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Focus on cost and agility to ensure your cloud migration success – CIO

When businesses migrate to public cloud, they expect to enjoy greater agility, resiliency, scalability, security, and cost-efficiency. But while some organizations undergo a relatively smooth journey, others can find themselves embarked on a bumpy trek fraught with time-wasting detours and lurking money pits and with that glowing cloud promise still beyond their reach.

Where do they go awry? Too often, impetuosity and a diminished focus on key business drivers can result in a loss of direction, reports Chris DePerro, SVP, Global Professional Services at NTT.

When assembling the case for a move to public cloud, organizations tend to overload stakeholder expectations and lose sight of the main imperatives behind the initiative namely, supporting business agility and cost-efficiency, DePerro says. When a cloud strategy team has those chief objectives nailed down, they can plan supporting considerations such as security, resiliency and scalability around them more effectively.

The Multicloud Business Impact Brief by 451 Research summarizes the findings of its own Voice of the Enterprise: Cloud, Hosting & Managed Services, Budgets & Outlook 2022 survey and identifies costs as a key driver and desired outcome of cloud transformation as well as a key limiting factor in the use of some of these resources. Indeed, 39% surveyed cited concerns about controlling costs.

But cost-efficiencies from public-cloud adoption can be undermined if organizations overspend to get there. Public-cloud services can be a tremendous resource if proper care is taken to plan and optimize the environment rather than just pushing the entire estate to the cloud as is. If optimization isnt done, clients are often left with a larger bill and fall short of their cloud aspirations.

In many instances, the problems can be traced to inexperience in and insufficient understanding of cloud-migration best practices, and a lack of proper planning. Too often, organizations set off with project plans that do not take account of the full gamut of challenges.

Why do organizations fast-forward cloud migration, even if it might result in headaches afterwards?

Common missteps are not taking time to understand and remediate as many issues as possible within the existing IT estate before migration occurs, says DePerro. Its crucial that the best migration approaches are selected based on solid discovery for each workload. This determines the approach best suited to an organizations specific applications.

DePerro adds: Without a thorough pre-migration assessment of its IT estate, an organization might shift its existing inefficiencies into the cloud, where they become even more of a budgetary and performance burden by bumping up clouds operational costs.

The capacity to innovate and respond to changing market conditions in a rapid manner is even more vital. Cost-efficiency and expectations of agility should be integral to a properly orchestrated cloud-migration program.

Agility is not always well understood, explains DePerro. Increasingly, its about using the cloud to give organizations the facility and flexibility to achieve their business objectives faster, rather than necessarily having numerous added features from the onset. We are seeing more and more customers trying to modernize in an incremental nature so as not to get bogged down in overly complicated transformation. Often, expediency overrides functionality when it comes to getting apps to market fast so that value can be derived ASAP.

This requirement plays into the increased adoption of multicloud models. The business benefits of multicloud are compelling: organizations want to develop/run their applications in the cloud environment thats best suited to their needs: private, public, edge or hybrid.

This in turn enlarges the complexities of managing workloads across multiple platforms.

Working with a managed cloud service provider is a proven way to mitigate those complexities, DePerro says, especially if its cloud reach extends across both multivarious cloud platforms and business industries, as NTTs does. This enables us to share both technical knowledge and cross-sector insight.

Increasing multicloud take-up demonstrates again how rapidly cloud opportunities are evolving, leaving migration roadmaps outdated.

Ultimately, many organizations will have to go multicloud because its the only way they will achieve their business objectives, DePerro believes. For many, multicloud is the new reality. And as with any journey into uncharted territory, being accompanied by a knowledgeable guide such as NTT, that has helped organizations complete their cloud journeys, will help navigate the twists and turns ahead.

Visit NTTs website now to find out how to start your cloud journey with experts who understand the pitfalls and how to overcome them.

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Focus on cost and agility to ensure your cloud migration success - CIO

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LastPass cloud breach involves ‘certain elements’ of customer information – SC Media

LastPass on Wednesday reported that it detected unusual activity within a third-party cloud service thats shared by LastPass and its GoTo affiliate an event that was the companys second reported breach in three months.

In an update blog to customers, LastPass CEO Karim Toubba said the unauthorized party, using information obtained in the earlier August 2022 incident, gained access to "certain elements" of customer information.

Toubba said LastPass launched an investigation, hired Mandiant, and alerted law enforcement.

We are working diligently to understand the scope of the incident and identify what specific information has been accessed, wrote Toubba In the meantime, we can confirm that LastPass products and services remain fully functional.

Its concerning to hear that LastPass experienced another security incident following a previous one that was made public back in August, said Chris Vaughan, vice president, technical account management, EME at Tanium. Vaughan said the attack involved source code and technical information being taken from unauthorized access to a third-party storage service the company uses.

The new breach is more severe because customer information has been accessed, which wasnt the case previously, Vaughan said. The intruder has done this by leveraging data exposed in the previous incident to gain access to the LastPass IT environment. The company says that passwords remain safely encrypted and that it is working to better understand the scope of the incident and identify exactly what data has been taken. You can bet that the IT security team is working around the clock on this and their visibility of the network and the devices being connected to it will be severely tested.

