centralized data bring in the need to run physical servers in large numbers. The distributed infrastructure provided has a large impact when it comes to large-scale data analytics and processing. However, for organizations that need instant access to the data, edge computing is a very good option for them.

Every unit in the edge computing paradigm has its own computing, networking, and storage systems. Together they manage the following functions:

• Network switching
• Load balancing
• Routing
• Security

The integrity of the systems and their operations warrant information processing from varied sources, turning each of them into a focal point of data.

5.Security Acquisitions

Platform-native security tools are the need of the hour. Organizations adopting the cloud want them instead of the third-party tools. Providers, who can’t build the in-house tools would need to purchase them. Thus, cloud security acquisitions are likely to rise.

Also, because the security of the cloud platform is very complex and there would always one gap or the other, this one trend is going to linger for a long time. To that end, 2020 in Cloud Computing is likely to be brimming with mergers and acquisitions.

To Conclude…

The cloud has dramatically changed the way Information Technology works and functions. With the latest upcoming trends, the higher scalability is possible. There are also pay-as-you-go-models that save time and money.

With years of experience in helping clients transform their business by the power of the cloud, TechNEXA Technologies can help you understand and implement this technology seamlessly in your business. Contact us to know more.

1. Multi-cloud becomes a more intentional strategy:

While many organizations are already on multi-cloud that means they have different applications or workloads already on different public clouds. That’s changing – “What we are seeing now’s that multi-cloud has become a deliberate strategy which suggests making applications truly cloud-native and reducing architectural dependencies on particular cloud service”.

“For a long time, people were just wrestling with the cloud,” Matters says. “Now, as companies are getting familiar and comfortable with different private clouds and public clouds, we are beginning to see them put together true hybrid cloud strategies that span their data centers.

2. The cloud-native technology stack grows up:

Intentional multi-cloud strategies mean more teams will need to rethink their technology stacks. “This has implications on the technology stack used, like containers and Kubernetes, and on security, which now has got to be built into the appliance development pipeline and have detection and control points attached to the workload instead of to the infrastructure,” Jerbi says.

“Ultimately, multi-cloud isn’t an infrastructure strategy”, Reddy says. “Multi-cloud is an application strategy and business strategy. It is a means to end the care about their business applications. This is why the technologies that enable cloud-native development and architecture will continue to generate so much attention as multi-cloud cases.

3. Cloud connectivity becomes critical:

“Another trend to observe is that the interconnectivity between cloud vendors. Each vendor features thanks to providing dedicated network access to their cloud, but interconnecting between clouds and guaranteeing performance is more problematic,” says Michael Cantor, CIO at Park Place Technologies. “So, if a company is going to go truly multi-cloud and put different components in different places, interconnectivity and reliability of that connectivity have to be considered.”

Our experts at TechNEXA Technologies can help you securely migrate your data to the cloud onto a combination of platforms – AWS, Azure, Google Cloud.

1.Provide employees with basic security knowledge:

People working from home should be provided with the basic security knowledge so that they are also aware of the phishing emails and ensure to avoid the use of public Wi-Fi. They should be trained to check that their Wi-Fi routers are sufficiently secured and to verify the security of devices that they use to get the work done.

Employees should be particularly reminded to avoid clicking the links in emails which they receive from the people they don’t know. Your team needs to be in possession of basic security advice and it’s also important to have an emergency response team in place.

2. Provide your people with VPN access

One way to secure your data as it moves between your core systems and the external employees is to deploy a VPN. These services provide an external layer of security which in turns provide the following:

• Hiding the user’s IP address
• Encrypting data transfers in transit
• Masking the user’s location

Most large organizations already have a VPN at the place and they should check that they have sufficient seats to provide it to all their external employees. Once chosen the right type of VPN organizations must check that all their employees are provided with that service.

3. Provision Security Protection

Organizations must ensure that their security protection is up-to-date and is installed on the devices that are used for work. That means virus checkers, firewalls and device encryption should all be in one place and should be well updated.

