In case you had your head in the cloud for the past 5 years, there is a revolution in providing agile, flexible and pay-as-you-consume business IT. It’s called the Cloud!!

 

So, on a more serious note, it’s fair to assume that pretty much everyone has heard of “the cloud” and everyone has “some idea” of what it is, but the term “the cloud” is so “grey” (not quite fifty shades though some do think ‘cloud’ is sexy) and it has been bandied about so much in the past few years that it’s become difficult to tell exactly what it really means and what business benefits it offers. In contrast, in our personal lives the “cloud” is everywhere and used in our daily lives without often realizing it – your photos in iCloud, OneDrive, DropBox, Facebook – yep, that’s Cloud!!

Combine the skeptical “what can cloud do for my business” along with the fears about information security, with stories of cloud providers or online businesses suffering data breaches almost every week and it’s no wonder that cloud is still something many businesses don’t want to stick their business into.

Why now?

One of the reasons many businesses are reviewing what they do is that Windows Server 2003 support is ending July 14, 2015

After this date, Microsoft will no longer issue security updates for any version of Windows Server 2003. If you are still running Windows Server 2003 in your data center, you need to take steps now to plan and execute a migration strategy to protect your infrastructure. By migrating to Windows Server 2012 R2, Microsoft Azure or Office 365, you can achieve concrete benefits, including improved performance, reduced maintenance requirements, and increased agility and speed of response to the business.

You will no doubt already be looking at what you do with this estate, If it's moving to 2012 then great, but now could be the perfect time to look at moving what you can to the cloud.

 

Every Cloud has a Silver Lining Right?

Rather than fearing the unknown of cloud, let’s take a short look at the benefits it can offer to businesses of all sizes. As Cloud hosting gain RackSpace once said “the cloud is for everyone but not for everything” – I think that stands true today!

Of course we are all clear on what cloud" is right?.

Cloud is ubiquitous bandwidth, the centralisation of on-demand compute power and pay as you consume or pay as you grow data storage (huge arrays of server farms bigger than football stadiums with multiple redundant data recovery capabilities), plus applications that are more capable and more secure than ever before – certainly more secure than most businesses could ever make them within their private data centres
The cloud has also given birth to the “software as a service” (SaaS) industry (think Office 365 or Saleforce.com) where users do not own a program or application but have access to it on a subscription basis.

Ok, so you get that bit right, but what about the fact that many people just don’t think “Clouds” are secure. The name “Cloud” has probably caused more anxiety about the security of the cloud than any actual negative event – because if its “fluffy” in nature and you can’t see it – how can you secure it!  It might have been better if “Cloud” had been called “The Vault”, or “Alcatraz” or something else that sounds secure an impenetrable.

Of course, at a time when security is more important than ever, given the ever increasing regulatory pressures and the rise of standards and compliance bodies in cyber-space, the cloud is actually the safest data repository available to the majority of businesses. I am talking the big players here of course (not Joe Blogs that has a couple of servers in his garage connected to the internet). Cloud giants like Microsoft, Google, and Amazon, provide enterprise-class data centers with the strongest regulatory compliance, comprehensive and documented security service levels that exceed those of almost any company whose core business is not IT.

 

Ok so what can the cloud really do for your business?

Reduced Technology Spending – One of the biggest benefits of “Cloud” is to the businesses bottom line. Cloud technology allows you to reduce a significant portion of IT costs - from servers, Storage, Switching and Cooling to perpetual software and more.  Cloud leverages economies of scale by aggregating computing resources across many organizations and users – this doesn’t mean “shared” data just shared resources of grunt and storage. Of course this also reduces, maintenance costs, manpower costs and service desk costs.

Software Updates become a Thing of The Past – Software updates can be a serious drain on your IT’s time and resources. These need to be carefully planned, tested and have a roll-back plan they are important to ensure your applications (and of course operating systems) maintain full functionality, remain secure and of course are supported by the vendor. With services delivered from the “Cloud”, businesses can benefit from automatic software that get tested and deployed in the background, saving IT time, hassle and stress whilst freeing up their time to focus on IT tasks and project work to improve productivity across the business.

