Cloud Source

What Is Cloud Storage?

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Technology has made it possible to create highly personalized experiences for customers, based on an acceleration in data insights. But for many companies, the headaches around data management and data storage can almost overshadow its benefits. If this sounds familiar, you may want to consider cloud storage.

If you currently store data in an on-premise data center, you likely have backup procedures to protect against natural disasters and cyber security threats. Managing all of that data takes time and storing it takes space. If you’ve been exploring options, you’ve likely heard about cloud storage as a valuable investment.

What Is Cloud Storage and How Does It Work? Cloud storage differs from on-site storage because data is stored in an off-site, third-party provider’s data center. The data is accessible via the web; data centers are spread across a broad geographic area, but the data is easily retrievable from any secure connection.

A cloud storage option can handle any type of files, including video, photos, text files, and presentations. It is readily accessible.

What Are the Benefits of Cloud Storage? Cost savings may have been the first factor that led to your interest in cloud storage, but there are several key benefits:

  • Cloud storage uses a subscription-based pay model, allowing companies the ability to categorize this spending as operating expenses, rather than a capital investment that typically comes with an expansion to a data center. One of the biggest challenges with an on-site data center is growth constraints, but with cloud-based data storage, the expansion possibilities are virtually endless.
  • Cloud-based services are inherently scalable. If your business has a seasonal element or if you have an upcoming promotion, you’ll see that storing and accessing data through a cloud-based service means only paying for exactly what you need.
  • If a widespread natural disaster occurs or your systems are breached by a cyber security attack, your data is secure and ready to be used to keep business processes in motion.
  • On-site data centers require IT management and maintenance, as well as extensive space, cooling, and power. A third-party cloud storage provider eliminates all of these challenges.
  • Third-party providers offer a more robust set of security policies and tools than anything you could employ in-house.
  • One of the benefits of cloud storage is the synchronization across all devices. For instance, if you have changed information in a file, that change is recorded so that when your colleague opens the file on a separate device, the change is reflected.

The next time someone asks you, “What is cloud storage?” you can walk them through all the clear advantages that it offers over an on-site data center.

Migrating to a cloud storage solution comes with a lot of critical considerations, but the path is easier with the right guidance. Contact us at Cloud Source for assistance as you identify your needs and then evaluate data storage options that fit best with your goals.

What Are the Benefits of XaaS?

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If you’re in the market for any type of technology upgrade, you’ve probably wondered if XaaS is interchangeable with SaaS.

XaaS (everything as a service) encompasses any type of cloud-based solution that is offered as a managed services option. They are subscription-based, with a pay-as-you-go model that appeals to many companies.

SaaS (software as a service) is just one type of XaaS. Even if you haven’t made cloud-based technology a central priority, it’s likely that SaaS is being used somewhere in your company. It may simply be a project management tool or communication app being utilized by one department.

In addition to SaaS, there are two other primary types of XaaS that many applications fall into:

PaaS, or platform as a service, offers hardware and software tools over the internet. It is useful in delivering virtual machines and for tasks like application development or testing.

IaaS is infrastructure as a service and provides elements like storage and network and server resources on a subscription basis.

There are additional types of XaaS that companies may employ to address a specific gap in their technology solutions:

  • DRaaS, or disaster recovery as a solution, is a tool to allow companies to regain business functions after a natural disaster or cyber security attack.
  • UCaaS, or unified communications as a service, is one of the most common priorities for cloud-based solutions. It offers a variety of communications formats in a single app that can be accessed from anywhere with a secure connection.
  • AaaS, or authentication as a service, handles the management of identity and access to your systems.

After seeing the benefits of a few as a service solutions, many companies have begun to take a cloud-first approach, actively looking for areas in which a cloud-based solution can multiply the benefits across their organization. These benefits include:

Cost Savings: The subscription-based pay model means that services can be designated as operating expenses, rather than capital investments associated with traditional technology purchases. In addition, XaaS solutions demand less in terms of servers, hardware, network switches, and IT management and maintenance time.

Less Overhead: Cloud-based solutions take up less space and require fewer resources related to power and cooling.

