General

DevSecOps – Adding Security to DevOps Approach

Shantha Kumari

The increasing agility and Cloud Development has shifted the focus from the traditional perception of security. DevSecOps is the current trend, where rather than apply  security to the application towards the end, it is implemented in all aspects of the development process right from conception to implementation, deployment and maintenance.

DevSecOps is an emerging set of practices that help the industry keep pace with innovation. DevSecOps is a combination of Compliance Operations, Security Engineering, Security Science, and Security Operations. It is designed to allow practitioners to provide value to business partners by focusing on solving security complexity with a customer back mindset.

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Top 3 Reasons to Choose Cloud Based Disaster Recovery

Jatinder Virdee

Disasters happen, that doesn’t mean your business has to fail as well. Today, many companies are pursuing cloud-based DR solutions as an addition to or replacement for traditional solutions because of key factors such as cost and ease of use. When making these decisions it’s helpful if you can get the opinion of other knowledgeable professionals who have faced similar decisions.

Sysfore being a prime enabler for a variety of cloud solutions on Azure and AWS cloud platforms; we came up with top 3 reasons why a lot of companies are moving to the cloud,  keeping one of our customer stories – India’s largest and oldest agricultural firm- Harrisons Malayalam Limited as focus:

 

1. Keeps Systems Running:

Getting back up and running soon after a disaster is important in any business especially if it is a leading agricultural giant. This company focused on moving their systems to the cloud, greatly improving their disaster recovery and reliability, in addition to ensuring their core systems and processes remained operational during a disaster.  “With Microsoft Azure, our employees enjoy superior performance of our core business system, which keeps the business moving at maximum productivity.” Says Abraham Ittyipe, Harrisons Malayalam Limited- Chief Information Officer

 

2. Improve Service Quality:

No matter what business you’re in, your customers expect every interaction to be at least as good as the last one, if not more so. How can enterprises continuously improve? Let’s look at the example of the agricultural company mentioned above. It has survived and grown by adopting modern farming methods and automating many processes. This business needed to transform itself from a traditional on-premises software methods to a cloud-based IaaS vendor, without building, managing and supporting additional virtual infrastructure in another location — and they decided to use Sysfore to help them do it. “The fact that it’s built on a binary compatible architecture that moves HML’s infrastructure directly to Azure is a huge business benefit for us and allows us to drive higher quality service to our customers,” We’re happy to let Sysfore and Microsoft focus on infrastructure so that we can focus on farming.” Says Abraham Ittyipe, Harrisons Malayalam Limited- Chief Information Officer.

 

3. Reduce Spend:

No organization has an unlimited amount for CAPEX. HML needed to reduce spending, provide access to critical servers during a disruption, and allow for periodic testing — all with minimal maintenance. They found what they needed with Sysfore on Microsoft Azure.  “For what it costs to run Microsoft Dynamics AX on-premises for three years we can run it in Azure for four years,” Ittyipe says. “We are extremely pleased with our selection of Microsoft Azure. Its capabilities, performance, scale, and cost-effectiveness greatly simplify management of our technology infrastructure.” Says Abraham Ittyipe, Harrisons Malayalam Limited- Chief Information Officer

Get access to the full case study here.

 

Ready to leverage the cloud? Visit www.sysfore.com or write to us on info@sysfore.com

Surviving in a Multi Cloud Universe

Shantha Kumari

Multi Cloud is the use of multiple cloud computing services in a single heterogeneous architecture. Organizations typically opt for a multi-cloud approach, where it can offer the hardware, software and infrastructure redundancy necessary to optimize fault tolerance. It can also be used to manage your traffic from different customers across the fastest possible networks.

This is different from the Hybrid Cloud environment where a mix of on-premises, private cloud and third-party public cloud services such as Amazon or Azure, work in close collaboration between the platforms.

Multi Cloud Architecture

 

Multi Cloud Benefits

Multi Cloud Benefits

  • Redundancy, Scalability and High Availability – Incorporating a Multi-cloud strategy means committing to use two or more cloud services to minimize the risk of widespread data loss or downtime due to a localized component failure in a cloud computing environment. Such a failure can occur in hardware, software, or infrastructure.
  • Autonomy – The ability to deploy your applications on different cloud providers has the clear advantage of reducing dependency on a single vendor (referred to as “vendor lock-in”). Here it becomes difficult to meet the needs of diverse partners and customers. This increases the overall enterprise performance as there is greater flexibility in data deployment options. The workload moves between clouds as the computing needs and costs change with changing business needs.
  • Facilitates Disaster recovery and business continuity in case of unforeseen events or natural disasters.
  • High security across the multi cloud. Using a multi-cloud deployment model can help servers stay secure if used in consistent methods.
  • Pick and choose your features – Multi cloud provides you support for multiple platforms and service providers. Each having unique features and services, you can opt for those which satisfies your business needs and requirements.

Multi Cloud Concerns

The Cloud universe is diversified into public, private and hybrid clouds. Some organizations use a public cloud to make resources available to consumers over the Internet and a private cloud to provide hosted services to a limited number of people behind a firewall. A third type of cloud, called a hybrid cloud, may be used to manage miscellaneous internal and external services.

  • As organizations incorporate a mix of public, private and on-premises solutions for their application deployment and choice of cloud providers, it becomes important for them to deploy services in a consistent and repeatable way. Otherwise it will be difficult to control their IT infrastructure.
  • Multi cloud integration is a main pain point for organizations. Ranging from operating systems to protocol stacks, public IaaS providers use different technologies to build and support their cloud services. This diverse environments results in minimal software portability.
  • Complexity of multi-cloud. It consists of different technologies, different interfaces, different services, and different terminology. There is currently no standardization of terminology, instance sizes, or methodologies across cloud vendors.
  • Choosing the wrong provider and building apps in the wrong environments can negatively affect application performance, workflows, change costs and both communication and transactions with customers.
  • Accessing and maintaining security as the organization grows becomes difficult and complicated. Tracking costs and billing associated with multi cloud is difficult with the pay-per use model of the public IaaS.
  • Switching between cloud environments involves consistency and a level of efficiency for managing those dissimilar environments. It could be due to better and competitive price, features, regulatory requirements, performance, or other factors.

Possible Solutions for Multi cloud concerns

There are a number of ways to work around the multi cloud concerns.

  • The deployment issues can be overcome through consistency in automations. Automating most of the processes will solve the main issues of scale, speed, costs and accuracy.
  • Standard architectures for setting up, connecting and consolidating maintenance functions across the series of standalone IaaS systems makes it easier to opt for a multi-cloud strategy.
  • Third party cloud brokers can assess, compare prices, features and procure the suitable cloud services. They will also handle the cloud integration, management and accounting responsibilities.
  • Multi cloud management tools are available that can monitor usage, performance and costs across multi-cloud environments.
  • Audit and assess before an organization decides to monitor cloud services. It must first identify the specific services its employees use.

While enterprise interest in multi cloud and public IaaS continues to grow, if a proper multi-cloud management strategy isn’t in place, managing these clouds will be difficult for the IT.

Sysfore can guide you to migrate to a Multi cloud environment seamlessly. To know more, you contact us at  info@sysfore.com or call us at +91-80-4110-5555.