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7 Proven Methods for Boosting Website Traffic

Posted on 24/01/201919/06/2021 by Tushar

According to retail analyst, GlobalData, over 50% of UK consumers now shop online, with spending predicted to grow 30% by 2024. Indeed, by 2021, Statista forecasts 93% of internet users in the UK will be shopping online. While this is fantastic news for online businesses, it comes hand in hand with a growth in competition as more companies launch websites: 84% had them in 2018 compared to 70% in 2007. To be successful in such a competitive marketplace, companies will need to find ways of increasing website traffic and in this post, we’ll explain some of the main ways to achieve this.

1. Online advertising

For companies with new websites or those which struggle to get listed in search engine results, online advertising is often the chief method of attracting customers to your website. The main way to advertise is with Google and Bing, using paid search ads that appear in search results or display ads that appear on other websites. Alternatively, you can also advertise on social media sites. All of these options allow you to target specific audiences and track the progress of your campaign, helping to ensure your advertising budget is spent effectively. It can, however, be an expensive strategy.

2. Content marketing

Internet users aren’t always looking for products or services; quite often what they are seeking is information or ideas to help them solve problems. Providing content on your website which solves those problems can massively boost the number of people who visit as it can be found in search results and shared on social media. If that content subtly mentions and links to a product or service that you supply, it increases the chances of a sale. Take, for example, someone with a small garden looking for ideas to spruce it up. They find a blog article from a garden centre called ’10 ideas for revamping a small garden’ in which they find a picture of a table and chair set they like, together with a link to the product page. From this article, the visitor solves their problem and the garden centre makes a sale. This technique is widely used by businesses in all sectors.

3. Social media marketing

If businesses don’t want to pay for advertising on social media, they can always use these sites to promote their brand, their web content and their products or services. Social media is great for posting links to your website and with the ability to use eye-catching images and video, it can be a highly effective way to increase traffic, especially as other users can spread the word by liking and sharing your posts.

4. Improve SEO

Search engines are the main way consumers find the things they are looking for online, so optimising your website for them is vital if you want to improve the chances of your web pages ranking well in search results.

While the crucial factor in SEO is providing high-quality, fresh and relevant content on your pages, you must not overlook all the other key ingredients. These include having a well-structured, easily navigable website and placing relevant keywords in the titles, subheadings, meta descriptions and content.

5. A mobile-friendly website

A mobile-friendly or responsive website is a necessity in today’s online market. The main reason for this is the fact that users spend more time online on their phones than they do on laptops or other devices. Increasingly, users are also shopping more on mobiles too. According to Statista, at the end of 2018, smartphones generated the largest share of online retail revenue in the UK with many sources predicting the amount spent using mobile devices would double over the next few years to around £40 billion.

There are many reasons for this growth: there are more phone users, there is better internet access away from home, there are easier ways for people to pay using their phones and, importantly, more companies are providing mobile-friendly websites. For businesses, the last point is crucial, as without a mobile-friendly site, the growing market of smartphone shoppers won’t be able to fully access your store. That’s an issue which also makes search engines downrank sites which aren’t mobile-friendly.

6. Make use of email marketing

Email marketing has the highest ROI of any marketing technique and is very inexpensive to implement. There are various ways to grow an email list, such as using a pop-up that offers an incentive to sign up (e.g. 10% off your first order) or asking customers to sign up during the checkout process (e.g. ‘Get updates of our new products and latest offers’).

Once visitors have signed up, you can send marketing emails to them for free with links to your website included. Today, many companies combine email marketing with the use of personalised product recommendation software which tracks what a visitor has been looking at on the website and sends out emails with links to relevant products. This personalised form of email marketing can significantly increase traffic to your site.

7. Security and speed

Two other factors which can affect traffic numbers are security and speed. If your website is marked as ‘not secure’ on browsers, many users will not visit even if it appears in search results. Additionally, according to Google, 53% of visitors will abandon the site if it takes over three seconds to load on their devices. Solving these problems requires the installation of an SSL certificate on your website to make it secure and ensuring that the site is optimised to make it faster. Speed can also be increased by ensuring that your site is hosted on high-performance servers and that your hosting package provides all the resources to cater for the traffic your site needs.

Conclusion

The first step to increasing online sales is getting more people to visit your website. This has become increasingly difficult to achieve as growing numbers of businesses go online and compete for customers. That said, the internet market continues to grow, with more people spending more money online. Hopefully, the ideas presented here will help your business generate more online traffic.

Cloud-automated IT eliminates shorcomings of Traditional IT model

Posted on 23/01/201918/06/2021 by Tushar

For small and medium-sized companies, the traditional IT model of an on-premises network built and operated with an in-house IT staff is often fraught with problems. IT teams are stretched to capacity simply keeping the lights on and there are always going to be issues with systems performance, network reliability, end user productivity, data recovery, security and the help desk. Staffing is another constant challenge. And if companies decide to outsource some IT functions, they end up with multiple service providers, which creates additional headaches.

