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Centurylink Races Ahead of Competiton with Hybrid Solution

Off-the-shelf IT solutions aren’t a good fit for every company. They can’t deliver flexibility, agility and customization companies require. (Not to mention, they can rack up considerable costs!) That’s why Cancer Research UK turned to CenturyLink Technology Solutions when it needed an affordable, hybrid cloud solution to bring its new Race for Life website to market.

“With CenturyLink’s help, we managed to create a dedicated hybrid cloud, bundling the Race for Life project with other managed services for 50% less than the majority of other service providers were offering for the Race for Life website hosting alone,” says Mick Briggs, Head of Infrastructure at Cancer Research UK.

Read “CenturyLink races ahead of competition with hybrid solution for Cancer Research UK” now, and see how hybrid IT solutions can speed you forward and increase efficiencies.

Solving for “Total Costs” in the Cloud

It’s a simple question: How much is it going to cost to move an application to the cloud? But the answer is not simple, and many businesses suffer costly surprises when they make the move.

This paper shows you how to calculate the total cost of migrating applications to the cloud, including obvious hardware costs as well as the human costs of managing apps in the cloud.

Have you factored in these costs?

• Training related to new skills, tools, and processes

• Server CPU, memory, storage, and monitoring

• VPN and direct connect fees

• Need for additional cloud administrators

• Cost of moving data to the cloud

Gartner Quadrant for Cloud IaaS

The 2014 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Infrastructure-as-a-Service is available now and there are some must-read findings that will impact your cloud buying decision.

Download the complimentary analyst report, “Gartner magic quadrant for Cloud IaaS” now and discover:

• How the choice of an IaaS impacts the quality of your IT operations

• What visionary providers offer to reinvent the relationship between infrastructure, applications, and management

• How capabilities are being tailored to be attractive to both developer and IT audiences

Download the complimentary Gartner analyst now for additional insight into the fast-moving cloud market, and get armed with the information you need to evolve your cloud strategy.

The State And Direction Of Service Management: Progression, Deceleration, Or Stagnation?

Forrester’s third annual survey of SMA professionals, done in conjunction with the USA chapter of the IT Service Management Forum (itSMF), shows that since 2011, areas like process maturity, service catalog development, DevOps, and strategic thinking have improved, but not by much and not enough to keep up. Demand from the business is growing exponentially, while technology management’s ability to support it is progressing linearly, and though service management is an integral part of IT, it is not immune to obsolescence. SMA professionals should use this benchmarks report to understand their service management program’s status, strengths, and weaknesses and where they should focus future attention and investments to transform this borderline stasis into substantial progress.

It’s Time for a Serious Talk: 3 Questions to Ask Your DNS Host about Lowering DDoS Risks

It’s no secret that DDoS attacks are worsening by the day. From the largest financial institutions to smaller Internet companies, everyone’s a target. Neustar has had wide-ranging conversations with clients wanting to know how they can optimize protection as DDoS attacks increase in frequency and size. Most of these conversations boil down to three key questions and form the conversation you should be having, too—whether you use Neustar, another provider or your in-house team to manage your external DNS.

The Ultimate Guide to Drupal 8

Whether you’re a site builder, module or theme developer, or simply an end user of a Drupal website, Drupal 8 has tons in store for you. This ebook will enumerate the major changes in Drupal 8 for end users, for site builders, for designers and front-end developers, and for back-end developers.

Note that since Drupal 8 is still under active development, some of the details here may change prior to its release. Drupal 8 is now feature-frozen, so most information should remain relevant. Where applicable, Drupal 7 contributed equivalents of Drupal 8 features will be noted.

Cloud Security in Flux— Protecting Your Business with Defense in Depth

Can you build an invincible Drupal site? The easy answer is no, but you have a few ways to prepare and secure your site to withstand any sort of vulnerability or traffic spike.

Protecting your Drupal site requires multiple levels of security. By building layers of application-, network-, and endpoint-level protections—or what Acquia calls “defense in depth”— organizations can buy time to fend off would-be attackers, improving resiliency. However, defense isn’t just about on-premise security. Keeping your Drupal site safe and secure is a shared responsibility across your organization and trusted vendors.

In this ebook, we’ll go over ways you can best secure your Drupal site and best practices for how your organization handles security incidents.

Assembling a Next Generation Enterprise Web Infrastructure with Drupal and Acquia

In the past decade, the web has changed completely. What was once merely a content distribution channel is now all about social content—rich, interactive blends of media types shared by diverse groups of individuals and delivered to a variety of devices.

This sweeping change brought a new set of challenges. Many organizations’ websites now have blogging functionality, internal collaboration sites, customer support via technical forums, commerce functionality, and support for various devices, such as iPad and Android.

Acquia Lift: Personalization in Drupal

The days of “one-size-fits-all” marketing are over, and hyper-personalization is the new norm. Digital marketers and site owners are being asked to do more with less to engage customers, segment their audience, and offer highly tailored content. Acquia Lift provides the right content, at the right time through automation that serves the most relevant content to the site visitor.

Overcoming Five Roadblocks in Your Ticketless IT Journey

There are 5 roadblocks to getting to "ticketless" IT - and HP has 5 ways to remove these roadblocks. Learn how to get on the ticketless track with HP Service Anywhere.

Turn Data Into Knowledge: Social Collaboration Empowers a More Intelligent Service Desk

Turn data into knowledge. Enable IT to mine social knowledge and create insight for the business. The trends encompassed by cloud, Big Data, social, and mobile have given rise to a new style of IT. This new approach creates the opportunity to drive agility and time to value by connecting the IT service management (ITSM) landscape with today’s user interactions—driving collective insight, identifying trends, solving problems faster, and making better decisions.

Three Ways Big Data Can Transform Your Service Desk

Imagine an IT organization that can deliver services faster with improved service quality while radically reducing the number of IT tickets. This isn’t a vision for the future. It’s the reality today for growing numbers of organizations that are leveraging big data and connected intelligence to transform the service desk. In this white paper, discover three ways big data can transform your service desk.

Redefining Networks for Cloud, Analytics, Mobile, Social and Security

New technologies such as cloud, big data and analytics, mobile and social are transforming IT and business and bringing networks to the breaking point. In this white paper, IBM explores the impact of technology forces on data center and enterprise networks, and reveals the changes you’ll need to make to keep your network healthy. Read the white paper to learn how IBM can help you transform your network to meet the challenges of today’s technologies

Server Managed Services – Integrated Managed Infrastructure

Around the globe, organizations are struggling to manage their increasingly complex IT infrastructures, putting them at risk of downtime, lost revenues and a damaged brand reputation. Read the service profile to learn how IBM’s Server Managed Services—integrated managed infrastructure offers an array of server management support, from single tasks to end-to-end management that can help you drive down infrastructure management costs, rapidly respond to changing business requirements, improve availability while keeping your assets within your premises and enable you to choose and pay for only the services you need.

Optimized Sourcing in Hybrid IT Environments

Smart companies today are rethinking how they source and manage IT - and even starting from scratch - in order to reduce complexity, mitigate risk, and manage costs of increasingly hybridized IT environments. These companies are turning more and more to experienced service providers to deal with the scope and pace of change. Read the report to learn how and why hybrid IT is developing and accelerating and how to find the best qualified providers to help you “optimize by outsourcing.”