MongoDB-as-a-Service

Posted on May 17, 2013 by GetCloudServices

MongoDB-as-a-Service

What is MongoDB?

MongoDB, which derives its name from the word “huMONGOus” that refers to “extremely huge”, is the leading high performance, open-source, document-oriented, general purpose NoSQL database, which is designed for how we create and run applications these days. With the use of MongoDB, companies can become scalable and agile by enabling new types of applications, increasing the speed to market, improving customer experience, and decreasing the total cost of ownership.

MongoDB Features

Some of its notable features include:

Rich queries, and complete, flexible index support
Document data model that boasts of active schemas
Integrated replication for high availability
Auto-Sharding to facilitate horizontal scalability
Advanced security
Text search
MapReduce and Aggregation Framework
GridFS that facilitates large media storage

Benefits of MongoDB-as-a-Service

Irrespective of their sizes, companies using MongoDB can easily and quickly create, scale and run applications. Unlike a relational database where data is stored in columns and rows, MongoDB stores a binary type of JSON documents (BSON).

When used across several tables, relational databases inflict rigid, flat schemas. MongoDB is, in contrast, an agile NoSQL database, which permits schemas to differ across documents and to alter rapidly as applications evolve, while still providing developers the functionality that they expect from relational databases, like a full query language, secondary indexes, and strong consistency.

Enterprise Solutions

Enterprises can use the commercial edition of MongoDB-as-a-Service that provides enterprise-grade competence. While a startup can enjoy being more scalable and agile with MongoDB, enterprises can address their more demanding and complex requirements easily with the help of it.

Enterprises using MongoDB-as-a-Service can benefit from its advanced management tools, security features, as well as software certifications and integrations. They can also bring down their total cost of ownership, improve customer experience, and at the same time, maintain security, mitigate business risks, and ensure adherence to compliance and uptime standards that their business needs.

Some value-added capabilities of the enterprise version of MongoDB, which are not included in the open-source edition, include:

Advanced Security: Thanks to Kerberos Authentication, government and enterprise customers are empowered to integrate MongoDB into their standard security systems.
Software Integration: With SNMP support, integrating MongoDB with popular monitoring and management tools becomes easier.
Monitoring: On-Prem Monitoring offers alerts and visualization for MongoDB on more than 100 system metrics.
Certified OS Support: The enterprise version has been examined and certified on Ubuntu, Red Hat/CentOS, and Amazon Linux to offer stability.

So, get in touch with providers offering MongoDB-as-a-Service to know more about what would suit your business and budget the best.

Features Your Cloud Servers Should Have

Posted on May 16, 2013 by GetCloudServices

Features Your Cloud Servers Should Have

Many businesses are opting for cloud servers these days, as they offer a range of benefits and features that are not attainable using most other hosting options.

If you too are looking for such servers, it would pay to know little about what features they should have:

Security of your data and services: For whatever purpose you are using the server, it should be secured enough from external attacks. Your chosen cloud server should have firewalls enabled so that they can block any potential threat to the server. Also, it should offer some controls for you to configure what to allow and what to block, thus managing who accesses what.

Scalability: Whatever type of cloud server you are using, it should always be scalable. If your products/services are attracting more traffic now, your service provider should offer to balance the load properly. Moreover, your server should also allow easy and fast adjustments in CPU, disk space, memory etc, as and when you need them.

Good infrastructure: Probably what you should check at the first place is the infrastructure that your cloud provider is offering. The main challenge for cloud servers lies in making them responsive as quickly as possible. Good CPU, sufficient disk space is what you must be sure of.

Support to different OS: For short-listing a few from a wide variety of cloud serves, you should check if the service provider, whom you choose to deal with, supports multiple OS. This is important, as you won’t need to change your provider if you’re trying to explore a new OS with your app in the future.

Failure recovery: An efficient cloud server must offer seamless recovery from any kind of failure. Otherwise, you may lose out some important business data.

Monitoring: Make sure the cloud server provides you with essential tools to monitor the behavior of your applications after deployment at the server end. You can also use certain analytical tools like your portal’s graphs that will help you review peaks, averages, and low points.

