Tag Archives: virtualization

Virtualization Is The Big Equalizer

virtualization-equalizerInfrastructure is expensive. So it’s no wonder that many businesses traditionally would often spend the bare minimum to get up and running without considering their long term needs. Fast forward to today, and virtualization infrastructure is not only cheap to set up, it doesn’t require any major specialized knowledge to get started.

Even the smallest businesses (start-ups especially) generally have at least one or two servers that they use to host their services, but they’re generally only utilizing perhaps 10-20% of their potential capacity.
If SMB’s all took the opportunity to virtualize, they could scale their infrastructure with little burden on their capital expenditures. Since their existing infrastructure can be used, not only does it give them the opportunity to scale, is also allows the business to grow and build new environments alongside their existing ones.

Not only does it reduce capital expenditure, it also reduces operating expenditure. Since staff no longer need to manage a piece of hardware for every server and are able to administer their entire environment from their desks, staff efficiency is significantly increased.

Some studies have found that efficiency of staff can be increased by an average of 10%, but this can fly right up to a 270% increase, allowing a single administrator to oversee and manage 1800 servers. It also allows for faster deployment of new environments and applications, since a new piece of hardware isn’t needed to be provisioned. It’s as simple as pressing a button.

Additionally, these expenses are reduced further, since less floor space and power consumption is required for a cluster of virtual hosts over an entire datacentre of servers dedicated to a single task. VMware says that 70% of organizations have seen a “real measurable cost saving” from switching to virtualization, and it’s pretty easy to see why.

Initially, virtualization may require a slightly higher level of complexity to configure, since multiple hosts are recommended for failure resiliency and additional network equipment may be required to lessen the likeliness of a single point of failure, but the benefits pay off. This kind of work allows small businesses to boost their uptime as high as those that previously only a large provider could boast, such as 99.999%.

It truly levels the playing field, allowing start-ups and small/medium businesses alike to play on the same level as large providers that have significant money to invest in sprawling infrastructure. It opens up opportunities for start-ups who can’t afford to hire a team of engineers to operate their own infrastructure with 99% uptime.

Not only that, small businesses are the ones who experience the most explosive growth, and virtualization allows them to rapidly expand while keeping down both capital and operating expenditures for their projects.

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Cloud Investments Pay Off After Hurricane Sandy

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Many design and construction companies affected by Hurricane Sandy harnessed the powers of technology to serve their clients and remain operational in the aftermath of the storm.

Investments that paid off the best were virtualization tools and cloud-based private networks, say some firms. To communicate, most firms rerouted e-mail, sent out mass e-cards or used social media to alert clients and employees with key updates. Others went to much greater lengths and the difference showed.

For Jason Burns, vice president of technology for construction manager firm Hunter Roberts Construction Group in lower Manhattan, four years of disaster planning—and investing in virtualization technology—paid off after Sandy’s arrival. The storm surge flooded its office building’s sublevels, cutting power and displacing hundreds of employees, who were able to work remotely until they were able to get back into their main office.

But long before flood waters hit the firm’s headquarters at the World Financial Center near the surging Hudson River, Burns and his IT support team already had activated their disaster-recovery (DR) plans. They rolled all of Hunter Roberts’ critical network systems into the firm’s backup system. Barely a day after Sandy hit, the employees were back online, working from virtual offices set up around the New York City metro area.

The estimating division regrouped at a jobsite on Manhattan’s Upper East side; the purchasing group headed for the Upper West Side. Meanwhile, the accounting groups split off to two jobsites: one in Philadelphia, the other in Brooklyn. All the dispersed employees were able to log back into the company’s network as though they were in the office. They had access to key data and applications, including company phone numbers, thanks to virtualized server systems in the firm’s data center.

By using virtualization software by vendors such as VMWare, Burns and his IT team were able to “drop in” networked offices; monitor each site’s power use, security and connectivity from a central location; and distribute the employees’ office numbers to their new locales by using Voice-over-IP.

Asked for the investments that paid off, Burns cites server virtualization, security and Voice-over-IP (VoIP) technologies. Another key investment for DR, he adds, is that the firm only buys laptop computers so employees can login from remote locations.

