Small Business Virtualization

What Are You Looking For In The Cloud?

Monday, February 15, 2010 by Jon Schackmuth

flexibility, security, & possibly reduced capital expenditure…

By Jon Schackmuth

Savvy business owners looking to get in the cloud are looking for flexibility, security and reduced cost.

The underlying question is: Can small and medium sized businesses find what they are looking for in the cloud at a price they can afford?

Let’s start with flexibility in the cloud. Simply put, this is what the cloud does best. When the marketplace changes and we all know it does, the cloud allows business owners to turn the dial up or down as needed. As an example, if a business jumps from 1,000 hits to 50,000 hits on their website and it’s positioned at a cloud hosting company like BlueLock, running on virtual machines, they can call the 24/7/365 operations staff and spin up more virtual servers – scalability on demand. Conversely, if traffic slows in six months, simply turn the dial down and pay for the services being utilized – the beauty of metered usage…

Now that we have established that the cloud is flexible, the true objection of the cloud must be security. Security is paramount when it comes to companies like BlueLock. If in doubt, schedule a visit and see the layers of security BlueLock has to offer. BlueLock’s privately owned building is made of poured concrete with a steel and concrete roof. The actual servers are secured behind six levels of security and are accessed on a need-to-know basis. - TOUGH.

The use of Check Point firewalls and SAS 70 certification is the gold standard in the IT world and BlueLock utilizes both to protect its clients. Ask yourself: Where are my servers stored and who has access to them? What if your servers crashed today? What is your disaster recovery plan and how long could your servers be down before you start losing one customer? What is the value of that customer? These questions may be hard to answer, but the results could save your livelihood. BlueLock has all of them answered for you, 24/7/365.

At this point, if I haven’t given you enough to think about with flexibility & security, you are probably in the mindset that it’s too costly! Consider the amount you pay for your infrastructure. Excessive CAPEX (capital expenditure) can bankrupt a company faster than a lack of customers. What does it cost to build your own data center plus a back up site and then maintain it at the level that allows you to sleep at night?

Depending on the situation, the business may be a start-up or they may be upgrading existing servers. If you are a start-up, what do a full time IT employees cost? If you build for today and you hit the home run you planned for, your company may be crippled. If you spend too much CAPEX on IT infrastructure, you may not have enough left over for marketing and sales generating programs. Once the original hardware purchase has been made, switching to outsourcing and OPEX (operating expenditure) is sometimes a difficult decision. At some point, enough is enough when it comes to excessive CAPEX - you may need to go in a new direction and outsource – you may need to put your business in the cloud.

Having been a small business owner in the past, I can attest to each of these topics. Flexibility is paramount in any business, security is critical when clients trust you with their personal data, and cost overruns will bankrupt even the well-informed business owner. Having choices in the cloud is something that hasn’t been available in the past… Until now.

Fresh off center stage at VMware Partner Exchange 2010, BlueLock introduced its latest surprise, BlueLock CloudSuite. After years of offering a robust enterprise-level service, businesses can now have the flexibility and price competitiveness of the newly introduced Bluelock vCloud Express. For those who want managed services with varying levels of scale, security, and performance - choose between Virtual Cloud Professional and Virtual Cloud Enterprise. A business that requires onsite control of their own isolated cloud can try the Virtual Private Cloud, you own it and BlueLock manages it.

If you have questions about BlueLock's enterprise cloud computing options, please contact us.

Can a Cloud Comply with PCI DSS?

Wednesday, January 6, 2010 by Matt Hunckler

Security and compliance are hot topics in the cloud computing industry. PCI DSS is a set of requirements that, when adhered to, increase the level of security for payment cards transactions.

To become compliant with the PCI DSS, an organization must meet all of the security requirements and maybe even go through a formal auditing process, depending on the number of transactions processed each year. While these requirements may seem inconvenient,

But, can organizations really become PCI-compliant in a cloud computing hosting environment?

In searching for an answer to this question it's importnat to ask, "What kind of cloud computing service?" Many security experts have discussed the topic on panels and in the blogs, like this one. Most of my experience is with infrastrucutre as a service.

Just in working on small business virtualization projects with clients, here at BlueLock, I've had get educated on PCI DSS. The tricky thing for cloud computing hosting companies is that with standards like PCI, there are both application-side and infrastructure-side requirements for compliance.

So with IaaS, where does the responsiblity reside?

