HostingCon Global starts on Sunday with in-depth educational workshops starting at 1 p.m. and ending just in time for the second annual HostingCon Game Show from 5 p.m. to 6:30 p.m. This year’s edition is hosted by cPanel chief business officer Aaron Phillips, and should be a fun way to start a busy week.

“I’m really excited about the program this year,” Cheryl says. “We’ve always had this big cloud ecosystem that includes a lot of infrastructure, and peripheral software providers, but this year we put a bigger focus on offering some education that was specific to them; we’re bringing in a lot of new speakers this year and people who are involved in different aspects of the industry.”

This year the educational sessions offer a lot more opportunities for networking, based on attendee feedback, Cheryl tells us.

“Past attendees gave us feedback that they loved the networking aspect of HostingCon, but that they wished there was some more structure around it,” she says.

LOOKING FOR MORE? RSVP TODAY TO WHIR NEW ORLEANS NETWORKING EVENT

In order to deliver that this year HostingCon is offering speed roundtable sessions on Monday afternoon, something that was introduced last year. With the format, groups of attendees have 20 minutes of dedicated time with an expert in a small group setting before they move on to the next expert. The small group allows attendees to speak up and ask questions. “It’s a way to incorporate networking into the education sessions,” Cheryl says.

On Wednesday afternoon HostingCon will offer new industry workgroups that will allow attendees to work in small groups discussing industry trends or problems and present to the larger group at the end. These workshops will allow attendees to work through challenging topics together and get to know their peers in a productive format.

Asking Cheryl to pick her favorite HostingCon session is like asking a parent to pick their favorite child, but she did tell us that she is really looking forward to the session in the Exhibit Hall on Tuesday with Chris Tarbell, who prior to working as Managing Director of FTI Consulting Global Risk & Investigations Practice was an FBI special agent who took on Anonymous and Silk Road. It certainly sounds like a session that’s not-to-be-missed.

Don’t forget that you can add sessions to your schedule on the HostingCon website by selecting the star next to the session name.

What are some of the HostingCon sessions you are most looking foward to? Let us know in the comments and follow along this week as we offer more previews on educational sessions at HostingCon. Please email nicole.henderson [at] penton.com if you want to meet up with the WHIR at the conference. I love to connect with our readers!

Source: TheWHIR

1. What is Business Resiliency? Business resiliency and its associated services specifically revolve around the protection of your data. A proactive resiliency program would include HA, security, backup, and anything that impacts the confidentiality of data or compromises compliance. So, the idea becomes to unify the entire resiliency strategy plan to include all aspects of data protection.
2. What is the business objective? Creating a proactive approach where a business can handle disruptions while still maintaining true resilience.

Today organizations are leveraging data center providers and cloud services for their business resiliency and continuity planning. To create a good plan there are several key steps that must be understood. Remember, business resiliency means protecting the entire business. Even if some specific units don’t need to be brought back immediately there has to be a good plan around it all. In creating a resiliency strategy start with these two concepts:

• Use your BIA. Easily one of the most important steps in designing a resiliency plan and something that’s helps you better understand your business. These documents outline specific functions for each business unit, application, workload, user, and much more. Most of all, it helps outline which applications/workloads are critical and how quickly they need to be brought back up. By having such a document, an organization can eliminate numerous variables in selecting a partner which is capable of meeting the company’s business resiliency needs. Furthermore, you can align specific resiliency services to your applications, users, and entire business units.
• Understand Business Resiliency Components and Data Center Offerings. Prior to moving to a data center partner or cloud provider, establish your resiliency requirements, recovery time and future objectives. Much of this can be accomplished with a BIA, but planning for the future will involve conversations with the IT team and other business stakeholders. Once those needs are established, it’s important to communicate them to the hosting provider. The idea here is to align the thought process to ensure a streamlined DR environment.

Incorporating Resiliency Management Tools and Services

One of the most important management aspects within any environment is the ability to have clear visibility into your data center ecosystem. This means using not only native tools, but ones provided by the data center partner. Working with management and monitoring tools to create business resiliency is very important. It’s also important to have a good view into the physical infrastructure of the data center environment.

