White Papers

Key Considerations for Adopting Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)

Web application security requirements should align with an organization's overall security policy. In addition, there are some basic steps you can follow to produce a short list of essential security features for any Web application. In this expert E-Guide, find answers to four key Web application security questions. Also discover best practices for application-level firewall selection and deployment. SearchVirtualDataCentre.co.uk Over the past two years, we have seen a sharp rise in the different types of computing platforms that are available to organizations. Companies are now able to choose from building their own data centers, deploying traditional colocation in a data center or using a range of virtualized or cloud computing services. One of the many cloud options is Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) -- the rental of virtualized computing processing, memory, data storage and networking for the purpose of running an operating system. It offers many of the benefits that other areas of cloud computing do -- notably reduced costs -- and this is the area that I would like to focus on, because it is where we are seeing dramatic change. Until recently, implementation levels for IaaS have been low, mainly because of associated connectivity costs. However, in past six months this has changed.

The New Math: Double Your Results for Half the Cost with a Cloud-Based Contact Center

The contact center performs one of the most vital functions within an organization, forging the essential link between a company and its customers that builds loyalty and reinforces the values of the company brand. In keeping with its critical role, enterprises have traditionally invested millions of dollars into building and maintaining best-in class contact centers. For decades, this strategy made sense. In today's environment of rapid technological change and economic volatility, an on-premises contact center is no longer an asset; in most cases, it is a clear disadvantage. Hardware, software, and other related equipment require major capital expenditure in a world where technology is evolving so quickly that an on-premises contact center starts to become obsolete nearly as soon as it is assembled. When market conditions inevitably shift, companies saddled with aging equipment and massive maintenance fees are unable to stay flexible, making them vulnerable to more nimble competitors. Building a culture of innovation requires a shift in focus, putting an emphasis on agility while maintaining IT functions more efficiently and affordably. Today, on-demand contact centers are being recognized as a smart way for companies to stay agile while still delivering tremendous value to their customers. On-premises contact centers once the only reliable choice for the enterprise, a necessary investment with no real alternatives.

Guide to B2B Leads: Ensure the Highest Quality Business Data

Your organization's sales performance is only as good as your list of prospective leads. The right business data means sales sta s can quickly get in touch with key decision makers and initiate the sales cycle. Incorrect or outdated information can lead you on an expensive and time-consuming � not to mention frustrating � goose chase with no chance at a sale. Having the right information to explore new leads has become critical to the success of companies in virtually every industry. That's why more and more businesses are turning to data service providers to augment their sales and marketing e orts. Business data providers not only collect the most up-to-date information for decision makers throughout an organization, they update the lists � sometimes several times a year � to ensure your sales sta is spending its time making the sale, not hunting for contact information. This white paper will discuss how business owners and salespeople can source the freshest business data and what to look for when choosing a business data provider. What's driving the sales industry to need real-time contact data? The truth is, as soon as a contact list is printed, it's out of date � how fast the business landscape is changing.

Guide to B2B Leads: Ensure the Highest Quality Business Data

Your organization's sales performance is only as good as your list of prospective leads. The right business data means sales sta s can quickly get in touch with key decision makers and initiate the sales cycle. Incorrect or outdated information can lead you on an expensive and time-consuming � not to mention frustrating � goose chase with no chance at a sale. Having the right information to explore new leads has become critical to the success of companies in virtually every industry. That's why more and more businesses are turning to data service providers to augment their sales and marketing e orts. Business data providers not only collect the most up-to-date information for decision makers throughout an organization, they update the lists � sometimes several times a year � to ensure your sales sta is spending its time making the sale, not hunting for contact information. This white paper will discuss how business owners and salespeople can source the freshest business data and what to look for when choosing a business data provider. What's driving the sales industry to need real-time contact data? The truth is, as soon as a contact list is printed, it's out of date � how fast the business landscape is changing.