A Truly Mobile Workforce – Our workforce is increasingly mobile. Cloud technology allows you to do your job from wherever you are, as long as you have an Internet connection (even 3G/4G data connection). Gone are the days of a laborious VPN process, welcome 2-factor authentication and Cloud based direct access.

Capital Expense Reduction – Software licensing costs can be exorbitant for businesses, but most cloud solutions are charged on a pay as you go (on monthly basis). This allows businesses to reduce capital expenses by eliminating steep software licensing fees and just pay for what they use on a ramp up/ramp down model.

Collaborating Gets Easier – Today, global businesses and even local businesses communicating globally means that you’re more than likely collaborating or communicating with people in other countries and therefore different time zones. With cloud technology, everyone can work on a central copy of the same file, which enables effective collaboration rather than multiple versions being emailed around to groups of people. 

Mitigate against data loss – As well as the continued risk of data loss through hacking, there is also the very threat of losing data through he loss of end user equipment - laptops, tablets, USB drives and smart phones. We all know those horror stories on the news of USB drives left on train containing confidential data. As an example, 800,000 laptops are misplaced each year in airports alone.

Using Cloud technology (along with good practice) can help mitigate this since
Important data is stored and therefore backed up online. So if you do leave your laptop at the airport gate, your data is safe online.

 

Summary

So we have discussed a few of the merits that using Cloud based services can bring to your business. Not only does the cloud give us unprecedented power in business, but in the last five years, the cost of cloud services has reduced to a point where “storage” in the cloud is almost “free” with the main players in a constant price war to win business.  This means that businesses of all sizes, from two-person home businesses, to 1,000+ global businesses can benefit from enterprise-class IT tools by leveraging Cloud.

Millions of companies including many of the FTE250 now use the cloud to access billions of files nearly as fast as they ever did uploading a file from a PC hard drive back in the 90s. Over recent years, early fears about the security and privacy of data in the cloud have been dispelled by the implementation of data encryption at levels unmatchable in even some of the biggest “private” data centers.

We are interested to hear your views about Cloud –
1. What does your business currently run in the cloud?
2. In the next 3 years how many of your business services will be cloud based?

So we've all made some New Resolutions and most of us by now have probably broken them all. From an IT perspective, there's always things we'd like to improve or make better. Especially when it comes to SharePoint.

 

New Year, New IT Resolution # 1: Speed up SharePoint

According to Microsoft market research, 78% of all Fortune 500 companies use SharePoint in some form or another - whether it's for internal file and document sharing, to host their Intranet or to run their Web Site on.

Enterprises choose between the growing popularity of SharePoint Online provided with Office 365 and the more traditional on premises solution for more complex deployments. In some cases, enterprises deploy a hybrid solution with some of both.

User experience of SharePoint can vary dramatically depending on a number of different things. Here are three top tips to make sure it stays healthy and runs fast....just like that marathon you are training for!!

Tip #1 - Run Faster

When your applications suffer from bandwidth or latency challenges (common when running or accessing applications across a WAN or when access applications from the cloud), considering a WAN-optimized solution has many benefits. You can tune your deployment to handle the toughest locations around the globe without having to spend endless cash on upgraging bandwidth and circuits.

One of the added benefits of WAN-optimization with Riverbed is that you get the built-in Quality of Service (QoS) traffic shaping capability and the ability to send valuable deep packet inspection (DPI) flow traffic to Riverbed's SteelCentral suite for monitoring and troubleshooting.

Tip #2 - Give up those slow pages

Not all pages are slow with SharePoint Online or On-Premises but the ones that are could be mission-critical for your business. Knowing what those pages are, who manages them, and who accesses them will save you a ton of time and resources rather than playing a guessing game. You need to have a high level overview of page times, page views, and what users or IP conversations are impacted by the network, the server and sometimes the code itself.

