As a small business owner, you are both the architect and the builder of your business. The first step to building a great house is setting a solid foundation. A solid foundation offers a sturdy home for a family to enjoy, endures everyday stresses, and enables expansion.

You and a home builder have a lot in common. You both must follow your blueprints to set a solid foundation to continue to build upon. You require a motivated and empowered team to accomplish your business goals. You are also focused on the hard task of growing your customer base and maintaining happy customers.

According to IDC, the three top small business priorities are to improve productivity, reduce complexity, and manage expenses.[1] Unfortunately, as businesses grow their teams and customers, many begin facing IT challenges that get in the way of achieving their priorities. You may be struggling to keep business applications running efficiently, collaborating effectively with team members, or finding it difficult to scale. You may also have growing concerns about public cloud security and costs. Do these challenges sound familiar?

Don’t let your IT challenges get in the way of achieving your priorities. The Dell EMC PowerEdge T40 is the dependable IT building block for your small business. It builds upon the solid foundation you have laid for your business to thrive. It offers you the capability to efficiently support your small business.

Dependable

Builders invest wisely with reliable and sustainable materials and craftmanship that they trust. As the builder of your small business, it is important to invest wisely and choose a quality server engineered to specifically overcome IT challenges. If you require a reliable and efficient server for everyday business applications like file and print and mail and messaging, the PowerEdge T40 tower server has you covered.

You can run critical business applications that enable you to connect with your customers, prospective customers, and your team. It facilitates business applications to run quickly with faster computing capability than your everyday PC or laptop. It empowers multiple team members to work on the same file and print multiple documents efficiently. It allows you to communicate quickly and easily with customers and colleagues globally. Moreover, you can be assured with the reliable Dell EMC standard next business day hardware warranty.

The PowerEdge T40 helps you to manage expenses by avoiding unknown public cloud processing and storage costs. You can also control your sensitive data and access your data on-site instead of having it hosted on the public cloud. PowerEdge servers can be safer and cheaper than public cloud alternatives. As a matter of fact, independent research commissioned by Dell EMC uncovered that over 50% of mid-market organizations that have moved a workload from a public cloud service back to on-premise infrastructure cited security and/or cost as a reason for this decision.[2]

Efficient Operations

Builders know time is money and strive to maximize efficiency. You can efficiently support your small business with the foundational features of the PowerEdge T40 which allows you to easily consolidate, store, and share files on-site. The PowerEdge T40 server is built to process and transmit data quickly. This will provide your everyday business applications to run faster and reduce the amount of interruptions you may be experiencing. The server simplifies team collaboration, reduces re-work and provides peace of mind. You are also able to share more with team members and customers with a 50% increase in on-site data storage.[3]

As your organization’s primary developer, set a solid foundation for your company to achieve its business priorities. Choose the PowerEdge T40 as your dependable IT building block. It is the reliable and efficient foundation to withstand your IT challenges.

If you seek this dependable IT building block with remote manageability and 24/7 availability, consider the other Dell EMC PowerEdge one-socket servers.

SOURCE:

[1] SMB Digital Transformation: Attitudes, Priorities, and Assessment in Seven Countries, 2018

[2] ESG Master Survey Results, Tipping Point: Striking the Hybrid Cloud Balance, September 2018

[3] Based on Dell EMC Internal analysis comparing the T40 to the previous model

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PROTECT AGAINST KNOWN, UNKNOWN, AND UNDISCLOSED VULNERABILITIES IN YOUR NETWORK

The Cyber Threat Landscape

As threats continue to evolve in sophistication and speed, enterprises need effective, flexible, comprehensive security that meets the security and performance requirements of their hybrid networks.

Protect against the full range of threats in your network

Only complete visibility into all network traffic and activity will keep your network security ahead of targeted attacks that bypass traditional controls, exploit network vulnerabilities, and ransom or steal sensitive data, communications, and intellectual property.

Trend Micro™ TippingPoint™, an XGen™ security solution, provides best-of-breed intrusion prevention to protect against the full range of threats at wire speed anywhere on your network to protect your critical data and reputation.

Real-Time Security

Get proven network reliability and availability through automated, inline inspection without impeding network performance for hybrid infrastructure – including on-premises, private, and public cloud.

