We were pleased to announce today that our recent cloud hosting and other virtualization solutions implemented for customer Ciao Bella Gelato enabled the frozen dessert wholesaler and retailer to stay open for business despite the aftermath of Superstorm Sandy at its Florham Park, NJ headquarters.

In September, Ciao Bella had successfully converted its onsite company servers to an EarthLink Cloud Hosting solution, so that its applications and data were hosted, maintained and monitored virtually at a secure EarthLink data center.

With EarthLink Cloud Hosting supporting their IT infrastructure, Ciao Bella employees throughout the country were able to submit orders and access critical applications via the cloud even though power remained off at its New Jersey facility for almost two weeks.

An EarthLink Business Voice & Data customer since 2011, Ciao Bella IT Director and Controller Robert Serchuk sought EarthLink’s advice about its aging server infrastructure. With employees nationwide at corporate, retail stores, a warehouse and customer service center, Serchuk needed a reliable hosted infrastructure that would provide the company with operational efficiencies, disaster recovery and scalability for future growth.

EarthLink compiled a profile of Ciao Bella’s applications, creating a solution that included three virtual servers, Secure Hosted Email and Platinum-level Managed Services, providing a high level of managed support and an important safety net given the company’s lack of IT staff.

Ciao Bella’s IT servers now reside in the cloud, enabling its dispersed salesforce and production facility in Oregon to remain operational even though the company’s New Jersey location was shut down due to Superstorm Sandy. Even its New Jersey-based employees were able to work remotely, accessing their applications via the cloud.

“While disaster recovery was not the primary reason we virtualized with EarthLink, it probably should have been as it was a significant benefit after this storm,” shared Serchuk.

“The beauty of moving to the cloud is that we saved money by eliminating the capital expense of buying new servers and replaced our IT consultant with EarthLink. Plus, my time used to be split evenly between IT duties and finances. Now I can dedicate myself fully to our financials, which is a huge benefit. My CEO and Board are all very pleased with our EarthLink solution.”

Ciao Bella has experienced several key benefits since virtualizing with EarthLink. Its workforce is more productive, with faster access to the server and applications. Updates that previously took hours now take minutes. But the reliability of the new email platform perhaps had the most positive impact.

Before switching to EarthLink, frequent outages would last days and sometimes weeks. Now the email platform performs reliably, and employees can synchronize corporate email with their mobile devices, a feature not available on their earlier version of Outlook.

EarthLink Executive Vice President of Products and Marketing Michael D. Toplisek is pleased with how Ciao Bella’s new virtualization solution performed in a crisis.

“Ciao Bella is a great example of how cloud hosting uses geographic diversity to keep a business operational even in extreme circumstances. The company is also well-positioned for future expansion, with no need to buy new equipment for upgrades. They can now dedicate key resources to growth while EarthLink is there to manage their entire IT infrastructure.”

About Ciao Bella Gelato

Ciao Bella, America’s most stylish dessert brand, began in New York’s Little Italy and has been tempting taste buds for almost three decades. Beyond ordinary, Ciao Bella’s indulgent collection of gelato, sorbet and Greek frozen yogurt offers an unparalleled dessert experience by relying on a chef-inspired blend of naturally intense ingredients and a passion for evoking delight in every frozen bite. Offering unique and intense flavors like Blood Orange Sorbet, Key Lime Graham Cracker Gelato and Raspberry Greek Frozen Yogurt, Ciao Bella uses only the most select and pure ingredients, resulting in mouth-watering frozen treats that embody both classic Italy and modern America. The brand has been featured on the Oprah Winfrey Show and on AOL’s home page for its captivating creations. For more information, visit www.ciaobellagelato.com.

The post EarthLink Cloud Services Weather Superstorm Sandy appeared first on » EarthLink Cloud.

“We are pleased to be selected for this award, based on the cloud computing solution we deliver to independenceIT, ” said Michael Toplisek, EarthLink Executive Vice President of Products and Marketing. “With EarthLink Cloud Hosting providing customized, virtualized data center services, iIT now delivers its Cloud Workspace™ and application platforms to its clients with faster platform delivery. iIT also lowered its data center costs by16% with the EarthLink solution, and now enjoys the scalability to add new servers and storage on-demand as their business needs dictate.”

EarthLink delivers a Cloud Hosting service that is VMware vCloud powered, with the ability to reduce IT operating costs by consolidating resources, simplify IT complexity, and enable more flexible, agile service delivery through virtualization. EarthLink’s Cloud Hosting service provides a user-friendly vCloud Director Portal for creation of custom Virtual Machines (VM) and on-demand applications. The EarthLink Cloud architecture leverages highly available firewalls, multiple connectivity options and Storage Area Network (SAN) infrastructure to deliver highly redundant on-demand computing power.

Winners of the Cloud Computing Excellence Award are published in the October 2012 issue of Cloud Computing Magazine.

About TMC
TMC is celebrating its 40th anniversary as a global, integrated media company that helps clients build communities in print, in person, and online. TMC publishes the TMC’s CUSTOMER Magazine (formerly Customer Interaction Solutions), INTERNET TELEPHONY, Next Gen Mobility, and Cloud Computing magazines. TMCnet.com, which is read by 1.5 million unique visitors each month, is the leading source of news and articles for the communications and technology industries. TMC is the producer of ITEXPO, the world’s leading B2B communications event. In addition, TMC runs multiple industry events:  Cloud Communications Expo; Cloud4SMB Expo; CVx (ChannelVision Expo); DevCon5; HTML5 Summit; LatinComm Conference & Expo; M2M Evolution Conference & Expo; Mobility Tech Conference & Expo; MSPAlliance MSPWorld; StartupCamp; Video World Conference & Expo and more.

