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Getting the most of out of Cloud Investments

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Cloud is now mainstream, the enterprise cloud becomes the unquestioned foundation for the future of digital business,. We have customers come to us, unhappy with their existing payment profile and overall TCO. We believe they’re paying for a service and only utilising a small proportion of its features. It is bit of complex to get a transparent view of the price! A good solution provider should offer training and product knowledge to customers as standard to understand the cloud consumption of services and ability to define the thresholds to review its usage at various intervals. As a cloud services provider, ensuring that our customers are getting the most from their cloud investment is a top priority. We help you maximise on your investment by:

· Selection of workload types suitable for cloud hosting

· Right sizing of the cloud environment

· Showing you product features that suit your business needs and requirements.

· Making sure your money is being spent in the right way, and that the services you purchase are cost-effective.

· Ensuring your business is safeguarded with an end to end security policies and controls.

Some easy initial steps for you to evaluate the return-on-investment (ROI) of your existing cloud services:

· Setup thresholds and alerts to the respective stakeholders.

· Setup a workflow to define the cloud catalog and approvers.

· Make sure you know how to obtain the best from your products in terms of features and functions. Are you fully aware of the capabilities? If not, your CSP should provide awareness, education and training.

· Make sure your employees are fully onboard and committed to using the product, as well as using it to its maximum potential.

· And finally, it’s critical to ensure that you are trusting the right cloud services provider with your cloud set-up! If you’re with the wrong provider, you will already be at a disadvantage when it comes to maximising on your investment.

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What’s New in Microsoft Teams | Nov 2020

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There are several new features are released in Teams. Here some of the list of features which we can benefit from.

What’s New: Meetings

AI-based noise suppression
Our real-time AI noise suppression feature automatically removes unwelcome background noise during your meetings. The AI-based noise suppression analyzes your audio feed filtering out the noise and retaining only the speech signal. You can also control how much noise suppression you want, including a high setting to suppress more background noise. 

New Together mode scene selection
Together mode re imagines meeting experiences to help participants feel closer together even when you are apart. We are excited to introduce new Together mode scene selections to transport your team to a variety of settings. Choose a scene to set the tone and create a unique experience for your meeting, whether it be a smaller conference room meeting, or an all-hands meeting held in an outdoor amphitheater.

Polls in Teams Meetings
Polls in Teams meetings is a seamless experience powered by Forms that helps you conduct more engaging and productive meetings. As a meeting organizer or presenter, you can prepare, launch, and evaluate polls before, during, and after meetings, respectively. Your attendees can easily view and respond to the polls in the pop-up bubble or chat pane. To enable this feature as the meeting organizer or presenter, simply add the Forms app as a tab in your Teams meeting

Full screen support in new meetings experience
We heard you, full screen mode is back! With full screen mode on Windows the meeting window fills up the whole screen, removing all other screen elements, including the title bar on the top and task bar on the bottom. On Mac OS, full screen mode maximizes the meeting window and the title bar is hidden. This helps you to reduce distractions and focus your attention.

Start an instant meeting from your mobile device
You’ll now find the familiar Meet Now icon on the calendar tab and in the Teams channel helping you connect with your team instantly. Once you start your meeting, you can use any messaging app on your mobile device to share the invite or add participants directly to the meeting, and anyone in the Teams channel can join without an invite.

Updated layout for meetings on iOS 

We have improved the Teams experience on iOS devices with a new presentation mode, the ability to see more participants, and the ability to see shared content and a spotlighted participant concurrently.

What’s new: Calling
Call Merge
While you’re on a call with another person (or a group), you might want to add another expert to participate in the call. Similarly, you may receive an incoming call that makes sense to connect with one you’re already on. Call Merge gives end users the capability to merge their Teams VoIP and PSTN active 1-1 calls into another 1-1 call or another group call. You can merge your calls, simply by choosing the “…” (more actions) button from the call controls and select “merge calls”. Learn more.

Survivable Branch Appliance
To support the most critical conversations in the event of an outage, the new Survivable Branch Appliance (SBA) allows you to place and receive PSTN calls even in the event of a WAN outage. This SBA is now available to certified Session Border Controllers (SBC) vendors, allowing SBCs to link with the Teams client in the event the client cannot reach the Microsoft Calling network.

Ericsson Session Border Controller certification
Ericsson has completed the Session Border Controller (SBC) certification process, which ensures that their SBC supports Direct Routing for Microsoft Teams, joining the list of certified SBCs. This rigorous certification process [insert link here] includes intense 3rd party testing and validation in production and pre-production Direct Routing environments. Direct Routing permits customers to connect their own carriers and infrastructure with Phone System to enable Teams Calling. Learn more.

 

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What will cloud security look like in 3 years?

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Cloud security has been better than on-premises security for several years now. Increased automation and interoperability will cement its position as a best practice
 

Gartner states through 2020, public IaaS workloads will suffer at least 60 percent fewer security incidents than workloads in traditional data centers. When I pointed this out several years ago, many scoffed at the claim.

Both the hyperscalers and third-party security providers are spending about 70 to 80 percent of their R&D budgets on supporting public clouds. It should be no surprise that the quality and functionality of most cloud security technologies will be superior to traditional on-premises systems.

What do we have coming down the line in terms of cloud security? Here is what I think the landscape will look like in three years, maybe sooner.

