Eye Care Leaders Data Breach Caused by Cloud EHR Vendor. Don’t be the Next.

The databases and system configuration files for Eye Care Leaders, a manufacturer of cloud-based electronic health record and practice management systems for eye care practitioners, were recently hacked.

What Happened

The breach reportedly compromised the organizations’ cloud-based myCare solution, with hackers obtaining access to the electronic medical record, patient information, and public health information (PHI) databases on or around December 4, 2021, according to breach notification letters provided by some of the affected practices. The hacker then erased the databases and system configuration files.

When the breach was discovered, the company promptly locked its networks and initiated an investigation to avoid additional unauthorized access. That investigation is still underway, and it’s unclear how much patient data was exposed. However, it’s possible that sensitive data was seen and exfiltrated before the database was deleted. Patients’ names, dates of birth, medical record numbers, health insurance information, Social Security numbers, and personal health information regarding care received at eye care offices were all stored in the databases.

More than 9,000 ophthalmologists use the Durham, NC-based company’s products. It’s unclear how many providers have been affected at this time. Summit Eye Associates, situated in Hermitage, Tennessee, has revealed that it was hacked and that the protected health information of 53,818 patients was potentially stolen. Evergreen Health, a Kings County Public Hospital District No. 2 division, has also acknowledged that patient data has been compromised. According to reports, the breach affected 20,533 people who got eye care at Evergreen Health. The breach has been confirmed by Allied Eye Physicians & Surgeons in Ohio, which has revealed that the data of 20,651 people was exposed.

The records of 194,035 people were exposed due to the breach at Regional Eye Associates, Inc. and Surgical Eye Center of Morgantown in West Virginia. Central Vermont Eye Care (30,000 people) recently reported a data breach affecting EHRs. However, HIPAA Journal has not been able to establish whether the cyberattack caused the data loss at Central Vermont Eye Care on Eye Care Leaders.

Confidential Information Exposed

Update

Over the last two weeks, the number of eye care providers affected by the hack has increased. The following is a list of eye care practitioners who have been identified as being affected:

Protected Harbor’s Take On The Matter

There are more than 1,300 eye care practices in the United States alone. And with more than 24 million Americans affected by some form of visual impairment, the demand for eye care services continues to grow.  In response to these growing needs, we have seen an increase in cloud-based electronic health record management software solutions to streamline operations while increasing efficiency and security.

Unfortunately, this also means that cybercriminals see the eye care industry as a prime target for hackers because their information is so sensitive and accessible. That’s why you must know which cloud EHR vendors were hacked recently.

Protected Harbor’s 5 ways to prevent unauthorized access to your company data:

1. Strong Password Policy– Having your users add symbols, numbers, and a combination of characters to their passwords makes them more difficult to crack. Having a minimal amount of characters and changing it periodically (every 60 or 90 days) ensures that outdated passwords aren’t reused for years, making it much easier to get unwanted access to the account.
2. MFA– Multi-factor authentication is a great approach to ensure you only access the account. You will need another device (usually your mobile device) nearby in addition to your usual login and password since you will be required to enter a code that will be produced instantly.
3. Proactive Monitoring- Preventing unauthorized access is the initial step, but monitoring login attempts and user behaviors can also provide insight into how to prevent it best. For example, if you have logs of failed login attempts for a single user. You can launch an inquiry to see whether the user merely forgot their password or if someone is attempting to breach the account.
4. IP Whitelisting- IP Whitelisting compares the user’s IP address to a list of “allowed” IP addresses to determine whether or not this device is authorized to access the account. If your firm only uses one or a limited number of IP addresses to access the internet, as is usually the case, you can add a list of IP addresses that are granted access. All other IPs will be sent to a page that isn’t allowed.
5. SSO (Single Sign-On)- If your firm has a centralized user directory, using it to acquire access makes things more accessible and more manageable for you. You’ll have to remember one password, and if something goes wrong, your network administrator can deactivate all of your applications at once.

Richard Luna, CEO of Protected Harbor, stated: Unfortunately, this is how things will be in the future. The development tools used to create websites and mobile applications were created in the 1990s. Data transferability, or the ability to move data from one device to another, was a critical concern back then. The emphasis back then was on data proliferation. FTP comes to mind as a secure method with no encryption. Authentication was designed for discerning between good actors, not to harden data and protect against data theft because all data exchanges were between good actors back then. Now that we live in a different environment, we may expect more data breaches unless security is built into data transfer protocols rather than bolted on as an afterthought.

We’ve been helping businesses respond to these attacks for some time, including ransomware attacks and cross-pollinating destructive IP attacks across numerous access points and multiple AI use. If a company has 50 public IPs and we’re proactive monitoring the services behind them, and a bad actor assaults one of them, ban them from all entry points in all systems, even if it involves writing a synchronized cron job across firewalls or other protection devices. Add in artificial intelligence (AI) and comprehensive application monitoring, and a corporation has the tools to detect and respond to such threats quickly.

Final Thoughts

Data security isn’t a one-time or linear process. You must invest in software vendors, ongoing resources, time, and effort to ensure data security against unwanted access.

Cybercriminals are becoming more sophisticated every day, and they are employing cutting-edge technologies to target businesses and get illicit data access.

As the number of data breaches rises, you must become more attentive. It’s critical that your company implements concrete security measures and that each employee prioritizes cybersecurity.