Vaughan added that password managers are a challenging, but attractive target for a threat actor, as they can potentially unlock a treasure trove of access to accounts and sensitive customer data in an instant if they are breached.

However, the benefits of using a secure password management solution often far outweigh the risks of a potential breach, said Vaughan. When layered with the other security recommendations, it's still one of the best solutions to prevent credential theft and associated attacks. We just have to hope that customer confidence has not been impacted too much by these recent attacks.

Lorri Janssen-Anessi, director, external cyber assessments at BlueVoyant, added that theres a notion of security with cloud hosting, and while thats somewhat true, organizations must still stay aware of the attack surface that exists on cloud hosted networks, services, or applications.

Companies must still minimize user privileges, patch vulnerable software, be conscious of what assets are actively hosted, and make sure to have secure configurations to include the cloud security settings, said Janssen-Anessi.

Be thoughtful about what you choose to host in the cloud, and dont put critical data or operationally necessary applications that could affect your business continuity in the cloud as you are at the mercy of the hosting provider and their continuity-of-services, said Janssen-Anessi. Like any third-party connection, cloud hosting also needs to be thoughtfully included and secured within your ecosystem.

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AFME and Protiviti report calls for coordinated approach for further cloud innovation – Asset Servicing Times

AFME and Protiviti report calls for coordinated approach for further cloud innovation

65 per cent of cloud services are provided by just three entities, whose dominance is raising concerns among financial regulators, a report by the Association for Financial Markets in Europe (AFME) has found.

The AFME report, entitled State of Cloud Adoption in Europe - Preparing the path for Cloud as a Critical Third-party Solution, finds that this entity dominance, among other factors, is making it more difficult for firms to adopt cloud services and fully leverage their potential.

Financial institutions are also subject to multiple different regulators that may ask for the same information in different formats and through different channels, the report adds, with regulatory fragmentation and long approval times preventing financial institutions from innovating and slowing the pace of cloud adoption.

AFME cited the management of disruption in the cloud as a significant barrier to further innovation, with several high-profile cloud service outages highlighting the need for greater visibility and confidence in cloud providers abilities to predict, manage and communicate disruptions.

This is mainly due to the fact that regulators expect financial institutions to have primary responsibility for resisting threats to operational resilience, to guard against service disruptions and to recover from incidents, the report outlines.

AFME suggests nine recommendations for policymakers to address these challenges, including considering how cloud solution providers (CSPs) could be encouraged to provide greater transparency on resiliency, dependency and security issues within cloud services.

It outlines that greater visibility and analysis of dependencies between regions and the underlying control plane within each CSP is paramount. It also says that the adoption of multi-cloud strategies should remain at the discretion of individual financial institutions and should not be mandatory. Such a mandate could increase, rather than address, systemic concentration risk, the association warns.

In terms of regulatory complexity, AFME requests that authorities consider an approval model for deploying services to the cloud at a platform level, or remove time requirements for notifications, to reduce delays in the approval process.

The association also encourages greater coordination between the European Central Bank, European Supervisory Authorities and National Competent Authorities to ensure a consistent application of outsourcing. It asks that Information and Communication Technologies third-party registers also ensure minimum duplication for financial institutions and supervisors.

In addition, it requests that policymakers and regulators refrain from requiring localisation of data or cloud hosting solutions, as this challenges resilience, inhibits innovation and increases operational complexity.

Published in collaboration with Protiviti, AFMEs report follows a September 2021 publication outlining the key regulatory barriers to the greater adoption of cloud services in capital markets Building Resilience in the Cloud.

Fiona Willis, associate director of technology and operations at AFME, says: The benefits of cloud technology for the growth of the financial services sector are clear. [It allows] financial institutions to deliver agile, scalable and resilient services to their clients. However, our report finds the rate of adoption of cloud technology is currently being held back by overly complex and unharmonised regulation.

She adds: AFME members believe it is essential that policymakers, in the EU and globally, do not inadvertently impact the continued adoption of cloud services. We therefore make key recommendations to help ensure regulators and policymakers can work together to unlock the full potential of cloud opportunities for the financial services sector.

James Fox, director of Enterprise Cloud at Protiviti, comments: Regulators are quite rightly taking steps to make sure that the application of cloud technologies within financial services is properly regulated to avoid any potential risks or issues that could harm the global financial system.

However, a careful balancing act needs to be struck between properly regulating cloud technologies and not stifling innovation and competition within the financial services sector, and as our recent report shows, the current regulatory complexity is making it more difficult for financial institutions to adopt the cloud.

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AFME and Protiviti report calls for coordinated approach for further cloud innovation - Asset Servicing Times

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EU Officially Adopts Digital Markets Act to Target Anti-Competitive Behavior in the Online Marketspace – JD Supra

As the name implies, the DMA is targeted at large online platforms including those platforms that both consumers and businesses interact with and use on a daily basis including search engines, social networks, online advertising tech providers, cloud computing, and online messaging.