“We were managing this in the trenches, from the president to everyone else in the company,” he says. “A lot of planning paid off.” However, he adds, none of the planning would have paid off fully without the right IT team in place. Many employees had left their laptops at the office the weekend before Sandy hit. Burns and his IT group fetched some 60 laptops from the then-powerless office and went on a distribution mission to get them in the hands of displaced employees. The DR plan, he adds, simply “wouldn’t have happened without the IT team.”

The Network as the Computer

Structural engineer Thornton Tomasetti (TT) lost power for four days starting on Monday night, Oct. 29, at its 225-person, three-floor headquarters in midtown Manhattan. TT’s business-continuity strategy included many of the tools that Hunter Roberts used, including security and IP technologies. The firm’s ace in the hole is its system that backs up all New York City office data in its Chicago office through its wide-area network (WAN).

“There is an image of New York City’s project information on our Chicago server that is read-and-write accessible,” says Steve Ross, TT’s chief information officer.

Employees in any of the firm’s U.S. offices who were working on a New York City-area project were able to access the data from Chicago’s servers. “We back up both ways in Chicago and New York, currently, ” says Ross. Three other, smaller offices back up to the cloud, he adds.

In addition, all the external phone calls coming into TT’s New York City offices were routed to Chicago, Ross says.

Power came back on Nov. 2. On Nov. 3, IT personnel were back in TT’s office to reconfigure the systems so they would be operational on Monday, Nov. 5.

At press time, TT’s New York City phones were still down. However, through VoIP, TT is able to leverage its WAN so that people in all the firm’s offices can port their numbers. Meanwhile, all their clients and business partners have the cell- phone numbers of TT employees. TT sent the numbers out in a mass e-mail on Oct. 31.

Social media did its part to help amplify the power of networking investments. For example, design firms Perkins + Will and FXFOWLE used Facebook pages and Twitter feeds to stay in touch with clients and employees.

Author: Erin Joyce and Nadine M. Post with Laurie Meisel

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Embedded Virtualization Can Secure Industrial Networks

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Security issues in industrial markets have been receiving much attention in the media. The vast majority of devices that power infrastructures offer aging technology in many cases and are not well prepared for the latest cyber security threats.

Taking the energy grid as an example: one does not have to be a scientist to find the holes when approximately 70% of the infrastructure is more than 30 years old.

Devices that were never designed for a connected world in the first place are wide open for attacks. Utility providers and the dominating players that power this market are under intense pressure; critical infrastructure is supposed to be stable, robust and often certified for functional safety requirements.

While safety systems are left untouched following certification for risk, complexity and cost reasons, a secure system is only secure if it is able to withstand the latest vulnerabilities. The contradiction between the lifecycle of safety and security is a very expensive challenge today. However, the good news is that embedded virtualization can alleviate these security challenges.

To provide a solution that can be retrofitted to an existing infrastructure, new security devices are often integrated with existing devices. Firewalls, IPS, IDS or other boxes add to the CAPEX cost, but also increase the complexity of the supply chain management for installations that have may have a lifecycle of 25 years or more.

New systems are designed with both safety and security in mind. Functions that would be in separate boxes in the existing infrastructure can be consolidated to reduce the CAPEX burden and avoid even greater costs in supply chain management.

This idea is not new: consolidating workload into more intelligent systems by leveraging improved hardware architectures that support virtualization creates a significant opportunity to meet today’s architectural challenges.

One proven approach to security is to keep devices that need to be secure away from general access: for example, physically or virtually separated from networks such as the Internet.

The implication of this approach is that physically separate devices and networks need to be built for secure versus insecure devices. In general, this is impractical because of the expense and redundancy involved. A more cost-effective solution is to leverage embedded virtualization.

Virtualization for embedded systems that operates at the processor and board level is called a hypervisor. A hypervisor allows several virtual systems to run on a single piece of hardware efficiently. Hypervisors can be used to consolidate several systems into one, saving material costs; reducing size, weight and power; and reducing supply chain costs and complexity. Virtualization with a hypervisor can also allow developers to partition a system for functional, security and safety reasons.

Virtualization technology can also provide an OS-agnostic, safe and secure partitioning layer. This addresses a key concern of the market today: ensuring that different services on a device do not impact each other for security and safety.

