Posted by NaviSite Quarterly

Cutting costs is the top agenda of enterprises in the current economic backdrop. However, cost trims are not synonymous with trimming business efficiency. Some near-term cost-saving initiatives, if chosen carefully, can surely help you execute your long-term vision. Read more…

Posted by NaviSite Quarterly

Did you know that the live coverage of Barack Obama’s presidential inauguration was watched by 21.3 million over the Web, with more than 7.7 million streams flowing concurrently at peak time?

The soaring popularity of the Internet has opened up vast opportunities to deliver your content to your globally dispersed audience. And with democratization of the net, there is no limit to the volume or formats of content that are delivered online. This has created a demand for newer, better Content Delivery Network (CDN) solutions that tap into the power of Internet to deliver a jitter-free user experience, without increasing costs associated with the delivery of content that could include software, games, audio/video, CAD/CAM images, blueprints, and much more.

NaviSite takes content delivery outsourcing to a new level with the latest CDN portfolio that offers faster, reliable, and secure content delivery. NaviSite’s content delivery services break all the barriers of traditional content delivery where organizations had to worry about what they were delivering, to whom, and how - and most of the times were not sure if the content was delivered securely to the right audience.

NaviSite’s CDN solutions leverage the modern CDN technologies of our partner EdgeCast to deliver any kind of content, anytime, anywhere without investing the time, effort, and money required to set up and manage an IT infrastructure, yet offering all the flexibility, functionality, and support that such an infrastructure would provide. NaviSite’s CDN spans a full range of services from Electronic File Delivery (EFD) to content streaming to online video publishing services.

25% Faster and More Efficient Delivery of Your Electronic Content

Content providers succeed and fail by delivery times. A globally dispersed user base, larger file sizes and heavy costs are the key challenges faced by content providers. NaviSite has devised a low-cost alternative to traditional CDNs with 25% faster and more efficient delivery of your electronic content.

Millions of Streams Delivered Per Day

Slow downloading of rich media content can turn your audience off. NaviSite’s scalable content streaming services enable fast, hiccup-free delivery of speeches, podcasts, audio, video, news feeds and live performances. NaviSite supports the latest technologies like Adobe Flash (including FMS3), Windows Media and Microsoft Silverlight, for quicker delivery, high-speed streaming, and secure transfer for various content formats.

High Quality Video on Demand with Vidavee Technology
Consumers expect access to high-quality video on demand. As IP-based video traffic grows, the cost, quality, and operational issues associated with maintaining effective delivery continue to present a challenge to content owners. NaviSite’s Online Video Publishing Platform leverages Vidavee’s proprietary technology, so you don’t have to pay for outside transcoding and editing services or other licenses. The platform provides a web interface to edit, publish, upload, manage and distribute videos, insert ads into the videos, and analyze video usage patterns. Built from the ground up, the Online Video Publishing Platform empowers content providers to be successful in the era of omnipresent videos.

Real-time Insight into Content Delivery Trends

A key challenge in optimizing content delivery is the ability to analyze content usage, network performance, and delivery status. You need powerful reporting tools for adequate monitoring and reporting to have the real-time insights into content delivery trends. NaviSite’s advanced reporting tools provide real-time monitoring and historical reporting capabilities. These reports turn raw data into actionable information, allowing you to evaluate and maintain the effectiveness and performance of your content delivery initiatives.

Promise of Complete Content Security

In the race to meet the “anywhere, anytime” demand from consumers, a merely speedy content delivery is not sufficient. Delivering the content in secure manner has become an equally important priority. NaviSite provides complete security for your content - right from uploading to the time it reaches the hands of your audience. NaviSite’s full support of encrypted and authenticated HTTPS connections protects data in transit across the web. Moreover, NaviSite’s geo-filtering technology can control the access to your content by various geographic regions.

24×7 Access to High-availability Data Center

NaviSite’s Content Delivery Network spans 16 state-of-the-art data centers across different geographic locations, accelerating content delivery from any part of the world. Through strategically located high-capacity data centers, NaviSite supports the complete Content Delivery chain - from hosting, transcoding, streaming, to content publishing, delivery, and reporting. So you get the cost benefits and flexibility of controlling your own CDN while liberating yourself from ISP contracts, capital investments, and operational hassles.

There has never been a more exciting time to be part of the CDN revolution. NaviSite is a partner able to ensure lightning-fast, secure content delivery without worrying about the format, media, or distance. You can access the most complete range of CDN services to meet your needs of large digital assets delivery.

For more information on NaviSite’s CDN solutions, please email the author of this article at content@navisite.com.

