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Cloud Backup and Disaster Recovery | Availablous® | ZeaCloud®

How does cloud data backup and disaster recovery enable business continuity

Losing critical business data can be devastating for your business operations and customer trust. Learn how reliable and secure cloud backup and disaster recovery can facilitate seamless business continuity and minimize damage in the event of a data breach or disaster.

With more and more organizations moving to the cloud, they have become nimbler and more innovative in how they do business. As a self-service, on-demand environment, the cloud is increasingly important for companies to enable end-to-end digital transformation. In fact, organizations that made no digital transformation changes following COVID-19 saw costs rise by 16.6%, or $750K higher than the global average.

While cloud computing and automation are critical tools for seamless and scalable operations, businesses also need to navigate significant unpredictability, especially regarding data. The global average total cost of a data breach increased by nearly 10%, from USD 3.86 million in 2020 to USD 4.24 million in 2021. The primary aim, therefore, is to keep critical data on the cloud and on-premise secure and make it easily retrievable in the event of breaches, natural disasters, or other reasons.

Benefits of cloud backup and disaster recovery

The cloud has become the most powerful and affordable platform for business continuity and the preferred infrastructure for fast, sustained digital transformation. For businesses, data is everything. It's the lifeblood that drives operations and keeps the wheels turning. So, for data backup and disaster recovery, growing digital enterprises and startups can't afford to take any chances. A cloud-based business continuity solution is always a more efficient and less expensive alternative to manual, on-premise backup systems, and traditional disaster recovery methods.

Cloud data backup and recovery enables business continuity by providing reliable and secure backups of your critical business data. An off-site cloud solution can work securely and quickly to get your business back up and running quickly while minimizing damage in the event of a data breach or disaster. Thus, with cloud-based backup and disaster recovery in place, you can rest assured knowing that your data is safe no matter what happens.

While this is just scratching the surface, some of the other notable benefits of backup and disaster recovery are:

Flexible and scalable

Most cloud services are typically available on a pay-as-you-go basis, including backup and recovery solutions, which are a more cost-effective and scalable option than on-premise solutions. This means that even small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) should be able to implement a business continuity solution by choosing only the services they need at that time, and then scale up or down as their requirements change.

Cloud services are also more versatile than on-site alternatives as it allows you to choose what data you want on the cloud and what you want on-premise. For example, you can store only the most vital apps in the cloud, which have a higher level of security, while less critical data and systems can be hosted on in-house servers.

You can also tailor a cloud platform’s architecture to your specific needs. It depends on the nature of your business and your use cases. For instance, do you require the high-level security and control that a private cloud deployment provides? Or are you looking for the cost-effectiveness and simplicity of a public cloud? Whatever your business needs, the cloud helps you to choose the most cost-effective and flexible solution for it.

Faster recovery

Since the cloud enables storing data at several locations quite easily, retrieving data and restoring business systems becomes simpler too in the event of a breach or disaster. To view and retrieve backed-up business data, your administrator may easily connect to the cloud from anywhere, using any device. Even when the office is shut, a cloud backup and recovery solution can restore business data whether it’s from home, hotels, or convention centers.

Effortless backup

Without effective data backup, you can’t have a business continuity solution. Cloud-based data backup is 99% reliable, which means there is little to no risk of backup failure and data loss. There is no single point of failure because your data is saved in various locations via the cloud. This is superior to traditional backup methods like physical drives and servers. And unlike physical servers and devices, location and region have no bearing on the ability to backup data. All you need is an internet connection and secure device.

Multiple data storage platforms are available in the cloud with backup capabilities. Using a backup and recovery storage solution connected to cloud storage platforms, your data can be smoothly and automatically backed up to those storage platforms at all hours of the day, ensuring that your business and customer experiences are never disrupted.

Secure disaster recovery

While data needs to be accessible to all the relevant stakeholders, it must also be secure end-to-end. Access should be restricted by adequate authentication methods, and data should be encrypted when in storage or being transmitted to an employee’s device. An end-to-end backup and disaster recovery solution will not only restore your data but also perform all necessary checks on the devices it is being restored to. The solution makes sure there are no vulnerabilities that can be exploited during the recovery process, while also validating device health and users through multiple authentication methods.

Lowest downtime

With the support of data duplication technologies and automated recovery, cloud-based Disaster Recovery solutions are capable of accomplishing more aggressive recovery point and recovery time objectives than traditional solutions. Cloud-based disaster recovery enables you to define faster recovery timeframes and reduce downtime like never.

Cost-effectiveness

Any organization that tries to build a business continuity plan without using the cloud will not only incur huge initial capital costs, but also high monthly operational costs that can drive up budgets and impact the bottom line. Expenses associated with on-premise solutions, such as on-site hardware, set-up and maintenance expenditures, physical security, and server technicians, are eliminated with cloud-based business continuity.

Why you need an effective backup and disaster recovery plan

Regardless of revenues, size, or sector, having a business continuity strategy and disaster recovery protocol in place is critical. Here is how you can start with business continuity and disaster recovery plans off the ground.

Begin by examining the most crucial business functions that have the greatest impact on operations. Analyze your organizational processes, determine their importance, and identify potential risks.

Document the methods and protocols required to recover your most critical applications and data so that users can continue to function efficiently wherever they are in the event of data loss due to a breach or disaster.

Create a detailed plan for dealing with a crisis. Determine which internal teams will be in charge of implementing each piece, and make the plan available to all employees and users so that everyone understands what to do in the event of a disaster.

Cloud-based solutions can offer effective business continuity capabilities while reducing the financial costs of data loss or service outages. For example, a DRaaS (Disaster Recovery as a Service) solution enables you to meet recovery point objectives (RPOs) and recovery time objectives (RTOs) faster than any on-premise hosted recovery system. Thus, it enables minimal downtime and uninterrupted workflows, and significantly reduces the financial impact.

Conclusion

Unexpected events, such as equipment failures, power outages, ransomware, malicious attacks, and natural disasters, affect many enterprises. Such adverse situations can pose a threat to business continuity, revenues, reputation, and customer trust by affecting operations and causing processes to fail.  A business continuity strategy and disaster recovery program that covers your key IT infrastructure, as well as business data and apps, can help keep your organization going even in the worst-case scenarios. A simple data backup solution is not enough; you need the cloud to leverage reliable, affordable, real-time disaster recovery.

ZeaCloud’s Availablous® backup and disaster recovery solution serves as your first line of defense against data availability issues. To know how your organization can benefit from it, get in touch with our experts.

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Cloud Computing Trends 2022 | ZeaCloud®

Cloud Computing Trends 2022

2022 is shaping up to be an exciting year for cloud computing. We anticipate an increase in demand for containers, serverless cloud computing, and AI/ML deployments among enterprises as they mature in their cloud journey.

If the year 2021 is any indication, demand for cloud computing solutions will continue to rise in 2022 as well. While cloud computing had been gaining pace previous to COVID-19, the pandemic’s remote work issues and limitations hastened cloud computing trends. Cloud adoption will surely increase in 2022, as will three fledgling cloud computing innovations that gained traction in 2021.

Cloud computing is rapidly getting popular, and it has various advantages over traditional computing approaches. Migrating to the cloud, for example, can save companies money by decreasing the need for on-premises infrastructure and software. Cloud services may be scaled up or down as needed, making them an excellent choice for enterprises that encounter seasonal traffic swings. As this trend grows, it’s critical for business owners to be educated about new cloud computing trends so they can prepare their companies accordingly.

The big cloud trends

1. Containers

The development of containers, which, like Docker, provide a portable and agile approach to install and manage virtual computing applications in the cloud, is one of the main cloud computing trends to watch in 2022. A container allows an application workload to run across several clouds and even in hybrid on-premises deployments. A Kubernetes container orchestration platform is the most common way for consumers and cloud providers to enable containers.

A container-based strategy for cloud workload deployments benefits end-user businesses the most. A container-based cloud-native strategy allows workloads to be deployed over a multi cloud or hybrid cloud solution rather than being confined into a single cloud provider platform. Serverless and hybrid cloud models are the two most popular.

2. Serverless cloud

Serverless cloud computing, also known as Functions-as-a-Service (FaaS), is a cloud computing approach in which the cloud provider dynamically adjusts computer resource allocation to satisfy demand from running applications. It’s an on-demand, event-driven service that lets programmers write short, single-purpose functions that are triggered by events.

The advantages of serverless cloud computing over traditional server hosting are many. Businesses, for example, are no longer responsible for operating and maintaining servers. Serverless cloud services are scalable and adaptable to changing needs or demands.