Globally, including in both the US and the EU, legislators and government bodies have raised concerns that large online platforms are able to gatekeep and engage in anti-competitive behavior negatively impacting both daily consumer life as well as businesses ability to operate. The DMA is the EUs effort to open up a fairer online marketplace.

The DMA does not come alone. As noted in our previous alert, the DMA has been developed in close alignment with the Digital Services Act (DSA), together forming the Digital Services Package. The DSA applies to digital services, which broadly include intermediary services, hosting services, online platforms, and very large platforms. Once implemented and effective in January 2024, the DSA will set the standard for requirements related to fairness, transparency, and responsibility that online services must comply with. Related, the DMA focuses on regulating anti-competitive and monopolistic behavior in the technology and online platform (digital and mobile) industries. The DMA is on the forefront of a trend globally of looking to antitrust legislation as a way to regulate technology companies and online services.

On top of anti-competition rules and prohibitions, the DMA also further places personal data processing and data minimization principles on in-scope entities.

Some of the most important aspects of the DMA are that it will requireamong many requirementsin-scope businesses to (1) allow end-users to unsubscribe from the online service just as easily as it is to sign up; (2) obtain consent from end-users if the in-scope business is tracking end-users outside of the actual online service for purposes of targeted advertising; and (3) allow third-party apps and app stores to interoperate with the businesses online service (e.g., can no longer require users to only use the in-scope business apps and app stores).

With the DMA officially adopted, below are some essential insights to help impacted entities prepare for the legislations implementation.

Who Does the DMA Impact?

Although the DMA is a component of the EUs broad regulation of online platforms, it will only impose obligations on a small number of very large online platforms that act as Gatekeepers. This contrasts with the DSA, which will likely apply to a broader swatch of businesses operating online.

These Gatekeepersunder the DMAare core online platforms, such as online search engines, marketplaces, and social networks, that offer gateway services between consumers and businesses that have become indispensable to thousands of businesses and millions of users. Some of those platforms exercise control over whole platform ecosystems in the digital economy and are structurally difficult to challenge or contest by existing or new market operators, irrespective of how innovative and efficient those market operators may be. As a result, the likelihood increases that the underlying markets do not function efficiently with respect to these entities.

Thus, the intent of the DMA (according to the EU governing bodies) is aimed at regulating these largely uncontestable platforms to circumvent such market failures, while also opening up the markets for broader competition to the benefit of businesses and consumers.

To qualify as a Gatekeeper, a company must fit within the DMAs narrowly defined, quantitative, objective criteria. To achieve Gatekeeper status the company must meet the following:

(1) Significant impact on the internal market. The company must have an EU annual turnover above 7.5 billion, a market capitalization over 75 billion, and it must provide the same core platform service in at least three Member States;

(2) Provide a core platform service for business users to reach end users. The company must have at least forty-five (45) million active monthly end-users and ten thousand (10,000) yearly business users in the EU; and

(3) Durable and stable position in the market. The company must have an entrenched and durable position in the market, meaning that it is stable over timeif the company met the criteria in point (2) above in each of the last three (3) financial years.

Platforms and businesses that meet these criteria are presumed to be a Gatekeeper and are required to inform the European Commission within two (2) months of meeting the thresholds. The Commission then designates the company as a Gatekeeper unless the company provides compelling evidence to the contrary. The Gatekeeper status is then re-evaluated every three (3) years.

Obligations and Restrictions

The DMA establishes obligations for Gatekeepers and outlines what Gatekeepers may no longer do.

The bulk of the DMAs regulatory requirements revolve around allowing other businesses to promote their online offerings more easily to end-users on the Gatekeeper platforms and allowing end-users to access othersimilaronline services and offerings from third-party businesses through the Gatekeepers platforms. It essentially boils down to requiring Gatekeepers to allow more direct access and communication between third-party businesses and consumers.

For example, the DMA obligates Gatekeepers to (i) allow third parties to interoperate with the Gatekeepers own services in certain situations, (ii) allow their business users to access the data that they generate in their use of the Gatekeepers platform, (iii) provide companies advertising on their platform with the tools and information necessary for advertisers and publishers to carry out their own independent verification of their advertisements hosted by the gatekeeper, and (iv) allow their business users to promote their offer and conclude contracts with their customers outside the Gatekeepers platform.

Alternatively, Gatekeepers may no longer (i) treat services and products offered by the Gatekeeper itself more favorably in ranking than similar services or products offered by third parties on the Gatekeeper's platform, (ii) prevent consumers from linking up to businesses outside their platforms, (iii) prevent users from un-installing any pre-installed software or app, and (iv) track end users outside of the Gatekeepers core platform service for the purpose of targeted advertising, without effective consent.

Impact on Online Advertising

Importantly, the DMA also implements personal data and tracking-related regulations that closely align with the EUs data collection principles originally set forth in the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

Without obtaining an end-users specific consent, Gatekeepers are prohibited from (i) processing personal data for advertising purposes if the personal data comes from an end users interactions with a third party using the Gatekeepers online platform or service (e.g., the end-user has no direct connection to the Gatekeeper); (ii) combining personal data obtained from one core online platform service with the personal data obtained from third party services; (iii) using personal data obtained through one of the Gatekeepers core online platforms or services in the Gatekeepers other online platforms or services; and (iv) signing in end users to other services the Gatekeeper provides for the purpose of combining personal data.

