In our daily lives, we see more and more companies with a virtualized infrastructure. What once was a great fear, now gaining ground within organizations of all sizes and we often hear the CIO’s managers define this as a private cloud infrastructure.

The vast majority of these structures have not virtualized process automation, provisioning and orchestration to be considered private clouds. In reality, a structure of virtualization is not the same thing as a private cloud.

While virtualization is the basis for building a cloud, many other factors must be present in a private cloud. For instance, the creation of new virtual machines must be simple and quick provisioning and deploying applications, and even operating systems should be automated and may not involve a large number of specialists, as happens in many cases.

A private cloud offers intelligence in resource allocation, hardware platform, software, processes and governance, without neglecting fundamental concepts such as elasticity, identity management, security and customization features to meet the various demands.

Deploying a private cloud typically requires changes in concept and breaking paradigms in organizations. The company changes the look previously directed to traditional assets such as dedicated servers and infrastructure for services rendered and consumed on demand. This, after consolidated extends more easily to public clouds, in cases where the best allocation of a particular application cannot be a private cloud. Example: web servers, email, etc..

The choice of the partner for Private Cloud is the key to success to leverage the growth of your business.

Yesterday, I was doing some work on my desktop which got affected by virus unknowingly, and then I realized that most people fear is related to viruses that, indeed, create more trouble. But in addition to viruses, there are other dangers.

The common term that defines all software programs deliberately designed to damage a computer is malware (ie malicious software). In category of “malware” comes viruses, Trojans, spyware, worms and scarware.

The purpose of this article is to help you to understand how it can cause a lot of inconvenience and financial damage. Do not forget that they are created by a programmer in order to destroy or steal data from your computer.

Viruses are rampant among your file

virus is a program that copies one and infect a computer. He spreads himself in all files. If a file is infected with a virus copied or opened on another computer, it infects it too.

Most viruses are found in executable files, such as. Exe, but may target some common file type. Dock. Xls and. Ppt. The general idea is that viruses are designed to make your computer completely inoperable, to cause chaos and downtime.

You can protect yourself from viruses by installing an antivirus program required to be updated.

We pay great attention to how it ends filename: if it ends in. Doc.exe, you are dealing with a virus.

Spyware steals your information

This type of program is installed on your computer and collect information without your knowledge. These are passed on so that a spyware can “steal” your password or credit card details pa.

The purpose of spyware is to make money at your expense, and most people do not even realize what is happening. Your computer began to move slowly? If so, then it may be a sign that you have one or more spyware.

The main problem with this type of malware is that not all antivirus programs are designed to counter them.

Before you install antivirus software, make sure you have included the “antispy”.

Scareware take control of your computer to redeem

This type of attack is relatively new and works like this: you are tricked into downloading what appears to be an antivirus application that tells you that you have a computer infected with hundreds of viruses. You can clean your computer if you buy antivirus full license. Of course, these apps are all the type of malware, ie malware and in most cases you can not uninstall nor can you use your computer.

Do not think to buy full license but looking for better ways to eliminate Google’s scamware with special programs (eg, Malwarebytes, SuperAntiSpyware and ComboFi).

“Trojan Horse” to install back door

In many cases, the Trojan creates a “door” open on your computer that allows one remote to control it you.

The major difference between a virus and a trojan is that the virus reproduce itself, and a Trojan is installed involuntary computer user.

Protection against Trojan is the same as in the case of viruses. Make sure your antivirus is updated daily, do not open attachments or suspicious links and think carefully before you use a crack for Microsoft Office because it is the favorite of malware authors.

Worms infect your computer network

computer worms use the network to send copies from one computer to other computers. They use a security hole to travel from computer to computer, often automatically without user intervention.

Worms are the most common type of “malware” because it quickly spread through the network infecting everything that comes your way, although many users mistakenly refers to them as “viruses”.

One of the most famous “worm” is ILOVEYOU sent as an attachment to email. It did damage upto $ 5.5 billion to U.S. companies. Other examples are the RED CODE deleted 360 000 websites and Blaster that forces the computer to reboot continuously.

Because worm exploits a vulnerability in the computer network, they are the only ones who can keep you in part by a firewall and antivirus software updater.

We are experiencing a process of convergent technology that changes very fast and leaves a very high impact. Mobility, Big Data, Social Business and Cloud Computing will change the way we acquire and use technologies in the coming years. But the speed with which they arrive, we cannot always realize. As an example, let’s separate one of these components, mobility, and try to do a scenic flight by its implications.

First, I argue that, like other technologies, the pace of change is accelerating and is likely to increase further. In 2007 came the iPhone and the iPad in 2009. These two releases symbolize this staggering speed. In a few years, which was seen as a curiosity, is already part of our lives and is changing our own habits.

