So, what’s not to like?

Who Are You Writing For?

Unless you control the platform, you’re working for someone else. It’s a great pitch: we’ll give you an awesome publishing platform and all you have to do is to fill it with content; we won’t charge you a dime.

Except, if you’re a professional creative, the content you create is your living. If you write for a free platform, you’re no longer writing for yourself: you’re working to build an audience for the platform’s owners.

It’s No Longer Your Audience

If you self-host a site, you have access to a huge amount of information about your audience. That information is valuable. Even if you don’t intend to monetize your blog with advertising, knowing where your audience comes from, what they are reading, what they love, what they hate, and what they think are all valuable for a creative looking to carve out a niche and establish themselves as a professional.

With a self-hosted site, you own the platform. The audience and the community you build is the pay-off for the work that you put in.

Limited Monetization Potential

“Free” platforms will have to make money somehow. In the short-term they can coast on VC cash and good will, but platforms are incredibly expensive to build. Eventually most platforms are going to start monetizing their users — the ones that your content is helping to attract. That puts the interests of the platforms and its content creators at odds. If there’s value in a platform, it’s going to be extracted by the owners of the platform, which leaves content creators with an audience but not much else.

Your Brand Is Not Under Your Control

Personal branding is an infelicitous term, but the truth that lies behind it is that to be heard, creatives have to craft a voice that speaks to an audience. There are a huge number of factors that can contribute to shaping that voice, including design, dialogue, promotional opportunities, partnerships with community members, and analytics data.

With a self-hosted site, a writer, photographer, or designer has complete control over their personal brand. A self-hosted site acts as a central hub — a personal platform — that is closely identified with the personal brand of its owner.

If you just want to throw up the occasional article or you want to gain exposure, free publishing platforms are a great way to scratch the creative itch or drive traffic to a self-hosted site, but, relying on those platforms exclusively prevents content creators from building the dedicated audiences they need to make the most of their work.

About the Author

Graeme Caldwell works as an inbound marketer for Nexcess, a leading provider of Magento and WordPress hosting. Follow Nexcess on Twitter at @nexcess, Like them on Facebook and check out their tech/hosting blog, https://blog.nexcess.net/.

Source: TheWHIR

At this point, anything goes. Scotland wants to stay in the EU even if it means leaving the UK and standing on its own; similar voices are coming from North Ireland. To make matters worse many people who voted to leave now want to reverse their votes. In fact, there are over three million petitions already signed to hold a new referendum over the same decision. David Cameron (current UK Prime Minister) said that as an advocate of the “stay camp” he no longer feels he is the right person to lead UK into a future outside of the European Union and announced his resignation.

The UK government still has a way out of the decision to leave Europe and the coming days/weeks/months will determine what will actually happen. Right now anything is possible as there is no legally binding obligation just yet. While the EU heads are getting impatient already and want some clarity on final UK’s decision, the country has been put before a life-altering decision. From the possibility of splitting UK and going from Great Britain to Little England and possible repercussions from the EU side limiting UK’s ability to trade with the “continent” as a show of strength and a lesson for any other EU members entertaining similar idea of bailing, to losing powerful seat at the EU council, the consequences behind UK’s final decision could be felt by more than one generation.

Threats of sudden changes to UK government, splitting the country, and the possibility of having less than favorable position to trade with the European Union (which accounts for 16.5 percent of the world’s imports and exports) has had immediate impact on global markets as it brought uncertainty not just to UK, but also to the EU altogether. Such fears of financial and political uncertainty has sent a shockwave across financial markets dropping British Pound exchange rates to a 30 year low and increased volatility on global stock exchanges. Several credit rating agencies stripped the EU from its AAA ratings due to “weakened predictability, stability, and effectiveness of UK policymaking”.