Support: A cloud server provider should always offer highly trained and efficient 24X7 support so that you can clarify your doubts or seek answers to problems at any time. You should also make sure that they are proficient in the primary language that you use.

With the right cloud severs, you can get effective computing capacity, storage solutions, and provisioning services to streamline your business processes and conduct them in a better and faster way.

Software Asset Management In The Cloud

Posted on May 15, 2013 by GetCloudServices

Software Asset Management In The Cloud

Availing on-demand cloud services is now one of the most preferable options for organizations. The main force driving this trend is attributed to the cloud being the better, faster and easier solution for what you need than an on-site solution. As a result of this, your email, calendar or even your apps are all on the cloud. Perhaps you are now wondering about what happens to the software asset management in a scenario like this? To answer this question, cloud-based SAM, or software asset management allows the large as well as the mid-scale companies to track the licenses or the usage of their products. As a growing number of software companies transfer their operating systems and applications to the cloud, cloud-based SAM will play a larger and more important role than ever.

Here are some advantages of software asset management in the cloud:

Scalability: SAM is known to offer scalability. Since mobile devices serve to be one of the most important software platforms these days, it becomes a little difficult for large scale companies to track licenses, deploy patches, or keep track of usages. Hence, enterprises can’t rely on on-site SAM for this anymore, and cloud serves to be a smart solution.

Handling larger data: If your organization is a small one, it’s possible for you to track all you needs with software backed by a database. But with the growth of your company, the database will grow exponentially and gradually, it might become difficult to manage the entire process using your traditional software. Though you may opt for improving SAM’s infrastructure according to your requirements, there is bound to be an end point beyond which you can’t go further. In a situation like this, you may deploy it in the cloud, which is financially advantageous than the previous option.

Utilizing bandwidth: It takes a lot of time to create large patches or update OS, and even when you are able to do it, it may end up creating a network bottleneck. Software asset management in the cloud can ease this by using users’ public network for delivery. It also reduces the delivery time for user devices, as users won’t need to log in their devices into the corporate network and perform their functions through VPN connectivity.

SAM for geographically diverse workplace: In case your company has a diversely located worker population, placing SAM in the public cloud space will permit the processes to take place through user’s personal bandwidth. Experts believe that software asset management in the cloud will be most successful with user devices, which will always outnumber the ones that are datacentered.

So, contact some companies offering quality software asset management systems in the cloud to understand how it will help your business before you take your pick.

Database-as-a-Service: Know All About It

Posted on May 14, 2013 by GetCloudServices

Database-as-a-Service: Know All About It

What is it?

If you don’t want to install and maintain your own database, you can think about database as a service. These days, there are many service providers offering such services, where the responsibility of installing and maintaining the database for the client rests with the service provider, and application owners are charged based on their usage.

In other words, DBaaS or Database as a Service is an operational and architectural approach, which empowers IT providers to provide database functionality as a service to one or more consumers. DBaaS architectures support the following essential capabilities:

Automated compliance with and monitoring of provider-defined service definitions, quality and attributes of service levels
Consumer-based management and provisioning of database instances using self-service, on-demand mechanisms
Measurement of database usage enabling charge-back functionality or show-back reporting for every individual customer

In addition to these necessary characteristics, it is also expected that Database as a Service architectures will naturally secure multi-tenancy, support granular service elasticity, access using a wide variety of non-proprietary mechanisms and devices, integrated capacity planning, and automated resource management.

Why use Database as a Service

With DBaaS, organizations get an opportunity to optimize and standardize on a platform that eliminates the need to deploy, support and manage dedicated database software and hardware for every project’s multiple development, production, testing, and failover environments. Database as a Service architectures have in-built flexibility and resource pooling, and they are designed to deliver non-production as well as production database services that offer support to average workload needs on a daily basis, while scaling up to deal with augmented demand, and scaling down when that demand has decreased.

Benefits

Consumers can benefit from DB as a Service in a number of ways:

They can deploy new applications for the business more easily and quickly, thanks to the self-service provisioning and management feature.
Service definitions allow customers to understand exactly what service levels and capabilities they should expect from the provider.
Thanks to metering, there exists a greater transparency into IT costs and actual usage, which in turn enable customers to make more informed decisions about where to spend their money and time.
With DBaaS, organizations can rationalize their information architecture by controlling information explosion using security controls and data virtualization, thus giving data owners the capability to control when and how data is shared, while also abolishing the requirement for outmoded database instances.

