“Spring Clean” Your IT

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Spring Clean Your IT_TierPoint By Kip Thurston, General Manager and Vice President

Spring is coming. For many organizations, it’s a hopeful time of year. January and most of February are filled with budget discussions, but by March and April, those negotiations are (mostly) behind us. Best of all, there’s still plenty of time left in the year to make things happen.

To get the rest of the year started off on the right foot, we suggest a little in-house spring cleaning. Below are three ideas, any of which could be blown up into a major project. However, even minor efforts in each of these areas can help you realize some quick wins.

#1 Out with the Old

Almost every organization has some part of their IT infrastructure that’s getting a little long in the tooth. Now may be a good time to consider which of your applications and data sets can be moved from aging on-premises hardware and into the cloud. You can get immediate performance (and security) improvements and make hardware upgrades and maintenance a thing of the past.

Tip: Clouds are not an all or nothing strategy. Most organizations we work with use some form of hybrid IT, with their applications and data spread across public and private clouds as well as on-premises data centers. Taking this approach can help you manage your budgets wisely, ensure data security, and get the performance you need. Continue reading →

Considering DRaaS? A Guide to Help Identify Your Best Path to the Cloud

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By Russ O’Risky, Senior Solutions Engineer

Let these discussion points help you prepare your move to a public cloud infrastructure.

Seasoned cloud sales experts know that what they draw out of you in that critical first discussion can set the stage for your success in moving to the cloud. Your answers and the strategies they identify, will help guide how you both approach and invest in your public cloud infrastructure. Your cloud partner should be asking these types of probing questions to guide your move to the cloud.

draas-public-cloud-imageQuestion No. 1: What are you doing for disaster recovery (DR) now?

IT teams often see moving DR to the cloud as a safe first step in adopting real estate in public cloud infrastructure. Your response to this DR question can drive what we solve for and how we solve it. Comprehensive DR in the cloud can be an integral bridge to everything else you want to do.

Client Example: In one instance, we discovered that a company had no DR. They wanted to move production to the cloud, which meant significant downtime. We laid out a phased approach that incorporated Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) as their first step to the cloud for their entire infrastructure. Continue reading →

Spotlight: TierPoint Solutions Engineering

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By Lisa Shea, Communications Manager

The Role of TierPoint Solutions Engineers

Senior Vice President of Solutions Engineering Rob Carter has a clear vision of his team’s mission: to establish TierPoint as an extension of each customer’s IT team, ensuring they view us as trusted advisors who can help align their business needs through technology solutions.

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The Solutions Engineering team is led by (left to right) Johnson Cauthen, Brian Bean, Rob Carter, John Stoker and Matt Brickey.

Solutions Engineers (SE) work closely with many other internal teams, especially Sales, Engineering, Service Delivery, Product, and Security to design sophisticated custom IT solutions that address each client’s unique challenges and budget. Continue reading →

Bridging Communication in the Multi-Generational Workplace

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by Midd Carmack, Senior Product Manager

This is a unique time in history for the business world. Many baby boomers are still active and not ready for retirement. Gen Xers are in the prime of their careers and eager to climb the corporate ladder but are also struggling with the demands of raising families. Millennials are redefining what it means to “go to work.” Each of these three generations has very different views on how to leverage technology to get the job done. For IT leaders, that can lead to challenges as you try to implement applications and strategies across all three generations.

80% of Fortune 500 executives find that effective communication across generations is a challenging issue.

With a generation gap of nearly 50 years, a broad range of perspectives, needs, and motivators in the 2017 workforce has emerged. This makes it imperative to consider how a multi-generational workforce perceives technology, and how technology can be used to communicate, collaborate, and improve productivity. Continue reading →

Making the Case for All-Flash Storage

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By Travis Foschini, Solutions Architect 

Many of the IT managers we work with are considering all-flash arrays in their on-premises or colocated data centers. While the cost per GB for flash storage is coming down, it’s often considered a luxury because of the way storage costs are traditionally evaluated. Despite the many benefits of flash, it can be difficult to gain approval for sufficient funding from the fiscally-minded business executives. In this post, I’ll lay out four primary arguments that can help get you over this hurdle.

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4 Reasons All-Flash Storage Makes Sense

The case for flash storage is both a technical and a financial one. Both can be useful for convincing the powers that be. Continue reading →

Mitigating Hybrid Cloud Security Risks

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By Paul Mazzucco, TierPoint Chief Security Officer

When a business considers moving its workloads to the cloud, availability of resources is often one of their biggest concerns. Understandably, they want their data and applications to be available when they need them, whether they choose a private cloud, a public cloud, or have TierPoint host their cloud in one of our data centers.

One of the greatest threats to high availability is the Denial of Service attack or DoS. This form of cyber threat has been with us since the late 1990s, so most of you are probably familiar with it. In short, a DoS attack floods a network with traffic, rendering it useless.

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In more recent times an even more insidious type of attack has emerged: Distributed Denial of Service or DDoS. In the DDoS, cybercriminals take over devices connected to the net, even simple devices such as online security cameras, to create a botnet, an army of mindless devices all targeted at bringing down a single network. Continue reading →

Designing an HA/DR Strategy for SQL Server 2016

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By Mike Donaghey, DBA Services Manager

To ensure business continuity in the face of a power outage, natural disaster, or equipment
failure, it’s important to consider your high availability (HA) and disaster recovery (DR) strategy. HA minimizes the odds of a disruption from malfunctioning equipment or service failure, while DR is your plan for getting up and running after a disaster.

Developing an HA and DR strategy can be challenging.  Microsoft’s SQL Server 2016, like most other major databases, offers several possible HA/DR options, but which you choose will depend on your company’s requirements for recovery and the details of your IT infrastructure, as well as which edition of SQL Server you have. Microsoft provides a comprehensive comparison chart of the High Availability features of SQL Server 2016 editions here.

To help you understand your options, Matt Aslett, Research Director for Data Platforms and Analytics at 451 Research, and I reviewed many of the key considerations and capabilities around HA/DR plan and SQL Server 2016’s HA/DR capabilities in this recent webinar:

Register now: On-demand webinar_SQL Server: Understanding Your Options for Disaster Recovery & High Availability Continue reading →