Lately we have seen a rise in cloud customers reliance on widely available online tools that purport to help an enterprise calculate everything from pricing, usage workloads to TCO. Some of the primary tools often cited are: Azure Pricing Calculator AWS Pricing Calculator AWS Total Cost of Ownership Oracle Cloud Workload Estimator Google Pricing Calculator We are here to confirm what your likely first instincts are when attempting to use these tools, which is they are wrong, a futile exercise, and probably biased, given the hundreds of data points and variables in every cloud environment. Wrong First, they are wrong. Always. Maybe it’s a ...
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“The biggest risk is not taking any risk. In a world that’s changing quickly, the only strategy that is guaranteed to fail is not taking risks.” – Mark Zuckerberg, Founder and CEO, Facebook If you’ve been avoiding risk or waiting for the right time to take bold action in reducing both your reliance and cost structure with Cisco – the wait should be over. The market readiness to reduce or eliminate your Cisco dependence is at an all time high with suppliers who are stable, reliable, innovative and eager to win your business. Below we’ll outline how: The Cisco ecosystem is set up to work against the economics of its own customers Why their ...
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Like a migrating herd of Wildebeest across the Serengeti, companies around the globe continue its rush toward that shimmering lake of Cloud Compute that promises lowers costs, increased flexibility and scalability (and more according to the brochures). As with any panacea, the dream usually falls short of the reality. Cloud compute for many has hit that ‘middle ground’ where actual benefits and unexpected problems meet. As the body of problem evidence mounts for Cloud Compute, there are some clear myths that have arisen that need to be ‘debunked’. Only when these myths are fully understood can organizations minimize the risks and still ...
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As technology marches ever forward, the threats to Enterprise Security have seemingly multiplied exponentially. Our ability as organizations to stay ahead of the risks that technological advancements have brought to the forefront are challenged daily. Literally. They are challenged everyday by threats from: Foreign governments trying to access data and networks Cloud security as more and more corporate data is stored outside proprietary networks Shadow IT Ransomware Phishing attacks on unaware employees Internal bad actors (i.e. employees who wish to do harm) Malware installed on endpoints surreptitiously by external bad actors There are ...
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In Part I we discussed consideration of a multicloud strategy. Pricing and product transparency were the themes for part II. In part III we address the last in this series: Application Portability. To see all three in our Multicloud eBook, please visit here. The enterprise’s application processing workloads must be compatible to portability between Cloud providers, including technology stacks that are common across all Cloud provider platforms, such as the use of application microservices and open stack services such as containers and Kubernetes. It is also important to consider how you'll integrate data and applications residing in ...
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If you missed Part I - start here. Is a Cloud Broker right for you? A Cloud Broker by definition is an entity that manages the use, performance and delivery of cloud services, and negotiates relationships between cloud providers and cloud consumers. As cloud computing evolves, the integration of cloud services may be too complex for Cloud consumers to manage alone. A Cloud Broker can also be in a unique position to collect, analyze and conduct opportunity assessments on pricing that will be key to a multicloud or Cloud Arbitrage strategy. Generally, cloud arbitrage is the practice of taking advantage of a price difference between two or more ...
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Many enterprises adopt a multicloud strategy out of a desire to avoid Cloud supplier lock-in or to take advantage of innovative solutions with a certain Cloud provider. There are many rationales for using multiple clouds, as they each have different strengths and weaknesses for performance and functionality, different pricing schemes, and some workloads simply run better on one cloud platform versus another. Although neither provide a financial breakdown of their cloud business, AWS continues to dominate the cloud infrastructure market, but its lead is starting to wane as Microsoft Azure and Google Compute Engine make significant inroads. ...
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The more I work with Cisco lately, the more I’m reminded of the television commercial made famous by the Wendy’s hamburger chain in the United States, wherein an elderly woman and her friends open their giant hamburger bun only to find a tiny piece of meat inside and ask, “Where’s the beef!?” When I review Cisco EA agreements, our clients and I are asking the same question, but in this case the EA is the giant bun and the beef is the value. What’s getting presented to us on this nice Cisco plate appears to be a lot of hamburger (i.e. the “best deal!”), but often when we lift the bun, the value (beef) is elusive and hard to find. The “Best ...
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The latest casualty in what some consider the emerging trade showdown between the USA and China has come in the form of ZTE, who has announced they have ceased ‘major operations’. On April 16th, 2018, the U.S. Department of Commerce banned American companies from exporting parts to ZTE. Given that 25%+ of the components that make up ZTE equipment comes from U.S. manufacturers, ZTE was forced to shut down its production lines. While most people are aware that ZTE manufactures mobile handsets, most were not fully aware that the bulk of their revenue comes from telecom exchange, optical transmission, and other tier one communications equipment. ...
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Underinvested? Overinvested? Do we have the right supplier(s)? Are we running the right software? Are we using the right security technology? Are our solutions keeping us safe and protected? Do we have applications and a network infrastructure that can be properly protected? These are the starting questions IT and Financial leaders of any organization face today when they look at the Equifax Security Breach – one the largest and deepest in US history. If you are unfamiliar or have chosen to forget it on purpose (apologies in advance if that’s the case), it impacted 140 million consumers’ personal information, including social security ...
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