Choosing Your Cloud Computing Data Center

Posted on May 13, 2013 by GetCloudServices

Choosing Your Cloud Computing Data Center

With a wide variety of cloud providers available in the market these days offering cloud computing data centers with different features, choosing one is often a tough task.

If you too have been in a dilemma, here are some tips for selecting your cloud computing data center:

Evaluate the provider’s experience and expertise: Check the provider’s reputation and experience in managing enterprise data centers, delivering mission-critical applications, and offering secure hosting. Also, check if your chosen provider has a robust foundation for offering future services matching the transformational potential of the cloud. You should also consider their access to technical expertise before making your final decision.

Examine their portfolio: Check if the provider offering cloud computing data center offers the right degree of resilience, performance, and security at the right price. You should choose a provider with a portfolio that includes the complete range of environments for dealing with different types of workloads.

Check DCIM: Did you know that the market for DCIM (Data Center Infrastructure Management) is estimated to grow from US$307 million in 2011 to an enormous US$3.14 billion by 2017? You should remember that DCIM begins with network intelligence, which in turn starts right at the component level. So, it’s prudent to deploy a high performance, flexible network infrastructure to keep up with the rapidly rising demands of your expanding business.

Assess automation: Cloud computing data centers that offer automation of compute resources based on real-time demand can provide their clients with a much better value, while optimizing the competent use of their own resources. After all, dynamic auto-provisioning can considerably decrease the cost and burden of manual provisioning without sacrificing performance.

Check the availability of customized models: You should choose a provider that offers flexible and reliable solutions, which would meet both your own and end-user specifications. So, the right partner would work with you to create a customized model that works best for you and your clients.

Built-in business services: Many cloud computing data center providers offer tools to deploy cloud services, apart from providing usage reporting, promotional support, business intelligence services, and the ability to track customer resource consumption and billing automatically. By choosing such in-built services, you can control costs better, eliminate wastage, and get a better ability to scale resources on demand.

With on demand availability, performance and reliability becoming critical for success, cloud data centers, which perfectly align with your business requirements and support your business goals, are going to become a big thing in the future. So, get on the cloud today by making an informed decision based on the factors as mentioned above.

Security Benefits Of Cloud Computing

Posted on May 10, 2013 by GetCloudServices

Security Benefits Of Cloud Computing

Cloud usage, of late, has witnessed a tremendous growth. A lot of business documents, video files, and images are being stored on the cloud these days. Some people have even started using the cloud for storing personal documents that hold tremendous emotional value, which is why they don’t want to lose the same.

If you are wondering what security benefits cloud computing can offer, here are some to take note of:

Loss of a lone server doesn’t’ matter: Unlike the days earlier when the loss of one server meant the loss of your data stored on it, cloud computing helps you to store your files securely. Clouds draw from multiple data centers, and even when an entire data centre would be offline, the customers won’t notice any change in their cloud services. This means that not only will your files won’t get lost, but also that there won’t be a period of time when your files and data won’t remain accessible just because a server isn’t working.

Data secured despite changes in technology: Since your cloud provider usually makes automatic updates, you can rest assured that you are benefiting from the latest technology. This is unlike storing data on devices that become redundant all of a sudden and you are left with no choice of recovering your stored files or images.

Adequate back-ups in place: Storing files on personal devices is risky because you can lose all of it if your device is lost, misplaced, stolen, or gets damaged. But when files and data are stored in the cloud, they will be safe, both from unauthorized access and loss, as long as the correct security measures are put in place.

Anytime, anywhere access: Though this isn’t always considered to be a security benefit, this feature of the cloud can still protect an organization in some instances. For example, an organization may suddenly need an important piece of data or software for its business, without which its production or sales may be affected negatively. If it’s stored in the cloud, it can gain access from any destination and at any time. Thus, businesses can benefit by accessing data in real time.

Scalability: Cloud computing services can be easily scaled up or down based on your needs. With the availability of infinite computing resource, a business can get additional resources, as and when it needs. In a way, this safeguards your investment as you don’t need to put in money for resources that you may never use. So, while businesses on an expansion plan can easily scale up to hire additional cloud resources, those facing a hard time can cut down on their resource usage with equal ease.