The problem is highlighted in the 2018 State of the CIO survey conducted by CIO Magazine, in which CIOs said their role is becoming more digital and innovation focused, but they don’t have time to address those pressing needs because they are bogged down with functional duties.

The common business challenges reported in the survey are often symptoms of needs that are misaligned with technologies and service providers, plus the lack of budget to address the problems. Those challenges typically revolve around:

security and disaster recovery
lost productivity due to downtime and end users waiting for support
shadow IT and users not following security training
escalating or unpredictable costs
outdated infrastructure
shortage of talent
multiple tech providers and systems working at cross-purposes

Smaller businesses that may have turned to traditional managed service providers quickly discover these services lack seamlessness and result in reactive support challenges. According to the Ponemon Institute’s State of Endpoint Security Risk Report, 80% of these reactive issues can be eliminated through standardization and automation.

Moving to a cloud-based IT infrastructure

Cloud-automated IT services can address these challenges and free up IT teams so they can align their strategies with the business. Cloud-automated IT does all this by providing seamless, proactive support, enterprise-level security and compliance, redundant systems, highly available virtual desktops, continuous upgrades, predictable costs and improved end user productivity. The cloud-based IT infrastructure is managed by a team of experienced, knowledgeable, highly trained professionals who apply industry best practices.

Aligning the technologies in the IT infrastructure and having experts managing them delivers several key benefits:

Cost predictability: Not only are ongoing costs for an IT infrastructure that supports the business predictable and easy to budget for, surprise costs for disasters like outages, ransomware and security breaches are essentially eliminated.

Reduced Friction and Risk: By standardizing on best-in-class, constantly updated technologies, friction is reduced between equipment, vendors, integration points, and service providers. This results in stronger security, performance, and ease of use.

User Satisfaction and Productivity: If you’ve ever muddled through a few days of work on a loaner laptop you understand how important the user experience is to employee satisfaction and productivity. VDI and proactive management deliver a better computing experience and increased productivity. Instances can be refreshed just like you would with a cell phone.

With cloud-automated IT, the entire IT infrastructure moves to the cloud in a well-planned, efficient manner. The service provider helps create a personalized upgrade plan based on the specific needs of the organization, does a health check on existing applications, makes sure everything is configured properly and updates applications to the latest releases.

And cloud-automated IT goes far beyond simply lifting and shifting existing systems to the cloud. It is a holistic approach that aligns cutting-edge technologies and fully managed services to provide smaller companies enterprise-grade IT that can make a significant impact on the security and effectiveness of the business.

How Analytics Can Assist Businesses in Ensuring Safety

Posted on 22/01/201918/06/2021 by Tushar

the growing threat of cyberattacks, many are turning to analytics to help protect their systems and comply with regulations. Here, we’ll take a close look at what security analytics is and how it can benefit businesses.

Security analytics – an overview

Like all forms of data analytics, security analytics involves the collection and aggregation of a wide range of data from numerous sources. The purpose, however, is to analyse this data to discover vulnerabilities and threats to the security of a company’s systems and data. Data can be gathered from firewalls, routers, network traffic, antivirus software, OS event logs, businesses apps, cloud resources, ID verification and access management logs and endpoint data. It also uses employee and user behaviour data and third-party threat intelligence information. This is then analysed using specially developed security algorithms which seek out patterns and sequences that give insights into potential, emerging or existing threats.

Modern cybersecurity analytics tools also employ AI and machine learning, which enables them to learn from past experiences to continually improve their ongoing threat detection. So, as new threats evolve, they will be able to detect these too. Of crucial importance is that this is done in real-time so that threats can be dealt with proactively and stopped before an attack inflicts damage.

Ways in which security analytics can be used

Security analytics can be used for a wide range of measures. It can detect links in network traffic activities which signify the emergence of a potential attack. It can discover attackers threatening to infiltrate a system’s endpoints, such as its laptops and mobile phones. It identifies vulnerable, compromised or prohibitively shared user accounts. It blocks unfamiliar communications channels, preventing data being copied, downloaded or transferred without authorisation. It can also safeguard against identity theft by stopping users from sending their details to other sites.

Security analytics can even be used to protect against internal threats; monitoring employee activity to identify intentional or negligent behaviours which put the system’s security at risk. It does this by employing algorithms that uncover suspicious actions which indicate threats or vulnerabilities.

Compliance is another area in which security analytics can play an important role. Here, it can help automate compliance requirements, such as the gathering of log data, the management of data networks and the monitoring of data actions, enabling the company to compile reports and detect users not working in compliance with internal IT policies. Where incidents occur, security analytics can also assist in any forensic investigation, unearthing the activities and sources of the related events.

The benefits of using security analytics

The chief benefit of using security analytics is that, aside from detecting threats and potential security breaches, it also alerts the company when these incidents are likely to happen and before they actually do. In this way, its insights enable the company to be proactive in its security.

With threats coming from a wide range of sources, such as hacking, malware, ransomware, phishing, internal sabotage and negligence, and with cybercriminals using far more sophisticated tools, some of which also make use of AI and machine learning, many businesses can see real value in security analytics.