Ultimately, it's the responsibility of the company that is doing the payment card processing. The scope of PCI DSS goes beyond what infrastructure as a service companies provide. So, if a cloud computing service provider claims that they are "PCI compliant," it's important to remember that you must still assess your own organization outside of what the service provider manages.

At BlueLock, we use tools from our partners at Shavlik to run regular compliance scans of our clients' environments. If it's important for your organization to be in compliance with PCI DSS, then it's important for you to audit yourself regularly.

To find out more about PCI DSS, visit the PCI Security Standards Council website.

BlueLock Named One of Fifty Indiana Companies to Watch

Tuesday, July 14, 2009 by Alicia Gaba

Fifty companies, including BlueLock (18 from Indianapolis) were named to the Indiana Companies to Watch list. The list was compiled after the submission of over 500 nominations by the Indiana Economic Development Corp., its small business development network, Purdue University and the Edward Lowe Foundation.

We'd like to congratulate two of our clients for also making the list: Vontoo and WebLink International. Great job guys!

Cloud Computing Outlook IS Sunny

Thursday, June 18, 2009 by Alicia Gaba

Rob England recently wrote an article on cloud computing entitled, “Cloud Computing Outlook Far From Sunny.” He adamantly argues that cloud computing is a good fit for “high risk/low-capital applications like startups or small business or websites” but has a “more jaundiced view” towards the cloud for enterprise computing and existing core applications.

Yes, everyone has jumped on the cloud bandwagon and is touting “cloud” on every offering possible in hopes of grabbing a small piece of a very large pie that being eaten up as we speak, but that doesn’t mean it’s a worthless technology for the enterprise. England says, “Quite simply, the idea is impractical for legacy enterprise applications.” He claims that this “technical solution” doesn’t really solve the non-technical business problems, but actually presents more problems, introducing greater complexities to manage. He doesn’t have software as a service in mind in this article, which is good because neither do I. He is talking about the “internal grids or hosted computing or the myriad of other things that seem to get lumped into ‘The Cloud.’” Great, because I’m assuming by that, he’s including what we call “infrastructure as a service.”

The number one problem, he argues, is migrating legacy applications. It is true that some applications simply weren’t built for the cloud, which is probably why he is so skeptical of legacy migration. But many others would argue that it won't be impossible forever. Bernard Golden, author of The Case Against Cloud Computing, believes that at some point someone will develop a physical-to-cloud migration tool that can alleviate those technical migration pains. I’m with him. It’s going to happen.

But more importantly, I don’t believe that there is any reason why enterprise clients should stay away from cloud computing. There are many enterprise-level cloud options out there. And if the worry is that there will be too many pains associated with a large enterprise moving into the cloud, why don’t they opt for a full-service cloud, like those offered by managed service companies (such as BlueLock)? Then they don’t have to worry about the resources, people and time it takes to migrate everything to the cloud, their service provider will do that for them.

Misconceptions of Cloud Computing

Monday, June 8, 2009 by Brian Wolff

Mary Hayes Weier wrote a piece about the misconceptions of cloud computing in InformationWeek’s “Plug Into the Cloud.”

Conventional wisdom says that small and midmarket companies are more interested in cloud computing due to their tighter infrastructure budgets and constraints while larger companies want to keep everything inside their walls (i.e. private cloud computing performed in-house).

However, she argues, Forrester’s research shows that thinking is wrong.

Myth #1: Smaller companies are more interested in cloud computing.
Forrester’s research shows 1 in 4 large companies with 1,000 employees or more plan to employ an external provider or have already done so for pay-per-use computing of virtual servers, AKA infrastructure-as-a-service (lately also called computing as a service). In comparison, only 18% of midmarket and 15% of small businesses have plans for IaaS, from a survey of more than 2,600 hardware decision makers at organizations.

Myth # 2: Larger Companies are more interested in internal or private clouds.
Forrester’s research shows that 33% of large companies plan to outsource their IaaS while only 24% want to run their own clouds. 44% plan to use a mixture of both. (Hint: we believe a mixture of public/private will be the solution that will make the most sense for the most companies going forward, along with different types of public clouds for different needs – production, test/dev, etc.)

Another finding I find not too surprising: the larger the company, the greater the awareness of pay-per-use cloud computing.

Company size & percentage of those unaware of cloud computing:

20,000 +: 21% of respondents
5,000 – 19,000: 23%
500 – 5000: 20%
100 – 499: 26%
100 or less: 31%

BlueLock Small Business Profile Featured in the IBJ

Monday, March 30, 2009 by Alicia Gaba

BlueLock was recently featured in the Indianapolis Business Journal. The Small Business Profile explains BlueLock's Infrastructure-as-a-Service model and the virtual cloud computing offerings that have made BlueLock the success that it is today.

