Locking Down Private Cloud Security

In study after study, security is noted as a top concern in moving to the cloud.

  • 1/3 of surveyed central IT professionals still call cloud security a significant challenge.
  • 52% of surveyed technology decision makers have concerns around the risk of unauthorized access, data integrity and protection in the cloud.
  • 62% of surveyed IT security professionals say their top cloud concern is unauthorized access to data by outsiders.

Despite the widespread concern, security can be one of the core benefits of moving to the cloud. According to the Alert Logic Cloud Security Report, in a cloud environment you’re actually safer from incidents like Trojans, brute force attacks and other suspicious activities.

This white paper compiles industry data and expert insights to discuss the opportunity to leverage private cloud while maintaining — or exceeding — your data security requirements.

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Customer Data Platforms: How They Work, What They Solve & Why Everyone Needs To Use One

Today’s customers have been trained by Amazon, Netflix, Spotify and many others to expect personalized experiences and have little tolerance for firms that do it poorly. Quality data is needed to fuel the technologies that power personalization, but assembling that quality data can be hard.

Enter the Customer Data Platform (CDP). As defined by the Customer Data Platform Institute, a CDP is a marketer-managed system that builds a unified and persistent customer database that is accessible to other systems. While they are promising to be faster, easier, cheaper and more flexible than previous solutions – even the most savviest of martech professionals aren’t fully understanding their benefits, capabilities and integration abilities.

View this report today to learn the:

  • 3 main functions of a CDP
  • 8 advantages of using a CDP to assemble customer data
  • 8 common questions about CDPs and their answers
  • Key ways to select and budget for a CDP and more!

Download a copy of the CDP Institute’s report, “Customer Data Platforms: How They Work, What They Solve & Why Everyone Needs to Use One” today.

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GDPR Impact Series 2018

2018 sees the long-awaited General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) enter into enforcement starting May 25th. It is a once-in-a-lifetime change to the legal basis on which individuals share their data with organizations.

Research company DataIQ recently examined how consumers expect their data to be used and whether they intend to exercise their new rights, as well as into what organizations intend to do to bring their data-driven practices into line with the Regulations. Download the report now to:

  • Understand the consumer perspective on data collection, consent, context, and control
  • Learn key strategies for the business/marketer’s processes, top opportunities, and challenges in adjusting to the new Regulation
  • Identify any mis-alignments between the two sides’ views of the data exchange and their root causes

Whether you view data as the new oil or as the beginning of the fourth industrial revolution, its relevance in today’s world is hard to deny. By laying the groundwork now, businesses will be able to embrace the opportunities presented by GDPR, and this research takes us one step closer to a more comprehensive understanding of how to truly put the customer and their expectations at the center of everything a brand does.

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Why the Universal Data Hub?

Today’s business leaders are faced with an increasingly fractured vendor landscape leading to operational inefficiency, siloed teams, loss of consumer trust and legal risk and, worst of all, a disjointed customer experience. In a market where companies largely differentiate and scale on customer experience, this makes data strategy a vital component of organizational health.

Download our Universal Data Hub white paper to learn:

  • The 4 Core Problems Created by the MarTech Explosion – The gaps between marketing technologies and the data they leverage, left unaddressed, spread throughout an organization
  • What is a Universal Data Hub? And What are Its Key Tenets? – What it is and what should you look for when considering a centralized platform for your digital marketing stack
  • Functionality Checklist for a Universal Approach to Data – The key functionalities you need to consider and evaluate when implementing a universal data strategy

The data foundation you establish will not only allow for more effective and lucrative marketing now, but is a critical step to delivering on the value of all data sources in the future that are exploding with the advent of mobile, IoT, artificial intelligence and machine learning.

Companies that take a universal approach to data will immediately fill organizational and customer experience gaps, while laying the data infrastructure critical to competing in the future. Download our white paper today to get started.

