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Addressing IT challenges in remote locations.

January 2, 2017 | 161 views

The central office has traditionally been the centre of gravity for most organisations, writes Taj ElKhayat, regional vice-president: Middle East and Africa at Riverbed Technology. That is where the data centre is located, and where most of the IT staff works. However, remote offices and branch offices (ROBOs) are becoming increasingly relevant because they are often where business happens. In fact, according to the 2016 Riverbed Remote Office/Branch Office IT Survey almost 50% of all employees work in remote sites; 50 per cent of companies’ data is stored outside the data centre; and branch offices represent roughly 50 per cent of the IT budget. These findings should come as little surprise when considering that the average corporate data centre serves 55 ROBO locations.

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Clarity Insights

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IT SYSTEMS MANAGEMENT

Data Center as a Service Is the Way of the Future

Article | July 14, 2022

Data Center as a Service (DCaaS) is a hosting service that gives clients access to actual data center infrastructure and amenities. Through a Wide-Area Network, DCaaS enables clients to remotely access the provider's storage, server, and networking capabilities (WAN). Businesses can tackle their on-site data center's logistical and financial issues by outsourcing to a service provider. Many enterprises rely on DCaaS to overcome the physical constraints of their on-site infrastructure or to offload the hosting and management of non-mission-critical applications. Businesses that require robust data management solutions but lack the necessary internal resources can adopt DCaaS. DCaaS is the perfect answer for companies that are struggling with a lack of IT help or a lack of funding for system maintenance. Added benefits data Center as a Service allows businesses to be independent of their physical infrastructure: A single-provider API Data centers without Staff Effortlessly handle the influx of data Data centers in regions with more stable climates Data Center as a Service helps democratize the data center itself, allowing companies that could never afford the huge investments that have gotten us this far to benefit from these developments. This is perhaps the most important, as Infrastructure-as-a-Service enables smaller companies to get started without a huge investment. Conclusion Data center as a service (DCaaS) enables clients to access a data center remotely and its features, whereas data center services might include complete management of an organization's on-premises infrastructure resources. IT can be outsourced using data center services to manage an organization's network, storage, computing, cloud, and maintenance. The infrastructure of many businesses is outsourced to increase operational effectiveness, size, and cost-effectiveness. It might be challenging to manage your existing infrastructure while keeping up with the pace of innovation, but it's critical to be on the cutting edge of technology. Organizations may stay future-ready by working with a vendor that can supply DCaaS and data center services.

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IT SYSTEMS MANAGEMENT

Enhancing Rack-Level Security to Enable Rapid Innovation

Article | August 8, 2022

IT and data center administrators are under pressure to foster quicker innovation. For workers and customers to have access to digital experiences, more devices must be deployed, and larger enterprise-to-edge networks must be managed. The security of distributed networks has suffered as a result of this rapid growth, though. Some colocation providers can install custom locks for your cabinet if necessary due to the varying compliance standards and security needs for distinct applications. However, physical security measures are still of utmost importance because theft and social engineering can affect hardware as well as data. Risk Companies Face Remote IT work continue on the long run Attacking users is the easiest way into networks IT may be deploying devices with weak controls When determining whether rack-level security is required, there are essentially two critical criteria to take into account. The first is the level of sensitivity of the data stored, and the second is the importance of the equipment in a particular rack to the facility's continuing functioning. Due to the nature of the data being handled and kept, some processes will always have a higher risk profile than others. Conclusion Data centers must rely on a physically secure perimeter that can be trusted. Clients, in particular, require unwavering assurance that security can be put in place to limit user access and guarantee that safety regulations are followed. Rack-level security locks that ensure physical access limitations are crucial to maintaining data center space security. Compared to their mechanical predecessors, electronic rack locks or "smart locks" offer a much more comprehensive range of feature-rich capabilities.