This ability to securely combine different partitions not only reduces the development costs, but also the operating and capital costs. Using fewer chips and boards reduces the capital cost of the product.

OPEX is also reduced with less inventory and spares and a simpler process for upgrading hardware and software. Now, any new patches or updates to parts of the system software will not affect the real-time operation of the system, nor require lengthy testing and re-certification.

The move to virtualization extends the lifecycle of embedded products. Existing code can run on its own secure partition running an RTOS while new features can be added to the non-real-time partition running an OS such as Linux or Microsoft Windows for the user interface.

To implement this efficiently, virtualization uses hardware enhancements specific to a CPU architecture, enabling all the advantages with minimal impact on performance and latency, especially for the hardware-assisted isolation between partitions.

This strategy greatly extends the life of an embedded product without the expense of having to rewrite real-time embedded code, add and re-certify drivers or redesign hardware. This is a particular issue for systems that combine real-time capability and user interface in one operating system – when there are patches or updates to the OS, the whole design has to be re-tested and possibly re-certified to ensure there is no impact on the real-time operation.

The influence of machine-to-machine (M2M) networks is growing and many devices now need additional gateways, firewalls and other communication functions. Virtualization is an excellent way of adding these to the system through the non-real time operating system without having to change and re-certify the real-time elements of the software or change the hardware.

One proposed architecture that is fast gaining ground is to provide more localized and connected processing power close to where it is needed, often as a gateway to the wider Internet. Local traffic can be processed quickly and acted on, while the data is still available to the wider systems across the Internet, whether it is a train, a manufacturing floor or a power plant. This approach provides the ability to consolidate a number of functions from communications to data processing. This is costly and complex when implemented in separate boxes. The ability to consolidate a wide range of functions reliably and securely into an intelligent single unit is more cost effective and becoming increasingly popular.

This trend has implications for security. Consolidating workloads in a single device means communications are linked to real-time operations and the flow of data. This means there is a need to keep certain functions highly separated.

Safety-critical code must be protected and unchanged to retain its certification, and yet the security that protects the system has to be updated regularly to defend against ever changing attacks. At the same time, there are communications protocols and data capture in the system that need real-time performance alongside human interfaces that can be run at slower speeds.

All of this provides a potentially highly complex environment. The traditional approach has been to have separate devices for each of these functions, such as the communications and real-time elements.

However, security needs to be deeply embedded within the system to provide maximum protection; and physical separation leads to a number of architectural challenges that can be expensive to solve.

Virtualization has already opened up a wide range of new applications in IT, but the ability to provide true real-time performance alongside a mainstream OS opens up yet more embedded opportunities in new and existing markets.

Smart-grid networks, manufacturing systems, and transportation are all set to benefit from the consolidation of workloads and the separation of communication and security functions on to a single core. This allows cost-effective development of secure, reliable and future-proof embedded systems. Running the same operating systems on both a single- and multi-core device opens up a platform of equipment that can scale from a single core to many, all with the same software base.

Consolidation of workloads also has a significant effect on the capital and operational expenditures. Building a single unit with a single board rather than multiple units with multiple boards reduces the upfront costs. Millions of M2M devices are being rolled out, connected to hundreds of thousands of gateway units, so this is a significant saving in the upfront cost.

Decoupling the software lifecycle of different elements and still being able to use a single device can reduce expenses. All of this can provide dramatic savings in development time and equipment cost, allowing more processing performance to sit closer to where it is needed in the network and support lower cost sensors and terminals in the home or on the factory floor.

Author: Alexander Damisch
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Hype Cycle For Cloud Computing, 2012

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Enterprises are beginning to change their buying behaviors based on the deployment speed, economics and customization that cloud-based technologies provide. Gartner cautions however that enterprises are far from abandoning their on-premise models and applications entirely for the cloud.

Based on an analysis of the Gartner Hype Cycle for Cloud Computing, 2012, the best results are being attained by enterprises that focus on a very specific strategy and look to cloud-based technologies to accelerate their performance. Leading with a strategic framework of goals and objectives increases the probability of cloud-based platform success. Those enterprises that look to cloud platforms only for cost reduction miss out on their full potential.