• Ideal for inline deployment with multiple fault-tolerant features that support continuous uptime and high availability
• Extend your existing TippingPoint network protection to AWS and other hybrid cloud environments with the powerful Trend Micro™ Cloud Network Protection™

Threat Intelligence

Achieve protection from advanced threats through industry-leading global threat intelligence

• Protect against known vulnerabilities and all potential attack permutations with minimal false positives
• Protect against undisclosed threats through exclusive access to vulnerability data from the Zero Day Initiative
• Connected Threat Defense delivers integrated security to provide automated and faster-time to protection
• Out-of-the-box recommended settings with automatic updates provide immediate and ongoing threat protection with little manual effort

Centralized Insight

Integrate and priorities security policy, response, and visibility with centralized management

• Gain centralized visibility into the network to make informed decisions and take immediate action on potential threats to infrastructure or data
• Integrate with Trend Micro and complementary third-party solutions, including SIEM, NGFW and VA/VM, to enhance a layered security approach
• Centralized management provides a scalable, policy-based operational model and enables straightforward management of large-scale deployments

Machine Learning

Maximize real-time protection with patented machine learning techniques

• Leverage mathematical models to determine if network traffic is malicious or benign
• Block network traffic that emulates characteristics of known or unknown malware families
• Detect and block DNS requests from malware infected hosts attempting to contact their C&C hosts using domain generation algorithms (DGA)

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We have been hearing a lot about automation and how it has satisfied the needs of workflow done manually on a day to day basis. Every organization is aiming to automate its business in such a way that accolades manual work and operations remain uninterrupted. Your business definitely is in need of it and here you will realize why.

RPA or Robotic process automation is a technological invention to strategically perform a sequence of activities without any human intervention. RPA promises to change the traditional way of doing IT solutions in an organization so that the human resources can enhance their capabilities shifting focus on tasks that requires reasoning, judgement, emotional intelligence and association with customers.

In IT domain, many business processes are dependent on multiple IT elements and does not communicate with each other resulting in consuming more time and labour. Here RPA comes into picture. RPA automates almost all the repetitive business processes and works faster than humans doing the same task eventually reducing staffing cost. Here it’s necessary to know how does this work. Robot in the abbreviation RPA does not mean a bodily robot but a computer software that can emulate human performing the task by interacting with applications interface. RPA Robots or Bots holds power to mimic most human actions like logging into applications, automate reports generation, data migration, quality assurance and more.

Biggest adopters of RPA are banks, Healthcare, Telecom, Insurance, Travel & Logistic and Human resources. Each industry uses RPA in their own way to achieve fast benefits, minimal upfront investments and 100% accuracy. Not just this but many hyper-growth companies also use RPA to sustain in this industry by partnering with RPA software providers such as Automation Anywhere, UiPath and Blue Prism.

So how RPA will be effective for your business?     

Robotic automation increases the overall productivity of the business. Since the end result of business is to generate revenue, RPA with great accuracy helps in automating sales operations.

According to Gartner the RPA market grew 63% in the year 2018 and expects the software revenue to reach USD 1.3 billion in 2019. ICICI Bank is the first bank in India to deploy Software Robotics. Using this they perform more than one million banking transactions per working day. The system recognizes patterns and execute activities across multiple applications such as data validation, data formatting, currency exchange rate processing and multi format message creation.

Software robots can be easily trained and get integrated perfectly into any system. RPA software robots can be appointed by banks to initiate credit card applications. They can gather all required documents, can do background checks, issue the card if the individual is eligible and case can be closed on successful delivery. This can reduce the banks turnaround time and can achieve higher customer satisfaction.

RPA is the biggest revolution in digital transformation. It can play a key role in increasing speed and efficiency of the business without compromising on the quality. Companies who has already implemented RPA has seen tremendous growth. It is gaining a lot of attention in IT industry. It is one of the fast growing and adopting technology in the coming years. So to reap the benefits fast, adopt faster.

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Information Technology today has become an vital part of businesses today as it is not only fueling the business but also enhancing the way you treat your customer. System administrators work around the clock to maintain & manage complex infrastructure which builds base for any business. Every business these days uses huge number of devices such as laptops, routers, printers to barcode scanners. This enables the flexibility to work from anywhere, anytime on any device. Earlier when the need was only to manage desktops, conventional Client management system was used. But with the increase in devices, enterprise mobility and BYOD(Bring-your-own-device) these tools couldn’t fulfill the requirements. Keeping track of all these endpoints manually became a challenge. The answer to this challenge is Unified endpoint management.

So what exactly is Endpoint and Unified Endpoint Management(UEM)?