By many companies and IT professionals, the potential disruption of mobility has not yet been realized in its fullness. In many situations II raises barriers preventing companies capitalize new opportunities that mobility open. The main cause is the fact that the mobility breaking thoughts and processes rooted, difficult barrier to overcome.

Let’s look at the model that dominated IT in recent decades and formed the largest base of professionals who are in the management of the IT areas. Before mobility, computing was restricted to physical locations, the locations where they were desktops. To use a personal computer we had to move in to the office or to our homes. With laptops, we began to have portable machines. Could carry them anywhere, but clearly, the mobility was still limited. You cannot comfortably use a laptop in a boarding line … The physical access restrictions limited the design of business processes. We had to create queues, since people who have access to information to meet specific business task was to your desktop on your desk. And we had to get to them to get this information.

Today we have a billion smartphones, and soon will reach two billion. We also have many millions of tablets and six billion cellphones. This means that almost 70% of the world population can communicate anytime, anywhere. Mobile devices are already part of our life. Use them in almost all our daily activities. Incidentally, if you think about it, since we left home alone with our smartphone, our house keys and wallet. In brief, both the portfolio as the keys are embedded in the smartphone. Suffice it to our daily lives.

But the disruption caused by mobility has not reached us in its fullness. Well, actually we already see clear signs of these changes, transformations which are true in virtually all sectors of business. Let’s take the example of the digital book coming years. Today I read a book on Kindle or paper, and after reading some stretch, go to Wikipedia and Google search certain quotes, facts or events which I read to delve into the subject. Now imagine if the book itself has this possibility. I click on a name of a city or a historical figure and it takes me to Wikipedia and YouTube automatically. And if it could show me new links to delve into the topic and share the paragraph that I liked with my friends on social platforms such as Facebook. It is a new book and creates new reading habits.

In the corporate, mobility will change the habits of work and will require that existing systems to be redesigned for this new scenario. One company, increasingly using mobile and featuring smartphones and tablets for their employees, cannot be limited to restricted access imposed by the current standard keyboard-mouse ERPs, CRMs and other systems built into the world of desktops.

Thus, in business, by pressure from users using simple and intuitive interfaces on their smartphones and tablets, developers will have to seek a new conceptual model for their systems. Estimated by Gartner, who point out that in the coming years we will have four times more projects being developed aimed at mobile devices that for PCs and laptops, are becoming more recurrent. This acceleration in demand, unexpected and apparently catching by surprise many departments and managers, is forcing companies to recycle their professional seeking new strategies, techniques and technologies to meet this need. Discussions such as those related to the adoption of the HTML5 model or native environments, which two years ago were virtually unknown issues and ignored by most developers are already common place in the “hallway conversations”.

IT managers have to make quick decisions, often in scenarios uncertainties. A simple migration from desktop applications to tablets, with interfaces liposuction is not appropriate. The concept and design behind reveal clear differences in a system designed for Windows and one for iOS. Furthermore, mobile devices embedding technologies that allow applications to create totally innovative ideas. For example, applications are beginning to emerge, as ShopAlerts based on geolocation technology built into smartphones. This application was created by the American company Placecast offering this service very interesting, that sends text messages to customers of its customers (companies like Starbucks, for example) to identify that they are in a certain region near a store, to detect geographical position of your smartphone. According to the company, 79% of customers who receive personalized message become more likely to visit the store.

Mobility also affects work habits. Consumerization moves the axis of the gravitational power of adoption of technologies within the IT field for users. The movement most emblematic of this rupture models is BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) and, soon, BYOC (Bring Your Own Cloud). Consumerization also begins to affect businesses globally. Today we are already the third country in the number of smartphones and more or less two years will be the second, overtaking Japan We are in the tenth and tablets, with the entry of cheaper tablets on the market will go up quickly in the rankings. Therefore, as consumerization and BYOD policies / BYOC are not only for developed countries, but an issue that our managers have to start tackling it now.

Of course, nothing comes easy. We have security challenge. Arise malware and viruses for smartphones. Lack of policies for BYOD can also raise questions with audits. But, arguably, the mobility is present in everyday life, whether personal or professional. Moreover, it becomes increasingly difficult to separate the two sides of the equation … This will result in new habits, new ways of interacting with technology, and this should be reflected in the strategies of IT companies.

Strongly suggest that IT strategies should not ignore the mobility. There should be no separation between business strategies, IT and mobility. The very pulse of consumerization also brings us to another aspect of the definition of the strategy: it is absolutely essential that IT and business lines draw IT strategies in partnership. Include mobility in the organization’s strategy is a step beyond what we see today in most companies: tactical actions, development of some applications to meet emergency pressures. The result is a multiplicity of unconnected actions that will be a time bomb. Several technologies, entering through all open windows in the company, eventually causing short circuit in IT management, when users require integration of its numerous applications with legacy systems.