The above prohibitions and consent requirements tie into the GDPRs principle of data minimizationusing the minimum amount of personal data and only for the purpose of which a business has informed the end-user.

Gatekeepers will need to build out consent mechanisms and procedures if they hope to continue the above data collection and processing practices for their own purposes and as a part of the services, they provide third parties (e.g., advertising and analytic services).

Penalties

The European Commission, supported by the national competition authorities, will carry out enforcement of the DMA. The Commission will have the sole authority to initiate proceedings and make infringement decisions. The DMA sets maximum fines based on a percentage of a companys global annual turnover. If a Gatekeeper fails to adhere to the requirements in the DMA, the Commission can impose fines of up to 10% of the companys total global annual turnover, and up to 20% for repeated infringements. Additionally, the Commission can impose periodic penalty payments of up to 5% of the Gatekeepers average daily turnover. In the case of systematic infringements of the DMA obligations, the Commission also has the authority to impose additional remedies necessary to achieve compliance. These remedies can include behavioral and structural remedies such as the forced sale of parts of the business, or a prohibition on the acquisition of other companies in the digital sector, but in any case, must be proportionate to the offense committed.

Key Takeaways

The DMA will be applicable as of May 2023. This gives potentially affected entities roughly six (6) months to assess their Gatekeeper status and jump-start their compliance efforts. Once in effect, the DMA aims to provide a fairer online business environment and intends to create new opportunities for innovators and technology start-ups to compete in the online platform environment without having to comply with unfair terms and conditions limiting their development. Lastly, the DMA anticipates that consumers will have more and better services to choose from, more opportunities to switch their providers, direct access to services, and fairer prices. Put simply, the DMA plans to prevent Gatekeepers from using unfair practices toward the businesses and customers that depend on them to gain an undue market advantage.

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NICE Enlighten XO Receives 2022 Industry Award from Speech Technology for Boosting Contact Center Performance with AI-Based Solutions – Yahoo Finance

Enlighten XO advanced AI builds smart self-service, delivering CXi through a unified suite of applications on the CXone platform

HOBOKEN, N.J., December 08, 2022--(BUSINESS WIRE)--NICE (Nasdaq: NICE) today announced that Speech Technology magazine has named NICE a 2022 Top Ten Speech Industry award winner for boosting contact center performance and functionality with its artificial-intelligence (AI) based capabilities powered by its Enlighten AI engine, as well as NICE CXones advanced analytical and digital capabilities. The Speech Telephony awards program recently highlighted developments in speech technologies across a range of industries and advanced technology providers.

According to Speech Technology, "When it comes to cloud contact center solutions, one could easily make the case that NICE CXone is among the leading integrated platforms in the industry. And in the past year, NICE really boosted performance and functionality with a slew of artificial intelligence-based capabilities powered by its Enlighten AI engine."

Speech Technology continued, "An example is the new Enlighten XO, which automatically generates insights from human conversations to build smart self-service with advanced AI. Enlighten XO analyzes 100 percent of interactions from any voice or text platform to discover opportunities for automation. Purpose-built AI models identify customer intents, training phrases, and problem-solving activities."

Speech Technology also pointed out other contributions by NICE to contact center performance excellence:

NICE Customer Experience Interactions (CXi) is a framework delivered through a unified suite of applications on the CXone platform. CXi empowers organizations to meet customers wherever their journeys begin, enables resolution through AI and data-driven self-service, and prepares agents to resolve customer issues. The CXi approach combines CCaaS, workforce optimization, speech and text analytics, artificial intelligence, and digital self-service.

NICE introduced Enlighten AI for Complaint Management, which automatically identifies and categorizes consumer complaints and automates the remediation process. Driven by NICEs AI engine, the solution analyzes 100 percent of interactions across all communication channels and operationalizes root-cause insights to protect organizations from reputational and compliance risks. NICE Enlighten AI for Complaint Management also serves as an early warning system, notifying companies of the potential risk of regulatory action.

NICE partnered with Google Cloud, integrating CXone with Google Cloud Contact Center Artificial Intelligence (CCAI), enabling intelligent natural language capabilities across the customer journey, including self-service bots and agent-facing virtual assistants. CXone Virtual Agent Hub allows businesses to expand their customer self-service capabilities with conversational bots for voice and chat that leverage Google Clouds Contact Center AI.

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"NICE is taking the digital-first customer experience to the next level through the power of AI," said Barry Cooper, President, CX Division, NICE. "We are proud to receive this important award that reinforces our role as an industry leader helping brands deliver data-driven, actionable insights in real time as they automatically learn from every interaction."

For further information on NICE Enlighten AI for CX, please visit our website here.

About Speech TechnologyInformation Today, Inc. (ITI), located in Medford, N.J., is the parent company of Speech Technology Media, producers of Speech Technology magazine, SpeechTechMag.com, and the SpeechTEK conference. SpeechTEK and Speech Technology magazine are recognized worldwide as the leading sources of news, information, and analysis relating to the speech technology industry. Both provide additional sources of news, information, and analysis through online communities at speechtek.com and speechtechmag.com, and opt-in electronic distribution networks, STM eWeekly, and The Speech Technology Bulletin.

