It is that time of year again. The seasons are changing, the days are getting shorter and the end of the year is fast approaching. Customers are wrapping up projects, closing out budgets and starting to plan operations for the New Year. Procurement decisions have been made and the project cycle will continue into the winter.
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 .
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?
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.
Thus far, much of cloud computing has been “coin-operated”. Put in your quarter and out comes X amount of real-time data storage or Y period of email service, forms analysis, payroll processing, etc. The payoff: An affordable OpEx transaction that instantly delivers. So easy, so hassle-free — as long as you “fit in the box” of offerings available from the Cloud Provider
Ideas are cheap, the ability to execute is priceless. Nowhere else in technology is this more apparent than in the delivery of virtual desktops. Why you ask? Because virtual desktops put DaaS providers, their partners, and clients internal IT, directly in the crosshairs of the end users and their expectations. The margin for error is razor thin. If the end user cannot easily access their virtual desktop and work from their preferred device — the best laid plans, and cost benefits for leveraging virtualization at the desktop level are meaningless.
Implementing Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) is not an easy endeavor. Many CIO’s and IT staff have been “restructured”, due to costly mistakes. There are big rewards for those who can successfully deliver DaaS and VDI offerings to the market. And as with anything worth doing there are going to be challenges and risks, especially for those looking for a simple transaction.