IT should take a step forward and position itself as a leader in this process of transformation to a “mobile enterprise”. Draw a mobility strategy integrated with business strategy, redesigning processes to harness the potential of mobility (possibly eliminating activities not digital), create governance policies for this new scenario (such as creating apps and creating internal policies for downloading apps external stores) and analyze which technologies, techniques and skills (interface design man-to-machine is a new skill necessary) will be required to fulfill their tasks. Should not repeat the same mistake, when the emergence of the Web At the time, most IT departments left the first sites is borne marketing, focusing on what was most important from their point of view: implementing ERPs. Then had to include websites in business processes (e-commerce), integrating the ERPs, and this demanded a lot of rework.

Mobility should not be left without governance and therefore, IT must take a leadership role in this process. But beware, do not replicate the current model control and its lengthy approval processes, but consider that consumerization is a factor impossible to be prevented, as well as acting synergistically with the user areas. IT is no longer the shepherd of the sheep, but must be proactive contributor and guiding the adoption of new technologies by the company.

Even God is living with few natural disasters and man-caused incidents, the frequency and magnitude of them have grown over the past 20 years.

Companies have become increasingly dependent on technology and the cost of unplanned downtime for business often cannot be computed, making disaster recovery increasingly critical.

If you are an executive of a medium enterprise, think about developing capabilities to recover production environments efficiently that is something unimaginable. The indisputable fact is that, a disaster for a midsize company is no less than to any other company.

Establish a plan from the criticality of the services associated with business processes is critical. The more critical and depends on the business process assistant to IT services, the greater the need for a disaster recovery plan. Your goal should be to mitigate the risk, reducing downtime and restoration operations, maintaining brand awareness and business requirements.

The challenge is great, but its strategic role is to find a balance between the required availability, ie, the amount of acceptable data loss, the turnaround time operational IT costs and operations maturity.

Recovery with cloud services is emerging as an alternative to traditional approaches to disaster recovery. According to Gartner, by 2014, 30% of midsize companies will adopt cloud recovery (RAAS).

Also known as Recovery as a Service (RAAS), it resolves the issues of the environment that has undergone a standstill following the criteria and requirements below:

• Creating the necessary environment;
• Replicating environments and data;
• Managed virtual machines (VMs);
• Ensuring data consistency and production;
• Performing the test set recovery.

Disaster recovery is essential to identify the key business requirements. As evaluation criteria, requirements and criteria cited, should fully support the business objectives and in line with the current capabilities of IT.

In our daily life, unknowingly we use some form of cloud-based services to complete various things. These cloud services basically derived from the most rapidly growing I.T. sector known as “Cloud Computing”. Since, the cloud concept has emerged, it has shown a significant growth rate and is predicted by some industry analysts that it will grow with a rate of 1,100% by 2015.

Looking at such a rapidly growing rate, many new web hosting providers are now entering in the hosting industry to offer effective solutions based on such innovative technology. Apparently, many such web hosting providers are now offering the same enterprise hosting services and due to this, it has become more vital for users (customers) to recognize the ins and outs of the offerings and integrated technologies provided by the hosting companies.

Let’s take Virtual Private Servers (VPS) and Virtual Machines (VMs) as an example. Both the technologies are capable of enabling the virtualization. Certainly, a virtual private server based on the software virtualization technology “Virtuozzo” is a cheap option compare to virtual machines for businesses that are limited on budget. However, there is certain impact of choosing a normal virtual private server (vps) over a hardware virtualization vLite based virtual machine (vm).

In this article, we are going to see, what would be the impact of choosing a typical Virtuozzo VPS Hosting over a vLite VM Hosting.

Basically, a vps is a small virtual server sharing one platform, which is formed by partitioning a physical dedicated server using a virtualization technology like Xen and Virtuozzo. Whereas a virtual machine, is a bit different from a virtual private server as it splits the server completely using a hardware virtualization technology “vLite”. A fact that, though a vps is fully isolated it shares the system files. By sharing the system files, it may create various security issues as the customers’ data can never be isolated completely.

If there is a vps with over 50 partitions and users, the increased strain on a server can create issue for other virtual private servers, resulting in slowing the performance due to software virtualization layer. However, the hardware virtualized VMs are designed purposely for several users with partitioned servers in order to ensure that performance is not affected by other customers.

Also, a normal software virtualization based vps get huge traffic, and then likely it is going to utilize the total of the servers CPU. While, a hardware virtualization based virtual machine has its own CPU which ensures that the traffic of one customer doesn’t affect others.

In Virtuozzo based VPS, you get limited access to the operating system, whereas with vLite VMs you get full administrative access (i.e. root access) to the server to perform any updates that are available. The vLite vps plans provide complete isolation just like a dedicated server is, however the virtuozzo based vps are not fully isolated.