Endpoint is a node or device connected to LAN/WAN that communicates back & forth across the network. An endpoint can be a hub, switch, modem, host computer or server. All these endpoints should be located into the business network and must be timely maintained by software updates. Unified Endpoint Management is a software tool that manages and secures all of organizations diverse endpoints from a centralized console. Unified Endpoint Management  is the amalgamation and advancement of Client Management Tools(CMT), Mobile device Management(MDM) and Enterprise Mobility Management(EMM).

Components of Unified Endpoint Management(UEM) :

Client Management Tools(CMT) are used by desktop support organizations to automate system administration such as inventory management, software distribution and usage monitoring.

Mobile Device Management(MDM) is a security software that helps managing mobile devices. MDM stores information about device enrollment, support of applications management, device lockdown, authorized data access, location tracking, mobile policy management and telecom management.

Enterprise Mobility Management(EMM) offers all the MDM features and allows organizations to securely enable employees use of mobile devices and applications.

Basically MDM helps manage MacOS and Windows 10 using APIs but it fails to aid conventional desktop applications. Here CMT can help. Some organizations have converted their MDM into UEM solution, keeping MDM workflow as their base. And others have modified their client management approach and framework to adapt to the UEM market.

Key Highlights of UEM :

• Manage multiple endpoints on different platforms(iOS, MacOS, ChromeOS, Linux, Android, Windows and more) from one single console
• Reduces IT management cost
• Enhances IT security
• Enhances visibility over network devices with end-user support
• Onboarding of BYOD(Bring your own device)
• Enables better business decisions
• Excludes patch work for root of a problem as analysis of devices becomes easy

Business needs to change their approach from devices to users to better understand endpoints and user requirements. This is possible only when IT workers know their network, conditions and solutions of any problems. With multiple tools(EMM, MDM, CMT) available managing single endpoint, creates lot of havoc in automating a process.  With implementing UEM, IT workers can manage user demands priority-wise. Everything gets streamlined and consistency can be achieved by relying on reports generated from UEM.

In couple of years, Gartner forecasts majority of enterprises will switch from CMT, EMM or MDM to UEM solutions. Businesses needs to realize their demand of network requirements, number of devices to be used including IoT devices and desktop devices. According to that they can decide upon the solutions from vendors offering similar features and decide which is best fit for their enterprise. UEM offers business to control all the endpoints, regardless of operating system or device category. Businesses who do not have plans to deploy a UEM solution must know that the clock is ticking and they should get-up-and-go to implement this as their priority.

So what are your plans for unifying the way you operate ? Let’s discuss soon !

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In today’s connected world, everyone relies on technology more than ever before. Cybercriminals have expanded their pace by entering into a computer every 40 seconds on average. And so cybersecurity has become the foremost priority of every organization as they are often the target of such attacks. Cybersecurity is the practice of defending internet-connected systems, networks, devices including hardware, software and data from attack, damage or unauthorized access. CyberSecurity is the new buzz in organizations and businesses whether large or small. Every business has different perspectives & priorities, and as cyber-attacks continue to get bigger every year it becomes important for every business to stay on top of the current trends in the cybersecurity news cycle. As breaches are not easily detected, protecting organizations from cyber threats will become difficult. Following are some of the cybersecurity trends that will be seen in 2020:

Cyber Security budget will persistently increase: CyberSecurity is the top priority of every organization professional’s mind. Companies’ annual investment in privacy and security has gone up and is estimated to increase further. Per employee, companies are spending an average of around $2,300 for cybersecurity. However, depending on the known and unknown threats, businesses progressively add resources into security solutions resulting in an increase in spending. Cyber budgets in 2019 have increased by 59%, which is around $124 billion. It is predicted to reach $128 billion by 2020. The biggest individual market with the largest spending is anticipated to be the US. 

Attackers and Defenders will cash in on Artificial Intelligence: Artificial Intelligence(AI) and Machine Learning(ML) are taking the spotlight to identify and counter back to threats that crop up. AI-based solutions are implemented to work around the clock and have the potential to respond within milliseconds to attacks as compared to when identified manually. The brilliant side of the story is defenders can use AI to build strong security frameworks to automatically detect a threat and nullify threats before they harm the organization’s security. Simulated attacks can be performed on a network to block system weaknesses before malicious attacks. But AI isn’t perfect and has a flip side too. AI-based solutions can be used by cybercriminals to probe networks. Once an AI system is assaulted, cybercriminals can use AI to intensify their offensive activity. AI could also be used for phishing and launch other attacks via AI botnets designing realistic emails to dope individuals, hence making it difficult to identify major attacks. Over time, organizations will have to mop up the cybersecurity challenges that AI holds in the future.