Europe

Does whether Brexit will happen or not make Europe less attractive as a single market? I don’t believe it does. Although UK is a significant player within the EU it’s just one of the 28 countries which make up the EU; there are other countries like Switzerland and Norway which have free trade agreements with the EU. Europe and the United States have very similar GDP, around €18.9 trillion for the EU and €18.3 trillion for the U.S. at the end of 2015. So while a British exit would impact these numbers it will not make nor break Europe’s attractiveness as a single trading market next to the U.S. or China. Europe is and will remain a very attractive market to foreign businesses looking for exponential growth outside of their current geographical region because access to any large single market is key for an “easy” international expansion.

Companies that want to expand to Europe need to understand that Europe’s resiliency is not built on a single country, and while businesses that opted to HQ in UK might face some unexpected challenges, there are way more than one way to shine a penny. While even the shadow of a Brexit brought a scare to the financial markets, business in Europe will continue as usual even in the somewhat unusual circumstances.

Lessons learned

Some UK citizens are learning some new facts after they have already cast their votes and came to new conclusions. Looking from technological perspective businesses do not need to take the hard way nor do they need to learn everything from their own mistakes. Trading in regional and global economy for a lot of companies has become a digital business and while some businesses try to change and adapt to the digitalization era others undergo transformations and take lead.

Agility is key in today’s shifting markets and understanding technological solutions in order to leverage them for competitive advantage is more important than ever because business environments change continuously; from different customer needs to behavioral patterns and commoditized technology access allowing market disruptions on a whim.

Companies that already operate internationally or have global ambitions need to focus on what’s important for their core business and limit their risks through partnerships. Although this is not possible for all companies or verticals no company should be investing into technology that is not their core business and is already globally available as commodity.

Whether accessing Europe or the U.S. markets from abroad finding partners that can support your business locally limits your risks and lowers your investments, not to mention that it makes you a lot more resistant to some of the hazards like regulatory changes. This rings especially true for tech companies which tend to operate internationally and just recently had to deal with the invalidation of Safe Harbor agreement. The Brexit scenario will add further to the confusion and will certainly not make matters any easier in short or mid-term perspective.

Yet despite all these obstacles the internet and cloud industry growth has been skyrocketing and even in uncertain times the prediction is that businesses will spend slightly less on Information Technology (IT) this year, we are still talking about a $3.49 trillion market for 2016, according to Gartners forecasts, with $22.4 billion going this year into IaaS expenditures.

After all changing a data center or cloud services location when it’s being used as a service is relatively “easy”, rather than having to pack-up, migrate and sell off facilities. Partnership with IaaS and Managed Services Providers (MSPs) is a way to avoid many predicaments from technology, legal, and market perspectives. Companies that offer IT as a service in general are much more versatile in dealing with local regulatory challenges.

Business as usual

The results of the UK’s referendum were rather unexpected and while Brexit is not a fact yet, it is clear that even a threat of a threat can have a massive impact on the markets and that business environment can literally change overnight. There is nothing that businesses fear more than uncertainty and lack of stability.

There is a lesson to be learned here over the design for failure. Being at the very least somewhat ready for sudden market shifts and political changes impacting trade and economic stability is an important part of becoming future-proof and should be incorporated into every company strategy. In the digital era and information driven economy this is much easier than ever before. Leveraging access to Infrastructure-as-a-Service, Software-as-a-Service, Network-as-a-Service, and in general commoditized IT is a part of becoming agile as a company.

Bottom line: uncertainty and change is a part of life and business (now more than ever) and even though you cannot foresee everything nor avoid all risks you can certainly plan for uncertainty and unexpected changes by staying lean, mean, and agile as a business. In order to achieve that find a trustworthy and experienced partner who will assist you in your business ventures.

As the English would say, “Keep Calm and Carry On” …just make sure to do your due diligence.

