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CEO of Leading Expert in Fullstack Omnichannel Software Development Will Zhang Reveals Top Emerging Technologies in 2020 – True Hollywood Talk

As the new decade begins, many exciting technological advancements are unraveling that can shape the future of the technology industry. Changes brought by emerging technologies can enhance, disrupt, or dislodge established tech businesses. Nearly 50 years ago, technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), augmented reality, and cloud-based technology did not exist in the real world. These were are just thoughts that lived inside the creative and imaginative minds of fiction writers and only existed in the pages of science fiction novels and movie scenes. Nowadays, these new technologies are the buzzwords of the tech industry.

Technological changes and innovation can either enhance the existing market or disrupt it. Some innovations enhance a product in an existing market; however, some innovations create a new market and eventually displace an existing market. In the past 20 years, we have witnessed disruptive technologies that toppled existing technologies and made them obsolete, rising tech leader Will Zhang explained. Zhang is the founder of Fintelics, an emerging technology company based in Ontario, Canada. It specializes in developing cutting edge technology solutions on artificial intelligence, blockchain, cloud computing, omnichannel, big data solutions, and business process automation.

Emerging technologies such as AI, blockchain, and cloud computing are now a fact of life. These technologies will have an impact on peoples lives, and it will change the execution of business operations. We can no longer ignore these technologies, Zhang emphasized. He further pointed out that it will change the way people live their lives and how entrepreneurs do their businesses. He added that companies are finding ways to exploit the benefits of new and innovative technologies that tech experts predicted will significantly disrupt the industry.

In just a short time, Zhang steered Fintelics to become a rising star in the highly dynamic world of technology. In 2019, FinTech Awards recognized Fintelics as the Leading Expert in Fullstack Omnichannel Software Development to acknowledge its significant contributions in advancing omnichannel software development. Aside from this, Fintech Awards also named the company as the Best Custom FinTech Solutions Consultancy Ontario.

Likewise, Zhang led the company to become an APN AdvancedSelect Tier Consulting Partner. The APN badge solidifies its credentials and credibility in the tech industry, which means that Amazon Web Services (AWS) recognized the company as a subject matter expert in emerging technologies.

Zhang said that artificial intelligence (AI), blockchain technology, and cloud computing are the emerging technologies to keep an eye on for 2020. He noted that these new technologies would continue to strive and evolve in the years to come.

Artificial Intelligence

He said that AI is not a new term since this jargon has been the buzzword for many years now. Among the emerging technologies, it is the most popular since it is at the forefront of most business automation. Similar to predictive analytics, AI will continue to strive this year. I predict that the global trend will be that more and more businesses will adopt this technology. I observe that AI practices are gradually getting better over time. And it is moving towards becoming a mature technology very soon, he shared with so much excitement in his voice.

He added that AI would continue to revolutionize businesses and lead the digital transformation in the workplace. Last year, the McKinsey Global Survey revealed that about 50% of the respondents are already integrating AI technology in at least one of their business operations. He pointed out that AI adoption will continue to rise in the upcoming year as confidence in the technology grows. He mentioned that plenty of businesses would see the meaningful value that AI can bring to a company.

Blockchain

Zhang said that tech research firms considered blockchain technology as one of the top strategic technologies for 2020. However, experts, at the moment, see blockchain as an immature technology. Still, no doubt that once mature, this new technology can potentially reshape industries.

Blockchain is a technology that is a work in progress. Right now, the general trend is many technical teams are focusing on developing blockchain technology. So one day, it could help solve real industry problems and add value to businesses, he noted. He added that blockchain has tremendous potential, but it must first overcome poor scalability and the problem of interoperability.

Cloud computing

After AI, cloud computing is probably the second most popular buzzword in businesses around the world. Despite its popularity, AI remains underutilized and less understood. He said that most entrepreneurs would immediately think about storage whenever they heard the term cloud computing, but, on the contrary, it is more than that. He explained that the cloud has tremendous promise to perform a multitude of tasks in many industries.

