Are You Prepared for an Emergency?

Every company’s management team faces the challenge of having too many things going on with not enough time in the day. It’s difficult to get everything done, so when push comes to shove, particular projects and issues need to be prioritized to be completed. What do we have to do today that can’t be put off to tomorrow? Often, a businesses fall into a reactionary rut where they are constantly “putting out the fires” first, and while it’s vital for a business to put out those fires (literal or metaphorical), that approach makes it difficult to proactively prepare for those kinds of issues to streamline the process of resolving them. Secure Quorum was created to provide a simple, secure medium to deal with emergencies and incidents.

What we noticed was that businesses didn’t often consider planning for emergencies as part of their operations. The emergencies I’m talking about thankfully don’t happen often, but fires, accidents, power outages, workplace violence and denial of service attacks can severely impact the bottom line if they aren’t addressed quickly … They can make or break you. Are you prepared?

Every second that we fail to make informed and logical decisions during an emergency is time lost in taking action. Take these facts for a little perspective:

• “Property destruction and business disruption due to disasters now rival warfare in terms of loss.” (University Corporation for Atmospheric Research)
• More than 10,000 severe thunderstorms, 2,500 floods, 1,000 tornadoes and 10 hurricanes affect the United States each year. On average, 500 people die yearly because of severe weather and floods. (National Weather News 2005)
• The cost of natural disasters is rising. During the past two decades, natural disaster damage costs have exceeded the $500 billion mark. Only 17 percent of that figure was covered by insurance. (Dennis S. Mileti, Disasters by Design)
• Losses as a result of global disasters continue to increase on average every year, with an estimated $360 billion USD lost in 2011. (Centre for Research in the Epidemiology of Disasters)
• Natural disasters, power outages, IT failures and human error are common causes of disruptions to internal and external communications. They “can cause downtime and have a significant negative impact on employee productivity, customer retention, and the confidence of vendors, partners, and customers.” (Debra Chin, Palmer Research, May 2011)

These kinds of “emergencies” are not going away, but because specific emergencies are difficult (if not impossible) to predict, it’s not obvious how to deal with them. How do we reduce risk for our employees, vendors, customers and our business? The two best answers to that question are to have a business continuity plan (BCP) and to have a way to communicate and collaborate in the midst of an emergency.

Start with a BCP. A BCP is a strategic plan to help identify and mitigate risk. Investopedia gives a great explanation:

The creation of a strategy through the recognition of threats and risks facing a company, with an eye to ensure that personnel and assets are protected and able to function in the event of a disaster. Business continuity planning (BCP) involves defining potential risks, determining how those risks will affect operations, implementing safeguards and procedures designed to mitigate those risks, testing those procedures to ensure that they work, and periodically reviewing the process to make sure that it is up to date.

Make sure you understand the basics of a BCP, and look for cues from organizations like FEMA for examples of how to approach emergency situations: http://www.ready.gov/business-continuity-planning-suite.

Once you have a basic BCP in place, it’s important to be able to execute it when necessary … That’s where an emergency communication and collaboration solution comes into play. You need to streamline how you communicate when an emergency occurs, and if you’re relying on a manual process like a phone tree to spread the word and contact key stakeholders in the midst of an incident, you’re wasting time that could better be spent focusing to the issue at hand. An emergency communication solution automates that process quickly and logically.

When you create a BCP, you consider which people in your organization are key to responding to specific types of emergencies, and if anything ever happens, you want to get all of those people together. An emergency communication system will collect the relevant information, send it to the relevant people in your organization and seamlessly bridge them into a secured conference call. What would take minutes to complete now takes seconds, and when it comes to responding to these kinds of issues, seconds count. With everyone on a secure call, decisions can be made quickly and recorded to inform employees and stakeholders of what occurred and what the next steps are.

Plan for emergencies and hope that you never have to use that plan. Think about preparing for emergencies strategically, and it could make all the difference in the world. Secure Quorum is a platform that makes it easy to communicate and collaborate quickly, reliably and securely in those high-stress situations, so if you’re interested getting help when it comes to responding to emergencies and incidents, visit our site at SecureQuorum.com and check out the whitepaper we just published with one of our customers: Ease of Use: Make it Part of Your Software Decision.

