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The headless approach to content, commerce, and customer experience is exploding. In fact, in 2018, according to recent research from Pupuweb,29% of businesses were using a headless approach and another 38% planned to adopt one before 2020. Companies are finding, however, that headless comes with its own set of challenges that requires a slew of technologies to solve. Thats why Gatsby Cloud seems to be a turning point for the headless space.

Weve asked industry experts how Gatsby Cloud is impacting the headless tech space and what other innovative technologies are enabling the headless approach.

Related Article:24 Headless CMS That Should Be On Your Radar in 2019

Gatsby Cloud is a commercial platform meant to make launching static sites easier. Some of the new features include real-time previews, CMS integrations, and a cloud quick-start wizard. Gatsby Cloud helps solve many of the challenges with the headless approach, bringing enormous benefits to content creators and developers alike.

Caleb Sylvest, Partner & Experience Designer at Plano, T.X.-based Spacetime says for content creators, in particular, there is a lack of previewing live content with headless or other data-agnostic solutions. So, he explained, creating content for new pages or blog posts or profiles can feel disjointed without knowing how the end creation will look. He says Gatsby Cloud solves this issue by providing live previews as new content is added similar to other traditional platforms like WordPress or Shopify.

Gatsby Cloud can also help tech teams gather buy-in for adopting headless technologies because it greatly simplifies the process for creating new sites. This is crucial because headless software is usually much more developer-friendly, but the lack of previewing capabilities often puts content creators off to using the approach. The benefits can be huge, Sylvest said, but maintenance and growth still need to be manageable and easy to understand.

Matt Weinberg, Co-Founder and President, Technology & Development at Happy Cog believes the new cloud platform makes it easier for people to get sites up and running with Gatsby while having access to the tools and features they're used to with their other systems. Gatsby Cloud, however, isnt a threat to other static site generators or technologies, but rather its a turning point for the headless tech space. I think it helps expand the market by making it visible to a whole new set of people, Weinberg said. Gatsby Cloud shows whats possible with the headless approach by leveraging the right technologies.

While Gatsby Cloud is bringing plenty of ease to headless and static environments, there are a number of other technologies that can drastically improve headless content delivery to static sites.

One of the greatest benefits to websites built with static files is that theyre deployment is highly flexible. Take advantage of the static file structure Gatsby uses, Sylvest recommended, to host on servers optimized for flat file systems. He says Netlify, Fastly, or Surge all provide exceptional hosting at low cost. Weinberg also suggests Cloudflare Workers Sites as a great option for hosting static sites.

Gatsby Cloud offers integrations with hundreds of different CMSs, so organizations should find one that closely aligns with their needs.With the ability to use a Headless CMS, suggested Slyvest, try something new instead of WordPress or Drupal to manage content and data.

He says Contentful and Sanity, in particular, are great options for headless static sites.

While a headless CMS will likely store most of the content youd need, if you have other data sources GraphQL can simplify delivery. In addition, suggested Weinberg, consider using Apollo Server as the GraphQL server your static site pulls data from. He says its easy to set up and configure, even for large enterprise-grade sites.

Headless sites with lightweight tooling enable developers to streamline their processes. Follow a strict development workflow using Git and Github for code development, testing, and deployment, Sylvest suggested. This will give companies the speed and agility they need to quickly launch new websites or features.

One of the main drawbacks of headless static sites is slow build times. While Gatsby Cloud partly mitigates this issue with live previews, there are other tools that can help improve the build process. Weinberg suggests using CI/CD systems like CircleCI, Jenkins, or GitHub Actions. These can all help automate your build and deploy process and make sure your tests all run before deploying code, he added.

Gatsby Cloud will fan the flames of interest in headless content delivery to static sites and applications because it reduces the drawbacks and solves a number of issues many organizations would normally face with a pure headless CMS. It brings a frontend to a frontend-less environment.

However, Gatsby wont fuel a fully-fledged customer experience across channels. In their own words, Gatsby is a framework based on React that helps developers build blazing-fast websites and apps. In other words, If youre thinking that Gatsby can be the frontend layer for your entire digital experience, think again.