The post EarthLink Earns 2012 Cloud Computing Excellence Award from Cloud Computing Magazine appeared first on » EarthLink Cloud.

Mike Salviski is the Sr Director of Enterprise Solutions, overseeing Cloud, Virtual and Data Center Solutions and IT Services Sales. Previous roles were Director of Business Development at LogicalSolutions.net where he was involved in oversight and sales of their enterprise VMware cloud platform. Mike has 10 years of experience in the Enterprise Application Architecture space with Fortune 500 Companies, as an employee of SAP Software for 7 Years. Past companies also include silicon valley based Plumtree Software and PeopleSoft Software.

—

In your quest to move your business’s applications to the cloud, you have many choices. There are different cloud providers, different technologies, different platforms, and different price points.

Choose wisely. Because choosing the wrong cloud hosting provider is a lot like choosing the wrong parachute.

When you’re going skydiving, you’re not looking for the cheapest, feature-less parachute on the market, are you? No, you want to make sure you find one that fits your needs and is ultra-reliable.

You also want to make sure you have the proper backup plan in place. Just in case.

So the best advice I can give any company choosing a cloud provider is to make sure you choose one that’s not just easy to migrate to, but one that’s also easy to migrate away from. Just in case.

That means a vCloud Powered and Certified Provider like EarthLink.

If you’ve already made the smart choice by selecting EarthLink Cloud as your cloud provider, you can be confident that as a vCloud Powered and Certified Provider, we can easily migrate your data and VMs both to and from our platform, because we use a standard VMware format.

We know it is your business data, applications, and digital property, and we want you to be able to maintain ownership and portability.

Here are some additional benefits of choosing a vCloud Powered Provider such as EarthLink:

• vCloud Connector: VMware vCloud Connector lets you view, operate on and transfer your computing resources across vSphere and vCloud Director. EarthLink Cloud Hosting customers can easily view their vCloud resources from within their vSphere native client. This allows monitoring and management of your private and public cloud in one location.

• vShield Edge: This feature secures the edge of a virtual datacenter with firewall, NAT, DHCP, and Web load-balancing capabilities that enable rapid, secure scaling of cloud infrastructures. Along with network isolation, these edge services create logical security perimeters around virtual datacenters and enable secure multi-tenant environments.

• vCloud 5.1 Enterprise Features: in VMware vSphere version 5.1 (coming soon), there are many new industry-tested features such as vShield Load Balancing and greater resource support. Version 5.1 also supports larger virtual machines, allowing up to 64 virtual CPUs (vCPUs) and 1TB of virtual RAM (vRAM).

At EarthLink, we strive to help you build and run the cloud environment that’s right for your business. We do everything we can to keep our customers running on our vCloud platform because they love all that it does for them, not because they are locked into it. If there’s anything else we can do for you, please let us know.

Learn more about additional cloud hosting or virtualization services for your business, contact an EarthLink Business IT Solutions Consultant today! Email us, or call 800-957-4872.

The post Benefits of Using a vCloud-Powered Cloud Provider, Like EarthLink appeared first on » EarthLink Cloud.

Michael J. Herrmann is Senior Product Manager, Cloud Workspace SaaS and TechCare for EarthLink Business IT Services. In this role, his responsibilities include working closely with sales, developing product strategic directions, and overseeing his portfolio of Cloud and high-touch business product and services. Prior to joining EarthLink, Mr. Herrmann held a range of strategic planning, consulting, and product management positions.

—

As with clouds in nature, cloud computing is always changing.

So, what’s new up there in the cloud?

Much of the cutting-edge cloud product research and development these days is focused on ways to free your data and applications from the physical devices they traditionally live in.

It’s called virtualization, and it’s really a big deal.

Instead of you having to make a backup copy of all your company’s data and rotate it through an off-site storage area, the process can simply happen automatically.

Instead of setting up 500 end-user computers with the right applications, configurations, and connecting them to the necessary servers, all you need to do is move your data to the cloud and all that manual work becomes unnecessary.

It now happens every day, via the cloud.

3 IT Benefits of Virtualization & the Cloud

By freeing the virtual from the physical, cloud providers like EarthLink Business are able to make IT simpler, more efficient, and more secure.

How simple? End-users can now just use their applications and don’t have to wonder if they’ve mapped this drive or that. Control tools allow you to easily manage the cloud and how it’s accessed.

How efficient? You or your users need to move data to the cloud once…that’s it. The cloud infrastructure can manage all the redundancies and replication of data to ensure accessibility.

How secure? With compliant services, distributed backup, and replication, if one physical device does happen to fail you shouldn’t see any impact as another server takes over.

Those are very real and very powerful general benefits of the cloud today. But I’d also like to share with you a more detailed and focused example of how virtualization and the cloud can help you manage your business.

Today’s Device Management Nightmare for IT

Let’s take a look at a transition frequently described as Bring Your Own Device (BYOD): internal customers are demanding the ability to use their personal laptops, tablets, and smartphones for business. Let’s admit, too, that many people are doing this whether it’s “officially” supported or not.

While a service-focused IT organization is always looking for ways to improve the experience of their customers (giving them what they need and want), they are also challenged with maintaining security and reducing costs wherever possible.

