Articles

Top Magazines Lower TCO - Case Study

31 Jan 2012

Condé Nast Digital Germany uses GoGrid to deliver content — securely, flexibly, and inexpensively

Condé Nast Digital Germany relies on GoGrid to distribute the high-quality content in several of Germany’s top print magazines over the web. When they visit the German-language sites for Glamour, GQ, and Vogue, readers find more than just the latest articles. Condé Nast Digital Germany provides them with archived content, communities, enhanced shopping, special microsites, and more. Reliant on advertising revenue, Condé Nast Digital Germany needs to keep its costs low while delivering an engaging experience to site visitors.

Is your service provider on the right cloud?

30 Jan 2012

Sometimes there are simply too many options and everything begins to sound the same so how do you select the best solution for your company? OK. Let's back up a second. You made the decision to outsource some or all of your IT operations. Either you need more capacity or perhaps you want to rent extra capacity for peak loads. Basically, you need to find new ways to quickly and easily accommodate to changes in your business without causing disruption.

Data centre SOS: save our servers!

27 Jan 2012

A 2011 report into data centre energy use highlighted that worldwide consumption grew by 56% between 2005 and 2010.¹ In fact, in 2010, data centres accounted for between 1.1% and 1.5% of the world's total energy consumption. Combine this increasing usage with rising energy costs, and you can see why a growing number of organisations are choosing to make economies of scale by cutting overheads or consolidating their data centres.

Cloud service saves accountants 30 per cent on their IT costs - Case Study

27 Jan 2012

A case study for Rise and George Hay Chartered Accountants

Overview

Chartered accountant George Hay wanted to reduce its IT costs and implement an IT infrastructure that would grow with its business. The company worked with Softwerx, an IT services and software development firm, to deploy a Cloud infrastructure based on DataCenter on Demand technology. With the help of Softwerx, George Hay reduced its IT costs by 30 per cent and gained peace of mind from a new disaster-recovery service. 

Your mobile can do more than call the emergency services

23 Jan 2012

SecurEnvoy walks you through a business continuity plan - so you’re ready for anything

There are few that will forget the last couple of winters. Freezing conditions saw chaos in most parts of the country, as our travel system ground to a halt, and flu epidemics threatened to close offices. But it’s not just wintry conditions that can cause chaos for organisations. The Icelandic ash clouds proved that - with employees either stuck in the wrong place or having to cancel important business trips. 

Investing in the future, by planning today - Case Study

23 Jan 2012

2plan Ltd provides advice, compliance and technology services to self-employed independent financial advisers (IFAs) nationwide, supported by one of the UK’s largest insurance companies, Standard Life. 

It needed to ensure its IT systems kept pace with phenomenal growth and supported the business seamlessly, enabling employees to focus on strategy and development. In order to do this it listed the help of Phoenix who were able to supply a full IT infrastructure hosting and management services using virtualisation technologies. A dual-centre failover, data replication and thin-client environment supports business continuity, while built-in scalability enables capacity upgrades in line with business growth. 

The Benefits of a Preventive Maintenance Service Plan for your UPS

23 Jan 2012

Eaton® Corporation, a global leader in power quality, distribution and control, strongly endorses a preventive maintenance service plan to maximize the reliability of an Uninterruptible Power System (UPS). Because companies rely on a UPS to deliver continuous power without any disruption to their business, a maintenance plan is a critical component to ensuring that a UPS minimizes the risks of downtime and performs as expected.

Cloud communications and the converged data centre

19 Jan 2012

Alastair Mills, of recently launched Six Degrees Group, explores the use of data, network and voice services, and whether point solutions or converged services are the future. He also identifies the pros and cons that companies must assess before making the decision that is best for them. 

Until recently, there has been a very clear divide between telecoms and IT networks, and between voice and data, but that divide is starting to crumble. Telecoms companies are beginning to see which way the wind is blowing: Verizon paid $1.4bn to acquire Terremark earlier this year as part of its strategy of providing “everything-as-a-service” to business and government customers worldwide.

4D Data Centres - Case study

17 Jan 2012

4D Data Centres is a UK co-location and connectivity business located in Surrey (Sirius 2 is its Tier 3 data centre) within easy reach of London and Heathrow. Close proximity to the M25 and the main railway line to London enables 4D to offer high-speed and diverse connectivity to the UK’s main communication hubs and other major colocation providers in London, Surrey, Kent and South East England. As well as quarter, half and full rack space provision, 4D offers a range of hosting services including server colocation, dedicated servers and managed services from its purpose-built secure data centre.

A difficult diesel generator system

16 Jan 2012

The performance requirements for data centres and for colocation are increasing all the time. Ten years ago, the fact that a data centre had a backup generator and could generate mains power when the mains failed was enough. Today it isn’t. Customers demand more, and new data centres being built are at N+1 – that is they not only have a backup generator, but they have another backup generator in case the first one fails to start, or there is a mains failure when one is being serviced. The introduction of Tier Levels from US-based organisations mandates at least two generator sets for the facility to be at Tier 3 level, either of which can support the entire facility electronic load. Customers in the market want such levels of performance and are increasingly asking for them and asking technical questions about the level of redundancy and resilience that a facility has. Facilities which cannot provide and demonstrate the necessary levels lose credibility and business and get left behind by the market.

