Are Big Data and Cloud Computing Related? How?

Big data and cloud computing are the most hyped phenomenon driving the IT stream of businesses all around the world. Experts say that the emergence of big data was a result of the rise of cloud computing and cloud data stores. Unexceptionally, both these terminologies hold high degrees of similarity in the IT industry. They are inter-dependent in the manner that cloud resources are required to support big data projects and storage while big data is a huge business case for moving the cloud.

Big Data is more about extracting VALUE out of Variety, Velocity and Volume while Cloud has its focus on scalable, elastic, on-demand, and pay-per-use self-service models. Big Data needs a large on-demand compute power and distributed storage and Cloud seamlessly provides elastic on-demand computer required for the same. The workload nature of the Big Data computing infrastructure makes it a perfect case for the cloud.

There are many patterns which highlight the relationship better:

SIMPLICITY: To mention it simply, simplification is the key component of Cloud and Big Data, which is the prime reason for their mass adoption.  The simplification provided by the combination of Big Data and Cloud Computing can increase the adoption of a seemingly complex problem of large scale distributed processing.

COST-EFFICIENCY: Both Cloud and Big Data deliver value to companies by lowering the cost of ownership. Their combination has been driving the cost down for enterprise and bringing value to enterprises.

SECURITY: Both the platforms offer data security and protect privacy concerns. System integrators have been building solutions within the enterprise to build Elastic Scalable Private Cloud Solution that brings in the value which enterprises can leverage to bring a Scalable Distributed Processing in action within the enterprise.

For more details on cloud computing, visit NetActivity or call Harry Bhatia at 216-503-5150 X 206. http://www.netactivity.us/contact-us



Source: http://www.netactivity.us/blog/are-big-data-and-cloud-computing-related-how/

Only 10% of Hospitals & Clinics Keep Their Patients’ Data Safe

                     Startling Findings and Educates Healthcare Providers on Solutions


This is a startling fact that has many people questioning the data security practices of hospitals and clinics everywhere. According to privacy researchers at the Ponemon Institute, “Recent numbers show 90% of health care organizations have exposed their patients’ data — or had it stolen — in 2012 and 2013.” The implications of this research are far-reaching and unsettling for most consumers. However, unified communications and IT security providers, like Net Activity, have devised many solutions to help curtail this epidemic.

Most attacks are the caused by hackers who want to acquire medical records due to their extreme value. The information in medical records (name, birth date, addresses, phone numbers, medical history and social security numbers), can be easily used for identity theft, fraudulent medical billing or acquiring prescriptions to resell on the street. Hackers can use the medical information to accomplish just about anything once acquired. This flaw in IT security is not a series of isolated incidents but an incredibly widespread problem now affecting millions of people across the nation.

In August, Community Health Systems reported that Chinese hackers had allegedly stolen a staggering 4.5 million patient records in what could be the largest breach of patient data to date. The company is treating the breach as a violation of HIPPA, even though the hackers didn’t gain access to medical records (only names, addresses, birth dates, phone numbers, and Social Security numbers were stolen). The breach happened between April and June this year, and was discovered in July. According to cyber-security firm Mandiant, which helped investigate the breach, the group responsible for the attack is known as “APT 18,” and may have links to the Chinese government.

The majority of hospitals and health organizations are using outdated technology on a single network making the job of hacking into networks even easier for criminals. IT security is often a large oversight for healthcare organizations because their objective is to save lives. Unfortunately, lack of internal IT expertise and outdated technology plagues the healthcare industry making it an easy target.

The challenge here is that doctors are inherently more interested in saving lives, instead of upgrading their IT security. This a great thing for society and we believe that’s exactly what doctors should be focused on! The only thing is that IT security must be addressed too. Over the years, we’ve learned exactly what it takes to protect health organizations and we love being a part of the solution to this problem. It’s unfortunate when something like this happens but it brings much needed education to the issues at hand. It is Managed IT Service Provider’s duty to educate  the small businesses and provide doctors with the technology tools they need to do their jobs, protect their  patients and spend their time focused on saving lives, instead of firewalls.

Source: http://www.netactivity.us/blog/only-10-of-hospitals-clinics-keep-their-patients-data-safe/

Review This Checklist When Outsourcing IT Help Desk Support

Outsourcing any sort of IT services brings in a unique set of worries to the business owners. Where do I start? How do I find a trustworthy and knowledgeablemanaged IT service provider? Will they help if my whole system crashes? Will I lose all my data? The list of doubts is endless.

Outsourcing IT help desk support is one of the most important strategic decisions and you want to make sure that your data is safe throughout the contract period. Here’s a list of questions you need to ask before finalizing the deal with an IT help desk support provider.