Security in the cloud

For businesses using cloud-based systems, it is possible that your vendor already provides a wide range of robust security measures to protect your systems from cybercrime. Here at eukhost, for example, our cloud servers are protected with enterprise-class security. We work in partnership with Fortinet to offer next-gen FortiGate firewalls which feature intrusion prevention and inflow virus protection systems that detect and isolate threats before they reach your server.

In addition, we provide extensive VPN features, DDoS protection, email security, SSL certificates, email signing certificates and more. For added peace of mind, we also provide the industry-leading Veeam backup solution, designed for cloud infrastructures. It features virtual machine backups, replication and encryption which keep your data secure in case of system failure, data corruption, bad updates, ransomware or human error.

When it comes to compliance, the security we provide helps companies meet regulations such as GDPR and PCI DSS. With regard to the latter, all our cloud servers are PCI compliance capable and we can provide the server environment required for this purpose.

Conclusion

As threats become increasingly more advanced, it is good to know that technologies to protect IT systems, such as security analytics, are being developed and deployed to combat them. The best place to host such big data analytics, of course, is in the cloud. It’s reassuring, therefore, that the cloud, itself, already comes with a range of robust security measures to protect you, whether you use security analytics or not.

How Google Home and Amazon Echo Will Affect the Content of Your Website

Posted on 22/01/201919/06/2021 by Tushar

The way we interact with the internet is changing. Many of us now use voice to search online and the answers we get are increasingly being spoken to us. This isnâ€™t just happening on smart speakers, which are becoming commonplace, it is also being used on phones, computers and even on devices like smart TVs. If this is the future of how we use the internet, it is obviously going to affect the content that organisations place on their websites and in this post, weâ€™ll look at what changes are likely to be needed.

Why you need to act now

It is estimated that by 2020 over half of all internet searches will be done by voice. This is due to a number of factors. First of all is the low price of smart speakers. You can pick up a basic Amazon Echo Dot or a Google Home for around Â£30; cheap enough to put several around the home so voice searches can be done anywhere without having to touch a keyboard.

Hand in hand with their low price are the consistent improvements in natural language processing. Computers can now understand what we say and speak back to us in intelligible ways and their ability to do so is getting better all the time. While, for the time being, what we can do with voice search is fairly limited, the scope of their abilities will no doubt expand to help us in ways we currently havenâ€™t begun to fathom.

For website owners, this means that what you publish on your sites will increasingly be read out to the searcher rather than being presented to them visually and this will impact how that content is created in the first place.

Voice search results

One of the biggest differences between voice and keyboard searches will be in the way that search results are presented. As we all know, when we search using a keyboard and screen, we are shown a list of search results and click on the one that most appeals to us. This is why most websites strive to be on the first page of results.

With voice search, this isnâ€™t always going to happen. Where there is a screen on which to view the results, for example when using Cortana, Siri, or Google Assistant on a computer or phone, the results may show up as we are used to. However, on smart speakers and other devices, reading out a long list of titles and snippets would not be user-friendly; instead, the google search engine will make the choice for us and read out what it considers to be the most appropriate answer.

Indeed, even screen-based search is moving in this direction. Type a question into Google , today, and before it presents a list of websites to look at, it will show you what it considers to be the best answer in the knowledge graph at the top of the page. This is a move which keeps the visitor on a Google page and reduces the chances of any other web page being visited.

Whatâ€™s the solution for website owners? It means that for voice searches, it is even more crucial that the titles and metadata are focused on the search query and, in doing so, provide answers in themselves that can be read out. Websites that can feature in the knowledge graph are the ones which are most likely to be visited.

The rise of natural language generation

With the use of AI and machine learning, the information supplied by voice searches is going to get more sophisticated. At present, it uses natural language processing to understand your enquiry and then uses this to identify the most relevant content to speak back to you. In the future, it will go beyond this. With natural language generation and AI, the search engine will be able to gather the essential information from the internet, perhaps taking small elements from many different sites and will reformulate these into a single, cohesive and comprehensive answer. So, rather than speaking out verbatim what it finds, it will generate specific answers to specific questions. For example, if you ask what restaurants are the best in your local area, it might search all the various review sites, looking beyond star ratings, to consider the actual text individuals write in their reviews. In addition, it may also take into consideration the browsing and purchase history of the customer in order to offer what it considers the appropriate response. In this sense, search engines will morph into concierges offering personalised customer services.

Will there be an end to screen searches?

There will always be a need for screen searches. If consumers want to purchase something, they usually want to see it first. Indeed, it goes against freedom of choice not to give a customer options and if they removed these, google search engines will lose massive revenues from their advertisers. This is perhaps why so many smart speakers with screens are already being produced, in order to give us the best of voice and screen searching.

How will this affect content creation?

All these developments point to several changes that websites need to make to help them stay relevant in the age of the voice search.

Firstly, the content published on a webpage needs to be structured and written in a way that makes sense when read aloud. This means writing in a way which sounds natural and using vocabulary that communicates information clearly. Accurate punctuation, which is essential for ensuring meaning is communicated clearly, will become more vital than ever.