-Gerard Ibarra, CEO of Secure Quorum

Bridging the Gap Between the Web and Telephony

Businesses face a fundamental challenge in the worlds of telephony and messaging: Those worlds move too slowly, require too much telecom knowledge and take too long to adopt. As a result, developers often forgo phone and SMS functionality in their applications because the learning curves are so steep, and the dated architecture seems like a foreign language. Over the last twenty years, the web has evolved a lot faster than telephony, and that momentum only widens the gap between the “old” telecom world and the “new” Internet world. Plivo was created to bridge that gap and make telephony easy for developers to understand and incorporate into their applications with simple tools and APIs.

I could bore you to tears by describing the ins and outs of what we’ve learned about telephony and telecom since Plivo was founded, but I’d rather show off some of the noteworthy ways our customers have incorporated Plivo in their own businesses. After all, seeing those real-world applications is much more revealing about what Plivo does than any description of the nuts and bolts of our platform, right?

Conferencing Solution
The purest use-cases for Plivo are when our customers can simply leverage powerful telephony functionality. A perfect example is a conferencing solution one of our customers created to host large-scale conferences with up to 200 participants. The company integrated the solution into their product and CRM so that sales reps and customers could jump on conference calls quickly. With that integration, the executive management team can keep track of all kinds of information about the calls … whether they’re looking to find which calls resulted in closed sales or they just want to see the average duration of a conference call for a given time frame.

Call Tracking
Beyond facilitate conference calls quickly and seamlessly, many businesses have started using Plivo’s integration to incorporate call tracking statistics in their environments. Call tracking is big business because information about who called what number, when they called, how long they talked and the result of the call (sale, no sale, follow up) can determine whether the appropriate interaction has taken place with prospects or customers.

Two Factor Authentication
With ever-increasing concerns about security online, we’ve seen a huge uptick in developers that come to Plivo for help with two factor authentication for web services. To ensure that a new site registrant is a real person who has provided a valid phone number (to help cut down on potential fraud), they use Plivo to send text messages with verification codes to those new registrant.

Mass Alert Messaging
Because emergencies can happen at any time, our customers have enlisted Plivo’s functionality to send out mass alerts via phone calls and SMS messages when their customers are affected by an issue and need to be contacted. These voice and text messages can be sent quickly and easily with our automated tools, and while no one ever wants to deal with an emergency, having a solid communication lifeline provides some peace of mind.

WebRTC
An emerging new standard for communications is WebRTC — open project that enables web browsers with Real-Time Communications (RTC) capabilities. WebRTC make communications a feature of the Web without plugins or complex SIP clients. Plivo already supports WebRTC, and even though the project is relatively young, it’s already being used in some amazing applications.

These use-cases are only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to how our customers are innovating on our platform, but I hope it helps paint a picture of the kinds of functionality Plivo enables simply and quickly. If you’ve been itching to incorporate telephony into your application, before you spending hours of your life poring over complex telecom architecture requirements, head over to plivo.com to see how easy we can make your life. We offer free developer accounts where you can start to make calls to other Plivo users and other SIP endpoints immediately, and we’d love to chat with you about how you can leverage Plivo to make your applications communicate.

If you have any questions, feel free to drop us a note at hello@plivo.com, and we’ll get back to you with answers.

-Mike Lauricella, Plivo

The Power of Great People

In 1995, Peter Drucker, one of the founding fathers of modern-day management, shared a profoundly simple idea: “People are our greatest asset.” Today, almost two decades later, that quote is reiterated in one form or another by the top executives at the largest companies in the world. You can have the best product, a stellar marketing plan and the perfect vision, but without a great team of people to execute with those tools, your company isn’t going anywhere.

In an online world now driven by innovation, it’s easy to want to substitute “technology” for “people” as a business’s greatest asset, but I’d argue that Peter Drucker’s quote is as true now as it was in 1995. Think about it in terms of keeping your webiste online. Your server’s hardware — a powerful CPU, ample storage space, tons of RAM and a fast network connection — might dictate how your website runs when everything is going smoothly, but when your traffic spikes over the holidays or an article on your blog goes viral, your ability to respond quickly to keep your website operational will be dictated by the quality of your server admins and support staff.