As more firms migrate their activities online, the popularity of serverless cloud computing is predicted to expand in 2022. Look at the top cloud computing trends to watch in the coming year.

3. Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning on the Cloud

More than merely a storage place for processing power, the cloud has developed into a powerful digital transformation platform for modern enterprises. Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence are being used by businesses to derive insights from data, and best automation practises are being used to increase productivity. Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) are two of the most talked-about technologies today. And with good reason: they have incredible potential business benefits. Both machine learning and artificial intelligence can process vast amounts of data faster and more efficiently than humans. By giving insights into customer behaviour, trends, and preferences, they can also assist firms in making better judgments.

Key trends beyond simple cloud operations

1. Innovation and application development technologies

Containers and Kubernetes, in particular, have opened up new possibilities in application development, thanks to cloud computing. Containers are a lightweight method of packaging applications for deployment on any cloud platform or architecture.

Kubernetes is an open-source container management system for large-scale deployments. It has grown in popularity among DevOps teams because of its ability to automate container deployment, scaling, and operations. Cloud providers, such as containers and Kubernetes, are projected to prioritize innovation and application development technologies in 2022. They will continue to invest extensively in these areas because they see them as the way computing will develop in the future.

2. Cloud gaming, AR/VR

We will see a massive increase in cloud gaming in the coming years. Google Stadia and Amazon Luna will affect the future of cloud gaming in 2022. Introducing Cloud Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality (VR/AR) has made VR/AR headsets more affordable while also encouraging the rise of cloud gaming among a wide range of demographics. Data visualization, product design engineering, and other fields will benefit from cloud-based VR and AR. Because of new service models and hardware availability, cloud gaming is predicted to increase at an exponential rate.

3. Compliance and security improvement

Businesses are increasingly concerned about the security of their cloud deployments and data compliance. In response, cloud providers like ZeaCloud are constantly innovating their cloud solutions for improved security features and compliance certifications. As a result, Secure Access Service Edge and cloud-based disaster recovery procedures are in high demand.

4. Edge of Secure Access Service

Secure Access Service (SASE) is a cloud security architecture that allows companies to monitor and control access and communication across cloud apps, cloud services, on-premise IT infrastructure, and end-user devices. It gives users a single sign-on experience across different enterprise cloud apps while adhering to the toughest security standards.

5. IoT platforms

The rapid expansion of IoT platforms is soon becoming a rising trend in today’s intricately connected society. IoT platforms are cloud-enabling technologies that work with practically any device with the required configuration and hardware support to let cloud applications and apps run on it. Using smart device management and remote setup, the Internet of Things acts as an intermediate, collecting data from a variety of devices. This intelligent networking lays the path for IoT to become a major cloud computing trend.

Conclusion

Two important trends in 2022, namely containers and serverless cloud, will grow cloud computing usage and the development of new ways to employ cloud-based systems for insights and efficiency. Cloud adoption is predicted to increase as cloud-based systems improve in processing power, scalability, and flexibility. Every company’s adoption path and speed will be different, but one thing is certain: there will be no going back.

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5 ways public cloud is an environment-friendly| Zeacloud® Blogs

5 ways public cloud is an environment-friendly approach to IT

Public cloud computing can be a great solution for businesses to reduce their energy dependencies and consumptions when it comes to IT.

Many organizations around the world have been increasingly looking to adopt greener, or more environment-friendly, ways of doing business over the last decade. From minimizing carbon footprints through fully remote operations in the service sector post-COVID to conducting mass plantation drives, modern businesses are taking much-needed positive steps towards preserving our precious planet and its resources. However, the impact of the public cloud on creating a green business environment is often overlooked by many. A research paper commissioned by Google shows that migrating from traditional technologies to the cloud reduces energy consumption by 87%.

It’s hard to deny that with rapid advancements in technology, cloud computing solutions are getting more energy-efficient and environmentally friendly. With that said, let’s compare the in-house data centers and cloud systems.

5 environmental benefits of the public cloud

Low energy consumption

Having a dedicated in-house data center is a hefty investment, to begin with. Maintaining such a huge data infrastructure needs a tremendous amount of electricity, which adds a significant burden on resources. An uninterrupted surge of electricity is required to run data centers and cool them off.

On the other hand, public cloud servers work as a central data center for multiple organizations which are operated remotely. This means organizations don’t have to invest in creating and maintaining data infrastructure, but it also helps them save electricity significantly as it will be maintained by a third-party service provider.

Maximum utilization of resources

A high utilization rate is often a good sign for being environment-friendly as it reduces waste. Data center hardware staying idle for a long time increases the risk of it becoming obsolete, which is often the case with on-premise data centers. Research into this shows that physical data centers have only a meager 5% to 10% utilization rate in general.

The public cloud, on the other hand, has a utilization rate ranging from 60% to 70%. Every hardware in a public cloud is installed with maximum utilization in mind. With a single public cloud system handling the data of many organizations, it can use every data center optimally to manage the fluctuating demand and even out capacities.

Environment-centric infrastructure

Infrastructure plays a huge role in making a cloud system energy efficient. The strategic location and source of electricity are key considerations in choosing the ideal cloud system location. Unless you are a large corporation like Amazon or Google, it’s not possible to find your ideal data center location with an in-house, uninterrupted electricity supply. Here, opting for a public cloud is a greener, and cost-effective, option.

Here’s why:

Most public cloud servers are near the facilities that transmit electricity. Additionally, the servers are monitored and maintained by experts round-the-clock to maintain optimal hardware utilization, which results in relatively lower energy consumption to operate and maintain the ideal temperature.

Quick updates for maximum efficiency

A frequently updating cloud system is the ideal one for an organization. With every update in cloud technology, the system gets more and more efficient in utilizing the resources while minimizing the energy consumption in the long run.

The system and hardware used in legacy data centers are often used for the longest time, with little to no updates in between. Using outdated technology that requires heavy physical infrastructure usage, like multiple servers, can have huge implications on an organization’s carbon footprint.

The biggest strength of a third-party cloud service is you don’t have to worry about getting the latest versions of business applications. Since it’s operated and maintained by professional cloud operators and managed service providers, they can ensure that your business gets the most efficient technology that also optimizes the use of resources and costs.

Positive impact on climate

In addition to all the factors mentioned above, cloud computing provides additional benefits that make it a welcome addition to scaling businesses that want to be more environment-friendly. For instance, AWS, along with its partners, uses a 28% less carbon-intense power mix compared to corporate data centers. Also, its global cloud infrastructure is constantly striving to achieve 100% renewable energy usage as it reached 40% in 2016.

With all the factors mentioned above, it’s quite clear that the future of business needs an environmentally conscious infrastructure, and cloud computing can play a key role in it.

ZeaCloud, as your strategic cloud partner, can help you design, build, and smoothly run a robust public cloud infrastructure that helps you play your part through an eco-friendly approach to enterprise IT.

Get in touch with us today.

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When should enterprises adopt private cloud? | Zeacloud® Blogs

When does it make sense for enterprises to opt for private cloud

For businesses across industries, cloud computing has many advantages. Migrating to private can help organizations to improve efficiency, make business data more secure and easily accessible, and gain new insights from their data by incorporating analytics.

Cloud computing has many advantages for different businesses across industries, but like with many other new and powerful technologies there are business impacts to consider. Organizations must make several key decisions in order to effectively benefit from cloud migration. First, they must choose the type of cloud environment they want to use. While several well-known corporations with well-known brands are among the hyper-scalable public cloud providers, a private cloud is a better fit for many organizations. Let’s look at why.

What is a public cloud?

Public cloud is defined as, “Computing, where scalable and elastic IT-enabled capabilities are supplied as a service to external consumers using Internet technologies,” according to Gartner. It’s usually available on a pay-per-use basis and in a multi-tenant environment, which means data from multiple companies can be stored on the same physical server. With a public cloud infrastructure, a cloud service provider usually hosts the servers that store the data and run the applications.

This is the most commonly used cloud computing infrastructure globally due to its flexible usage and pricing models. Companies can scale their cloud computing and storage systems up or down as and when required to meet business requirements, based on an operational expenditure, or OpEx, model with varying costs as opposed to a fixed billing model.

What is a private cloud?

A private cloud server is a safe and isolated environment created by virtualizing resources from many servers. This form of cloud is only available to a few enterprises rather than the public, ensuring that those organizations are suitably insulated from one another. A private cloud server is usually rented on a monthly basis.

