Tuesday, July 31, 2012

Launching an Assertive Infrastructure Management Process for Positive Results

IT infrastructure management requires immense expertise and experience to efficiently handle critical applications and avoid any disappointing results. The management process has to be streamlined and in total sync with the global standards. It should possess flexible capabilities so that solutions can be customized, efficiency enhanced and costs reduced ultimately resulting in profitable gains. A systematic IT infrastructure eliminates all doubtful issues related to costs and process hindering factors. It is better to seek advice from professionals who are sufficiently proficient to resolve issues with minimum damages.

There are many outsourcing companies whose core competency lies in infrastructure management. They provide customized solutions that are in alignment with your business goals and help you achieve your target without much hassle. India is fast emerging as a powerful IT center for addressing all IT issues effectively. The companies providing outsourced infrastructure management services help in reducing expenses required for infrastructure, facilities, training and re-hiring, personnel and administrative overheads thus reducing the total cost of ownership. They have powerful tools that are deployed to analyze the weak areas in your IT operations such as lack of monitoring or any specific skills.

These experts provide you with commendable and dedicated hosting services at an extremely low price which creates an ideal environment for hosting dedicated web servers, mail servers, applications, databases, corporate intranets and extranets, live streaming or broadcasting and many more. The infrastructure is extremely well equipped and the data centers are at par with global standards. They provide consistent support and adhere to world class service level agreements. They have a grand portfolio of managed services that you can choose from. They provide fast connectivity and seamless streaming services.

The managed service providers that offer colocation services in India observe stringent security measures and a controlled environment. They provide a variety of space options from cages to racks with the requisite power and bandwidth for your web hosting applications. You are provided with facilities such as an individual server, high uptime, reliable network, tight security and a 24×7 support system. The processes are optimized and advanced monitoring procedures are deployed which helps in delivering outstanding performances. The wish to succeed can become a reality when ideal practices are implemented.

The competition is bound to get more intense and cruel. Infrastructure management is the core need for any business. Those who wish to survive and sustain for a long period have to adopt practices that are exclusive and unique. Priority should be given to innovative methodologies that aim at reducing costs and enhancing performances.

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Wednesday, July 25, 2012

Go Public on Cloud with the Required Security Controls

Have been mulling over on public cloud computing? If yes, then its crucial for you to know that it requires security model reuniting multi-tenancy with scalability along with the need for trust. As organizations shift their computing platforms with their information, identities and infrastructure to the cloud, they need to let go of some amount of control. For doing that, they should be able to rely on cloud systems and trust their solution providers and confirm cloud procedures and events. Essential building blocks of trust and verification associations comprise data security, access control, event management and compliance.

In case of the conventional datacenter the access to software and hardware, controls on physical access and identity controls help in securing data. In case of cloud, this security barrier that safeguards infrastructure is diffused. In order to compensate, security systems needs to be more data centric. The data hence requires its own safety that follows where it goes and safeguards it. It will need:-

· Data isolation
In case of multi-tenancy, data needs to be stored securely so that it is secured when various consumers use shared hosting services. Encryption, virtualization and access control will be the points to enable varying degrees of separation between interest communities, corporations and users. In the forthcoming days, data isolation shall be crucial and deployable for IAAS and also for SAAS and PAAS.

· Constant data security
There will be always the requirement for policy-oriented content security to fulfill the organization’s own needs and regulatory mandates. For few categories of data, information-centric safety will demand encryption in transit, at rest, management all over the cloud and all through the data life cycle.

· Efficient data classification
Cloud computing generally imposes a resource trade-off between a high performance and the need for robust security. Data classification is an important tool for making this equation balance. Organizations will require knowing that why information is essential and where it is situated as qualifications for making performance benefit/cost decisions and ensuring that data-loss avoidance measures concentrate on most crucial areas.

However, if you have been thinking of going all public on cloud then in order to attain better and greater performance opt in for cloud hosting services by eminent solution providers. As you partner with a leading name you can have access to all the services with no extra expense. Innovative cloud hosting solutions make sure you have access to better security, a scalable cloud architecture with multiple servers and limitless power in various data centers, making use of cloud and dedicated servers through automation.


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Tuesday, July 17, 2012

Successfully Secure Yourself from DDoS Attacks- Stop Being a Victim

The latest to the bandwagon of cyber attacks after threats like phishing, data leakage, website defacement, legal risks etc., is the Distributed Denial-of-Service, or more commonly known as – DDoS. It is an organized attack that renders a service unusable or unavailable to its users – temporarily or indefinitely. More specifically, a DDoS attack is a form of protest by a person or an organization against what is called ‘Censorship’ of the internet. Typically, the most common targets for DDoS attack are the sites or services hosted on web servers of banks, third party payment gateways, e-commerce portals, social media portals and even root name servers.

A recent survey from McAfee states that 80% of respondents, who represented different organizations across the world said that they have faced a DDoS attack. 35% of respondents see 10 or more attacks per month compared to 18% in 2009. A hackers group called ‘Anonymous’ has been responsible for a number of DDoS attacks on various websites and servers.

The attack leaves organizations with a long term reputational loss apart from financial loss and at times permanent business disability. The most common way of attack is, to overload the server, router or the network link, thereby compromising the bandwidth. Herein, the server sends large volumes of traffic, leading to processing of illegitimate requests instead of servicing legitimate ones, thus congesting the bandwidth and at times leading to system crash.

DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attacks, because of their nature and execution are very difficult to identify in their early stages. Early detection of a DDoS attack is critical to reduce its impact. To curtail these attacks, organizations today need industry leading DDoS Network Security Solution, aided by scrubbing centers that can handle most complex DDoS attacks with zero downtime for the client.

However, managing such an infrastructure not only requires extensive expenditures but also the dedication of precious resources for running and maintenance. It is for this reason that organizations turn to external vendors who provide DDoS security services that are efficient, reliable and cost-effective.

Business verification process provided in DDoS solution ensures free flow of legitimate traffic and diverts illegitimate traffic to “scrubbing center”. These scrubbing centers make sure that all the illegitimate traffic is filtered and only clean and genuine traffic passes through. The identified malicious traffic goes to the Null zone where it is terminated. This ensures that the attack gets controlled and only legitimate traffic reaches out to the server.

Market trends show that demand for outsourced DDoS solutions to fight these DDoS attacks is growing. Organizations are looking for external partners to meet their security needs and the cloud is becoming crowded with new vendors that are fast emerging to offer these services.



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Tuesday, July 10, 2012

Up Close with Cloud Computing Services


Cloud computing was a revolutionary movement that transformed the way enterprises and organizations carried out businesses. Earlier enterprises incurred huge costs as they need to install applications on computers to perform various business operations but now the applications are hosted online. Thus cloud computing can be defined as a computing model that offers servers, networks, applications and data centers through the internet. Companies and organizations need to buy only the type and the amount of services that they require. That means companies need not install any hardware, software or applications; they just have to buy the requisite services provided over a network by third parties. As there is no installation there are no maintenance worries.

Types of Cloud Computing Services
Cloud computing has seen tremendous growth over the past few years. Most of the popular web applications used today such as Skype, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Picassa, YouTube and so on are offered through cloud. Cloud computing services are broadly classified into three and they are:
  • Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)
Infrastructure as a Service or IaaS gives access to storage and servers in the cloud. Another important advantage is that it offers the elasticity to scale up and down the server and storage capacity. This is extremely useful for those companies who don’t have sufficient server and storage capacity especially at the time of traffic.
  • Platform as a Service (PaaS)
Platform as a Service or PaaS refers to the provision of platforms so that customers can build their applications on it. PaaS comes to the aid of those businesses which cannot provide enough resources during peak times.
  • Software as a Service (SaaS)
Software as a Service or SaaS is the most popular computing model that offers businesses access to software service in the cloud. The companies need not install any software but can access it from anywhere.

Advantages of Cloud Computing
  • Convenient on demand model for network access
  • Reduced Costs and increased storage availability
  • Extensive flexibility and higher reliability
  • No need of keeping applications up to date as it is highly automated
Though there are several cloud computing providers, not all can provide impeccable services. A good service provider would offer:
  •  Self-provision servers, network, storage infrastructure real-time from anywhere, anytime
  • Facilitates instant deployment of new Servers with zero capital expenditure on hardware and software
  • Highly-available multi-tenant environment
  • On-demand Compute and Storage
  • Elastic services - scale servers and storage in real time

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Wednesday, July 4, 2012

Evolution of Datacenter Management

Datacenters today have evolved over the past few years and have successfully cooled rooms that had housed numerous servers. The new age datacenters in an aim to minimize overall footprint, feature high density servers that need advanced power and cooling systems. Simultaneously, owing to the constant security threats, datacenters today also feature high-end security systems that are managed and monitored from remote locations.

Furthermore, technology innovations and high end IT systems have also brought in certain difficulties that have resulted data center management become a tedious process. Conventionally, datacenter have been very static till sometime back. Majority of enterprises who went on to become IT enabled has established datacenters with several or few physical servers by following a straightforward approach in managing these set ups.

It was observed that an IT team would take responsibility of the server sprawl while the facilities team managed the power, cooling and building management. These two teams communicated with each other when a team was tracking any issues to a component being managed by the other team or whilst making changes in the data center. These teams did not have real-time insight into each other’s activities.

However, depending on the research and findings on energy requirements, enterprises today most often overprovision power and cooling capacities with an aim to cater to forthcoming demands. Furthermore, some companies make use of OEM software management solutions supplied by datacenter solution providers to manage the respective datacenter solutions.

Innovative Datacenter Solutions
Most enterprises want their IT infrastructure to help them grow and not drag down their potentiality by incurring heavy expenses on maintenance needs. No company wants to witness shrinking storage space, complaining IT engineers, overloaded servers and constant IT demons that would waste their money and time. In order to keep functioning in today’s competitive environment en enterprise needs to resort to innovative datacenter solutions. Leading internet datacenter service providers offers the following services:-

·         Dedicated hosting services
·         Co-location services
·         Bandwidth services
·         Load balancing
·         Disaster recovery services
·         Advanced firewall services

Furthermore, with economic change, datacenter space too acquired a premium that made power expenses soar. Companies found it complex to locate a space to set up additional server capacity and simultaneously provision power in a cost efficient way. Addressing this issue of space, enterprises to minimize space requirements resorted to blade servers that toned down a server to a compact form so that numerous servers could be accommodated at the same rack space.


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