Cloud Hosting

In today's uncertain landscape, many entrepreneurs and managers think that to future-proof their businesses, they need to overhaul their cloud migration since the rest of the market is already doing it. Although it is important to keep the information technology (IT) infrastructure as modern as possible, the large investment it entails can have significant implications on other crucial parts of the organization. As such, before investing totally in cloud migration, businesses should have a roadmap that shows how they will benefit from the move.

Michael Bathon, vice president of cloud services at Rimini Street, discusses with The Manila Times the pertinent issues businesses should focus on in developing a cloud-based roadmap tailor-fit to address an organization's unique and specific needs.

The Manila Times (TMT): The pandemic has pushed migration to the cloud across industries around the world. We're interested to know that while it's a very positive development, does it follow that most businesses must upgrade to best-of-breed systems as soon as possible?

Michael Bathon (MBa): I have to say "everybody else is doing it" isn't a sufficient reason for any business to make the jump entirely to the public cloud. At the same time, as your infrastructure requirements and costs continue to grow over time, you will have fewer resources that can be directed toward innovative projects.

If your competition is enhancing its security and disaster recovery posture while reducing digital infrastructure costs per unit, you risk setting yourself up for failure down the road. Overhauling your IT infrastructure is daunting to be sure; anytime you make a large investment in an area that touches just about every corner of the business, the overall implications can be high.

But that is the key point - not every business needs a complete overhaul. Cloud migration should come only after you build a business roadmap that shows how your organization will benefit from the move.

TMT: You're talking about a roadmap for cloud migration. That can only mean, first of all, priorities to ensure your journey to the cloud is secure and will bring the business to the desired destination. What would be your guideposts in developing such a roadmap?

MBa: One of the first and most obvious things cloud migration does for your business is free up your workforce. With fewer servers and/or data centers to run, your talent can focus on new and "cool" initiatives that help drive your core business forward. Instead of using resources to maintain systems, you enable teams to perform more valuable and rewarding work and help improve morale across the organization.

Making the move to a public cloud provider also allows businesses to secure talent. The reality is, if you're not looking at the cloud now, members of your IT team might leave because really, nobody wants to work for an organization that is solely based on antiquated systems, with no sight of modernization on the horizon.

Finally, a cloud roadmap allows your IT team to shift their focus back to your business. How much time does your IT team spend running hardware? And is it really driving new business? What if you could turn on its head so the team could focus on something new? It's certainly more attractive to both business leaders and those in the trenches to work on innovative projects rather than maintaining ageing systems.

TMT: We understand the "people first" concept in successfully running any enterprise. What else should a cloud migration roadmap entail, especially for those just starting out?

(MBa): If you look at the current IT processes, you have testing, support, and anything else you can think of and migrating them as-is to the cloud probably won't work the way you envision because it's a different paradigm.

I strongly encourage teams that are new to the cloud to do a readiness assessment to determine which processes are (or are not) "cloud ready." Once your core data, whether HR data, customer data, client supply chain data in the cloud, you can start consuming cloud-based tools that allow you to unlock the real value of your data.

An overlooked reality is very few, if any business, have migrated to 100 percent cloud-based infrastructures. On the flip side, it also rarely makes sense to invest in the most current enterprise resource planning on the market (and the associated support costs that come with it).

The cloud is inevitable, and what a cloud rollout looks like for your business will likely differ from that of other organizations, but at the end of the day, the key question is this: Would you rather spend time supporting your existing applications and/or implementing new backup software in order, or do you want to build in a level of flexibility that will help you grow and, ultimately, future-proof your business?

Rimini Street is the leading third-party support provider for Oracle and systems applications software products and a Salesforce partner.

Read the rest here:
Building a resilient cloud-based business - The Manila Times

When lockdown began, all industries suffered, but some were impacted even more than others. Much like travel and tourism, the transport industry in general and the cross-country passenger bus services in particular struggled to survive. Having been unable to operate at all for a period, this meant their customers and the need to keep them happy became even more important, because these businesses certainly wanted their clients to return in droves once the lockdown ended.

The forward-thinking ones have been investing in customer-facing applications as well as internal IT workloads, such as their core platform for information management, online ticketing, storage, analytics and other services.