Cloudwashing and Inflated Enterprise Expectations

While the hype surrounding cloud computing may have peaked, cloudwashing continues to cause confusion and inflated expectations with enterprise buyers. This just slows down sales cycles, when more straightforward selling could lead to more pilots, sales and a potentially larger market. Cloud vendors who have the expertise gained from delivering cloud platforms on time, under budget, with customer references showing results are starting to overtake those that using cloudwashing as part of their selling strategies.

Additional take-aways from the Gartner Hype Cycle for Cloud Computing include the following:

  • The Cloud BPM (bpmPaaS) market is slated to grow 25% year over year, and 40% of companies doing BPM are already using BPM in the cloud. Gartner has identified more than 30 bpmPaaS applications and platforms, and defines this category as a model-driven BPM platform in the cloud to construct next-generation process-centric applications for systems of differentiation and innovation.
  • Cloud Email is expected to have a 10% adoption rate in enterprises by 2014, down from the 20% Gartner had forecasted in previous Hype Cycles. This represents modest growth as the adoption rate of this category had been between 5 and 6% in 2011.
  • Big Data will deliver transformational benefits to enterprises within 2 to 5 years, and by 2015 will enable enterprises adopting this technology to outperform competitors by 20% in every available financial metric. Gartner defines Big Data as including large volumes processed in streams, in addition to batch. Integral to Big Data is an extensible services framework that can deploy processing to the data or bring data to the process workflow itself. Gartner also includes more than one asset type of data in their definition, including structured and unstructured content.
  • Master Data Management (MDM) Solutions in the Cloud and Hybrid IT are included in this hype cycle for the first time in 2012. Gartner reports that MDM Solutions in the Cloud is getting additional interest from Enterprise buyers as part of a continual upward trend of interest in MDM overall. Dominant vendors in this emerging area include Cognizant, Data Scout, IBM, Informatica, Oracle and Orchestra Networks, are among those with MDM-in-the-cloud solutions.
  • PaaS continues to be one of the most misunderstood aspects of cloud platforms. The widening gap between enterprise expectations and experiences is most prevalent in this market. Gartner claims this is attributable to the relatively narrow middleware functions delivered and the consolidation fo vendors and service providers in this market.
  • By 2014 the Personal Cloud will have replaced the personal computer as the center of user’s digital lives.
  • Private Cloud Computing is among the highest interest areas across all cloud computing according to Gartner, with 75% of respondents in Gartner polls saying they plan to pursue a strategy in this area by 2014. Pilot and production deployments are in process across many different enterprises today, with one of the major goals being the evaluation of virtualization-driven value and benefits.
  • SaaS is rapidly gaining adoption in enterprises, leading Gartner to forecast more than 50% of enterprises will have some form of SaaS-based application strategy by 2015. Factors driving this adoption are the high priority enterprises are putting on customer relationships, gaining greater insights through analytics, overcoming IT- and capital budget-based limitations, and aligning IT more efficiently to strategic goals.
  • More than 50% of all virtualization workloads are based on the x86 architecture. This is expected to increase to 75% by 2015. Gartner reports this is a disruptive innovation which is changing the relationship between IT and enterprise where service levels and usage can be tracked.

Bottom line: Gartner’s latest Hype Cycle for Cloud Computing shows that when cloud-based platforms are aligned with well-defined strategic initiatives and line-of-business objectives, they deliver valuable contributions to an enterprise. It also shows how Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS) are the catalysts of long-term market growth.

Author: Louis Columbus
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Realizing Business Virtualization Benefits

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I think the enterprises of the future will look very different from those of today. Organizations will become leaner and more virtualized as their business processes grow more reliant on ecosystem partners. Process boundaries will transcend a specific entity.

Many macroeconomists believe that real shareholder value (and, ultimately, economic growth) will be driven by the speed and quality of innovation. Historically, enterprises have been successful by capitalizing on a disruption (market transition) that plays into their core strengths, competency, and market position.

However, as new disruptions occur, companies that once had competitive advantage must adapt to “the new normal.” Many have struggled to keep pace with those disruptions, often due to legacy culture as well as out-of-date process and infrastructure.