So, start storing your files and data on the cloud today.

How Cloud Computing Enhances Employee Enthusiasm And Productivity

Posted on May 9, 2013 by GetCloudServices

How Cloud Computing Enhances Employee Enthusiasm And Productivity

Couples belonging to dual income families are increasingly finding it difficult to manage the high demands of both their professional and personal schedules. This is why it becomes important for businesses to offer techniques that boost employee enthusiasm and productivity without compromising on their business’s integrity. A key solution lies in offering employees ease of collaboration and more flexibility. This is where cloud computing technology can help.

If you are wondering how this technology can improve employee enthusiasm and productivity, here are some factors to take note of:

Flexibility and Ease of Access from remote locations: By using cloud computing technology, employees are no longer tethered to their office desks. They can log in from remote locations and access files at any time and from anywhere in the world. A burgeoning community of telecommuters is also making use of this technology as they can work from home without sacrificing the small joys and responsibilities of life. Often, employees may have to leave town due to certain emergencies when it might become difficult for the companies they work with to hire new employees for the post. Many of these employees too would not like to leave their jobs. Cloud technology offers the perfect solution for such cases as it’s a win-win for both the parties.

Collaboration made easy: At times, employees working on a project many be located in two different locales. For them, waiting for a document, a correspondence, an approval, or a response is often quite frustrating. But with cloud computing technology, your entire team can enjoy the benefits of real-time collaboration online. Many tools and cloud services are available these days that let you save your work on the cloud, and even get back-ups for the same.

Bid adieu to External Drives: Earlier, storing important information or presentations on flash drives or CDs, which could be easily lost, were a big risk. But with the cloud, you can now store your data and files easily, share them with people, and access them from anywhere and at any time. No wonder that cloud computing technology has made lives easier and helped speed up the entire process of work.

Though there are platforms like Amazon Cloud Drive, Google Drive etc that offer a lot of options for remote access, you should consider a private cloud provider for added security and customized features. However, your final choice should be decided after taking into consideration the size of your business and its unique needs. It’s always prudent to thoroughly research all your cloud computing options and decide which best suits both your present and future requirements.

Role Of Cloud Computing OS

Posted on May 8, 2013 by GetCloudServices

Role Of Cloud Computing OS

If you want to put your IT resources to better use to enhance performance and flexibility, your answer lies in cloud computing technology. However, it’s important to remember that there exists an extremely sophisticated underlying infrastructure, which drives the cloud. It is the cloud computing OS that offers support to the underlying complexity of cloud computing resources that are managed well.

Most cloud computing operating systems are designed in such a way that cloud applications and services don’t need to reconstruct underlying technologies to tailor them for every particular deployment. Cloud users gain scalability, control, security, and predictability by having critical shared infrastructure at the operating system level. In addition, cloud computing OS also supports important standards that improve interoperability and portability across cloud environments.

For applications running in federated and other complex environments, it becomes essential to conceal much of the complexity requisite for supporting them, which is why the operating system platforms are designed accordingly. In fact, a great deal of the functionality necessary for the competent operation of several applications is in-built in the operating system. After all, it should function in the background proficiently to make sure that all the right resources (like requisite storage, memory, and processing power) are available, as and when required.

In addition, the cloud computing OS implements a desired level of security and ensures quality of service, thus facilitating applications to access the needed resources to deliver an acceptable level of performance.

Perhaps you are now wondering why cloud computing OS has become so important at present when more and more businesses are shifting their focus to cloud computing. The answer lies in the fact that the OS (operating system) has to be designed to improve the cloud platform to support balanced workloads, which could be scaled in a secured way. Without this, the end users won’t be able to get the optimum benefit from a cloud platform.

Cloud computing OS has evolved over the past few years to match the innovation of distributed computing. While it was normal to run each application in a closed environment in the past, the scenario has changed these days. Since the competitive business environments these days demand efficient operations and superior customer service, businesses need interoperability across platforms to manage their key applications.