If Only Your Infrastructure Had a Brain

16 Jan 2012

The critical challenge faced in managing a cloud infrastructure is a lack of control.  The inability to properly understand and control all the moving parts prevents organizations from operating efficiently and achieving desired cost savings and density levels.  The complexity associated with shared infrastructure and mobile workloads, combined with varying technical, business and operational requirements across applications, has left organizations with no choice but to wildly over-provision shared environments in order to keep systems operating safely. 

Clifford Chance - Case Study

16 Jan 2012

Clifford Chance is a leading law firm, employing 3,800 legal advisors across 27 offices and 20 countries. As a result of the increasing challenges and industry issues facing the legal sector, Clifford Chance recognized the need for an intelligent data centrer management service which could enhance the management of its two London based data centers. With this in mind, the company chose to approach nlyte Software through a non-competitive pitch.

Oracle Application Acceleration Solutions Provide Customers with Improved User Experience

12 Jan 2012

Since most database applications are I/O-intensive, they generally require high storage I/O performance – such is the case with Oracle-based applications. Research on user needs have shown that Oracle application users share a common belief that their back-end storage system I/O performance needs to be improved in order to overcome major challenges such as long index query response times, slow index updates, low efficiency of external cache hot database table queries, and low concurrent capacity. However, the root cause of these problems is often that the arbitrary I/O processing capacity of a storage system cannot meet the performance requirements of Oracle applications.

Who actually is responsible for virtual backup?

12 Jan 2012

The virtualisation landscape has changed for the better for SMBs. The technology required is no longer just a viable option for enterprises with ample budgets and vast resources; it’s now available to companies of all sizes. With an increase in the number of available virtualisation options, and analysts including Gartner and IDC predicting growth in the sector - 2012 is set to be the year that virtualisation becomes a reality in the SMB space. 

Cost-effectively dealing with the growing security compliance issue

11 Jan 2012

Michael Hamelin, Chief Security Architect with security lifecycle specialists Tufin Technologies explains how to extract maximum value from automated compliance audit software – and improve your organisation’s security posture in the process…

In these IT cost-conscious times, most budgets – yes, even in the IT security department – are always under review, and usually in a downwards direction. At the same time – and just to make life interesting - the volume of regulatory and compliance requirements are heading in the opposite direction.

The Six ‘Gotchas’ of Disaster Recovery

11 Jan 2012

It is no surprise that disaster preparation is top of mind among people these days. The images and stories coming out of Japan following the devastating earthquake and tsunami and recently repeated in end-of-year reviews, inevitably lead to people wondering, "What would I do if the earth moved or water flooded my state, city or neighborhood?" The floods in Thailand in late 2011 which have resulted in major hard-drive shortages are another example of disasters which can affect business continuity.

Rackspace Defines Five Cloud Trends For 2012 – The Year The Cloud “Got Real”

10 Jan 2012

Infrastructural awareness comes to the fore alongside importance of open source, mobile and services

Rackspace Hosting, the specialist in hosting and cloud computing, has determined five trends that will be fundamentally important market-driving factors across the cloud computing landscape in the year ahead. As we now look to more refined and attuned levels of cloud adoption and deployment across every industry vertical, Rackspace’s Chief Technology Officer, John Engates, shares his vision for the cloud in 2012 and beyond.

Don’t fear the outsourcer, let it free you

10 Jan 2012

Outsourcing is often seen as a threat by an internal IT department, but according to Michel Robert, managing director of Claranet, this anxiety is misplaced.

On any given day, an IT department’s schedule will include a rather hefty chunk of day-to-day ‘housekeeping’ – tasks that are fairly mundane but necessary, not to mention time-consuming. And lets not forget maintenance of existing infrastructure and systems usually represents at least 80% of an IT department’s workload.  In the meantime, most IT departments are also being asked to address new business requirements without any additional staff.

Client Services - Case Study

09 Jan 2012

Aspect’s unified communications application powers collections company to triple productivity

Client Services, Inc., founded in 1987, is a full service receivables management and call centre services company. With the majority of its business generated from debt collections on credit cards, Client Services also handles teleservices, telesales and customer service calls. The company offers a diverse selection of programs from first party/early stage recovery, to third party/post charge-off recovery, along with a variety of customer care management solutions.

Review of 2011 and 2012 predictions

06 Jan 2012

Three senior executives at Dimension Data, the global IT services provider, have given their views on the enterprise technology trends we saw in 2011, and what’s going to happen in the year ahead.

The New Twitter: Just Another Pretty Face? Or Just the Ticket to Reach The Masses of Social Networkers?

05 Jan 2012

Twitter recently decided to change its user interface and, at the same time, introduce a host of new features (http://fly.twitter.com/). These changes were meant to make it more compelling as a social networking platform and, at the same time, make it more intuitive for the un-initiated to grasp. However, there are rumblings that Twitter’s face lift has left many feeling a little … disconnected.

By David Lavenda

Can business harness the benefits of the hybrid cloud without losing data privacy?

03 Jan 2012

Gary Sumner, CTO and founder of Datacastle, argues that businesses must centrally manage and enforce their data-security policies to cope with a growing panoply of cloud-services and endpoints

Radical changes in the way business stores its data are looming, with massive implications for data-security.

New Forrester research shows 66% of enterprises are moving their desktops, servers and data into the relatively uncharted territory of the hybrid cloud.