Bigleaf Expands Cloud Access Network In Dallas

Bigleaf Networks has announced that it is expanding its Cloud Access Network with a fifth gateway Cluster in Dallas, Texas.

By tunneling all customer traffic through the Bigleaf-owned Cloud Access Network, Bigleaf’s patent-pending SD-WAN platform is uniquely able to prioritize and seamlessly failover all applications, including hosted VoIP, Virtual Desktop, Point of Sale, VPNs, and SaaS. Bigleaf hosts its redundant gateway clusters in major Internet peering hubs across North America for optimal performance. With the addition of this Dallas Gateway Cluster, Bigleaf customers will automatically see higher performance to applications hosted in the southern U.S., and Bigleaf customers in the southern U.S. will gain increased performance for all traffic.

“We’re excited to invest in this expansion, and other upgrades coming later this year,” said Bigleaf founder and CEO Joel Mulkey. “Our unique Cloud Access Network gives customers highly-peered connections directly to all of the major cloud providers, so with our service, customers don’t have to struggle with the expense and complexity of private circuits into those cloud networks to get peak performance.”

Bigleaf’s plug-and-play SD-WAN offering is delivered as an SLA-backed 24/7 managed service. Features include:

• Intelligent Load-Balancing across multiple Internet paths from different ISPs
• Dynamic Quality-of-Service (QoS) to prioritize VoIP and other performance-sensitive traffic over commodity Internet
• Same-IP Failover to ensure uninterrupted VoIP and other real-time sessions while moving between ISP circuits
• Transparent outside-the-firewall deployment for easy zero-breach installs
• Real-time intelligence on ISP circuit latency, packet loss, jitter and throughput

Source: CloudStrategyMag

Malaysian Web Hosting Firm Exabytes Acquires HT Internet to Grow Managed Services

Malaysian web hosting provider Exabytes Group has acquired domains and web hosting company HT Internet, Telecompaper reports. The deal will allow Exabytes to branch into e-commerce and offer fully managed website and e-commerce services to its current client base of 75,000 customers and 200,000 websites. Financial details of the acquisition were not disclosed.

Exabytes will take over HT Internet’s Grow, DomainPlus, and other brands, and integrate the company’s team with its own, according to Telecompaper. The companies will share back-end resources, and the HT team will focus on growing the managed services business.

See also: Exabytes Acquires Singapore Cloud Hosting Provider Signetique

WHIR Networking Event Austin Attracts Best of Local Hosting Industry

WHIR Networking Events made its first stop of 2017 in one of our favorite cities: Austin, TX!

The event had a solid turnout and was a great way for attendees to spend a few hours on a Thursday night, mingling with like-minded industry folks and talking shop in a casual environment. Thanks to our sponsors we were able to provide complimentary food and drinks, and give away some fantastic prizes.

Here are the winners:

AWS Outage Shows Dangers of Single-Cloud Reliance

Source: TheWHIR

AWS Takes Down Hundreds of Sites in Massive S3 Outage

Availability issues with the US-EAST-1 region of AWS’ S3 storage service caused downtime or slow performance for many websites on Tuesday.

Affected sites include Airbnb, Business Insider, Chef, Docker, Expedia, Heroku, Mailchimp, News Corp, Pantheon, Pinterest, Slack, and Trello, as well as parts of AWS’ own site, and ironically itsdownrigthnow.com and Down Detector, VentureBeat reports.

AWS acknowledged the issues before 7:30 a.m. Pacific, saying it was investigating. Shortly after 10:30 a.m. Pacific, the company updated the statement on its status page.

Report: Hackers Take Less than 6 Hours on Average to Compromise Targets

Most hackers can compromise a target in less than six hours, according to a survey of hackers and penetration testers released Tuesday by security awareness training firm KnowBe4.

The Black Report was compiled from 70 surveys taken at Black Hat USA and Defcon, and shows that phishing is the preferred method for 40 percent of hackers. A further 43 percent said they sometimes use social engineering, while only 16 percent do not use social engineering at all. Forty percent sometimes use vulnerability scanners, 60 percent use open-source tools, and just over 20 percent use custom tools for hacking.

A majority of those surveyed (53 percent) said they sometimes encounter systems they are unable to crack, while 9 percent say they never do, and 22 percent said they “rarely” encounter such targets. KnowBe4 chief hacking officer Kevin Mitnick performs penetration testing with a separate company (Mitnick Security), with a 100 percent success rate. Mitnick will present the keynote address at the upcoming HostingCon Global 2017 in Los Angeles. [Register now for HostingCon Global and save $100 on your all-access pass]

Unlike big data, IoT may live up to the hype

Big data has long promised more than it delivers, at least for most enterprises. While a shift to cloud pledges to help, big data deployments are still more discussed than realized, with Gartner insisting that only 14 percent of enterprises have gotten Hadoop off the ground.

Will the other darling of the chattering class, IoT (internet of things), meet the same fate? In fact, IoT might deliver, according to new data from Talend compiled in conjunction with O’Reilly. Dubbing 2016 “the year IoT ‘grew up,'” the report declares 2017 the year that “IoT starts to become essential to modern business.”

