The IT Nerd

Recently, Susan Bowen, CEO and President of Aptum, hosted a panel discussion on “How business leaders can stay on the offensive in challenging times” with Philbert Shih, Managing Director of analyst firm Structure Research; Jack Danahy, Former SVP of Business Development and Chief Evangelist with managed security leader Alert Logic; and Mark Vivian, CEO of Oracle Managed Services provider Claremont.

During the discussion, they touched on these topics:

• Business Strategy – How the pandemic has impacted business, and strategies to grow in the face of challenge
• IT Security – Security in the new business landscape, and its impact on the IT environment
• IT Infrastructure – The immediate impacts IT infrastructure can have on business success
• Remote Work – Strategies to keep remote workers engaged and maintain (or even build) productivity

A defensive business strategy is often the fallback approach for organizations in turbulent times. Over the past year the COVID-19 pandemic has caused many organizations to adopt this mindset. Putting new remote work strategies in place, shifting budgets to compensate for unpredictable revenue and trying to maintain a ‘business as usual’ stance has consumed senior executives across all industries. To grow their customer base and revenues, businesses must now be on the offensive.

The panelists all agreed organizations looking to be more aggressive need to have a solid cloud strategy. Toronto-based Philbert Shih at Structure Research has followed the cloud and data centre market for 20 years and noted that like the 2008/2009 financial crisis, the pandemic has spurred interest in cloud and outsourced infrastructure. 

As businesses shift more of their infrastructure to the cloud, security will play a key role. For example, the increase in employees working from home creates different security dynamics, Alert Logic’s Jack Danahy noted. IT infrastructures that were once managed on-site now need to be managed remotely. And with more devices being used for both personal and professional applications, new security processes need to be explored. 

Technology isn’t the only factor organizations need to address to take a more offensive business stance post-pandemic. Remote work is here to stay and ensuring employees feel connected to one another and the company will be more important when they’re not in regular face-to-face contact.

All panelists believe over the next 12 months, more organizations will turn to the cloud to boost scalability, efficiency and security.  

Please see Bowen’s full blog here: https://aptum.com/blog/how-business-leaders-can-stay-on-the-offensive-in-challenging-times/

The roundtable recording is also available here.

While 91 per cent of organizations were successful in increasing security as a result of adopting cloud services, it remains a top concern for many. This finding comes from part two of the four-part Cloud Impact Study from Aptum, the global hybrid multi-cloud managed service provider. The report, titled The Security and Compliance Barricade, identifies common security, compliance and governance challenges impacting organizations undergoing cloud transformation. 

The independent research reveals that more than half of survey respondents (51%) see security as the main driver behind cloud adoption. However, 38 per cent cite security and data protection as the primary barrier to cloud transformation. 

Security and compliance play a critical role

Part one of the Cloud Impact Study, Bridging the Cloud Gap, found most survey respondents plan to take a hybridized approach to their cloud infrastructure, with more than half (59%) of respondents saying they will reduce their on-premises infrastructure to some degree and increase public cloud deployments within the next 18-24 months. A further 66 per cent intend to expand their private cloud workloads. 
According to data found in today’s report, this expansion and diversification of infrastructure raises security and compliance issues among senior IT professionals, including: 

• Control and governance (82%) 
• Visibility through a single portal (81%) 
• Ability to meet requirements of compliancy audits (80%) 

Together, Aptum and Alert Logic partner to safeguard business critical data across the infrastructure and application stack, merging security technology, threat intelligence and 24/7 security experts to deliver security outcomes to businesses in an as-a-service model. 

The study’s results reinforce the importance of incorporating security into cloud architectures from design through to implementation and transformation. The results call for organizations to take a holistic approach to cloud architectures, with security principles embedded in the design. By doing this, businesses can mitigate threats and minimize risks as they arise to create an environment safer than any on-premise or legacy alternatives. 

The full findings of part two of the Cloud Impact Study, The Security and Compliance Barricade, can be found here.

Aptum’s Cloud Impact Study was created from the opinions of 400 senior IT professionals in Canada, the U.S. and U.K. across industries in financial services, IT, technology, telecommunications, manufacturing, retail, public and commercial sectors. The final two reports will focus on Costs and Budgets and Modernization Opportunities. 

For part one of the report, Bridging the Cloud Gap, please visit here. 

While Canadian organizations have often been perceived as conservative when it comes to adopting new technologies, a new survey from Aptum, a global hybrid cloud and managed services provider, demonstrates exactly how essential cloud computing has become in the country. Seven out of 10 (69 per cent) Canadian organizations said the cloud is very important.
In a recent global survey of 400 senior IT professionals from organizations in industries including financial services, manufacturing, public sector, retail and telecom, more than half (51 per cent) of respondents from Canada strongly agreed that cloud computing is essential in enabling business continuity within their organizations (compared to 49 per cent globally). Canadians are slightly ahead of their global counterparts in how much they rely on cloud with 51 per cent of respondents saying they strongly agree cloud computing is essential to the financial security of their organizations (compared to only 40 per cent globally). 

This level of strategic importance placed on cloud has translated into organizational confidence in technology to help businesses maintain continuity throughout the current COVID-19 pandemic. For example:

• 53 per cent have used cloud services to provide customers with critical services (48 per cent globally);
• 77 per cent had used cloud to enable their remote workforces (76 per cent globally).  