Scalability: While traditional, on-premise software generally demands that you hold a number of users that exceeds your actual use, one of the key benefits of XaaS is scalability. You are able to spin up more users in a matter of minutes and reduce them just as easily. For companies expected to grow and for those that have seasonal elements to their businesses, this feature offers a key advantage. You pay only for what you use.

Before investing in any type of XaaS solution, you may have questions about some areas, such as security or how much visibility you would have in a solution managed by a cloud provider. You might wonder whether it’s easy to cancel a solution that isn’t working as well as you had anticipated.

These are all questions that come up as companies explore cloud-based solutions, and Cloud Source is the ideal guide for walking you through each consideration for choosing the right technology. Contact us to get started examining potential options and to ultimately leverage the best solutions to move your company forward.

Does Your Data Migration Require a Customer Success Team?

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Data migration is a complex process that often combines the pressure of a strict deadline combined with unanticipated obstacles. No matter the size of business, challenges like the navigation of existing IT systems and limited budgets can create a need for specialized expertise. A customer success team offers insight to predict likely challenges and resources to address them.

A customer success team partners with your data migration team from the initial planning stages to identify potential problems and address them in advance. They equip companies with tools and practices to avoid the setbacks that can derail a data migration budget and timeline. There are three main ways in which they support a data migration:

Scope: A customer success team assists the company in a complete scope of all data, workloads, and files that need to be migrated. They assess and categorize the data and designate where each type of data will need to move.

Strategic Planning: The customer success team then studies the complexities in migrating the data of the company’s IT environment. In a company where the IT environment may rely on a complex infrastructure web, the team will identify the potential obstacles and strategically develop navigation plans for a successful migration.

Proof of Concept: The customer success team migrates a small set of the user base to demonstrate how a larger migration will perform. The subset of data could include shared files and documents as well as mailboxes to give a snapshot of what steps need to be taken to successfully migrate larger sets of data.

While there are countless ways that a data migration can go sideways, there are a few problems that tend to be more common:

Talent: Even if your company has a knowledgeable and well-trained staff, their specialty may be in areas like running your existing IT environment, applying certifications, and backing up your systems. That doesn’t mean they are prepared to manage a major migration. It’s not unusual for a thriving IT team to be unfamiliar with the intricacies of moving data and workloads.

Method: Many companies choose a lift-and-shift approach by default, but this is an opportunity to evaluate data and eliminate what is no longer needed. You may be able to archive some data to create an uncluttered environment and reduce costs.

Speed: Some teams move too fast in their app assessment, failing to understand the amount of data, the size, and the workloads being moved.

Sticking the Landing: Companies may overlook the critical steps of ensuring that data safely lands in the destination – and that it is both available to users and secure.

Failing to Plan: The hard work of a data migration is not the actual migration; it’s the planning for the migration. A customer success team provides an assessment of the scope and strategy necessary to meet deadlines and budgets.

Budget: The timeline and budget for a data migration are often much lower than the reality. Your customer success team helps you gain an accurate picture of what the demands of the data migration will be on your company.

Bringing in a customer success team for your data migration can help you save time, money, and a lot of headaches. Contact us at Cloud Source to learn more about planning a successful data migration.

5 Ways Cloud Monitoring Improves IT Management

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Companies adopting a multi-cloud strategy find that an increasingly complex environment forces them to get stuck in maintenance mode rather than pursuing new multi-cloud strategies. Cisco reports that 73% of networking teams say maintaining the status quo takes precedence over new strategies. But new cloud monitoring approaches could be part of a streamlining strategy equipping teams for better IT management.

One of the biggest challenges of any cloud migration is equipping network teams to visualize how traffic moves between cloud networks and understand how cloud instances communicate. It’s also important for teams to have visibility as traffic moves through virtual private gateways. These are just a couple of examples, but let’s go deeper into five situations that demand cloud monitoring:

Application and Network Visibility: Network teams need to be able to visualize how cloud traffic is flowing. A solution that offers a picture of applications, pathways, and interfaces offers better visibility into how bandwidth is being utilized as traffic moves through various locations.