He predicted that cloud computing would continue to thrive around the world because of the tremendous value that it can offer to a business. We are seeing big enterprises are starting to adopt cloud computing. Many companies are integrating it into their platform. Some companies are adopting cloud-agnostic solutions that allow their products to live on multiple platforms. In contrast, others adopt a cloud-native application suited only for one platform. He predicted that the wide adoption of cloud computing would continue to happen in 2020, he discussed while pointing out the world trend on cloud computing adoption.

In Summary

Zhang noted that these emerging technologies are opening new possibilities and opportunities for various industries. With this development and innovations, the future of technology looks exciting, he said. AI, blockchain, and cloud computing are emerging technologies that are maturing at different paces. He emphasized that the current trend will be finding the best way to solve the problem rather than just finding a solution.

The story of a newcomer in the tech industry that rose to this splendor is well, literally, incredible. The awards and recognition that Fintelics earned in the last two years are both startling and inspiring. Despite being a neophyte, it has already attested that it can compete with the giants of the industry.

For businesses that want to generate a competitive advantage using emerging technologies, Fintelics can help you find a solution. Please check their website at http://www.fintelics.com, and follow them on Twitter at @Fintelics1, on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/fintelics/.

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Employment Security working to expand capacity due to to surge in COVID-19 Unemployment Claims – Taylorsville Times

The North Carolina Division of Employment Security is taking immediate actions to help people who are unable to work because of COVID-19, according to an April 3rd press release.Approximately 370,000 North Carolinians have filed for unemployment insurance assistance since March 16, an unprecedented spike in filings as a result of the pandemic. Prior to COVID-19, DES received about 3,000 claims a week.

As of April 3, DES has sent out more than $10 million in unemployment benefits for claims related to COVID-19. That number will grow exponentially in the coming days. Claimants should be aware that it takes approximately 14 days from the time a person files a claim to receive their first payment.

DES is committed to intaking and processing every claim from workers impacted by COVID-19 in a timely and efficient manner, despite the extraordinary surge in demand. Accordingly, DES is moving aggressively to build the capacity necessary to help North Carolinians quickly get their benefits.

To better assist individuals and employers, initial steps include: Hiring 50 new staff Adding 100 staff from Division of Workforce Solutions Career Centers Contracting with an additional 200-person call center Adding computer servers to ensure capacity for large number of people filing online Doubling printing and mail capacity to ensure timely delivery of documents Purchasing more than 500 new computers and other equipment so employees in the office and at home can work to process claims.

Following these initial steps, the division will have more than 850 people working to process unemployment claims and get payments out the door.

The Division of Employment Security understands that for people who have lost their jobs, the assistance cant get there soon enough, said Lockhart Taylor, assistant secretary for DES. We are taking immediate action to increase our capacity in the face of this historic challenge and be there for the North Carolinians who need our help.

On Saturday, March 28, Governor Roy Cooper authorized DES to implement three federal unemployment programs. The first provides an additional $600 in weekly benefits. The second provides up to 13 additional weeks of benefits. The third is Pandemic Unemployment Assistance, which is assistance for people who are not typically eligible for state unemployment benefits. This should provide coverage to self-employed workers or independent contractors. DES needs final guidance from the U.S. Department of Labor in order to make the federal assistance available.

Individuals can file for unemployment benefits online at des.nc.gov. Those who have internet access are encouraged to check the website for updates and answers to their questions before calling the customer call center. People without internet access should call 888-737-0259 for assistance.

The most up-to-date information about eligibility and how to apply for benefits can be found on the Division of Employment Security website at des.nc.gov.

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Is edge computing the answer to a data center overload? – Tech Wire Asia

Edge computing can be a solution to data center strain. Source: Shutterstock

Just 20 percent of business executives believe that their current data-center is meeting their needs. Only 6 percent are confident that these facilities are sufficiently updated for their day to day use.