If you’d want us to conduct an IT security audit on your current security policies, we’ll work with you to ensure that you’re well-protected against unauthorized data access and other cyber risks. Contact us today!

What are the types of clouds? Which one’s best for your business?

When you think of cloud technology, the first thing that comes to mind is big companies like Google and Amazon using it to run their massive online operations. But the truth is, this type of software has many small-time entrepreneurs using it to run their businesses. And if you’re not sure which kind of cloud computing service is right for your business, here’s a brief explanation about the different types of clouds and why you should choose one over the other.

What is a Hybrid Cloud?

The hybrid cloud integrates private cloud services, public cloud services, and on-premises infrastructure. It provides management, orchestration, and application portability over all three cloud services. As a result, a unified, single, and flexible distributed computing environment is formed. An organization can deploy and scale its cloud-native or traditional workloads on the appropriate cloud model.

The hybrid cloud includes the public cloud services from multiple cloud service providers. It enables organizations to

• Choose the optimized cloud environment for each workload
• Combine the best cloud services and functionality from multiple cloud vendors.
• Move workloads between private and public cloud as circumstances change.

A hybrid cloud helps organizations achieve their business and technical objectives cost-efficiently and more effectively than the private or public cloud alone.

Hybrid Cloud Architecture

Hybrid cloud architecture focuses on transforming the mechanics of an organization’s on-premises data center into the private cloud infrastructure and then connecting it to the public cloud environments hosted by a public cloud provider. Uniform management of private and public cloud resources is preferable to managing cloud environments individually because it minimizes the risk of process redundancies.

The hybrid cloud architecture has the following characteristics.

1. Scalability and resilience

Use public cloud resources to scale up and down automatically, quickly, and inexpensively to increase traffic spikes without affecting private cloud workloads.

2. Security and regulatory compliance

Use private cloud resources for highly regulated workloads and sensitive data, and use economic public cloud resources for less-sensitive data and workloads.

3. Enhancing legacy application

Use public cloud resources to improve the user experience of existing applications and extend them to new devices.

4. The rapid adoption of advanced technology

You can switch to cutting-edge solutions and integrate them into existing apps without provisioning new on-premises infrastructure.

5. VMware migration

Shift existing on-premises infrastructure and workloads to virtual public cloud infrastructure to reduce on-premises data center footprint and scale according to requirements without additional cost.

6. Resource optimization and cost savings

Execute workloads with predictable capacity on the private cloud and move variable workloads to the public cloud.

Hybrid cloud advantages

The main advantages of a hybrid cloud include the following.

• Cost management_ Organizations operate the data center infrastructure with a private cloud. It requires a significant expense and fixed cost. However, a public cloud provides services and resources accounted for as operational and variable expenses.
• Flexibility_ An organization can build a hybrid cloud environment that works for its requirements using traditional systems and the latest cloud technology. A hybrid setup allows organizations to migrate their workloads to and from the traditional infrastructure to the vendor’s public cloud.
• Agility and scalability_ Hybrid cloud provides more resources than a public cloud provider. This makes it easier to create, deploy, manage, and scale resources to meet demand spikes. Organizations can burst the application to a public cloud when demand exceeds the capacity of a local data center to access extra power and scale.
• Interoperability and resilience_ A business can run workloads in public and private environments to increase resiliency. Components of one workload can run in both environments and interoperate.

Reference Link

https://www.ibm.com/cloud/learn/hybrid-cloud

What is a Public Cloud?

A public cloud is a computing service provided by third-party service providers across the public Internet. It is available to anyone who wants to use these services or purchase them. These services may be free or sold on-demand, allowing users to pay per usage for the storage, bandwidth, or CPU cycles they consume. Public clouds can save organizations from the cost of buying, maintaining, and managing on-premises infrastructure.

The public cloud can be deployed faster than on-premises and is an infinitely scalable platform. Each employee of an organization can use the same application from any branch through their device of choice using the Internet. Moreover, they run in multi-tenant environments where customers share a pool of resources provisioned automatically and allocated to individual users via a self-service interface. Each user’s data is isolated from others.

Public cloud architecture

A public cloud is a completely virtualized environment that relies on a high-bandwidth network to transmit data. Its multi-tenant architecture lets users run the workload on shared infrastructure. Cloud resources can be duplicated over multiple availability zones for protection against outages and redundancy.

Cloud service models categorize public cloud architecture. Here are the three most common service models.

• Infrastructure-as-a-Service_ in which third-party providers host infrastructure resources, such as storage and servers, and virtualization layer. They offer virtualized computing resources, such as virtual machines, over the Internet.
• Software-as-a-Service_ in which third-party service providers host applications and software and make them available to customers across the Internet.
• Platform-as-a-Service_ in which third-party service providers deliver software and hardware tools for application development, such as operating systems.

Advantages of Public Cloud

The public cloud has the following advantages

1. Scalability

Cloud resources can be expanded rapidly to meet traffic spikes and user demand. Public cloud users can gain high availability and greater redundancy in separated cloud locations. Apart from the availability and redundancy, public cloud customers get faster connectivity between the end-users and cloud services using the network interfaces. However, latency and bandwidth issues are still common.

2. Access to advanced technologies

Organizations using cloud service providers can get instant access to the latest technologies, ranging from automatic updates to AI and machine learning.

3. Analytics

Organizations should collect useful data metrics they store and the resources they use. Public cloud services perform analytics on high-volume data and accommodate several data types to give business insights.