Another factor is in creating different content for different searchers. The use of subject orientated terminology might be suitable for some readers but not for others. A search engine could determine the level of understanding that a searcher has and look for search results that the user could understand when the website was read out to them. For some businesses, therefore, the solution would be in creating both a laypersonâ€™s and a subject specialistâ€™s page.

Graphical data is one area, in particular, which needs to be looked at carefully when considering voice searches. Tables and lists work very well for visual searches and can save users lots of time when they look for information on your site. However, when read out, they donâ€™t always make the best sense and it would be easier to understand if the information was put into sentences and paragraphs. The obvious answer to this is the development of a new type of responsive site â€“ one which provides different versions depending on whether the results are shown or read. This, however, is a development for the future. For the time being, it may mean making both sets of information available.

SEO also has a part to play in helping websites do well in voice searches. Indeed, Google recommends that SEO focuses on making it simple for the search engines to understand what the content is about. This should be done through the use of titles, meta descriptions, headings and subheadings as well as using proper descriptions rather than just keywords in image alt-tags. Just remember that most of these things need to work for visual consumption at the same time.

Conclusion

With the advance of voice search technology and the popularity of smart speakers, we are moving into a new era of internet use where there is less need to be stuck to a screen to find the information we want or to carry out actions. For website owners, this will push you towards creating content that is suitable for both kinds of search and which makes sense when read aloud.

Ways cloud hosting is similar to Santa

Posted on 21/01/201918/06/2021 by Tushar

You might think it Christmas crackers to believe a beardy, old sleigh driver donning a red hat, has anything remotely in common with an internet-based hosting solution â€“ but youâ€™d be wrong. Both of them, in their own unique ways, can bring us many benefits. So, as Christmas approaches and we begin to let our minds wander away from work and towards the festivities, hereâ€™s a more seasonal and humorous post for you to enjoy. Here are the reasons why cloud hosting is like Santa Claus.

When it comes to running critical operations, Santa relies on his sleigh just as much as businesses need their applications. Downtime for either can be disastrous. Sleigh failure can result in millions of unhappy children waking up to empty stockings – an unimaginable reputational disaster for the worldâ€™s most trusted brand. For others, the standstill caused by server failure not only damages reputations but can also result in significant losses.

Neither Santa nor businesses like downtime

While Santa relies on magic reindeer dust to keep his sleigh in action, for businesses, the best option is to migrate to cloud hosting where the possibility of downtime due to server failure is non-existent. The virtual nature of a cloud environment means that it delivers consistent performance with guaranteed 100% uptime. This is because its hyper-converged design protects against everything from hard disk failure to an entire server failure, enabling critical apps to be always available.

Reindeer fast performance

Speed is essential for both Santa and modern businesses. For Santa, dropping off presents to the worldâ€™s 2 billion children in a single night means he has to work fast. Itâ€™s been scientifically calculated that he needs to travel at approximately 650 miles per second to get everything done in time and to achieve this, he needs more than your average reindeer. Indeed, the average reindeer can only manage 15mph and most of those would be flagging after half an hour of pulling all that weight.

What makes everything possible for Santa is that he uses the cloud. Rather than taking the sleigh over rugged terra firma, riding high in the cloud provides an almost friction less environment to travel and where gravity has less of an impact. This massively improves his speed.

That same cloud, or one very similar to it, can also help boost the speed of your data. Indeed, as data is weightless, it can travel even faster through the cloud than reindeer, almost at the speed of light. And with high-performance servers featuring powerful Intel Xeon CPUs and super-fast SSD drives you can perform critical tasks quicker than an elf can say â€˜Merry Christmasâ€™.

Santa has been so impressed with cloud technology, heâ€™s now adopted load balancing to prevent his sleigh tipping over on tight corners. For cloud hosting users, load balancing maximises speed and capacity utilisation so that when servers are busy, the load is distributed. This ensures that no server suffers from performance problems and, with multiple data centres at their disposal, cloud providers can always ensure optimised performance.

Both Santa and cloud hosting save you money

Whether you are buying presents for your children or cloud hosting for your business, it is important that what you buy offers you value for money. Whatâ€™s great about the cloud is that you can save on the costs of running a data centre and the capital expenditure needed to pay for hardware. Everything you need is provided by the host. There will be no need to pay for premises, electricity, physical security, maintenance or insurance.

Similarly, with Santa, those who have well-behaved children can save on the cost of buying presents. Instead of spending a fortune on Amazon, simply get your â€˜nice listâ€™ kids to write a letter to Santa and put it in the nearest post box. Doing this automates the process of putting presents in stockings and under the tree on Christmas Eve. Although a small delivery fee of a mince pie and a shot of something warming is required, the savings are dramatic, especially when your child has an eye for expensive electronic gadgetry.

Unfortunately. If you have naughty kids, youâ€™ll have to supply your own presents or make do with the small bag of coal that â€˜bad listâ€™ children get left.