As demands continue to ramp up rapidly overburdened data centers wont be sustainable for long. To manage new challenges around bandwidth, security and emerging technologies such as AI and 5G, more processing power will be required by businesses.

To accommodate for increasing workloads, data needs to be moved away from the central data center alone, and distributed across a variety of platforms such as core data centers, cloud and particularly, the edge.

Gathering more limelight recently, much of what 5G and IoT can offer is only made possible through edge computing. It brings data storage and computation closer to where its needed, expediting processing and at the same time, minimizing latency.

But it also helps with cloud offload, where network traffic going to and from the cloud can be drastically reduced.

With the immense growth in the amount of data being generated, moving data to and from the cloud is not only time consuming, but costly. The concept of cloud offload has arisen because of this, and edge computing allows for value to be extracted from data at the location where its generated. If necessary, it can even be downsized to be sent over to the cloud for storage or analysis.

With this said, will edge computing replace the cloud?

The edge and the cloud are part of the same continuum, and the edge can be thought of as an enabler for the cloud to expand its reach.

Edge computing does not focus on storing data, rather, it is designed to gather and process data on-site quickly, and analyze data in real-time. Cloud computing, on the other hand, is made to store data, and can easily be scaled according to needs.

Take a look at public cloud providers such as AWS and the complementary role of the edge in cloud computing is evident.

For the enterprise looking to do on-premise edge computing, Amazons AWS Outpost a fully assembled rack of computing and storage that mimics the hardware design of Amazons own data centers will be installed at the clients premises.

Outpost runs on services such as the EC2 compute service, which makes it operationally similar to the cloud.

Edge computing is still in the early stages, but it is already playing a key role in shaping the industry today, and investment from big industry players shows its early worth.

Companies such as Walmart are already using it to generate profit: the US retail giant plans to rent out space at its supercenters as edge computing data centers scattered regularly across the country.

To keep up, enterprises must begin to invest more into their data infrastructure, and start implementing edge computing in stages.

Emily Wong

Emily is a tech writer constantly on the lookout for cool technology and writes about how small and medium enterprises can leverage it. She also reads, runs, and dreams of writing in a mountain cabin.

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Work from home: Securing RDP and remote access – We Live Security

As work from home is the new norm in the coronavirus era, youre probably thinking of enabling remote desktop connections for your off-site staff. Heres how to do it securely.

Accessing your servers or workstations desktops remotely is a great way to manage them. Its also a huge target for hackers.

For example, if hackers can gain access to the administrator login to your Domain Controller, they effectively own your Windows infrastructure and can quickly wreak havoc on your organization. From sending corporate emails to accounting departments and bookeepers, to siphoning off your companys intellectual property, to encrypting all your companys files and holding them for ransom, hacks on Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) can be very bad.

In this context, although we will mainly say RDP, we mean all kinds of remote desktop and remote access software, including VNC, PC Anywhere, TeamViewer and so forth, not just Microsofts RDP. The good news is there are many defenses against RDP attacks, starting with turning it off. If you dont really need remote access, the off switch is the simplest.

If you do need to allow such access, there are a variety of ways to restrict it to the good guys:

First off, allow access only from internal IP addresses coming from your companys VPN server. This has the added benefit of not exposing RDP connection ports to the public internet.

Speaking of exposing ports, if thats your only choice, you may want to serve up RDP on a non-standard port number to avoid simplistic worms from attacking your network through its RDP ports. Keep in mind, though, that most network scanners check all ports for RDP activity, so this should be viewed as security through obscurity, since it provides practically no additional security against modestly sophisticated attackers. You will have to be extremely vigilant about reviewing network access and login activities in your RDP server logs, as it may be more a matter of when and not if an attacker accesses your network.

RELATED READING: COVID19 and the shift to remote work

Second, make sure to enable Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) for remote users as another authentication layer, which we discussed in Work from home: Improve your security with MFA.