The writer explains the benefits of BlueLock's cloud computing technology:

This allows businesses to concentrate on their core operations without having the expense of hardware and personnel to maintain it. Since about half of BlueLock’s clients are software companies, that means they can focus on writing better code and responding to code changes or upgrade requests from their clients.

Read what else they had to say.

When Disaster Strikes Will You Be Ready?

Wednesday, March 18, 2009 by Brian Wolff

The devastating fire this past week to the apartment complex on the canal could have been significantly worse if the buildings were occupied. And if they were would the homeowners, home business owners and small business that were to occupy the space have had appropriate backup and a disaster recovery plans? Do You?

According to a recent survey conducted by Thomson Financial, 34 percent of companies do not maintain a backup work facility. If your facility was temporarily or permanently shut down how would your employees access data and programs which keep your business running?

With virtual disaster recovery, all you need is a place to plug your laptop, and you will be back in business, no matter how devastating the crisis.

Glen Curtis has written a fairly in-depth analysis of how a number of industries are addressing disaster recovery planning.

Virtual Disaster Recovery Strategies Keep Businesses Running

Thursday, March 5, 2009 by Brian Wolff

Accidents happen! But even minor mishaps can be major catastrophes for small business owners. Every year, thousands of companies are unprepared for the interruption caused by a minor fire, flood, and burglary or computer meltdown. How widespread is the problem? According to a (NFIB) National Small Business Poll, man-made disasters affect 10% of small businesses, and natural disasters have impacted more than 30% of all small businesses in the USA.

And even more alarming are the findings from the Financial Planning Association: Of the businesses which suffer a disaster, 40% fail to reopen. An additional 25% of those which reopen never recover from the losses and setbacks and close within a year.

So the question is are your prepared. Do you have a comprehensive back up, of your data and processes? How quickly will you be operational if disaster strikes? In this brief video demonstration, using Logo building blocks, our CEO, John Qualls shows how a cloud based disaster recovery strategy creates an affordable and reliable disaster recovery solution.

Small Business & the Benefits of Cloud Computing

Thursday, February 26, 2009 by Brian Wolff

In a recent post on in Wisdom of the Clouds, James Urquat talks about small businesses and cloud computing. Using survey data from Rackspace as a starting point, he explains the problem begins with awareness, as more than two-thirds of small businesses have never heard of "cloud hosting."

What will happen as these companies begin to discover cloud computing? This untapped market has huge potential. Individually none of the projects would be very large, but collectively, there is tremendous opportunity for the right suppliers. Urquat says:

What I'd love to see is various cloud providers (at all levels of the stack) creating programs that specifically advertise and market themselves to mom-and-pop services, manufacturing shops, and so on. Targets for volume should be impressive; 100,000 customers should not be a surprising goal.

And the financial benefits for these smaller companies are significant when compared to their overall operating budgets. This is apparent when you look at the case of Marian College. The InformationWeek writer compares their environment to real cloud as "something less of a cumulous."

But this small college, with a student body of 2,100, has dipped into cloud computing, virtualized its infrastructure, made virtual servers available over the network practically on demand, and coordinated its internal operations with an outside cloud located at BlueLock. The program was begun to bring an affordable disaster recovery solution to the university - improved processing times, and ability to share information have led to other benefits as well. For more on Marian College, view this video:

Clouds Computing – A Solution for Companies of Any Size

Monday, November 3, 2008 by Brian Wolff

As I talk to people about BlueLock, I am often asked this question. “Is my business really big enough to consider a Cloud Computing solution?”

My answer: The deciding factor on whether or not you should move to a cloud computing environment is not really a question of size, but one of dependence on core technology to maintain the business. For example what happens to your business if your servers are down for 20 minutes? If the result of the outage is missed sales opportunities and dissatisfied customers, a cloud environment will make sense because of the resiliency, redundancy and disaster recovery protocols.

If your small business is growing rapidly, and you can not accurately anticipate future demand on your infrastructure, a Cloud Computing environment eliminates the constraints as you access as much or as little of he capacity as you need.

And finally, if you have limited IT staff, the switch to the Cloud allows you to hire talent to develop or sell your product instead of maintaining your infrastructure.

Making the move to the Cloud is not a question of how big you are, but how big you want to be!