Is DaaS the thing that will finally make the CIO's life easier?

If you're the Director of IT, VP of IT or the CIO of your company, chances are your life hasn't been getting "easier" with time.  The technology needs of an organization are more complex than ever and IT is no longer just a hygienic need, it is a driver for growth and innovation.  The companies with the best IT leaders are winning in the marketplace because they understand that technology is the engine that moves the company forward.  So if your job is to manage this highly complex environment then the success of your company could very well hinge on your ability to steer the technology ship in the right direction.  No pressure right?

So what are some of the top concerns on the mind of most CIO's today?  This is what we're hearing from you: 

Mobility - specifically the security concerns of managing a dispersed workforce that wants to bring their own devices to get work done (and often will whether you like it or not).  This can be an IT nightmare when it comes to support and security.  We've all read the stories about the lost laptop that cost a company thousands if not millions because of the sensitive data that was exposed. 
Compliance - either with internal policies or external regulations / laws.  It's not good enough to to be good, you have to show an audit trail of your goodness.
Shrinking or flat budgets - the do more with less mentality still hasn't gone away completely and until we see an economic uptick, the likelihood is that you'll be dealing with some cost-pressure for the foreseeable future.
Disaster recovery / continuity - everyone wants it, but few can completely afford everything they want and many lose sleep over what they don't have.  The next ice storm or tornado or hurricane or flood or plague of insects can kill a company, if not completely at least for a while.  

Those are some (though not all of course) of the issues facing IT today.  It would be logical then to focus on solutions that address those needs but also allow IT to get away from the "break / fix" routine and into a role of technology leadership.  Instead of fixing a laptop for the CFO, they should be helping the CFO and her staff find technologies that can transform the way they get work done. But how can you do that if you're always putting out fires?  You need to minimize the fires and free up staff time to focus on more important things.  Easier said then done perhaps, until now.

Desktop as a Service (DaaS) can solve these problems.  DaaS is the outsourcing of the desktop environment to a third-party provider (hence the "as a service").  Worthy providers in this space have multiple, location-diverse data centers in an Active/Active setup.   Put simply, a better setup than what most companies deploy on their own.  Your servers, desktop environment (using Citrix or VMware) are all in a secure and redundant data center environment.   This allows your users to have zero or thin clients, or even use tablets, smartphones or home-based PCs of their own.  Before you have a mini panic attack about the idea of that much outsourcing, consider a few things:

• There are ways to protect your data so that you'll feel good about it.  Of course picking the right provider is paramount when it comes to this and the overall success of a cloud adoption strategy.
• You're still in control, you've just decided to get out of the business of owning your own hardware / data center.
• It really is more reliable and secure if you add up the net benefits of such an arrangement (don't expect us to convince you on that here in this blog as space does not allow for it, but we're asking you to keep an open mind and consider a discussion about it).

WIIFM (What's in it for me?): So how does Desktop as a Service (DaaS) actually make your life easier:

1) Managing mobility is easier.  A lot easier in fact. Users can bring their own devices without the burden of IT managing the security issues.  A stolen laptop no longer costs the company in lost data, since the data is never stored locally to begin with. The user can have a windows desktop experience on any device (including iPads and smartphones), and the computing / data storage is happening at a data center and not on the client.   You get out of the business of managing individual devices and into managing (in a centralized way) the core technology needs of your company.  IT spends less time fixing laptops or troubleshooting pesky software issues and suddenly life is all rainbows and sunshine for everyone (that may be an exaggeration but it truly does get better). 
2) Compliance requires an audit trail and many DaaS providers have made this a lot easier with built-in tools to handle that for you. 
3) For all its benefits, DaaS is likely to actually cost less, not more, than what you're doing today.  To prove this will require a thorough TCO analysis but 9 out of 10 times, you'll find a cost savings over a reasonable time frame. 
4)  Disaster Recovery and continuity is built-in.  When your HQ loses power for a week you'll be the one that is resting comfortably that night while your peers are scrambling to get things back up and running. 

DaaS is part of an overall picture of what cloud technology can do to transform the way your company approaches the fulfillment of its technology needs.  Want to learn more?  Visit us at www.stellistechnology.com or call +1 (207) 216-2155 and we'll be happy to start a discussion and bring together subject matter experts to help put a solution together for your enterprise.

How to Buy Bandwidth for the Enterprise: What you Absolutely Need to Know

"If I asked my customers what they wanted they would have said a faster horse" - Henry Ford

If you've been thinking about bandwidth in terms of "faster is better" then you're not alone but you're probably focused on the wrong thing.
Here is a primer for you: 

• Bandwidth is not speed.  Bandwidth is the size of the connection and has an indirect relationship with how fast your data will travel across the network
• Speed is actually how fast your data travels to and from where it needs to go.  
• Latency measures how fast/slow your packets of data travel to and from a particular destination.  The less latency the better
• Packet loss is just as it sounds, how many packets of data are simply "lost" in the network to and from any given destination.  Accept nothing less than perfection from your provider on this
• Jitter is the consistency of speed across the network

Here is a simple analogy:  pretend five cars are racing toward the same destination.  Then pretend that the road they're using is a 50-lane highway.  Latency would be the measurement of how long it took those five cars to get to the destination.  Bandwidth is the number of lanes on the highway.  Jitter is how much variation there is among the five cars (if the first car got there in 1 minute and the last car in 1 hour, then it could be said that is a high amount of jitter)

So if you focus on buying a 50-lane highway for your enterprise that may be fine but you are missing the bigger picture, especially if you're in a global or dispersed organization that has many applications or communications running across the network. 

For starters, is that highway a longer distance to get to your most important destinations?  Is there a network of roads that could get you there faster but perhaps not with as many lanes?  What is theoretically better, a two lane road that gets you there in half the time or a 50-lane highway that takes twice as long? 

The truth is, you can't easily get behind the curtain with most of the major network providers around the globe, so determining the best network connection for your enterprise is a challenge.  There are however a few things you can do to make sure that you're optimizing your choice in a network provider and they are unashamedly:

1) Work with Stellis Technology Advisors who can act as a no fee, single point of contact in the sales process to help facilitate the best choice for a provider.
2)  Make sure that SLAs are aggressive and structured for the type of network traffic you're doing today and will be doing in the future
3)  Make sure that your provider offers the kind of dynamic tools needed to be flexible.  (Taking from the analogy above, where you're going today may not be the same destination you'll be going in the future, so keep your options open).  These include elastic network tools, real-time network monitoring and port sizes that are suitable to current and future needs.