Tip #3 - Get to know your applications better!

One of the most common complaints for SharePoint is the SQL database and the execution of customized .NET code. Being able to take a deep dive into the code and finding out what tier, what transaction, and what user was impacted by slow response time will help fix any mean time to resolution issues. When you have all the transactions for all the tiers for all users at one-second intervals, you never have to reproduce the issue, you have it all at your fingertips.

Talk to us @Cisilion or email sales@cisilion.com for more information

www.cisilion.com

 

Avoid Network Operations Center Finger Pointing

Did you learn anything from BlackFriday that will help ensure that on Cyber Monday you can better prepare your network operations center (NOC) for to advoid finger-pointing and blame for poor performance or denail of service.

During this holiday season, the ITsystems for any retail business is mission-critical and business and sales  performance is going to be a direct result of your application performance—and provbably the only time of the year you can really review your IT performance.

 

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1) Keep IT Simple. You don't have to be in Media, eCommerce or retail to know that solving IT problems quickly can make a huge difference in the overall performance of your organiszations IT and client / customer facing business applications. The simpler your network and application monitoring tools and alerting systems, the easier it is for you to determine where the problem is, why its occurring and what needs to be fixed!

Sounds simple right? But when you have complicated, non-shared tools for network performance management (NPM) and application performance management (APM), IT and network teams typically get hampered by any attempts to problem solve together as a cohesive team. Whilst in the the past, that did not matter as much because fixing the network usually solved most end user experience challenges. That's not the case now - i had just last week a client who'd been trying to fix some intermittent user issues for 3 weeks!!

Within today's Hybrid Enterprise and with so many components affecting application performance, it's not always the network that is at fault.... it could be an application, part of an application, a database server or your Internet pipe! Knowing and fixing quickly is key to keeping the business running smoothly!

 

2) Manage from the Top Down not Bottom Up - the critical ingredient to the success of any business is to have the customer or end-user experience of business critical applications at the top of your priority list!  With today's hybrid enterprise and with applications and services spread across so many systems with many inter-dependencies, you need a performance engineering team that can manage and work across a number of different teams. Without this joined up approach, everyone will be working in their own silo and with no accountability for the overall success of your application delivery

 

3) Ensure you have an integrated Cross-Architecture performance dash board - lmost all troubleshooting begins in the NOC. As a network operator, you get a quick view of whether you have an application problem or a site problem with a dashboards like this:

This dashboard in the NOC gets you started. Where you go from here is up to the data and must be easily shared across teams to be effective when troubleshooting and fixing and issue.The dashboard above is from Riverbed's SteelCentral.

 

4) Remember - Better Together! - With a comprehensive set of passive and active NPM and APM monitoring tools such as those from Riverbed's complete Application Performance Platform™, you have a much better chance of solving application performance issues across teams and much faster.

Another advantage of Riverbed's set of solutions is a continued commitment to "Better Together" solutions. For example, AppResponse 9.5 now integrates with SteelHead 9.0 for visibiility and troubleshooting WAN-optimized web applications on premise or by SaaS.

SteelCentral NetProfiler provides deep packet inspection (DPI) data of the specific ports, protocols, and applications running in your branch offices from another together-is-better solution by integrating with SteelHead.

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Cisilion are proud to Riverbed Premier Plus Partners and Riverbed Authorized Support Partners. Contact us for more information, to book a demo or explore a Proof of Concept.

If you or your team are responsible for running or delivery the IT for a retail store or chain today - the busiest shopping day of the year - the last thing you is urgent phone call only to be told that the point of sales (POS) system is down at one of your stores.

With shoppers lining up for today's Black Friday deals, bargains or the boxing day rush – you know that these sales make the difference between profit and loss, especially with so much traffic and sales now online!

With panic on hand about just what has happened - you ask your branch manager, "When were the DR plans last tested?" A long pause followed by “umm….” confirms your fears. With little optimism, you instruct the branch manager to implement the DR plans.