Flexibility, cost savings, security, and control are all advantages of a private cloud, which are especially crucial to firms with predictable workloads or customization requirements, as well as those in regulated industries. If you want to build a private cloud in your own data center rather than using a cloud service provider, you’ll have to develop a lot of software, buy and install hardware, and make provisions for many architectural considerations. Not to mention the resources, various skill sets, and identifying the right approaches to IT service delivery.

When to use private cloud?

After determining a company’s cloud goals and priorities, it can assess whether private cloud computing is the proper IT environment for them. Some of the key factors that influence their choice are:

Industrial compliance

For some businesses, the private cloud will be the only way to ensure compliance with regulations in their respective industries. In the healthcare sector, for example, HIPAA mandates that electronically protected health information (ePHI) be created, received, stored, and transmitted securely. Although HIPAA is the compliance certification for the US healthcare industry, any partners or subsidiaries that work with US-based companies or handle data of US nationals must be compliant with it. In India, the introduction of DISHA, a HIPAA equivalent certification, will require healthcare companies to receive, store, and transmit data in a similar way for consumer security.  

Similarly, in the banking sector, regulations such as PSD2 and GDPR for open banking and data storage, respectively, have made a strong case for companies to move to the private cloud for better security of data and systems. Banking and financial services organizations that are lagging behind in moving to the cloud stand to be at a disadvantage, and the best way to tackle evolving regulations and compliance requirements is to migrate to the private cloud.

Predictable server usage

Organizations with somewhat predictable and consistent resource demands might consider adopting a private cloud, besides those with PSD2, HIPAA, or other compliance concerns. Such firms are more likely to maximize their resources, and hence see their cloud spends increase, while also being less likely to fully utilize the elasticity that is one of the public cloud’s key features.

Need for flexibility

Organizations that may profit from the enhanced flexibility of a virtualized environment should also consider the benefits of private cloud. Many firms, especially medium-sized and large businesses, operate several applications and often simultaneously, each of which is housed on its own hardware.

Virtualizing a server that runs a specific application, such as email, enables a company to scale up or down its resources. As servers running more resource-intensive applications are provisioned with greater computational power or storage, performance improves and service delivery is faster. It also saves money because the additional resources are taken from underutilized servers rather than being leased or purchased individually.

Given these benefits, an organization should assess the following factors to determine which cloud deployment works best for them:

Security

Compliance requirements

Cost-efficiency

Scale of application workloads

Business processes and need for interoperability

A good cloud service provider that offers hosted private cloud solutions can assist with these assessments and make recommendations tailored to the company’s needs.

Conclusion

Whether you should use a public cloud or a private cloud entirely depends on your requirements. For many businesses, private cloud deployments can be more beneficial as it offers a closed, secure network. For others, a hybrid network implemented through a cloud service provider can offer the best of both worlds with both unlimited scalability, seamless data management, and heightened security.

Scale rapidly with seamless agility and robust control with fully customizable ZeaCloud® Private Cloud Solutions. Get in touch with us to know more.

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Things to remember when moving to public cloud | Cloud Migration | Zeacloud® Blogs

What does cloud migration entail and what to keep in mind

Organizations today are under pressure to digitally transform in order to remain competitive. Part of that transformation often includes migrating to the public cloud for greater efficiency and optimizing IT costs in the long term. If you're considering migrating to the cloud, remember it's not a destination but rather a journey. And it's one that needs to be carefully planned and executed in order to be successful.

Planning your digital transformation journey

According to Gartner, "digital transformation represents the changes associated with the application of digital technology in all aspects of human society."  

In other words, it's a journey that can take many forms, and while migrating to the cloud may be at its center, there are several steps along your path to success. These include:

Continuously improving the customer experience

Streamlining business processes and increasing agility at scale

Enabling new business models with transformative technologies

The cloud migration journey

Migrating to the public cloud is a journey, not a destination. It’s also not one migration, but often a series of smaller migrations that result in a comprehensive cloud adoption strategy and plan. Although many organizations are well into their multi-year migration journeys at this point, some are just starting out. Here, we’ll focus on how you can get started on your cloud migration journey.

The first step as an organization planning digital transformation and cloud adoption is to ask a pertinent question: “What do we want to achieve?”

In order to build your cloud strategy, you must be clear about the business outcomes you want it to drive. Beginning with an outcome-based approach allows you to look beyond the infrastructure elements of IT and helps ensure your organization is on track with its digital transformation efforts. Asking yourself what you want to achieve will lead naturally into the next step.  

Is public cloud the right choice?

Before making a choice, you’ll want to consider your business needs. Think about your business objectives and how public cloud can help you achieve them. Make sure you understand the cost factors that will determine whether public cloud is more affordable for your organization in the long run.

Once you have all that information, it’s time to make an informed choice about which option is best for your organization: public cloud or private cloud. So, to answer the question: is public cloud the right choice – yes, it is. Especially if you are just beginning your digital transformation journey and want to build an infrastructure quickly and cost-effectively to support deeper digitization initiatives.

Here are some of the most common reasons why you should move to the public cloud, and fast:

You want to get started with digital transformation quickly and cost-effectively

Your business can benefit from bottom-line benefits the public cloud offers that are not possible with on-premise infrastructure, such as reduced costs, unlimited storage, flexibility and other services through a pay-as-you-go model

How do you get started?

Start with a pilot project. As you begin your journey to the public cloud, consider starting with a "greenfield" application — i.e., an application that's being built from scratch. This allows you to take advantage of cloud-native approaches, including Infrastructure as Code (IaC) and DevOps processes, from the beginning. Use an IaC tool like Terraform or CloudFormation to define your infrastructure "code," then use a build tool like Jenkins or GitHub Actions to automate deployment and management of your application environments on the public cloud provider. If you don't have any greenfield applications available, start by reconfiguring part of an existing legacy app into containers with Docker or Kubernetes.

Choose one business-critical application for this initial effort; something important but relatively low risk would be ideal.

Get management support and sponsorship. The nature of most organizations requires buy-in from executives who can help overcome potential obstacles (such as resource constraints) along your path to transformation in the public cloud. It also helps if they validate what's in it for them (such as increased business agility). Then organize your efforts through cross-functional teams composed of people from IT operations, development/DevOps, security operations, risk management and finance.

Five cloud migration best practices, one digital platform

As you plan your migration to the cloud, there are five key areas that need to be addressed. Each of these will require attention from different stakeholders with varying skill sets. The platform — built on a machine learning-based engine — gives every stakeholder access to a single-view interface where they can see all the information they need for productivity and process efficiency. The best thing is that you don’t have to rebuild your data center (or your team) in order to migrate and run applications in the public cloud.

Plan and Prioritize Workloads

Design the Right Migration Approach

Configure and Test Your Environments

Migrate and Validate Your Applications

Optimize and Manage Your Cloud Environment

Migrating to public cloud is crucial to your digital transformation

When your IT infrastructure is in the cloud, it is easier to deploy new applications and services quickly. You can set up new virtual machines in seconds and start running them immediately. The cloud gives you more visibility into your IT environment, too, so you can see what's running, how many customers are using it, and what the load on each system is. This lets you scale your services to meet demands automatically, without a huge burden on budgets.

The cloud also makes it easier for you to gain new insights from your data by adding analytics capabilities that let you analyze large amounts of data quickly, and give employees a powerful way to explore information using business intelligence tools that help uncover trends and patterns across any dimension or variable in your data.

Scale your enterprise IT with an agile and fully customizable ZeaCloud® Public Cloud Solutions. Get in touch with us to know more.

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Public Cloud | Managed Service Provider | Enterprise Cloud Computing

Choosing the right Managed Cloud Services Provider

Companies that have migrated to a public cloud service or have converted their infrastructure to a hybrid infrastructure over the last few years have seen huge benefits in terms of cost and efficiency. More and more organizations are realizing the importance of moving to the cloud in a planned and consistent way to stay competitive, rather than taking reactionary and hurried measures to meet their IT needs.  Most successful companies understood the importance of the cloud for maximizing their efficiency and operational accuracy. Especially in the post-pandemic world, global spending on public cloud services is predicted to grow by 18.4% in 2021.

With that being said, it’s not too late for you to migrate to the cloud or build a hybrid infrastructure to accelerate digital transformation. Adopting cloud computing or scaling up your existing cloud deployments is as much a business strategy as it is an IT strategy since you’re investing in future-ready infrastructure that supports more complex business processes and drives revenue generation. Hence, it is extremely important to choose the right cloud service and managed services provider who understands your business needs and growth objectives.