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IT SYSTEMS MANAGEMENT

Infrastructure Lifecycle Management Best Practices

Article | July 6, 2022

As your organization scales, inevitably, so too will its infrastructure needs. From physical spaces to personnel, devices to applications, physical security to cybersecurity – all these resources will continue to grow to meet the changing needs of your business operations. To manage your changing infrastructure throughout its entire lifecycle, your organization needs to implement a robust infrastructure lifecycle management program that’s designed to meet your particular business needs. In particular, IT asset lifecycle management (ITALM) is becoming increasingly important for organizations across industries. As threats to organizations’ cybersecurity become more sophisticated and successful cyberattacks become more common, your business needs (now, more than ever) to implement an infrastructure lifecycle management strategy that emphasizes the security of your IT infrastructure. In this article, we’ll explain why infrastructure management is important. Then we’ll outline steps your organization can take to design and implement a program and provide you with some of the most important infrastructure lifecycle management best practices for your business. What Is the Purpose of Infrastructure Lifecycle Management? No matter the size or industry of your organization, infrastructure lifecycle management is a critical process. The purpose of an infrastructure lifecycle management program is to protect your business and its infrastructure assets against risk. Today, protecting your organization and its customer data from malicious actors means taking a more active approach to cybersecurity. Simply put, recovering from a cyber attack is more difficult and expensive than protecting yourself from one. If 2020 and 2021 have taught us anything about cybersecurity, it’s that cybercrime is on the rise and it’s not slowing down anytime soon. As risks to cybersecurity continue to grow in number and in harm, infrastructure lifecycle management and IT asset management are becoming almost unavoidable. In addition to protecting your organization from potential cyberattacks, infrastructure lifecycle management makes for a more efficient enterprise, delivers a better end user experience for consumers, and identifies where your organization needs to expand its infrastructure. Some of the other benefits that come along with comprehensive infrastructure lifecycle management program include: More accurate planning; Centralized and cost-effective procurement; Streamlined provisioning of technology to users; More efficient maintenance; Secure and timely disposal. A robust infrastructure lifecycle management program helps your organization to keep track of all the assets running on (or attached to) your corporate networks. That allows you to catalog, identify and track these assets wherever they are, physically and digitally. While this might seem simple enough, infrastructure lifecycle management and particularly ITALM has become more complex as the diversity of IT assets has increased. Today organizations and their IT teams are responsible for managing hardware, software, cloud infrastructure, SaaS, and connected device or IoT assets. As the number of IT assets under management has soared for most organizations in the past decade, a comprehensive and holistic approach to infrastructure lifecycle management has never been more important. Generally speaking, there are four major stages of asset lifecycle management. Your organization’s infrastructure lifecycle management program should include specific policies and processes for each of the following steps: Planning. This is arguably the most important step for businesses and should be conducted prior to purchasing any assets. During this stage, you’ll need to identify what asset types are required and in what number; compile and verify the requirements for each asset; and evaluate those assets to make sure they meet your service needs. Acquisition and procurement. Use this stage to identify areas for purchase consolidation with the most cost-effective vendors, negotiate warranties and bulk purchases of SaaS and cloud infrastructure assets. This is where lack of insights into actual asset usage can potentially result in overpaying for assets that aren’t really necessary. For this reason, timely and accurate asset data is crucial for effective acquisition and procurement. Maintenance, upgrades and repair. All assets eventually require maintenance, upgrades and repairs. A holistic approach to infrastructure lifecycle management means tracking these needs and consolidating them into a single platform across all asset types. Disposal. An outdated or broken asset needs to be disposed of properly, especially if it contains sensitive information. For hardware, assets that are older than a few years are often obsolete, and assets that fall out of warranty are typically no longer worth maintaining. Disposal of cloud infrastructure assets is also critical because data stored in the cloud can stay there forever. Now that we’ve outlined the purpose and basic stages of infrastructure lifecycle management, it’s time to look at the steps your organization can take to implement it.

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APPLICATION INFRASTRUCTURE

The Drive with Direction: The Path of Enterprise IT Infrastructure

Article | June 6, 2022

Introduction It is hard to manage a modern firm without a convenient and adaptable IT infrastructure. When properly set up and networked, technology can improve back-office processes, increase efficiency, and simplify communication. IT infrastructure can be utilized to supply services or resources both within and outside of a company, as well as to its customers. IT infrastructure when adequately deployed aids organizations in achieving their objectives and increasing profits. IT infrastructure is made up of numerous components that must be integrated for your company's infrastructure to be coherent and functional. These components work in unison to guarantee that your systems and business as a whole run smoothly. Enterprise IT Infrastructure Trends Consumption-based pricing models are becoming more popular among enterprise purchasers, a trend that began with software and has now spread to hardware. This transition from capital to operational spending lowers risk, frees up capital, and improves flexibility. As a result, infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS) revenues increased by 53% from 2015 to 2016, making them the fastest-growing cloud and infrastructure services segments. The transition to as-a-service models is significant given that a unit of computing or storage in the cloud can be quite cheaper in terms of the total cost of ownership than a unit on-premises. While businesses have been migrating their workloads to the public cloud for years, there has been a new shift among large corporations. Many companies, including Capital One, GE, Netflix, Time Inc., and others, have downsized or removed their private data centers in favor of shifting their operations to the cloud. Cybersecurity remains a high priority for the C-suite and the board of directors. Attacks are increasing in number and complexity across all industries, with 80% of technology executives indicating that their companies are unable to construct a robust response. Due to lack of cybersecurity experts, many companies can’t get the skills they need on the inside, so they have to use managed security services. Future of Enterprise IT Infrastructure Companies can adopt the 'As-a-Service' model to lower entry barriers and begin testing future innovations on the cloud's basis. Domain specialists in areas like healthcare and manufacturing may harness AI's potential to solve some of their businesses' most pressing problems. Whether in a single cloud or across several clouds, businesses want an architecture that can expand to support the rapid evolution of their apps and industry for decades. For enterprise-class visibility and control across all clouds, the architecture must provide a common control plane that supports native cloud Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) as well as enhanced networking and security features. Conclusion The scale of disruption in the IT infrastructure sector is unparalleled, presenting enormous opportunities and hazards for industry stakeholders and their customers. Technology infrastructure executives must restructure their portfolios and rethink their go-to-market strategies to drive growth. They should also invest in the foundational competencies required for long-term success, such as digitization, analytics, and agile development. Data center companies that can solve the industry's challenges, as well as service providers that can scale quickly without limits and provide intelligent outcome-based models. This helps their clients achieve their business objectives through a portfolio of 'As-a-Service' models, will have a bright future.

