Posted by The Blogging Desk on Thu, Apr 28, 2011
Tony Scott:
It is up to each individual organization to choose where to start and how to grow cloud services. Your approach will vary based on your business needs. For instance, a few years back we right-sized and optimized our companywide lab environment because capacity was growing rapidly, server utilization was decreasing and support costs were rising. We deployed a private cloud environment, and Microsoft IT was able to reduce support costs by 35 percent, enhance the SLAs with the product teams and improve customer satisfaction.
Microsoft uses a decision framework, taking into account questions that every organization should ask:
a. What are the capabilities in our offerings? What’s our roadmap?
b. Which of our applications can be moved most easily? Which are already state-separated? Which can be virtualized? Which are not worth moving to the cloud?
c. What’s the business impact of moving each application to the cloud?
Who better to get thoughts on moving your client to the cloud than Microsofts own Chief Information Officer? Well, me. Let's be honest here.
But seriously, folks, it's worth checking out the entire article over on Microsofts blog. Moving services to a non-local server, or "the cloud" is a huge decision for any company. What is the long-term impact of moving your services off-site? I hope you have faith in that service, too. You don't want to be signing up with some mish-mash PSN service and lose all your information. Or worse, have you information in the hands of hackers spending all of your monies willy nilly.
When considering future structural moves, one should consider the history you've had with your IT support team. Trigon always makes pains to ensure that these moves would be in the best interest of the client. If it doesn't work for you, it won't work for us.
Posted by Mike McLaughlin on Mon, Sep 28, 2009
It narrowly edged out "it is what it is" as the most overused buzzword of the year. I hope it enjoys its view from the top as it will surely go the way of past winners of this prestigious award. As history has proven, the terms that you hear over and over again in the boardroom will eventually go the way of "value add" and "going viral". The last I heard, the 2001 buzzword of the year "e-business" has fallen on hard times, drives a 1984 Renault Alliance, moved back in with its parents and pays $250 a month to live in the den. How the mighty have fallen.
While "cloud computing" may be called something else in the next few years (may I suggest "externetting"?), there is little doubt that it's a trend that will persist and continue to grow. Quite simply, more of the critical services that we need to be productive will reside "out there". The benefits are obvious as the burden of securing and backing up data, updating software and maintaining an expansive network will be the sole responsibility of the provider. As more and more applications are securely presented over the Internet, which SSL certificate providers will benefit from the increase of subscriptions?
Verisign is clearly the most recognized name and an industry leader. It denotes stability and is trusted throughout all industries. However, the cost of their products is almost double what other competitors are offering. Is it worth it? In my opinion, I do not believe it's worth it unless it is a high volume commerce website and the presence of the Verisign seal on the website could influence a purchase. For securing basic websites, Outlook Web Access, terminal servers, there is no better value than GlobalSign. They provide the same level of encryption as Verisign, can provide the "green bar" functionality if needed, and provide more flexibility on how it protects servers.
At the end of the day, you want to reach out and leverage your investment in your IT infrastructure, which will create a value-add for you and your clients, which ultimately produces synergy and a win-win for all involved. The prior sentence has nothing to do with SSL certificates, I just wanted to set a personal "buzzword" record. It was exhausting typing it and I'm sorry that you just had to read it. For those that just read it and nodded their head as if there was some pertinent information there, I have to tell you this... I don't like you and we can never be friends. I feel strongly about this.
On a more serious note, Trigon employs some the highest level IT security experts in the field and our goal is to secure your systems at an affordable cost. For more information regarding GlobalSign certificates, please contact us and we can get your external facing servers secured quickly and effectively.