What are Public Cloud Services?

Public cloud services refer to the on-demand computing and storage infrastructure and services that are owned, operated, and maintained by a third-party service provider and provided to enterprises over the public internet. It allows businesses to host their enterprise solutions, and store and distribute data using their servers and storage systems on the hardware owned by the service provider. This shared infrastructure is hosted on the public cloud and shared by multiple organizations. Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure are the most popular examples of public cloud services.

Enterprises use public cloud services for web-based email hosting, online office applications, storage, and as a testing platform for company software. It is an especially valuable technology for small and medium enterprises (SMEs) due to its numerous benefits, such as;

It is cost-effective as it doesn’t require the purchase of independent hardware and software

You pay only for the services you use

The service provider undertakes regular maintenance, so no need to hire an in-house team or expert

Unlimited scalability to meet your everyday business needs as well as planned and unplanned workloads

Minimum lags and failures due to a vast network of servers

Why do you need a Managed Cloud Services Provider?

Enterprises can simplify their cloud computing initiatives and ensure outcome-driven implementation by hiring an experienced managed services provider that can customize and manage your end-to-end cloud infrastructure. Having the right cloud partner takes a significant burden off of the company’s shoulders, enabling them to deploy, test, and maintain a comprehensive cloud system that generates maximum returns while augmenting core functions.

6 Key factors in selecting the right partner to manage your cloud

Now, let’s take a look at some of the key qualities of an ideal managed services provider for your business. Keep in mind that every business has different reasons to deploy a cloud system. This guide will help you match your cloud requirements with your prospective vendor.

1. Business knowledge and technical expertise

First of all, an ideal third-party cloud service provider must be thoroughly knowledgeable of the enterprise’s various requirements to provide the right combination of cloud solutions. Depending on your individual business needs, it should also provide you with crucial cloud computing insights and the latest trends that’ll help you gain a competitive edge.

2. Seamless deployment and continuous maintenance

Your third-party cloud service provider must have a dedicated team to undertake the deployment of your cloud systems quickly and seamlessly. The cloud infrastructure you get should also allow frequent upgrades of enterprise software and applications with easy management and maintenance.

The faster your cloud system gets deployed and upgraded, the faster you can overcome your enterprise challenges and competitors. A reliable third-party vendor should undertake every cloud-related aspect for maximum results.

3. Secure infrastructure and policies with data protection and backup

A comprehensive security infrastructure is the most crucial aspect of an ideal cloud service provider. It should have a secure authentication system and protocols in place so that only authorized persons can make changes. The system also logsand reports these changes to track them effectively and take corrective actions in the event of errors. The security policies should adhere to the enterprise standards with comprehensive data retention and backup features to keep business operations running without interruptions.

4. Service Level Agreement (SLA)

Your third-party cloud vendor should be able to assure every basic service for the cloud operations that your organization needs for uninterrupted functionality. Most of the enterprises take this crucial point for granted, however, this factor differentiates premium cloud service providers from others. What is especially more important with SLAs with your managed service provider is to ensure that they will unfailingly follow through on each aspect of the SLA within the stipulated time and budget.

5. Organization, planning, and risk assessment

The inner workings of your cloud infrastructure must be highly organized, with adequate planning and precautions for identifying, assessing, and mitigating risks. Your managed service provider should plan and share reports and analyses of risks to the organization’s IT heads and management on a regular basis with prescriptions and strategies to address them effectively.

If a vendor has first-hand experience in providing cloud services to a company similar to yours, it should be your first preference as it saves you significant time in communicating the requirements of your business niche and planning accordingly. And most importantly, the cloud service provider must establish sound risk-management policies to differentiate from its competitors.

6. Trust

Last, but certainly not the least, the Managed Cloud Services Provider must operate on a foundation of industrial ethics and legal, operating guidelines. Check the vendor’s reputation and achievements by observing the performances of their existing clients and their testimonies. Communicate with your peer businesses with similar cloud requirements to gauge the vendor’s quality of services.

Partner with ZeaCloud to leverage the power of cloud for business growth

Having the right public Managed Cloud Services Provider by your side will give your business a significant competitive edge in the new normal that will undoubtedly favor companies that are able to leverage the digital and cloud boom. We hope the points mentioned above will help you find the most suitable cloud computing service vendor for your unique business needs.

We can say with absolute confidence that your search for the right cloud partner ends here. ZeaCloud provides the most cost-effective and result-driven cloud solutions that cater to a wide range of industries and are designed to match your business profile.

For industries getting started with the cloud, we provide 360-degree cloud solutions with result-driven insights and strategies. For companies with an existing cloud infrastructure, we work as your cloud maintenance and development consultant with over multi-decade experience as digital practitioners.

Reach out to us today to get your cloud journey started the right way.

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Public Cloud Computing Infrastructure | Managed Public Cloud

Choosing the right cloud infrastructure for your business

Enterprise cloud computing system has now become a household term of sorts for many businesses worldwide. What emerged as an additional supporting technology to take the load off their on-premise enterprise IT systems is now an indispensable technology for modern businesses to be truly digital and prepare for the future.

According to Gartner, the cloud application services (SaaS) market has grown significantly from 85.7 billion USD in 2018 to 133 billion USD in 2021. And the trend keeps on growing with each passing year because of massive digital transformation, especially after the COVID-19 pandemic. However, the biggest mistakes companies make is rushing towards creating a cloud ecosystem without prior research. Not only does it result in lower returns from your cloud computing infrastructure, but it also puts a huge dent in your company’s budget.

To help you avoid the common mistakes with cloud adoption and migration, this blog will give you some crucial insights on various cloud computing infrastructures and their key differences so that you can choose the right one for your business.

Types of Cloud Infrastructures 

Private Cloud

In a private cloud computing environment, all hardware and software resources are licensed exclusively to, and accessible only by, a single customer/enterprise. The biggest strength of a private cloud network is its added data security and multi-layered customization. As we deploy it for only one organization, the company gets complete control over its functionality and designs it to meet its unique IT requirements. Having a remote server also ensures that your data stays within your organization and is distributed across the private system using the intranet.

So, is the private cloud right for you?

Well, if your organization is willing to spend on its own internal server and in-house cloud administrators, then a private cloud infrastructure may work for your business. Unfortunately, it requires spending a heavy chunk of your budget and significant office space to run a private server successfully. Hiring a team of capable cloud technicians is non-negotiable for your server’s regular maintenance. Also, having separate network infrastructures, data centers, and software licenses adds further costs to your overall budget.

Deploying private cloud infrastructure is also rather challenging compared to a public network as it requires connections to multiple data sources, while taking significant time and expertise to deploy it correctly. Increased security on a private cloud server also means significant limitations to its remote work capabilities, especially for retrieving data on smartphones and mobile devices. Security is also a major consideration for businesses, especially large enterprises with complex business models, and industries such as banking, for instance, where there is a large amount of data to be handled and strict regulations on how it is processed. Additionally, it is also used by government bodies to store the sensitive data of millions of people with maximum security.

Hybrid Cloud

As the name suggests, a hybrid network lets you enjoy the benefits of multiple clouds working in harmony to achieve your business objectives. It’s an IT architecture that incorporates two or more cloud computing environments and seamlessly blends their functionality to give you a complex network of cloud computing ecosystems.

Sounds complicated? Let’s simplify it by understanding how a hybrid cloud ecosystem works.

A hybrid cloud infrastructure uses a Local Area Network (LAN), Wide Area Network (WAN), Virtual Private Network, and Application Programming Interface (API) to connect multiple devices together. These devices are then connected to multiple digital servers using virtualization and data centers to create a network of interconnected data streams that can be configured to mimic business processes. As it’s connected to multiple cloud platforms, you can allocate the data management processes to various cloud systems for uninterrupted operations in case of uncertainties.

An ideal cloud infrastructure should comprise one private and one public cloud infrastructure to give your business the best of both worlds. The private cloud system helps keep your data safe from external threats, and public cloud infrastructure provides impeccable third-party support and multi-device availability. The biggest strength of such hybrid cloud networks is their limitless scalability. You can manage sudden spikes and lows in demand without putting excessive pressure on your cloud systems as you can allocate multiple cloud platforms quickly and reliably to handle fluctuating workloads.

However, like every cloud infrastructure, it too has its drawbacks and limitations. First, having multiple cloud deployments means difficulty in maintaining adequate security. Therefore, it’s not recommended for companies dealing with highly confidential information as you can’t identify where your data is being utilized. Hybrid cloud networks also have hidden costs as operational visibility is limited. Hence, it may prove expensive in the long run if you’re not monitoring the cloud processes regularly.

