How COVID-19 is Reshaping the Digital Landscape

[et_pb_section fb_built="1" admin_label="section" _builder_version="3.22"][et_pb_row admin_label="row" _builder_version="3.25" background_size="initial" background_position="top_left" background_repeat="repeat"][et_pb_column type="4_4" _builder_version="3.25" custom_padding="|||" custom_padding__hover="|||"][et_pb_text admin_label="Text" _builder_version="3.27.4" background_size="initial" background_position="top_left" background_repeat="repeat"]With each passing month the world is learning how to fight and survive the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. Challenged by this unprecedented phenomenon experts are trying to project exactly how it is going to shape the future of the global economy. Scientists and analytics are focusing on global and regional logistics to map the road ahead so that society can reboot itself. The digital market might be the one field of human endeavor that rises to the occasion and even goes beyond. While the IT sector first took a hit back in March 2020 when people started self-isolating, specific segments of the technology market are now thriving. IT decision makers are pouring their efforts into modern tech solutions to help companies establish remote work infrastructure all throughout April and May. The cloud market for one has become a shining example of streamlining complex enterprise workflows during these difficult times.

Cloud Market Growth During COVID-19

That's correct, the cloud market has seen significant growth during Q1 2020. Before we get into the specifics, let’s have a look at what big players are doing.

Microsoft

Microsoft appears to be in top form. Widespread isolation forced a vast majority of the global populace to work from home. Companies are now required to inject corporate-level efficiency into people’s homes. MS emerges with a vast range of helpful services and benefits from Microsoft Azure packages. In practice, the company’s communication platform, MS Teams, has seen a massive jump in usage. They are prioritizing cloud capacity in general, but beyond that are focusing on specific industries, primarily health organizations. “Top priority will be going to first responders, health and emergency management services, critical government infrastructure organizational use, and ensuring remote workers stay up and running with the core functionality of Teams,” said MS in an official blog post. Additionally, the popularity of Microsoft Azure continues to climb. At the moment, the service is the public cloud favorite among enterprises. It was pointed out that 77% of enterprises regard MS Azure as a vital component to their current operations. Also, Office 365 is being rebranded into Microsoft 365, with the suite promising to offer additional AI-driven features.  

Amazon

Amazon made other efforts. Its subdivision, Amazon Web Services, is directing a whopping $20 million towards scientists who are working on diagnostics and testing for the highly unpredictable corona virus. AWS is also the number 2. choice, with 33% of enterprises claiming it’s a critical addition to their business operations. Furthermore, the latest cloud market analysis has shown increased usage of Amazon’s cloud services, as the need for remote work climbs. Various AWS tooling proved helpful in the current situation, including:
  • Amazon WorkSpaces: the service is achieving record highs, as companies upscale their work-from-home efforts in the wake of the corona virus pandemic. AWS WorkSpaces marks an avg. daily spend during March ‘20 +155% Y/Y versus +57% vs. February ’20.
  • Amazon AppStream: Amazon is set to roll out 450 applications enabling students to study remotely in an easy-to-set-up manner.
  • AWS COVID-19 Data Lake: the cloud industry giant instituted a centralized repository of fresh an curated datasets and characteristics about the corona virus and associated illnesses.

IaaS and SaaS Stats

Current data and reports on the economy and global market aren't exactly painting a pretty picture. However, an increasing number of businesses are viewing cloud adoption as the perfect safe haven in an otherwise unstable financial climate. The latest statistics indicate that the cloud market is growing and hasn’t been devastated by COVID. Quite the opposite, in fact. IaaS/PaaS Cloud Infrastructure Services were dominated by MS, Amazon and Google. Also, the public cloud is taking center stage within the infrastructure, hardware and software realm. The steady growth has been noted during 2018, all through 2019, and in 2020. Last year, MS has seen steady growth in the utilization of its cloud services. Emphasizing enterprise-grade SaaS – Microsoft, Salesforce and Adobe are taking the lead, for cloud-based services. Recent data has also brought some staggering numbers to our attention. It appears that, as of February 5, 2020, $1 trillion market capitalization of the public cloud industry, marking a 45% growth rate. On the IaaS front, while AWS is in the lead, Microsoft Azure sports an impressive figure of 62% in annual growth. Conversely, enterprise SaaS vendor market share was also led by Microsoft, Salesforce, Adobe, SAP, Oracle. Accumulated statistics and data all point to the rather obvious expansion of the cloud market.