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IT SYSTEMS MANAGEMENT

Network Security: The Safety Net in the Digital World

Article | July 14, 2022

Data Center as a Service (DCaaS) is a hosting service that gives clients access to actual data center infrastructure and amenities. Through a Wide-Area Network, DCaaS enables clients to remotely access the provider's storage, server, and networking capabilities (WAN). Businesses can tackle their on-site data center's logistical and financial issues by outsourcing to a service provider. Many enterprises rely on DCaaS to overcome the physical constraints of their on-site infrastructure or to offload the hosting and management of non-mission-critical applications. Businesses that require robust data management solutions but lack the necessary internal resources can adopt DCaaS. DCaaS is the perfect answer for companies that are struggling with a lack of IT help or a lack of funding for system maintenance. Added benefits data Center as a Service allows businesses to be independent of their physical infrastructure: A single-provider API Data centers without Staff Effortlessly handle the influx of data Data centers in regions with more stable climates Data Center as a Service helps democratize the data center itself, allowing companies that could never afford the huge investments that have gotten us this far to benefit from these developments. This is perhaps the most important, as Infrastructure-as-a-Service enables smaller companies to get started without a huge investment. Conclusion Data center as a service (DCaaS) enables clients to access a data center remotely and its features, whereas data center services might include complete management of an organization's on-premises infrastructure resources. IT can be outsourced using data center services to manage an organization's network, storage, computing, cloud, and maintenance. The infrastructure of many businesses is outsourced to increase operational effectiveness, size, and cost-effectiveness. It might be challenging to manage your existing infrastructure while keeping up with the pace of innovation, but it's critical to be on the cutting edge of technology. Organizations may stay future-ready by working with a vendor that can supply DCaaS and data center services.

Read More
IT SYSTEMS MANAGEMENT

What Is IaaS? A Data Center in the Cloud Packed with Services

Article | August 8, 2022

IT and data center administrators are under pressure to foster quicker innovation. For workers and customers to have access to digital experiences, more devices must be deployed, and larger enterprise-to-edge networks must be managed. The security of distributed networks has suffered as a result of this rapid growth, though. Some colocation providers can install custom locks for your cabinet if necessary due to the varying compliance standards and security needs for distinct applications. However, physical security measures are still of utmost importance because theft and social engineering can affect hardware as well as data. Risk Companies Face Remote IT work continue on the long run Attacking users is the easiest way into networks IT may be deploying devices with weak controls When determining whether rack-level security is required, there are essentially two critical criteria to take into account. The first is the level of sensitivity of the data stored, and the second is the importance of the equipment in a particular rack to the facility's continuing functioning. Due to the nature of the data being handled and kept, some processes will always have a higher risk profile than others. Conclusion Data centers must rely on a physically secure perimeter that can be trusted. Clients, in particular, require unwavering assurance that security can be put in place to limit user access and guarantee that safety regulations are followed. Rack-level security locks that ensure physical access limitations are crucial to maintaining data center space security. Compared to their mechanical predecessors, electronic rack locks or "smart locks" offer a much more comprehensive range of feature-rich capabilities.