When it comes to smart speakers, digital signage, dynamic sites, and dynamic applications, youll need to extend your frontend technology stack.

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Gatsby Cloud and its Impact on the Headless CMS Space - CMSWire

BOSTON, Dec. 2, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Nasuni, a leading provider of cloud file services, today announced that Meredith Corporation, the No. 1 magazine operator in the U.S. and owner of brands such as PEOPLE, Better Homes & Gardens, InStyle, REAL SIMPLE and Parents, moved to Nasuni to deliver a global file system on Amazon Web Services (AWS). AWS supports industry leaders like Meredith with scale, multi-site file sharing and powerful cloud migration capabilities. With Nasuni, Meredith can enable fast, reliable collaboration between many office locations without heavy infrastructure at each site.

Meredith chose Nasuni to address its unstructured data challenges because of the service's simplicity, cost savings and performance. Nasuni's cloud file services leverage the strengths of both AWS and edge devices, helping Meredith to reduce its on-premises infrastructure by 80%, eliminate traditional backup, and let teams collaborate faster to accelerate design and editing cycles. Nasuni Cloud File Servicesis designed in accordance with theAWS Well-Architected Framework, which helps cloud architects build secure, high-performing, resilient, and efficient infrastructure solutions.

Dave Coffman, Meredith's director of enterprise infrastructure, said, "We tried all different types of technology approaches, but we could never catch our white whale, a global file system. We used to robocopy from a file server in Iowa to New York, but that was slow and difficult. Now we robocopy to Nasuni and let the magic happen. It's faster and much more reliable, so there's a lot less stress before the deadline."

In addition, Nasuni recently launched its Nasuni Cloud Migrator for AWS, which lets customers prepare, plan, execute and operationalize unstructured data workloads for a successful cloud-first strategy. Data migration seamlessly moves to Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) faster and with less effort. Other features on display include Nasuni's support for AWS Snowball, enabling petabyte-scale data transfers to AWS, as well as the Nasuni Analytics Connector that provides the ability to harness unstructured data into company insights with AWS.

In addition, Nasuni will be showcasing many new solutions for AWS at AWS re:Invent 2019, including:

"Traditional NAS can't deliver the scalability, easy collaboration and simplified management that media companies like Meredith require," said Andres Rodriguez, founder and chief technology officer of Nasuni. "Nasuni's global file system, combined with the power of AWS, makes it easy to store, protect and provide access to files, no matter how large they may be."

For more information on Nasuni Cloud Migrator for AWS and other enhancements, visit http://www.nasuni.com.

About NasuniNasuni is a file services platform built for the cloud, powered by the world's only global file system. Nasuni consolidates network attached storage (NAS) and file server silos in cloud storage, delivering infinite scale, built-in backup, global file sharing, and local file server performance, all at half the cost of traditional file infrastructures. Leading companies from a wide array of industries rely on Nasuni to share and collaborate on files across multiple sites, enhance workforce productivity, reduce IT cost and complexity, and maximize the business value of their file data. Sectors served by Nasuni include manufacturing, construction, creative services, technology, pharmaceuticals, consumer goods, oil and gas, financial services, and public sector agencies. Nasuni is based in Boston, Mass. For more information, visit http://www.nasuni.com/.

Social media linksTwitter: http://www.twitter.com/nasuniLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/nasuniBlog: http://www.nasuni.com/blog/

All company and product names are property of their respective owners.

For more information, contact:Cheryle CushionNasuni+1.857.444.8417ccushion@nasuni.com

Justine BoucherMetis Communications+1.617.863.0294nasuni@metiscomm.com

SOURCE Nasuni

http://www.nasuni.com

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Media Giant Meredith Corporation Selects Nasuni To Help Move Traditional On-Premises File Infrastructure To Amazon Web Services - PRNewswire

For enterprises working on digital transformation projects, there is one specific challenge that is likely to cause major headaches. The challenge lies in successfully future-proofing the thousands of critical applications enterprises use every day. Many of these critical applications run on systems that are running out of support such as Windows 7,Windows Server 2008 and Windows 2008 R2. This poses a threat to business continuity, security and budgets. Worse still, it will prevent enterprises and their customers from seeing the benefits of digitisation.