Both come with expert little helpers

When you have significant workloads, it pays to have experts on hand to help you get things done. Santa, for example, has an army of elves who spend their days creating the presents, wrapping them up and loading them onto the sleigh. Theyâ€™ll also manage the naughty and nice list and organise the presents in a way that enables delivery to be done with awe-inspiring efficiency.

If Santa has a technical problem, Mrs Clause offers 24/7 support, together with tea and biscuits, to help him find an effective solution. Last year, for example,Rudolphâ€™s nose was a bit dim and Mrs Clause provided the right type of carrot to add to Rudolphâ€™s food â€˜til the luminous glow was restored.

Users of cloud hosting also benefit from expert little helpers. Working away behind the scenes is an army of engineers and technicians who ensure that your hosting is expertly managed. Theyâ€™ll monitor and maintain the servers, update the software, scan for intruders and malware,and generally make sure your hosting is working as effectively as possible.

At the same time, should you have any issues, a good cloud host will provide their own 24/7technical support. While they may not know one end of a reindeer from the other, they will have expert skills in helping you with all your hosting needs and will be available by phone, live chat or ticket.

Wrapping up

So, as you can see, it is possible to compare Santa with cloud hosting. Comparing,however, doesnâ€™t mean you have to choose between them. If youâ€™re clever and have been good all year, you can have both. Now, that is good tidings.

5 Advantages of Using the Cloud with a Bring-Your-Own-Device (BYOD) Policy

Posted on 21/01/201919/06/2021 by Tushar

If you have not come across BYOD before, it stands for Bring Your Own Device and is when businesses allow their employees to use their own laptops, tablets and smartphones for work, instead of supplying them themselves. When BYOD is used in conjunction with a cloud-based system, it brings many benefits. In this post, weâ€™ll look at what these are.

Greater flexibility.

When businesses with cloud-based systems begin to offer BYOD, it enables employees to work away from the office whilst still being able to access the system over the internet. This means that where ever an employee is, theyâ€™ll still be able to access the data and files they need.

As a result, it offers companies a great deal of flexibility. For example, if there is no need for an employee to be physically in the office to carry out their work, they can work from home, using their own laptop. If this applies to enough staff, it is possible to use smaller office premises cutting the cost of business rents, rates, utility bills, maintenance and insurance.

It also enables companies to offer more flexible working conditions which are better suited to those who need to work around things like childcare. As a result, talented individuals who would have been put off by rigid 9-5 routines may be willing to work for you.

Keep employees happy and reduce training costs

We all have our preferred devices for work; some like to use Windows computers, while others prefer to work with Apple Macs. When you supply your own devices, it is easier for a company to lease these in bulk and as a result, everyone gets the same thing.

It can, however, be difficult for those who have always used Windows to work with a Mac and vice versa. It can take them time to learn the new skills and even require training to take place. Until they are up to scratch, their productivity levels will be less than expected. Giving them the chance to use their own device removes these obstacles and leads to higher morale and improved job satisfaction.

App compatibility and employee collaboration

If you think that application compatibility may be an issue with BYOD, youâ€™ll be relieved to know that many apps can be used across a range of different operating systems and devices. For example, Office 365, perhaps the most widely used business suite, works with Windows, Mac, iOS and Android, enabling your employees to work anywhere, any time with its email and other applications. In addition, with Team Sites, which is included with Office 365, employees can improve collaboration while in different locations, editing documents simultaneously and taking part in online conferences.

Cuts the cost of device leasing

The obvious advantage of BYOD is that if employees are using their own devices to work, you donâ€™t have to buy or lease them. Developments in computer technology mean that whether purchased or leased, hardware will become dated and even obsolete within a few years. As a result, there is the constant cost of replacing it. BYOD gets rid of this cost.

In addition, if your IT department provides maintenance for BYOD devices (itâ€™s worth doing as your staff will still have IT issues which might affect their work) itâ€™s unlikely this will need as much input as it would with hardware provided internally. Staff generally take care of their own devices better than they do company devices and they are more likely to understand how to sort out minor errors themselves.

BYOD is compatible with data security

With the introduction of GDPR, one concern about BYOD is whether its use could ensure that confidential information and customer data remained secure. The answer is yes, provided that itâ€™s properly regulated and monitored and that only those employees who need to use the data are given access to it.

Key to ensuring data is secure is having sound password management, including making sure that employees are trained on password safety and that strong passwords are used when connecting to business systems.

At the same time, employees must agree to regularly back up their systems and update software to more secure versions when they are released. This will prevent any security holes in older versions being exploited by hackers. If using software such as Office 365, these apps will be updated automatically.

Conclusion

For companies that use cloud computing, the option to allow employees to bring their own devices offers a number of advantages. It increases their flexibility, it keeps employees happier, it enables them to continue to use the same apps, it saves money and, if implemented wisely, is compatible with GDPR and other regulations.

When should you abandon your ‘lift and shift’ cloud migration strategy?

Posted on 20/01/201918/06/2021 by Tushar

The easy approach to transitioning applications to the cloud is the simple “lift and shift” method, in which existing applications are simply migrated, as is, to a cloud-based infrastructure. And in some cases, this is a practical first step in a cloud journey. But in many cases, the smarter approach is to re-write and re-envision applications in order to take full advantage of the benefits of the cloud.