Read More
IT SYSTEMS MANAGEMENT

Enhancing Rack-Level Security to Enable Rapid Innovation

Article | July 6, 2022

As your organization scales, inevitably, so too will its infrastructure needs. From physical spaces to personnel, devices to applications, physical security to cybersecurity – all these resources will continue to grow to meet the changing needs of your business operations. To manage your changing infrastructure throughout its entire lifecycle, your organization needs to implement a robust infrastructure lifecycle management program that’s designed to meet your particular business needs. In particular, IT asset lifecycle management (ITALM) is becoming increasingly important for organizations across industries. As threats to organizations’ cybersecurity become more sophisticated and successful cyberattacks become more common, your business needs (now, more than ever) to implement an infrastructure lifecycle management strategy that emphasizes the security of your IT infrastructure. In this article, we’ll explain why infrastructure management is important. Then we’ll outline steps your organization can take to design and implement a program and provide you with some of the most important infrastructure lifecycle management best practices for your business. What Is the Purpose of Infrastructure Lifecycle Management? No matter the size or industry of your organization, infrastructure lifecycle management is a critical process. The purpose of an infrastructure lifecycle management program is to protect your business and its infrastructure assets against risk. Today, protecting your organization and its customer data from malicious actors means taking a more active approach to cybersecurity. Simply put, recovering from a cyber attack is more difficult and expensive than protecting yourself from one. If 2020 and 2021 have taught us anything about cybersecurity, it’s that cybercrime is on the rise and it’s not slowing down anytime soon. As risks to cybersecurity continue to grow in number and in harm, infrastructure lifecycle management and IT asset management are becoming almost unavoidable. In addition to protecting your organization from potential cyberattacks, infrastructure lifecycle management makes for a more efficient enterprise, delivers a better end user experience for consumers, and identifies where your organization needs to expand its infrastructure. Some of the other benefits that come along with comprehensive infrastructure lifecycle management program include: More accurate planning; Centralized and cost-effective procurement; Streamlined provisioning of technology to users; More efficient maintenance; Secure and timely disposal. A robust infrastructure lifecycle management program helps your organization to keep track of all the assets running on (or attached to) your corporate networks. That allows you to catalog, identify and track these assets wherever they are, physically and digitally. While this might seem simple enough, infrastructure lifecycle management and particularly ITALM has become more complex as the diversity of IT assets has increased. Today organizations and their IT teams are responsible for managing hardware, software, cloud infrastructure, SaaS, and connected device or IoT assets. As the number of IT assets under management has soared for most organizations in the past decade, a comprehensive and holistic approach to infrastructure lifecycle management has never been more important. Generally speaking, there are four major stages of asset lifecycle management. Your organization’s infrastructure lifecycle management program should include specific policies and processes for each of the following steps: Planning. This is arguably the most important step for businesses and should be conducted prior to purchasing any assets. During this stage, you’ll need to identify what asset types are required and in what number; compile and verify the requirements for each asset; and evaluate those assets to make sure they meet your service needs. Acquisition and procurement. Use this stage to identify areas for purchase consolidation with the most cost-effective vendors, negotiate warranties and bulk purchases of SaaS and cloud infrastructure assets. This is where lack of insights into actual asset usage can potentially result in overpaying for assets that aren’t really necessary. For this reason, timely and accurate asset data is crucial for effective acquisition and procurement. Maintenance, upgrades and repair. All assets eventually require maintenance, upgrades and repairs. A holistic approach to infrastructure lifecycle management means tracking these needs and consolidating them into a single platform across all asset types. Disposal. An outdated or broken asset needs to be disposed of properly, especially if it contains sensitive information. For hardware, assets that are older than a few years are often obsolete, and assets that fall out of warranty are typically no longer worth maintaining. Disposal of cloud infrastructure assets is also critical because data stored in the cloud can stay there forever. Now that we’ve outlined the purpose and basic stages of infrastructure lifecycle management, it’s time to look at the steps your organization can take to implement it.

Read More
APPLICATION INFRASTRUCTURE

The Drive with Direction: The Path of Enterprise IT Infrastructure

Article | June 6, 2022

Introduction It is hard to manage a modern firm without a convenient and adaptable IT infrastructure. When properly set up and networked, technology can improve back-office processes, increase efficiency, and simplify communication. IT infrastructure can be utilized to supply services or resources both within and outside of a company, as well as to its customers. IT infrastructure when adequately deployed aids organizations in achieving their objectives and increasing profits. IT infrastructure is made up of numerous components that must be integrated for your company's infrastructure to be coherent and functional. These components work in unison to guarantee that your systems and business as a whole run smoothly. Enterprise IT Infrastructure Trends Consumption-based pricing models are becoming more popular among enterprise purchasers, a trend that began with software and has now spread to hardware. This transition from capital to operational spending lowers risk, frees up capital, and improves flexibility. As a result, infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS) revenues increased by 53% from 2015 to 2016, making them the fastest-growing cloud and infrastructure services segments. The transition to as-a-service models is significant given that a unit of computing or storage in the cloud can be quite cheaper in terms of the total cost of ownership than a unit on-premises. While businesses have been migrating their workloads to the public cloud for years, there has been a new shift among large corporations. Many companies, including Capital One, GE, Netflix, Time Inc., and others, have downsized or removed their private data centers in favor of shifting their operations to the cloud. Cybersecurity remains a high priority for the C-suite and the board of directors. Attacks are increasing in number and complexity across all industries, with 80% of technology executives indicating that their companies are unable to construct a robust response. Due to lack of cybersecurity experts, many companies can’t get the skills they need on the inside, so they have to use managed security services. Future of Enterprise IT Infrastructure Companies can adopt the 'As-a-Service' model to lower entry barriers and begin testing future innovations on the cloud's basis. Domain specialists in areas like healthcare and manufacturing may harness AI's potential to solve some of their businesses' most pressing problems. Whether in a single cloud or across several clouds, businesses want an architecture that can expand to support the rapid evolution of their apps and industry for decades. For enterprise-class visibility and control across all clouds, the architecture must provide a common control plane that supports native cloud Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) as well as enhanced networking and security features. Conclusion The scale of disruption in the IT infrastructure sector is unparalleled, presenting enormous opportunities and hazards for industry stakeholders and their customers. Technology infrastructure executives must restructure their portfolios and rethink their go-to-market strategies to drive growth. They should also invest in the foundational competencies required for long-term success, such as digitization, analytics, and agile development. Data center companies that can solve the industry's challenges, as well as service providers that can scale quickly without limits and provide intelligent outcome-based models. This helps their clients achieve their business objectives through a portfolio of 'As-a-Service' models, will have a bright future.