Third, whenever possible, only allow incoming RDP connections from your users public IP addresses. The easiest way for remote employees to look up their public IP address is to search Google for What is my IP address and the first result will be their IP address. Then your remote workers can provide that information to your IT/Security staff so that your company or organization can build a whitelist of allowed IP addresses. It is also possible to build a whitelist of allowable IPs by allowing their subnet, since dynamic home IP addresses would normally still fall within a subnet after a router reboot or other network maintenance on the client end.

Even if you secure your RDP access, there has recently been a flurry of exploits against it, so to avoid issues, make sure its fully patched. More information on securing RDP can be found in Its time to disconnect RDP from the internet.

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Rationing the cloud: How coronavirus has created capacity issues – Open Access Government

These are unprecedented times. Its a sentence you no doubt will have heard a lot in the last few weeks, and one that applies to technology every bit as much as other sectors.

In fact, public cloud services have seen a massive spike in demand since the COVID-19 pandemic hit, and Microsoft have reported that whole countries have gone from not using cloud to deliver teaching at all to 100% cloud-based remote learning all in a matter of weeks. Collaboration platforms such as Microsoft Teams are probably responsible for the majority of that increased demand.

Its not surprising, therefore, that we are starting to see the first signs of resourcing issues.

The Register has reported that Azure seems to be full, and I have seen similar coverage of cloud capacity problems elsewhere.

On-demand, scalable computing resources, such as virtual machines (VMs), are a popular choice to increase computing capacity through Azure but with the current surge of cloud custom, users may encounter errors when trying to provision VMs.

For those that do encounter these errors, at the time of writing, Microsoft is suggesting:

I would suggest, however, that this final option be treated with caution. Although all Azure regions are built to the same level of compliance, there are factors to consider when moving data to a different region, such as the US, and subsequently relying on Privacy Shield frameworks and the EU Model Clause to safeguard this data.

Cloud providers are prioritising government and emergency services use of the cloud. Freeing up capacity for emergency health service use by temporarily moving less critical data to less stressed regions seems to chime well with public interest, but during the current emergency, are there any regions that are less stressed?

I do not believe that Microsoft will move data out of the region in which customers have placed it. However, what individual customers choose to do is their decision, and the current crisis may tempt some to create resources outside of their normally preferred regions.

In this instance, I would add the following advice to that above:

As with many essentials right now, its important that we are all mindful of the resources we are using and the impact that has on others.

Capacity issues in Azure will also affect, and be affected by, capacity issues in Office 365. Microsoft have already vastly scaled up this capacity, particularly in response to increased demand for Teams. Customers have very little control over the underlying resource provision of Office 365 since it is delivered as SaaS (software as a service). However, many of the same considerations as outlined above will apply to Office 365.

In all cases, I strongly advise against panic buying: we all know where hoarding toilet roll gets us.

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3 Altcoins To Consider In This Time Of World Crises – ZyCrypto

Amidst the world economic crisis, one thing crypto investors look for is digital assets that can stand the test of time. The current COVID-19 pandemic has negatively affected major market prices with panic selloffs causing investors to dash into exchanging their crypto holdings for cash.

The massive selloff ripped the crypto market off billions of dollars in losses over the past weeks, leaving most people to wonder if things will get better for the crypto market prices to recover.

There is no reason to think that the market prices will not fully recover, or this crisis will even bring the crypto market to an unfortunate end. However, choosing the right altcoin is vital to your successful HODLing journey. Here are three altcoins that you may need to consider during this time of crisis.

Ethereum is still one of the top cryptocurrencies and second-best by market capitalization. Although many altcoins dropped back as Bitcoin rallied in February, Ethereum was able to scale to a new 2020 high. ETH is currently in high demand, and by its low supply, it can bring many gains with the next bull run.