This has enabled smaller, more nimble innovators to enter markets and disrupt business models, competing on a different basis of advantage. Most companies on the Fortune 500 list and S&P 500 were not on these lists 25 years ago.

To counter this disruption, we see some enterprises creating more dynamic business process architectures in which they seek out partners who can offer compatibility-as-a-service. With their partner ecosystems, they call upon partners for what they need, when they need it, and for as long as they need it.

This approach exploits everything-as-a-service. CrowdFlower is a great example of a partner who offers “people-as-a-service” with its crowdsourcing platform.

Businesses can become leaner and rely less on legacy infrastructure or business process. Success will be defined by how well enterprises can adapt and innovate. At the same time, they can rely on the domain expertise of their partners.

Cisco IBSG calls this Business Virtualization—the ability of corporations to engage and disengage with internal resources or ecosystem partners in a dynamic and real-time fashion, without regard for ownership or location of physical and human assets.

In our research, we have identified 10 principles for success:

1. Choose your path of differentiation: product, experience, or cost?

2. Move decision making closer to the customer.

3. Advocate the use of partnerships to speed innovation across your value chain.

4. Align your business toward a greater share of annuity revenue models.

5. Utilize your virtualization infrastructure to enter new markets and lower risk.

6. Drive a “Work Your Way” environment with flexible IT consumption models.

7. Implement an open innovation model to increase speed and shorten the ideation-to-cash process.

8. Shift noncore services and operations to an on-demand, limited fixed-cost model.

9. Build a listening infrastructure, creating sensing mechanisms that allow for immediate reactions to customer feedback.

10. Instill the use of customer lifetime value as your key decision influencer.

Technology is making it possible for enterprises to be more dynamic and focus on accelerating their innovation by investing in their core competency. Senior technology leaders (CIO, CTOs, and VPs) will lead this transformative change and need to drive their CEOs towards this imperative.

Author: Scott Puopolo
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Managing Backups In Virtual Environments

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Virtualization has “virtually” changed the IT world in which we all work and play.   Why is virtualization so attractive to IT administrators?  The answer is easy — there are many uses and benefits that we gain through virtualization.  For starters, the thought of being able to have a single server’s physical footprint represent many servers on the network has been a boon to administrators looking to consolidate space and reduce operation costs.  Having the ability to quickly stand up a VM copy of a major application or work server for patch testing is a benefit that allows administrators to test during business hours is simply a game changer. But what about backup of data in virtualized environments?

Let’s take a step back to understand where we stand in the area of backup and recovery today. Symantec recently surveyed more than 1,400 IT professionals on their backup practices and ability to recover information in the event of a disaster. The findings strongly suggest that traditional approaches to backup are broken and a new approach is necessary. Here’s why:

•    Confidence in backup is lacking — especially virtual backups. The purpose of a backup is to have worry-free data recovery in case of disaster. Yet, 36 percent of respondents are not confident that their backed up data can be quickly recovered when needed. And when it comes to virtualized backup, 42 percent of respondents reported that their virtualization backups don’t work adequately.

•    Backup SLAs aren’t being met. One-third of respondents indicated that they’re either not meeting backup-and-recovery SLAs or are unsure if they are. Of those not meeting SLAs, 49 percent said they can’t meet them because they have too much data—due to the size of the backup, lack of bandwidth, and the sheer volume of data.

•    The current backup and recovery approach is complex. More than one-third of respondents noted that backup is extremely time- consuming, and nearly as many said the same about recovery.

In this scenario, it is evident that backup and recovery need to change. To address growing backup needs, and streamline the complex processes, enterprises anticipate making significant changes in the near future. Within the next 12 months tape-based backups will decrease by one-third, and Symantec expects these organizations will be investigating appliance and cloud-based backup solutions. As many as 72 percent of the organizations surveyed would change vendors if they could double the speed of their backups.

Bring virtualization into the picture, and the paradigm changes significantly. I often speak with administrators that look for ways to simply protect their virtualized assets for the purpose of full recovery in the event of disaster- i.e. their backup solution is only working to back up, but not truly embrace their virtual solution.  What if we start taking the approach of having the backup software actually using virtualization as a true extension of the recovery plan?  Can we take virtualization to be a resource that can be leveraged as the platform for recovery for both physical and virtual servers alike?

