cloud assurance

As the use of cloud solutions in government increases, both business and IT leaders are recognizing that the safety and success of their business depend on finding ways to take full advantage of cloud innovation while ensuring consistent service levels, data management and privacy, and user experiences. Hybrid IT management includes aligning the organization around service levels, cost control, security, and IT-enabled innovation.

Big Data is not just a big buzzword. Government agencies have been collecting large amounts of data for some time and analyzing the data collected to one degree or another. Big data is a term that describes high volume, variety and velocity of information that inundates an organization on a regular basis. But it’s not the amount of data that’s important. It’s what organizations do with the data that matters. Big data can be analyzed for insights that lead to better decisions and better services.

IoT has proven its value in the private sector. Ever since the 1980’s, US manufacturing has undergone a dramatic transition based on IoT. Machines that where once manually calibrated and maintained began to be controlled by specialized computers. These computers were able to quickly recalibrate tools which allowed manufactures to produce smaller batches of parts, but were also often locked into proprietary computing languages and architectures.

Too often we hear that people want to move everything to the cloud. Unfortunately cloud is not the easy button, and it will not fix every problem that you have with IT today. We have seen a large number of customers who do the math after moving to the cloud only to realize that it was more expensive to run in an offsite cloud than onsite IT. These customers then move away from offsite cloud for workloads that never should have left the building. The cloud in its many varieties is a good tool that can help organizations, but it needs to be thought out. This document is intended to help you move the right workloads to the right clouds in the best way possible and avoid the yoyo effect of moving twice and paying for the privilege of the experience.

Security is a looming issue for organizations. The threat landscape is increasing, and attacks are becoming more sophisticated. Emerging technologies like IoT, mobility, and hybrid IT environments now open new organization opportunity, but they also introduce new risk. Protecting servers at the software level is no longer enough. Organizations need to reach down into the physical system level to stay ahead of threats. With today’s increasing regulatory landscape, compliance is more critical for both increasing security and reducing the cost of compliance failures. With these pieces being so critical, it is important to bring new levels of hardware protection and drive security all the way down to the supply chain level. Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) has a strategy to deliver this through its unique server firmware protection, detection, and recovery capabilities, as well as its HPE Security Assurance.

The advent of cloud computing and software-defined data center architectures for modern application delivery has made networking more sensitive than ever before. Applications in the digital age require networks that can expand and contract dynamically based on consumer demand. Enterprises are implementing software-defined networking (SDN) to deliver the automation required by these new environments, but the dynamic nature of SDN makes network management and monitoring fundamentally more challenging. Network infrastructure teams need monitoring tools that can provide visibility into these new and constantly changing networks. This white paper explores the importance of SDN monitoring and examines a leading example of a solution, CA Performance Management with CA Virtual Network Assurance integration.

Data breaches are bad for business, so every enterprise needs security. In the past this was expensive, because security products were designed for companies with deep pockets and teams of experts. But that's changed. New 'cloud based' services, such as those offered by Qualys, are fast to deploy, safe and easy to use. What's more they're even more affordable. With growing demands from customers and regulators for security, now is a good time to invest in security. Leading cloud-based security services deliver a professional level of security assurance in a form that fits the circumstances and pockets of small businesses.

VMware vCloud® Government Service provided by Carpathia® is an enterprise-class hybrid cloud service that delivers the tried and tested VMware capabilities widely used by government organizations today, with the added security and compliance assurance of FedRAMP authorization. The hybrid cloud is becoming more and more prevalent – in fact, nearly three-fourths of large enterprises expect to have hybrid deployments by 2015.

VMware vRealize® Suite is the market-leading cloud management platform purpose-built for heterogeneous multi-cloud environments. It provides a comprehensive management stack for IT services on VMware vSphere® and other hypervisors, physical infrastructure, OpenStack, and external clouds such as VMware vCloud® Air™ and Amazon Web Services, all with a unified management experience.

Digitalization has spurred new opportunities for how business gets done. With the emergence of big data and mobility, enterprises see the promise of making employees more productive and keeping customers more engaged. And they recognize that efficient, prompt application development and delivery are instrumental for taking advantage of these new opportunities. In this unforgiving era of digitalization, you need to be first to market if you want to flourish.

The VMware enterprise-ready, cloud management platform is purpose built for hybrid cloud, and designed to work in heterogeneous environments. It enables you to deliver and manage infrastructure and applications quickly for the business, while maintaining IT control. To learn more about the industry’s most complete cloud management platform, read about our customer deployments globally.

Today, applications facilitate commerce on a global scale. They play a key role in delivering products and services to customers, a role that directly affects the success of the business. Companies that rapidly deploy, update, and manage business applications have a competitive advantage. To maintain this fast pace, many organizations have adopted a hybrid cloud—a combination of private and public clouds—to become more agile. But true agility isn’t easy

VMware vRealize® Suite is the market-leading cloud management platform* purpose-built for heterogeneous, multi-cloud environments. It provides a comprehensive management stack for IT services on VMware vSphere® and other hypervisors, physical infrastructure, OpenStack, and external clouds such as VMware vCloud® Air™ and Amazon Web Services, all with a unified management experience. With vRealize Suite, IT can provision and manage at scale—compute, storage, network, and application services across multiple private and public cloud environments.

The enhanced performance that results from the DevOps approach has been proven to have a big impact on the overall performance of the business, with faster, more reliable software delivery, consequent cost savings, and faster time to value. Now that cloud is an integral element of the enterprise, automation of cloud management is key, and feeds into the DevOps approach. VMware offers your IT organization the opportunity to become DevOps-ready, using the GUI and API-led approach to enable an automated self-service infrastructure.