EOS is still an altcoin with a high potential this year. It appears to be on every list as a promising altcoin. It is reported that, if big players such as Amazon and Uber move to the blockchain, EOS will be their focal working point.

Furthermore, Binance Coin has been ticked by most experts as an immeasurable digital currency. The cryptocurrency market has witnessed a significant selloff that keeps trading platforms very active. As Binance is one of the top cryptocurrency exchanges which offers more favorable rates in the market, BNB is set for immense growth.

Cryptocurrencies are classified as high speculative assets, and as such, investors should do more research before investing in any coin.

Nevertheless, with the newly effected cases of the pandemic reducing drastically in Asia, it brings a kind of hope to investors as the Asia continent shoulders a large part of the crypto community.

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The views expressed in the article are wholly those of the author and do not represent those of, nor should they be attributed to, ZyCrypto.This article is not meant to give financial advice. Please carry out your own research before investing in any of the various cryptocurrencies available.

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How is Bitcoin performing after the crash? Altcoins show promise – AMBCrypto

Bitcoin gets rejected from the $7,000 level for the 5th time in 15 days showing that the bears are in effect. This struggle to climb above the $7,000 mark comes after the price plunged from $9,200 to $3,850 from March 07 to March 13. Although, at the time of the drop, the whole ecosystem suffered equally, however, some altcoins have been more resilient than others. Bitcoin, for one, is trying but failing while altcoins leave it in the rear-view mirror.

The drop had implications ranging beyond the most obvious factor, price. Bitcoin networks difficulty, hash rate, block production times, mining industry, and companies within the space have all felt the ripple effect and are still reeling from it. As for companies, many received margin calls due to the drop. Take, for example, Hut8, who dipped deep into their BTC reserves during this crash.

With the price at $6,6770, Bitcoin has recovered 41% since the drop and has 59% more to recover. Since the magnitude of this drop was huge, this has caused some Bitcoin values to go askew. The Sortino ratio for Bitcoin has reached levels unseen since 2016 and this is bad for Bitcoin as an asset, especially, at a time of uncertainty.

Sortino ratio is a variation of the Sharpe ratio and is used to measure a portfolio or an assets risk-adjusted return. The Sortino ratio is the ratio of the difference between the expected return of an asset and risk-free return, and downside volatility or negative standard deviation.

At press time, the Sortino ratio, LIBOR 90d, value is at 0.00084. The last time Bitcoins value was this low was in 2016.

Source: TradingView

Additionally, among FTXs altcoins, mid-cap, and shitcoin index, Bitcoin has been the worst-performing asset since 2020. BTC showed a total relative performance of -6.68%, the worst performance among the mentioned indices. Altcoin perpetual index was, surprisingly, the best performing index class with 11.69% surge YTD while, shitcoin perpetual index was at -4.81% and mid-cap had a relative performance of -2.81%.

A similar performance track record was noticed with Bitwises indices. Year-to-date, the best performing Bitwise index was Bitwise 20 with a 6.7% return. Following this was Bitwise 100 [-4.4%], Bitwise 10 [-4.6%], this was followed by Bitcoin with a -6.3% return since 2020. Bitwise 70 had the worst performance with a return of -8.9%.

Although this looks bleak for Bitcoin, it is only in the shorter timeframe, the bigger looks much better. On average, historically, the first quarter of every year that Bitcoin has been alive has had negative returns.

Hence, the future or at least the second quarter looks bright for Bitcoin as seen in the above table.

Source: TradingView

Furthermore, the approaching halving might push the price higher, as many people expect it to.

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Summit Hosting Offers 90 Days of Free Cloud Hosting to Help Small and Medium Businesses Operate Remotely During COVID-19 – Benzinga

Summit Hosting, a dedicated server cloud hosting company serving the U.S. and Canada, has launched a 90-day free, no contract required offer to assist businesses who may need enhanced remote accessibility to use Sage or QuickBooks at home due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

ATLANTA (PRWEB) April 06, 2020

Today, Summit Hosting, a leading managed application cloud hosting company in North America, announced the launch of the Summit Cares' campaign to help small and mid-sized businesses who have been impacted by the COVID-19 (coronavirus) pandemic.