About the Author
Martin Wielomski is a Manager of Business Development for the EMEA region for PhoenixNAP Global IT Services. He has years of experience in the Information Technology and Hosting industries and specializes in strategy development and international business, sales leadership and product management. He also writes for several international IT oriented magazines and blogs and advises about technology, management, customer relations, sales and international business expansion while leveraging human connection potential in his corporate strategies. Martin believes in lifelong learning and leadership through engagement, while maintaining realistic and down to earth people approach. He can be reached at: linkedin.com/in/martinwielomski

Source: TheWHIR

There are five security advantages these new micro-segmentation offerings provide to the cloud that haven’t previously been obtainable:

1. New micro-segmentation offerings enable companies to use a consistent set of tools for both their local data centers and the cloud. In the past, security administrators and operators have had to use different security tools for their local data centers and each cloud service provider. This meant the security roles and policies within their companies had to be mapped and maintained across multiple data centers (private and public) and different toolsets – a very complex and costly undertaking. Contemporary micro-segmentation tools work within a company’s local data center and across leading cloud service providers’ data centers, greatly simplifying operations and reducing costs.
2. New micro-segmentation technologies provide encryption within the cloud from virtual machine to virtual machine. Traditionally, it was believed that data was secure enough once within the security protection provided by the perimeter of the public data center. New micro-segmentation technologies now encrypt data between the virtual computing instances within the cloud for each company and user community. This encrypted added layer of security is a major step forward for protecting the most sensitive data in the cloud.
3. New micro-segmentation technologies use concealment as a basis for security strategy. Traditional security offerings have used a fortress strategy in which they build a wall around the data they are trying to protect, but still leave the processing environment visible to cybercriminals. New micro-segmentation offerings conceal the applications and data on the cloud to the point where it doesn’t appear like anything is active. Cybercriminals aren’t seeing information such as active IP addresses, operating system types or other information that would provide insight as to how to attack a company’s data. The cybercriminals are not aware of the applications and data in the cloud, and therefore it is not a target.
4. Micro-segmentation prevents lateral movement of security infiltrations to the data center. A key concern of the cloud is that a company’s data may be compromised because “the other guy” on the cloud didn’t take the appropriate precautions. Micro-segmentation protects cloud users from “the other guy.” Each company’s cloud processing environment is isolated and secure. Malware and cybercriminals are bounded by any given segment, and this makes all users of the cloud more secure.
5. Micro-segmentation can prevent security breaches in the cloud. A security breach occurs only when a company’s data leaves the cloud, not when the actual security infiltration occurs. New micro-segmentation capabilities contain threat intelligence that recognizes abnormalities and invoke policies to prevent data from leaving the cloud where these inconsistencies occur until the appropriate security analysis can be applied.

The cloud has never been more secure and micro-segmentation takes cloud security to amazing to new levels, so that enterprises can fully realize the benefits of the cloud even for their most critical and sensitive data.

About the Author

Rod Sapp, Global Vice President, Security and Cloud Product Management, Unisys

Rod Sapp manages the Unisys products portfolios including Enterprise Servers, storage, security products and cloud products.

Rod and his team are responsible for business planning, server portfolio definition, partner selection & management, and product launch and lifecycle management.

Rod’s organization collaborates extensively with Unisys sales channels and clients as well as Unisys engineering and services organizations to develop market-leading whole product solutions. Rod’s organization works closely with Unisys strategic technology partners including Dell, IBM, EMC, Oracle, VCE, Intel and Microsoft.

Rod’s background includes ten years of sales experience and twenty years of product and portfolio management that has included the Unisys ClearPath mainframe servers and more recently comprises the Unisys X86 business, storage offerings and software products.

Source: TheWHIR

Whereas an attacker needs to find some way to access your network, a malicious employee’s already inside. From the beginning, they’re operating from within your firewall, from within every line of defense designed to prevent a data breach. Not only does this make them significantly more difficult to stop, it also means they can cause far more damage if left unchecked.

So what can you do, exactly? How can you prevent an insider from wreaking havoc within your security perimeter?

First, understand their motivations

The motive behind a malicious insider’s actions often boil down to one of two things: either they’re acting on some frustration or grievance with their company, or they’re motivated purely by financial gain. The good news is that the former can be mitigated through good management techniques. After all, an employee won’t generally have reason to cause harm to their company if they love their job, right?