Posted by Tony Rorai

In the current economic climate, IT Directors have to balance costs with the continuing march of technology more than ever. Prudent organizations know that standing still is the worst thing they can do, so the discussion becomes how to offload critical but non-strategic functions to free up resources and focus on core business priorities. The first of these functions that should be migrated to a hosting provider like NaviSite is Enterprise Email and Collaboration. Read more…

Posted by NaviSite Quarterly

ConnectEDU connects students, educators, and employers with higher education and career opportunities through its innovative, web-based solutions.  They use AppStructure, NaviSite’s dynamic computing platform, to create a robust foundation for connecting hundreds of thousands to a successful future. Read more…

Posted by NaviSite Quarterly

Imagine a scenario where you buy costly servers and other IT hardware, and then spend too much of your precious time and money managing, upgrading, and running them. Is it worth the hassle, especially today when you would like to focus on surviving the slowdown rather than worrying about the operational hiccups of your IT environment? Cloud computing has unlocked a new generation of IT that promises agility within your business without stretching your IT spend.  The current economic crisis is the right environment for this new revolution to grow in.

Today is the time to do more with less, and get the flexibility to scale your IT to meet your needs. Cloud computing is a solution that lets you do this swiftly and cost-effectively. This saves you from needing to raise huge amounts of capital to build and operate your own data center, which might be a tough proposition in this challenging market. What’s more, you save money, reach global audiences, gain web-scale efficiencies, and get more time on hand to focus on solving your critical business issues, while your IT environment continues to meet growing business demands.

The “What” of Cloud

The question “what is cloud computing” leaves many confused. As with any new technology buzzword, there are multiple definitions for cloud computing circling the IT world. Some call it “evolved hosting,” some “virtualized environment,” and still others refer to it as “platform as a service, infrastructure as a service, or software as a service.” Surprisingly, all of them are true!

Cloud computing is an emerging on-demand development, deployment, and delivery model that delivers off-site IT components, including infrastructure, applications, and services over the net on a pay per use basis. The key features of cloud computing worth noting are:

• It is on-demand, which means the resources are provisioned or de-provisioned quickly using technologies such as virtualization.
• It is off-site, which means you do not own the IT resources; they belong to the provider and you use them when needed. It also means lower costs, since you do not require any software or hardware.
• It is “pay per use” model, which means that you pay for what you need, saving costs on unnecessary hardware software purchases.
• It is over the net, which means that the computing infrastructure or applications and their associated data reside on a central web-based server rather than on an end user’s desktop (including servers, network, and storage). This gives users the mobility to access the information that they need any time, anywhere, from any device with an Internet connection—including mobile and handheld phones.

The “Where” of Cloud

The cloud can be deployed anywhere across the computing stack, and can expand or contract based on business needs. The cloud computing landscape of organizations can be a mix of various clouds, including:

• Cloud Infrastructure or “Hardware-as-a-Service”: It includes providing shared/reusable hardware computing hardware – such as servers, storage network, and managed services for a specific time and usage-based fee. Virtualization, grid computing, and para-virtualization are all examples of Cloud Infrastructure.
• Cloud Application or “Software-as-a-Service”: It involves offering specialized software that is installed, run, and maintained on a Cloud Infrastructure somewhere and can be accessed by the end users over the net. You pay based on number of application users or seats.
• Cloud Platform: This refers to a unified platform that dynamically provisions, configures, reconfigures, de-provisions, and manages hardware and software as needed.
• Cloud Service: This is independent software that can be used in conjunction with other services to achieve an interoperable machine-to-machine interaction over the network.
• Cloud Desktop: This includes desktop applications that run from the cloud hardware via the Internet.
• Cloud Storage: In this type of cloud, the data is separated from the place where it is processed, and stored remotely.

The “Why” of Cloud

No matter which cloud you find yourself on, its silver lining is common across, which is why more and more businesses are transitioning to the cloud. One of its key advantages is that it is a cost-effective way for businesses to acquire and use IT – a proposition that is magnified in the economic crisis. This makes it a valuable solution for small and medium businesses that need to maximize productivity without spending too much on IT resources or hardware, and now even for large enterprises who are striving to stay afloat in the downturn.

Another compelling reason to consider cloud computing is that it adds responsiveness and flexibility to your business and is ideal for businesses that experience frequent spikes in usage. The on-demand model lets you re-size or right-size your IT environment and eliminates the need for planning computing demand in advance, which further saves the surprises or costs inherent in computer capacity planning.