So what’s the problem with using MacBooks, iPads, Androids, or personally owned laptops on business networks? The reason they are not part of the typical IT infrastructure is due to computer imaging or “cloning.”

Generally speaking, since the 1990’s IT organizations have managed company PCs via the establishment of a standard “image” of a PC configuration that’s set up on every employee computer, thus making them clones of the master image. This concept of PC image duplication often poses restrictions on individual PCs.

I still remember a number of years back being excited to get a new laptop that had Wi-Fi capabilities built into the hardware – it was pretty cool and new at the time. Trouble was, when I tried to turn on the Wi-Fi while I was waiting for a flight one day, I quickly found out that the PC image put on my laptop didn’t know about any of the new or unique laptop capabilities I wanted to take advantage of.  In other words, no Wi-Fi for me.

The clone was built to a lowest common denominator of what a laptop “should” be. Great for the economics of managing PCs…very bad for my customer satisfaction.

So, if we take that scenario and ramp up the variables by a thousand, you’ll get a feel for the daunting task faced by IT organizations today besieged by BYOD requests. What’s an IT director to do?

That’s where virtualization and the cloud can help.

How Software as a Service Can Solve the Problem

Here at EarthLink Business we have a Software as a Service (SaaS) suite that takes the PC desktop  along with all its programs and makes the entirety of it an application in the cloud. It’s called Cloud Workspace.

By using our Cloud Workspace.service, your IT team can win the device management battle. Now all they need to do is provide internal customers with login credentials to reach their virtual desktop using whatever device they choose.

With Cloud Workspace, our operations team leads the customer/user setup process (enabling user accounts, verifying application licenses, etc.) and then provides your administrator with an easy-to-use self-service control panel so you can take it from there.

We’ll help you think through a simple work plan to check in with your internal customers to see if they need any help moving their local files up to their new cloud drive via a simple drag-and-drop or a built in FTP tool/cloud drive for larger collections of files.

Identifying which of your customers need what apps is done during the relatively brief on-boarding exercise. You also have the option of having us move your apps to the cloud and having the app upgrades, maintenance, data security, backup and recovery all managed by our operations team.  The applications your customers use are installed and maintained by the Cloud Workspace team, who can also assist in moving the associated data.

Using the Cloud Workspace control panel, it’s easy to set up new IT customers, and establish customized folder visibility (aka, permissions) and security rules for your cloud drive/folder structures. So, for example, your Marketing group can see and share their marketing materials, and the Finance group can see and share theirs. But if they are set up in two security groups, you don’t have to worry about wandering eyes going where they shouldn’t go.

Moving to and using the cloud every day for your business should be simple, efficient, and secure. The trick is finding a cloud service provider you can trust to give you the capabilities and tools you actually need and not try sell you on products you really don’t need.

Not too long ago, a client told me they were considering a move to large, collaborative platform that they’d host and manage as a more secure alternative to the file sharing system they were using. When I asked them to tell me more about their expected uses, it became clear pretty quickly that the company was unlikely to utilize most of the functionality new platform would provide – making it costly overkill.

In the spirit of keeping things simple, I suggested setting up some Cloud Workspace folders that everyone in the company could see and some dedicated to various projects. That way they’d have the convenience of a cloud folder but with the security of the data remaining in their company’s Cloud Workspace area. Long-story short, it worked very well.  It was simple, efficient, and secure – always the way to go!

We’ve got a great team and SaaS suite at EarthLink Business to help you part those dark IT clouds (couldn’t help the pun, sorry) and make your company’s goals a reality.

If you’d like to get started or just talk things through, drop us a note or give us a ring and one of our cloud experts will help you and your business get started!

The post The Cloud and the Silver Lining for Your Business appeared first on » EarthLink Cloud.

By Joe Reazor Director of Data Center Services/Operations

Joe has been managing IT organizations for the past 12 years. He has held management positions with both national and international corporations helping to lead segments of their IT divisions. Joe joined EarthLink Business through the LogicalSolutions.net acquisition and has been instrumental in the growth of its cloud based solutions. As Director of Data Center Services and Operations, Joe is responsible for the Cloud Services operations, engineering, and support teams.

—

Maybe you’ve weighed all the pros and cons, crunched some numbers, (perhaps even read these great blog articles by our own Brian Fink and David Epps below), and decided that moving your IT operations into the cloud is a good business decision.

Maybe you’ve already even signed on for cloud services with EarthLink Business or have some services hosted by us and are looking to move even more.

Let’s take a look at a couple possible scenarios for two services you might want to move to the EarthLink Business cloud: Email and Applications.

Email

Email is one of the top services that companies are moving to cloud providers like EarthLink Business. Let’s look at some of the important details for migrating your business email to the cloud:

1.  The absolute most important part of changing your email service is that all your users need to preserve their email history.  Could you imagine telling your CEO, “Sorry, but you’re going to lose your 15 years of email history when we move to the new provider”?

Obviously, that’s not going to work, so you have to look at the options for moving all of this email data. EarthLink Business consultants can work with you to select the cloud email platform that’s right for your business based on your current email hosting technology.