While good companies focus on improving their products, great companies focus on improving their people. In 2010, Google approached the challenge of improving its people by creating GoogleEDU — a program designed to formalize the process of educating employees in new skills, strategies and perspectives. Beyond building a stronger team of smarter individuals, Google is clearly investing in its employees, and that investment goes a long way to engender loyalty and job satisfaction.

What if your business doesn’t happen to have Google’s resources or a $269 billion market cap? That’s the problem Learntrail set out to solve. Our platform was designed to make it easy for businesses to create stunning, full-featured multimedia courses that can be monitored and tracked in detail with a few clicks.

You can bring your new-hire orientation program online, centralize training documents for new products, or create simple lessons about company-specific procedures through a sleek, easy-to-use portal. You’ll also get real-time reports about your team’s progress, so you’ll know exactly how your training is being used by your employees. To prove how confident we are that Learntrail will meet your needs, we have a risk-free, no credit card required 14-day trial that lets you kick the tires and get a feel for how Learntrail can work for your business.

Your people are your greatest asset.

-Daniel Hamilton, Learntrail

The Challenge of Sending Email Simply

You need to send email. Usually, that’s a pretty simple task, so it’s not uncommon to find users who think that sending a monthly newsletter is more or less the same task as sending a quick note to a friend about going to see a movie. In fact, those two email use-cases are completely different animals. With all of the nuances inherent in sending and managing large volumes of email, a plethora of email marketing services are positioned to help users better navigate the email marketing waters. It’s tough to differentiate which features you might need and which features are just there to be a “Check” in a comparison checklist. ActiveCampaign set out to make the decision-making process simpler … We knew that we needed the standard features like auto-responder campaigns, metrics reports and email templates, but we also knew we had to differentiate our service in a meaningful way. So we focused on automation.

Too often, the “automation” provided by a platform can be very cumbersome to set up (if it’s available at all), and when it’s actually working, there’s little confirmation that actions are being performed as expected. In response, we were intentional about ActiveCampaign’s automation features being easy to set up and manage … If automation saves time and money, it shouldn’t be intimidatingly difficult to incorporate into your campaigns. Here is a screenshot of what it takes to incorporate automation in your email campaigns with ActiveCampaign:

No complicated logic. No unnecessary options. With a only a few clicks, you can select an action to spark a meaningful response in your system. If a subscriber in your Newsletter list clicks on a link, you might want to move that subscriber to a different list. Because you might want to send a different campaign to that user as well, we provide the ability to add multiple automated actions for each subscriber action, and it’s all very clear.

One of the subscriber actions that might stand out to you if you’ve used other email service providers (or ESPs) is the “When subscriber replies to a campaign” bullet. ActiveCampaign is the first ESP (that we’re aware of) to provide users the option to send a series of follow-up campaigns (or to restrict the sending of future campaigns) to subscribers who reply to a campaign email. Replies are tracked in your campaign reports, and you have deep visibility into how many people replied, who replied, and how many times they replied. With that information, you can segment those subscribers and create automated actions for them, and the end result is that you’re connecting with your subscriber base much more effectively because you’re able to target them better … And you don’t have to break your back to do it.

SoftLayer customers know how valuable automation can be in terms of infrastructure, so it should be no surprise that email marketing campaigns can benefit so much from automation as well. Lots of ESPs provide stats, and it’s up to you to figure out meaningful ways to use that information. ActiveCampaign goes a step beyond those other providers by helping you very simply engage your subscribers with relevant and intentional actions. If you’re interested in learning more, check us out at http://www.activecampaign.com.

-Peter Evans, ActiveCampaign

‘The Cloud’ and Agility

As the CEO of a cloud-enabled application platform for the .NET community, I get the same basic question all the time: “What is the cloud?” I’m a consumer of cloud services and a supplier of software that helps customers take advantage of the cloud, so my answer to that question has evolved over the years, and I’ve come to realize that the cloud is fundamentally about agility. The growth, evolution and adoption of cloud technology have been fueled by businesses that don’t want to worry about infrastructure and need to pivot or scale quickly as their needs change.