• Is comprehensive network assessment included? Taking down the details will save on time later on. Having a well-documented overview of your network as well as your IT service provider will save time and confusion.
• Are they providing you a signed service agreement? This will clear up any confusion about legal and billing jumbos. It is the best way out to set expectations.
• Will they assign a specific engineer to your account? While this would not be possible for larger entities, having a dedicated engineer for your company would be beneficial at times, but it also limits the range of support that can be available to you. On the contrary, having multiple engineers on your team broadens the amount of expertise and experience available to you.
• Do they have a separate telephone line to answer your queries?  Most of the IT companies have a separate line for support instead of the administrative office. You should know the details in case of an emergency.

When are their off hours?What are the charges for emergency support? Any notable IT company will offer a higher rate for their emergency support services. You should have information about the charges so that you will be ready in the event of an emergency.

Seeking answers to these questions from your IT managed service provider would make it easier to initiate terms of communication and have a long-term contract. If you are looking for a reliable IT Managed Services Support provider in Cleveland, Net Activity, Inc. holds a strong reputation for providing 24x7 help desk support to its clients since 2002. In case you need to know about our services in detail, please contact Harry Bhatia at 2165035150 X 206 or visit http://www.netactivity.us/contact.html


Source: http://www.netactivity.us/blog/review-this-checklist-when-outsourcing-it-help-desk-support/

Cloud Computing Enters Phase 2 – Centralization to Decentralization

Cloud computing is all about centralization i.e. the ability to push servers and workloads that run on expensive on-premise facilities to more affordable systems on clouds. This in turn allows businesses to share resources with other tenants to increase the overall efficiency by reducing costs. Centralization facilitates a single location for data that may have once existed in many enterprise silos. Moreover, it allows users to manage processes and systems centrally with a single set of tools.

Despite all the positives of centralization, the cloud is likely to shift to a distributed approach (decentralization) over the next decade. Centralization can be termed as the Phase 1 of the Cloud Computing era while decentralization is the Phase 2. It focuses on moving the data processing back to the consumers of those processes and data. So, the Phase 2 has recreated the notion of client/server computing, with the cloud being the server and workloads excluding their applications or data moving back to the clients.

This shift is not necessarily a complete change, as the workload will move closer to those who use them, while remaining centrally managed and controlled. In spite of being executed across a widely distributed architecture, they will remain logically centralized whether or not their processing and bits are physically distributed.

The cloud platform automates the distribution of workloads on private cloud instances, which are paired closely with the centralized public clouds. While it may seem like the workloads are residing in the public cloud, they are actually deployed in a hybrid-like distributed architecture. Cloud computing technology enforces flexibility to such a surprising extent. Ironically, once we move to a centralized cloud-based architecture, all possibilities are open including putting the workloads back on-premises, minus the silos.

The Net Activity, Inc. team can help you with your migration to the cloud. We are uniquely positioned as leaders in the cloud infrastructure services network and provide cloud computing solutions which let you have a competitive edge over other businesses. Please visit http://www.netactivity.us/contact.html for more details. You can also call Harry Bhatia at 2165035150 X 206 to discuss further.

Source: http://www.netactivity.us/blog/cloud-computing-enters-phase-2-centralization-to-decentralization/

3 Easy Techniques for Migrating to Managed IT Services

All the roads lead to managed IT services. Yes, whether you agree or not, whatever is the size of your business, hiring IT support services is the final destination. The benefits of outsourcing your network management services are widely known.  Resellers, traditional solution providers, integrators, and product oriented solution providers – all have been migrating to the managed services model from at least a decade. The reasons for moving over are clear – higher growth rate, cost efficiency, proactive solutions, 24x7 assistance, and many more. Research and Markets predicts that the global managed services market will grow at a 12.4 percent clip through 2018. Managed services, especially the managed security services offer a great potential to generate higher margins. 

A planned and thoughtful approach can help your migration to hiring an MSP. Here is a glimpse of what can ease the process:

Conducting a Gap Analysis: Performing a gap analysis can help you with a roadmap to reach to the managed services space. It will help you understand whether you need to retain personnel or hire new sales and technical employees. At this stage, companies can decide whether to manage its own infrastructure or hire the services of a third-party hosting or cloud service provider.

Revising Business Approaches: This is undoubtedly a great transition and businesses will need to develop service level agreements (SLAs) and manage them. Companies will require new way of delivering services and measuring results.

Automating Service Deliveries: MSPs perform many customer support duties remotely instead of dispatching technicians for on-site support. For making this efficiency a reality, MSPs need to automate deliveries. As a client, you should check to see whether your MSP provides automatic service deliveries.