Possibilities are there that customers on a typical vps hosting servers may also suffer through the reduced uptime and disruptions of service. However, with the high availability offered on hardware virtualized VMs this can be easily avoided.

Also, the virtual machines based on hardware virtualization offer greater reliability as compared to VPS. The customers on VMs don’t have to share the CPU & RAM, which makes it a more reliable and stable hosting solution. As the VMs are based on the SAN Disks, it offers 6 times faster speed as compared to a normal VPS.

The vLite based virtual machines ensures high availability and performance as the resources are allotted properly on every individual virtual machine, which can also be upgraded easily whenever needed resulting in increased uptime and speed.

vLite vps hosting solution provides more security, enhanced redundancy and performance as compared to a software virtualized vps hosting. The vLite vps hosting is an ideal solution for webmasters and businesses that require greater authority and agility over the cpanel shared hosting plans, however, doesn’t need a full dedicated server.

Certainly, many of you must have heard about the microformats or microdata related to search engines, but do you know the importance of microformats and microdata in SEO?

This article provides a summary of what microformats and microdata is, how they work and what advantages can it offer to users.

Microdata or Microformats – What is it all about?

Let’s start getting the idea behind these strange concepts, aimed at structuring the information in a standardized way, i.e., that we all can agree on how to describe certain things. For example, if we talk about a product, we must first believe that all products have features (and we all must agree on these features…), so we can decide that a product has a name, a price, a specifications and where to buy them.

Once we managed to agree; now it’s about creating syntax, i.e. pieces of code, which again we all share and agree with them.

This process is what gives rise to microdata (HTML5 syntax), microformats and RDFa (for XHTML), different names, different syntax, but with the same goal: to give a meaning through the “markup” in the HTML standardization about to describe properties and syntax. It is clear that the “markup” in the code is only visible to machines, i.e. for a user represents no change.

What is the relation of these with search engines?

Do not be naive; the promise of the machines to understand natural language is the great promise that is never fulfilled. When you read the word “Levi Strauss” does not know if we are talking about a brand or a famous anthropologist… or if they do, they have serious problems of interpretation. But as we have seen through microformats / microdata with meaning through code words that were previously impossible to understand.

So if we markup a word in the content with the proper “attribute” showing it a person or brand it will much easier for search engines to understand it and utilize the information to create more robust information to provide relevant search results. This way, there will be no longer rise in misunderstanding and search engines will know what we are trying to show without any misinterpretation. Now imagine this for any type of information you can think of: Reviews, People, Products, Businesses and organizations, Places, Recipes, Events and Videos.

The Present SEO, But Also the Future

We’re not only talking about the future, but also the present. Google shows results enriched (the famous ” rich snippets “) based on microformats / microdata, i.e., some results show extended information (photo, stars of review, number of people who have opinion…), ideas which were introduced by Yahoo! SearchMonkey, a few years ago.

Thus we have the possibility to create custom search engines based on what we look for, such as Google Products and Recipes (Google Product Search & Google Recipe Search) are a clear example of this, in these search engines it have advanced features such as search by Ingredients or Cook Time or by number of Calories. Such possibilities are those that provide semantic markup of information.

So in the future we should look and obtain information relevant to the object we want, because if a person seeking information about web hosting products, our products should show in the results.

And this is the real Web 3.0 and Semantic Web, a website where the code means dowry relevant content thus more easily understood by machines, showing improved results and information snugly. And obviously offer many more possibilities, we can indicate, for example, if the search engines when looking for “New York” I mean the name of a song or a city, so on until the limit is exhausted imagination.

What is clear and confirms HTML5 is that the future of semantic search is that your code will be more and richer making your web pages more easily parseable and understandable by machines and increase your chances in search engine results.

Is Content Still the King in SEO?

Yes, there is no doubt that the content is the one which is capable of influencing a visitor and converting that visitor into a customer.  So, you still need to take care of your website/blog content. In this article we will try to explain the process of how to manage and create your content to maximize your search engine traffic.

Content Strategy

Those who are dedicated to search engine optimization, keep in mind that we are just providing tips to maximize your search engine traffic, not miracles and paranormal phenomena.

So the first thing you need to understand is that you need to create content on your website and ensure that the content grow continuously. You must ensure that in every month there should be an increase in the indexed pages of your website. So, you need to define your content strategy, i.e. how you to write and how often.

Information Architecture

Once we know what you write, you have to organize it within your site, create a navigation structure that makes sense to users and search engines. Particularly, you must pay attention of the following:

- Create a navigation structure based on your search typologies of users and not based on your internal organization or your corporate needs.

- Promotes cross-links, which means that content can be accessed with one click deep, using features such as items / products related or highlighting your best sellers or relevant for a certain period.