4.Run a password audit

Your company should need to audit employee passcodes.

The use of two-factor authentication should become mandatory, and you should ask the people to apply for the toughest possible protection across all the devices. You should also ensure that business-critical passwords are securely stored.

5. Ensure the software is updated

Organizations should ensure their employees updated their software with the latest version according to the support under the company’s security policy. Not only this the company must activate the automatic updating on all your devices.

6. Encourage the utilization of (secure, approved) cloud services

One way to protect your employees and their data is not to store their data locally. Content storage must be cloud-based where possible and employees should also be encouraged to use cloud apps (such as Office 365). It’s also important that any third-party cloud storage device is verified for use by your security teams.

7. Reset default Wi-Fi Router Passwords:

Not every employee has reset their default their password of the Wi-Fi router. If you have an IT support team then they should give telephonic training to everyone on resetting their password. You do not want your data to be subjected to the man in the middle, data sniffing, or any other form of attack.

You may also get to make arrangements to buy any excess bandwidth used, as not every broadband connection is equal. Employees should be told to avoid using the public Wi-Fi or use it as a VPN as it is a bit secure with that.

8. Mandatory backups:

It should be ensured that online backups should be available and should be regularly done. If not, then employees should be encouraged to use external devices for the backup option. If you use Mobile device management (MDM) or Enterprise Mobility Management (EMM) services, then it is possible that you will be able to initiate automated backups via your system management console.

9. Develop contingency plans

Triage your teams. Ensure that the management responsibilities are shared between teams and do ensure that you put contingency plans at a place by now in case key personnel get sick. Tech support, password, security management, essential codes, and failsafe roles should all be assigned and duplicated.

10. Foster community & care for employees

The reason many people are working from home is because of health pandemic. The grim truth is that employees may get sick or worse during this crisis. With this in mind community chat, including group chat using tools such as hangouts, will become increasingly important to preserve mental health, particularly for anyone enduring quarantine.

Encourage your people to talk with each other, run group competitions to nurture online interactions and identify local mental health.

The bottom line is that your people are likely to be under a great deal of mental stress, so it makes sense to raise each other through this journey.

Before opting for a cloud service provider, it is important for you to set the right expectations and how these will support your business objectives. There are various sections of the business where the IT expertise can change the game. The principal elements to consider for the same are:

• Consulting Services: The cloud service providers offer consultation for all the individual business needs. Their core services are tailored for very specific client needs. This consideration is necessary when business when strict needs in terms of availability, response time, capacity and support.
• Design the framework: After understanding the business patterns, requirements and the current infrastructure, the cloud service provider designs a framework that is best suitable for your all business needs
• Data Migration: Data migration is most important while working efficiently with the cloud. Therefore, for a cloud service provider, it is important to check whether the data can be migrated in a smooth and proper manner.
• Reduced downtime: A cloud solution provider organizes your solution in such a way that the downtime is reduced with an imperative growth in business.
• Savings: With reduced downtime, you get an additional benefit of savings. It helps in avoiding any budget overruns, reduced overheads and waiting for time.
• Data warehousing: A cloud service provider helps in obtaining data from various sources and arranging it in an efficient manner. This makes it easier to conduct data analysis and obtain the required data from different sources. Hence it further helps in defining a precise data strategy which is compatible with all your business process and plans. This all leads to a smooth business operation.
• Offer Managed Services: A managed service IT program helps in a more efficient and proper deployment of data warehousing for the company. These managed services help you achieve organized IT infrastructure management with cost-efficiency. This all ensures better user experience and support for your all business needs.