Lessons Learned from COVID-19

There’s absolutely no doubt that the corona virus calamity is going to leave a major dent in the global economy. The devastating effects were felt in damn-near every corner of the world. When it comes to all the technology we’ve managed to create as a species, the cloud space is most certainly playing its part beautifully. The global population already experienced the biggest benefits of cloud market growth: In closing, people are helping each other and reaching out to each other more than ever before. Companies and businesses continue to connect. The public cloud bridges the gap with limitless tooling, vast infrastructure scalability and functionality.[/et_pb_text][et_pb_cta title="Webinar - Security with Microsoft 365 Tools" button_text="Add to calendar" _builder_version="4.1" header_text_color="#000000" body_text_color="#ffffff" body_font_size="17px" background_image="https://hentsu.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/Movavi-ScreenShot-018-Webinar_-Microsoft-Modern-Workplace-Boosting-Safety-and-Stability_-hentsu.jpg" custom_button="on" button_text_size="14px" button_icon="%%370%%" button_custom_margin="5px||||false|false" button_custom_padding="15px||15px||false|false" filter_saturate="109%" filter_brightness="88%" filter_contrast="132%" hover_enabled="0"]

Join our next installment of the Microsoft Modern Workplace Webinar Series focusing on Safety and Stability.

Event starts on Wednesday, May 6th at 10am EST / 3pm BST.

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Date/Time

Date(s) - 01/01/1970
12:00 AM - 12:00 AM

Location

600 5th ave. NY, NY

Understanding Your Office 365 Options

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We have provided cloud solutions to asset managers for the past three years and in this time completed various types of email migrations to Office 365. These migrations include a mix of moving clients from an on-premise Exchange or a third-party legacy private cloud provider entirely to Office 365 to working with hybrid solutions that span both own on-premise and Office 365. 

During these migrations we noticed a range of issues with clients who opted to set up their Office 365 accounts via a more economical re-seller or through bundled packages with other services. 

Here are a few things to be wary of when setting up your Office 365 accounts with the wrong partner:

  1. Some of these providers offer what is called a “Syndication Tenant”. Microsoft retired this type of subscription but it is still offered by many existing re-sellers. With a Syndication Tenant agreement, the Office 365 account, Azure AD tenant and data is held by the re-seller and can’t be easily migrated away. In this setup, a multiple step process is required to hand over the account to another partner. The data needs to be backed up, the account deleted, and the data re-imported into a new account. All of this means extra complexity, user upheaval and extended downtime. 
  2. Some re-sellers, especially the syndicated tenant providers, do not offer the account holder true admin rights which means only a subset of the Office 365 functionality and management is available. 
  3. You could end up locked into a strict contract when negotiating your agreement. Sometimes your contract could last up to two or three years with no variations possible on the user services and license counts. 
  4. Security options are limited when compared to native Office 365 solutions or conditional access policies.
  5. Interface solutions from these re-sellers often lack basic functionality such as single sign on tools. 

With issues like these it is important to do your due diligence when exploring your options before committing. More likely than not you will find that your safest and most efficient option is to partner with a trusted and experienced service provider or go to Microsoft directly.

How Hentsū does it differently

We are a Tier 1 Microsoft Cloud Service Provider (CSP) and work directly with Microsoft. We are also a Silver partner and specialists in the asset management industry. All of this allows us to provide a range of flexible solutions tailored to the world of fund management. 

