Five ways that Cloud Computing will Change IT roles

When cloud computing was instigated in the market there were very mixed views as to how it will help the future of the IT industry. There were proponents of the positive and negative outcomes of cloud computing in the industry. In hind sight this reaction is almost similar to when open source was introduced.

Cloud Computing is rapidly rolling as a standard in business organizations. The technology is revolutionizing the way organizations manage infrastructure and business processes. As we see cloud computing is growing and admired as the solution for organizations seeking to save time and money on IT costs and leverage their business processes to increase profits.

Let’s see how the cloud computing will change business and the tech industry.

Easy Accessibility of Data through Cloud

The accessibility of cloud computing is a major incentive for business owners, which allows its employees to access the data from anywhere at any time, instead of carrying the data on a memory card or emails or coming into the office. If entrepreneurs are on a business trip or any employee on a vacation, it provides easy access to the data through cloud computing, making many of the inconveniences void.

Saving your IT Costs

Most of the organizations use cloud computing as pay-as-you-go aspect. This means organizations pay only for the service and storage that are currently being used by them. This automatically cuts down the IT costs leading to an increase in the revenue. With the expansion of the company or a growth in the storage requirements storage needs can be scaled up or in the case of software, more payment can be made for increase in the usage for the same.

Small companies, start-ups can break-even faster as cloud computing rapidly improves the standing of the company against the competition by bringing in more revenue quicker and scope for grabbing important market share.

Boost for the Architects

Massive growth is lined up in days ahead. It will be inevitable that all manual activities/services will be replaced by automation. Such a scene provides a huge scope for enterprise architects who will play major roles in IT. Skilled architects whose roles include development, implementation and enforcement of automated systems in every IT organization for uncountable services such that it makes the tasks simpler, easier to perform.

Utilizing cloud computing services help organization through cloud based software in sending invoices to clients, organizing and synchronizing employee payroll, to name a few.

Storage
Everyone with a computer spends a lot of time acquiring data and then trying to find a way to store it. For some computer owners, finding enough storage space to hold all the data they've acquired is a real challenge. Investing in larger hard drives and other external storage devices like thumb drives or compact discs are expensive. Desperate computer users might delete entire folders worth of old files in order to make space for new information. But some are choosing to rely on a growing trend: cloud storage. Cloud storage is an area which is the latest burst. For individual computer owners it is the safest and most economical. Enterprise Storage such as Backup, Disaster Recovery in cloud are still pondered over by bigger organizations but are getting easy acceptance by small industries to use cloud for their storage purposes.

Process Improvement

Today even though most of the business has been digitized there still remains some documentation like hardcopy memos and handouts to employees and customers. Cloud computing has changed that as more and more businesses are giving up on documentation by utilizing emails to circulate important documents. Even we can store documents at one centralized location and grant access to employees. Through on demand solutions and shared services, which can be hosted on cloud, organizations can capitalize on the development of new skills and solutions. This leads to better business processes which in turn ensure that the organization is lean enough to adapt to market changes and even see them as new opportunities for growth.

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Best Practices for Successful Migration to SharePoint 2013

Recently Microsoft has announced SharePoint 2013 beta version release, and its full version is expected to be released in early 2013. And well, you might already be considering migrating to SharePoint 2013? Here let us discuss all about SharePoint 2013 Migration.

There is so much to learn and various new features to be discovered and what certainly will be interesting is how quickly businesses migrate to the new platform. Taking those steps will gain you immediate benefits in your current environment in order to ensure you are ready to quickly take advantage of the new SharePoint 2013 features.

Migration to SharePoint 2013

Many organizations are planning to migrate, consolidate and restructure their legacy content to the next version of SharePoint. There’s more to do than just sit and wait: you can take steps today to prepare your environment for the new release.

Whether you are looking to move today or tomorrow, whether migrating your data to SharePoint on-premises or SharePoint Online, you should do it by keeping an eye on how it will impact the inevitable. You can seamlessly move your entire SharePoint environment, as well as Microsoft Exchange Public Folders, and Windows files, to on-premises versions of SharePoint, SharePoint Online, or a hybrid of the two.

Here are some of the best practices to be considered while upgrading or migration to SharePoint 2013

Best Practices for Agile Migration      

• Before upgrade, ensure present environment is fully functioning
• Perform a trail upgrade on a test farm
• Take the backup of your present database
• Set original data as read-only, while migrating
• Migrate all of your content to both SharePoint On-Premises and the Cloud either anyone of them to save time and money
• Migrate content with simply drag and drop option, move content when you want to move it, schedule it during non-working hours with bulk migrations or phased
• Consolidate the data to a single location from all of your sources to improve productivity
• Migrate multiple SharePoint site lists and libraries simultaneously and save project costs and timeframe.
• Assign metadata to content, which improve intelligence.
• Simplify Your Project Management with schedule steps in migration and get real-time progress reports.