A lot of companies provide managed cloud service in India. However, you must consider the following before making a choice:

• Efficient: You must look at which company can efficiently migrate the data to the cloud with proper cost-efficiency and least amount of time. As in this information age, time is the key to success.
• Experience: One must check the reputation of the company with a cloud solution provider and their experience with different clients. This will help in dealing with issues if any occurs and provide timely support.
• Cost Effective: Depending upon the size of your organization and business requirements, you must lookout for the cloud service provider that can provide you all the solutions in a cost-effective manner.
• Honest: Data security must be the primary concern for any business. Therefore choosing a trustable cloud service to provide is very important so that your data can be safe.

Think again before starting migration to the cloud, as many organizations make mistake at the beginning without knowing their hardware, software and networking infrastructure. If you don’t follow the proper strategy then the migration can cause the non-preventive downtime hence causing more issues.

Approaching and doing cloud migration without a clear picture of your hardware, software and inventory infrastructure is like driving miles without the map and hence all this causes waste of lot more money.

Taking a hardware and software inventory

The main goal and approach behind having hardware and software inventory are to ensure and better understand what relies on what. It is helpful in determining the cloud migration process and knowing what needs to be migrated. Hardware and software inventory accounts for all servers, storage, security, as well as operating systems.

Taking a network inventory

Network inventory is more than your internet connection. A proper network inventory includes:

• Network capacity (WAN and Internet) by location
• Appliances including firewalls (both physical and virtual), switches, routers, and other capabilities
• Technology in use such as Ethernet, MPLS and “IP”
• In addition to the inventory, the organizations should create a topology map including IP address ranges showing WAN and internet uplinks.

Understanding your network inventory can be difficult because of couple reasons. First you need to ensure that your chosen CSP can meet all your network requirement workloads. This can help you determine which applications are the most bandwidth-intensive and which may need to remain only on-premises. In addition to all this, it’s very important to understand this for proper timing of cloud migrations.

It’s all too common to find organizations that can just “lift and shift” their existing workloads to the cloud. While in certain cases it is often possible to easily migrate the workloads to the cloud but in some, you need to perform extra efforts over the applications that need to be migrated over the cloud.

But before we access our applications, let’s see what other options do we have:

• Rehost: Otherwise known as “lift-and-shift” rehosting involves migrating workloads to the cloud without any code modification. This approach is quicker and requires less up-front resources. However, rehosting fails to take advantage of many of the benefits of the cloud such as elasticity. Additionally, it may be cheaper on-premises, rehosting is way more expensive than other approaches that optimize for the cloud.
• Replatform: Replatform involves small upgrades to workloads for the purpose of taking better care of the cloud than it would be in the case of rehosting approach. Replatforming is the better approachable way for the cloud migration, other benefits of cloud functionality and cost optimization without the heavy resource commitment of our next migration method.
• Refactor: The most involved approach of all, refactoring involves recoding and rearchitecting in order to take full advantage of cloud-native functionality. It is by far the most resource-intensive solution of not only just cost optimization but also cloud functionality.

Understanding which factor is suitable for you mainly begins with the assessment of your application/app. Is it a revenue-generating application that includes investing in it? If so, perform a cost-benefit analysis in order to determine the cost in terms of resources and downtime and the benefits the application needs to gain from replatform or refactor. And if the application doesn’t generate any revenue and just needs to be sustained then you can try replatform or rehost.

When coming up to the point of cloud migration, always try to remember these things in your mind. Otherwise, you can let yourself into trouble and make your task tougher hence slowing down the process of cloud migration. Choosing between rehosting, replatforming and refactoring is a complex undertaking. Fortunately, if you choose a better service provider then it will take the responsibility to take care of your workload. If you’re interested in learning more about what it takes about successful cloud migration, contact the experts at TechNEXA Technologies.

1. Always Patch

Managing software updates and specifically patching endpoints helps to secure your organization from unknown threats. The appearance of the new endpoints such as the Internet of things (IoT), Bring Your Own Device (BYOD), and other operating system and software vulnerabilities – requires countless patches.

2. Seek out all endpoints

For this, you should first see how many within your organization network – how many devices are there? You’d better give this a chance because endpoints account for the vast majority of security breaches – estimates put at the number of 70%. It’s important to know the information because you can’t secure the organization then.