Stone He, President, Huawei Cloud (Southern Africa), points out it is no surprise to discover that these companies are determined to continuously improve their end-user experience and provide travellers with more real-time information.

A critical foundation for doing so is cloud computing, which is why an increasing number were already shifting to the cloud even before the pandemic struck. During lockdown, cloud proved critical in making sure their business and production systems could continue to run without any impact, he says.

These organisations prioritised the development and consolidation of hybrid workloads, not only for the customer-facing systems, but also for their internal IT systems. Many are now searching for more agile, resilient and cost-effective cloud services to replace their current service providers or eliminate the need to host their own data centres.

Another key advantage of the cloud is that it helps them overcome scalability challenges related to the processing and analysis of their data, he adds. For businesses that deal with multiple national routes, thousands of passengers and any number of destinations, the sheer volume of data that needs to be processed is enormous.

This is why these entities need a world-class cloud provider that offers local hosting and more cost-efficient solutions to support their businesses.

Some key challenges a move to a locally hosted, international cloud provider can help to solve, adds He, include: significant cost reductions; access to local support services and a dedicated local cloud team; and a reduction in operational complexity.

It goes without saying that any such move would require a seamless migration, since these businesses like in most other sectors simply cannot afford to have their production workloads go down during a migration.

Asked what sort of benefits such businesses would glean from a move to a locally sited cloud data centre, He suggests it would enable access to real-time travel status updates and the opportunity to suggest alternative routes if things do go awry. Most vitally, it would allow head office to easily communicate with staff on the ground, who would have a full view of the situation. Furthermore, they can leverage the cloud to provide greater safety, thanks to real-time vehicle diagnostics, not to mention keeping track of passenger counts and, ultimately, being able to effectively deploy resources when responding to the needs of the business.

The days of maintaining and replacing on-premises servers at Intercape are over and the decision to move our production servers to cloud was made in March 2020," says Karl Rosch, IT Manager at Intercape. He continued: After investigating various platforms, the decision was made to move to Huawei Cloud and the cost and reliability of Huawei Cloud made it a very attractive offering."

Rosch also found that the transition to Huawei Cloud was seamless with the local support from a Huawei engineer who assisted with the set-up and migration project. After more than a year on the Huawei platform, the uptime has been excellent and support from the Huawei team has been outstanding, said Rosch.

The transnational transport sector is already being impacted by new disruptors like Uber, albeit that these are not direct competition yet, but these companies still need to offer the flexibility that customers exposed to ride-sharing apps have come to expect. This means a move away from the rigid approaches to timetables and scheduling of the past. The flexibility and scalability of the cloud will be a huge benefit with regard to how they manage their operations and approach their customers moving forward, explains He. Whats more, only the cloud can provide a genuine foundation to ensure easy adoption of future technology advances, particularly around machine learning and the Internet of things. Thanks to the cloud, these digital technologies can be quickly deployed, enabling these organisations to not only keep their future innovations on track, but also any potential disruptors at bay, He concluded.

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Travelling to the cloud - ITWeb

Applications and databases play vital roles for organizations hosting services and consumers accessing data resources and protecting them is a top priority for any data center.

Connected to an internet full of hackers, billions of devices, and malware, networks are vulnerable to an array of web-based threats. Not long ago, the priority for network security was securing the network perimeter, but forces like remote work and the widespread adoption of cloud and edge computing make defending the perimeter increasingly tricky.

Its no longer a question of if malicious actors can gain access. Its whether theyre able to move laterally within the network when they do. As zero trust has evolved from buzzword to product in the last decade, a consensus has emerged that microsegmentation-based framework is the surest defense against the next generation of threats. To preserve server security, zero trust ensures intruders will never reach an organizations crown jewels.

Here we look at why zero trust is a significant boost to application and database security and how to adopt a zero trust architecture.

Downtime, machine failure, and cyberattacks can be devastating to organizations. When data is offline or unavailable, personnel and customers alike arent pleased. Knowing this, administrators secure the network with a suite of software and security tools to keep the network running and data available. For the data center, power redundancy and backup and disaster recovery solutions are essential protections.

Another crucial example of a network tool are traditional firewalls placed at the network edge to prevent intruders and malicious packets from gaining entry. As the perimeter has long been a cybersecurity priority, security policies inside the network and traffic between network segments changed little. As the years transformed network perimeters, accessing a network gateway has never been easier.