4. Flexibility

The scalable and flexible nature of the public cloud allows customers to store high-volume data. Many organizations depend on the cloud for disaster recovery to back up applications and data during an outage or in an emergency. However, it’s tempting to store all data, but users must set up a data retention policy to delete data from storage to reduce the storage cost and maintain privacy.

Limitations or challenges of Public cloud

• Runway costs_ Increasingly complex pricing models and cloud costs make it difficult for companies to track IT spending. It is cheaper than on-premises infrastructure, but sometimes organizations pay more for the cloud.
• Limited controls_ Public cloud customers face the tradeoff of restricted control over the IT stack. Moreover, data separation problems arise due to multi-tenancy and latency issues for remote end-users.
• Scarce cloud expertise_ The skill gap among IT experts in the cloud is another challenge. Without expertise, companies can’t handle the complexities of advanced IT demands.

What is a Private Cloud?

A private cloud is defined as computing services provided over a private internal network or the Internet, only to specific users rather than the general public. It is also known as a corporate or internal cloud. The private cloud provides many benefits to businesses, such as scalability, self-service, and elasticity to a public cloud. In addition, it gives extended, virtualized computing resources through physical components stored at a vendor’s data center or on-premises.

One of the main advantages of the private cloud is that it provides an enhanced degree of control to organizations. As it is accessible to a single organization, it enables them to configure the environment and manage it in a unique way tailored to the particular computing needs of a company.

A private cloud can deliver two models for cloud services. Infrastructure-as-a-Service enables a company to use resources, such as network, storage, and computing resources. And platform as a service that allows a company to deliver everything from cloud-based applications to sophisticated enterprise applications.

Private Cloud Architecture

A private cloud with a single-tenant design is based on the same technologies as other clouds. Technologies that allow customers to configure computing resources and virtual servers on demand. These technologies include

1. Management software

It provides administrators with centralized control over the applications running on it, making it possible to optimize availability, resource utilization, and security in the private cloud environment.

2. Automation

It automates the tasks, such as server integrations and provisioning, which must be performed repeatedly and manually. Automation minimizes the need for human intervention and gives self-service resources.

3. Virtualization

It provides an abstraction to IT resources from their underlying infrastructure and then pooled into the unbounded resource pools of storage, computing, networking, and memory capacity divided across multiple virtual machines. Virtualization allows maximum hardware utilization by removing the physical hardware constraints and sharing it across various applications and users.

Moreover, private cloud customers can leverage cloud-native application practices and architecture, such as containers, DevOps, and microservices, to bring greater flexibility and efficiency.

Benefits of private cloud

Advantages of private cloud include

• Freedom to customize software and hardware_ Private cloud users can customize software as needed with add-ons via custom development. They can also customize servers in any way they want.
• Full control over software and hardware choices_ Private cloud users are free to buy the software and hardware they prefer or services provided by the cloud service providers.
• Fully enforced compliance_ Private cloud users are not forced to rely on the regulatory compliance provided by the service providers.
• Greater visibility and insights into access control and security because all workloads execute behind the user’s firewalls.

Challenges or Limitations of private cloud

Here are some considerations that IT stakeholders must review before using the private cloud.

• Capacity utilization_ Organizations are fully responsible for enhancing capacity utilization under the private cloud. An under-utilized deployment can cost significantly to a business.
• Up-front costs_ The cost of required hardware to run a private cloud can be high, and it will need an expert to set up, maintain and handle the environment.
• Scalability_It may take extra cost and time to scale up the resources if a business needs additional computing power from a private cloud.

Is hybrid cloud the best option for you?

Because not everything belongs in the public cloud, many forward-thinking businesses opt for a hybrid cloud solution. Hybrid clouds combine the advantages of both public and private clouds while utilizing existing data center infrastructure.

Cloud computing is becoming more and more popular, but many businesses are still unsure which type of cloud is right for them. This article explored the pros and cons of hybrid, public, and private clouds and provided advice on which type of cloud is best for your organization. Protected Harbor offers a wide range of cloud computing services to help businesses reduce costs and increase efficiency by outsourcing data storage or remote office functions. It can host a wide range of applications, including e-mail, video conferencing, online training, backups, software development, and much more. Protected Harbor is the right choice for businesses of all sizes. We are providing a free IT Audit for a limited time. Get a free IT consultation for your business today.

Common mistakes organizations make while migrating to the cloud.

Cloud service providers like AWS, Google, and Microsoft Azure allow organizations to host their data effortlessly without a need for specialized hardware. Many small and large organizations are rapidly moving to the cloud from traditional hardware IT infrastructure. Cloud services provide the benefit of just paying for the resources you actually use, which save you from additional cost.

Cloud environments are generally reliable, scalable, and highly available, prompting both start-ups and enterprise-level businesses to take advantage of migrating to the cloud.

“The sun always shines above the clouds.” But what’s missing in this quote is that beneath the cloud, there are often torrential downpours, high winds, and lightning. The same is the case with cloud computing. However, cloud computing provides a lot of benefits, there are some pitfalls as well.

This guide has compiled organizations’ common mistakes while migrating to the cloud. Avoid these common mistakes to ensure a smooth transition to the cloud that showers your organization with benefits.

1. Migrating to the cloud without governance and a planning strategy

It’s simple to provision resources in the cloud, but there are unplanned policy, cost, and security problems that can be incurred. Here planning and governance are essential. A related mistake IT managers make is that they do not understand who within the organization is responsible for a specific cloud-related task, such as data backups, security, and business continuity.