• Uptime, Status Reports, and Logs. Having an aggregate report will help administrators better understand how their environment is performing. Furthermore, managers can make efficiency modifications based on the status reports provided by a data center’s reporting system. Furthermore, working with a good log management system is absolutely critical. This not only creates an effective paper trail, it also helps with infrastructure efficiencies. A good log monitoring system is one of the first steps in designing a proactive, rather than a reactive environment. Many times logs will show an issue arising before it becomes a major problem. Administrators can act on those log alerts and resolve problems at a much steadier pace rather than reacting to an emergency.
• Mitigating Risk and Protecting Data. It’s important to work with a comprehensive suite of highly standardized and customizable-tiered offerings which can support all levels of business requirements. Good data center partners can deliver a broad spectrum of resiliency solutions which range from multi-data center designs to cost-effective cloud-enabled DRaaS. Furthermore, you can use professional services to assess, design, and implement disaster recovery environments, as well as managed services to help ensure business continuity in the event of a disruption. Partner offerings can be tailored to specific customer needs; and remain flexible, agile and scalable to continue to meet evolving requirements.
• Meeting Regulations and Staying Compliant. Data center partners can provide structured DR and security methodologies, processes, procedures, and operating models on which to build your resiliency programs. Leading data center models are founded on industry best-practices, methodologies, and frameworks including Lean Six Sigma, ITIL V3, ISO 27001, ISO 22301, and BS25999. In fact, data center partner consultants can help organizations meet FISMA, HIPPA, FFIEC, FDIC, PCI, and SOX compliance requirements. Furthermore, a partner’s DR audit and testing solutions helps organizations to meet corporate and regulatory audit requirements by demonstrating maturity of a business resiliency program.

The process of selecting the right data center partner should include planning around contract creation and ensuring that the required management and business resiliency tools are in place. Remember, your data center is an important extension of your organizations and must be properly managed and protected. Good data center providers will oftentimes offer tools for direct visibility into an infrastructure. This means engineers will have a clear understanding of how their racks are being utilized, powered and monitored. These types of decisions make an infrastructure more efficient and much easier to manage in the long-term.

Source: TheWHIR

Defining the priorities and goals in the vendor/partner relationship establishes a framework to build upon. Partners should agree on what the priorities and goals are and who is responsible for them.

A good, basic joint business plan will bring all parties together to agree on priorities, goals, responsibilities and time frames.

It does not have to be anything fancy, lengthy or require weeks of effort. But it does need to provide the documentation on what the partnership is based on and why it’s being done.

Some critical elements of a business plan for a vendor/partner or partner/partner relationship are:

Clear Objective Unified Goals

This is the first step in creating a plan together. All the goals in the plan need to clearly state what the goals are and how it benefits both parties. It is at this stage that partners can clearly define the value propositions to each other and if the value propositions and joint goals align, then the rest of the plan will come together far more easily.

Stakeholders and Responsible Parties

Once the goals of the relationship are defined, stakeholders and responsible parties for each objective along the way are mapped. More than likely, this will be a combination of both the partner and vendor teams to bring the goals over the finish line.

At this stage, it’s extremely important to define ownership about who is accountable.

Timeframes

Next up would be a best-case timeline. As with all goals, timelines towards success are needed. Drawing a line in the virtual sand helps prioritize actions and base other activities around the completed outcomes. Be cautious not to be too “set in stone” with them though. Sometimes it’s necessary to reset expectations due to things out of the partners’ control. Revisit the plan and adjust as necessary.

Milestones

As with any good plan, milestones or markers of progress should be built into the planning and review process. These are the “mini goals” within a larger goal framework. These milestones will ensure that the plan is on track, and that the teams are moving forward with regard to the specific goals. Often times, these are also good markers for other activities that can be done to bolster goal related efforts, like marketing or training.

Review Cadence – When the business plan is initially laid out, the cadence of how the partners are going to check in with one other to ensure everything is on track should be established. Best practice is a formalized QBR of some kind quarterly or every other month; along with a weekly or bi monthly status check with documented accomplishments, next steps, and open issues.