- Watch the indexing of new content. If you have a content strategy that monitors these new contents, make sure that it becomes a part of search engine indexes as soon as possible. Twit the links from the new contents pages using the social share buttons and use File sitemap.xml to promote good practices that indexing new content.

The HTML Container

Your content should always be within a structure (a container) below, this structure is the HTML that provides meaning (semantic) text, therefore, this structure should be thoroughly studied, clearly establishing the hierarchy of the document (title , header text, footer, related areas…).

Keyword Analysis

Once you have defined the themes that fit to your content strategy, now it’s the time to write your content using the tools like “Google Adwords Keyword Tool”.  This tool will help you know exactly what the users are looking for in your niche. You may then write the contents based on those keywords or key phrases to catch those searches.

Also, it is very important to analyze the seasonality of certain keywords and adapt your content to them. For example, if you have a web hosting business and it’s the Christmas, then you should put some content on Christmas and special discount offers for Christmas. It indicates you where you should put the focus of content depending on the season and time of year.

Importance of Title and Meta Description

There are two important key parts ahead in the SEO: Title and Meta Description.

The text is the “title” tag, which is usually the title of the article, which is also the clickable text in blue color that appears in the search engine results and therefore has to be clear and clearly explain the content. So you should pay special attention to the “degree” of your articles, the same as being descriptive and attractive.

The other key text is the “meta description” is the descriptive text that appears below the blue title in the search engines results. This text is increasingly important, because every time users pay more attention to it. This text is not critical to appear above (the “title” itself), but it is critical that users check it. So it must be a simple text, easy to understand, including keywords and particularly that call to action.

Naturalness of the Text

Forget about keyword density, length of 300 characters and write a quality text, concise, simple and as difficult to say exactly what is right, without another word, but without missing anything, do not forget the main function of the text is “conversion” of a visitor into a customer.

Much has been written about how to write for SEO. Just keep in mind one thing, search engines do not buy, the users themselves. So any text designed exclusively for search engines will be a disaster, forget high keyword densities of duplication. Write a quality text, not forgetting to mention the keyword, but without straining.

And remember, use metaphors not mean a better writer, search engines and users like texts generally clear, concise and descriptive. Another obvious rule that you must remember is that if you want someone to come looking for certain words, such words should come out in the text.

Distribution of Content and Links

Do not forget to put the “icing on the cake” rich content you’ve created, sync your strategy links and content distribution in social networking to prioritize content that interest visitors.

Due to the increasingly used and popularity of cloud-based services, most of the ERP merchants now tends to provide a cloud-based ERP; however, people are still not clear about “What exactly the Cloud ERP Means”. Many people think that the term “Cloud ERP” is same as “Software as a Service ERP”, but the truth is that it is far different from the Software as a Service ERP. In order to determine the cloudiness of the products offered in the market, the ERP managers from organizations need to evaluate several aspects of the cloud ERP options.

Key Challenges While Selecting the Cloud ERP

• Selection of a Cloud ERP system suitable for an organization is not as simple as it seems. There is a wide range of cloud characteristic from which an organization need to choose the best.

• It is highly important to understand the term “cloud” as the features offered by the vendor completely depends on it. The ERP options can range from hosting of an on-premises system, to private or public cloud networking, to multi-tenant or singe-tenant SaaS. Kindly, remember that according to Gartner, the multi-tenant SaaS ERP system is not a suitable option for every organization.

Recommendations for Selecting the Best Cloud ERP

• Evaluate the aspects and cloud characteristics of an ERP system to distinguish several offerings.

• Utilize the aspects mentioned in the content below to select the type of cloud ERP suitable to your requirements.

Introduction to ERP System

ERP software often called as “Enterprise Resource Planning” system is a business management software which is gaining a great value in industry especially with small medium enterprises (SMEs). An enterprise requires planning, resource allocation, and project goals in order to achieve success. The ERP software plays a very crucial role in driving businesses towards success. Its most important benefits to businesses is the integration, automation, and ability of creating processes that simply allow companies to know how efficiently they are working.

Today, in the industry, many merchants are selling their traditional ERP solution as a cloud ERP in order to promote it as being state-of-the-art. In some cases, instead of deploying them on-premises, they are being offered as hosted systems. Also, some vendors are promoting it by combining with application management services which are being sold under subscription license models. Though a combination of hosted ERP system with application management system can benefit in some ways such as outsourcing of operations and management of ERP system, however, when you speak about a solution associated with “cloud” it becomes really difficult to realize the characteristics like greater scalability, elasticity and automatic patches and upgrades. Without redeveloping and re-implementing the existing architecture and ERP system, it’s hard for the vendor to offer a cloud-native service with transparent, automatic patch management.