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Spotlight

Clarity Insights

Clarity Insights is the largest consulting company in the US that focuses exclusively on data strategy, engineering, science and visualization. We help our clients—Fortune 1000 companies across multiple industries—leverage data and analytics to find actionable insights that can help them seize new opportunities and solve their toughest business challenges.

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IT SYSTEMS MANAGEMENT

Hudson Interxchange Leverages the Carma Network & Digital Infrastructure (NDI) Platform

Hudson Interxchange | August 12, 2022

Hudson Interxchange partners with Carma’s Network and Digital Infrastructure Platform (NDI) to form the fully integrated core of its operations, engineering, customer service, customer facing portal. Carma uniquely spans every traditional industry vertical, offering functionality to enable seamless delivery of interconnection in Meet Me Rooms and usage-based billing for large power feeds that Hudson Interxchange will utilize in a single platform. “Hudson Interxchange required a solution that could rapidly deploy, integrate all existing data, and deliver new functionality. We selected Carma’s platform because its holistic approach links ordering, service delivery, and billing into a single solution for a seamless customer experience.” Tom Brown, President & CEO, Hudson Interxchange “Carma combines management of 15MW of power, Meet Me Room interconnection to 300 different carriers, and cloud services in a single platform for Hudson Interxchange so they can focus on their core business, while we deliver a turnkey IT platform to enable it,” according to Frank McDermott, CEO, Carma. Carma addresses the challenges of today’s telecommunications businesses with an industry-focused solution that aggregates over two dozen functions into one system. Traditionally disjointed silos like sales, order entry, contract management, workflow, ticketing, space, power, interconnection, conduit, outside plant fiber, capacity management, expense management, revenue assurance, billing, reporting, analytics, and customer facing portals come together for the most capable, ubiquitous, and scalable platform available. About Hudson Interxchange Hudson Interxchange offers unparalleled infrastructure and capacity strategically located at key aggregation points across a global platform of existing and emerging markets, enabling seamless connectivity and dense power with scalable offerings that maximize operational and capital expenditure. The flexibility of the Hudson IX platform enables infrastructure solutions that are tailored to a customer's specific needs. The Hudson IX team is hyperfocused on providing exceptional client experience. About Carma Carma delivers the world’s first Network & Digital Infrastructure (NDI) platform that provides a fully integrated sales, operations, service, and finance solution for any vertical in the telecommunications industry. Carma aggregates over two dozen functions into one platform for a simpler, more robust, and more secure ecosystem with a dramatically lower total cost of ownership. Carma links the physical assets of the network and data center to every customer, order, service, and invoice line item for complete visibility into every transaction. Carma is a Microsoft for Startups member, CSP Direct Partner, and ISV Cloud Embed Partner.