The Cloud entails no upfront capital costs and low operational costs. What’s more, it helps enterprises to seek and deploy new technology innovations without worrying about procuring and managing resources to enable it - so that they can compete better in the market. You do not need to build in-house expertise for IT components and technologies, as your cloud computing provider deals with all this and more. Remote access, effective resource utilization, portability, real-time collaboration capabilities, and speed to market are some of the other propositions driving the shift to cloud, especially when information has become more and more on-demand and mobile.

The Future of the Cloud

Cloud is here to stay and will continue to expand. Gartner estimates that by 2012, one in every three dollars spent on enterprise software will be a service subscription rather than a product license, and that early adopters will purchase as much as 40 percent of their hardware infrastructure as a service rather than as equipment. In another 2008 survey, IDC predicted that spending on IT cloud services will reach US$42 billion by 2012, which makes it 23% of total IT spending in 2012. While strategic business processes like finance will take longer to reach the cloud, non-critical business services and applications accessed outside the firewall like information or entertainment-oriented services such as video on demand are fast moving to the cloud.

The real foundation for cloud computing is not just Internet, it is trust. Technology providers need to build the trust that the servers, applications, and business information of their customers are secure. The provider who understands specific business needs as well as various technologies and delivery models can help you leverage cloud in the best possible way and achieve maximum business value from IT spend.

So, if you need scalable, affordable, and flexible IT infrastructure, then Cloud is the way to go. And if you choose a provider who is able to align it well with enterprise IT management, security, governance, and visibility, then you are ready to accomplish more and succeed in the Cloud.

NaviSite is a leading technology provider with extensive experience in cloud computing. Their dynamic cloud computing platform, AppStructure, which combines Virtualization, SOA, and Web 2.0 across infrastructure, application, and service layers, can help organizations build clouds and manage them, adding agility and cost-effectiveness within businesses. With deep knowledge of both enterprise and cloud data centers as well as vast capabilities across all layers of the Cloud stack, including infrastructure, applications, operating systems, databases, platform, and virtualization, NaviSite can help design creative, hybrid delivery solutions that leverage the best of both worlds.

If you have any questions or need more information about NaviSite’s cloud computing solutions, then contact the author of this article at content@navisite.com.

Posted by NaviSite Quarterly

SAP applications dominate the enterprise IT landscape today. NaviSite has designed an end-to-end SAP infrastructure management portfolio that offloads all the worries of running a mission-critical SAP environment and aligns infrastructure strategy with business needs. Read more…

Posted by NaviSite Quarterly

NaviSite Bridges the Gap between High-Performance Data Centers and Reduced Costs   

Downtime, Disruption, Cost, and Compliance – companies are continuously faced with these IT challenges. Gartner believes that during the 2009–2014 period, delivery of IT infrastructure services will become highly automated. Considering the current economic environment, it is the right time to leverage the IT infrastructure of tomorrow to gain a competitive advantage in the future. However, with infrastructure costs soaring, companies are exploring solutions and providers that can help them keep their data center costs to a minimum without compromising on the performance and availability of IT resources. Read more…

Posted by Rathin Sinha

The IT world is abuzz with “cloud computing.” If one performs a Google search for the word, almost 20 million results show up now compared to just a few barely two years ago. The number of news references to cloud computing today is several times that of the term “web-hosting”. Pundits and practitioners keep on speculating over the promise of cloud computing and if it might one day allow companies to move all of their data and applications into “the cloud” and out of data centers.But where exactly is this mysterious cloud? And what really is cloud computing? In the simplest terms, the cloud is just some form of network connection to an IT infrastructure, and cloud computing refers to using distant, interconnected servers and hardware to store data and run applications, over the internet. The connected infrastructure allows users to perform a variety of functions that their own company’s infrastructure might not be able to offer on its own. Read more…

Posted by Brady Reiter

Most organizations are looking for ways to cost-effectively manage their Oracle EBS, PeopleSoft, Siebel, Hyperion, Lawson and Kronos applications. Outsourcing applications to a third party to manage is a good option to save money, time and resources.  However, choosing an application management provider is not an easy task.

To make the assessment easier, here are top 25 questions to ask a prospective application management provider.  This Top 25 will ensure a comparable analysis of providers and will also enable you to lay the framework for a total cost of ownership (TCO) analysis. Read more…

Posted by Jason Hollenberg

NaviSite engineers have noticed a recent trend in the IT industry to move toward tape-less backup solutions for cost and efficiency reasons. This tends to occur mostly within small organizations where tape backup equipment and managing costs have a higher impact than in larger corporations. IT administrators are forced to balance between backup solutions they can afford and what their backup needs actually are. Many administrators choose to ensure business critical data (email and files) is stored on redundant hardware such as RAID1 (mirrored) or RAID5 (striped with parity) or even automated copy jobs to another physical server and consider that data safe.

Read more…