2.  After you’ve selected an email platform, your next step is to create a cloud migration plan. Here are some important questions you should consider:

• How much data needs to move and can it be done over the Internet? This depends a lot on what your local Internet connection is from where your email is hosted today.  It also depends on how big of a maintenance window you can arrange.
• How much time do you have? Can you use an entire weekend or more to migrate, or do you have a single overnight at best?  The more time available to migrate your mail, the easier the process usually is.  Unfortunately, though, email is too mission-critical to usually allow for much down time.
• Do all users need to migrate at once, or are you ok to migrate in batches?  You can move your users to the new platform first and then migrate their mail in batches afterwards. This makes the process easier and allows you to update users as you go.
• Can your users assist with your migration by using a step-by-step migration guide from their desktops to export and import their own email? Most companies’ users can do this, which spreads out the work and often allows for data moves at a pace that works for everyone.
• Don’t forget your mobile devices.  You need a plan to update connections on everyone’s phones and tablets.  Usually a simple step-by-step guide with screenshots allows most users to perform this by themselves.

3.  When migrating to EarthLink Business’s Hosted Exchange service, you should consider the following issues:

• Do you have a local administrator in your office who would be comfortable managing user accounts?  We can provide a self service portal allowing you to control your own user accounts and mailbox limits so users can be added or removed 24 hours a day on your own.
• Don’t forget public folders and distribution groups.  Companies often account for all their users but forget some of the other parts of their mail service.  Shared public folders and custom distribution groups are big ones often overlooked.  We need to make sure to recreate those in the new environment.
• Do you have any server level rules? Things like mailbox forwards, aliases or other server based rules need to be accounted for and recreated.  This is easier when moving from your local Exchange to EarthLink Exchange, but can be done for other platforms as well.

4.  By now, you have probably already chosen either a shared or dedicated Exchange service, but make sure you have taken into account any regulations or special requirements your industry may impose.

• Is it acceptable to be hosted on a shared mail platform?  Should you consider a dedicated Exchange environment to meet any special regulatory needs? Shared email hosting works for most companies, but there are cases for going with dedicated. It often makes sense for large companies or cases where you want to tie into an existing Exchange server for the migration.
• Do you need archiving or encryption services to meet any special requirements?  EarthLink can provide both of these services whether you are using shared or dedicated Exchange.

If you do need archiving or encryption services, what are your requirements for each?  What is the retention period of archiving? Does everything get archived or just certain email that meet criteria that you define? Likewise for encryption: do all emails get encrypted or just certain ones you designate?  If this is a requirement that you have, most likely your technical teams already know the answers to these questions.

Applications

After email, most companies are looking to move the many applications they use internally or externally to keep their business operating into the cloud.  This can range from a simple file server to a complex, industry-specific application.

Depending on the scope, there are a number of details you want to make sure you consider when looking at your various applications and exactly how you can move them into the cloud.  You will want to take into account the following:

1.  What Operating System requirements does your application have?  Windows is the most common, but Linux can be supported, too.

2.  How much RAM and CPU does it take to run the application today?  Do you have a good baseline of typical load and usage or is that something EarthLink Business could assist with capturing?   EarthLink Business has the tools to help you capture this data and we strongly recommend doing this prior to making a move to the cloud.  It will greatly help in having more success with the migration.

3.  How much data is the application using and where is that data stored?

• Is the data stored in a file system?
• Does the application use a database? If so, which database? Is the application absolutely mission-critical? If so, you can afford zero downtime and should consider a clustered database setup.
• What is the tolerance for downtime in order to migrate the data to the cloud service?  As with email migration, will it be possible to move the data over your Internet connection, or will you need to consider using a physical drive?  If so, this might require a longer downtime or a data-sync after the initial data load.

4.  Does the application utilize Active Directory credentials for login?  If that AD service runs locally, we’ll want a backup running in the cloud too.

5.  Can the app work in the cloud? Have you discussed running the application virtual in the cloud with the application vendor? This is especially important for industry-specific applications. Often the application vendor will already have published documentation on special requirements or caveats that should be considered.  If not, you will need to contact the software vendor directly or risk finding out part way through the process that the application will not run in the cloud.

6.  Is the application web based or client-server based?  If client-server, will it run over a wide area network or should you consider running a terminal server setup in the cloud using something like Citrix?

7.  Is the application mission-critical so that you can afford zero downtime? If so, in addition to possibly needing a database cluster, you might require load balanced servers.  If that is the case, does the application support load balancing?  Does the software vendor have special requirements for load balancing?

8.  What level of backup does the application require?  How long can you tolerate being down during a recovery process?  Does the application support granular level restores through a database or other application-level data stores?

9.  How much bandwidth do you need? Considering the bandwidth required to connect to your application is an important consideration. The biggest impact to that is the number of concurrent users and the amount of data transfer each might have.

You’ll want to consider the total number of users of the application and get an idea from the software vendor on the data that gets transferred by the application to the client computers.  If excessive, solutions like Citrix offer a good way of keeping all the data-intensive work on the cloud while minimizing the data transfer to your office.

These are just some of the important variables to consider when looking to move your applications into the cloud.  You’ll want to spend time working with an EarthLink Business solutions consultant and possibly our engineers if your application is very complex.  Those teams are well equipped to analyze your current application infrastructure needs and help you to devise the best plan for moving it into the cloud.

Your Cloud Migration Partner

Moving your email or applications to the cloud can be an important step forward for your business. So be sure to consider all the details that go into a seamless and successful cloud service migration.

Luckily, with EarthLink Business as your partner, you have the experience and expertise at your fingertips to help guide you through the process and make sure your business reaps all the benefits of using cloud services to their fullest extent.

The post Moving Email & Applications into the Cloud appeared first on » EarthLink Cloud.