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Delivering Governed Self-Service BI Across the Enterprise

The purpose of this document is to provide Pyramid Analytics customers with an actionable, high-level framework, guidance and tips to successfully deliver governed self-service BI across the enterprise. Although ad-hoc reporting tools have come a long way the past few years, most of the tools in the market today have significant governance gaps.

Self-service BI governance involves a partnership between business and IT leaders on how to best empower everyone to make data-driven decisions efficiently and responsibly. Analytics guides interactions, informs decisions, drives processes and ensures better outcomes. In balancing organization and individual needs, a collaborative initiative considers various user perspectives and reporting use cases. Since everyone must participate, governance requires an organizational reporting culture change.

In summary, effective self-service BI governance processes are essential to ensure users are viewing high-quality, relevant data for decision-making. They also help users understand standards for creating and sharing reports responsibly.

Pyramid Analytics provides organizations with an intuitive administrative framework to publish and share content. Administrators can configure role-based access using group security profiles and track lineage and versioning at the storyboard level to gain complete telemetry on how users are consuming content.

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Improve Self-Service Analytics Credibility with Data Quality

Data is at the heart of every organization.

In the journey to become more data-driven in decision making, we are seeing unprecedented democratization of data and adoption of self-service analytics. Rigid data collection and reporting processes of the past have given way to rapid gathering of raw, unstructured and crowdsourced data. As a result of that change, there are inevitable trade-offs with data quality.

Self-service visual analytics solutions often quickly expose data quality issues that you may not even realize exist. Unfortunately, inaccurate data undermines the powerful value of self-service analytics. If people don't trust your reports, they won’t use them. Since self-service analytics credibility, adoption and success hinges on accurate data, data quality should be given more attention as you implement these solutions.

Every organization today depends on data to understand its customers and employees, design new products, reach target markets, and plan for the future. Accurate, complete, and up-to-date information is essential if you want to optimize your decision making, avoid constantly playing catch-up and maintain your competitive advantage.

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The Enduring Value of Narrative Reporting

While they throw numerous cross-department teams at the problem or embark on yet another technology initiative, year after year organizations continuously labor through the reporting process, delivering bland, formulaic reports that provide little decision-making value.

Many business intelligence (BI) solutions in the marketplace today—the very tools designed to interrogate data and produce meaningful insights—are only making things worse.

Meanwhile, emergent self-service BI tools promise to empower end users and improve speed to insight. While they can produce attractive data visualizations in dashboard style reports, they haven’t made it any easier to produce the professional, narrative-style reports that many business leaders require.

In this paper, we explore these in greater detail, discuss why many BI solutions fall short, and explain how Pyramid Analytics excels in each of these key areas.

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2018 Hybrid Cloud eBook: The New Normal

Where once Operations teams built extensive, high-availability data centers, today they extend their capabilities with the elastic storage, compute, and delivery capacity of public cloud services. In this eBook we look at some of the considerations Ops - and especially the newly-minted DevOps - teams must keep in mind as they integrate public cloud services into their hybrid cloud environments. From the serious - to the quirky, this collection of perspectives provides a window into the challenging world of the hybrid cloud operation.

Chapters Include:

  • The problem lurking inside your hybrid IT strategy
  • SaaS comes at you fast
  • 10 ways to make outage mitigation fun
  • Cloud capabilities turn developers into operational experts
  • Self-sourced data won’t get you where you want to go
  • Metrics that beat Murphy’s law
  • Cloud-first + DevOps-first = 81% competitive advantage
  • Optimizing for resources and consumers alike

Get your copy of the 2018 Hybrid Cloud eBook today!

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Monitoring for Maximum Uptime

Ensuring the Edge Starts with Seeing It

Processing power and data are moving to the edge of your network—enabling better experiences, faster response times, real-time information and more.

Know what that means?

Visibility into the edge is becoming more and more important with every business-critical function that moves out there.

Here’s how to keep an eye on your edge and ensure availability. Read this knowledge brief, Monitoring for Maximum Uptime.