The next critical step in any ecosystem is setting up the communication channels. Research shows that communication is one of the biggest stumbling blocks in partner/vendor relationships. It seems that we often struggle to get and keep this aspect working. Partners can establish guidelines for communication models that work most of the time.

People have different ways they take in information. Some like to read, some like to watch, some like to do. And in today’s world, there are many different ways to consume information. If we want to get communication to work, then we need to commit to a multi-channel, multi-format process for communicating with the teams.

Some of the most important factors to consider:

Be Consistent

The best way for us to establish communication channels with vendors and partners is to become consistent and predictable in the time and type of communications we push out to our ecosystem.

Communication channels need to be at regular, predictable times and formats. For example, if communication is through a a monthly newsletter, send it on the same day every month. This pattern will set up as an expected way for partners and vendors to receive information.

Format

As many studies have shown, people need to see, hear and talk about something seven times before it is committed to memory. Studies also show that people learn in a variety of ways, so we should consider at least 3 different delivery mechanisms for messages. As a best-case scenario, the top three should be email, video and social. These 3 types of communication have shown to be the most accepted and successful ways to communicate with vendors and partners.

Be Relevant

The biggest difference between successful and unsuccessful communication strategies comes down to relevance of material. The more relevant the message is to the audience receiving it, the more likely communications is well received. Consider a newsletter packed with marketing information. A developer or other technical person is not going to read the newsletter because it is of no value to them. Likewise, a newsletter with only technical content would be glossed over by a salesperson. The closer you can align your content with the reader, the more effective your communications become.

Enable Communication at All Levels

Establishing communications using the best practices noted here will hit most of the communications channels we need to address: sales, technical, marketing, development, and executive. Depending on the vendor chosen and the strategic nature of the partnership, aligning at the executive level is a critical best practice often overlooked.

Again, like the business planning exercise, this does not have to be a big production; instead it is a connection between the executive levels in each organization to ensure they are in alignment with the strategic visions for each company. As much time as we spend making sure the product, sales, technical and marketing is in sync, it can all be washed away if the strategic vision for either the partner or vendor changes. Making sure communication is enabled within all levels of the organization is a best practice for success.

In conclusion, building out a partner ecosystem can be a powerful differentiator for the company, the market evaluation and as an enabler to your clients’ success. If the necessary time is taken to evaluate all aspects of a potential relationship, and then manage the relationship with these industry best practices, your company will be on its way to a successful, vibrant ecosystem that positively impacts top and bottom lines.

Join me at HostingCon July 24-27 to explore partnerships in even more depth.

Source: TheWHIR

SEE ALSO: Report: US No Longer Lowest-Risk Country for Data Centers

Internet and cloud services giants, who operate some of the world’s largest data centers, are privy to this, and so is the Pentagon. The US military issecond only to Google in the amount of renewable energy generation capacity it has secured through long-term PPAs, according to a recent Bloomberg report.

Data Center Providers Enter Clean-Energy Space

Google’s giant peers, including Amazon Web Services, Facebook, Microsoft, and Apple, are also on Bloomberg’s list of 20 institutions that consume the most renewable energy through such agreements, and so are numerous US corporations in different lines of business, such as Wal-Mart Stores, Dow Chemical, and Target. There are two names on the list, however, that wouldn’t have ended up on it had Bloomberg complied it before last year: Equinix and Switch SuperNAP.

Both are data center service providers, companies that provide data center space and power to other companies, including probably all of the other organizations on the list, as a service. The main reason companies like Equinix and Switch wouldn’t make the list in 2014 is that there wasn’t a strong-enough business case for them to invest in renewable energy for their data centers. There was little interest from customers in data center services powered by renewable energy.

While still true to a large extent, this is changing. Some of the biggest and most coveted users of data center services are more interested than ever in powering as much of their infrastructure with renewable energy as possible, and being able to offer this service will continue growing in importance as a competitive strategy for data center providers.