What are you talking about – this won’t happen
Well, this might sound a bit last decade and bit extreme  - but it does illustrate the impact that an IT Failure can have on a retail store and your sales!

Today’s retail store environments are heavily reliant on IT (in store servers, WAN connectivity, POS systems, wired and wireless networks) – they are highly critical and there are huge risks and costs associated with any kind of downtime.

Imagine even a less extreme scenario where the POS fails and checkout attendants need to switch to a manual or paper-based process - A US study last year found that 50% of customers who had to wait in line for longer than 5 minutes would avoid that retailer or brand in the future. Yet like many branches, retail shops often lack the protection and DR plans that “online only” businesses have to keep them up and running at critical times.

For your business to survive – this needs to change!

Protecting your Retail Stores from IT Failure and Risk
Many leading retail businesses are now taking “store IT” assets and turning them from a liability to a point of competitive advantage.

Here we look at how with Riverbed SteelFusion®, branch office consolidation and WAN acceleration technologies can help you modernize, protect and improve the retail IT environment:

 

 

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1) Optimise those in-store applications.  As the consumer retail experience becomes ever more digital, in-store apps drive revenue and operations. Riverbed SteelFusion can help by enabling businesses to centralise corporate applications such as Microsoft Exchange and SharePoint while delivering a fast and consistent experience to remote users/stores. Other applications such as Customer-facing and backroom apps including inventory and time management that “need” to run locally can be hosted directly on the SteelFusion platform. Riverbed SteelFusion ensures continuous operations of your store despite network outages with the added benefit of letting you store and manage servers and data centrally, transforming how you provision, protect, and recover services.

2) Streamline Point of Sale systems With the most critical application in the retail store is the point-of-sale terminal. With SteelFusion, its possible to eliminates the need for a dedicated POS server. The POS servers can be run locally on SteelFusion to eliminate / remove the cost of keeping local servers/storage locally while providing additional security by encrypting any and all customer data. SteelFusion’s data centralisation provides near-real time customer data meaning its always available centrally in the data centre for analysis.

3) Empower Your Digital Signage.  You will know that a critical component of a modern in-store experience is the use of digital signage for promotions, advertising, content, and pricing. Many of these today need a dedicated media server running in the back room. Because SteelFusion eliminates the need for the dedicated infrastructure that powers the digital signage, it means you can now run the media engine on the converged appliance to cut costs. What’s more, the built-in WAN optimisation can optimize and pre-populate video content, meaning a better experience in store.

4) Monitor customer experiences.  One of things asked by marketing and finance is “how do you monitor the experience of customers using new in-store applications?”.  The question is are you meeting your internal SLAs with these apps? SteelFusion can provide remote application and traffic monitoring, which when coupled with Riverbed SteelCentral performance management can provide you with in-depth monitoring of transactions, the user experience, and your overall infrastructure performance.

5) Breakout customer Wi-Fi traffic. One of the emerging aspects of the modern retail store is customer Wi-Fi and the growing expectation that this will just be available for free. By utilising Riverbed SteelFusion you can now eliminate the need to back haul internet traffic across your WAN or MPLS. Riverbed SteelFusion’s built-in WAN optimisation with Path Selection enables you to send Wi-Fi traffic – consumer or corporate – directly to the Internet. With SteelFusion you can easily leverage lost-cost Internet links such as ADSL and reduce the cost of bandwidth at each store location by more than 5 fold.

6) Eliminating stacks of IT and Storage and Back-up.  Most stores have stacks of IT - including file, print, domain controllers, and directory servers – not to mention back-up servers and tape drives. Using Riverbed SteelFusion all of this can be eliminated – meaning you can get rid of the physical server and storage infrastructure associated with these servers by converging them onto the SteelFusion platform. All of this can be reduced down to a single 1U appliance. SteelFusion delivers power, cooling, and space savings and will easily fit into backrooms without complicated wiring.

 

What’s more, with all the data now stored in the Data Center (and projected back to the stores), you are also solving compliance, data integrity, security and performance issues.