About NICEWith NICE (Nasdaq: NICE), its never been easier for organizations of all sizes around the globe to create extraordinary customer experiences while meeting key business metrics. Featuring the worlds #1 cloud native customer experience platform, CXone, NICE is a worldwide leader in AI-powered self-service and agent-assisted CX software for the contact center and beyond. Over 25,000 organizations in more than 150 countries, including over 85 of the Fortune 100 companies, partner with NICE to transform - and elevate - every customer interaction. http://www.nice.com.

Trademark Note: NICE and the NICE logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of NICE Ltd. All other marks are trademarks of their respective owners. For a full list of NICE marks, please see http://www.nice.com/nice-trademarks.

Forward-Looking StatementsThis press release contains forward-looking statements as that term is defined in the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Such forward-looking statements, including the statements by Mr. Cooper, are based on the current beliefs, expectations and assumptions of the management of NICE Ltd. (the "Company"). In some cases, such forward-looking statements can be identified by terms such as "believe," "expect," "seek," "may," "will," "intend," "should," "project," "anticipate," "plan," "estimate," or similar words. Forward-looking statements are subject to a number of risks and uncertainties that could cause the actual results or performance of the Company to differ materially from those described herein, including but not limited to the impact of changes in economic and business conditions, including as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic; competition; successful execution of the Companys growth strategy; success and growth of the Companys cloud Software-as-a-Service business; changes in technology and market requirements; decline in demand for the Company's products; inability to timely develop and introduce new technologies, products and applications; difficulties or delays in absorbing and integrating acquired operations, products, technologies and personnel; loss of market share; an inability to maintain certain marketing and distribution arrangements; the Companys dependency on third-party cloud computing platform providers, hosting facilities and service partners;, cyber security attacks or other security breaches against the Company; the effect of newly enacted or modified laws, regulation or standards on the Company and our products and various other factors and uncertainties discussed in our filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (the "SEC"). For a more detailed description of the risk factors and uncertainties affecting the company, refer to the Company's reports filed from time to time with the SEC, including the Companys Annual Report on Form 20-F. The forward-looking statements contained in this press release are made as of the date of this press release, and the Company undertakes no obligation to update or revise them, except as required by law.

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20221208005072/en/

Contacts

Corporate Media Contact Cindy Morgan-Olson, +1 646 408 5896, ETCindy.morgan-olson@niceactimize.com

Investors Marty Cohen, +1 551 256 5354, ETir@nice.com

Omri Arens, +972 3 763 0127, CETir@nice.com

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NICE Enlighten XO Receives 2022 Industry Award from Speech Technology for Boosting Contact Center Performance with AI-Based Solutions - Yahoo Finance

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Taking control of your cloud: How to stop the weakening rand from negatively affecting your technology strategy – ITWeb

The depreciation of the rand against the US dollar reached its highest point of the year in early November, at R18.41 to the dollar. According to a recent Moneyweb piece, this can be attributed to a number of reasons, with interest hikes in the US and the promise of higher yields causing investors to move away from emerging markets, while the Russian war in Ukraine, lockdowns in China and more continue to fuel an inflation that had already started in 2021 as economies recovered from the pandemic.

The weakening rand brings with it a host of knock-on effects, from inflation increases to a more negative general sentiment within the country, explains Jaap Scholten, Head: Group Hybrid IT Strategy at Datacentrix, a hybrid IT systems integrator and managed services provider.

It also has a direct impact on the technology sector, in particular the cloud consumption of local businesses, with many organisations hosting workloads with hyperscalers now finding themselves roughly 20% over budget year on year.

Add to this the ever-growing volume of data being created today, and you're left with companies that desperately need to find another solution to balance the management of the increasing data and technology budgets.

According to Scholten, should a business find itself in this position, it's time to reconsider your cloud set-up and strategy.

One consideration for organisations is whether to switch solution providers, preferably to a local partner that fixes costs in rands, as this circumvents the fluctuating exchange rate challenges. It is also important to find a provider with no data egress costs. As much as feeding data into the cloud (data ingress) is effectively free, it can become costly to get it out again (egress), particularly when it comes to paying for it in dollars. Workloads with a high transaction rate of data in and out, such as databases, suffer the most in terms of data egress costs.

Another important advantage of local hosting is the fact that data sovereignty is ensured, meaning that compliance with local data privacy and security regulations will also be in place.

These challenges can easily be overcome with the hybrid cloud model from Datacentrix, which is hosted in Teraco's highly available environment and powered by the Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) GreenLake edge-to-cloud platform.

This Africa-first cloud offering delivers an 'as-a-service' experience that provides a base load combined with on-demand capacity, providing the agility and economics of public cloud with the security and performance of on-premises IT.

The discussion around consumption-based IT and its ability to offer flexibility and scalability associated with cloud while maintaining on-premises autonomy over an organisation's data is not new, states Scholten, nor is the narrative around the cost benefits of pay-per-use economics that eliminate investment in excess compute, storage or networking capacity.