By David Epps – Director IT Solutions Consulting, EarthLink Business

David has worked in the IT industry for over 20 years and has extensive experience in assisting organizations in making critical IT decisions. David has assisted over 150 organizations with BCDR planning, in-source vs. out-source decisions, technology selections and implementations, and in conducting IT risk assessments. David began his career as an IT manager in the healthcare industry, then moved into consulting and management roles in the Managed Services industry. He has held several senior level technical positions with companies such as ACS, SunGard, Velocity Technology and EarthLink Business.  David is a graduate of the University of South Carolina with a Master’s in Business Administration and a BS in Electrical and Computer Engineering.

When it comes to making smart IT purchasing decisions for your company, it’s essential that you move beyond the buzzwords.

“The cloud” may be the business buzzword of the year (and EarthLink Business offers cloud services that we are very proud of), but it can be a somewhat vague and overly broad term that appeals to some and puts others off without fully understanding it.

Some mistakenly view the cloud as an all-or-nothing proposition, probably based on the cloud metaphor. You’re either in a cloud or you’re out of a cloud.

But in business that’s really not the case.

Solving Real Business Problems with Managed IT Services

Instead of the cloud, I encourage EarthLink Business customers like you to think of managed IT services. These outsourced IT services (including traditional cloud services) offered by managed service providers like EarthLink Business can be selected individually to target specific business needs and solve real business problems. As an EarthLink Business customer, you have probably already taken that first step.

To take the next step, I encourage the business leaders I work with to re-examine their business and come up with a list of additional, specific challenges or opportunities they may want to address with managed IT services:

• Would the business benefit from after-hours support?
• Do we have gaps in our in-house IT security that need to be filled to reduce risk?
• How much money could we save with a virtual help desk?
• Could virtual desktops be used to fill our disaster recovery needs?
• Are all company laptops (and the data on them) systematically protected?
• Would seasonal or temporary IT support services make the business more flexible?
• Can I free up expensive IT resources to work on a more important business project?
• Which areas of the business would benefit most from leveraging managed IT services?

There’s no one right mix of managed IT services. Your business is unique. You may end up selecting one, two, or a whole suite of managed services to address the needs of your business.

Your industry will drive some IT needs. So will your growth stage. Are you a start-up? A young company entering a period of rapid growth? A mature company concerned about cost controls?

Is your business seasonal or cyclical? Do you have new competitors pressuring you to innovate in order to compete? Do you have an important new product being developed?

While all the above questions – and others – will impact your needs and drive specific business decisions, companies typically turn to managed IT services for these benefits:

• Lower IT costs
• Increased speed and flexibility deploying IT resources
• Access to expertise or skillsets you don’t have in-house
• Fill temporary needs, internal gaps or demand spikes
• Cap or reduce headcounts
• Ability to free in-house expertise to focus on important projects

You can consult with an EarthLink Business representative to see if there’s a good business case to move to one or more managed IT services.

Plan Ahead for Integration

After you’ve decided that your business could benefit from some mix of managed IT services, how do you ensure that they are integrated properly into your business?

Here are seven things I advise businesses that will be implementing managed services:

1. Set Expectations: Make sure expectations are set correctly, in detail, with your managed service provider. Who is doing what? How? When? How fast? How much? Be clear, honest, and open – and insist on the same from your provider.
2. Ask Questions: Ask any question you can think of. Yes, even the ones you think may be dumb. The only real dumb questions are the ones you never asked that come back to haunt you. Go through as many real-life business scenarios as you can with your managed services provider and make sure you and your provider know how they will be handled going forward.
3. Document Everything: Service providers are very experienced and adept at selling their services. They do it all the time. However good you are at your business, you will be less experienced buying services than your provider is at selling, giving them the upper hand initially. So, you need to even the playing field a bit through meticulous documentation of responsibilities.
4. Think “Relationship”: You are about to enter an important relationship with your managed IT provider. As with other, more personal relationships in life, it takes two to make the relationship work. And remember, it takes commitment. So make sure you’re fully comfortable with the provider becoming your partner. If you’re not sure, shop around some more.
5. All Aboard: Be sure to get everyone in your organization onboard with the transition to managed services. Make sure everyone knows that they are expected to make it work, to be responsible and not just point fingers at the service provider if there are any challenges. Check all the boxes in your organization. Get the explicit buy-in of your executive leadership teams, finance (be sure they are onboard with your cost models), IT, and the end-users (make sure they know changes are coming). You want any push-back to come before you start implementing your managed IT services, not after it’s done.
6. Demand Accountability: You should feel comfortable demanding that your service provider is accountable for doing what they say they will do, for honoring commitments and providing the services and service levels agreed on (remember, you documented everything, right?). Also make sure to hold the rest of your organization accountable as well. Don’t be surprised that your service provider will hold you accountable for your end of the relationship.
7. Review Regularly: Transitioning successfully to managed IT services isn’t a one-time, set-it-and-forget-it thing. Plan on regular review meetings – whether that’s monthly or quarterly – to monitor service levels, communicate upcoming projects, and review other roadmap items so your service provider is properly prepared and ready to provide the needed levels of service.

Implementation Checklist

The implementation phase is typically the most difficult and demanding part of the relationship between your business and your managed IT services provider.

One reason is that during implementation you are actually adding workload throughout your organization before the IT services can lessen your workload and provide other benefits. At this point, it’s just a pain!