Making a shift to a cloud platform with proper planning and governance can significantly level up your organization’s productivity and eliminate the infrastructure-related roadblocks. Moreover, you can get the highest return on investment with a cloud migration while starting with clearly defined business objectives, governance, and a planning strategy.

2. Migrating all data at once

You have assessed the cost and benefit, run tests to ensure your applications are correctly working, and are ready to shift to the cloud. You may want to migrate all of your data to the cloud at once to speed up the process, but it can cost you more downtime in the long run.

When you migrate to the cloud, you are more likely to experience some issues. Therefore, if you shift all data at once and a problem occurs, you can lose your business-critical or sensitive data. To avoid this situation, execute your cloud migration in steps. Start with the test or non-essential data and then proceed with the critical data.

3. Not designing for failure

Being a pessimist can put you at risk while migrating to the cloud. As the traditional IT infrastructure, cloud servers are also prone to downtime. In this case, the best workaround is to design for failure. Amazon mentioned that “there is a need to design for failure in its cloud architecture best practices, and if you do so, nothing can defeat you.” Designing for failure includes setting up for safety to ensure that any outage that occurs results in minimal damage to the company.

I am designing a cloud infrastructure by keeping failure and downtime in mind, incorporating a fault-tolerant cloud-optimized architecture. The recovery strategies should be in-built into the design to ensure minimal damage and optimal output even when the cloud architecture faces downtime.

4. Neglecting security aspects

However, cloud service providers offer a security layer, but it is prone to security threats if the application has flaws. Any potential risk can cost you a lot if your IT infrastructure has flaws while migrating to the cloud. It is even more critical while dealing with sensitive data, such as healthcare or financial data.

The implications of attack in the case of financial data are severe. Potential security risks include account hijacking, data breaches, abuse of information, and unauthorized access. Data encryption and robust security testing are a must while migrating data to the cloud. Neglecting cloud security can put an organization to severe damage. It is always recommended to go through the Service Level Agreement (SLA) that you sign with the cloud provider.

5. Not controlling cost and prioritizing workloads

Once you see the power of cloud computing, it can stimulate enthusiasm for cloud-based projects. But if you start the process by defining use cases and understanding the cost modeling, it will help you keep track of cloud computing costs. Consider a common scenario_ when organizations use cloud services, they sometimes migrate large data sets or non-priority workloads to the cloud that might be better handled in another way.

As the data scales, the cloud cost exceeds it, and added expenses can obscure the financial benefit offered by the cloud. Having a robust understanding of what you want to achieve from a business point of view and developing a cost-based assessment will ensure that you get the cloud benefits.

6. Inadequate understanding of organization infrastructure and networks

It is essential for organizations to thoroughly understand their assets and workflow before migrating to the cloud. Organizations have inadequate knowledge of how their systems and data need to work together. As a result, they fail to create a complete map of their network and infrastructure and deliver failure.

Each cloud service provider offers unique attributes. Organizations can’t compare these providers when they do not fully understand what they need in a provider. Moreover, when organizations move their data to the cloud without proper understanding, it can cause breaks in their IT infrastructure that negatively impact consumers.

7. Not having an exit strategy

An exit strategy outlines meditations regarding extracting your applications from a cloud whenever required. Many organizations think an exit strategy is unnecessary as they don’t expect to get back from the cloud. However, it’s essential to have an exit strategy, even if you never use it. It also needs to be considered for changing service providers, not just bringing workloads back on-premises.

Conclusion

Organizations need to consider all mentioned aspects while migrating to the cloud. Taking these considerations into account before migration can help organizations reduce potential risks. Cloud migration is a complicated process that can benefit from professionals’ assistance. Help your organization avoid these mistakes by working with experienced partners.

Cloud migration is a complicated process, and disregarding any piece or feature can jeopardize the migration’s success. Protected Harbor guarantees 99.99 percent uptime with a remote tech team available 24×7, remote desktop, complete cybersecurity, and more. With the appropriate mix of business processes, technology, and people, you’ll be well on your way to reaping the benefits of cloud computing that so many businesses are currently reaping. Just make sure you’re aware of the pitfalls and typical blunders we’ve discussed that can sabotage your cloud migration. Contact us today to migrate to the cloud.

AWS VS Azure Serverless CRS/ Event Sourcing Architecture

For the past few years, serverless cloud computing has been the talk of the town, especially when it comes to resource efficiency and cost reduction. However, only cloud-optimized design patterns and architectures can make this achievable. The cloud is transforming how software is planned, produced, delivered, and used. It works by focusing on the development of small and independent businesses.
This article will examine the serverless CQRS and event sourcing architectures of Azure and AWS. Let’s get this party started.

CQRS and Event Sourcing Pattern

Command and Query Responsibility Segregation (CQRS) is a pattern that can be leveraged where high throughput is required. It provides different interfaces for reading data and operations that alter the data. CQRS addresses various problems. In conventional CRUD-based systems, conflicts can arise from a high volume of reading and writing to the same data store.

The event sourcing patterns are used with the CQRS to decouple read from write workloads and enhance scalability, performance, and security. Microservices replay events via the event store to compute the appropriate state. The event sourcing patterns work efficiently with the CQRS because data can be reproduced for a particular event, even if the query and command data stored have different schemas.