How and where IoT gets real, however, may surprise you.

The new hyped kid on the block

IoT has been proclaimed the $11 trillion savior of the global economy, which has translated into IoT becoming even bigger than big data, at least in terms of general interest. This Google Trends chart shows IoT surpassing big data in search instances around the middle of last year:

Google Trends

If we get more specific on “big data” and instead use Apache Hadoop, Apache Spark, or MongoDB, all hugely popular big data technologies, the crossover is even more pronounced. IoT has arrived (without its security intact, but why quibble?). Indeed, as the Talend report avers, “[W]hile the buzz around big data is louder, the actual adoption of big data in industry isn’t much larger than the adoption of IoT.”

That’s right: IoT is newer, yet sees nearly as much adoption as big data. In fact, IoT, as the source for incredible amounts of data, could actually be what makes big data real. The question is where.

Betting on boring

The answer to that question, according to the Talend report, which trawled through more than 300TB of live data to glean its insights, is not where the analysts keep insisting:

We found that IoT spending today is for use cases that are much different than those predicted by McKinsey, Gartner, and others. For example, the greatest value/consumer surplus predicted by McKinsey was in factories around predictive maintenance and inventory management, followed by healthcare and smart city–related use cases like public safety and monitoring. While these use cases may be the top producers of surplus in 2025, we do not see much spend on those use cases today. In contrast, home energy and security is low on the McKinsey list, but that’s where the market is today, in addition to defense and retail.

It’s not that the analysts are wrong when they pick out details like industrial automation as incredibly ripe for IoT disruption, so long as we don’t assume “ripe” means “developed to the point of readiness for harvesting or eating.” Given the complexity of introducing significant changes into something like factory automation, such industries most definitely are not “ripe” for IoT. The potential is huge, but so are the pitfalls holding back change.

Home energy and security, by contrast, are relatively straightforward. Or, as the report continues, areas like health care are in desperate need of disruption, but the likes of online patient monitoring “seems 100 times more complex than simple home monitoring or personalized displays for in-store customers.”

Hence, home energy (9 percent) and security (25 percent) accounts for the biggest chunk of IoT deployments in 2016, with defense (14 percent) and retail (11 percent) also significant. Health care? A mere 4 percent.

Given that regulation and complexity are inimical to real-world IoT adoption, it’s perhaps not surprising that unlike big data, which is mostly a big company phenomenon, IoT shows “more continuous adoption … across large and small companies.” As such, IoT deployments are more evenly spread across geographies, rather than following big data’s concentration on the coasts.

In sum, IoT could well end up being a truly democratizing trend, a “bottom-up” approach to innovation.

Source: InfoWorld Big Data

Webair Partners With Data Storage Corporation

Webair has announced a partnership with Data Storage Corporation to enhance its high availability (HA) Disaster Recovery and overall support capabilities for IBM Power Systems (iSeries, AS/400, AIX) environments. The demand for Webair’s Disaster Recovery-as-a-Service (DRaaS) solution has grown exponentially over recent years, and the addition of IBM Power Systems support positions it for even further expansion.

Many companies require both x86 and IBM Power Systems platforms to run mission-critical applications, making disaster recovery critical to these environments. The partnership between Webair and Data Storage Corporation provides x86 and IBM Power Systems users with:

• Recovery point objectives (RPO) and recovery time objectives (RTO) of one hour, including continuous replication, network automation and orchestration
• Seventy-two hours of monthly recovery site usage before incurring additional fees
• Fully managed quarterly recovery site testing with attestation report
• Per-IP failover, public BGP failover, DNS failover, L2 stretch, and VPN(s)
• One week of checkpoints
• Recovery site network architecture customization to enable customer infrastructure integration
• The ability to replicate data to any Webair DR location, including U.S. East and West Coasts, Canada, Europe, and Asia. 

Through this new partnership, Webair now also offers customers fully managed IBM Power Systems solutions and services backed by a premier IBM Managed Services Provider.

“Webair’s strategic partnership with Data Storage Corporation broadens our Disaster Recovery support capabilities,” explains Michael Christopher Orza, CEO of Webair. “While most providers only offer a limited range of services encompassing specific operating systems and workloads, this partnership delivers a true DRaaS solution that is customized to mirror customers’ specific production environments and supports both state-of-the-art and legacy platforms.”

Webair customers can also take advantage of ancillary services available at its data centers as part of their larger DRaaS solutions, including public and private cloud infrastructure, snapshot-based storage replication, colocation, authoritative DNS, third-party cloud connectivity, Backups-as-a-Service, network connectivity, and Seeding. These services are fully managed and can be tied directly into DRaaS infrastructure via private and secure cross-connects.

“I am excited about the Data Storage Corporation / Webair partnership and the opportunities it will provide to both companies as our services are in high demand across all markets and industries with tremendous growth forecasted,” says Hal Schwartz, President DSC.  “Because of this partnership, the combined teams can now provide first-class management and technical support, allowing them to deliver and fully manage cloud, hybrid cloud and cloud backup solutions with the highest confidence and service levels.”