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IT SYSTEMS MANAGEMENT

Flexential® Announces New Capabilities to Hosted Private Cloud - Advanced Access

Flexential | August 10, 2022

Flexential, a leading provider of data center, colocation, cloud and connectivity, today further extended its FlexAnywhere™ hybrid IT solutions portfolio that address key CIO pain points by improving application performance, providing business agility and the ability to scale IT infrastructure, and delivering superior interconnection capabilities. The new enhancements to Flexential's Hosted Private Cloud (HPC) – Advanced Access solutions provide full control of enterprise private cloud environments with new capabilities for rapidly migrating applications, workloads and data as business requirements change. The company also today added support for advanced metrics and reporting tools backed by Machine Learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI). Long-term adoption of hybrid work environments has reduced reliance on traditional infrastructure. Gartner® forecasts that "worldwide end-user spending on public cloud services will reach nearly $600 billion in 2023, up from $494.7 billion in 2022".* It's essential that businesses have the operational control and flexibility to adjust, plan and scale workload placements accordingly. Flexential's HPC Advanced Access solution is a high-performance hosted private cloud offering that allows customers to have full administrative control over the provider-owned VMware vCenter server. Originally launched in 2021, the solution has seen rapid adoption, with the number of hosted private cloud customer deployments more than doubling across the national FlexAnywhere™ platform of 40 data centers in the last year. HPC Advanced Access continues to provide unique levels of customer control and resource management with performance that was previously unachievable. The solution will now support more flexible workload movement and placement, self-driving application operations and performance optimization. Core enhancements include: Application Mobility: Enabling customers to reliably move workloads without downtime or performance degradation. ML and AI-driven Performance Management: Providing continuous performance optimization, capacity and cost management, intelligence remediation and integrated compliance across customer operations. Advanced Metrics and Reporting Tools: Offering self-service capabilities across applications and infrastructure, allowing businesses to optimize, plan and scale their VMware Cloud. "Flexibility has never been more essential to the modern-day enterprise," Mike Fuhrman, chief operating officer of Cloud and Managed Services, Flexential. "With the latest enhancements to our HPC Advanced Access solution, our team is providing customers with the tools and insights they need to be more agile in their workload placements, application operations and overall performance. As business needs shift, we continue to meet customers with the solutions that will drive efficiency no matter their operational location." "Hybrid IT solutions continue to grow in popularity as enterprises increasingly turn to professionally managed data centers to deploy key elements of their infrastructure. By providing direct access to vCenter coupled with advanced analytics, Flexential's customers can now benefit from the best of both worlds. These advanced capabilities enable new levels of AI-powered visibility in a solution that already delivers maximum configuration flexibility to enterprises for managing their own applications, while providing peace of mind as their data is hosted and replicated securely in Flexential's hosted private cloud," said Geoff Thompson, VP, VMware Cloud Provider Sales. BRIDGE Healthcare Partners is a managed service provider (MSP) that focuses on servicing the IT needs of clients in the highly regulated healthcare space and other non-profits throughout the US. As a result it needs a dependable, secure environment to ensure the availability and safety of its clients' applications and data—including electronic health records (EHR) and billing information. The company utilizes Flexential Private Cloud and Hosted Private Cloud - Advanced Access to protect its clients' Electronic Healthcare Records and enable seamless operations. "Flexential is in complete alignment with our strategic plan—from its people and service to its growth perspectives. "Our clients rely on us to deliver high-performing, reliable IT environments so their healthcare data and applications are secure and always available. Flexential is key in helping us deliver this essential service." Tracey Campbell, CEO of BRIDGE Healthcare Partners "Our clients look to us to simplify their IT infrastructure and provide the flexibility and agility to grow the business into the future. Flexential's Hosted Private Cloud – Advanced Access solution provides them with the control and visibility they need to be confident in deploying their most critical data in a hybrid environment," said John Simonton, VP and COO of PEAK Resources, Inc. About Flexential Flexential empowers the IT journey of the nation's most complex businesses by offering flexible and tailored hybrid IT solutions comprised of colocation, cloud, connectivity, data protection, managed, and professional services. The company builds on a platform of three million square feet of data center space in 19 highly connected markets, and on its 100GB private backbone to meet the most stringent challenges in security, compliance, and resiliency. See how Flexential goes beyond the four walls of the data center to empower IT through an interactive map found on www.flexential.com.

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APPLICATION INFRASTRUCTURE

eStruxture Data Centers Signs Infrastructure Masons Climate Accord to Reduce Global Carbon Emissions

eStruxture | August 04, 2022

Today, eStruxture Data Centers, the largest Canadian cloud and carrier-neutral data center provider, is pleased to announce that it has signed the Infrastructure Masons Climate Accord (ICA), which unites over 70 companies to reduce carbon in digital infrastructure materials, products, and power. “At eStruxture, we are committed to designing and powering our data centers sustainably, and we are thrilled to be a part of this important initiative to promote global carbon accounting of digital infrastructure and work together with our industry peers towards a Net Zero future. Todd Coleman, President and CEO of eStruxture The ICA includes several large hyperscale companies, representing some of the largest digital infrastructure portfolios in the world, and over 40 colocation data center providers, product, service and investment firms. Together with these industry trailblazers, eStruxture will collaborate to adopt open standards, policies, and reporting around carbon reduction to drive industry accountability. “We established iMasons to unite the builders of the digital age,” said Dean Nelson, Chairman and Founder of Infrastructure Masons. “The ICA represents an unprecedented collaboration between leading digital infrastructure companies to accelerate our journey to carbon neutrality. Today, we are combining forces to compound the efforts of these firms to make meaningful and sustained progress toward that goal.” Sustainability is one of the core fundamentals that eStruxture was built upon and signing this accord is an important step on the company’s journey to reducing the environmental impact of the data center industry and building a better future. About Infrastructure Masons Infrastructure Masons (iMasons) is a non-profit, professional association of technology and business leaders who represent over $150Bn in infrastructure projects in over 130 countries. The organization is guided by an Advisory Council composed of global leaders who manage some of the largest digital infrastructure portfolios in the world. The iMasons vision is to Unite the Builders of the Digital Age by enabling our global membership to Connect, Grow, and Give Back. Members leave their companies at the door and connect as individuals. iMasons has four strategic industry priorities – increase Awareness, enhance Education opportunities, champion Diversity & Inclusion, and inspire Sustainability through deep member engagement. Visit the website at imasons.org or LinkedIn. About eStruxture eStruxture is the largest Canadian data center provider with locations in Montreal, Toronto, Vancouver, and Calgary. Our solutions are designed to give you more: more locations, more capacity, more connections that enable you to run modern, demanding enterprise applications, and offer your business the control to rapidly scale in response to unpredictable changes in business processes.