A good time to reach out to us is when your fund is about to be registered (SEC, FCA, etc). We know the industry requirements and can provide guidance on best practices and compliance. We also have the ability to work earlier with startups to ensure that they have all the tools in place from day one and can scale as they grow. 

Generally, we advise to take the following steps when setting up cloud services: 

  • Create a native Office 365 account through Microsoft directly, or use one of the Hentsū starter packages. We create client accounts directly with Microsoft so you hold the keys to the Azure AD tenant.  Your data is always your data so you can migrate to another provider at any time.  
  • Validate that you hold ownership over your Office 365 account and email domain. 
  • Purchase license subscriptions and set up users and groups.
  • Don’t go for 12 month commitments until you are sure of which services you actually need. We offer all of our clients the same 12 month discounts but on a monthly rolling basis. 
  • Set up data loss prevention and data retention policies and be aware of two factor authentication and mobile device security. We enable all these features by default as you on-board to our setup.

So be sure to carefully consider all the possibilities before signing on with Office 365 re-sellers or bundled solutions, as there are a range of options for your Office 365 needs. If you are unsure of where to go next for your Office 365 solutions, reach out today to learn how we can best support you. 

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Date/Time

Date(s) - 01/01/1970
12:00 AM - 12:00 AM

Location

600 5th ave. NY, NY

Provisioning Infrastructure as Code Through Microsoft Backed Terraform  

  • Quick and reliable public cloud deployments using Terraform
  • Enables users to describe public cloud environments in code
OK, the secret is out (our CTO Alex gave a talk about it, you can watch it below). One of the reasons Hentsū can deploy environments so quickly and reliably is because of the tools we’ve selected.  We’ve been using HashiCorp Terraform to describe, deploy and maintain public cloud environments since the company was founded. So we were glad to see Microsoft recently announced a multi-year partnership with HashiCorp to enhance the Terraform Provider for Azure. This is great news for Terraform users, like Hentsū, who have already benefited from using the Infrastructure as Code method of provisioning.

What Exactly is Terraform?

Terraform enables us to describe public cloud environments in code (HashiCorp Language). Terraform can then compare a public cloud account to the code and create a plan of changes to bring the environment up to date. If the plan is acceptable it can then be applied by Terraform to create, update or delete infrastructure resources such as networks, routing tables, firewall rules and virtual machines. It does this rapidly with as much parallelisation as possible leading to a slick, reliable and iterative way of deploying and maintaining public cloud environments. Deploying additional environments (test, staging, production) becomes a copy & paste exercise, or we create reusable modules. Using a code versioning system, like Git, we can version control a public cloud environment and even rollback to a previous version if, for example, a firewall rule change didn’t have the desired result. Changes can be codified on a separate code branch, and a pull request and approval required to promote changes to the master branch. This makes for a robust change management workflow for business-critical production environments. The code commit history provides an audit trail of who changed what, and the commit notes describe why. Terraform requires administrative credentials to make changes to public cloud environments. Storing these securely is a challenge so we prefer to generate short lived credentials that are usable for maximum 1 hour. Also, as part of a release pipeline, a scheduler like Teamcity or Jenkins can apply approved changes on behalf of IT and development teams.

Hentsū and Terraform

Microsoft backing HashiCorp only confirms that using Terraform to provision resources on cloud platforms is becoming the standard way of deploying infrastructure. Hentsū has first-hand experience using the software to deploy infrastructure successfully for its clients.

How Hentsū can Help

Want to discuss using Terraform software to deploy onto the cloud? Contact us at: hello@hentsu.com

Date/Time

Date(s) - 01/01/1970
12:00 AM - 12:00 AM

Location

600 5th ave. NY, NY

Amazon Web Service UK (London) Launched

AWS now in the UK

Hentsu deploying to AWS UK London cloudToday, Amazon announced the launch of AWS data centres in London. In addition to the existing Dublin and Frankfurt locations, AWS now has a third European region choice, and one which is especially useful to UK customers. As usual for AWS regions, this UK location comes with multiple levels of resiliency and comprises of two data centres.

