BIOS Blog

When it comes to managed services providers, helpdesk services are crucial. If your team members find themselves locked out of mission-critical applications or plagued by bugs, their productivity and morale will suffer. Getting their issues resolved in a timely fashion is crucial to business success. An MSP that fulfils these three helpdesk KPIs will help you be a more effective organization.

If you’re like over one third of businesses, you might not be fully aware of the impact of unplanned downtime. Here are some quick figures – nearly half of businesses experience over four hours of unplanned downtime every four months, and according to Aberdeen, just one hour of downtime can cost an average of $260,000 USD. In other words, a thriving business can expect to lose at least one million dollars a year, if not more, due to IT failures.

You've been hearing a lot about cloud for a long time now. But, did you know that the market size for cloud is growing exponentially and is projected to be at $317 billion by 2022 and "by 2021, at least 75% of large and global organizations will implement a Multi-Cloud capable hybrid integration platform, up from less than 25% in 2018."*

Luckily, the answers you need to build a multi-cloud strategy that will withstand the test of time is here. I'm happy to share our Multi-Cloud newsletter featuring Gartner research.

Private data centers are expensive. They cost money in terms of power, maintenance, and man-hours – and even though many companies are switching to the cloud, 75% of companies still use private clouds. Here are a few ways to mitigate the necessary costs of private cloud ownership.

Congratulations! Simply by contemplating a vulnerability scan, your organization is more prepared than a majority of organizations. A recent study by Tenable shows that only 48% of companies perform any kind of regular vulnerability scan whatsoever – and only 5% conduct rigorous practices. If you want to become part of that 5%, however, you have to do more than consider a vulnerability scanning program – you have to commit.
Here’s what you need to know:

There are two ways to get started with Multi-Cloud – by accident or on purpose. By accident means that people start using different clouds for different things with no road map for a common management, security, compliance, or cost-optimization strategy. Aiming for multi-cloud on purpose means having these ducks in a row.

Let’s not focus on people who have a strategy, however. If anything’s clear, it’s that many more organizations end up with multiple clouds by accident then walk into it with their eyes open. How does this happen, and how do you rescue yourself when it does?
Accidentally Stumbling into the Multi-Cloud.

While cloud opens a new world of scale and agility, there are some serious risks that need to be mitigated if moving to the cloud is to be a success. The chances are, if a company is using cloud, it is because they want to be closer to their customers and to have more interaction. This means exposing data that would traditionally sit behind a corporate perimeters that was locked down to the big world. This can be done safely but it needs planning and managing.

Security considerations in a Multi-Cloud world.

Once companies embrace the cloud and reap its benefits it is almost inevitable that they will become Multi-Cloud users. You may think that a multi-cloud environment may look like a CIO purchasing implementations from HPT, AWS, and Azure. What it actually looks like is different business units buying six different cloud solutions.

First of all, let’s start with the basics, what is Multi-cloud?

This one is pretty simple, multi-cloud is the concept of using of multiple cloud computing and storage services in a single architecture.

How did it evolve?
Well first came the concept of cloud, as companies became conformable with it and began to realize the benefits, much as the elimination of capital expenditure, the ability to scale up and down and the agility to provision workloads almost instantly. Today almost every company we speak to is using some elements of the cloud to run their business on. With that came concerns about governess and security and companies began to develop a hybrid cloud approach. Keeping some works loads on their premise and even building private clouds and using the public cloud for the rest. This then developed to a cloud first approach for many companies, where the preference became to use the cloud, be it private or public as the first choice for any application. Now businesses are beginning to use multiple public clouds due to the advantages this approach brings. Namely;

With a variety of cloud services now in offer from the likes of Amazon, Microsoft the decisions involved in moving to the cloud can feel like a minefield. Cloud readiness assessment cuts through the clutter to recommend the best approach for moving your applications to the cloud. Good ones set out a way forward that included running costs, transition plans and time scales and you have no longer have to take all or nothing approach a cloud readiness ass will highlight if hybrid cloud is right for you. It’s the simple way to cut through the clutter and starts with just 5 questions.

The growth of Hybrid Cloud

Global Cloud adoption is growing at a breath taking pace changing forever the way enterprise think about how they deploy and manage their IT. Gartner recently said Cloud would become a 300B industry by 2022. However, companies still in general keep part of their IT infrastructure On Premise, usually in a heavily virtualized or private cloud environment. This approach is known as Hybrid cloud and almost all businesses are now adopting it.

The rapid emergence of Multi-Cloud

As companies grow more confident in using the public cloud and begin to realize the huge cost saving advantages, speed to deployment and scalability they increasingly become cloud first when thinking about how to deploy new IT infrastructure or use applications. What has become apparent to most companies is that different clouds have different advantages for different circumstances and at different costs. This has lead companies to use several clouds and this is known as Multi-Cloud. Gartner says by 2022, 80% of companies leveraging the cloud, will have a Multi-Cloud approach.