According to a recent prediction by Gartner analyst David Cappuccio, 80% of enterprises could cease using traditional data centres by 2025. The reality is, far fewer enterprises could be stuck relying on them by 2025 given that so many are wrongly concentrating solely on front-office applications. The back-office on which the whole business depends is being neglected in digitisation attempts

Gartner predicts worldwide cloud services will grow by 17% this year to hit $214bn, compared with $182bn last year. Applications are right at the heart of this. More than a third of the 550 enterprise-level IT chiefs surveyed for the IDG Cloud Computing Survey last year said they are under pressure to migrate all applications and infrastructure to the cloud, while nine-in-ten plan to have some part of their applications or infrastructure in the cloud this year, with the rest following suit by 2021.

As this migration continues, estimates by global software network SpiceWorks highlight how 79% of organisations still have at least one Windows 7 system on their network and a quarter of businesses plan to migrate all their machines from Windows 7 after the end of life deadline next January.

Other estimates place Windows Server at approximately 70% of server OS installations with about 40% of those on Server 2008/2008 R2 with millions of enterprise applications run on Windows Server, the majority on Windows Server 2008 or earlier.

Compounding this is the reluctance of many enterprises to move to Windows 10 because of concerns about moving onto the treadmill of six-monthly or annual updates. This involves almost continual testing and a risk of damage and disruption to business due to application failure.

Immediate needs may be satisfied at the cost of longer-term resilience as migrations are poorly executed, causing major disruption. But looming end-of-life deadlines are placing a level of urgency on cloud migration projects with Microsofts January deadlines for the end of life for Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 drawing ever closer.

Enterprises rushing to migrate to the cloud before end of life deadlines may wrongly feel they have to leave applications behind because there is no reliable way of migrating them successfully. Critical applications may be removed from the scope of digitisation if they cannot be migrated, often leaving organisations locked into expensive, unwieldy contracts with multiple technology providers.

But many of these fears about cloud migration are unfounded. New innovations in application encapsulation present a clear opportunity for successful middle-tier and back-end application migration.

Experts working in application encapsulation an emerging strand of compatibility container software services can effectively lift those middle and back-end applications from their legacy environments and achieve what is thought to be impossible transposing them successfully into any existing cloud system. This is a feasible alternative to virtualisation which has been pushed as the solution for some. In reality, even though virtualisation can solve some conflicts between applications and make deployment more straightforward, there are further compatibility issues between applications and cloud-providers systems that it cannot solve.

Advanced application encapsulation technology provides the best possible solution available because it doesnt require any recoding or refactoring which can be complex, time-consuming and costly. The entire process can take as little as four weeks, allowing ample time to migrate those critical apps before Microsofts end-of-life date. Another significant advantage this has over virtualisation is that it takes complete control over the packaging while also offering the redirection, isolation and compatibility needed to successfully migrate incompatible applications into any cloud system.

A key benefit of this is the peace of mind that comes with knowing the enterprises critical apps will continue to function fully in the cloud, safe from the threats and limitations of end-of-life expiry dates. It is the dawn of the age of evergreen IT, an age in which condemned but critical systems are given more than just a new lease of life in the cloud they are given invincibility. The process effectively futureproofs the application, enabling it to be managed with any third-party tool as a cloud-native application.

As a cloud-agnostic solution, application encapsulation is an attractive proposition for businesses that want to avoid being locked into a single cloud provider. Application encapsulation also offers enterprises the opportunity to get ahead and nip potential IT nightmares in the bud with technology providers already leading the way in application migration, providing robust solutions that can be tested through proof-of-concept or pilot services.