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IT SYSTEMS MANAGEMENT

Hudson Interxchange Leverages the Carma Network & Digital Infrastructure (NDI) Platform

Hudson Interxchange | August 12, 2022

Hudson Interxchange partners with Carma’s Network and Digital Infrastructure Platform (NDI) to form the fully integrated core of its operations, engineering, customer service, customer facing portal. Carma uniquely spans every traditional industry vertical, offering functionality to enable seamless delivery of interconnection in Meet Me Rooms and usage-based billing for large power feeds that Hudson Interxchange will utilize in a single platform. “Hudson Interxchange required a solution that could rapidly deploy, integrate all existing data, and deliver new functionality. We selected Carma’s platform because its holistic approach links ordering, service delivery, and billing into a single solution for a seamless customer experience.” Tom Brown, President & CEO, Hudson Interxchange “Carma combines management of 15MW of power, Meet Me Room interconnection to 300 different carriers, and cloud services in a single platform for Hudson Interxchange so they can focus on their core business, while we deliver a turnkey IT platform to enable it,” according to Frank McDermott, CEO, Carma. Carma addresses the challenges of today’s telecommunications businesses with an industry-focused solution that aggregates over two dozen functions into one system. Traditionally disjointed silos like sales, order entry, contract management, workflow, ticketing, space, power, interconnection, conduit, outside plant fiber, capacity management, expense management, revenue assurance, billing, reporting, analytics, and customer facing portals come together for the most capable, ubiquitous, and scalable platform available. About Hudson Interxchange Hudson Interxchange offers unparalleled infrastructure and capacity strategically located at key aggregation points across a global platform of existing and emerging markets, enabling seamless connectivity and dense power with scalable offerings that maximize operational and capital expenditure. The flexibility of the Hudson IX platform enables infrastructure solutions that are tailored to a customer's specific needs. The Hudson IX team is hyperfocused on providing exceptional client experience. About Carma Carma delivers the world’s first Network & Digital Infrastructure (NDI) platform that provides a fully integrated sales, operations, service, and finance solution for any vertical in the telecommunications industry. Carma aggregates over two dozen functions into one platform for a simpler, more robust, and more secure ecosystem with a dramatically lower total cost of ownership. Carma links the physical assets of the network and data center to every customer, order, service, and invoice line item for complete visibility into every transaction. Carma is a Microsoft for Startups member, CSP Direct Partner, and ISV Cloud Embed Partner.