AWS Lambda VS Azure Functions

AWS Lambda is a serverless computing service software executing code in response to a triggered event. It automatically manages all the computing resources for streaming regular operations without provisioning or managing servers. AWS lets you trigger Lambda for over 200 services and SaaS applications on a pay-as-you-go basis. It performs resource management, such as server and operating system maintenance, code and security patch deployment, automated scaling and power provisioning, code monitoring, and logging.

Key Functionalities

• Develop custom back-end services
• Automatically respond to code execution requests
• Run code without provisioning or managing infrastructure

Azure Function helps you accelerate and simplify serverless application development. You can develop applications more efficiently with a serverless compute, event-driven platform that helps resolve complex orchestration issues. Unlike AWS Lambda, Azure Functions provide multiple feature deployment options, including One Drive, KUdu Console, GitHub, Visual Studio, DropBox, and Zip,

Key functionalities

• Schedule event-driven tasks across services
• Scale operations based on customer demand
• Expose functions as HTTP API endpoints

AWS Dynamo DB VS Azure COSMO DB

Amazon DynamoDB is a fully managed NoSQL database that provides predictable and fast performance with seamless scalability. It lets you offload the administrative burden of scaling and operating a distributed database without hardware provisioning, replication, setup and configuration, cluster scaling, or software patching. Moreover, it provides encryption at rest, eliminating the complexity and operational burden involved in protecting sensitive data.

Critical features of AWS DynamoDB include

• Automated Storage scaling
• Fully distributed architecture
• Provisioned throughput

Azure COSMO DB is a fully managed NoSQL database service for advanced application development. With CosmoDB, you can get guaranteed single-digit millisecond response times and availability, instant and automatic scalability, backend by SLAs, and open-source APIs for Cassandra and MongoDB. You can enjoy fast reads and writes with multi-region and turnkey data replication. Moreover, it provides real-time data insights with no-ETL analytics.

Key features include

• Fast, flexible application development
• The guaranteed speed at any scale
• Fully managed and cost-effective serverless database

AWS Cognito VS Azure B2C

Amazon Cognito gives authorization, authentication, and user management for your mobile and web applications. Users can directly sign in with a username and password or use a third party, such as Amazon, Facebook, Apple, or Google accounts. The two main components of AWS Cognito are identity pools and user pools. Identity pools let you grant users access to other AWS services, and user pools are user directories providing sign-up and sign-in options for application users.

Features of Amazon Cognito include

• Built-in, customizable web UI
• User profiles and directory management
• OpenID Connect providers

Azure Active Directory B2C is an identity management service enabling custom control of how users can sign up, sign in, and manage profiles using Android, iOS, .Net, and single-page (SPA). You can provide your customers with the flexibility to use their preferred enterprise, social, or local account identities to access applications. Azure B2C is a customer identity access management (CIAM) service capable of supporting millions of users and authentications per day.

Features of Azure B2C include

• Strong authentication for customers leveraging their preferred identity providers
• Integration with databases and applications to capture sign-in
• Customization for each registration and sign-in experience.

AWS API Gateway VS Azure API Management

AWS API Gateway is a fully managed service making it easy for developers to create, deploy, monitor, maintain, and secure APIs at any scale. These APIs are the “front door” for applications to access business logic, functionality, or data from backend servers. Through API Gateway, users can create WebSocket and RESTful APIs enabling real-time two-way communication applications. Moreover, it supports serverless and containerized workloads and web applications.

Azure API Management is a way to create modern and consistent API gateways for back-end services. It helps organizations publish APIs to external and internal developers to unlock the potential of their benefits and data potential. Each API consists of one or more operations, and it can be added to products. Today’s innovative organizations are adopting API architectures to accelerate growth. Moreover, it lets organizations build applications faster and deliver prompt value to customers using the API-first approach.

Conclusion

If you want to exploit the full potential of serverless cloud computing, all non-functional requirements should be known before developing an application. Know your business requirements and choose the right cloud service provider with the correct services and features. This prior knowledge will help you find exemplary architecture and design patterns and combine them. Software developers and software architects should give more thought to the event sourcing architecture in the case of distributed systems.

Protected Harbor is the market’s underdog player that consistently exceeds consumer expectations. It has endured the test of time with its Datacenter and Managed IT services, and all clients have said: “beyond expectations.” It’s no surprise that businesses prefer to stay with us because we offer the best cloud services in the industry and the best IT support, safety, and security. This is the road to the top of the heap.

Why is cloud cost optimization a business priority?

For businesses leveraging cloud technology, cost optimizations should be a priority. Cloud computing helps organizations boost flexibility, increase agility, improve performance, and provide ongoing cost optimization and scalability opportunities. Users of cloud service providers like Google Cloud, AWS, and Azure should understand the ways to cloud cost optimization. This article will discuss why cloud cost optimization should be a business priority.

What is cloud cost optimization?

Cloud cost optimization reduces the overall cloud expense by right-sizing computing services, identifying mismanaged resources, reserving capacity for high discounts, and eliminating waste. It provides ways to execute applications in the cloud, leveraging cloud services cost-efficiently and providing value to businesses at the lowest possible cost. Cost optimization should be a priority for every organization as it helps maximize business benefits by optimizing their cloud spending.

Here are some of the most common reasons cloud cost optimization is a business priority:

1. Rightsize the computing resources efficiently

AWS cloud support and many other cloud providers offer various instance types suited for different workloads. AWS offers savings plans and reserved instances, allowing users to pay upfront and thus reduce cost. Azure has reserved user discounts, and Google Cloud Platform provides committed user discounts. There are multiple cases where application managers and developers choose incorrect instance sizes and suboptimal instance families, leading to oversized instances. Make sure your company chooses the proper cloud storage that aligns well and is the right fit based on your business requirements.