However, it is worth unpacking the total economic impact of our hybrid cloud solution to get a better picture of the holistic cost benefits that it delivers to the modern enterprise, he continues.

With Datacentrix, you effectively pay for a baseload set at a certain threshold, plus whatever you consume over and above that baseload, on a varying basis. The financial commitment is thus made on the baseload, with calculable costs as you scale up, which makes for a predictable financial outlay if you need more capacity for your baseload.

Importantly, our pricing is fixed in South African rands at the beginning of the term, anywhere between one and three years, and even scale-out options during the hosting contract will still be quoted at the same unit price. This ultimately adds more stability and predictability to your financial commitment, while also negating the often expensive egress costs, he adds.

There are various intangible factors that should be considered too. For instance, if you work with a reputable systems integrator, you could gain high availability across multiple data centres, which effectively means no downtime. In addition, if the deployment is in the right data centre, you also gain significantly from connectivity savings a cable into the African Cloud Exchange will give you a gigabit per second or faster connectivity for the cost of a cross-connect cable.

We also believe our customers can expect to see a significant drop in historic total cost of ownership (TCO). With traditional IT infrastructure, there are issues pertaining to growth and capacity planning where those nasty financial surprises usually slip in. For instance, there may be no compatible hardware available when wanting to upgrade, or a lack of integration between disparate infrastructure, or even significant price hikes on new generation equipment. Datacentrix's cloud model eliminates these problems and provides their customers with a clear financial path forward.

Lastly, it is worth mentioning that, with Datacentrix, you do not need highly skilled staff members to keep your systems running. Should you already have these skills in place, they can be applied to rather optimise your deployments, instead of having them look after hardware, storage and networking stability, he concludes. Essentially then, not only can this reduce maintenance cost, but also accelerate improvements and transformation.

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Questioning the Cloud Value Proposition | No Jitter – No Jitter

According to Wall Street and the quarterly reports filed by many top technology companies, including Amazon, Google, and Microsoft, cloud growth decelerated in the quarter that just ended. The growth of cloud computing has slowed a bit this year, The Wall Street Journal admitted, and most tech publications sing the same tune. Some people are now questioning whether the cloud was cheaper, as was claimed, than the data center. It may not be time to abandon the cloud, but it sure sounds like we need to look at it more closely.

Lets start with a basic truth. If youre an enterprise with a data center that contains hundreds of rack-mounted servers, and youre looking at the price of running an application instance in a virtual machine in your data center versus in the cloud, the data center will be cheaper. You can get almost the same economies of scale as an enterprise as a cloud provider could achieve, and you dont have to pay the cloud providers profit margins.

So, the cloud is a massive fraud? Not so fast. If you have an application, not a single instance, that has to support consumer access via the Internet, and you want to host the application somewhere, that same cloud is almost certainly going to be cheaper. Why? Because the application will need to scale to the maximum number of users expected, and providing that scalability in your own data center means buying a bunch of servers that wont be used most of the time. The clouds scalability is based on resources shared across all its users, so its more efficient.

There is a legitimate reason to use cloud resources. The current trends toward direct online product information and sales support encourage the building of applications that have to scale significantly and so are reasonable candidates for public cloud hosting. Whats not legitimate is the often-expressed view that everything is moving to the cloud. What we are seeing now is proof thats not the case.

Suppose the cloud was really cheaper, and that everything in the data center could run in the cloud at a lower cost. Here we are in an economic downturn, and yet companies are decelerating their cloud adoption. Forget savings, they say, and toss out that cheaper cloud option! Nonsense. Clearly, a cheaper cloud would be adopted more, not less, often. But suppose that the clouds growth depends not on overall cheapness, but on enterprises shifting to an online marketing/sales model. If were in that same economic downturn, wouldnt it be smart to wait till things look better before we start our new online program? The result is a slowing of cloud growth.

Or suppose youre a social media company whose revenues come from ads. Do your advertisers, seeing the threat of an economic downturn, decide to up their spending, so you can up your cloud spending? Doubtful, so what really happens is that they cut their spending, and you cut yours. Cloud providers revenues dont grow as fast as a result.

The signals from the market are clear; cloud spending depends on consumers online activity. Its the variation in these consumer workloads that makes an application a candidate for the cloud. If lower overall cloud costs were driving adoption, the same companies would accelerate a movement to the cloud. In fact, wed have converted to the cloud long ago.

OK, so everything isnt moving to the cloud. Whats the action item? For IT and network planners, including CIOs, the truth about the cloud raises two questions. First, what actually happens to applications that, instead of being run either in the cloud or data center, must now be run with a foot in both worlds? Second, if the role of the WAN is to connect the cloud piece of applications to the data center piece, what does the network of the future actually look like?

The questions here are as important as their answers. What theyre showing is that the network of the future is being framed by application software decisions rather than by things like the location of workers or facilities. As the cloud becomes the universal on-ramp for applications, how the cloud relates to workers and relates to the data center (outwards to the workers and inwards to the data center) establishes network policy.