Just last week, Digital Realty Trust, also one of the world’s largest data center providers, announced it had secured a wind power purchase agreement that would cover the energy consumption of all of its colocation data centers in the US.

More Interest from Data Center Customers

According to a recent survey of consumers of retail colocation and wholesale data center services by Data Center Knowledge, 70 percent of these users consider sustainability issues when selecting data center providers. About one-third of the ones that do said it was very important that their data center providers power their facilities with renewable energy, and 15 percent said it was critical.

Survey respondents are about equally split between wholesale data center and retail colocation users from companies of various sizes in a variety of industry verticals, with data center requirements ranging from less than 10kW to over 100MW. More than half are directly involved in data center selection within their organizations.

Most respondents (70 percent) said their interest in data centers powered by renewable energy would increase over the next five years. More than 60 percent have an official sustainability policy, while 25 percent are considering developing one within the next 18 months.

Download results of the Data Center Knowledge survey in full: Renewable Energy and Data Center Services in 2016

While competitive with fossil-fuel-based energy, renewable energy still often comes at a premium. The industry isn’t yet at the level of sophistication where a customer can choose between data center services powered by renewables as an option – and pay accordingly – or regular grid energy that’s theoretically cheaper. Even utilities, save for a few exceptions, don’t have a separate rate structure for renewable energy.

The options for bringing renewable energy directly to data centers today are extremely limited. Like internet giants, Equinix and Switch have committed to buying an amount of renewable energy that’s equivalent to the amount of regular grid energy their data centers in North America consume, but it doesn’t mean all that energy will go directly to their facilities. This is an effective way to bring more renewable generation capacity online, but it does little to reduce data center reliance on whatever fuel mix supplies the grids the facilities are on for both existing and future demand.

If, however, more utilities started offering renewable energy as a separate product, with its own rate – as Duke Energy has done in North Carolina after being lobbied by Google – data center providers would be able to offer the option to their customers, and it would probably be a popular option, even if it meant paying a premium. According to our survey, close to one-quarter of data center customers would “probably” be willing to pay a premium for such a service. Eight percent said they would “definitely” be willing to do so, and 37 percent said “possibly.”

At no additional cost, however, 40 percent said they would “definitely” be more interested in using data center services powered by renewable energy.

As the survey shows, interest in renewable energy among users of third-party data center services is on the rise, and if more utilities and data center providers can find effective ways to offer clean energy to their end users, they will find that there is not only an appetite for it in the market, but also that the appetite is growing.

Download results of the Data Center Knowledge survey in full: Renewable Energy and Data Center Services in 2016

Source: TheWHIR

Most of these regional players are using OpenStack, IDC said in a statement this week. The analysts expect growth in regional cloud providers to continue.

The announcement focuses on one major sector of the cloud market: Infrastructure-as-a-Service. Amazon Web Services continues to dominate it, “followed by a long tail of much smaller service providers.”

The firm forecasts the size of the global IaaS market to more than triple between 2015 and 2020, going from $12.6 billion last year to $43.6 billion four years from now.

This growth is poised to ensure continued growth in demand for data center capacity around the world, as both top cloud providers and smaller regional players expand their infrastructure to support more and more users.

Read more: How Long Will the Cloud Data Center Land Grab Last?

Unlike the early years of cloud, when the majority of the growth was driven by born-on-the-web startups and individual developers, the next phase of growth will be fueled to a large extent by enterprises.

Almost two-thirds of respondents to a recent IDC survey of more than 6,000 IT organizations said they were already using public cloud IaaS or were planning to start using it by the end of this year.

Enterprises are increasingly looking to public cloud services to help them make their businesses more agile, Deepak Mohan, a research director at IDC, said in a statement:

“This is bringing about a shift in IT infrastructure spending, with implications for the incumbent leaders in enterprise infrastructure technologies. Growth of public cloud IaaS has also created new service opportunities around adoption and usage of public cloud resources. With changes at the infrastructure, architectural, and operational layers, public cloud IaaS is slowly transforming the enterprise IT value chain.”

See also: Top Cloud Providers Made $11B on IaaS in 2015, but It’s Only the Beginning

Source: TheWHIR