2. Improves employee’s productivity and performance

When engineers or developers do not need to deal with many features to optimize, they can easily focus on their primary role. Implementing cloud cost optimization can free up the DevOps teams from constantly putting out fires, taking much of their time. Cloud optimization lets you spend most of the time and skills on the right task to mitigate risks and ensure that your services and applications perform well in the cloud.

3. Provides deep insights and visibility

A robust cloud cost optimization strategy affects the overall business performance by bringing more visibility. Cloud expenditures are structured and monitored efficiently to detect unused resources and scale the cost ratio for your business. Cloud cost optimization discovers the underutilized features, resources, and mismanaged tools. Deep insights and visibility reduce unnecessary cloud costs while optimizing cloud utilization. Cloud cost optimization does reduce not only price but also balances cost and performance.

4. Allocate budget efficiently

Cloud cost optimization eliminates the significant roadblocks, such as untagged costs, shared resources, etc. It gives a cohesive view and accurate information about business units, cost centers, products, and roles. It becomes easier for organizations to map their budget and resources accurately with complete financial information. It gives businesses the power to analyze billing data and the ability to charge back by managing resources efficiently.

5. Best practices implementation

Cloud cost optimization provides businesses to apply best practices, such as security, visibility, and accountability. A good cloud optimization process allows organizations to reduce resource wastage, identify risks, plan future strategies efficiently, reduce spending on the cloud, and forecast costs and resource requirements.

Final words

Cloud cost optimization is not a process that can happen overnight. However, it can be introduced and optimized over time. Cloud computing has a lot of potentials, but organizations should pay attention to cost optimization to take full advantage. It’s not a complicated task but requires a disciplined approach to establish good rightsizing habits and drive insights and action using analytics to lower cloud costs.

Enterprises can control expenses, implement good governance, and stay competitive by prioritizing Cloud cost optimization. Cloud costs must be viewed as more than just a cost to be managed. A good cloud cost strategy allows firms to better plan for the future and estimate cost and resource requirements.

Protected Harbor is one of the US’s top IT and cloud services providers. It partners with businesses and provides improved flexibility, productivity, scalability, and cost-control with uncompromised security. Our dedicated team of IT experts takes pride in delivering unique solutions for your satisfaction. We know the cloud is the future. We work with companies to get them there without the hassle; contact us today, move to the cloud.

Why Are Cloud Services Taking Over?

With the rising popularity of cloud services, many businesses are migrating to create their remote servers. There are many reasons you might choose cloud services over setting up your hardware, but all business owners should consider simple economics.

The days when businesses had to rely on the availability, provision, and ability to have huge spaces to run their operations are long gone. The world has evolved, and startups are flourishing because they are facilitated. No office turns into a small space, then eventually into a vast building rapidly. What enables all of this is the Cloud.

One benefit of this is that you can use several tools and features to protect your data from intruders and hackers who might otherwise gain access to any information stored on your primary server. Cloud storage space is often much cheaper than in-house. Cloud Services are taking over due for a plethoric number of reasons. Henceforth let us have a look at them in detail.

Improved Storage and Convenient Backup

Storage is provided to businesses through massive servers contained in the Cloud. Therefore, companies do not need to rent out prominent places to hold their servers or buy such servers. Then, there is also the presence of excellent backups since the Cloud service providers have their backup servers and are responsible for it. It is their job to back things up and not the businesses’. This also leads to a drastic improvement in its performance to its clients.

Scalability, Flexibility, and Performance

In an excellent turn of events for businesses, Cloud Technology has been designed to be scaled to match the alternating IT requirements of companies. Therefore, as a company grows, it is evident that more storage space and bandwidth will be required to keep up with the ever-increasing traffic on its applications, websites, and other services. So, to accommodate the re-scaling of companies and ensure optimum performance under heavy loads, Cloud servers can be deployed automatically. This also improves speed and minimizes downtime of web applications, amongst many others.

Cost-Efficiency

As we have seen above, the lack of required space and servers significantly reduces the running costs through Cloud services. Overhead costs related to software updates, server hardware updates, and server management also reduce this. Another thing that facilitates this decrease in operational expenses is that Cloud services can be used on a pay-per-use basis. As a result, businesses can utilize the same benefits they want and guarantee a return on their investments.

Lack of Responsibility Towards Malware Attacks and Data Protection

The data of businesses fall under the responsibility of the Cloud service provider. At face value, it may seem unsafe since another company has access to your business’s data. However, this is far from reality.

Your business data is kept secure due to exceptionally well-rounded and dexterously designed contracts, with accentuation given to even the tiniest details. Therefore, once a malware attack comes into motion, your business is not the liable party; it is the company acting as the Cloud service provider.

This opens the doors to many advantages. When a malware attack occurs, a business utilizing a Cloud service can go on its merry way and continue focusing on improving its services. At the back-end, the Cloud service provider will take care of removing the actual malware.

• Automatic Software Updates

Through automatic software updates, Cloud service providers can ensure that whatever issue caused a breach can be covered. Since the business software at play is running on the Cloud servers, the provider can step in seamlessly to remove the malware.