5g Security Predictions: 5g connectivity comes with the use of a large number of IoT devices and BYOD (Bring your own devices). The network will move to distributed routing instead of centralized routing. This means it will become hard to screen all IoT devices, connecting to the 5g network and moving away from the central router makes them the prime targets for cyber attacks. 5g experts predict that more than 36 billion devices will be connected to the internet by the end of 2020. The ever-growing volume of personal data needs to protect against exploitation as 5g will collect small details about users mobiles, cars and other sensitive data that will give cybercriminals more opportunities for exploitation and attacks. The dramatic expansion of 5g creates a multidimensional cyberattack vulnerability.In the increase of emerging threats, redefined security solutions or framework is the need of an hour.

Expertise Adversity: The shortage of Cybersecurity professionals will continue to increase. The Cybersecurity training needs to be advanced as certifications alone won’t help. It has been a recurring issue for the last couple of years. The number of cybersecurity openings is flowing all over the place rapidly, but the supply can’t keep up the demands. This gap is expected to be widened by 2020. Cybersecurity Ventures recently estimated that the global shortage of cybersecurity will reach 3.5 million unfilled positions by 2021.

Cybersecurity’s future is in the clouds: Utilization of cloud has become inescapable, users store photos and memories, email accounts, business files, and other important personal data. With on-premise data spread across on public and private clouds, organizations do not have centralized control leaving several security gaps. To bridge these gaps organizations are constantly working on implementing hybrid environment solutions for cloud deployments for both public and private clouds. 

Data Isolation and Guidelines will intensify: Organizations need to restructure their data privacy rules and regulations as the previous year it was predicted by the European Union(EU) will penalize violation of General Data Protection Regulations(GDPR). EU created GDPR for security protection of data for companies doing business with European customers. High-profile data breach attacks made consumers more and more demanding for better privacy rules. Government all around the world is so involved in the global cybersecurity crisis that they keep updating new data storage regulations. A huge amount of private data stored over the internet calls for robust security measures and practices affecting the organization’s massive security operation in 2020. The Indian government will reveal the official cybersecurity policy by January 2020.

The number of data breaches & attacks is increasing by the day. Cybercriminals are also getting advanced by using the double-sided sword of AI to break into organization cybersecurity. It becomes important to keep updated with the latest technologies. Merging the latest and existing technologies will help protect businesses of all sizes against upcoming threats.

So what do you think, is your organization Cyber Aware? 

Attacks can come from any loose end, so Beware of the Trap.

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Are you looking for intelligent, automated and simplified management of data?

Know how you can achieve that by Hyper-converged Infrastructure.

What does Hyper-converged Infrastructure mean?

Hyper-converged infrastructure is a prototype shift that tightly integrates storage, computes, networking and virtualization resources in a single system. Thus, reducing infrastructure complexity and enhancing scalability without compromising on performance. Hyper-converged infrastructure can also be termed as Hyper-convergence.

There are many benefits of this tightly integrated node infrastructure, but the primary reasons for organizations switching from complex infrastructure to the simplicity of hyper-convergence are lower costs, consistent performance, and flexibility. Things that Hyper-convergence can do:

Cost-Efficient 

Data scaling is the biggest challenge that organizations are facing today. Hyper-convergence is modeled to avoid frequent purchases of infrastructure every few years. Low costs hardware is used to scale the data center that can be easily managed. Expanding HCI is as simple as just adding the IT resource. Integrating components reduces storage use, power use and lowers management costs. HCI data center costs become less as there is lesser equipment to purchase and manage. Companies can start small and grow resources as needed.

Staff Efficient

As everything gets folded into a hyper-converged environment, recruitment needs of the organization change. Instead of having specialist staff for each resource area, infrastructure specialist can be recruited.

Data-Efficient

Because all the components are working together, the management of tools can be achieved from one console. There’s constant pressure on the IT department and data centers to deliver predictable results. When multiple applications share the same infrastructure, it’s possible that the performance of one application can hinder the performance of others. HCI’s performance settings eliminate resource contention and variable application performance. It also improves data efficiency by deduplicating data which leads to an increase in storage capacity and network bandwidth.

Data Protection

In a traditional data center, data protection is both complex and expensive. It is required to purchase expensive hardware to protect data. However Hyper-converged environment comes with built-in functionalities like data backup, recovery, and disaster recovery. After all hyper-convergence is all about simplifying infrastructure.

Performance Efficient

Hyper-convergence allows organizations to deploy workloads and many kinds of applications to enjoy high performance. HCI uses fast CPUs and SSDs storage devices. The environment handles all CPU and memory capacity so that instead of focusing on individual resource needs administrators can focus on applications.