Because FatCloud is a consumer of cloud infrastructure from Softlayer, we are much more nimble than we’d be if we had to worry about building data centers, provisioning hardware, patching software and doing all the other time-consuming tasks that are involved in managing a server farm. My team can focus on building innovative software with confidence that the infrastructure will be ready for us on-demand when we need it. That peace of mind also happens to be one of the biggest reasons developers turn to FatCloud … They don’t want to worry about configuring the fundamental components of the platform under their applications.

Our customers trust FatCloud’s software platform to help them build and scale their .NET applications more efficiently. To do this, we provide a Core Foundation of .NET WCF services that effectively provides the “plumbing” for .NET cloud computing, and we offer premium features like a a distributed NoSQL database, work queue, file storage/management system, content caching and an easy-to-use administration tool that simplifies managing the cloud for our customers. FatCloud makes developing for hundreds of servers as easy as developing for one, and to prove it, we offer a free 3-node developer edition so that potential customers can see for themselves.

The agility of the cloud has the clearest value for a company like ours. In one heavy-duty testing month, we needed 75 additional servers online, and after that testing was over, we needed the elasticity to scale that infrastructure back down. We’re able to adjust our server footprint as we balance our computing needs and work within budget constraints. Ten years ago, that would have been overwhelmingly expensive (if not impossible). Today, we’re able to do it economically and in real-time. SoftLayer is helping keep FatCloud agile, and FatCloud passes that agility on to our customers.

Companies developing custom software for the cloud, mobile or web using .NET want a reliable foundation to build from, and they want to be able to bring their applications to market faster. With FatCloud, those developers can complete their projects in about half the time it would take them if they were to develop conventionally, and that speed can be a huge competitive differentiator.

The expensive “scale up” approach of buying and upgrading powerful machines for something like SQL Server is out-of-date now. The new kid in town is the “scale out” approach of using low-cost servers to expand infrastructure horizontally. You’ll never run into those “scale up” hardware limitations, and you can build a dynamic, scalable and elastic application much more economically. You can be agile.

If you have questions about how FatCloud and SoftLayer make cloud-enabled .NET development easier, send us an email: sales@fatcloud.com. Our team is always happy to share the easy (and free) steps you can take to start taking advantage of the agility the cloud provides.

-Ian Miller, CEO of FatCloud

Dallas

My name is Fabrienne Curtis, and I work in the Accounting Department at SoftLayer. I joined a team with thirty other people (from several different departments) to raise money for the American Heart Association, and because I love to help and work on community projects, I volunteered to be a team captain. Our team had a ton of great ideas for fundraisers, so we set an ambitious goal of raising $12,400 ($400 per person). When the dust settled, I’m proud to report that we me that goal with a total team tally of $12,488 (which SoftLayer then matched).

Beyond the fundraising, participating in the Dallas Heart Walk at Victory Park was a highlight this year. No one on my team knew that this walk had a personal meaning to me … I lost my dad to congestive heart failure and wanted to walk in his behalf. When I got to the Heart Walk, I was touched. There was a “Survivor Wall” and there were several signs where you could share who you’re walking on behalf of. If not for SoftLayer, I probably wouldn’t have participated in the Heart Walk, so as I wrote on the wall and created a sign for my dad, I thought about how good it felt to work for a company that truly cares about the well-being of its employees.

SoftLayer added a little flair to the event by setting up a photo booth for people to take pictures and take home, and with the help of Don Hunter, Hao Ho and my husband Jerry, 679 photos were taken!

Here are some pictures I snapped from the 2012 Dallas Heart Walk:

The Start!

The SoftLayer “Uniform”

The Crowd

Victorious!

Thank you SoftLayer for having a heart! If you want more coverage of this years event, check out this Dallas Heart Walk 2012 video and click through to our Dallas Heart Walk Flickr album.

-Fabrienne

Houston

Dallas didn’t get to have all of the fun when it comes to the AHA Heart Walk, and I made sure to document the Houston goings-on to share with our avid SoftLayer Blog readers. From bake sales to ice cream socials, the Houston office was diligent about donating money and raising heart-health awareness for months prior to the 2012 walk, and those months were extremely eventful. Like Fabrienne, I jumped at the opportunity to be one of 18 team captains at SoftLayer, and considering the fact that cardiovascular disease is the number one killer of Americans, I was inspired to get everyone involved.