Of course, understanding’s only the first step. You aren’t really going to be able to do much to satisfy an employee that’s angry about being laid off, nor can you really stop a greedy insider threat with kind words and good management. In order to actually protect your data, you’ll need to take things a little further.

Second, implement strict access controls

Too often, I see enterprises that seemingly take a communal approach to file security. That is to say, everyone has access to everything – even a lowly desk jockey in accounting is able to log in to a file repository containing their business’s most sensitive data. Simply put, this is unacceptable – an employee should only be able to access a particular file or repository if it’s directly related to their work.

Otherwise, they need to be locked out.

Third, utilize document-centric security

Now, even access controls won’t always stop an employee if they’re aware of a particular security hole or glitch. That’s where document control comes in. If you protect all of your sensitive files with a solution that lets you control how, when, and where they’re accessed, then it won’t matter if a malicious insider releases them into the wild – you can just flick a switch and they’ll be unusable.

Finally, be proactive

Last but certainly, always make sure you stay abreast of the latest vulnerabilities, and remove access permissions from employees that no longer work for you. A disgruntled former IT professional might be aware of an unpatched vulnerability that they can exploit to access your network – it falls to you to keep that from happening. Active prevention offers more protection than even the most hardened firewall.

About the Author

Max Emelianov started HostForWeb in 2001. In his role as HostForWeb’s CEO, he focuses on teamwork and providing the best support for his customers while delivering cutting-edge web hosting services.

HostForWeb Facebook

HostForWeb Twitter

Source: TheWHIR

Whether you are in a technology company or are dependent on technology to operate, you will leverage IT resources differently. Some may argue that nowadays almost all companies are tech companies. That is certainly true to some extent, but I want to make sure that we make a clear distinction between technology being someone’s core business or whether it’s being used to support their core business in order to make the right decisions when building future proof companies.

As technology development keeps progressing and leaving no market untouched by its impact, enterprises deal not only with challenges from the adoption side of new technologies and access to qualified tech staff, but at the same time, the growing amounts of data they are collecting and analyzing. This, along with ever-changing data governance and/or lawmaking is putting a strain on budgets and the ability to execute business strategies. To make matters worse, there are continuously more external threats in the form of existing competitors and new companies (often startups) which are small, agile and have the ability to disrupt even the biggest corporate goliaths by having access to commoditized technology on a whim. Additionally fueling this fire, there are security threats looming on every corner and Shadow IT treading on IT departments budgets from within.

Business Success
So how do you stay sane in this unstable and consistently changing business environment we operate in today? The answer is simple: financial agility! You need to stay lean and mean and always have the ability to respond quickly to new challenges and market moves while keeping your eye on the prize (long term strategy goals).

The only way to achieve this is to let business and information technology departments play nicely and understand common goals.

Are you seeking answers on how to apply the right technology to stay on top of your business? How to solve business and technology challenges and how to course correct by adopting or phasing out IT solutions? Need to do this while staying within budget and not breaking the bank? Do you want to understand how virtualization, containerization, storage and data availability married with the right mix of connectivity and auxiliary IT services can impact your business goals on a local and global scale?

To find answers to these questions, visit HostingCon Global 2016 in New Orleans and attend Martin and William’s session on Tuesday, July 26, 2016: 1:30 PM – 2:20 PM, titled: “Technology & Business: The Frenemies”.

Lear about topics such as:

· access to capital
· limiting operating costs
· responding quickly to market needs with technology
· dealing with quick paced growth or deceleration
· accessing local and global markets physically and technically
· staying online and available or data accessibility guarantees
· allocating resources for core business activities and improving technical efficiency by doing more with less and on demand

Knowledge is power so make sure to see us there, power-up and muscle out a bigger piece of your markets pie! Become future proof now!

This article is brought to you by HostingCon, the Cloud and Service Provider Ecosystem event. Join us in New Orleans, Louisiana July 24-27, 2016 to hear Martin and other thought leaders talk about issues and trends in the cloud, hosting and service provider ecosystem.

Source: TheWHIR