3. Stay Current

You must adapt to the increasing complexity of hackers and the cyber attacks in the upcoming year. The organization should continuously work to improve the cyberattacks, hence causing the constant evolvement of the threat landscape. Therefore, your organization should deploy the endpoint security solutions that keep up with the deluge of malware which can be expected in the future.

4. Be Resilient

Experts suggest that companies must aim to be resilient, assuming breaches are inevitable. Such endpoints are expected to account for 70% of the breaches, being able to find an attack at the endpoint while continually operating the business. A threat or attack to an endpoint must not be allowed to demobilize the entire business.

5. Be Strategic

Many organizations are observed to have an inconsistent approach to endpoint security. Companies must manage the endpoint security strategically and begin to comprehend all the risks associated with the endpoint. Not doing so may result in inadequacies in processes and procedures leaving endpoints hospitable for attacks and breaches.

6. Make it a Priority

Overall endpoint security and cybersecurity need to become the priority within the organization’s business plans. The endpoint doesn’t just protect your business – it preserves your reputation, reassures your customers, and streamlines your business processes. Without the necessary prioritization that cybersecurity demands, endpoint security might fail if not secured properly.

However, cloud migration  can represent a daunting journey. Forced to re-evaluate their assets IT decision-makers face mounting pressure. They are facing the urgency of cloud and cloud migration on multiple fronts. Cloud migration at TechNEXA provides a managed suite of agile services in order to guide your organization on this journey. This service combines global digital delivery and best-in-class technologies to thoroughly analyze options ensuring a successful migration, modernization, and if needed management of your environment.

You can control your total cost by rationalizing and modernizing your application portfolio and infrastructure to exploit new services capabilities.

Organizations need to understand how these strategies and technologies of 2020 where thet need to be applied across the business models in a continuous and complementary cycle:

• Continuous Operations: It helps to exploit the technology that supports running the business today, modernize it and improve the efficiency. Existing business models and environment sets upon the stage in which opportunities are explored and will ultimately influence the cost, risk, and success of implementing efforts.
• Continuous Innovations: It helps to exploit the technology that in return helps to transform the business. This innovation cycle looks more radicals at the changes within business models supporting the technologies that extended the business.

Trends and technologies do not exist within an isolation. They build on and reinforce one another to create the digital world. As per Gartner report, following Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends have been identified for 2020:

• Hyperautomation deals with the application of advanced technologies including AI and machine learning to increasingly automate the processes. This trend was kicked off a year ago with Robotic Process Automation (RPA). As per Gartner technology and trends 2020 report,  Hyperautomation requires a combination of tools for help and support.
• Multiexperience deals with the way people control, perceive and interact with the digital world across the wide range of devices. The combined shift in both perception and interaction models leads to the multisensory and multimodal experience, something we will see starting off from 2020.
• Democratization explores how to create a simplified model for people to consume digital systems and tap into automated expertise. Throughout 2023, Gartner aspects of the democratization tends to accelerate.
• Human augmentation explores how humans are cognitively and physically augmented by the systems. Gartner anticipates that over the next 10 years, increasing levels of physical and cognitive human augmentation will become more prevalent as individual seek personal enhancements.
• Transparency and traceability focus on data privacy and digital ethics challenges and the application of design that increases the transparency and traceability hence enhancing the trust.