I’ll be the first to admit that I am not in the best of shape, so a five-kilometer walk through a course at Reliant Stadium would be pretty challenging. My team had been tirelessly preparing for the 5k “mini-marathon” walk, and as November approached, you could sense the excitement and enthusiasm brewing. Walking only one mile can add up to two hours to your lifespan, so in the process of preparing for the walk, we added quite a few hours to our collective lives. When the big day finally arrived, we were ready:

The Houston Heart Walk SLayers

Given that our day started at an unbelievable 7:00am on a Saturday, most of our participants were tired-eyed and ready to chow down on the free burritos and fruit provided by SoftLayer, and by the time we fired up the photo booth and broke out the goofy props, everyone was wide awake. It’s like they say, “Give a man a fish and he’ll eat for a day … Give a man fun props and a camera, and he’ll have a blast (and pictures that can be used against him.” Actually, I don’t know if “they” say that, but it’s true:

Before we knew it, a gunshot of glitter and colorful confetti got the crowd of people moving down the 3.1-ish mile track, and we were hooting and cheering, pumped to represent our company! By mile two, my legs were a little wobbly and the sun was scorching, I could see that our dog, Rikku (whom had been carried the entire way) looked was confused about why I was putting her through the exhausting task of being comfortably in my arms as we herded through the people like cattle.

AHA water stations and mile markers reminded us that we were doing it for the best cause ever: The people we love and the people of the past that have been lost due to heart disease. It’s a safe bet that if you don’t know someone directly affected by heart disease, you will eventually. The American Heart Association organizes these fundraisers and walks every year across the world to gather donations and raise awareness so that one day, we may be able to conquer this silent killer. With their donations, they’re able to participate in research for preventative treatment, provide education to children to avoid obesity and fund medical research that could one day breakthrough and save lives.

All in all it was a wonderful experience, one that I’ll definitely be sure to be a part of next year.

-Cassandra

The Three Most Common PCI Compliance Myths

As a hosting provider that specializes in Oracle ATG Commerce, Spark::red has extensive experience and expertise when it comes to the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standards (PCI DSS). If you’re not familiar with PCI DSS, they are standards imposed on companies that process payment data, and they are designed to protect the company and its customers.

We’ve been helping online businesses maintain PCI Compliance for several years now, and in that time, we’ve encountered a great deal of confusion and misinformation when it comes to compliance. Despite numerous documents and articles available on this topic, we’ve found that three myths seem to persist when it comes to PCI DSS compliance. Consider us the PCI DSS compliance mythbusters.

Myth 1: Only large enterprise-level businesses are required to be PCI Compliant.

According to PCI DSS, every company involved in payment card processing online or offline should be PCI Compliant. The list of those companies includes e-commerce businesses of all sizes, banks and web hosting providers. It’s important to note that I said, “should be PCI Compliant” here. There is no federal law that makes PCI compliance a legal requirement. However, a business IS required to be PCI compliant technically in order to take and process Visa or MasterCard payments. Failure to operate in with PCI compliance could mean huge fees if you’re found in violation after a breach.

Payment card data security is the most significant concern for cardholders, and it should be a priority for your business, whether you have two hundred customers or two million customers. If you’re processing ANY credit card payments, you should make sure you are PCI-compliant.

There are four levels of PCI compliance based on the number of credit card transactions your business processes a year, so the PCI compliance process is going to look different for small, medium-sized and large businesses. Visit the PCI Security Standards Council website to check which level of PCI compliance your business needs.

Myth 1: Busted.

Myth 2: A business that uses a PCI-compliant managed hosting provider automatically becomes PCI-compliant.

Multiple parties are involved in processing payment data, and each of them needs to meet certain standards to guarantee cardholders’ data security. From a managed hosting provider perspective, we’re responsible for things like proper firewall installation and maintenance, updating anti-virus programs of our servers, providing a unique ID for each person with computer access to restrict access to the most sensitive data, regular system scanning for vulnerabilities. Our customer — an online retailer, for example — would need to develop its software applications in accordance with PCI DSS, keep cardholders data storage to a minimum, and perform application-layer penetration tests that are out of their hosting provider’s control.

