Supply chains have long been a crucial part of almost any business’s processes. Ensuring that you have the right materials and items to complete your work is more than a question of effective sourcing: it’s also about forward planning and adequate data-sharing. It can be disastrous if things go wrong.
There have been plenty of technological developments in the supply chain management field, such as modelling software designed to locate where efficiencies can take place. However, emerging cloud technology has an increasingly essential role to play in developing optimised and efficient supply chains.
- Topic:
- Hosting (IT)
The recruitment sector is one of the most cost-conscious areas in business: staying profitable in this highly competitive market means always spending cash wisely and keeping an extremely close eye on operations. So it’s no wonder that for leading recruitment firms, staff productivity is under constant scrutiny. Clearly you will be doing everything possible to encourage your people to be focused, diligent and energetic in their work - but is there more you could do as a business leader to help them achieve better results from their working day?
If you haven’t done so already, migrating your IT infrastructure to the cloud can make a tangible difference to business productivity levels. This is not simply an IT decision which only impacts your operations behind the scenes. It’s an important step that will offer excellent frontline and bottom line benefits too. Here’s why.
- Topic:
- Hosting (IT)
There are many reasons why businesses are moving business operations to the cloud, with convenience and security are among the top considerations.
Increasing your competitive edge may not come to mind when considering cloud-based business solutions, but it should be. By thinking strategically about the features offered by advanced cloud hosting solutions, you can get ahead of your competitors in several ways.
Businesses of all sizes are using their migration to the cloud to reassess their approach to governance and turn it into a business advantage. They are even relishing new and challenging changes to data regulation, as cloud-based business operations can be used to make compliance with these regulations easier and more transparent, giving cloud-based enterprises a distinct advantage over many competitors.
- Topic:
- Hosting (IT)
Britain’s construction industry is large – and with demand coming from all sorts of sources such as house builders, infrastructure projects and more, it’s unlikely to shrink in the long term. With bricks and mortar the key commodity in construction, the thought of all these many firms moving their finance functions into a virtualised, in-the-cloud computer may seem a little counter-intuitive, but that’s far from the case – and moving to the cloud is actually a very smart decision.
- Topic:
- Finance
Many firms are thinking increasingly long and hard about shifting all kinds of functions to the cloud. From data and information storage to finance functions such as payroll, there are increasingly few areas in which the cloud isn’t having an effect on a finance leader’s plans. Here in Britain, it’s believed that 88% of organisations use some sort of cloud-based tool – and the trend towards cloud-based products and software is on the rise. But how exactly does a shift to the cloud work – and what are the long-term considerations?
Choosing your cloud type
If you plan to move your firm’s finance functions into the cloud, there’s a whole host of hoops to jump through. The first one is to familiarise yourself with the sort of cloud services you need. Many finance functions can be carried out in the cloud, such as centralised payment management and the monitoring of dynamic cash flow models.
You’ll most likely have to choose between a public, private and a hybrid cloud – all three of which have their advantages and disadvantages. In essence, public clouds have shared virtualised servers, while private cloud servers are entirely your own. Public servers tend to be more flexible, but private servers can be especially handy if you require a large amount of processing power. Perhaps you have a distributed team with lots of members in each location, all of whom are running CPU-heavy specialist finance packages. In that case, private clouds could represent better return on investment.
- Topic:
- Finance
One of our cloud hosting experts recently ran some IOPS workload tests on the big hyperscalers (Azure & AWS). The aim was to locate the best place to place mixed workload VMs and see some real world, achievable IOPs based on a consistent set of tests.
In addition, we’ve included a converged cloud for comparison running on SSD and a dedicated SAS SAN; this is on the Access Alto Public Cloud platform on their UK region running on VMware.
- Topic:
- Hosting (IT)
Cloud computing has revolutionised the way we do business and how we interact with data and services in our daily lives. Instead of running applications from software downloaded onto physical systems and machines, cloud computing uses services stored online to provide these same applications to anywhere that has an internet connection.
- Topic:
- Hosting (IT)
VMware products are generally well-known and simple to explain. VMware ESXi, though, is one of the lesser known products which goes under several different names – just to confuse things. So we’re here to answer two questions:
- In layman’s terms - what is VMware ESXi?
- Why should I care – what can it bring me?
- Topic:
- Hosting (IT)
You may find from time to time that a snapshot removal fails and that the delete all option is not working. What you are left with is a virtual machine running off of the snapshot disks whereas vCenter may think that the virtual machine has no snapshots.
What does this mean and how can I avoid it? Well, first let me explain how the VMware snapshot process works and what should happen.
- Topic:
- Hosting (IT)