To answer this, we need to first understand the current environment. Sure, the world is going virtual in a strong way but this is not something that is going to happen overnight.  Although many early adopters have moved forward to become near 100 percent virtualized, most administrators are still governing environments that are heavily comprised of both physical and virtual server assets.  As such, administrators need a solution that is not only purpose-built to work for their entire environment but one that takes advantage of the virtual infrastructure specifically to allow them to further leverage their IT investments.

Furthermore, businesses need to be able to not only leverage their existing virtual infrastructure for items including instant recovery of any physical or virtual server that is protected, but also leverage the cloud to recover, test or migrate any virtual machine that is in your environment.  And for good measure, imagine that when it is time to migrate that physical server to a new virtual body you simply power on the virtual copy that was created and maintained as part of the standard backup of a physical server! This greatly simplifies the complexity that exists around backup today, and it means that in the near future, we can backup – and recover – our most important information literally at the touch of a button.

To successfully embrace new technologies and increase confidence in backing up mission-critical data, Symantec offers the following recommendations:

  1. Break the backup window. Eliminate out-of-control backup windows by using solutions that accelerate full backups multifold without sacrificing recovery time either.
  2. Unite physical and virtual backups. Using a single solution for both environments will drive down operating costs, reduce storage, and accelerate recoveries.
  3. Consolidate backup and recovery tools in a single appliance. Integrating backup, deduplication, and storage in a single solution will drive down operating costs and capital expense while simplifying day-to-day operations in the data center and remote offices.
  4. Fight infinite retention. Many businesses have tremendous legal risk and cost exposure resulting from over-retention of backup tapes. Identify what information to archive and what to delete, based on relevance to legal discovery or compliance cases. This reduces the time and cost IT spends on eDiscovery and eliminates the need to keep backups forever.
  5. Stop putting tapes on trucks. Combine deduplication with disaster recovery to transmit data over the network from the production site to the DR site instead of loading tapes onto trucks.

 

Author: Vijay Mhaskar
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IT spending by SMBs up 15% in first quarter

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Biggest spending is going towards tablets, cloud and virtualization, according to a new study.

Small and medium-sized businesses are spending more money on IT, including adopting tablets, cloud services and virtualization to a greater extent, according to Spiceworks’ State of SMB IT survey.

IT budgets at companies with fewer than 1,000 employees grew 6 percent in the first half of 2012 from the second half of 2011, and 15 percent year-over-year, according to the survey.

The average annual IT budget is currently $152,000, up from $143,000 for the second half of 2011 and the $132,000 reported for the first half of 2011, it said.

Much of the jump in SMB IT spending is due to tablet adoption, the Spiceworks study reveals.

SMBs are spending more on technology across the board, from hardware and devices, to cloud services and virtualization. For example, 62 percent have deployed or plan to deploy tablets within the next six months. That compares to the 50 percent reported for the second half of 2011, according to Spiceworks.

Also, 48 percent use cloud services and 64 percent use virtualization, compared to 28 percent and 54 percent for the first half of 2011, respectively.

While the growth of virtualization is tapering off, the respondents are virtualizing more applications — 3.1 applications versus an average of 2.1 applications a year ago.

The largest portion of IT budgets will be allocated to hardware purchases, followed by software and IT services, according to the survey.

The State of SMB IT survey included 1,498 respondents from around the world. About half of respondents were from North America; 33 percent were from Europe, the Middle East and Africa; 15 percent from Asia-Pacific; and 4 percent from Latin America, according to Spiceworks.

Author: Mikael Ricknäs
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Improve Performance While Lowering Costs

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Expertly meshed information technology and voice technology services are the perfect combination of near term problem solving and long term competitive opportunities for organizations today.  Delivered across a redundant and highly performing mesh infrastructure, mesh services have proven to lower or completely eliminate technology ownership problems, while improving the customer experience and productivity gains.  Industry leading technologies and technology talent are available in any fraction or combination to fit your exact operational and budgetary expectations.