Businesses I have worked with who have successfully and painlessly implemented managed IT services have benefited from being organized and systematic about the implementation phase. I generally encourage that they develop a checklist to cover the important milestones in the process.

While business all have their own unique milestones to add to their checklist, it can be helpful to start with a generic implementation checklist like this:

• [  ] Onboarding:  [  ] Executive Teams    [  ] Finance    [  ] IT    [  ] End Users
• [  ] Kick-Off Meeting: Expectation setting between you and your provider.
• [  ] Create Timeline: Highlight the key milestones in the project.
• [  ] Identify Key Resources: You and your provider should identify who is responsible for what on your end and establish communications guidelines
• [  ] Testing: Test data, services, and business processes prior to launch; document all tests; make sure all areas of the business are tested.
• [  ] Testing Validation: Make sure the responsible business units validate and sign off on results for their area.
• [  ] Go Live: Monitor & document performance immediately; establish measurements and benchmarks you can use to analyze performance issues in the future.
• [  ] Schedule Regular Meetings: Include all stakeholders. Discuss ongoing performance, additional needs, planning.

To find out more about the range of managed IT services offered by EarthLink Business, check out our virtualization services, managed security services, managed support services, and hosted applications (such as secure email hosting)

The post Choosing and Integrating Managed IT Services for Your Business appeared first on » EarthLink Cloud.

Let’s get the bad news out of the way immediately: there is no such thing as a perfectly secure network.

Even with the most advanced protection technology, the most effective security systems, and best-planned preventative controls, a company’s data will still be at some risk. New and sophisticated cyber-attacks are created every day, with threats coming from profit-motivated criminals, hackers with various agendas, unscrupulous competitors, and even foreign governments.

So perfection is not a possible option. BUT…and here’s the good news: you can get very close.

But you have to approach your cyber-security in an intelligent and systematic way, implementing a strategic array of countermeasures that protect multiple points of vulnerability for your business (e.g., network, servers, desktops, and smartphones). Implemented correctly, you can greatly reduce your security risk to the point that you can feel confident that you can prevent security breaches.

For most organizations, this goal requires an increased level of dedication to security. After all, small and midsize companies typically have few or no resources dedicated to information security. Most of these organizations don’t even have a way of determining how much sensitive information is stored on their systems. And while most businesses do know they need anti-malware tools and a firewall, they don’t fully understand how comprehensive their security measures need to be.

There are 10 key areas that we advise businesses to focus on in order to mitigate information security risks:

1. Security Awareness Training

This is one of the areas companies ignore…at their peril. No, it’s not high-tech. No, it’s not sexy. But security awareness training has the greatest security ROI and highest security impact. It’s true.

Most security breaches actually originate inside companies by disgruntled or negligent employees.

So, what should you do? Educate everyone in your company so they can help identify a variety of security risks.

For example, employees should be able to spot and identify email phishing and spoofing attacks.  They should also be trained not to store, send or copy sensitive information that’s unencrypted. And they should know not to share sensitive information over the phone unless they are 100% sure of the audience.

Again, our #1 advice to mitigate your security risk: train employees on security policies and practices. And make sure to revisit the issues and retrain at least yearly (sooner if you can).

2. Anti-Virus & Anti-Malware Protection

Virus outbreaks make the news (like the recent Flame virus), so most people know they should have anti-virus and other malware protection for their personal computers. And most people assume businesses are protected. Often they are not. Or at least not adequately protected.

Malware infections can hit your bottom line hard. They can cause fraud, loss of data, identity theft, or decreased companywide productivity due to slow or unusable computers.

Businesses are increasingly adopting an “endpoint security” strategy to combat malware threats. Endpoint security is an information security concept that means that each device (or endpoint) on a network should be responsible for and capable of providing for it’s own security.

Whatever your anti-malware solution, it should scan email for attached viruses, monitor files in real time for infections, and perform thorough scans of every file.

3. Data Encryption

Encrypted data isn’t any less likely to be stolen by hackers or other intruders. But data encryption is still a powerful part of your business’s information security. Encryption protects your data even after it has been accessed. Once it is encrypted, your business data is worthless to the bad guys and remains protected. They would need the encryption key to read your data. So we advise all businesses to encrypt data in case it is compromised or lost (employees leaving unencrypted laptops at airports or coffee shops has caused some serious data breaches).

4. Access Controls

Your business should not be a free-for-all for your employees. When everyone has access to everything, your information security is at risk. For increased security, only give employees (and partners) access to the data they need. This includes both physical and logical access. A good strategy is to start by granting the least privilege. You can then escalate privileges to allow access to unauthorized data on an as-needed basis.

5. Patching

Patching is essential to minimizing the risk to your computer systems. Patches are often released to fix security holes in systems and applications. Make sure you keep all operating systems and applications you run patched. Install the latest firmware updates on all network devices.

6. Mobile Devices

Laptops, smartphones, and tablets have increased the productivity and mobility of today’s workforce. But along with that productivity comes vulnerability. Lost or stolen laptops and other mobile devices are the top cause of data breaches. We recommend you manage endpoints centrally to allow your security policies to be easily deployed. You should also enable auto-lock or require a password to access all devices.

EarthLink Business offers managed laptop security services to address these risks.

7. Monitoring

Knowledge is power. In the security realm, monitoring is the knowledge you need to be confident you have powerful protection. Make sure your business is set up to monitor systems and network devices for any abnormalities.