Both the urgency and the pace of cloud migration are continually gathering momentum. For many enterprises there are only two options leave business-critical legacy applications behind and limit their digitisation progress, or get ahead of the curve with an application encapsulation solution that facilitates a smooth digital transformation, reanimating applications into an evergreen existence.

Photo by Glenn Carstens-Peters on Unsplash

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Encapulsation means application migration is no longer the blocker to digital transformation - Business MattersBusiness Matters

The worldwide leader in servers has suffered yet another rough period as Dell Technologies reported its third straight quarter of large server revenue declines on Tuesday.

It is a competitive [server] market out there in the large bids, said Jeff Clarke, vice chairman of Dell Technologies, during Dells third fiscal quarter earnings call with media and analysts Tuesday night. Its an aggressive marketplace from a pricing point of view. Were competing, but those bids are clearly competitive. Probably the other thing thats important to notice, [server deals] are taking longer to close. The caution that were seeing with our large customers is certainly being seen in our ability to close transactions or how long its taking to get the order closed.

Dells server and networking business dropped 16 percent year over year to $4.2 billion in its third fiscal quarter, which ended Nov. 1, 2019. The company previously reported a 12 percent drop in its server business year over year in its second fiscal quarter. During Dells first fiscal quarter, the company reported a 9 percent drop in server and networking revenue year over year.

Clarke attributed the server slump to a large sales drop in China such as with Chinese hyperscaler operators -- while also pointing out that the worldwide server market hit a record high in 2018.

[Related: 5 New Dell HPC Products For AI, Storage, PowerSwitch And PowerEdge]

Clearly we saw unprecedented growth in the industry last year that growth is being digested by the largest companies in the world and were seeing that primarily in those large enterprise in the United States and EMEA, said Clarke. China has been a headwind for the last three quarters, and that continues to be a headwind for us in that marketplace.

Tom Sweet, chief financial officer at Dell Technologies, said the Round Rock, Texas-based company isnt going into bids that isnt deemed profitable for Dell in the long-term.

We clearly see where component cost deflation is being used to price pretty aggressively right now. We see that trend generally in the large bids across the globe and in China, said Sweet. Were going to compete where we need to compete and we clearly want to grow the customer base, but we want that customer base to be long-term and the right type of customer for us in terms of profitability cycle that makes sense over time. So we are being selective. Thats just the dynamic were in right now. Our transactional server business is holding up reasonably well, so the weakness is in those two areas.

Although Dells server sales were a disappointment, the company excelled in the storage market once again. Dells third quarter storage revenue increased 7 percent year over year hitting $4.1 billion.

We saw just a continued progress of our PowerMax platform and the new Unity XT both of them were growing in the double digits. So very strong demand for our new storage products, which is encouraging, said Clarke. The continued build-out of on-premise private cloud VxRail plus VMware Cloud Foundation are clearly things that are highlights of our storage business and storage demand.

Overall, Dells Infrastructure Solutions Group -- which includes servers, storage, data protection and networking decreased six percent year over year to $8.4 billion, mainly due to the server sales decline. Orders for Dells flagship hyperconverged infrastructure solution, VxRail, increased a whopping 82 percent year over year in the third quarter.

Dells largest revenue driver continues to be its Client Solutions Group (CSG) made up of PCs, notebooks, tablets and monitors. For its third quarter, CSG sales grew 5 percent year over year to $11.4 billion. Commercial CSG sales grew 9 percent year over year to $8.3 billion, while consumer CSG revenue fell 6 percent to $3.1 billion.

Total revenue for Dell Technologies was $22.85 billion, up 2 percent compared to $22.48 billion in revenue Dell generated in the same quarter one year ago. Dells net income for the quarter was $552 million, up from a loss of $895 million year over year.

Dell reported total gross margins of $7.1 billion, up 20 percent compared to $5.9 billion in the same quarter one year ago.

Dells stock is down 3 percent in after-hours trading Tuesday night at $53.19 per share.

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Dell's Server Sales Slump Continues - CRN: The Biggest Tech News For Partners And The IT Channel