Public Cloud

Public cloud is the most cost-effective, reliable, and efficient cloud system commonly preferred by small to medium enterprises. But what makes it a popular choice?

For starters, a public cloud is a computing service provided by third-party providers using the public internet, making it accessible for anyone who wants to have their own customized cloud system. Public cloud networks use a pay-per-usage pricing system as companies only have to pay for CPU cycles, storage, and bandwidth they use, making it more cost-effective compared to its peers.

Your third-party cloud service vendor, like ZeaCloud, AWS, or Azure, for example, deploys, secures, and maintains the data flow throughout the organization on its own cloud infrastructure. Hence, choosing the right public cloud service provider plays an important role in your business’s online success.

Learn about our Managed Public Cloud services

Another great benefit of a public cloud network is its accessibility on various devices, including a smartphone. As it uses a public network platform to distribute company data, any employee within the organization with the right credentials can access company data from any device of their choice, which makes it especially ideal for remote work environments. It also provides virtually limitless scalability options to handle unpredictable business scenarios.

Of course, there are important things you must do Your cloud service provider must have multi-layered security protocols as the public cloud network is unsecured compared to the private network. As the platform is used by multiple other businesses at once, the company itself has no control over its maintenance and management. It has to be completely undertaken by an external managed service provider unless they spend significantly on building and retaining an in-house team of cloud experts to manage their infrastructure.

Fortunately, you can overcome all these issues by partnering with an experienced and competent managed cloud service provider.

We, at ZeaCloud, provide the most cost-effective and result-driven public cloud services with 360-degree support and 24/7 care.

Evaluate your cloud options and build a business case

Understanding the key differences, advantages, and disadvantages of cloud infrastructures helps you make an informed decision on selecting the right cloud system for your business that gives desired results for years to come. I hope this blog helped you in finding your ideal cloud system.

Speak to our cloud consultant today to discuss your business requirements and get started with the right solutions.

Get in touch now!

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Tips on public cloud implementation | Deploying public cloud in 2022

Public Cloud Implementation Tips Tricks and trends in 2022

The public cloud architecture is fully virtualized, allowing for flexible resource sharing. Most cloud implementations, including public cloud ones, are very scalable. Public clouds allow your organization to expand its capacity without having to build its infrastructure.

Depending on your organization's demands, public cloud installations can provide temporary or permanent capacity. Considering implementing public cloud in your organization? Let's look at some of the best public cloud implementation tips, tricks, and trends in 2022.

Public Cloud Implementation Tips, Tricks, and trends in 2022

Select a suitable public cloud provider

You should know the major factors when choosing a public cloud provider besides computing, storage, security, and database services. Depending on your organizational needs, you may want specific services in your cloud deployment along with your cloud infrastructure. Public cloud providers let you choose which services you want, allowing you to design the most appropriate cloud environment for your infrastructure requirements.

Establish a security plan

Putting security rules in place is essential before implementing cloud in your organization. Cloud-based technology has opened up some exciting possibilities, but it also means organizations need to be more vigilant with protecting their enterprise network, applications, data, and users from threats. Consider implementing your own security team or hiring a security service to protect your business.

Consider collaboration rather than building own cloud server

Purchasing and maintaining server equipment requires time, resources, and money. Rather than building a bespoke service prone to downtime, collaborate with other businesses for a fee or another consideration. The cost of public cloud computing for business applications is much lower than maintaining and upgrading on-site infrastructure every few years. Public cloud is also easy to manage, especially with an external team of dedicated cloud experts.

Implement two-factor authentication

Security should be your number one concern when you are just getting started with public cloud computing for your company. No matter how secure you believe your data is, adding more security and recovery mechanisms is always beneficial. Therefore, every employee who logs into your cloud computing environment should be subject to two-factor authentication.

Training your team properly

Demonstrating how to operate applications on the cloud and following digital security guidelines helps your staff save time. Consumers will find it less necessary to switch between multiple apps with more familiarity with the software. You should make sure your team is comfortable using cloud-based software before implementing it.

Conclusion

When using public cloud resources and services, you do not need to install any on-premise infrastructure or software. Users have access to the resources they require for their projects. It is the responsibility of public cloud providers to maintain the servers and infrastructure that support their services.

These tips will definitely help you implement a successful public cloud infrastructure for your business. Additionally, you don’t have to look anywhere else for the right public cloud partner.

ZeaCloud provides robust and cost-effective public cloud hosting services as your digital transformation partner. Our public cloud services can cater to small, medium, and large enterprises with security and accuracy you can count on.

Contact us today to get started with your public cloud journey.

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Planning enterprise cloud implementation | How to build a cloud team

Getting a team together to implement Public Cloud

Having a well-defined roadmap for digital transformation helps simplify the journey. Therefore, a step-by-step approach is crucial for the successful implementation of a public cloud system.

Cloud computing has revolutionized several aspects of conducting business today. With cloud computing, individuals and companies can easily access information stored at remote sites.

Public clouds allow companies to connect to an off-site hosted computing environment, paid for by a monthly subscription fee. With that said, let’s look at the best measures of putting a team together for public cloud implementation.

Getting a team together to implement public cloud

A step-by-step approach is crucial in preparing to implement a cloud solution. To prepare for the project, the project team needs to ensure it understands the following issues:

Business and client demand

Architecture, both business and IT

Usage

Establish a center of excellence for cloud implementation

A company would benefit immensely from implementing a cloud solution. Unifying team goals towards cloud system ensures that to achieve that on all levels. This team stays focused on the goal, prepares and distributes all kinds of information about the project timelines, hires experts, and gains the clout necessary to achieve it.

This team should have all the necessary organizational support, such as a project management office to drive project initiatives, a change management team, executives who can enforce changes, and anything else that’s required.

Engage the services of a reputable cloud partner

Take advantage of professional assistance. Professional managed cloud services providers can help you run an efficient and secure cloud infrastructure along with solutions for always-on availability, and maintenance, and support at all times.

Start with small testing

Many businesses that have successfully moved to the cloud have done so piecemeal; most companies avoid migrating all their applications at once.

Your cloud infrastructure should serve your business in the way you want.

It is also important to consider the cost implications of this decision. Public clouds are less expensive in the short term than private clouds. Your executive team can effectively manage the cloud budget depending on these small testing before implementing it all across the organization.

Plan a migration strategy that suits your needs and goals

The plan specifies what needs to be migrated, how and when it will be migrated, and how and when testing will take place.

Contingencies will happen, so plan for them in the schedule.

Choose a vendor

The vendor you select should have experience managing infrastructure for a business like yours. Do your homework on their successes and failures before settling on a vendor. You should stay away from data lakes if you are new to cloud computing since they are massive and, if not managed well, become a liability rather than an asset. Don't limit yourself to one vendor if you are planning on using a public cloud. Having a vendor-agnostic cloud strategy is best.

Data backup and recovery

Make sure you back up all your crucial systems adequately before starting your migration plan. You will have a lot on your plate, so plan accordingly. When working with a public cloud, make sure you have a good contract covering disaster planning and disaster recovery.

Choosing between building a team and hiring a cloud service provider

For your cloud resources to perform well, you must have a good internet connection. Make sure you have a failsafe strategy for internet connectivity.

Keeping your team in control will ensure continuity in the business. Ensure every aspect of the business is considered, including the legal aspects. Don't forget a strong team is essential to implementing public cloud successfully.

Speaking of building a strong cloud team, ZeaCloud can work with you as your strategic public cloud partner that designs a customized public cloud infrastructure.

Get in touch with us today.

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Implementing managed cloud services in 2022

Why managed cloud services should be on your agenda in 2022

Regardless of the industry of your business, it is not possible to function efficiently without the help of IT services. However, hiring in-house IT specialists to take care of all IT-related work can be expensive. This is where you must consider managed IT services. If you haven’t invested in it yet, it is high time to do so.

But before getting on board with managed cloud services, you need to pay special attention to its various features to design a comprehensive IT system for 2022 and beyond. Continue to read and we will share more details on why you need a managed service provider.

What are managed cloud and IT services?

Before looking at the major trends in the market to determine the right solutions for your organization, you need to be aware of what it is all about. Managed services are the process where you seek the help of dedicated IT professionals from a third-party service provider to take care of all IT-related matters of your business. However, you will hire them contractually without having to hire them full-time or retrain them. Whenever there is a need for IT support and maintenance assistance, this external service provider will attend to it. This will keep you away from the need to build and grow an internal IT team within your organization.