• Empowered edge emphasizes how the spaces around us are highly populated by sensors and devices that connect people to one another and the available digital services. However as per technology and trends report 2020, edge computing will become an important factor virtually across all industries and use cases as the edge is empowered with increasingly more sophisticated and specialized resources with more data storage.
• Distributed cloud examines a major evaluation in cloud computing where the applications, tool, security, and others are physically shifting from a centralized data center mode to the point in which the services are distributed and delivered at the point of need. This represents the significant shift from the centralized model of most public cloud services hence leading to a new era in cloud computing.
• Autonomous things explore how physical things in the space around people are enhanced with great capabilities to perceive, interact and move with various levels of human guidance, autonomy, and collaboration. The automation of these things goes beyond the automation provided by the programming models and they exploit AI to deliver the advanced behaviors.
• Practical blockchain focuses on how blockchain can be leveraged in enterprises uses cases that are expanding over the next three to five years. Asset tracking also has value in other years, such as tracing food across a supply chain to more easily identify the origin of contamination.
• AI security deals with the reality of securing AI-powered systems that are behind the people-centric trends.

As far as we can see in these stretegic technology and trends of 2020, the new year anticipates great opportunities as well as challenges for CIOs and their teams. Yet, it is paramount to always remember that embracing change and adopting new technologies that guarantee your enterprise will remain active and competitive on the market. Resisting change will only set your company a few but important steps behind. To know how you can cut down your IT expenses in the year, you can talk to our experts at TechNEXA Technologies.

Backup and Disaster Recovery Plan

The new backup and disaster recovery technologies are addressing these issues automatically, making backup and recovery effortless and invisible to the enterprise stakeholders. The only way for IT to meet these challenges is through automation. AI and machine learning tools can help with better data protection and hassle-free as possible. These technologies mainly help in:

• Active-Monitor and Backup: Best-in-class see issues as soon as they happen and determine whether configurations may cause failure before even the backup runs.
• Automate Remediation: Next-gen backup and recovery solutions saves IT time and eliminate downtime with the reduced risk by automatically correcting issues like VSS errors, low drive space, network connectivity, and other issues.

The underlying message is that the disaster can occur anytime and anywhere, what we need to do is to have a reliable backup plan that can be effective. This is especially important when it includes customers and other financial information that can be disastrous for the company’s reputation and business continuity. The backup plan needs to contain three main strategies:

1. Data Retention: It must be clear where data is being stored and which files are being packed up. To recover from a disastrous loss, a full copy of your infrastructure is required not just a copy of your files. The company must look at how often they need to backup data and needs regular update.
2. Recovery ability: The time for recovery needs to be considered. How long your business can afford without your IT systems? This will also influence what type of tech and support you will require for your required timeframe.
3. Security: Ensure that the disaster recovery is secure and protected. You need to have solid connectivity to protect while transferring your data and information.

Testing Your Backup

Other than performing a regular backup, companies need to test whether the tools are working properly. Failure to restore organization data, systems and processes can cause serious damage to your company and business continuity. Lost data and organizational downtime can result in regulatory investigations, lost business and even damage to the brand reputation.

Frequent testing of your tools can help you prevent the damage and alarm you with the warning signs that can cause damage to your data. However, the issue with regular backup and disaster testing is time. Performing administrative tasks can become very time consuming and over the course of a year it accumulates into a substantial amount of IT resources.

Backup Systems and Managed Services

TechNEXA Technologies offer a fully managed backup and disaster recovery solutions for business of all sizes. With this system, we not only take care of the day-to-day running of your backup solutions as we perform them at the frequency of your choosing. Additionally, we also perform the management and testing of your backup and disaster solutions, with continuous monitoring of your backups, identifying your problems and maintain the integrity of your data.

Show Me the Money!

At the time of building applications and workloads on AWS, you need to take control of the economic model of your architecture. It’s also important to think about the basic pricing, as compared to the on-premises data centers. This can help you in reducing your AWS bill efficiently. There are 5 basic concepts that can help you reduce the AWS costs:

1: Shutdown unused AWS Resources

In order to optimize the cost of your AWS bill, you need to shut down the unused AWS resources, especially in the development environments which means at the end of the day and weekend. Services such as AWS OpWorks and Elastic Beanstalk allow the developers to deploy and redeploy the applications with full consistency without worrying about the configuration of the underlying infrastructure.