The Summit Cares campaign offers free Sage or QuickBooks cloud hosting to new customers now through June 30th, 2020, so businesses can run their financial operations remotely in accordance with social distancing. During the 90-day period, new customers will pay $0 in up-front costs, including no set-up fees, for a month-to-month dedicated server hosting subscription service. No 12-month commitment or contract is required to begin.

"We're all living in uncertain times right now and Summit Hosting understands the impact this has had, and will continue to have, on businesses in 2020," said Stanley Kania, CEO of Summit Hosting. "The ability to run your company from home and offer remote positions to employees is more important now than ever before. We want to help businesses have this remote flexibility without worrying about more costs during the economic strain the world is facing."

Under Summit Cares, Summit Hosting is also offering current customers the option to add an unlimited amount of users to their accounts at no additional cost until June 30th, 2020.

Summit Cares will be active until June 30th, 2020. After this date, hosting and user costs will revert to normal pricing.

All businesses who use Summit Hosting's services also get the advantage of dedicated servers, meaning they don't share their cloud server with other companies. Each business can partner with Summit Hosting's technical experts to customize their cloud environment to meet business needs.

Any U.S. or Canada-based business interested in hosting QuickBooks or Sage in the cloud at no cost for 90 days or learning more about Summit Cares should contact a hosting specialist by email at sales@summithosting.com or by phone at 888-244-6559.

About Summit Hosting

Summit Hosting is the leading provider of managed application hosting on dedicated servers in the U.S. and Canada. At Summit, you'll never share resources with another company and you will be able to fully customize the cloud according to your unique business needs. Your experience with Summit Hosting begins with a knowledgeable U.S.-based sales team. They work with you one-on-one to understand your business, goals and hosting needs. Once they've developed the right solution to meet your objectives, Summit Hosting puts that plan into action with their technical team.

Visit https://www.summithosting.com for more information about Sage cloud hosting and QuickBooks cloud hosting services.

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AWS: the worlds most comprehensive cloud platform – Gigabit Magazine – Technology News, Magazine and Website

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is considered the worlds most comprehensive and in-depth cloud platform.

As a subsidiary of Amazon, AWS provides on-demand cloud computing platforms and APIs to individuals, organisations and governments on a pay-as-you-go basis.

Officially launched in 2002, AWS today offers more than 175 fully featured services from data centres worldwide. The organisation serves hundreds of thousands of customers across 190 different countries globally. Recognised as a leader in the field, no other cloud provider offers as many regions with multiple Availability Zones connected by low latency, high throughput, and highly redundant networking.

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It has several different solutions, such as: application hosting, websites, backup and storage, enterprise IT, content delivery and databases.

Why is it considered the leading cloud platform?

Most functionality - AWS has considerably more services and features within those services than any other cloud provider. This ranges from infrastructure technology like compute storage and databases to the latest technologies such as machine learning, AI and the Internet of Things. This allows it to be easier, faster and more cost effective to move existing applications to the cloud and create almost anything.

Largest community of customers and partners - AWS has a large and dynamic community, with millions of active customers and tens of thousands of partners globally. Customers from every industry and of all sizes are running every imaginable use case on AWS.

Most secure - AWS is designed to be the most flexible and secure cloud computing environment today. Its core infrastructure is designed to meet the requirements for the military, global banks and other high-sensitive organisations. AWS supports 90 security standards and compliance certifications, as well as 117 AWS services that store customer data and provide the ability to encrypt that data.

Fastest pace of innovation - Through AWS, it can allow the latest state-of-the-art technologies to experiment and innovate more efficiently. AWS is continuously increasing its pace of innovation to invent new technologies to empower businesses to transform their operations. In 2014, AWS created the serverless computing space with the launch of AWS Lambda, which enables developers to run their code without managing servers.