Experts believe that the following four elements are necessary for creating an operationally sophisticated cloud computing environment:

Abstract and well-defined interfaces that conceal implementation details
Support for security at the core
Capability to manage virtualized workloads, and
Workload optimization to offer superior performance and quality of service

So, make sure that your cloud computing OS caters to all these aspects.

Tips For Handling Cloud Computing Projects

Posted on May 7, 2013 by GetCloudServices

Tips For Handling Cloud Computing Projects

Whether you are planning a move to the cloud or are already handling cloud-based assignments, knowing a few things would help you manage your cloud computing projects better.

Here are some tips that can help you in your endeavor:

Adequate knowledge and technology expertise: Your core team should have adept and experienced cloud professionals on board, who know about the different types of cloud environments, and are capable of directing the teams to get the jobs done seamlessly.

A clear idea about your needs: You should have a clear idea about your data requirements, the type of applications you will need to run on the cloud, the software you will require for handling projects, and the estimated capability of your cloud server, among others. This will help you choose the right tools and techniques to complete your cloud computing projects on time.

Exercising proper control and ensuring security: You should maintain control over your cloud environment and cloud-based resources, and determine the level of access you grant to your employees and managers to handle the tasks. You should also make sure that your cloud vendor has proper security measures in place, which give you complete security and confidentiality of your critical business data.

Compliance with legislation: Your cloud environment should conform to specific legal regulations. If you fail to ensure this, you might find it difficult to access certain features of your cloud environment or may even be prevented from using the cloud for your business.

Options to overcome power outage: Local power outages often cause cloud failures. Therefore, it would be a prudent move on your part to search for availability options such as multiple- geographic/service zones that can protect your cloud computing projects from power outages.

Check for VLAN or VPN connections: In terms of access to the cloud, the weakest link is often taken to be the internet connections. Therefore, you can check if it’s possible to attach your company’s VPN or VLAN (virtual LAN) to the cloud service. Since VLAN or VPN connections are often associated with particular SLA guarantees of availability, they offer higher performance, which in turn will help your cloud computing projects.

These are some of the basic factors that should be kept in mind as they will help you choose a cloud provider that offers long-term value for your investment. So, go ahead and deliver quality results for your cloud computing projects using these tips as mentioned above.

Some Cloud Computing Tools

Posted on May 6, 2013 by GetCloudServices

Some Cloud Computing Tools

Once you have got a clear idea about the different types of cloud computing platforms, their limitations and advantages, it becomes important to know about some cloud computing tools that would help you to leverage the cloud technology for your business needs.

Here are some tools, from which you can take your pick:

Automated Server Provisioning Tools: As cloud environments often contain dozens, and sometimes even hundreds or thousands of virtual machines (VMs), it would be extremely time-consuming and expensive to opt for manual configuration. What’s more, human error often triggers security vulnerabilities. This is why automating server configuration can speed up the process apart from improving the security aspect. Automated server provisioning tools boost business agility, and help avert variations that could trigger vulnerabilities.

Tools to check System Loads and Attacks: Such tools, which are often open-source, help check security and performance of test servers before they are deployed. Starting from monitoring loads on systems to uncovering attacks, they can help test your servers before putting them into production. For example, if a tool identifies a cluster-wide resource leak triggered by one user, it could indicate a distributed denial-of-service attack or other attempted breach in your test server, which should then be fixed.

Cloud Management Tools: Be it the infrastructure management tools, virtualization management tools, or tools for ensuring compliance or security with rules governing data protection, a wide variety of cloud computing tools for managing the cloud environment are available in the market.

Cloud Computing Tools to optimize your assets and boost profits: By using good cloud management practices, you can not only decrease expenditure but also improve security. For example, by using asset discovery tools, you can find out the number of applications and other systems that your company uses in reality, and compare those findings with the official list of applications. Such tools often help you to estimate the level of capacity your business will need in the cloud, which in turn will allow you to cut costs by eliminating duplicate or unnecessary applications, and bundling one-off licenses into volume purchase agreements. Even security administrators can use these same tools to get a complete list of the cloud applications and services that they need to secure.

As more and more businesses are moving an increasing number of applications to the cloud, vendors have started providing better integration between in-house and cloud management tools. You too can take your pick from the extensive bouquet of cloud computing tools to gain better visibility into and exercise better control over your cloud environments.