If you’re pursuing PCI compliance, you have a significant advantage if you start with a PCI-compliant managed hosting provider. Many security questions are already answered by your PCI-compliant host, so there is a shorter list of things for you to be worry about. You save money, time and effort in the process of completing PCI certification.

Myth 2: Busted.

Myth 3: A business that uses SSL certificates is PCI compliant.

Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) certificates allow secure data transmission to and from the server through data encryption that significantly decreases the network vulnerabilities from IP spoofing, IP source rooting, DNS spoofing, man-in-the-middle attacks and other threats from hackers. However, SSL cannot protect cardholder data from attacks using cross-site scripting or SQL injection, and they don’t provide secure audit trails or event monitoring. SSL certificates are an important part of secure transactions, but they’re only part of PCI DSS compliance.

Myth 3: Busted.

If you have questions about PCI compliance or you’re interested in Oracle ATG Hosting, visit Spark::red, give us a call or send us an email, and we’ll do what we can to help. When PCI compliance doesn’t seem like a scary monster in your closet, it’s easier to start the process and get it done quickly.

-Elena Rybalchenko, Spark::red

5 Ways to Minimize Downtime During Summer Vacation

It’s a fact of life that everything runs smoothly until you’re out of contact, away from the Internet or on holiday. However, you can’t be available 24/7 on the chance that something breaks; instead, there are several things you can do to ensure that when things go wrong, the problem can be managed and resolved quickly. To help you set up your own “get back up” plan, we’ve come up with a checklist of the top five things you can do to prepare for an ill-timed issue.

1. Monitoring

How will you know when things break? Using a tool like Server Density — which combines availability monitoring from locations around the world with internal server metrics like disk usage, Apache and MySQL — means that you can be alerted if your site goes down, and have the data to find out why.

Surprisingly, the most common problems we see are some that are the easiest to fix. One problem that happens all too often is when a customer simply runs out of disk space in a volume! If you’ve ever had it happen to you, you know that running out of space will break things in strange ways — whether it prevents the database from accepting writes or fails to store web sessions on disk. By doing something as simple as setting an alert to monitor used disk space for all important volumes (not just root) at around 75%, you’ll have proactive visibility into your server to avoid hitting volume capacity.

Additionally, you should define triggers for unusual values that will set off a red flag for you. For example, if your Apache requests per second suddenly drop significantly, that change could indicate a problem somewhere else in your infrastructure, and if you’re not monitoring those indirect triggers, you may not learn about those other problems as quickly as you’d like. Find measurable direct and indirect relationships that can give you this kind of early warning, and find a way to measure them and alert yourself when something changes.

2. Dealing with Alerts

It’s no good having alerts sent to someone who isn’t responding (or who can’t at a given time). Using a service like Pagerduty allows you to define on-call rotations for different types of alerts. Nobody wants to be on-call every hour of every day, so differentiating and channeling alerts in an automated way could save you a lot of hassle. Another huge benefit of a platform like Pagerduty is that it also handles escalations: If the first contact in the path doesn’t wake up or is out of service, someone else gets notified quickly.

3. Tracking Incidents

Whether you’re the only person responsible or you have a team of engineers, you’ll want to track the status of alerts/issues, particularly if they require escalation to different vendors. If an incident lasts a long time, you’ll want to be able to hand it off to another person in your organization with all of the information they need. By tracking incidents with detailed notes information, you can avoid fatigue and prevent unnecessary repetition of troubleshooting steps.

We use JIRA for this because it allows you to define workflows an issue can progress along as you work on it. It also includes easy access to custom fields (e.g. specifying a vendor ticket ID) and can be assigned to different people.

4. Understanding What Happened

After you have received an alert, acknowledged it and started tracking the incident, it’s time to start investigating. Often, this involves looking at logs, and if you only have one or two servers, it’s relatively easy, but as soon as you add more, the process can get exponentially more difficult.

We recommend piping them all into a log search tool like (fellow Tech Partners Marketplace participant) Papertrail or Loggly. Those platforms afford you access to all of your logs from a single interface with the ability to see incoming lines in real-time or the functionality to search back to when the incident began (since you’ve clearly monitored and tracked all of that information in the first three steps).