Three Most Common Types of Cloud ERP and Dimensions that Define Cloud ERP

Below are the three types of Cloud ERP being offered by vendors along with the dimensions in following tables:

• Hosted ERP System with Application Management Services as Traditional: “Premise-y” – This is a service based on on-premises systems and most of the time known as cloud ERP or on-demand ERP.

• Multitenant SaaS-ERP as Web: “Cloud-y” – This service is a kind of combination which is offered by most of the SaaS-ERP providers in the market.

• Fully cloud-enabled as Cloud-Enabled: “SaaS-y” – This combination of service is now being offered in the market by some cloud providers.

Table 1. Dimensions of Gartner’s Cloud Definition

Table 2. Other Dimensions

Choosing the Best Cloud ERP System for Your Organization

Few of the aspect mentioned in the Table 1 and Table 2 are much relevant to the ERP systems. In order to choose the best suited and the most beneficial cloud ERP for your organization, you need to conclude the combination of characteristics listed in both the tables.

Scalability and Elasticity

Scalability and elasticity are the two most important features necessary for businesses to fulfill their strong seasonality requirements such as higher workload seen in e-Commerce stores before Christmas. The companies that develop faster through purchase can mainly benefit with the high scalability feature.

Recommendation: If your business workload is unpredictable in the ERP system, then definitely you need to think beyond the traditional hosting, and should occupy dedicated resources. You should look for a service that will dynamically scale up and down the resources, with low latency.

Metered Usage

The metered usage is much related to elasticity, however not identical. The metered usage basically involves of the financial aspects. There is a service known as “Shelfware as a Service”, a concept where the users have to pay for an application subscription. These subscription agreements are usually based on a fixed number of users, where the users don’t know what services have been dubbed as “Shelfware as a Service”.

Recommendation: Well, most of the businesses and organizations know their consumption model, so selecting a model based on a limited number of users would be beneficial for them. However, an organization that requires high elasticity need to make sure that the contract includes a clause which will enable them to pay only for the services they have consumed in the given period of time. It would be better to avoid the “Shelfware as a Service” model.

Shared Technology

It is common that the sharing of various things occur on almost each layers of the technology heap. All of the hosting data centers share a few things like buildings, electrical supplies and air conditioning systems. There are many such providers who provides virtualized servers that allows apps to share the hardware, leading crash of one physical server affecting multiple ERP instances.

On the other hand, it is possible to share the DBMS; however, it can also negatively affect the performance of ERP instances, even if the organization keeps the data in different database schemes. Certainly, if the database tables are shared, there will be a logical partition which most of the times is supported by the encryption between multiple clients’ data.

Recommendation: The organizations should decide which level of data and application they would like to share. Remember that, the more the infrastructure is shared, the risk of failure increases and will get more potential for systems to affect each other in a negative way.

License Types

Definitely, a combination of a traditional perpetual license with hosting and application management services can be good, however, if the subscription model is used for years, the total cost may get higher than an initially purchased license. Another possible option would be to utilize the subscript model for temporary usage such as for upcoming divesture, when there’s a higher requirement of elasticity or it’s impossible to use the capital expenditure.

Recommendation: Businesses can evaluate the TCO model for the expected time of their ERP software for various license types, including the upgrades and replacement of hardware. After then, kindly choose the most suitable license type based on the requirements or alternatively a subscription license can be used while for the implementation and deployment phases, however, when the requirement is finished, simply switch to a perpetual license. This way business can avoid the “shelfware” for the users that were never deployed.

Application Management Services

Well, when you talk about SaaS-ERP, it is SaaS providers responsibility to take care of the operation and management of the service. However, when you say Hosted Cloud ERP, all the services under the solution such as Backup and DR, current operations and system monitoring, patches and upgrades are offered as extras. The application maintenance services usually includes of corrective, adaptive, preventive or perfective services.

It may be possible, that in future the new solutions might involve the multi-tenant SaaS-ERP systems in order to evaluate and enhance “application maturity” via business-related application performance monitoring.

Recommendation: Evaluate the level of service you need for your organization. There are some cases, where a third party provider can offer you such management services, and operation of the system in your name.

Location of Data and Processing

It is possible that a vendor may provide you a cloud ERP from a data center without knowing its location. In such a case, the provider can change the location anytime depending on the load balancing and availability of the data centers and the connectivity offered. It is too hard for an end user to know the exact physical location of the data. Such conditions can pose issues in various industries or in public sector institutions.

Recommendation: While contracting with the cloud ERP provider, make sure to include the terms of having control over the physical location and processing of your data. Also, ensure to ask under which clause the personal information will be handed over to the law enforcement agencies, tax and financial auditors.

Convenient to Toggle to a Different Solution

In the case of on-premises, users toggling a different solution, the data migration is entirely left to users. While, if you go for new solution, the provider may offer you some tools and services to migrate your data, however, the attempt to toggle systems is similar, whether it is an on-premises or cloud ERP.

