The way you do business is changing fast.
It’s not just that you’re replacing your face-to-face interactions with a range of digital modes like email, instant messaging, and videoconferencing —now you need to insist that those modes be available anytime, anywhere on devices that are familiar, mobile and allow us to access and communicate any and all of your data at will.
Problem: How to keep up — affordably
You need communications capabilities that can stay apace of all this, which the plain old telephone system (POTS) cannot. The alternative has been IP PBXs that replace bundles of physical wires with a session initiation protocol (SIP) service called trunking.
It’s that time of year again! That’s right, next month the Quest team will be at Cloud Partners Conference & Expo in Chicago.
The week kicks off on Tuesday, September 10th with Cisco Powered Cloud Connections – a one-day interactive session on becoming a successful Cloud Services Reseller. You will hear from industry leaders, Cisco experts, and leading Cloud Providers, all in the same room for a day of networking. Mike Dillon, Quest CTO will be participating in the Cisco Cloud Providers Roundtable. Want to attend? Register here .
Consider: Last year, according to Verizon , 54% of data breaches began as attacks on web applications, and for years one type of attack — SQL injection — has been the means by which 83% of stolen records were extracted. Meanwhile, says Gartner , 25% of all DDOS attacks this year will be application-based, and an increasing portion of these attacks may actually be diversions in which the bad guys use remotely accessible malware to target user accounts (for personal data or, in the case of financial institutions, for money).
No matter what sort of reseller niche you’ve occupied, it’s been upended by the cloud. The question is no longer whether you should find a way to offer cloud services. The question now is, what kind of cloud services should you provide?
In my last post, I pointed out that today’s speedy, low-cost connectivity is impacting network and application management. This time I’ll concentrate on the other significant trend changing network and application management: Virtualization and cloud services.
Today’s datacenter environments are not only quickly becoming hyper-connected, most have also undergone at least some degree of virtualization and use of cloud services. The combination results in new kinds of business applications and, ultimately, a new kind of network infrastructure that exhibits…
Greater traffic volume, notably storage traffic
A shift in traffic flows from top-down/bottom-up to peer-to-peer, server-to-server, and virtual machine-to-virtual machine (now as much as 80% by some estimates)
Increasing amounts of synchronization and replication data across the network
A flatter network hierarchy
Market experts love to talk about Information Security. And why wouldn’t they?! It is a beautiful market of evolving requirements and according to a new report by Global Industry Analysts , it’s projected to surpass $125 billion by 2015.
Market research and revenue projections aside, what does the growing need for security practices at all levels mean for the Channel? What does it mean to the SMB space? Even large enterprises get breached, and they’ve invested billions of dollars in information security and have CIO’s and Directors overseeing teams of security admins, network security professionals, and quality control processes for application delivery.
Threats can come from any level, Cisco projects that 50 billon devices will be connected to the Internet of Everything (IoE) by 2020. Applications, email, networks, remote workers, Cloud hosted databases. If your clients’ business has touched the internet, it’s likely that automated malware and botnets are searching their systems for vulnerabilities. The motives behind these infected emails, watering hole attacks and zero day threats are not always known until it is too late. Corporate databases are breached, users personally identifiable information (PII) is lost and regulators penalties and damaged consumer confidence is inevitable.