5. Getting Access to Your Servers

If you’re traveling internationally, access to the Internet via a free hotspot like the ones you find in Starbucks isn’t always possible. It’s always a great idea to order a portable 3G hotspot in advance of a trip. You can usually pick one up from the airport to get basic Internet access without paying ridiculous roaming charges. Once you have your connection, the next step is to make sure you can access your servers.

Both iPhone and Android have SSH and remote desktop apps available which allow you to quickly log into your servers to fix easy problems. Having those tools often saves a lot of time if you don’t have access to your laptop, but they also introduce a security concern: If you open server logins to the world so you can login from the dynamic IPs that change when you use mobile connectivity, then it’s worth considering a multi-factor authentication layer. We use Duo Security for several reasons, with one major differentiator being the modules they have available for all major server operating systems to lock down our logins even further.

You’re never going to escape the reality of system administration: If your server has a problem, you need to fix it. What you can get away from is the uncertainty of not having a clearly defined process for responding to issues when they arise.

-David Mytton, ServerDensity

A Multi-Cloud Strategy – The Key to Expansion and Conversion

Web and mobile applications have collapsed geographic barriers to business, bringing brand and commerce experiences ever-closer to increasingly far-flung customers. While web-based business models are powerful enablers for global expansion, they also create new a new challenge in managing availability and performance across diverse and distributed markets: How do you ensure consistent web performance across all markets without investing in physical infrastructure in all of those markets?

Once a business gets its core business on a consistent and reliable provider like SoftLayer, we typically recommend that they consider a multi-cloud strategy that will spread availability and performance risk across a global infrastructure of public and private data centers, delivery networks and cloud providers. Regardless of how fantastic your core SoftLayer hosting is, the reality is that single-source dependency introduces significant business risk. Fortunately, much of that business risk can be mitigated by adding a layer of multi-cloud architecture to support the application.

Recent high-profile outages speak to the problem that multi-sourcing solves, but many web-based operations remain precariously dependent on individual hosting, CDN and cloud providers. It’s a lot like having server backups: If you never need a backup that you have, that backup probably isn’t worth much to you, but if you need a backup that you don’t have, you’d probably pay anything to have it.

A multi-cloud strategy drives revenue and other conversions. Why? Because revenue and conversions online correlate closely with a site’s availability and performance. High Scalability posted several big-name real-world examples in the article, “Latency is Everywhere and it Costs You Sales.” When an alternative vendor is just one click away, performance often makes a difference measured in dollars.

How Cedexis Can Help

Cedexis was founded to help businesses see and take advantage of a multi-cloud strategy when that strategy can provide better uptime, faster page loads, reliable transactions, and the ability to optimize cost across a diverse network of platforms and providers. We built the Cedexis Radar to measure the comparative performance of major cloud and delivery network providers (demo), and with that data, we created Openmix to provide adaptive automation for cloud infrastructure based on local user demand.

In order to do that effectively, Cedexis was built to be provider-agnostic, community-driven, actionable and adaptive. We support over 100 public cloud providers. We collect performance data based on crowd-sourced user requests (which represent over 900 million measurements per day from 32,000 individual networks). We allow organizations to write custom scripts that automate traffic routing based on fine-grained policies and thresholds. And we go beyond rules-driven traffic routing, dynamically matching actual user requests with the most optimal cloud at a specific moment in time.

Getting Started with Cedexis

1. Join the Community
   Get real-time visibility into your users’ performance.
2. Compare the Performance of Your Clouds and Devliery Network
   Make informed decisions to optimize your site performance with Radar
3. Leverage Openmix to optimize global web performance
   Optimize web and mobile performance to serve global markets

The more you can learn about your site, the more you can make it better. We want to help our customers drive revenue, enter new markets, avoid outages and reduce costs. As a SoftLayer customer, you’ve already found a fantastic hosting provider, and if Openmix won’t provide a provable significant change, we won’t sell you something you don’t need. Our simple goal is to make your life better, whether you’re a geek or a suit.

-Julien Coulon, Cedexis