Why should you use managed cloud services? What can managed services do for your business in terms of future-readiness? To answer some of these pertinent questions, here’s an overview of some of its most prominent benefits.

Benefits of managed services 

Improved data security

The future of remote work seems like it is going to stay forever. Hence, businesses will need to pay special attention to data security. On the other hand, the number of hacking attempts and brute force attacks recorded along with time are increasing at an alarming rate. Therefore, your business should hire cybersecurity specialists. Managed cloud service providers like ZeaCloud can assist you with it.

Smooth business migration to the cloud

Your business can improve productivity and performance by moving to the cloud. This is a classic scenario where an external service provider and partner can help you end to end. It is possible to move the overall business and its operations to the cloud and you will not have to do anything. The managed services provider will take care of everything. You just need to experience the benefits that come along with it.

365x24x7 maintenance and support

When your business requires round-the-clock support, managed services will ensure that help is readily available. This will help your business to function perfectly well at all times. When you experience a system downtime at 2 am, there is no need to panic. You can get assistance from the helpdesk and restore services immediately. There is no need to wait until the next morning. Hence, you can increase the trust and credibility of your business as well manifold.

Become future-ready by adopting modern enterprise technology

One of the most prominent trends we see in modern enterprise enterprises and platforms is how they are enabled with artificial intelligence. This helps organizations automate repetitive business processes and reduce significant recurring expenses.

Another trend in managed services is the use of IoT.

Blockchain and IoT are some key technologies available out there currently. Along with the help of managed IT services, you can get those services to benefit your business. For example, you can harness the power of IoT to develop a robust, secure, and highly efficient method for exchanging information between devices.

With everything mentioned above, it's quite clear that cloud and digitization are the future of enterprise technology that can help business unlock unparalleled efficiency and productivity. All you need is the right partner to ensure your infrastructure is robust, efficient, and scalable, and ZeaCloud helps you achieve just that.

We have designed our IT and cloud services to cater to your unique business use cases and simplify your digital transformation journey.

Get in touch with us today.

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Guide to business continuity | Backup and Disaster Recovery Solution

Implementing business continuity solutions and things to consider

Your business continuity plan clearly outlines how your business operates when faced with an unexpected disruption.

The business continuity plan you follow must clearly outline how your business would continue to operate when it encounters an unexpected disruption. This is pretty much similar to a comprehensive disaster recovery plan. That’s because you will consider all the different aspects of your business when developing the business continuity plan.

Why do you need a business continuity strategy?

One of the most important things you should do when you undertake any digital transformation initiative in your business is to have a solid business continuity strategy. You can never predict when your business will encounter a disaster. In such a situation, you need to ensure that the business receives a minimum impact from it.

You can make your business services available to customers and stakeholders during a disaster with a detailed business continuity plan and technology to back it up. Regardless of the challenges you face, it is possible to continue with your operations. On the other hand, it is also possible for you to promote quick disaster recovery. This will eventually help you to get your business back to normal.

Business continuation best practices

When you try to develop a digital transformation strategy for business continuity, you should know the best practices of business continuation. Here are a few of them.

Maintaining team and business operations

The business continuity plan should help you maintain business operations throughout the crisis. This will help you maintain your brand reputation and overcome financial

losses by making sure that teams have access to the tools they need to serve customers. You can also enhance the overall stability of your business.

Building customer confidence

Your customers should know that your business is equipped with a robust continuity and data recovery plan. Then the customers will trust your business and will go ahead with your business without keeping any second thoughts in mind.

Preserve brand reputation

Disruptions and disasters can ruin your brand reputation. A proper business continuity plan can help you to keep your brand image away from being tarnished.

Gain competitive edge

The business continuity plan will even assist you in gaining a competitive edge in the industry. You can restore functionality within the shortest period and react quickly to disasters. This will eventually help you to stay ahead of your competition.

Guide for business continuity

With a step-by-step guide to create a robust business continuation model, now you have answers to the question “What Is Business Continuity and Why Is It Important?”. While keeping that in mind, let’s focus on the steps to create a robust business continuity model.

Comprehensive

You need to be comprehensive with the business continuity plan. It should be in a position to help you with overcoming disruptions that you have to face. There should be proper backup plans in place. You must carefully consider every single factor that would play a major role in the continuity of your business.

Realistic

It is crucial to be realistic with the business continuity plan. Otherwise, you will encounter challenges while you are trying to implement them. You must check how realistic the plan is at the time of developing it.

Efficient

The business continuity plan will not deliver any prominent benefits to you unless it is implementable and backed up by a robust recovery tech solution. Your business is complex, and you need to ensure that your business continuity plan can deliver efficient results, regardless of complexity.

Adaptable

Your business will change along with time. Therefore, you need to ensure that the business recovery plan is highly adaptable. To ensure that, you may think about from now on with cloud technologies.

Keep these tips in mind and proceed with developing a robust business continuation model. What you must also consider is investing in an enterprise-level business continuity application like Availablous®. Our flagship data backup application protects your business from the loss of mission-critical data due to external disasters and malware attacks.

Availablous® - Let Your Data Meet Immortality!

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Digital Transformation in Business | Digital Transformation for Business Continuity

Ensuring business continuity in the digital era with cloud computing

The digital era of business allows us to make the most of cloud computing. Using cloud computing to ensure business continuity gives a much-needed competitive edge to businesses.

As business owners, it is crucial to equip ourselves with a business continuity plan. Otherwise, you face many challenges in the long run as you lose your competitive edge.

That’s where cloud computing plays a crucial role. We are living in a digital age, where businesses get the opportunity to make the most of cloud computing. It is up to you to harness the benefits of cloud computing and empower your disaster recovery plan.

What is business digitization?

Businesses are now shifting from manual processes by people to automated processes, giving their employees more room to strategize. This is where cloud computing plays a crucial role. For example, we have seen how paper documents were replaced by online documents stored in the cloud. Thus, cloud computing provides many benefits to companies. For instance, it can reduce the physical presence of excess infrastructure and manual handling.

Depending on the current business needs, organizations can determine what operational activities and processes still require physical presence. Cloud computing can handle everything else while helping businesses to get the most out of digitization. You can be innovative with your business and reduce overheads.

On top of that, you will also be able to improve business productivity. Hence, cloud computing and digital transformation are considered important tools which will help your business to ensure a competitive edge.

Now the question is how to update your business continuity strategy for 2022 and beyond?

Firstly, you need to do an internal audit in your company and see what existing processes to be digitized. You can also observe how much time you can reduce and how you can stabilize your business. Here are some things that you can do to develop a solid business continuity strategy.

Have a proper data backup and disaster recovery mechanism

Imagine what would happen if you lost all the data that you have stored in computers? Without data, it will not be possible for you to conduct your business operations, let alone grow. This is where you should have a proper data backup and disaster recovery mechanism.

At the time of implementing such a mechanism, you need to understand what data backup and disaster recovery services are. Along with that, it is worthy to have a basic understanding of the difference between data backup and disaster recovery. Then you can choose the right cloud data backup and disaster recovery solutions for your organization from what’s available in the market. Make sure that you carefully assess different data backup and disaster recovery solutions to pick the best one matching your business.

Moving the services to the cloud

The services used by your business can also be moved to the cloud to improve security and accessibility. For example, employees will be able to access the services from their mobile devices from anywhere. Availability of services in such a way can help your business to boost overall productivity.

On top of that, you can enhance the security of your services and safeguard overall business process continuity. Even during a pandemic, your employees can work from home and ensure the continuity of your business.

Conclusion

Now you have a good understanding of how cloud computing can help you with ensuring business continuity. Keeping these in mind, seek the assistance of the best cloud solutions provider like ZeaCloud.

Availablous®, our proprietary backup and disaster recovery solution, makes your cloud deployments secure with robust, in-built, business continuity and disaster recovery controls. You can set up automated protocols for rapid data recovery and restoration of critical data to ensure seamless execution of your organization's continuity plan.

Our customized cloud management services ensure business continuity with disaster data recovery, data backup, public cloud hosting, and managed cloud services.

Get in touch with us today.

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Cloud Complexities in 2022 | Avoiding Cloud Mistakes

Top 5 Cloud Complexities to Prepare For.

As we are two and a half months away from a brand-new year, now is the perfect time to evaluate your IT and cloud system and upgrade it with technologies that’ll help your business grow in 2022. Surprisingly, this is the biggest challenge especially for small and medium businesses (SMBs) to understand the intricacies of a cloud system to find possible flaws.