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5 Ways IT Resilience Beats Disaster Recovery

IT Administrators are responsible for the technology that keeps the world’s businesses running. Every day they are faced with circumstances threatening to bring down your applications, servers, and even communication. IT is forced to recover from catastrophic weather events, hardware failures, advanced ransomware infiltrations, and hundreds of other potential disasters. Even a minor event in just one of the millions of components in a modern datacenter can ripple out of control and cause enterprise-wide problems.
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Monitoring for Maximum Uptime

Ensuring the Edge Starts with Seeing It

Processing power and data are moving to the edge of your network—enabling better experiences, faster response times, real-time information and more.

Know what that means?

Visibility into the edge is becoming more and more important with every business-critical function that moves out there.

Here’s how to keep an eye on your edge and ensure availability. Read this knowledge brief, Monitoring for Maximum Uptime.

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The Public Cloud Smackdown

Choosing a public cloud vendor within your organization can be a grueling battle between differing opinions. And if it begins to resemble a cage fight more than a heated debate, then it might be time for outside experts to weigh in.

In this session, our experts in Azure, AWS and Google square off to:

  • Compare and contrast the distinguishing features of each cloud ecosystem
  • Explain why there are times you need multiple platforms to stay ahead
  • Share why a multi-cloud approach is the model of choice in today’s ever-changing world
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Choosing the Right Private Cloud for your Enterprise

Private Cloud solutions are still at the heart of enterprise IT. In particular, private cloud solutions powered by technologies like Microsoft®, VMware® and OpenStack® will continue to play a crucial role — both today and in the future. As a result, choosing the technology mix best suited for your unique use cases and business requirements is absolutely critical.

In this white paper, we compare the top three private cloud technologies — Microsoft, VMware and OpenStack — and examine:

Whether you’re starting out or stalled out, review these important considerations to get on track. The white paper covers:

  • Platform-specific advantages
  • Platform-specific tradeoffs
  • Real-world case studies
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10 Steps to Success in Public Cloud Adoption

Poor planning is the top mistake organizations make when approaching public cloud adoption. With the pressure to transform while maintaining IT operations, public cloud projects often suffer from rushed implementations, lack of expertise and inadequate organizational support. Before the first chunk of data ever moves to the cloud, there are a myriad of decisions to be made.

Our white paper, 10 Steps to Success in the Public Cloud, boils those decisions down to ten milestones to guide your strategy and planning activities.

Whether you’re starting out or stalled out, review these important considerations to get on track. The white paper covers:

  • Planning frameworks and best practices
  • Ways to foster education and communication
  • Tips on building your business case and selecting pilot workloads
  • Strategies to address security and governance
  • Automation and migration methodologies
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Data Center Evolution: Getting In Front Of the Change

BY THE END OF 2018, 50 PERCENT OF NORTH AMERICAN SERVER RACKS WILL BE OFF-SITE.

Data centers have come a long way since they first began appearing as a fixture of corporate computing. According to Datacenter Dynamics, the total number of data centers around the world was set to peak at 8.6 million in 2017, and then begin a slow decline. But what is driving the decline?

In the era of widespread cloud adoption and cloud-enabled managed hosting, more and more enterprises are realizing that managing issues like IT sprawl and underutilized servers is a headache they can live without. The economics of running large data centers has fundamentally changed, leading to a change in long-term IT strategy.

In our Data Center Evolution: Getting in Front of the Change video, join speaker Jim Hawkins, VP, Global DC Operations & Engineering at Rackspace as he:

  • Discusses the evolution of the data center and its current trajectory
  • Experiences a virtual tour of Rackspace’s data centers and operations

ABOUT THE PRESENTER:

Jim Hawkins, VP, Global DC Operations & Engineering, Rackspace

Jim has been with Rackspace for over 8 years. He is responsible for leading our data center, network, change management, monitoring, and implementation teams globally across Rackspace. His specialty includes weaving Lean Six Sigma and operational discipline into the design and daily operation of Rackspace’s critical infrastructure and teams.

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