Read More

IT SYSTEMS MANAGEMENT

Flexential® Announces New Capabilities to Hosted Private Cloud - Advanced Access

Flexential | August 10, 2022

Flexential, a leading provider of data center, colocation, cloud and connectivity, today further extended its FlexAnywhere™ hybrid IT solutions portfolio that address key CIO pain points by improving application performance, providing business agility and the ability to scale IT infrastructure, and delivering superior interconnection capabilities. The new enhancements to Flexential's Hosted Private Cloud (HPC) – Advanced Access solutions provide full control of enterprise private cloud environments with new capabilities for rapidly migrating applications, workloads and data as business requirements change. The company also today added support for advanced metrics and reporting tools backed by Machine Learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI). Long-term adoption of hybrid work environments has reduced reliance on traditional infrastructure. Gartner® forecasts that "worldwide end-user spending on public cloud services will reach nearly $600 billion in 2023, up from $494.7 billion in 2022".* It's essential that businesses have the operational control and flexibility to adjust, plan and scale workload placements accordingly. Flexential's HPC Advanced Access solution is a high-performance hosted private cloud offering that allows customers to have full administrative control over the provider-owned VMware vCenter server. Originally launched in 2021, the solution has seen rapid adoption, with the number of hosted private cloud customer deployments more than doubling across the national FlexAnywhere™ platform of 40 data centers in the last year. HPC Advanced Access continues to provide unique levels of customer control and resource management with performance that was previously unachievable. The solution will now support more flexible workload movement and placement, self-driving application operations and performance optimization. Core enhancements include: Application Mobility: Enabling customers to reliably move workloads without downtime or performance degradation. ML and AI-driven Performance Management: Providing continuous performance optimization, capacity and cost management, intelligence remediation and integrated compliance across customer operations. Advanced Metrics and Reporting Tools: Offering self-service capabilities across applications and infrastructure, allowing businesses to optimize, plan and scale their VMware Cloud. "Flexibility has never been more essential to the modern-day enterprise," Mike Fuhrman, chief operating officer of Cloud and Managed Services, Flexential. "With the latest enhancements to our HPC Advanced Access solution, our team is providing customers with the tools and insights they need to be more agile in their workload placements, application operations and overall performance. As business needs shift, we continue to meet customers with the solutions that will drive efficiency no matter their operational location." "Hybrid IT solutions continue to grow in popularity as enterprises increasingly turn to professionally managed data centers to deploy key elements of their infrastructure. By providing direct access to vCenter coupled with advanced analytics, Flexential's customers can now benefit from the best of both worlds. These advanced capabilities enable new levels of AI-powered visibility in a solution that already delivers maximum configuration flexibility to enterprises for managing their own applications, while providing peace of mind as their data is hosted and replicated securely in Flexential's hosted private cloud," said Geoff Thompson, VP, VMware Cloud Provider Sales. BRIDGE Healthcare Partners is a managed service provider (MSP) that focuses on servicing the IT needs of clients in the highly regulated healthcare space and other non-profits throughout the US. As a result it needs a dependable, secure environment to ensure the availability and safety of its clients' applications and data—including electronic health records (EHR) and billing information. The company utilizes Flexential Private Cloud and Hosted Private Cloud - Advanced Access to protect its clients' Electronic Healthcare Records and enable seamless operations. "Flexential is in complete alignment with our strategic plan—from its people and service to its growth perspectives. "Our clients rely on us to deliver high-performing, reliable IT environments so their healthcare data and applications are secure and always available. Flexential is key in helping us deliver this essential service." Tracey Campbell, CEO of BRIDGE Healthcare Partners "Our clients look to us to simplify their IT infrastructure and provide the flexibility and agility to grow the business into the future. Flexential's Hosted Private Cloud – Advanced Access solution provides them with the control and visibility they need to be confident in deploying their most critical data in a hybrid environment," said John Simonton, VP and COO of PEAK Resources, Inc. About Flexential Flexential empowers the IT journey of the nation's most complex businesses by offering flexible and tailored hybrid IT solutions comprised of colocation, cloud, connectivity, data protection, managed, and professional services. The company builds on a platform of three million square feet of data center space in 19 highly connected markets, and on its 100GB private backbone to meet the most stringent challenges in security, compliance, and resiliency. See how Flexential goes beyond the four walls of the data center to empower IT through an interactive map found on www.flexential.com.

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APPLICATION INFRASTRUCTURE

eStruxture Data Centers Signs Infrastructure Masons Climate Accord to Reduce Global Carbon Emissions

eStruxture | August 04, 2022

Today, eStruxture Data Centers, the largest Canadian cloud and carrier-neutral data center provider, is pleased to announce that it has signed the Infrastructure Masons Climate Accord (ICA), which unites over 70 companies to reduce carbon in digital infrastructure materials, products, and power. “At eStruxture, we are committed to designing and powering our data centers sustainably, and we are thrilled to be a part of this important initiative to promote global carbon accounting of digital infrastructure and work together with our industry peers towards a Net Zero future. Todd Coleman, President and CEO of eStruxture The ICA includes several large hyperscale companies, representing some of the largest digital infrastructure portfolios in the world, and over 40 colocation data center providers, product, service and investment firms. Together with these industry trailblazers, eStruxture will collaborate to adopt open standards, policies, and reporting around carbon reduction to drive industry accountability. “We established iMasons to unite the builders of the digital age,” said Dean Nelson, Chairman and Founder of Infrastructure Masons. “The ICA represents an unprecedented collaboration between leading digital infrastructure companies to accelerate our journey to carbon neutrality. Today, we are combining forces to compound the efforts of these firms to make meaningful and sustained progress toward that goal.” Sustainability is one of the core fundamentals that eStruxture was built upon and signing this accord is an important step on the company’s journey to reducing the environmental impact of the data center industry and building a better future. About Infrastructure Masons Infrastructure Masons (iMasons) is a non-profit, professional association of technology and business leaders who represent over $150Bn in infrastructure projects in over 130 countries. The organization is guided by an Advisory Council composed of global leaders who manage some of the largest digital infrastructure portfolios in the world. The iMasons vision is to Unite the Builders of the Digital Age by enabling our global membership to Connect, Grow, and Give Back. Members leave their companies at the door and connect as individuals. iMasons has four strategic industry priorities – increase Awareness, enhance Education opportunities, champion Diversity & Inclusion, and inspire Sustainability through deep member engagement. Visit the website at imasons.org or LinkedIn. About eStruxture eStruxture is the largest Canadian data center provider with locations in Montreal, Toronto, Vancouver, and Calgary. Our solutions are designed to give you more: more locations, more capacity, more connections that enable you to run modern, demanding enterprise applications, and offer your business the control to rapidly scale in response to unpredictable changes in business processes.

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