By rebuilding applications specifically for the cloud, companies can achieve dramatic results in terms of cost efficiency, improved performance and better availability. On top of that, re-envisioning applications enables companies to take advantage of the best technologies inherent in the cloud, like serverless architectures, and allows the company to tie application data into business intelligence systems powered by machine learning and AI.

Of course, not all applications can move to the cloud for a variety of regulatory, security and business process reasons. And not all applications that can be moved should be re-written because the process does require a cost and time commitment. The decision on which specific applications to re-platform and which to re-envision is a complex risk/benefit calculation that must be made on an application-by-application basis, but there are some general guidelines that companies should follow in their decision-making process.

What you need to consider

Before making any moves, companies need to conduct a basic inventory of their application portfolio. This includes identifying regulatory and compliance issues, as well as downstream dependencies to map out and understand how applications tie into each other in a business process or workflow. Another important task is to assess the application code and the platform the application runs on to determine how extensive a re-write is required, and the readiness and ability of the DevOps team to accomplish the task.

The next step is to prioritize applications by their importance to the business. In order to get the most bang for the buck, companies should focus on applications that have biggest business impact. For most companies, the priority has shifted from internal systems to customer-facing applications that might have special requirements, such as the ability to scale rapidly and accommodate seasonal demands, or the need to be ‘always available’. Many companies are finding their revenue generating applications were not built to handle these demands, so those should rise to the top of the list.

Re-platform vs. re-envision

There are some scenarios where lift and shift makes sense:

Traditional data center. For many traditional, back-end data center applications, a simple lift and shift can produce distinct advantages in terms of cost savings and improved performance.
Newly minted SaaS solution. There are many customer bases that have newer SaaS offerings available to them, but perhaps the functionality or integrated solutions that are a core part of their operations are in the early stages of a development cycle. Moving the currently installed solution to the cloud via a lift and shift is an appropriate modernization step – and can easily be transitioned to the SaaS solution when the organization is ready.

However, there are two more scenarios where lift and shift strategies work against digital transformation progress.

Established SaaS solution. There is no justification, either in terms of cost or functionality, to remain on a legacy version of an application when there is a well-established SaaS solution.
Custom written and highly customized applications. This scenario calls for a total re-write to the cloud in order to take advantage of cloud-native capabilities.

By re-writing applications as cloud-native, companies can slash costs, embed security into those application, and integrate multiple applications. Meanwhile, Windows Server 2008 and SQL Server 2008 end of life is fast approaching. Companies still utilizing these legacy systems will need to move applications off expiring platforms, providing the perfect impetus for modernizing now. There might be some discomfort associated with going the re-platform route, but the benefits are certainly worth the effort.

How Can Migrating to the Cloud Help Customers?

Posted on 20/01/201919/06/2021 by Tushar

There are many benefits of migrating to the cloud: financial savings, increased agility, tighter security and uninterrupted service, just to name a few. But one often overlooked benefit is the improvements it brings to the customer experience and the positive effects this has on user trust and satisfaction, brand engagement and a companyâ€™s online reputation.

Improving the user experience is increasingly important for an enterpriseâ€™s success. According to Bloomfire, over 80% of businesses see the user experience as something which helps differentiate between competitors and, by the end of the decade, it is projected to overtake price and product choices as the main reason why consumers choose one brand over another.

Online, where consumers expect immediate, unlimited and uninterrupted access to information, products or services, businesses that still use non-cloud systems may miss out on the opportunities that the cloud has to offer. Migrating to the cloud provides the tools and services businesses need to participate in todayâ€™s competitive, on-demand marketplace, enabling them to enhance the customer experience and reap the rewards of doing so. Here are the ways migrating to the cloud can improve your customersâ€™ experience.

Give customers 24/7 access to your products and services

The days where customers were prepared to wait for usual business hours to get in touch with a company are over. Today, they expect online operations to be available 24/7, whether that is to buy products, contact customer support or access online services. They also expect that these things can be done from anywhere, using any type of connected device.

By migrating to the cloud, it means that businesses have a much greater flexibility to put these things in place. For example, as employees can connect with work-based applications anywhere they have a connection, it means they can deal with customer service enquiries even when they are out of the office, helping expand operations and keeping costs to a minimum. Indeed, by using AI chat boxes, many of the inquiries a company has out of hours can be automated with only a minimal need for any human interaction.

This 24/7 availability can be provided for many services, such as product sales, ticket ordering, delivery tracking and much more.

Provide a one-stop shop

Ever had the experience of waiting for ages in a phone queue and then, when you finally get through, to be told you need to call a different number? There is nothing more frustrating for a customer than finding out they cannot access all a companyâ€™s services from a single point of entry, whether this is on the telephone or online.

Thankfully, the tools and systems available to companies which migrate to the cloud enable them to provide the integrated services that their customers demand, without them needing to leave the website.