Source: CloudStrategyMag

Dimension Data Launches Managed Cloud Service For Microsoft

Dimension Data has announced the availability of its Managed Cloud Services for Microsoft. The new offering provides organizations with a cloud-based managed service for Microsoft Exchange, SharePoint, Skype for Business, and Office 365, whether deployed in the public cloud, on premises, in a private cloud or as a hybrid model. Combined with its planning and deployment services, Dimension Data is now able to provide its clients with a complete end-to-end managed service, with the added benefits of meeting client-specific security and compliance.

Based on statistics presented during Microsoft’s 2016 Q3 earnings call, there were over 70 million commercial Microsoft Office 365 monthly active users. In addition, *Microsoft Office 365 is one of the fastest growing areas of technology in the enterprise sector today.

According to Tony Walt, group executive of Dimension Data’s end-user computing business, for these productivity solutions to be effective in an enterprise environment, they need to be managed and supported. However, managing the administrative complexity, while at the same time extracting the full value from each of the applications, is a challenge for CIOs and enterprises today.

“With the feature-rich cloud productivity suite of applications increasingly becoming the foundation for organizations transitioning to a digital business, Dimension Data’s Managed Cloud Services for Microsoft and the software-as-a-service Cloud Control management platform is a game changer. It is revolutionizing the automation and management of enterprise Microsoft messaging and collaboration.  Managed Cloud Services for Microsoft provides the services and technology you need to plan, deploy and manage your Microsoft messaging and collaboration suite, ensuring that the complexity inherent in an integrated environment is seamlessly addressed, while also guaranteeing you have the flexibility to grow and adapt to the migration to cloud,” says Walt.

Managed Cloud Services for Microsoft is a solution that manages the automation and management of enterprise Microsoft messaging and collaboration applications. Cloud Control™, Dimension Data’s administrative platform and portal enables help desk representatives to perform tasks to resolve issues that would normally require escalation to second or third level administrators, delivering reduced costs and ensuring customer satisfaction.

Managed Cloud Services for Microsoft builds on Dimension Data’s expertise with Microsoft’s productivity solutions, with the company having deployed more than one million seats of Office 365 globally, over 1.5 million seats of Exchange on-premise, and another two million cloud-based Exchange seats. Dimension Data has also completed more than 400 SharePoint projects and over 500 Skype for Business projects globally.

“We have combined more than 25 years of expertise in delivering Microsoft solutions and managed services with our own intellectual property and management tools,” said Phil Aldrich, director of end-user computing, Dimension Data. “Managed Cloud Services for Microsoft provides our clients with the best of both worlds, delivering enterprise performance and management for their Microsoft workloads with the flexibility and scalability of cloud.”

The service is being rolled out globally to address the needs of Dimension Data’s worldwide client base.

Source: CloudStrategyMag

Report: Nearly One-Third Of Consumers Aren’t Aware They Use The Cloud

There is confusion over what qualifies as ‘the cloud,’ according to a new consumer survey. Despite marking that they use at least one of several popular cloud-based applications, such as Google Drive, Dropbox or Microsoft OneDrive, over 30% of consumers subsequently responded that they do not use or access information in the cloud. Clutch designed the survey to gauge consumers’ knowledge and habits regarding cloud usage.

When it comes to understanding which applications are part of the cloud, experts say that the confusion is understandable.

“From private cloud, managed private cloud, to in-house and public cloud, there are many different technologies which can be referred to as cloud, but are very general,” said Alexander Martin-Bale, director of Cloud and Data Platforms at adaware, an anti-spyware and anti-virus software program. “The reality is that knowing exactly when you’re using it, even for a technical professional, is not always simple.”

Over half of the respondents (55%) say they are “very” or “somewhat” confident in their cloud knowledge. However, 22% of respondents who do consider themselves very confident in their cloud knowledge did not know or were unsure about whether or not they use the cloud.

Lucas Roh, CEO at Bigstep, says this is likely due to the overuse of the cloud as a buzzword. “It boils down to the fact that the word ‘cloud’ has been used everywhere in the press,” he said. “People have heard about it, and think that they conceptually know how it works, even if they don’t… They’re only thinking in terms of the application being used, not the actual technology behind those applications.”

When it comes to the security of the cloud, 42% of respondents believe the responsibility falls equally on the cloud provider and user.

Chris Steffen, technical director at Cryptzone, says there has been a shift in how people view the security of the cloud. “I think the dynamic is changing along with the information security paradigm,” said Steffen. “People are realizing ­— ‘Hey, maybe I do need to change my password every five years,’ or something similar. You can’t expect everything to be secure forever.”

Based on the findings, Clutch recommends that consumers seek more education on cloud computing, as well as implement simple additional security measures, such as two-factor authentication.

These and other security measures are increasingly important as the cloud becomes more ubiquitous. “The cloud is not going anywhere. If anything, it’s going to become more and more an integral part of the stuff that we do every single day, whether we know that we’re using it or not,” said Steffen.

Clutch surveyed 1,001 respondents across the United States. All respondents indicated that they use one of the following applications: iCloud, Google Drive, Dropbox, Box, Microsoft OneDrive, iDrive, and Amazon Cloud Drive.

Source: CloudStrategyMag