What seems inevitable is that nearly all application access will move to the cloud, that mission-critical transaction processing and databases will remain in the data center, and that the Internet on the outside, and cloud-to-data-center connections on the inside will be the WAN of the future. In fact, the current cloud evolution could have a major impact on MPLS VPN services by siphoning traffic off VPNs and onto the Internet.

Is the basic value of the cloud under threat? No, the coverage of the cloud is whats questionable. Weve accepted facile views of cloud benefits that never had any basis, and were now struggling to understand the real benefits of the cloud. Cloud benefits are more complicated, so they take more than a few soundbites to communicate. The moral here is that the cloud, as it gets more pervasive, mature, and advanced, also gets more complicated, and we have to accept it will take some effort to deal with that. Once we do, then the real future of the cloud will become clear.

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Questioning the Cloud Value Proposition | No Jitter - No Jitter

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CloudWave acquires Sensato to expand its healthcare cybersecurity portfolio – Help Net Security

CloudWave acquires Sensato Cybersecurity, bringing together cloud hosting services and managed Cybersecurity-as-a-Service for healthcare organizations.

Sensato was founded by long-time health information technology visionary John Gomez, who will join CloudWave as chief security and engineering officer.

Sensato developed a fully integrated Cybersecurity-as-a-Service platform (CaaS) that features an innovative solution stack to provide real-time network monitoring, intrusion detection, and asset fingerprinting along with a 247 Security Operations Center designed specifically for healthcare infrastructure and connected devices. It will be available immediately as part of CloudWaves new Sensato Cybersecurity suite.

As healthcare organizations are increasingly being targeted by cybercriminals, CloudWaves Sensato Cybersecurity suite provides a level of security that combines the ability to comply with best practices and regulations, detect threats, and respond to cybersecurity incidents in a fully integrated and easy to deploy holistic platform.

The Sensato Cybersecurity suite is a natural fit with CloudWaves OpSus Cloud Services. It will enable hospitals to implement a fully managed cybersecurity program, resulting in full HIPAA and NIST compliance, with end-to-end service and support from a single provider.

The companys Cybersecurity Tactical Operations Center (CTOC), a next generation SOC, employs a tactical approach to cybersecurity with continuous monitoring by cybersecurity analysts, while also incorporating machine learning.

The blending of operations for cybersecurity and cloud service delivery into a single extended healthcare ecosystem, spanning public cloud, private cloud and on-premises healthcare technology environments is unprecedented and provides a seamless, enhanced experience to customers.

As a managed cloud service provider to hundreds of hospitals, CloudWave has witnessed how devastating a cyber event can be to healthcare organizations. Unfortunately, the frequency of these attacks continues to risean increasing number of customers have called upon CloudWave for rapid response services to help halt and remediate cyberattacks on their on-premises systems in just the last two years, said Erik Littlejohn, president and CEO of CloudWave.

With the addition of the innovative, proprietary technologies included in the Sensato Cybersecurity suite, along with the cyber expertise of the Sensato team, CloudWave will be able to offer customers the high-level cybersecurity we provide for our cloud-based delivery to on-premises systems., Littlejohn continued.

Rich Temple, vice president, CIO at Deborah Heart and Lung Center in Browns Mills, NJ, commented, The Sensato Cybersecurity suite offers a level of healthcare data protection to hospitals that would be difficult to implement on our own. Theres peace of mind in knowing that our systems are being monitored and protected by an experienced team of cybersecurity specialists.

He continued, As a long-time CloudWave customer, we know that having a single partner for services delivery of our cloud-hosted applications and our on-premises cybersecurity systems and support simplifies our IT operations significantly.

CloudWave is the independent cloud and managed EHR hosting provider in healthcare and has been delivering secure IT services to the healthcare market via the cloud for more than a decade. The company is 100% focused on healthcare with more than 250 hospital environments currently managed in the public cloud and the OpSus private cloud.

CloudWave also employs a defense-in-depth approach to cybersecurity. Its Sensato Cybersecurity suite and CTOC further fortifies the OpSus Cloud Services platform and provides complete, managed cybersecurity as a service to customers.

Were excited to become part of the CloudWave family, said John Gomez. The promise of what well be able to collaboratively provide to the healthcare community with our combined expertise securing and delivering IT services is beyond measure.

The terms of the deal were not disclosed.

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5 things you need to know about re:Invent, AWS’s biggest cloud event of the year – About Amazon

Thousands of cloud-computing fans will convene in Las Vegas from November 28 through December 2 for the Amazon Web Services (AWS) 11th re:Invent cloud conference. Each year, re:Invent features leader keynotes, new service announcements, fun, and inspiration. Here are five things to know about this years re:Invent:

re:Invent is AWSs biggest cloud event of the year, and an opportunity to check out all the latest news and developments in compute, databases, analytics, machine learning, and storage. You can follow all the key announcements, and get a peek at the newest cloud technologies from AWS at the Amazon Press Center.

After going virtual in 2020, and offering a hybrid event in 2021, re:Invent is offering more in-person events so all attendeesfrom customers to partners to aspiring technologistscan learn from experts and each other. The team has designed an in-person program with nearly 2,300 sessions. To ensure the conference is as inclusive as possible, AWS is live-streaming all keynotes and leadership sessions for virtual attendees. All presentations, including breakout sessions, will be captioned and broadcasted. To catch the re:Invent action remotely, register to virtually attend.