Benefits

But what does this mean for asset managers using AWS technology and Hentsū customers in the UK?
  • Lower latency to your UK offices and data centres
  • Lower latency to other financial institutions, exchanges, and market data providers
  • If there are any specific requirements around UK jurisdiction, this is now easily mandated as part of the deployment
  • Connectivity is now available as a cross connect from multiple points of presence in London
Hentsū is now deploying to AWS London. For existing customers we can redeploy your existing environments to the UK region, with the minimum downtime.

More Information

The AWS Europe (London) Region offers two Availability Zones at launch. AWS Regions are comprised of Availability Zones, which refer to technology infrastructure in separate and distinct geographic locations with enough distance to significantly reduce the risk of a single event impacting availability, yet near enough for business continuity applications that require rapid failover. Each Availability Zone has independent power, cooling, physical security, and is connected via redundant, ultra-low-latency networks. AWS customers focused on high availability can architect their applications to run in multiple Availability Zones to achieve even higher fault-tolerance. AWS also provides multiple Amazon CloudFront edge locations in the UK for customers looking to deliver websites, applications, and content to UK end users with low latency. These locations are part of AWS’s existing network of 68 edge sites across North and South America, Europe, Asia, and Australia. See the full press release here. Contact us for more information on how you can take advantage of the new UK London AWS region.

Date/Time

Date(s) - 01/01/1970
12:00 AM - 12:00 AM

Location

600 5th ave. NY, NY

Embracing Cloud for your Enterprise

It appears that just about any technology you use in your personal life touts some aspect of “cloud”. From Google Drive and DropBox to iCloud and OneDrive, companies are allowing users to wizard away their data to these services that magically don’t exist within their personal devices. One may assume that cloud services are simply storage solutions where you can move things into the safekeeping of a company. But of course, this is just the tip of the cloud iceberg. At Hentsu the cloud is our business so we’ve written a few tips to help clear up some of the confusion regarding what else a “cloud” service can be.  
  1. Grid Computing: Fancy speeding up number crunching and relieving your poor hardware from stressful workloads? Then move your work off to a grid computing service! These clusters of computers share a workload between themselves, freeing up your machine’s capacity. Services such as Google’s BigQuery and DataLab allow for large sets of data to be processed and analysed with all the power Google can muster, in a cost-effective manner. Provisioning compute clusters in the cloud has far less set up time and upfront costs compared to their in-office counterparts.
  2. Software as a Service (SaaS). Need some software now? You may not need to download it! Some companies offer fully functional software from within browsers or via remote connection. Office365 and similar services allow users to create Office documents from their web browser or phone without downloading anything to their machines. These documents are even backed up online and easily sharable with URL links, allowing multiple people to edit the same document at once. SaaS isn’t limited to documents, anything from monitoring tools to communication can be provided as a cloud based service.  Better still, the software provider will take care of all maintenance and updates.
  3. Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). Companies and individuals don’t always have the right hardware they need to operate as desired. Hardware also represents a big upfront expense and a maintenance burden. How about you let someone else take care of all that? Whereas SaaS allows you to make use of software not on your machine, IaaS lets you make use of infrastructure you don’t physically have. Companies such as Amazon and Microsoft have created professional grade virtual networking environments where you can deploy virtual machines and large data stores without the overhead of maintaining a datacentre.
  So yes, the cloud can be where you store and share your photos, but it can be so much more. Here at Hentsu we specialise in cloud technologies and have a wealth of experience helping organisations move their operations from traditional platforms to the cloud. If you think your business may benefit from any aspect of the cloud then feel free to get in touch, we can ensure you end up with the services right for you.

Date/Time

Date(s) - 01/01/1970
12:00 AM - 12:00 AM

Location

600 5th ave. NY, NY