Cisilion are proud to Riverbed Premier Plus Partners and Riverbed Authorized Support Partners. Contact us for more information, to book a demo or explore a Proof of Concept.

Yesterday, we ran an event at the Duck and Waffle Restaurant (40th Floor Heron Tower) on Optimising the Digital Experience with Riverbed's Performance Management platform and in particular SteelApp.

We made a few un-due "assumptions" that all of our guests know what Load Balancing and "Application Delivery Controllers" are and how they work. We thought we would give a brief overview into each.

Acronyms and Terminology

GLBs, ADCs, Traffic Managers, Reverse Proxy's, Application Proxy's. These words/phrases were used a lot today in different contexts. We thought it was worth clarifying exactly what these “ADCs” and “Traffic Managers” actually do, and how they differ from plain and simple “Load Balancers”or DNS round-robin processes.

So – what is a “Traffic Manager?”

A Traffic Manager performs similar functions for a website (or web service), that a call flow management system does in a call centre. Think about a customer service representative in a small business for example. Their direct-dial number is published in the phone book or online and they handle in bound and out-bound customer queries, ranging from account queries, technical support questions, through to escalations and complaints.

This is where the trouble starts.

As this "small" company begins to become more successful, the volume of calls increases and customer service levels begin to decrease as calls are left unanswered or dealt with in-correctly. For example, the phone line may be engaged, or the customer service rep may be away from his desk, so calls get missed. In this scenario, the customer service rep is also busy dealing with all kinds of “unwanted calls” - : sales call, wrong numbers, spam calling from other company’s for example as well as personal calls.

What the company needs is a way to control how phone calls are routed to employees to ensure that their customers are services by the right people in the fastest time possible.

So what’s the solution?

In the case of the example above, many businesses implement a call centre technology. A Call Centre is a great way to solve the problem as a company can sit a number of call centre “operators” on a call management system, to balance the phone calls across the members of staff, to route particular calls to particular departments and most importantly, to give them more control - such as stopping calls from certain locations, screening out nuisance calls, and in some cases, to even respond directly to customer inquiries. Above all it’s all about improving the customer experience…

How does this work for my applications then?

In a very similar way actually.

In just the same way as the example above, businesses may have an online application (let’s call it an e-commerce website) that may be hosted with a single web server with a public IP address. As the business grows they quickly progress to building a farm of web servers which may be hosted on-premise in the cloud on in a hybrid combination of the two.

To ensure that the applications are delivered in a timely, secure and most efficient way, businesses choose to deploy “Traffic Management” in front of these web applications. These traffic management systems (often referred to as “Load Balancers” or “Proxy’s”) are application delivery controllers. Their job is to manage the delivery of the critical applications and services that the business publishes. The effectiveness of these ADCs can be measured by one simple metric – the degree of control that the application delivery controller gives you in delivery the application to the use in the fastest and most personal way.

 

Ok, I got it! So where and how do I deploy them?

Virtualization and Cloud have had a significant impact on the architecture of applications and servers running in a business – this deployment model applies equally to ADCs.

• The old architecture was monolithic - with all elements of an application deployed within a physical data center and physical ADCs in close proximity to manage the traffic. It was a static environment, with long lead times required to change or upgrade the overall application deployment.
• The new architecture is more flexible, which follows the advantages of virtualisation. With elements of an application spread across a range of IT environments (and often in different locations) we can now place an ADC around each part of the application meaning we can ensure application availability whatever the demand without buying expensive static and “future proofed” hardware meaning we can not only better control costs, but we can support an environment that is more dynamic and distributed in nature.

 

And an example of how Riverbed SteelApp does this is?

Yesterday, Steve Mavin (from Riverbed) spoke about ‘See Tickets’. See Tickets is one of the largest online ticket resellers in Europe, with over 34 million online unit sales per year.  The IT team at See Tickets was becoming increasingly aware that its website struggled to cope with huge and sudden spikes in web traffic – meaning they were missing sales! With 85 percent of ticket sales made online, and over 1 million page views per day, See Tickets is heavily reliant on the performance of its website infrastructure.