Why search elsewhere if you get cost efficient managed IT services at Net Activity, Inc.? We have expert solutions for managing your IT network services. Please call Harry Bhatia at 2165035150 X 206 to discuss further details or visit:http://www.netactivity.us/it-managed-services.html to know more about our service offerings.

Source: http://www.netactivity.us/blog/3-easy-techniques-for-migrating-to-managed-it-services/

Learn 5 Ways How VoIP Drives Collaboration

With Unified Communications, collaboration has become an open-ended thing. It represents a different set of needs, involving multiple parties, along with a diverse set of applications so that everyone can work together. While collaboration is comparatively a difficult concept for decision makers to figure out vendor offerings, VoIP is significantly easier to work with. The following information will help you to understand how VoIP plays an important role in driving the collaboration value proposition:  

VoIP is The Voice:
Although self-evident, business VoIP phone services represent a step further than just telephony. VoIP facilitates other forms of vocal communication too, making a wider group of employees comfortable.

VoIP is Real Time Communication:
Speed and efficiency is real time today. Especially for the short turnaround collaboration needs, you need to have real-time access. Here, there is no better tool of choice than VoIP.

VoIP is Nomadic:
VoIP is web based and characterizes flexibility as other collaboration applications. With VoIP, users can access both the company phone system and multiple modes of voice from any broadband connection. Thus, with its versatile nature, VoIP is an ideal tool for collaboration in today’s distributed workforces.

VoIP is Free (Near to free):
Nothing encourages adoption of technology more than making it free. While there are certain costs associated with using VoIP in the conventional manner (as part of your phone system), there are web-based VoIP applications that provide voice at little or no cost. This increases and eases the willingness of employees to collaborate outside of work.

VoIP is Easy Integration:
As telephony has moved into the data network, it can support more applications in the IP environment, making the collaboration experiences better. This definitely will increase adoption of VoIP technology.

Net Activity is a leading VoIP Phone Service Provider that installs and configures on premise based phone systems and IP based solutions.  If you wish to try their result-oriented services, please contact Harry Bhatia at 2165035150 X 206 or visit: http://www.netactivity.us/contact.html



Source: http://www.netactivity.us/blog/learn-5-ways-how-voip-drives-collaboration/

Know Your IT Help Desk Better

IT help-desks represent the busiest and most important of the business operations as they are in direct communication with the customers. They are responsible for making a business competitive and efficient. ITSS (IT support services) have expanded in a major way as companies expand their operations, ways of handling hardware and software issues, troubleshooting networks, and accomplishing other complex tasks. With a fully functional department, offering well managed IT services organizations are taking it as a challenge to present a distinguished customer service to its customers.

Let’s understand the segregated tasks of the IT help-desks:

Level 1 support helps to filter calls and provide prompt troubleshooting. The resources at this basic level deal with password resets, PC configurations, etc.

Level 2 caters to issues that include laptop or user device support. Here, resources resolve customer queries by troubleshooting on one hand and hardware installations as well as in-house repairs on the other.

Level 3 support goes even higher to aspects such as server repairs, database administration, data centers, etc.

Level 4 concerns with people outside your organization. This is typically an external part of the IT support services and includes hardware and software vendors.

An evolved help desk should have these properties to ensure productivity and achieve an adequate return on investments.      

Well groomed face of the organization should be a prerequisite: Apart from the technical competencies, the IT service providers need to be backed by soft skills as their responsibility is to display a well-groomed face of the organization to the consumers.

Proactive participation: This is another key feature that adds up to the skill sets of a matured ITSS system. It helps companies anticipate issues and solve them with minimum downtime.

Flexibility and adaptability: This 4-level structure may not be applicable to all the organizations.  The help desk must retain a flexible style of working to respond to any kind of problem that comes up abruptly.

Help desk analytics: An analysis of the performance, issues, challenges, and achievements of the help-desk would map out a better road to a problem free and planned growth.

Teamwork rewards: An effective Help Desk demands teamwork. While it requires personnel of various technical levels, it is important that they gel as a team.

Net Activity, Inc. is a leading provider of IT support services since 2002. We have teamed up with the right people and the right technology to support your IT infrastructure. Our help desk support system is well staffed with trained experts to provide you excellent and satisfactory service. You can be assured of a hassle-free service after an agreement with us. Allow us to manage your IT services and we would never let you down. Contact Harry Bhatia over the phone at 2165035150 X 206 or visit us at http://www.netactivity.us/contact.html to know our service options.

Source: http://www.netactivity.us/blog/know-your-it-help-desk-better/