The applications available in the cloud provide customers with easy to use interfaces from which they can manage all their services from a single place, whether on a website or smartphone app. Just think of all the things that online banking customers can now carry out on a bankâ€™s website or apps. And if they have a problem, they can have access to support using the same interface no matter where they are, what time of day or what device they are using.

Offer personalised experiences

Despite all the concerns around data privacy, most customers prefer it when companies provide them with personalised shopping experiences. Itâ€™s great for consumers seeing products and services that are tailored to their needs and desires and putting these things directly in front of customers certainly helps improve sales. Itâ€™s a win-win situation for both consumer and company and something we are seeing a lot more of when we visit websites.

The reason companies can provide personalised shopping experiences is because of the vast amount of data that is made available. Websites can track browsing and shopping history; they provide wish lists to see what people like; if customers donâ€™t inform them directly, their algorithms can quickly ascertain a consumerâ€™s age, gender, family background, geographic location and similar data; and all these things can be compared with the data of those in a similar demographic. The result is that users of these websites see an increasingly accurate guess at the things they are looking to buy and this increases their chance of buying them â€“ especially when the company uses this data to incentivise a purchase through offers and discounts.

To provide personalised shopping experiences, however, all that data needs to be collected, processed and analysed. And there is a lot of data to collect. Cloud computing offers the best way to do this, providing unlimited storage and processing capacity, charged for on a pay as you use basis while allowing the use of widely available big data and AI applications to undertake the data crunching.

Improve the trustworthiness of your brand

The cloud provides several ways to improve the reputation of your brand. With high availability cloud hosting, the bad press associated with application downtime can be a thing of the past; the security features available from service providers means that there is a reduced risk of IT systems becoming victims of cyber attacks, infections or ransomware; and the choice of cloud-based tools on offer provides a range of ways to ensure that customersâ€™ needs are dealt with quickly. Together, these things ensure that customers see your online provision as something that is both reliable and trustworthy.

Conclusion

Migrating to the cloud can greatly improve the user experience, helping to attract new customers and retain existing ones. With many tools available, the cloud can help businesses give their customers the online experiences they demand, providing 24/7 access to integrated services and personalised shopping from a reliable and trustworthy business. With these in place, businesses will have a clear advantage over their competitors.

On your journey to the cloud, choosing the proper implementation partner.

Posted on 19/01/201918/06/2021 by Tushar

When you are planning a move to the cloud, choosing the right partner is critical. Even though it can be difficult to know exactly what to look for, there are things you can do in your search for an implementation partner that can help you make informed decisions and mitigate risks along the way.

Learn to spot a re-badged reseller

With the systemic shift to move IT infrastructure and applications to the cloud, there has been a dramatic increase in the demand for IT consulting services. This cloud economy has precipitated a situation where many vendors and resellers are re-inventing themselves as service providers rather than simply as technology sellers.

Organizations are setting themselves up as cloud service providers despite lacking the necessary qualifications to do so. These re-badged resellers will have a number of flaws including limited experience within the team, limited knowledge about specific industries and solutions and a lack of service-oriented culture. These flaws can put the companies that choose to work with these new services organizations at risk.

They have neither the knowledge nor the experience to deliver specialized, high-value services to customers. They may hire some experienced staff but, without a strong strategic direction set by management and reinforced by an entrenched services culture, they are unlikely to be able to deliver the business transformation organizations seek.

Meet with the people who are actually doing the work

Organizations should beware of partners that introduce high-level consultants to the customer but get junior staff or offshore teams to execute the work. It is important to meet and speak with the team that is actually doing the work. The clarity and effectiveness of communications can suffer enormously when the team doing the work is not the same as the team speaking to the customer.

Come up with a list of demands

As an organization looking to move to the cloud – you may have a lot of questions and having a partner with the focus and experience deep enough to provide a high level of service is critical.

It is important to come up with a list of demands in your search for an implementation partner:

A mix of specific technology knowledge and business knowledge so the team can clearly understand the organization’s business imperatives and deliver cloud solutions accordingly
A strong physical presence and footprint in the industry with positive customer references, preferably from long-term customers in the same industry as your organization
A stable, well-qualified team with significant tenure at the organization, proving that the organization is a genuine player in the marketplace rather than a rebadged product reseller
Proven project control and governance methodologies that can be clearly explained
The ability to bring senior vendor representatives into any discussion to drive results

Ask questions

Organizations should ask the following questions to determine whether a potential partner is capable of delivering a successful cloud service:

What is your customer retention rate and how do you measure it?
Where will our data reside and what access controls are in place?
Is there a dedicated project manager for this implementation and what are his/her qualifications?
How will you ensure we have control of the system?
How will your team work with ours to ensure project success?

Once these questions are satisfactorily answered, the organization can move to the next stage of assessing whether the partner is suitable.

When it comes to defining a path to cloud, organizations should focus on providing increased business efficiencies, increasing user satisfaction and meeting business expectations, as well as addressing the risks identified. With the right partner in place, organizations can achieve enormous benefits and mitigate those risks.