The biggest reason for this is that rapid innovation has, in a way, added to the complexities of cloud. With every passing year, enterprise technology became more and more complex in order to perform mission-critical tasks efficiently and accurately.

From complexities of managing cloud with on-premise infrastructure to the way the cloud communicates with other systems within organizations, cloud systems are getting more and more complex as time passes. The choices and the confusions they create among organizations is one of the biggest reasons why they hesitate to move to cloud thinking it is expensive or complicated.

To help you look beyond the jargon and concepts and focus on the business benefits of a robust cloud ecosystem, we’ve curated the top 5 cloud complexities to watch out for in the near future.

Importance of understanding cloud complexity

Before getting started, it’s important to understand that cloud complexity is not only limited to the technological aspects and connectivity with devices within an organization. Although it’s the most common factor associated with it, approach towards cloud technology and response to the changing technology by team plays a crucial role in managing cloud complexity.

According to Deloitte, small-size (33%) and medium-size (37%) businesses are most vulnerable to cloud complexity issues as they directly affect their ROI. Moving forward, understanding the nuances of cloud computing and preparing your system and IT teams for the changes is the key to maximize your returns from their cloud infrastructure.

With that being said, here are the 5 cloud complexities to prepare for in 2022 and beyond.

Top 5 cloud complexities you should plan for

Compatibility

One of the biggest challenges of cloud complexity is understanding the compatibility of cloud systems in terms of both hardware and software. As industries rapidly migrate towards a hybrid work environment, the urgency to incorporate cloud systems leads to deploying a system that’s not compatible with the existing IT infrastructure.

The heterogeneity of IT systems and the cloud have resulted in enormous investments in technology that don’t comply with the expected company standards. Moreover, companies might lose precious time in identifying and fixing flaws in the legacy system.

To avoid this issue, companies should undertake thorough research before selecting your ideal cloud ecosystem with compatible hardware and software as you migrate from your legacy system.

Cost-saving

The cost of a cloud system increases with its functionality. As the business grows, the functionality of the cloud system also grows with it, resulting in a more complex and costly cloud system.

Finding the right balance between cloud efficiency and cloud cost is rather challenging, as most businesses struggle with managing cloud speed, the scale of operations, and

overall cost in the long run. Work with your in-house teams or external managed service providers to evaluate potential costs that you might need to add in the future to ensure your budget is not overrun and your digitization initiatives are not hampered either.

Scalability

The key takeaway of rapid cloud adoption is many businesses initially adopted it to solve a focused problem with utmost efficiency. For instance, many SMBs have incorporated cloud systems to enable a hybrid ecosystem where employees can work from the office and home. As the company grows, the cloud system also performs a variety of tasks with the same effectiveness.

Although it’s rather difficult to accurately measure your cloud scalability with added functionality, recognizing your scalability needs early on will help you upgrade your cloud system effectively to manage the flexibility needs of the cloud system for your business. Being proactive about handling cloud complexity is the best way to stay a step ahead of technological challenges.

Network monitoring and data availability

Most cloud service providers offer cloud-native tools for monitoring, log aggregation, metrics and exceptions management. These tools work just fine as an entry-level monitoring system for your cloud operations. But as the scale of operation increases, these tools become more and more time-consuming and expensive.

The best way to boost data availability and accessibility in the cloud system is to replace or modify your monitoring tools with custom applications, ensuring that the data you monitor is useful and relevant to your business.

Team management

Last but certainly not the least, keeping your IT team updated with the latest trends in technology and cloud infrastructure is the best way to stay proactive in terms of handling cloud complexity. Cloud has quickly become a powerful tool for businesses in the last few years, and many breakthroughs in the technology will make cloud even more beneficial in the future, but also more complex.

Having a capable public cloud service partner and tech-savvy IT employees that can deploy, monitor, predict, and maintain an efficient cloud infrastructure is the biggest asset for businesses worldwide.

Final Thoughts

Understanding cloud complexities in the post-pandemic business era keeps you ahead of the curve. It helps you improve your cloud infrastructure with every major innovation in technology that makes your cloud system achieve more.

Speaking of achieving more, ZeaCloud’s custom, enterprise public cloud services & solutions can give your business a much-needed competitive advantage by creating a future-ready technological ecosystem.

Reach out to us today.

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Cloud Adoption Best Practices | Public Cloud Implementation

Best practices for public cloud implementation

Successfully implementing cloud computing infrastructure for your business gives you a significant competitive edge and keeps your business future-proof in the technology-focused business environment.

Cloud adoption has become the new norm in the post-COVID business environment, and rightfully so. A 2020 study by Accenture states that migrating areas of your business to the public cloud can cut your Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) by as much as 40 percent. However, the path to becoming a digital-first enterprise has many challenges, particularly for small and medium enterprises, in terms of migrating to a cloud computing environment quickly and efficiently, which is often easier said than done.

Migrating to the cloud requires meticulous planning, a thorough understanding of the tools available, and a long-term vision in order to successfully implement a cloud computing infrastructure that suits your individual business needs. In this blog, we’ll help you implement an impactful public cloud computing infrastructure with 5 best practices.

Thorough assessment of cloud computing options 

Your journey towards cloud adoption and migration must begin with thoroughly understanding the cloud service options available and how conducive they are to your business needs and budget. With a rise in demand for cloud computing, the number of cloud service providers has also increased drastically. However, selecting the right cloud partner for your business requires a dedicated effort.

Having a clear vision of what you want to achieve from a public cloud service helps significantly in trimming down the available options. Remember, no two cloud services are made equal. It’s important to conduct a detailed analysis including a cloud service profile, past experience in cloud deployment, the types of industries it has served, and pricing structure to find out if their services match your requirement.

It is also important to note that a partnership with a cloud service provider is a long-term deal. Shifting from one cloud vendor to another brings business operations to a halt entirely and adds further cost to the company. Therefore, you do it once and do it right.

Design your cloud migration strategy 

Depending on your current business scenario and existing technology infrastructure, it’s important to communicate with your selected cloud partner to design a practical and efficient cloud migration strategy.

Two of the most common approaches to cloud migration strategy are:

Forklift Approach: This strategy is appropriate for companies with huge data sets. Here, the on-premise data sets are migrated to an equivalent digital storage platform using a public cloud server.

Data Migration as a Service: Many cloud service providers provide specialized data migration as a service option, where they transition on-premise data to the cloud architecture slowly using a step-by-step approach.

Make sure that the approach you select is detailed enough to understand all the intricacies of data migration with respect to your organization and are flexible enough to locate every data set mapped against its on-premise counterpart.

As your data storage needs increase, your cloud service should be scalable enough to accommodate your storage needs. Having the right security measures also helps in ensuring that mission-critical on-premise information is secured from any potential data leak during the migration process. 

Learn about our Managed Public Cloud services

Select cloud computing technology that matches your company policies

Speaking of data security, your ideal cloud computing technology should be compatible with the company’s security, data management, and compliance policy. The trickiest part is that most client-to-client cloud security infrastructure shows little to no difference in its functionality. You must study the reference cloud architecture that cloud services offer in order to understand how their governance and work patterns differ from each other. 

With this exercise, you can align your business needs to the cloud roadmap and select the perfect partner for cloud deployment.

We strongly advise opting for portable cloud master data management with a cloud architecture that supports micro-services to enable continuous updates and enhancement of a cloud system, which is crucial in the modern business environment. It should also provide on-demand scalability in terms of data volume, sources, and the number of end-users with secured encryption.

And to seal the deal, your cloud service provider must provide you with continuous compliance software that continuously monitors and regulates the cloud’s integrity with dedicated checks on governance and compliance issues. 

Incorporate automation to accelerate business operations 

Incorporating a plethora of cloud computing applications to connect multiple business software and automating business operations is the next step in maximizing your company’s digital efficiency. Cloud infrastructure helps you in designing business process automation (BPA) infrastructure to automate everyday business tasks by synergizing various enterprise tools. 

As every application connected with the cloud can be operated and implemented through code, you can deploy repeatable automation templates to carry out the process accurately without human intervention.

And the possibilities don’t stop here!

You can also implement Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML), and Internet of Things (IoT) features to your digital ecosystem to further accelerate business operations with added accuracy, so that you can focus on important business tasks. Cloud computing can also conduct data analytics by processing data stored in servers to create a cost-effective and impactful data analytics system.

Create an inventory of existing IT tools

Last but certainly not the least, creating an existing IT tools inventory will help you select the right cloud computing ecosystem among a variety of service providers. Analyzing your current IT tools and applications gives you a better picture of the applications and processes that need to be migrated to a cloud system. 