When See Tickets launches a new event, thousands of people will hit their website at the same time, and there is a real danger that the web site will collapse. SteelApp steps in to act as a shock absorber, and manages the incoming requests to protect the application, and speed up the response time.

Riverbed SteelApp was chosen for its flexibility and reporting metrics to monitor and review website traffic patterns, identify trends, and make informed business decisions. They use SteelApp to apply a series of application business policies to control the type, flow, and priority of traffic to their website. This enables See Tickets to manage traffic to the back-end servers to cope with the huge peaks of visitors coming to the site. 

In addition, SteelApp Web App Firewall is a key part of the solution, providing an additional layer of security, giving See Tickets optimum protection for their online presence. See Tickets’ customers have the reassurance that their personal and financial information is protected, as they comply with the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS).

Online ticket sales and similar high-volume transactions are a great example of the way in which SteelApp can make a real difference to a web application: put simply, shorter response time means they make more money, and downtime means losing money.

Anything else?

Riverbed SteelApp, is the #1 virtual application delivery controller (ADC) for scalable, secure, and elastic delivery of your enterprise, cloud, and e-commerce applications.

We'd love to hear from you to talk through your application and business performance needs. Please get in touch @Cisilion or contact me directly @rquickenden 

 

 

The Latest 2014 Gartner Magic Quadrant has just been released and as usual it’s the usual leap-frogging match between Cisco and Microsoft Lync that we see every year. This year Microsoft have just beaten Cisco to the post. I won’t dwell too much on the report as I am sure by now you’d had a chance to read it. If you haven’t, you can read it here. 

If you read between the lines a little, one thing mentioned a couple of time is the growing mention (and lack of support in some cases) for WebRTC. Within the latest report, Gartner states that “Enterprise planners must also expect considerable change in technology and requirements…….Significant advances, such as WebRTC, are making it easier to integrate communications directly into business applications.”

So what is WebRTC?
WebRTC enables media rich browser-to-browser communications without the need to download “plugins” or run applets. This simplifies application creation for developers on the back end too and because its’ web-based and back-end based it means that updates can be rolled out really quickly without the need for users to download and install updated software.

WebRTC is already supported on over a billion endpoints according to Google (who are a major WebRTC developer) who expect the number of WebRTC-capable endpoints to grow to nearly 4 billion by 2016.

Phil Edholms’ who is a WebRTC expert and president at UC Strategies.com says that “The thing that is really exciting about WebRTC is that, in addition to enabling a website to allow two peer endpoints to begin a rich media session (voice, video, data, etc.) with a relatively simple set of instructions, WebRTC is the initial technology showing the change coming in the industry, the webification of communications.”

Why do I need to know about it?
It’s not just traditional Unified Communications such as Cisco Jabber and Microsoft Lync (which uses a non-standard HTML 5 variant)  that are moving to support this technology either. Specialist Web Conferencing providers technology that are enhanced by WebRTC either. The Contact Center, and customer interactions in general will see huge benefits in using WebRTC as it will enable much better interactions with people on SmartPhones and Tablets that don’t want (or cant) download special apps.

Whilst existing “leaders” are adding WebRTC support into their existing product portfolios, there are also new emerging vendors releasing UC&C products based solely around WebRT. For example in April 2013 GenBand introduced SPiDR, a specific WebRTC gateway. This sits on the network edge and provides web-centric, open APIs that allow app devs to build apps that use the rich communications services of the telecommunications network –voice, IM, video, conferencing, presence and all that other jazz.

Later this month, the online retailer http://www.toygeniusonline.com/ will go live with a new website in which shoppers can interact online with sales teams in real time. They will be able to provide real time assistance to shoppers about their products, answer any questions, and even show them videos of the products customers are interesting in. It’s like a physical shopping experience but online – all delivered using WebRTC technology. From here the virtual sales assistants can put the products customers select into virtual shopping baskets and then move shoppers to the online checkout when they are ready. They expect this to significantly help address the abandoned shopping basket and enrich the shopping experience.