This moves cloud security from a passive state to an active one. We’re no longer waiting to get attacked; we can detect when an attack is imminent and automatically challenge the attacker with automated defenses before the first penetration attempt. In some cases, we’ll have the ability to launch automated counterattacks.

Focus on intercloud security. As we move to a multicloud world, we’re finding that using native security systems for each public cloud is way too laborious and causes complexity and confusion that can lead to breaches.  

As I’ve stated before, multicloud is really not about cloud. It’s about the technology that exists between the clouds. Technology that has access to native interfaces, but logically runs above all public clouds. This means that you can orchestrate services to put up a unified defense as well as share knowledge-bases as to how to best defend against specific kinds of attacks.  

You will also need visibility into all major applications, databases, and storage systems within all public clouds; for instance, being able to see a CPU saturation that should be checked as a possible attack.    

Remove the humans. You may think of a Terminator-like scenario where the machines turn on us, but the reality is that humans are the weakest link in the security chain. Gartner states that through 2025, 99 percent of cloud security failures will be the customer’s fault. In my world, it’s more like 99.999 percent.  

No matter if it’s misconfigurations that leave doors open or plain mistakes because of lack of training, the more we factor humans out of the cloud security equation, the more secure we’ll be.    

This goes back to the “automate everything” approach that most security systems will use to provide cloud security within three years. If you’re worried about your job, don’t be. Somebody has to set up these automations and continuously improve them over time.   

The bottom line is that security will improve, and the cloud will become the safest place to be. As long as the R&D dollars pour into cloud-based security, this is a foregone conclusion.  

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Multicloud vs. Hybrid Cloud

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What’s the difference between multicloud and hybrid cloud computing?

Both “multicloud” and “hybrid cloud” refer to cloud deployments that integrate more than one cloud. They differ in the kinds of cloud infrastructure they include.

A hybrid cloud infrastructure blends two or more different types of clouds, while multicloud blends different clouds of the same type. You might say hybrid cloud is like combining apples and oranges, while multicloud is like combining different types of apples.

How does cloud computing work?

In cloud computing, applications and data are hosted in remote servers in various data centers, instead of in the same location of the users they are serving. When discussing multicloud and hybrid cloud, each individual cloud service or set of services from each vendor can be called a “cloud” for short.

What is the difference between a public cloud and a private cloud?

A public cloud is a cloud service that multiple customers use, although they don’t interact with each other, just as many customers can use one bank without drawing on each other’s funds.

A private cloud is a cloud service for only one customer. An organization can either build and maintain a private cloud themselves, or they can pay an external vendor to host a private cloud for them.

What does multicloud mean?

“Multicloud” refers to the combination and integration of multiple public clouds. A business may use one public cloud as a database, one as PaaS, one for user authentication, and so on.

If the multicloud deployment includes a private cloud or an on-premises data center as well, then the cloud deployment can actually be considered a hybrid cloud.

What does hybrid cloud mean?

A hybrid cloud combines public cloud computing with a private cloud or on-premises infrastructure. On-premises infrastructure can be an internal data center or any other IT infrastructure that runs within a corporate network.

Hybrid cloud deployments are fairly common. Some businesses migrate partly to the cloud but find it cost-prohibitive or too resource-intensive to move all the way, and as a result some processes, business logic, and data storage still take place in legacy on-premises infrastructure.

Businesses may also choose to adopt a hybrid cloud strategy in order to keep some processes and data in a more controlled environment (e.g. a private cloud or on-premises data center) while taking advantage of the greater resources and low overhead of public cloud computing.

Which type of cloud deployment should businesses use?

Finding the right cloud deployment comes down to a number of factors. Chief among them are cost and security.

Cost

Public clouds typically come with less overhead and less direct management than other types of infrastructure. The cloud vendor handles most, if not all, of the responsibilities that are part of maintaining a data center – provisioning servers, applying security updates, and so on. For this reason, businesses for whom cost is the deciding factor may want to move to a fully public cloud deployment, and perhaps a multicloud deployment.

Security

For businesses that have high regulatory standards for any subset of their data or business logic, a hybrid cloud deployment may be best. With a hybrid cloud, they can keep some data in a more tightly controlled environment, like a private cloud or on-premises data center.

However, these tightly controlled environments are not always more secure. Often, public cloud vendors have more resources for applying patches and protecting data than individual businesses, depending on their cybersecurity budget.

Other factors to consider:

  • Time and effort spent on cloud migration: Moving data and business operations fully to the cloud can be a resource-intensive task (although for many businesses it is worth the effort). A full migration into the cloud may not be immediately feasible for some businesses, causing them to adopt a hybrid cloud strategy.
  • Reliability: Deploying multiple clouds can help keep websites and applications up and running during periods of high user demand, as a backup cloud can take on some of the workload if one cloud is overwhelmed. This strategy is known as “cloud bursting,” because a workload “bursts” from one cloud to another cloud.
  • Vendor lock-in: Using multiple public clouds can reduce dependence on any one cloud vendor. (Cloudflare also helps reduce vendor lock-in by sitting in front of any type of cloud and boosting performance, security, and reliability.)
  • Performance: If a public cloud hosts servers at the network edge, moving to the cloud can vastly boost performance by cutting down on latency.
Can a hybrid cloud also be multicloud?

If a hybrid cloud deployment incorporates multiple public clouds, it can also be considered a multicloud deployment. For this reason, the terms are sometimes used interchangeably, even though they actually mean slightly different things.

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