The inter-dependency of on-premise and cloud applications plays a crucial role in designing an ideal cloud infrastructure. The seamless communication and data transfer between on-premise and cloud applications, with minimum network latency, can help you design a hybrid cloud system by incorporating a combination of public cloud and on-premise servers. 

Partner with ZeaCloud: Minimize IT costs & accelerate business growth

Successfully implementing a cloud computing infrastructure for your business can give you a competitive edge and keep your business future-proof in a business environment increasingly dominated by all things digital. We hope that the points mentioned above will help you design the most robust and bespoke cloud system that caters to your business objectives.

ZeaCloud will be more than happy to be a part of your business’ growth by providing cost-effective public cloud services that provide visible results.

Reach out to us today to know more about how we can help you in augmenting growth and revenues with the cloud.

Get in touch today!

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Public cloud computing | Public Cloud Managed Services

Why the public cloud is the best choice for your business

Engaging in digital transformation in today’s technology-driven business environment is incomplete without cloud computing integration. For small and medium enterprises, the public cloud is the best option to keep up with the new era of business.

According to Gartner, global spending on cloud services is expected to reach $482 billion in 2022, rising significantly from $313 billion in 2020. The rapid technological adoption and unprecedented shift in the business landscape because of the pandemic has brought a new age of digital transformation globally.

Public cloud computing has been the most crucial factor in this digital transformation, especially for small and medium enterprises (SMEs). It has helped numerous businesses quickly migrate from on-premise to digital platforms to survive and thrive in uncertain market scenarios. And we cannot ignore its impact on the global business environment in the last few years.

In this blog, we’ll understand what makes the public cloud the best choice for your business by highlighting its key features. If you’re looking for building or updating your cloud computing ecosystem, stay with us until the end.

Reasons to choose public cloud for your enterprise

1. Cost-effectiveness

A survey conducted among over 166 IT leaders shows that 61% of them adopted a private cloud computing system as a cost-cutting initiative. Especially during the pandemic, where sources of income were limited and maintaining company expenses was the biggest challenge, cloud computing helped them in creating a cost-effective business environment.

Compared to the private and hybrid cloud system, the public cloud is the most budget-friendly option for SMEs without compromising on the quality of services, and here are the key reasons why.

Firstly, the public cloud saves you the trouble of having and maintaining an on-premise data server, which additionally needs an on-site expert to operate it efficiently. To sum it up, your expense for maintaining the cloud ecosystem is non-existent. Public cloud servers are maintained by third-party service providers with dedicated expertise regarding their operation and maintenance.

Another factor that helps in cost management is the payment structure of public cloud services. Most public cloud service providers charge only for the service you actually use rather than having fixed monthly charges.

As more and more businesses are operating remotely, a cloud computing platform helps your workforce to access mission-critical data from any device, such as smartphones and laptops, thus saving on the costs of purchasing dedicated hardware without compromising on business efficiency.

Learn about our Managed Public Cloud services.

2. Quick and frequent updates

The leading public cloud computing services, like ZeaCloud, ensure that their clients get the most recent and updated cloud software and applications. Unlike traditional CRM and digital data management tools, which get updated yearly, the public cloud receives monthly or even weekly updates to match current business requirements. Having a constantly updating digital ecosystem takes a significant burden off of your IT infrastructure and lets your business keep up with the dynamic business environment.

Moreover, having a constantly updating cloud system enables you to connect with numerous industrial software more seamlessly, allowing you to better benefit from your cloud systems overall. Software such as Microsoft Power tools and SharePoint is the perfect example of industry-grade software that benefits the most from cloud integration.

3. Limitless scalability

Having on-site cloud hardware brings a challenge when it comes to scaling up. You are often limited with your on-site hardware capabilities and adding more to the existing system adds further costs to the company in the long run.

Fortunately, that’s not the case with the public cloud. As mentioned earlier, third-party service providers maintain public cloud systems with enough capacity to rapidly scale up and scale down your cloud system to match your current operational needs.

You can customize your server requirements to manage low traffic periods and save costs, and subsequently scale up immediately to manage high demand periods such as yearly sales and sudden spikes in demand. All you have to do is inform your service provider about the upcoming cloud needs and they can tune your cloud service to perfection.

4. Automation capabilities

With rapid advancements in cloud computing, Artificial Intelligence (AI), and Machine Learning (ML), you can now have your public cloud system automate everyday business tasks in order to further accelerate operational turnaround time with added accuracy.

Apart from making your business functions more agile and precise, it takes an enormous burden off of your talented workforce by undertaking redundant tasks, so that they can focus on more important business functions and add additional value. So it’s practically a win-win situation for both IT systems and human resources, which is impossible with old-school IT systems.

5. Competitive advantage

All the factors mentioned above make it quite apparent that incorporating public cloud computing in your business will give you a significant edge over your competitors. Although over 90% of businesses are already using cloud software and applications, having the right cloud computing partner can give you the most cost-effective and impactful digital tools that are on par with the applications used by industry giants.

Incorporating technology wherever it is possible is increasingly important for thriving in the digital age of business. Becoming proficient in leveraging technologies like cloud computing can give your business a much-needed competitive edge in the market. And with time, you can also expand the possibilities of what cloud computing can do for you.

At ZeaCloud, we understand the true potential of public cloud computing and how to customize it to best suit your needs. Speak to our experienced cloud consultants to learn more about our cloud offerings and bring us on board as your strategic and dedicated cloud partner.

Get in touch today!

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Security implementation with public cloud vs private cloud vs hybrid cloud

Security implementation with public cloud vs private cloud vs hybrid cloud

Cybersecurity is essential regardless of whether an enterprise hosts its infrastructure in a public, private, or hybrid cloud. Understanding the key differences between digital security among these infrastructures helps in designing an ideal cloud system for your business.

Even though some cloud architectures significantly simplify security functions and tool integrations, they often compromise flexibility. This blog discusses some differences in the nature of security implementation and protocols between private cloud, public cloud, and hybrid cloud. 

Security implementation in public clouds  

In a public cloud environment, third-party cloud service providers are often responsible for a secure IT infrastructure. It may not be enough privacy and security standards in place if you work in a specific industry or have specific information stored in a public cloud. As a consequence of these flaws, public cloud systems become more prone to attack by potential hackers when integrated with sophisticated malware. Many cloud service providers or Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) providers now offer built-in security solutions to help protect mission-critical data. 

Security implementation in private cloud  

A private cloud offers the best control over the security parameters of any cloud environment because you undertake security efforts either in-house or outsource to a managed services provider. As a private cloud user, you may have access to enhanced levels of authentication, API-enabled protection, additional levels of automation, and the flexibility to scale. 

Some options are available to businesses seeking improved security while using flexible public cloud infrastructure, such as a cloud-based content delivery network (CDN). An organization can hire a security company or build its own security team to fight against distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, provide security for online applications and websites, and facilitate the secure flow of information over the internet. You can provide faster and more efficient services to all your clients worldwide through an experienced security team in your company. 

 

Security implementation in hybrid cloud

Using a hybrid cloud, you can benefit from a private and a public cloud solution in one seamless service. Private clouds provide security along with extensive feature sets, while public clouds offer flexibility and customizability. This is an ideal combination for many companies, which is why hybrid cloud systems are more prominent among growing businesses. With hybrid cloud corporate designs, you get the best of public and private cloud architectures. Data centers and the cloud are examples of hybrid models that enable IT, administrators, to select where programs and data will live. 

 

Conclusion  

When it comes to cloud computing and cloud security, no single architecture will work for all enterprises. Cloud architects and developers must identify the cybersecurity requirements for all business applications and data types. It is possible to classify and designate technology services for deployment in either the public or private cloud, depending on each deployment model's costs and security implications. 

Zeacloud® offers enterprise-level cloud implementation services for every business type with security at its forefront. Our services range from public cloud deployment, business continuity solutions, managed public cloud, managed SD-WAN, Desktop as a Service (DaaS), and more.

Availablous®, our proprietary backup and disaster recovery solution, is a customizable and scalable platform to help ensure your cloud deployments are secured with business continuity and disaster recovery protocols.

Reach out to us today to build a robust cloud infrastructure.

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Managed SD-WAN | Cloud Infrastructure Management | Zeacloud®

Zeacloud® brings you next generation SD WAN solutions as a fully managed service enable secure access to your on premise systems across multiple geographies, cloud platforms, remote employees