Even though Canadian organizations seem to have fully embraced the cloud, they still find picking the right solutions and plotting a course through different technologies difficult with 72 per cent of respondents somewhat or strongly agreeing that complexity and abundant choices make choosing the right cloud strategy difficult (62 per cent globally). A majority of respondents in Canada (77 per cent) even wanted to accelerate cloud adoption but needed expertise or help to make it happen (69 per cent globally). 

Canadian businesses looking to adopt cloud services also face significant challenges in these areas: 

• Getting full visibility into all cloud environments through a single portal (23 per cent in Canada versus 21 per cent globally)
• Control and governance of access to cloud environments (25 per cent in Canada versus 18 per cent globally)
• A clear mechanism to detect and respond to security threats across all cloud environments (24 per cent in Canada versus 21 per cent globally)

The global survey of 400 senior IT professionals in Canada, the U.K, and U.S. was conducted between May and June 2020. 

There is a blog post from Aptum which uses global numbers from the survey: https://aptum.com/blog/cloud-technologies-leading-businesses-through-covid-19-crisis/

Also of note, all of Aptum’s data centers in Ontario, Quebec, British Columbia and England are now open and allowing access to their customers with clear guidelines and procedures to remain COVID-19 secure.

Aptum, a global hybrid cloud and managed services provider, has introduced its Managed Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) offering, allowing businesses to minimize the risk of IT service downtime from any type of disruption, including ransomware and malware, and focus instead on strategic priorities. 

Aptum’s Managed DRaaS relies on enterprise-grade replication software to back up customer data in near real time and maintain operations to mitigate disruptions, planned or unplanned, whether misconfigurations, attacks or natural disasters at the customer’s primary site. The solution uses the cloud to protect data offsite and allows customers to order and power up virtual machines (VMs) on demand in the event of a failover. Businesses can customize the offering to suit their specific needs, such as file-level restore or full or partial failover of systems.

Aptum will work with customers to build a Managed DRaaS solution that meets their overall Business Continuity Plan objectives, backed by 24×7 support, 365 days a year from service centers in North America and Europe.
Features of Aptum’s DRaaS include:

• Low Recovery Point Objective (RPO) – the measure of the maximum tolerable amount of data to lose in a failover – to protect the customer’s virtual production infrastructure
• Allows point-in-time rollbacks to protect against malware and ransomware·  Provides machine level, file level, partial or full restore
• Offers non-disruptive failover testing for validation purposes·  Provides ability to create dev/test environments using production data and software in an isolated and secure infrastructure
• Offers a remote disaster recovery site without the up-front cost associated with a second infrastructure stack

Aptum DRaaS is available immediately with supported environments including HyperV, VMware and Azure.

Aptum, a global hybrid cloud and managed services provider, today launched its Managed DevOps Service in partnership with CloudOps, a cloud consulting and professional services company specializing in DevOps. The Managed DevOps Service offers a cloud-based DevOps platform that allows customers to automate their development pipelines and reduce application delivery times. Customers are also provided with hands-on training on DevOps practices and tools so they can succeed. Through this offering, customers gain access to two highly sought-after skillsets – DevOps and Kubernetes – allowing teams to focus on developing applications without having to worry about navigating the complexity of the DevOps ecosystem alone or the operations of their DevOps platform.

The Managed DevOps Service from Aptum is a fully managed stack, running on cloud infrastructure. It can be deployed over Aptum’s managed private cloud, Azure, AWS and GCP. The service is based on a Kubernetes container orchestration system, which automates the deployment, scaling and management of containerized applications.

Aptum’s Managed DevOps Service solves several common DevOps challenges for customers:

• Speeds up application development times
• Avoids costs and time involved in hiring and retaining DevOps platform talent
• Multi-cloud support enables agile and flexible deployments- Supports hyperscale and private clouds, allowing companies to choose the most cost-effective option
• Customizable deployment of the data and control plane to comply with data sovereignty regulations.

The Managed DevOps Service is available immediately to customers in North America, United Kingdom and Europe. Additional details can be found here: https://aptum.com/services/cloud/managed-devops/.

Aptum, a global hybrid cloud and managed services provider, today launched Hybrid Cloud Manager, powered by HyperGrid, a management platform that enables customers to assess, monitor, optimize, provision and govern private and hyperscale public cloud environments through a single interface. The new service gives customers full control of their costs and simplifies the management of single, hybrid and multi-cloud environments.

Aptum’s Hybrid Cloud Manager is designed to improve the cloud experience for organizations by removing complexity and giving them real-time visibility into cloud resources and configurations. Customers can manage their Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) or Platform as a Service (PaaS) environments through one dashboard that offers a complete picture of the economics and performance characteristics of every cloud resource. The single view gives IT and business decision makers the information they need in a meaningful and contextual format, along with controls to continually optimize their cloud environments in real time.

Data is becoming an integral part of companies’ planning, offering new insights and efficiencies. But to unlock the full potential of their data, businesses need to treat their data as part of their corporate infrastructure. Aptum’s Hybrid Cloud Manager helps enable data as infrastructure by allowing organizations to track and control their data anywhere in the cloud.

Aptum’s Hybrid Cloud Manager uses a comprehensive set of tools and APIs to give customers the insight they need to better control:
• Cloud migration assessments
• Cloud planning and application insights
• Cloud cost management and optimization
• Cloud security and governance
• Compliance requirements
• Cloud and multi-cloud configuration

Aptum’s Hybrid Cloud Manager is available immediately to Aptum customers globally with cost analytics and optimization, and performance monitoring and recommendations for public and private cloud environments launching with Azure and VMware support. For more information visit https://aptum.com/services/cloud/hybrid-cloud-manager/