When it comes to cloud environment, it becomes more critical than with an on-premises system, as in cloud the users rely more on the cloud providers. Additional issues may occur, as the former provider has complete control over your entire system. Especially, when it is about losing an existing good paying customer, most of the providers are unwilling to show support and sometimes restricts users from accessing their data, causing the loss of data.

Recommendation: In case, if you want to terminate or switch your web hosting provider, make sure to include a term in your contract that getting the required level of access to your data, code additions, etc…

Impact over Changes to the Software, Including Upgrades

Usually, when it comes to traditional on-premises deployment, all the changes are completely under the licensee. SaaS-ERP is totally opposite to the traditional on-premises. Here in SaaS-ERP solution, only the provider has the rights to decide what changes to apply and when to deploy the new features to a client’s system. Many ERP vendors and productivity tools provider such as Google exists, who can deploy the changes literally within a night.

Recommendation: When deploying a SaaS-ERP, simply create a wide-range of sets of test data and  automatic testing routines that offers an ability to recognize possible bugs in the next version. You may then use these test results to make a decision on whether you want to deploy or postpone the upgrade until the next version is released.

Information Security Level of ERP System

Regarding the information security level, it is important to make sure the ERP system and its data is completely secured. When evaluating the security of a cloud hosting provider, remember that usually, a professionally managed cloud data center has the best security standards implemented than an on-premise have. Ensure that the provider guarantees that their systems are well tested for security vulnerabilities and meet with the legislation for all the countries where the data is or will be hosted and processed.

Based on the above Gartner’s Guidelines and Recommendations, ERP managers can select the right cloud ERP that best suits to their organizations.

Choosing a web hosting solutions for a business is really a confusing task as there is a huge competition in between website hosting companies in the hosting industry in India. Especially, when it is about choosing a web host for a dedicated server, there are various factors you need to consider about the dedicated servers.

First, let’s have a look at the two basic questions a beginner always have in his mind.

• What is a dedicated Server?
• When do I need a dedicated server?

Following are some guidelines which will aid you in choosing the best and reliable dedicated server web host.

What is a Dedicated Server?

Unlike shared server, a dedicated server is a web hosting server specially designed to suffice huge databases, mission-critical and high traffic websites. Usually, a dedicated server is dedicated to a single client. The client may host a single or multiple websites or utilize the server according to his requirements.

Compared to the shared and vps, these web hosting servers are bit costly, however, the benefit of a dedicated server is that it offers you complete freedom over the main administrative functions on the server and its environment.  It simply means that, the dedicated hosting client has root access to the server and has an ability to make the required changes in the server as needed.

When do I need a dedicated server?

It is the most common concern for beginners seeking for a trustworthy and affordable web hosting company to host their first mission-critical website. Although, for most of the people shared hosting is the first choice, however, before going for a web hosting solution it is necessary to know the core values of the solutions. For a mission-critical website, it is always recommended to opt for a dedicated server, but due to low budget most of the people either opt for a shared or a vps service.

As I have already mentioned that, shared hosting servers are much affordable than that of dedicated web servers. It means, you don’t need to have technical expertise. All the server administrations work is carried out by the shared web hosting provider itself. This is one of the main reasons why shared hosting is the most affordable option for small medium businesses or say for entry-level websites having least amount of traffic.

While dedicated server is the best option for database intensive sites, as it has the capability of handling millions of MySQL queries per hour, based on the server you choose. A Quad Core Intel Xeon server is always capable of handling such loads and offers 100 Mbps dedicated network line to ensure 100% uptime guarantee. You may also consider a dedicated server high traffic sites that requires greater reliability.

The dedicated servers come in two different solutions – Managed and Unmanaged. The only difference between both of them is that, in unmanaged you need to have higher level of technical skills or need to hire an administrator to manage your server management tasks. While in Managed Dedicated Hosting, all you need it to focus on your business, as the server management tasks are performed by the technical experts of the web hosting company.

Just imagine that, your commercial money-making business website is hosted on a shared server and due to high resource consumption by other websites the server got crashed for hours. Would you bear such loss? Obviously, nobody would like. Hence, it is better to think about renting a dedicated server.

Well, talking about the flexibility, a dedicated server provides you greater flexibility as compare to a shared server. On a shared server, due to limited access, you all you have to use the pre-installed software and applications without any choice. Whereas, with a dedicated server you have full access to operating system and complete rights to install any third party applications and software’s such as customized e-commerce application or a database application. Also, in order to improve your server performance, you may uninstall the unutilized pre-installed software and applications. This way you can increase your resources and utilize them for doing other things.

As on shared hosting server, as your business grows your website requirements will grow accordingly (Disk Space, Bandwidth, and RAM). Based on your resource requirements you might need to switch your plan either to VPS or Dedicated Server.  Whereas, with dedicated server you don’t have to switch to other plans as a dedicated server comes with dedicated and huge resources enough to suffice your growing business requirements.