To meet the challenges of managing such a complex environment, IT teams need an enterprise-ready cloud management platform that can support multivendor environments, automate application and service delivery, and facilitate operations and governance. VMware provides an enterprise-ready cloud management platform that delivers the industry’s most complete solution for managing a heterogeneous, hybrid cloud, and supports cloud management requirements across Day 1 and Day 2 operations for compute, storage, network and application level resources. The VMware solution is in use today across a wide range of industries and use cases, delivering benefits such as faster provisioning, optimized IT operations, and lower capital spending. To learn more about the VMware cloud management platform, visit http://www.vmware.com/virtualization/ cloud-management.

Organizations that automate their highly-virtualized infrastructure environments discover that they are able to introduce new forms of self-service and on-demand IT delivery models. As a result, they’re far better positioned to compete in a world where the quality and performance of applications increasingly dictates success and failure. On the journey to agility, the ultimate destination remains infrastructure defined by software and operating in a way that’s both application-aware and self-healing. For enterprises competing in the digital economy, deploying a CMP to manage increasingly complex infrastructure has become an indispensable part of that journey. Learn more about vRealize Suite and our strategy for the Software-Defined Data Center.

In the era of always-on business, enterprises need reliable, secure and consistently fast access at all times. Overlay that with the reality of how organizations combine on-premises systems with cloud-based solutions, and it’s clear that a robust, agile and flexible database platform is mandatory.

Only a handful of industries have been transformed by the digital age the way banking has. Internet and mobile banking, digital wallets, and a raft of new and innovative products have redefined “the bank” from a local, brick-and-mortar branch to an anytime-anywhere process. The new banking environment has opened opportunities for national, regional, and community banks alike, which are no longer constrained to serve only customers located in the areas where they maintain a physical branch presence. But it has also brought challenges associated with collecting, processing, analyzing, storing, and protecting vast amounts of new data, from multiple locations and sources.

An investment firm is only as good as its data and its ability to leverage that data to make smart trades. A firm’s ability to differentiate itself in meeting market needs and bringing new products to market all hinge on its ability to squeeze maximum value out of all available data. But when it comes to implementing the right technology and processes to support a data-reliant business, those three factors present tremendous challenge

The ability to observe, diagnose, and subsequently improve the performance of business-critical applications is essential to ensuring a positive user experience and maintaining the highest levels of employee productivity and customer satisfaction. The challenge of establishing an effective application visibility and control function is only growing, as trends such as mobility, virtualization, and cloud computing fundamentally alter datacenter and application architectures. With NetScaler Insight Center enterprises get: • Unparalleled application visibility and invaluable operational intelligence; • Increased operational efficiency, as troubleshooting and capacity planning efforts are greatly simplified; • An optimized user experience that drives greater employee productivity and customer satisfaction; • Increased assurance that governing SLAs will always be met; and, • Reduced total cost of ownership, based on having a low-cost, low-impact solution—particularly compared to traditional

Are you trying to secure cloud applications, while reducing user friction? With the right technology, IT/Security professionals can empower employees to work securely and efficiently anywhere, anytime. Office 365 is the world’s most used enterprise cloud application, but it’s just one of many applications and services a company might need to authenticate. This white paper explores the widespread use of Office 365, what that means from a security perspective and how a cloud-based authentication solution can enable single sign on for Office 365 and a range of other business-critical services and applications. Learn how to achieve high assurance with a solution that is invisible to your users when you download the white paper, Secure SSO to Office 365 and Other Cloud Applications with a Cloud-Based Authentication Solution.

How will you prepare your company for cloud adoption? Cloud services are especially attractive to midmarket companies hit with the high cost of meeting compliance requirements. Author and information security expert Felix Santos discusses: . Information security and data protection in the cloud . Recent cloud standards and audit initiatives . Evaluation criteria for selecting a cloud provider that offers trusted data assurance

At Viavi Solutions® we’ve had the benefit of observing a number of hybrid cloud deployments up close. All sectors of IT users from small to large enterprises, governmental groups, and even cloud service providers (CSPs) who themselves have begun to offer managed cloud services from third-party platforms—touch the hybrid cloud environment. CIOs, especially, face new challenges in deploying or expanding their enterprise presence in the cloud. This white paper examines four critical areas—migration, security, costs, and visibility—where CIOs can make major differences in the successful execution of hybrid cloud strategies. We’ve listed 20 fundamental questions CIOs can discuss with both their internal deployment groups and their external CSP/system integrator in preparation for a migration to or an expansion of hybrid cloud services.

What is the key benefit of SD-WAN? To provide seamless access to digital services for end-users. But IT is more distributed, fragmentary, and dynamic than ever, with hybrid apps, hybrid networks, and remote and mobile users everywhere. Hardware-bound legacy networks can never fulfill the promise of seamless access. Taming the chaos of today’s IT requires a new approach to networking. This is the promise of software-defined wide area networks (SD-WAN)—the ability to use plain-language business policies to automate and orchestrate all the components of digital access. Read this white paper to learn how SD-WAN lets you: • Manage centrally from a cloud console with a comprehensive view of your connectivity fabric that spans and unifies datacenter/cloud apps, branch/mobile users, and enterprise/cloud networks. • Orchestrate globally using business policy-based automation to define quality of service and access privileges for all apps/users. • Deploy locally with zero touch via automated

This paper covers the latest security trends, reinforces best practices in securing a cloud infrastructure, and outlines how best to meet compliance requirements (e.g., PCI, HIPAA).