Deploy a SIEM (security incident & event management) that correlates logs form all levels of infrastructure – network, systems, and user activity. Don’t just block activity at a firewall or IPS. Log it, review it and learn from it. Attackers are finding new ways to expose networks. Know what is happening so you can continue to address it.

You should also install content filtering to monitor user activity from within your business. The most common form of employee misuse of the Internet is to surf porn. Another co-worker witnessing this misuse of your company resources can result in legal action and a monetary judgment against your company. Employees also often download or email viruses, causing security breaches. So it is imperative that you need to monitor what your users are doing on the Web.

8. Firewall

A firewall is the first line of defense against any attack (network or host). It acts a barrier between a public network and a private network.

EarthLink offers managed firewalls that are designed to allow good traffic in and to keep malicious traffic out. A majority of firewall breaches are caused by the misconfiguration of firewall rules and policies.

9. Remote Backup

Backup is one of the most neglected areas of computing and therefore typically one of the biggest opportunities your business has to mitigate risk. Why? Because stuff happens. All the time.

Theft, floods, fires, tornadoes, hurricanes, and other unforeseen occurrences can cause large amounts of data loss that can cripple your business.

Often, businesses invest in securing data from hackers or malware, but then the data is physically destroyed by natural causes. If the data doesn’t exist, securing it from outside threats doesn’t matter.

That’s why it’s so important to backup your company’s data to an remote location so data will be retained in the event of a disaster at your main location.

10. Security Assessments & Penetration Testing

To secure your business you must stay vigilant. There are always bad guys looking for the next way to compromise your business’s information. So you have to perform annual or, better, quarterly vulnerability assessments to identify new risks. The ever-changing security environment is always creating new risks. Identify the new risks that apply to your business and fix them before someone else finds them.

We also recommend that all businesses have a formal Information Security Risk Assessment done every three years, which is the life cycle of most products these days.

If you need more information on security for your business, contact us and one of our IT experts can help you ensure your data is as secure as possible.

The post 10 Ways to Mitigate Your Business’s Security Risk appeared first on » EarthLink Cloud.

Brian Fink: Executive Vice President and Chief Strategy Officer

There are many benefits of cloud computing. And while they aren’t confined to any one type or size business, benefits can be especially transformative for today’s small to medium-sized businesses, who can effectively leverage cloud computing to compete with the IT resources and expertise of much larger businesses in their markets.

Top 5 Benefits of Cloud Computing

1. Lowering the Cost Structure of Computing Resources: To compete effectively today, your business can’t afford to waste money. Optimizing resources of all kinds is especially important to smaller businesses. Virtualization enabled by cloud services can help you pool and optimize your company’s computing resources. Users get access to IT resources as an on-demand service and you don’t end up paying for unneeded, idle computing resources. You can also save quite a bit by outsourcing the expertise necessary to run IT in-house.
2. Capital-Free Computing: With cloud computing services, your computer resources are no longer capital expenses. When IT becomes a service provided by a cloud hosting vendor, hardware expenses go off your books. There are no servers to buy, no firewalls, routers or other hardware, so your business can take advantage of a less restricted cash flow.
3. Speed to Finish Projects & Launch Products Faster: You know the drill: you want to start a project, so you need to put in a procurement request for hardware (and justify the expense), then wait for sign-off, wait for shipment, wait for server installation and setup, wait for testing. With EarthLink’s cloud hosting services, for example, it takes just minutes for us to turn up capacity for you to deploy or develop an application. Or you can do it yourself anytime from your Cloud Hosting Control Panel. Again, in minutes. Not weeks or months. This speed can be a major competitive advantage for a small to medium-sized business up against big competitors and their larger IT resources.
4. Frictionless Growth: Fast growth in a company with a traditional IT infrastructure can be challenging. On the one hand, you have to overspend and underutilize IT resources if you want to make sure you have the resources available when you grow. On the other hand, you can slow your company’s growth rate if you have to wait for your IT resources to scale up every time your company wants to expand. The speed and flexibility of the cloud means you always have the right resources for your company’s needs, no matter how fast you are growing. And you only pay for what you actually need.
5. Maintenance-Free IT: The virtual IT services offered by the cloud means lower operating costs for your business. Cloud providers maintain your IT as a service, so you don’t have to pay for expensive, in-house IT expertise and ongoing IT maintenance.

With all the very real benefits of cloud computing, why aren’t all businesses leveraging those advantages today?

If it’s due to a concern for security and data integrity, chances are they are thinking about public cloud computing.

A public cloud service is a large, shared computing environment; there may be thousands of servers connected the cloud provider and businesses pay to use these servers, almost like they would to a utility. This extremely flexible, powerful, pay-for-use system requires no commitment and works very well in many circumstances. But it doesn’t work for businesses that are uncomfortable having their IT resources being pooled with others and not having visibility into the location of their data. For some businesses, compliance issues make public cloud computing a non-starter.

However, private cloud services, such as those offered by EarthLink, can provide businesses a significantly higher level of security and data integrity than public cloud offerings. Cloud customers can use dedicated cloud servers that are set up to their specifications and give them direct access to their data. Private cloud vendors are able to offer data integrity, security, disaster recovery, and other benefits that make cloud computing a compelling choice for most businesses. The Cloud Provider could also include (as EarthLink’s cloud service does) automatic backup in multiple data centers and data recovery services with all cloud hosting services.