Multi-cloud Support Efficient

Hyper-convergence simplifies a hybrid cloud environment and lessens transitioning time and cost. Data & Applications can be moved easily between servers and the public cloud.

Data grows by 40% every year, in 2019 it has reached 28,000 exabytes.

With data growing at that speed, organizations need additional challenges to keep up with the infrastructure updates. With the Hybrid cloud being used endlessly,3-tier infrastructure cannot fulfill all the IT needs. Hyper-converged infrastructure is designed to deliver simplicity, higher automation, and scalability than converged infrastructure. Investments in the Hyper-converged environment has increased in recent years. Hyper-convergence is a good choice for those organizations that uses virtualization largely and having difficulty to cope up with the cost that is required for data storage and protection. With the technology in the right place, organizations will no longer need to rely on different computer or storage systems. They can rather invest their time and human resources on operational aspects than on maintaining infrastructure. 

Hyper-converged infrastructure is a bundled software model with potentials like data compression, data protection, data optimization, data deduplication, backup, and recovery. It is an integrated hardware and software package implemented and sold by a single vendor. Thus it requires less installation and configuration.

As per Gartner, 20% of organizations that are currently using 3-tier infrastructure will transit to hyper-converged infrastructure by 2020.

Hyper-converged infrastructure is the future. It centralized all the hardware needs in a single console. It is flexible and uses a pay-as-you-grow model when organizations need to expand.

Given the above-mentioned benefits of hyper-convergence, are you ready for this evolution? Have you already moved to the hyper-converged data centers, share your thoughts on this IT infrastructure solution!

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Technology today has changed the elementary facet of our lives. With urge for a stronger and better internet connectivity, digitization of processes has led the world to move towards automation. That wasn’t enough and thus the new buzz word Hyper Automation.

Hyper automation is the advancement of traditional automation capabilities by using technologies like Artificial Intelligence (AI), Robotic Process Automation (RPA) and Machine Learning (MI) to automate processes. Basically, hyper automation is a combination of automation tools to increase AI decision making. Hyper automation is the future of RPA of replacing human actions required for digital tasks. Gartner says that multiple tools are needed to replace the work that a human can do, and thus hyper automation combines all the automation efforts under a single umbrella.

Hyper automation is a prodigious tool to uplift the business. Businesses can benefit immensely from hyper automation in following ways:

• Decrease human effort by doing lot of work in less time
• Reduces risk of human errors
• Increases productivity and output

Execution and implementation of automation is tough and complicated. It creates new challenges for the businesses with how the IT environment is controlled. Automation is present in every step taken in companies such as device connectivity, collecting data, extract valuable data from business for analytics and present it to stakeholders for business profits. Automation is an underlying layer and thus judgment calls to identify the scope of automation are required before implementation. Thus, Gartner defines hyper automation important when constructing IoT devices.

Hyper automation will continue to expand, and companies need to focus on automating complex processes resulting in end-to-end solution. Amazon and FedEx are the top companies that has used hyper automation to intensify customers experience and execute piece of work related to logistics.

The implementation of automation results in a digital twin of an organization (DTO). Digital twin is a concept about creating digital representation of connected IoT devices managed by a single tool. Hence instead of giving access to different IoT devices, digital twin can be presented to stakeholders. Digital twin helps in predictive analysis of organizations assets leading to efficient functioning of business. With this concept businesses can eliminate problems before they occur to prevent failures. DTO are designed to work consistently and continuously. The data collected in this process is analyzed continuously and saved in cloud. This results in accessing data instantly for various business analysis. It also enables users to resolve issues from any remote location.

We’ve previously discussed how RPA will be effective for the productivity of the business. Soon automation will be important for every company. But without being aware of where automation is required in business and following the trend, implementing it would be a disaster. Hyper automation is both a blessing and a curse. So, it becomes important to firstly identify areas for automation. Employees in company should also be trained to make most out of automation and not think it as a danger to their job.

Companies are competing to future proof their business by implementing intelligent, robotic and automation systems. For hyper-automation in every facet of business it requires continuous and optimal blending of human and machine capabilities.

In a short span of time expansion of hyper-automation has inspired companies to eradicate manual operations quickly to use human force in other more important areas of business. If you’re still not in the game, then you’re definitely missing out on opportunities of expanding your business.

So, is your business ready for hyper automation? If not, what other automation technologies are you currently engaging? What benefits have your business reaped?

Please write to us at marketing@goapl.com

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