Also Read: SASE: Securing the Network Edge

A malicious actor can move laterally through the network with initial access, escalate privileges, and compromise sensitive data. Several attacks this year, including the SolarWinds Orion breach, showed how skilled advanced persistent threats (APT) could mask their activity while spreading malware across network systems.

In reversing the paradigm of designing devices to inherently trust other devices [allow all], zero trust calls for granular controls between network segments and eventually a day where only pre-categorized traffic is permissible [deny all]. Because SMB up to large enterprise organizations requires extensive data and application sharing capabilities, the network architects objective isnt to disrupt business-critical access instead, ensure abnormal traffic gets identified and managed.

By following the steps provided, network stakeholders can ensure that the organizations most important assets are secure, maximize visibility into network traffic, and adjust control policies to maintain regular business.

Todays network perimeter is rarely still. From the rise of remote work to the boom in endpoint devices in use, protecting an organizations attack surface is no longer entirely possible.

Network administrators need to take a birds eye view of their network and define where the most critical data and resources reside. Dubbed the protect surface, every organization has network segments vital to business continuity that likely deserve more substantial security than other segments. The Applications with client data, operational technology (OT) that controls industrial processes, and Active Directory come to mind.

With protect surfaces identified, the process of defining users and privileges begins. Who is accessing what resources? Does a user with initial access have access to the whole network segment or just a fraction of the data resources within an application?

Also Read: Top IAM Tools & Solutions for 2021

Applications and databases are responsible for storing and transmitting critical data across global networks. When resources move from defined protect surfaces, the flow, destination, device, time, location, user and role are all data points administrators need to inform next steps.

An image of how malicious actors could access your most important data and system controls will appear when analyzing how data moves. Equipped with valuable insight into traffic flows and vulnerabilities, administrators can start to test their findings.

At the heart of zero trust in practice is microsegmentation, the act of segmenting network components to ensure appropriate access levels for the relevant data resources.

The network fabric makes enforcing access betweens segments in your infrastructure seamless for data centers and software-defined data centers. By contrast, network fabrics arent ideal for microsegmentation in cloud environments. Fit for an SDDC environment, a virtual machine manager, also known as a hypervisor, can serve as an enforcement point for comprehensive network management.

And last but not least, next-generation firewalls (NGFW) are a popular choice for implementing microsegmentation because of their flexibility in deployment. Across environments, NGFWs can form a distributed internal layer of security throughout the network.

Also Read: Top Firewall (NGFW) Vendors 2021

No matter the microsegmentation route, administrators now can establish granular policy rules based on their prior findings. Essential information for establishing valid policies include clearly defining:

With the organization network mapped out, all packets, users, privileges, and protect surfaces defined, its time to configure policies to reflect an optimized security approach. Applying these policies can be one application at a time or en masse once its found successful. Administrators can then test flipping the trust switch for the first time. From allowing all to denying all traffic except whats prescribed the networks taken a giant leap.

Flipping the trust switch comes with its share of hiccups. As key personnel and clients begin using the network in its zero trust infrastructure, the IT department is sure to see a rise in technical support requests. Every request for greater access informs network and database administrators on adjusting controls to reflect the living organizations security framework. Monitor these requests and continue to track how sensitive data moves to optimize changes to policies.

Also Read: Top Rack Servers of 2021

There are no one-size-fits-all zero trust solutions. While vendors offer support, insight, and experience in implementing zero trust, a zero trust framework is custom to the organization and network it serves. With that in mind, the process for implementation described above isnt concrete. Organizations with initiative can take steps today to start the process of building a zero trust network architecture.

Zero trust covers the gamut of the OSI model to protect the organizations digital infrastructure. Implementing zero trust from network to application layers, databases, and software programs gives stakeholders the visibility to feel confident about the organizations security posture.

While an intimidating endeavor, moving towards zero trust is a process worth initiating to organize and secure your organizations data resources for years to come.

While databases and applications have long been mainstream components of the enterprise network, security services for protecting them are still a complex marketplace. To learn more about the industry, check out eSecurity Planets Top Database Security Solutions for 2021.

Also Read: Best Load Balancers of 2021

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Using Zero Trust Security to Protect Applications and Databases - Server Watch