• Automatic Software Integration

Once a newer methodology to prevent malware attacks or data leakages rolls out, the new feature will be distributed to all users using the business service, whether in an application or a website. Again, the business’ service is running on the Cloud service provider’s server, so one updation in the Cloud servers updates the distributed version for all users.

There is no reliance on each hardware component needing to be updated in a company since all its workers and users will be incorporating software that runs on the Cloud.

In the case of a backup failure, there is no need to worry since a Cloud service has multiple backups. For any business, creating such backups will prove to be tedious, overwhelming, and perhaps even out of reach to manage on-premises.

Similarly, covering up is a headache for the Cloud service provider when there is data leakage. For a business, it will be business as usual, as they say.

Business Continuation

There is always that element of risk involved when it comes to businesses. Unforeseen circumstances could cause a company to go bankrupt, and if it is based entirely on the Cloud, it may never be able to recover. This is because it has to sell all its offices, which would entail the servers present and all the other equipment when there is a lack of finances. A sophisticated backup may not be present in data loss situations since it is expensive and likely to be located on the same site. Therefore, all company data might be lost when a natural disaster occurs.

This is where Cloud service providers kick in, whether a business disaster or a natural disaster. A business can go online and remote if it is forced to sell all its offices due to financial constraints, thus reducing its costs instead of firing its employees or shutting down. There is simply no issue in case of data corruption or loss since Cloud service providers are both experienced and can provide multiple reliable backups.

The above results in the continuity of a business even under challenging times and situations.

Conclusion

All the reasons mentioned above make it imperative for a business to desire to incorporate Cloud services to accomplish its endeavors and run its operations. Since the entire world runs on companies, whether small or large, Cloud services are taking over!

Businesses are moving to cloud-based services because it makes their security and management more effortless. Since all data is stored on remote servers, there’s less risk of data theft or loss, which is a massive benefit for any company. Going with a private cloud service also means that you only have to pay for what you use, saving you money in the long run.

If you’re still on the fence about a move to the cloud, consider all of its benefits, then move to a cloud service provider or an MSP. From accessibility to cost savings, the cloud is an essential business tool that can help streamline practically every aspect of your business. Now is the time to upgrade to a private cloud.

The private cloud by Protected Harbor is more than just a backup solution. It improves the speed and efficiency of your business by providing flexibility, cost control, and enhanced security. With its multi-tenant design, you have access to all the advantages of a cloud solution without the risk of compromising security or performance. And with the ability to interconnect with the public cloud, you can take advantage of cost-effective solutions whenever they are available. Please take the next step to upgrade; contact.

The importance of owning your remote servers and using a dedicated protected cloud.

If you’re a business owner, then there’s a good chance this question must have crossed your mind to own your equipment and servers. Just remember, “owning” your equipment doesn’t mean the computers and systems in your office. Likely, you are already using a hosting web service or server for your business needs. After carefully considering your unique business needs, it would be best if you decided between onsite or off-site servers. Read along, and we’ll make the decision easy for you.

Onsite servers to Off-site servers; The trend

In 2021 more than 50% of the organizations moved their workloads to off-site or cloud servers. Managed service companies (MSPs) and value-added resellers (VARs) are gaining traction with their one size fits all solutions. Keeping an onsite physical server and equipment and maintaining the infrastructure is costly. But there are other reasons motivating businesses to move to an off-site setting.

• Onsite hosting has limited connectivity and accessibility than off-site hosting, which has unlimited capabilities.
• Remote and geographic expansion are more realistic in an off-site and cloud environment.
• The physical space of onsite housing servers incurs real estate and energy charges; off-site servers do not.
• Storing your data in a colocation datacenter is cost-effective, removing the need for in-house IT costs.
• The upfront costs of the physical equipment and server are significant for most businesses.

These technology barrier costs are causing the shift to datacenter solutions or dedicated off-site servers. Put, a datacenter solution or dedicated server is an option dedicated solely to your business needs and purposes. No other individual can access the server; it’s your data in our datacenter.

A closer look at AWS servers

The most popular dedicated off-site solution is Amazon web services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platforms. But how do you choose what’s best for your business? They all follow the pay-per-user approach and additional services and products needed over time, adding to costs as you grow.

Since AWS dominates the field, we will focus on just Amazon’s platform. The first thing to consider is that “You want solutions, not a platform.” For example, Office365 is a solution to edit and create documents, while Microsoft Azure is the cloud platform that hosts 365 and other programs online. Thus Amazon is a platform – not a solution. Amazon gives you cloud space for rent, with unpredictable costs as your business needs rise and fall.

You will not see an automatic performance improvement when you move your company’s workflow and applications into AWS. For that, you would need a dedicated protected-cloud environment and an intelligent, distributed database. Just hosting your applications on AWS does not mean you will have the ability to use those programs and computing resources efficiently. You have to meet AWS system requirements; AWS does not have to meet yours. If you want data backups and recovery, you have to do it yourself.

With AWS, Azure, and other popular server options, you only get a Virtual Machine (VM) and a console to work from. It is your responsibility to manage, maintain, and secure that VM. For example, with AWS, someone has to customize the CPU utilization limits, check to ensure the Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) volume doesn’t hit the IOPS or throughput limits, and increase your read or write performance using parallelization. It sounds like more of a problem than a solution

Also, it has been proven that AWS cloud is not as secure as your datacenter. The world JUST experienced an AWS outage, interrupting the operations for thousands of people and loss of business downright. Not only do you lose flexibility and cost-effective scalability with AWS and Azure. But you lose the reliability and stability you thought you were getting with the Amazon and Microsoft name.