Intellectual Property On Demand – meshIP

Make good decisions or bad decisions.  There are more advancing and powerful technologies available in the market than most organizations or executives stay keep abreast of – let alone effectively leverage or turn into a strategy.  The meshIP service offers technology seasoned experts to validate or map your technology strategy, address and achieve operational excellence, execute a winning financial strategy, or sales and marketing counseling to leverage the most advanced strategies and technologies.  Compare this service to a CEO, CFO, CIO, or CMO on demand.

Consumable Desktop, Servers, and Cloud Applications – meshDESK

Spend too much to own, or only pay as you go.  Every day a host of advanced technologies and services improve in environments owned and operated by technology companies.  If you are not a technology company, chances are you are wasting money.  The meshDESK service takes responsibility for cost, compliance, and spending risk so you do not have to.  Leverage simple to access hardware, storage, applications, and security controls that can grow or shrink month-to-month.  Compare this service to your utility company relationship.  You only pay when you turn on the lights.

Highly Agile Voice Communications On Demand – meshPBX

If you are not communicating how your customers want your competitors will.  Aging systems and limited agility are proving to drive unnecessary reinvestment and long term capital risk.  Today, customers demand predictable voice and messaging access. Advanced voice technologies make this simple and possible.  The meshPBX service combines enterprise system functions with low cost network utilization, while incorporating voice to email and other messaging opportunities.  Compare this to 911.  When they need you, you are there.

Our mesh services are uniquely architected for sole proprietors and global enterprise utilization alike.  Desktop applications, storage, business continuation and security are offered at $99 per month per user.  meshPBX features and voice network utilization including long distance start at $29 per month per user.  Simply add or remove users as needed.   Please contact us today for a tailored evaluation and quotation.  The savings can start immediately and your competitive technology position is guaranteed to be future proofed.

www.meshIP.com

800.759.3195

meshIP Launches Two New Services!

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meshIP, LLC is please to announce the launch of two new services! meshIP was formed five years ago and has specialized in company formation, business plan development, funding and growth strategies. We are adding to our capabilities to assist small and mid-sized firms in their growth by offering hosted computing and telecommunications services. These offerings allow our clients to get out of the IT business and focus on their business.

Our meshDESK service offering  allows businesses to end the cycle of information technology overspending and support frustration by moving your users to on demand access of our global application and infrastructure cloud.

Cloud computing is enabling customers to access IT services without any infrastructure investment or any services deployed in-house. meshDESK is an integrated service that takes complex services and makes them simply consumable to businesses and agencies.

Our meshPBX service offering is an advanced telephone system platform that is owned and operated within the best data centers in the world – so you can safely transfer your operational needs and risk to us, while enjoying exceptional pricing.

Most importantly, meshPBX is highly configurable to demanding and unusual collaboration environments, while providing a long list of standard elements to meet your expectations of high mobility, messaging integration, security, and audit.

We are excited to be offering these two new services. Please check out www.meshIP.com to learn more about our capabilities

Bring Your Own Device (BYOD)

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Having attained some basic oversight and policy control over personal devices in the enterprise, corporate IT administrators in 2012 face the appification of enterprise services. Opening up platforms such as iOS and Android to outside developers brings an increased risk of malware. Mobile virtualization enables one physical device to run two parallel virtual phones, supporting enterprise and personal use without compromising enterprise security or personal privacy.

These next-generation mobile devices will have quad-core Cortex-A15 processors from ARM with built-in hardware support for mobile virtualization. Users will be able to manage their work and their lives on one phone.

For example, the consumer domain will provide a full consumer version of Android with Android Market, Facebook, Angry Birds and other popular consumer apps. The service provider and handset manufacturer manage this domain and will keep the consumer software up to date.

The secure enterprise domain, meanwhile, will be deployed over the air and run its own Android instance without any market or consumer apps. Instead, this domain will connect to the enterprise mobile-device-management (MDM) system and, potentially, to a self-support portal/app store for employees. From these, the IT administrator can provision and take control of a full enterprise-targeted Android environment with IT-controlled enterprise apps. Updates of this Android version might be less frequent to ensure that enterprise applications run smoothly and can be validated as they become available.

As mobile virtualization increases the security, manageability and control of the Android environment, developers will have more incentive to create applications targeting the enterprise—setting the stage for the next revolution in enterprise computing.

Author: Morten Grauballe
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