There are many reasons that businesses and their IT teams may weigh up the option to backup and protect data with an inhouse solutions versus outsourcing data backup.
Continue readingLately you might have been hearing Cloud marketers endorsing a form of data centre that seems to be more than just a Cloud. Enter, the “Virtual Data Centre”. Could it be more virtual than the Cloud? Is it also a data centre? It sounds like the next level in co-location but in fact it’s still as good as it gets – which is nothing to be sniffed at.
We know about the different cloud deployment models at data centres: public cloud; private cloud; and the hybrid cloud, which combines both private and public clouds, usually from different data centres to facilitate cloud storage and processing. The Virtual Data Centre is capable of providing all three models within co-location data centres. The infrastructure can be segregated and made private to each customer but still allows each resident to expose their environment publicly.
Typical cloud users merely use data centre facilities for cloud-based applications – think Software as a Service (SaaS). Instead the Virtual Data Centre is virtualised right down to infrastructure-level and made available to customers – think Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS). The cloud provider is responsible for the CAPEX of the entire data centre kit i.e. physical servers and VMs, storage partitioning, network infrastructure and load balancers, however, the onus is on the cloud user to configure their partition of it.
Within the stack of cloud-computing, PaaS adds an extra layer of abstraction to that of SaaS. Where in SaaS cloud providers manage infrastructure used by applications being served from the Cloud, in PaaS the software development effort is provided with a framework (Microsoft’s Azure is prominent in this market). This framework entails middleware, operating systems and development and deployment services.
IaaS further abstracts the physical infrastructure made available to the user by the cloud provider. Popular hypervisors that are able to achieve this kind of resource pooling include VMware’s ESX and Microsoft’s Hyper-V and others, such as the open-source Xen and Oracle’s VirtualBox.
There are many reasons that businesses and their IT teams may weigh up the option to backup and protect data with an inhouse solutions versus outsourcing data backup.
Continue readingCyber-criminals are increasingly viewing education institutions as easy prey. No surprise then that the UK’s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) recently warned of a spike in the targeting of schools, universities and colleges.
Continue readingThe majority of Google services went down yesterday, leading to widespread disruption all around the world. Users were left waiting for almost an hour before hearing they could regain access.
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