Also, server security and data protection is one of the main concerns for any online business, as it is the data that maintains the continuity of a business. With a dedicated server, your customer’s sensitive information is completely secure and safe protected by a hardware and software firewall. Also, in order to protect your data you may opt for a backup plan at additional charge, which is offered as an add-on by most of the web hosting providers in India.

If you are running a business in India and requires a secure and reliable hosting, you may want to consider our high performance DELL PowerEdge and Intel processor-based Dedicated Servers Hosting Solution.

Host.co.in offers the most reliable and secured hosting solutions to help you boost your website performance and increase your productivity.

For any organization, their data is the most important thing that ensures the continuity of their business. Many organizations have a common goal to enhance their skill to recover from sudden incidents such as data loss and system failures, especially when natural and manmade disasters take place. As creating their own disaster recovery infrastructure can be too expensive for most of the organizations.

In this article, we will see how to take advantage of public cloud to suffice your backup and disaster recovery solution as well as some common but best backup practices.

Giving priority to the local protection

Everyone is aware of that the use of public cloud is growing tremendously; as due to its ability to provide unlimited server and storage resources virtually. Also, the public cloud is completely flexible as because you have an ability to increase as well as decrease the server resources as required and can utilize the operational budgets (OPEX) rather than using the capital budgets (CAPEX).

However, when you think of performing the data backup and recovery, 99% of the time the performance is delivered through the local resources (i.e. on-premise) to the machines.

Understanding and identifying the criticalness of the machines to business

If you decide to prioritize the local protection as your first line of defense, then probably the public cloud-based protection would be your second line of defense. You must determine the servers as well as the sensitive data that requires offsite disaster recovery protection. This can be done by identifying the most important business services that are necessary in daily operations in order to meet your organization’s goals. Also, there are many other dependents such as databases, middleware, etc… that are vital to the services and business continuity. You need to ensure the protection of these dependencies in the public cloud.

Find out alternatives to traditional backup for disasters

Most of the times, organizations considers only the large-scale disasters (losing entire server), however, there are many such incidents such as small app crash and data loss due to man-made mistakes like accidental file deletion or file overwrite. In such cases, the data loss may not be realized easily, but it is possible that in such cases the organizations may need the recovery of a single file.

Most of the traditional backup solutions, takes a full backup of your data. In such a case, you have to perform complete backup of your data, which increases your bandwidth usage (upload) making it an expensive solution. A solution like “R1Soft Backup and Recovery” can help you perform multiple point-in-time snapshots of your data. The incremental backup feature allows you to backup only those files in which changes are made on daily basis. The incremental backup helps in network I/O savings as well as storage consumed over the full backup.

Determining the way you want to restore and backup the data to meet the goal

Well, performing the backup of the system and storage will ensure the protection of everything on that operating system, which is perfect when you need to restore the complete environment with the use of “Bare Metal Recovery” feature. However, what if you want to protect just a database like Windows MySQL and MS SQL? In such a case, if you using the R1Soft CDP solution, you don’t have to worry about it as it allows you to backup Windows MySQL and MS SQL databases online with minimum disk I/O load and impact. But, if you decide to use any other backup solution, ensure that the backup agent offers such feature to protect your databases.

Think of backing up above the hypervisor level

Definitely, virtualization has powered the web hosting industry in a very unique way leading it a step ahead towards the future. The virtualization has offered various capabilities, including an ability to perform backups at hypervisor level of the VMs. However, this kind of backup creates a perimeter where you are able to restore to only a VM level; moreover, you can restore the files within the VM.

A fact that, if a virtual server fails then probably all the VMs created on the server will be at risk, hence it is better to run the backup agents within the VM operating system rather than just on the virtualization host.

Storing backups for long-term in the cloud

Usually, the storing of data is done for various reasons; the most important among them is for corporate requirements and to suffice regulatory requirements. Storing disk-based backups for long-terms on the company’s servers can be too costly, instead organizations can make use of public cloud storage to maintain backups and archiving old files for a long-term. Using public cloud as storage for long can be better cost-effective alternative solutions for low-budget organizations.

Verifying the security of data in public cloud

As the continuity of a business depends on its corporate data, it is necessary to consider the security of the data when moving data in the cloud. If you decide to move your organizations data in the public cloud, ensure the kind of security used to protect your data in that environment.

For example, physical security of the location where the public cloud is hosted, encryption of the data when the data is at rest, isolation of your data from other organizations with the same cloud backup provider. Also, verify the encryption method used to protect your data while sending it over the network to the public cloud.

Choose a quality cloud hosting provider who will offer you the best Backup and Restore solution to ensure the protection of your organizations data.