By the full utilization of the AWS Cloud network for your infrastructure, it’s very easy for the developers to deploy and redeploy their AWS resources to quickly build and re-build their environment. This main approach towards cloud computing helps in efficient usage of AWS resources and hence deleting the unused resources without any concern.

2: Use the appropriate storage class

There are 5 tiers of Amazon S3 storage available, and it’s important to know how and when to use each class in order to optimize your cost. For each tier, the cost is broken down into the actual storage amount, the number of HTTP PUT requests, the number of HTTP GET requests, and the volume of data transferred.

• Amazon S3 Standard is for general purpose usage for frequently accessed data, and is used for a variety of use cases. As being part of the AWS Free Usage Tier customers receive the 5GB of Amazon S3 Storage, 20,000 Get Requests, 2,000 Put Requests and 15GB of data transfer each month.
• Amazon S3 Standard-Infrequent Access (IA) is basically for the data that is less used but requires the same resiliency as the storage class and can be retrieved rapidly when needed. When the S3-IA pricing is less than the standard S3 tier, you are being charged the free trial of $0.01 per GB.
• Amazon S3 One Zone-Infrequent Access is almost similar to S3-IA but is even less expensive since the data is only stored in the single availability zone with less resiliency. Because of which One-Zone is the best option for the secondary backup.
• Amazon Glacier is used for the data that is stored for more than 90 days, such as backup or cold data. A glacier is as durable as the standard S3, but the trade-off with this is that it takes 3-5 days in the restoring of data. AWS has also recently introduced two new options for the backup of data from Glacier- including slower and cheaper bulk retrievals (5-12 hours), plus faster and more expensive expedited retrievals (1-5 minutes).

To optimize the cost of your data storage, one should consider implementing object lifecycle management that automatically transmits data between the storage class. For instance, you can automatically move your data from S3 Standard to IA after 30 days, archive data to Glacier after 90 days, or set up an expired policy to delete the objects after 180 days.

3: Select the Right Instance Type

Since different instance families cost different amounts, it’s important to see whether you are using cost-effective instances. Be sure to select the best instance that can suit your application workload.

In order to maximize the workload along with you spend, consider your specific use case while determining the factors like the type of processing unit and amount of memory required. Optimize the instance resources that result in the delivery of the price-performance for the price. You should approach the choice of instances at least twice a year in order to match the reality of your workload.

4: Monitor, Track and Analyze your Service Usage 

 Trusted advisor and CloudWatch are monitoring and management tools to access your instance metrics. Hence depending upon the data collected you can access your workload and scale your instance size up or down.

Trusted Advisor is an excellent tool since it identifies the idle resources by running configuration checks. Not only this, but these services also provide real-time guidance to the customers in the provision of resources provided by AWS – weekly update on the resources to improve the security and performance and hence reducing the costs.

5: Use Auto-Scaling

One of the main and best advantages of cloud computing is that you can align your resources according to customer demand. In order to maintain variable demand or to maintain all of a sudden traffic spike, you can design dynamically by using auto-scaling – or can add additional resources if needed in order to meet the rising demand.

Auto-scaling not only has the benefit of cost management, but it also helps in detecting whether an instance is unhealthy or not and then terminates the instance on its own, hence re-launching a new version on its own. The set-up process for auto-scaling is very simple and straight:

• Firstly, describe the launching configuration that will be needed while adding new resources to the instance.
• Secondly, one needs to set the minimum and maximum size of group for the number of instances and define the availability zone for the same.
• Thirdly, define the policy with the Auto-Scaling parameter that needs to be triggered when an instance is being created and configure a cool-down period to prevent the additional capacity.

Once you have gone through with these basics, you can master with the advanced AWS tools which help in improving your experience. Along with this it also helps in improving and managing your Cost Explorer, Billing Dashboard, and Detailed Billing Report. By using these tools properly and efficiently you can improve your economic experience and AWS will help in reaping the best out of cloud computing.