Hybrid Environments: Any application that moves from the on-premise network to the cloud and back will be challenging to track. A solution offering end-to-end path analysis with details of key performance indicators (KPIs) like network latency and packet loss can offer valuable insights.

Security: Companies advancing in cloud migration strategies should look for a solution that will monitor the source and destination of traffic to determine whether it should be allowed entry to the network. If an intrusion is identified, the network team should be provided with a recording of the activity of unwanted packets to determine the extent of a breach.

Costs: Granular-level analysis of network traffic is costly. A solution that measures bandwidth usage of applications and services can provide information about baseline activity and trends. This equips teams to focus on the services that use the most bandwidth and then compare to less-demanding applications to better plan for application and services costs.

Migration: Cloud migration is often heavily impacted by teams that don’t have a deep understanding of KPIs, basements, and how their measurement and monitoring impact a cloud migration. There are solutions available that improve visibility while measuring bandwidth and performance both pre- and post-deployment. Having a clear understanding of pre- and post-deployment KPIs improves the cost management and performance of any size cloud migration project.

Cloud monitoring can mean a lot of different things, whether it’s adding visual models that aid your network team in visualizing network traffic or better understanding baseline network traffic for security purposes. To learn more about the solutions available to address these areas, contact us at Cloud Source. We can help you leverage the best technology to improve the management of your IT environment.

Multi-Cloud Environments Need These Three Components for Success

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It’s time to set aside the one-size-fits-all mentality for cloud environments as an effective approach. Companies are embracing multi-cloud for their IT infrastructure for a couple of good reasons:

  • For some, the addition of multiple clouds may help achieve certain business goals while bridging to critical on-premise solutions.
  • Others may use multi-cloud as a way to improve resiliency or add redundancy, reducing costs and avoiding vendor lock-in.

Taking a multi-cloud approach creates an impact across the organization – and using infrastructure as a service (IaaS) can especially affect security and networking. Multi-cloud environments require a balance of giving users access to applications but still applying consistent security policy across disparate infrastructure and applications.

One way that companies are addressing this is by the adoption of zero trust network access (ZTNA). ZTNA uses a combination of strategies to protect resources, taking the position that all users and devices are considered untrustworthy until proven otherwise. With tools like multi-factor authentication, role-based access, and next-generation firewalls, ZTNA is a policy that can be applied in a multi-cloud environment.

To effectively manage a multi-cloud IT infrastructure, there are three important parts:

Policy: Organizations require a common security and enforcement framework from which to manage deployments across the proprietary architectures of different cloud providers, each built on unique frameworks with their own application programming interfaces. The security and networking architecture must be able to work across the cloud to utilize the native features of each cloud and manage them with automation.

Application Awareness: The corporate network must be application aware in order to recognize resource availability, real-time network conditions, and capacity – and optimize the end user experience. It should also be able to deprioritize unimportant network traffic and offer preferential treatment to time-sensitive transmissions.

Integrated Security and Networking: In order to reach their full performance capabilities, security and networking must be converged. Otherwise, the result is gaps in coverage that leave the environment vulnerable to a breach. A fully-integrated security and networking solution offers improved communications, automation, and coordinated enforcement. The possibility for a breach is reduced because of deep packet inspection and traffic segmentation. 

When choosing a path forward with a multi-cloud environment, organizations can achieve all three of these requirements through the implementation of software-defined wide area networking (SD-WAN).

With a cost-effective design for multi-cloud IT environments, SD-WAN allows for the connection of branch locations to cloud services and orchestrates comprehensive deployments from a geographically dispersed organization. Ultimately, SD-WAN offers a way to optimal security without sacrificing application performance.

A multi-cloud IT environment offers challenges in the area of complexity, but SD-WAN is a way to simplify and optimize effectiveness of the network. Contact us at Cloud Source to learn more about the specific benefits SD-WAN delivers.

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328 S. Jefferson St. Suite 603
Chicago, IL 60661
Ph: 312.753.7880
E: info@CloudSourceServices.com

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