It will be interesting to see this space develop further and see what next year’s Gartner Magic Quadrant looks like for the Unified Communications space.

Need to now more or see how this technology can benefit your business, visit our website or book a UC demo with us.

www.cisilion.com

When I first read (on The Register I think) about Microsoft’s new Skype translator I didn't really know what to believe I mean we now live in a world where even the most far-out and advanced concepts are becoming a reality - Knight Rider style Google Cars, ordering pizzas and cabs from your smart phone, Live HD video conferencing anywhere in the world (or even on a plane)!

I have played around with Apple's Siri, Bing Translate, Cortana and whilst all quite clever they lack the real understanding of the spoken word. hence, I was some what skeptical about the Skype Translator. I immediately thought about these experience, how will it deal with the complexities of language and accents?  How will it deal with homonyms?  and how can it ever be properly contextualised and therefore work in a real life real world environment?

Then..... I was lucky enough to see it in action...watching a live recording of Microsoft's new CEO Satya Nadella at the Worldwide Partner Conference where he demoed the product (albeit still in Beta) whereby a conversation was played out between one of his US colleagues and another German speaker.  After each person spoke they clicked a button when they had finished. THEN THE MAGIC HAPPENED....What we heard back was a near perfect full spoken (yes SPOKEN)  translation. It was incredible - and to think, I'm usually not that easy to impress!

So how does it work? Reading a bit  more about how this Translator technology works, impressed me even more. After a bit of googling (I mean Bing'ing) The Skype Translator actually works on a principle called "Deep Learning" which operates on the basis of neural networks rather than a set of language translation "rules" to deal with the complexities of languages.

This is huge and will no doubtedly have massive implications for the way we live and working the future. The full Beta is expected to land in November time so make sure you look out for it. We don't know yet how much of this will make its way into Lync - I would expect it too but as yet have not heard any clear messages about the matter.

If you havent seen Sype Translator in action, you can see aspects of it and how it works here: http://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2014/05/27/microsoft-demos-breakthrough-in-real-time-translated-conversations/

Welcome your views/thoughts on this as always. @rquickenden or @Cisilion.

If your business has remote offices spread across the globe, you'll know that these locations require a complete set of IT services to enable employees to work effectively and productively and to keep customers engaged.

Unlike data centers, remote offices need to supplement full infrastructure stacks with bandwidth optimisation, remote file and application delivery services, plus of course security services and appliances.

There have been a number of studies in recent months by the likes of IDC and Forrester to examine converged infrastructure as a solution to address the unique needs of these remote offices.

What is relatively consistent in such reports is the business' desire to migrate away from remote office solutions based on discrete system components toward solutions based on integrated and virtualised stacks, and a continued push to centralise all management and operational tasks taking the high cost and burden away from outsourced or lower skilled IT staff from visiting branches to perform often mundane IT tasks.

The implications in selecting remote office support solutions mean that businesses should be looking at deploying integrated and centrally managed solutions that require no local IT resources beyond the initial physical installation. 

We see many of these such publications as a little one sided - often favouring the vendor that has comissioned the study (as one would expect). What we @Cisilion see in reality is a little more complex than that. What we see if businesses exploring options around

• Centralisation - moving as many IT services as they can to the Data Centre
• Application Acceleration through WAN Acceleration services
• Migration to Cloud Services - whether this be Office 365, hosted telephony, or hosted CRM for example
• Centralised or Cloud Managed Wireless Networks (with a wireless first objective)
• Flexibility through Mobility - with secure BYOD or corporate managed SmartPhones

What becomes apparent is that all of these challenges mean introducing new layers of IT or decentralising the traditional boundaries of IT and the management that goes with it.

With these extended boundaries and management often comes questions and concerns around security - who is responsible, who manages it and how good is it....

If this sounds familiar, we'd love to hear from you at info@cisilion.com or @Cisilion