AWS leaders, including CEO Adam Selipsky, will host keynotes, announcing the latest product launches and sharing inspiring customer stories. Other keynote speakers include Amazon Chief Technology Officer Dr. Werner Vogels, Senior Vice President of AWS Utility Computing Peter DeSantis, Vice President of AWS Worldwide Channels and Alliances Ruba Borno, and Vice President of AWS Database, Analytics, and Machine Learning Swami Sivasubramanian. In total, re:Invent will feature 22 leadership sessions. Check out the full agenda.

At its heart, re:Invent is a learning conference, offering builder labs, bootcamps, gamified learning, and hundreds of technical sessions, from the introductory to the most advanced. Attendees get to dive deep with new technologies, and they can practice new ways of working and hone their skills alongside their cloud-community peers.

Participants will have opportunities to explore demos and interact with technology, including meeting a robot bar-keep, seeing a basketball free-throw analyzer, and playing a cloud-skills game. AWS is also hosting a showcase for sustainability, which highlights how technology is being used to address challenges like water conservation and decarbonizing operations. And the AWS Disaster Response rolling laba technology-packed truckshows the benefits of cloud capabilities during disaster responses. Finally, attendees can catch the annual AWS DeepRacer League Championship, where machine learning meets model cars racing autonomously around a tough track.

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5 things you need to know about re:Invent, AWS's biggest cloud event of the year - About Amazon

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GoZone WiFi and Forum Info-Tech Provide Toyota Arena and Ontario Convention Center with Innovative Portfolio of IT Solutions to Self-Manage, Automate…

Stadiums and Convention Center Venues Benefit from New Ways to Monetize and Differentiate their Facilities

ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. & CORONA, Calif., November 29, 2022--(BUSINESS WIRE)--GoZone WiFi, the leader in WiFi monetization and management tools, and Forum Info-Tech, a top 100 managed service provider (MSP), today announced that the two companies are working together to provide the Toyota Arena and Ontario Convention Center with advanced IT and WiFi solutions. Toyota Arena is a multi-purpose arena in Ontario, CA, hosting local sporting events and concerts including the Ontario Clippers, and the Ontario Convention Center is a full-service, state-of-the-art convention facility used for conventions, trade shows, exhibits and meetings.

GoZone WiFi and Forum Info-Tech are helping to drive revenue and connect with Wi-Fi users that exhibit or attend events at large facilities like the Toyota Arena and Ontario Convention Center using GoZones Smart WiFi Suite of guest analytics solutions and Forum Info-Techs IT products and services. These combined solutions offer these venues with updated IT services and the ability to self-manage and automate the onboarding of any type of user including exhibitors, guests, fans, contractors, and all their IoT devices.

"We are excited to partner with Forum Info-Tech to provide Toyota Arena with our combined innovative guest analytic and IT solutions," said Todd Myers, Founder and CEO, GoZone WiFi. "GoZones solutions for stadium and Convention Center facilities like Toyota Arena and Ontario Convention Center provide these venues with the opportunity to increase concession revenues, drive future attendance and make informed staffing decisions. In addition, these venues can better understand traffic flow and attendee behavior and apply that data to event layout and design. They also can showcase event sponsors with interactive ads, drive app downloads, and provide advertiser attribution."

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"GoZone Wi-Fi helps Forum Info-Tech add an additional layer of service for our Managed IT Service venues like the Toyota Arena and Ontario Convention Center. In addition to providing onsite and co-managed IT services for their computer networks, workstation support, and cloud hosting and security compliance, we have found that GoZone Wi-Fi provides Forum Info-Tech the logical extension of taking care of the venues Wi-Fi to provide an incredible and hassle-free WiFi experience for both the venue and those attending events," added Biren Shukla, President and CEO, Forum Info-Tech.

About GoZone:

GoZone WiFi is a SaaS company and leader in monetizing and managing Guest WiFi. The company offers business analytics, venue intelligence and guest engagement by using WiFi networks to deliver branded content, provide customer analytics, and display advertising. GoZones Smart WiFi Suite of products enables WiFi monetization through rich location data, marketing engagements, and third-party sponsorships. GoZones venue intelligence enables enterprises to strategically refine operations, bridging the gap between marketing and IT. Learn more at GoZoneWiFi.com.

About Forum Info-Tech:

Forum Info-Tech specializes in educating our clients on the information technology options available to ease business IT concerns and implement the best solution. Our professional scope ranges from engineering and implementing on-premise network solutions, designing and migrating to cloud solutions, business continuity, and data recovery solutions, and consulting on various IT projects. Our network and technical engineers combined experience allows us to successfully provide custom, affordable solutions to our valued clients. For more information, please learn more at http://www.foruminfotech.net.

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20221129005396/en/

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GoZone WiFi and Forum Info-Tech Provide Toyota Arena and Ontario Convention Center with Innovative Portfolio of IT Solutions to Self-Manage, Automate...

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