When choosing a private cloud service, look for a provider using familiar industry-leading software such as the VMware virtualization software used by EarthLink. Also, make sure your provider offers multiple, state-of-the-art, audited data centers to insure the integrity of your data. And lastly, make sure they can offer you industry-leading expertise to help you make a seamless transition to the cloud and then intelligently leverage the cloud as you grow.

If you’re wondering how you can leverage cloud technology more within your business – to become more agile or better control costs – contact us at EarthLink and one of our IT experts can help size your application or custom design a solution specifically for your business.

–

Fink leads the development and growth of Managed Services for EarthLink, a vitally important offering which includes secure IT outsourcing and cloud services. Fink’s responsibilities include working with the leaders of the company to ensure successful execution of the company strategy while evaluating additional strategic opportunities for the business.

Prior to joining EarthLink, Fink founded IntegraTouch, LLC in 2002. As managing partner and board member, he was instrumental in growing IntegraTouch’s systems integration and application operations business and providing executive IT and product services to the company’s largest customers. Fink served as Executive Vice President and CIO of One Communications from 2007 until 2009.

Prior to 2002, he was a senior executive for Global Crossing / Frontier Communications and was responsible for managing the company’s Information Technology and Product Development organizations, and led the development of the company’s IP services strategy. Fink held the CIO position for regional telecommunications company Schneider Communications, and development and strategic planning roles for AT&T Bell Labs. He has served on a number of technical advisory boards for successful upstart companies.

The post Leveraging the Cloud to Get a Competitive Edge appeared first on » EarthLink Cloud.

Now, as we continue our transformation to an integrated communications and IT services provider for business customers, we’ve announced several recent IT Services product launches that underscore how far EarthLink has travelled down the path.

This week, EarthLink Business launched Cloud Workspace™, a hosted desktop service and our latest virtualization product. This customized environment enables customers to control business applications and data with secure access for employees from anywhere, from any device and via any high-speed Internet or private MPLS connection. Cloud Workspace also helps to significantly reduce operating costs, eliminate capital expenditures, increase employee productivity with easy application access and reduce complex security challenges. Read more.

And in late April, EarthLink premiered three new IT Services packages designed to simplify the cloud so businesses can leverage the benefits of virtualization services. The Cloud Launch Pad, the Cloud Entry Bundle, and the Secure Email Bundle enable customers to economically partner with EarthLink to complement their internal IT resources by leveraging a comprehensive mix of IT Services and security experts in an enterprise class data center environment.

“With these carefully designed bundles, EarthLink has removed many of the real or perceived barriers for customers of any size to explore what the cloud can mean for their business,“ said Barbara Dondiego, EarthLink Chief Marketing Officer. “We often hear from customers that they want their provider to act as an extension of their internal IT team, helping them become more productive and effective. These bundles are a toolkit that enables that to happen easily.” Read more.

Watch for even more exciting IT Services product news in the weeks and months ahead as EarthLink enhances its suite of virtualization, data center, managed security services, and managed support services. By converging our extensive telecom assets with proven cloud-based IT technologies, EarthLink is well-positioned to offer both its existing and new business customers with an ideal blend of the services they need to run their enterprises as efficiently as possible.

For the latest EarthLink news, visit the press release page, follow us on Twitter and like us on Facebook and LinkedIn.

The post EarthLink, the Original Cloud Company appeared first on » EarthLink Cloud.

At the same time though, it does raise a few questions. If you are selling Internet to your customer so they can access the applications in the cloud, is there a difference between public and private? The easy answer is yes, but what is it and what does it mean for your customers?

The key here is security and performance. I strongly believe that security is going to be a primary driver in the continued evolution of our business. Internet threats are getting more and more sophisticated to the extent that even companies like Target and Citibank are not safe. This is the primary reason so many companies have chosen to invest huge capital to maintain “on-net” servers. Most of our customers today do not have the capital of a Target or a Citibank. For them, the ability to store their data and applications in a virtual hosting setting would have a dramatic impact on their IT budget. The key is to have those applications residing in a protected data center, sitting as a node on your private MPLS network.

It is imperative, that as the trusted adviser to your customers, you ensure them that there is no public Internet anywhere near their sensitive data if at all possible. Too many providers who tout a MPLS network use IPsec to bring sensitive customer data across the public Internet – either from the customer’s premises or from the applications in the cloud back to the customer. Introducing IPsec technology into a network not only increases security risks but dramatically degrades performance. The key to performance is the ability to retain Class of Service (COS); the ability to tag a specific packet with priority that can be retained from origination to termination.

Again, our partners’ customers look to them to figure out this whole cloud thing and to ensure that they are protecting our business. Make sure you are evaluating the carriers you do business with to ensure that they have a solution that meets your customer requirements. The cloud does not have to be a scary solution if you know how to get your customer there.

J.R. Cook is the vice president of alternate channels for EarthLink Business . Cook Joined EarthLink Business in 2009, when it was known as New Edge Networks, as the first vice president with sole responsibility for the company’s agent channel. With more than 13 years of experience managing channel partner relationships, Cook leads the formation of a dedicated agent channel by fostering powerful relationships and placing importance on growth from agent partnerships. Prior to joining New Edge Networks, Cook was vice president of premier accounts for TelePacific Communications after working as a director in its Telepartner channel. He was also key in building the agent channel for Mpower Communications, which was acquired by TelePacific in 2006.  He also is a member of the 2011-12 Channel Partners Conference & Expo Advisory Board .

The post Will Your Cloud Connection Put Your Customers At Risk? appeared first on » EarthLink Cloud.