 

Migration Methodologies

Now we all know some of the best practices of migration and that migrating content is no simple task and every migration activity is different. We have two types of migration processes—Manual Process Migration and Automated Process Migration, which helps to migrate the content from one server to other.

Manual Migration

Let’s talk about manual process migration for moving the database from your SharePoint Local or Public Folders to SharePoint On-premises or SharePoint Online. This process could be used if you had a small number of Public Folders to migrate.

Manual Migration is the old traditional way of migrating the data, cutting and pasting of content to new server. This process of migration is cost effective, yet time consuming and importantly error-zone solution.

If you are migrating small or huge data from public folders to the new server, it is better to go with the automated migration as it is error-free, low cost and saves time.

Automated Migration

Automated tools make your SharePoint Migrations completely seamless and easy as 1, 2 & 3. Just select the sites you want to migrate, define your settings and click migrate. Tools will take care of the complete migration and migrate the entire site along with associated Meta Data, security and versioning.

Most of the companies rarely migrate the data from server to server with custom settings and with selected site; in this case automated migration is the best choice to migrate the data. While migrating log files are created and we can track the process and avoid losing the data during migration. Luckily, there are few companies who help you in confidently preparing for your SharePoint 2013 migration with readiness solutions; some of them are:

• Quest
• MetaVis  
• ZSL
• e-Zest
• Metalogix
• Logimindz
• Infosys

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A Quick Guide for Successful Implementation of Desktop Virtualization Solution

Desktop virtualization:

Desktop virtualization (client virtualization) holds a great promise for helping IT departments address the consumerization of IT, although some implementations can be expensive. While virtualizing the desktop, most users prefer to deploy more than one approach of desktop virtualization.

 

There are several storage virtualization & server virtualization solutions that can perform well and save IT expenses of your company. Desktop virtualization is one solution that can provide employees with secure access to corporate data on any device. It allows users to use virtually any application anywhere and access Windows everywhere.

In April, Gartner published a report titled “Desktop Virtualization: Building a People-Centric Infrastructure.” In this report, Gartner discusses how desktop virtualization should not be a “one-size-fits-all” solution. Devices and IT departments should support the reality that everyone has their own tastes and preferences when it comes to what applications they regularly use, where they use them, and how they customize their applications to make them more personal.

Getting started with desktop virtualization

As the current generation employees carry smartphones and tablets to the workplace, organizations are looking for solutions that can help them embrace workplace mobility. Desktop Virtualization is a unique solution which provides users to access the corporate data any time anywhere.

Desktop Virtualization requires a careful approach to implementation in order to get the most appropriate and significant benefits. Regardless of the scope of the implementation, there are three phases that are key in the overall virtualization roll out plan.

Assess

In this initial stage enterprises need to understand the employees’ needs, depending on their roles & responsibilities, involving different applications to perform the tasks. IT departments need to sort employees and applications as per their requirement and ensure that all employees are sufficiently provided with what they need. Assessing also includes determining the employees’ awareness of the Desktop Virtualization process and its benefits; thereby educating them to fix any prevailing gap.

Design

At this stage, IT departments need to plan out detailed report of employee application needs before implementation of integration of the systems. This stage involves prioritizing all tasks of desktop usage from networking to storage and applications, as well as presenting them in a detailed architectural plan.

Deploy

After complete implementation of applications, IT departments need to closer with employees for smooth flow of virtual desktop experience and its applications for long time.

Before deployment, IT departments need to test solutions in a production and to make sure those error free virtual desktops. IT department should be regularly monitoring the desktops for any network or application issues.

This helps them to proactively observe and diagnose how best to optimize their desktop virtualization adoption.

Challenges of Cloud Desktop Virtualization

While embracing Desktop virtualization, companies can expect some or all of the following challenges namely;

• Choosing the right vendor to your business needs
• Selecting a platform, whether hosted in-house or third-party
• Check out the user experiences
• Technological challenges, if data is lost when moving between environments or making physical equipment (Printers, Scanners)
• Licensing prices may make or break the case for virtualization depending on the company considering it.

Some of the Top Desktop Virtualization Solution providers for your reference....

• VMware
• Microsoft
• Netapp
• HP
• Citrix
• Dell
• Cisco
• ZSL

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