5 partnering trends for global systems integrators in 2020 that will benefit enterprise customers

Posted on 19/01/201919/06/2021 by Tushar

Businesses have been doing some form of partnering for decades, but as companies seek to modernize and turn their organizations into digital enterprises, partnering has become more important than ever. With all the different technologies and systems that have to integrate, digital transformation can’t happen unless all parties are in sync and cooperating with one another.

In today’s business environment, true partnering means that all parties in the relationship are tightly aligned to the core. We’ve all read something similar to that before – it’s nearly cliché, but in this case it’s a real and absolutely critical distinction. When they step into a room, nobody should care if the person wears a badge from the global systems integrator (GSI), technology partner or the enterprise customer — they should all be on the same page working towards the same goal: delighting customers.

Partnering starts with the executive suites of all the parties fully on board and headed in the same strategic direction. It then continues through every part of the organization, where business partners work on joint operating plans, joint marketing campaigns and joint software and app development projects.

Here are five important trends we see as GSIs, technology partners and enterprise customers look to grow their businesses in the 2020s.

1. Deeper relationships. As these deeper business relationships develop in the 2020s, tech partners, GSIs and enterprise customers will operate in unison, seamlessly sharing information and jointly developing solutions designed to solve end-user customer issues. For example, in an IDC FutureScape report focused on Australia, the research group predicts that by 2022, empathy among brands and for customers will drive ecosystem collaboration and co-innovation among partners and competitors, which will drive 20 percent of the collective growth in customer lifetime value.

Strategic partners will develop a more cooperative relationship at all stages of the customer lifecycle, from recognizing an opportunity, to sales, developing a solution, delivering that solution, and finally, managing the long-term customer relationship. On the back-end, there will be more joint training between partners in areas such as sales, including becoming conversant in the products and services that each partner delivers.

Enterprise customers benefit from these deeper partnerships by having everyone working together as a single entity throughout the entire end-user customer lifecycle.

2. Vertical offerings. Once key strategic partnerships are established, the partner teams can jointly develop full-featured solutions tailored to vertical industries. If gaps appear, a GSI must demonstrate that they can assemble the right people and get them working together on a project. For example, at a medical services provider, the GSI may have a strong relationship with the CIO or CTO, but it’s the niche medical technology partner that has worked closely with the chief medical officer and all the nurse and physician teams over the years. Enterprise customers look for GSIs that can identity the right players and get them in a room where they can talk through the challenges and meet the customer’s goals.

3. Data-driven decisions. Enterprise customers will use data analytics to make decisions on the GSIs and technology companies with which to partner. These global businesses are looking for the technology processes and solutions that deliver efficiencies and the most profitability. They also look for industry-specific customer success stories in which the GSIs and technology partners have a proven track record working together and can show clear metrics to back up their use cases.

4. Agility. It’s likely that many enterprise customers already have preferred technology partners in areas such as cloud services, ERP, CRM, and IT security. GSIs must be agile enough to pivot quickly, responding to customer preferences and established relationships. They must demonstrate that they can match the right partner for each specific project and be ready to respond to an enterprise customer’s mission critical issues – whether those issues are already identified or lurking around the corner. Partnering allows the GSI the agility and speed to respond to the customer, in many cases, faster than through M&A activity or developing a new capability in-house.

5. Continuous monitoring. The GSI must be on top of all of the new features and upgrades that its technology partners develop. An enterprise that works with a GSI shouldn’t have to keep up with all of the tech upgrade cycles, and should never worry about missing out on important new capabilities. The integrator will understand the new features and benefits coming from tech partners, and also have unique insight into the enterprise customer’s environment so it can make informed recommendations as to whether an upgrade to a new release makes good business sense.

Partnering trends deliver business benefits

With the deeper integration between GSIs, technology partners and enterprise customers, important global businesses will reduce costs, make their customers more efficient and successfully transform their organizations, becoming digital enterprises that can compete and thrive in the 2020s and beyond.

1. Online advertising

2. Content marketing

3. Social media marketing

4. Improve SEO

5. A mobile-friendly website

6. Make use of email marketing

7. Security and speed

Conclusion

Moving to a cloud-based IT infrastructure

Security analytics – an overview

Ways in which security analytics can be used

The benefits of using security analytics

Security in the cloud

Conclusion

Why you need to act now

Voice search results

The rise of natural language generation

Will there be an end to screen searches?

How will this affect content creation?

Conclusion

Neither Santa nor businesses like downtime

Reindeer fast performance

Both Santa and cloud hosting save you money

Both come with expert little helpers

Wrapping up

Greater flexibility.

Keep employees happy and reduce training costs

App compatibility and employee collaboration

Cuts the cost of device leasing

BYOD is compatible with data security

Conclusion

What you need to consider

Re-platform vs. re-envision

Give customers 24/7 access to your products and services

Provide a one-stop shop

Offer personalised experiences

Improve the trustworthiness of your brand

Conclusion

Learn to spot a re-badged reseller

Meet with the people who are actually doing the work

Come up with a list of demands

Ask questions

Partnering trends deliver business benefits

Delivering excellence, collaborating across time zones.

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