Most proven operational expertise - AWS has unrivalled experience, know-how, reliability, security and performance. AWS has been providing cloud services to millions of customers worldwide through a variety of use cases.

To learn more about AWS, click here!

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Why large non-profits opt for small hosting companies over the cloud – BestTechie

Flexible customization options and security is one reason why non-profits need to opt for small hosting companies for their day-to-day operations. However, as more and more organizations are moving their operations to the public cloud, they need to be made aware of the fact that they usually lack the knowledge to implement and maintain the proper security for their cloud infrastructure.

This can have devastating consequences for them because non-profits face a greater risk of security breaches. As a result, a breach may go undetected and they lack the expertise required to respond to one, even if it were detected.

Suggested resource: Concourse offers free migration services to organizations who use Blackbaud CRM

Now that the focus of the whole planet is concentrated on how to fight the coronavirus pandemic, non-profits are likely to see a slowdown in the amount of people willing to donate. They can now take advantage of the time on their hands to reevaluate their internal infrastructure so that they can ensure that it is secured for when donations start to pick up again.

One of the preferred CRM systems used by non-profits is Blackbaud CRM and migrating it to a more secure hosting solution now will allow their systems to function more efficiently and to accommodate future demands and specific customizations once the turmoil of COVID-19 subsides.

Besides offering more control with flexible customization options, Concourse Hosting also offers secure integrations and the expertise in hosting Blackbaud CRM software.

The centrally located data center in Dallas, Texas offers fast connectivity across seven tier-one carrier backbones. The Blackbaud CRM user data is replicated to a secondary data center in Seattle for DR recovery at 4-hr RPO and 24-hr RTO.

Every organization has custom built Blackbaud CRM virtual servers that are dedicated to them alone. Concourses private cloud platform features VMware vSphere Enterprise Plus with High Availability. They keep pace with all the newest technology and these currently are running vSphere ESXi version 6.7.

Concourse works with Dell and they have created a custom powerhouse using a PowerEdge R640 stocked with dual Intel Xeon Gold 6244 3.6GHz processors. With 8 cores each, they have a total of 16 cores that either have 768GB or 1.5TB. Backed by ProSupport Plus, they have three 10Gb dual port network cards and redundant power.

Pure Storage provides the flash storage arrays where your Blackbaud CRM environments reside. These feature NVMe flash with 40 Gb uplink to their Cisco networking fabric. This system offers the latest and fastest storage and has sub-millisecond latency.

In March 2020, Concourse Hosting completed its annual security audit and is a PCI DSS Level 1 Service Provider. The security auditors also rated them as a HIPAA/HITECH compliant provider. This is a crucial security component for all organizations that provide services to the healthcare industry. Concourse is committed to security and Blackbaud CRM infrastructure benefits from the multiple layers provided. Regular penetration tests are run and annual audits are a must. AOC is provided upon request.

Each clients Blackbaud CRM resides within its own firewall security zone and has a dedicated firewall interface and custom access. Furthermore, the Development and Production environments are isolated from each other to eliminate any impact from user activity on either zone.

Non-profits want to have more control and often struggle to manage and secure everything because they lack the expertise. Therefore, they opt for Concourse and their most recent acquisitions were two new large non-profits. Concourse was recently chosen over competitor hosting options by the University of Arizona Foundation and the Texas Childrens Hospital. These organizations gave the hosting company a vote of confidence to host their Blackbaud CRM fundraising systems, the core system for the day-to-day running of their operations.

COVID-19 and lockdown has brought many of the fundraising activities for non-profits to a standstill and sponsors to these are concentrating their efforts to the race in finding a cure or vaccine. For now, organizations can concentrate on moving to a better hosting company over the cloud and experience the friendly support that their teams deserve.

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