The bottom line is if you work with GPU, AI, or large data sets, you need someone to manage and personalize your IT infrastructure. Moving to a dedicated protected cloud solution lets you customize the server environment to improve AWS.

What is the alternative?

With a dedicated protected cloud, someone constantly monitors your private environment to make sure everything goes smoothly and is customized to the company’s requirements. Actual IT management means knowing when to optimize the storage and network layers to support your extensive data set. Unlike AWS and Azure who will slow down your traffic moving between VM’s –unless you pay additional fees – we can help optimize applications to respond to requests made to these large data sets in a remote environment, with no extra cost.

Before anything, we always have an expert examine the applications a business uses, how exactly employees use those applications in a daily workflow and finally review the data loads involved to figure out what needs to be done to make this run properly. Having a team that understands and develops personalized Technology Improvement Plans (TIP) gets your business more bang for the buck than AWS or on-prem.

This is the gist of overall performance, Bottom line? You want to opt for a service that offers 99.99% uptime with reliable IT support. We improve the environment to give you the best performance for your workload. Not the opposite way around. For example, for a single client, we don’t have to tune the S2D. But we do because we have it and want to give them the best performance possible.

Check out our post on how dedicated servers are a safer alternative. But that doesn’t mean you are 100% safe from attackers. To ensure the safety of the data, consider providers with built-in features like Application Outage Avoidance (AOA) and complete network monitoring to handle issues before they are critical…

So, despite all of the above facts, if you’re still crazy enough to go with AWS cloud, that’s your decision. Irrespectively, if you’re not terrified by the lower and fixed price complete solution, best infrastructure setup and system monitoring, or our team doing the magic for your business, in that case, we at Protected Harbor will be more than happy to give you all the solutions you need.

Virtualization vs cloud computing

Cloud computing and virtualization are both technologies that were developed to maximize the use of computing resources while reducing the cost of those resources. They are also mentioned frequently when discussing high availability and redundancy. While it is not uncommon to hear people discuss them interchangeably; they are very different approaches to solving the problem of maximizing the use of available resources. They differ in many ways and that also leads to some important considerations when selecting between the two.

Virtualization: More Servers on the Same Hardware

It used to be that if you needed more computing power for an application, you had to purchase additional hardware. Redundancy systems were based on having duplicate hardware sitting in standby mode in case something should fail. The problem was that as CPUs grew more powerful and had more than one core, a lot of computing resources were going unused. This obviously costs companies a great deal of money. Enter virtualization. Simply stated, virtualization is a technique that allows you to run more than one server on the same hardware. Typically, one server is the host server and controls the access to the physical server’s resources. One or more virtual servers then run within containers provided by the host server. The container is transparent to the virtual server so the operating system does not need to be aware of the virtual environment. This allows the server to be consolidated which reduces hardware costs. Less physical servers also mean less power which further reduces cost. Most virtualization systems allow the virtual servers to be easily moved from one physical host to another. This makes it very simple for system administrators to reconfigure the servers based on resource demand or to move a virtual server from a failing physical node. Virtualization helps reduce complexity by reducing the number of physical hosts but it still involves purchasing servers and software and maintaining your infrastructure. Its greatest benefit is reducing the cost of that infrastructure for companies by maximizing the usage of the physical resources.

Cloud Computing: Measured Resources, Pay for What You Use

While virtualization may be used to provide cloud computing, cloud computing is quite different from virtualization. Cloud computing may look like virtualization because it appears that your application is running on a virtual server detached from any reliance or connection to a single physical host. And they are similar in that fashion. However, cloud computing can be better described as a service where virtualization is part of physical infrastructure.

Cloud computing grew out of the concept of utility computing. Essentially, utility computing was the belief that computing resources and hardware would become a commodity to the point that companies would purchase computing resources from a central pool and pay only for the number of CPU cycles, RAM, storage and bandwidth that they used. These resources would be metered to allow pay for what you use model much like you buy electricity from the electric company. This is how it became known as utility computing. It is common for cloud computing to be distributed across many servers. This provides redundancy, high availability and even geographic redundancy. This also makes cloud computing very flexible.

It is easy to add resources to your application. You just use them, just like you just use the electricity when you need it. Cloud computing has been designed with scalability in mind. The biggest drawback of cloud computing is that, of course, you do not control the servers. Your data is out there in the cloud and you have to trust the provider that it is safe. Many cloud computing services offer SLAs that promise to deliver a level of service and safety but it is critical to read the fine print. A failure of the cloud service could result in a loss of your data.

A practical comparison (Virtualization vs CLOUD COMPUTING)

VIRTUALIZATION

Virtualization is a technology that allows you to create multiple simulated environments or dedicated resources from a single, physical hardware system. Software called a hypervisor connects directly to that hardware and allows you to split 1 system into separate, distinct, and secure environments known as virtual machines (VMs). These VMs rely on the hypervisor’s ability to separate the machine’s resources from the hardware and distribute them appropriately.

CLOUD COMPUTING

Cloud computing is a set of principles and approaches to deliver compute, network, and storage infrastructure resources, services, platforms, and applications to users on-demand across any network. These infrastructure resources, services, and applications are sourced from clouds, which are pools of virtual resources orchestrated by management and automation software so they can be accessed by users on-demand through self-service portals supported by automatic scaling and dynamic resource allocation.