Five Tips to Create and Optimise Your Personalisation Programmes

Personalisation is a highly effective strategy to engage, acquire and retain site visitors. Marketers leverage website behavioural data to tailor offers and content to visitors relevant to their known interests and browsing history. The most effective vehicles for personalisation are personalised product recommendations and personalised emails. Often the biggest challenge of a personalisation programme is simply getting started and creating a framework to continuously manage, measure and optimise your initiative. Without a proper framework, the scope of personalisation programmes can become vast and even overwhelming. in this brief supplement to the white paper: A Marketing Imperative: Profile, Personalise and Profit. We outline five simple tips to create, implement and optimise personalisation programmes for product recommendations and email: 1. Set campaign goals 2. Put yourself in your customers' shoes 3. Keep it Simple 4. Measure, test and optimise your performance 5. expand beyond the fundamentals 1. Set Campaign Goals Marketing success is measured via quantitative and tangible results. Management is more likely to support and fund programmes that will impact the bottom line, so it is imperative to set campaign goals and metrics of measurement to illustrate the goals and forecasted success of your programme. To create effective metrics, it important to benchmark against past non-personalised programme performance and modify the performance metrics based on the impact of personalisation; marketers should leverage their web analytics and marketing optimisation solutions to view past programme performance.

Success Factors for Highly Effective Inside Sales Teams

Today's sales leader is confronted with a dazzling list of possibilities to enhance and increase revenues: CRM systems, new point solutions, channel strategies, Internet technologies, targeted lead generation programs, and many more. At the same time there is an unprecedented level of scrutiny into sales operations and demand for more reliable revenue production and forecasting. Following the burst of the "tech bubble" and in a climate of increased accountability, few executive management teams are willing to leave sales alone and hope for the best. Instead, many companies strive to balance the efforts of various internal teams to maximize sales productivity. Increasingly, a key component in realizing this vision is having an inside sales team in addition to a field-based sales team. In our 2005 annual Inside/Telesales survey, 40% of responding companies have an inside sales group. Our survey indicates that more than half (56%) of inside sales personnel have less than two years of experience and annual turnover is 42%. With ramp-up times averaging more than six months, getting new people up to speed quickly and supplying your best reps with the tools and motivation needed to retain them are of paramount importance. You'll want to consider the several practices outlined here to establish and manage your inside sales team.

Cloud Computing as a Managed Service: What is it and how to use it?""

If you listen to cloud computing advertisements on the web, "The Cloud" can be confusing. It is often described as a "workload optimized service management platform" - but what does that mean? Basically, in the most simplistic form, the cloud is a virtual data center. That is it! However, there are unique characteristics that allow it to be referred to as the Cloud. First, it is usually fully virtualized and accessed via the internet (or cloud). The technical concept actually isn't new. Companies have been implementing their own virtual private data centers for years. However, companies are now looking to adopt cloud computing as a managed service to reduce costs as well as time to implement new infrastructure, platforms or software applications. One of the fastest growing areas of cloud services is utilizing it for data storage and managed services to improve application and data accessibility. There are two types of cloud data centers - virtual private or virtual public networks. Larger companies have typically created their own virtual private cloud data center. However, that isn't an option for many small to mid-sized businesses. The initial capital required to build a virtual private cloud is cost prohibitive for many their only option is to turn to remote or branch offices to access applications and or services via a secure internet connection.

Real-Time Energy Optimization and Best Practices In a Mission-Critical Data Center

eBay is a company that cares about improving reliability given that downtime costs $2,000/second or $120,000/minute. The large scale of eBay's operations means they also need to keep equipment and electricity costs in check. To those ends, eBay has developed a model for its data centers that makes their IT operations both highly reliable and 50% less expensive to operate than the data centers they are decommissioning. In addition to minimizing faults and lowering operating costs, eBay's South Jordan, Utah facility has achieved the U.S. Green Building Council's Leadership in Energy & Environmental Design (LEED) Gold ranking. Just as important as the LEED Gold efficiency ranking and the Tier IV reliability is the flexibility designed into the eBay data center. It is a data center that can adapt as requirements and equipment changes and, particularly important for eBay, as demand requires accommodation for future growth. By implementing IT industry best practices as exemplified by eBay, even modest size data centers can improve their uptime, reduce costs and become more efficient using readily available equipment and straightforward techniques and processes. As one of the world's largest Internet commerce platforms, eBay demands extreme data center reliability; any downtime would impact transactions more than $2,000 a second.

The Relevance of Cloud Infrastructure to Enterprise Challenges

Even stripped of all the marketplace buildup and buzz, cloud computing services are undeniably changing IT options in meaningful ways. Still, cloud computing is neither a fundamentally new concept nor an IT outsourcing panacea, but is instead the result of the continuous evolution of hosting services to increase customer appeal and adoption of outsourced infrastructure. Further dissected, cloud computing essentially combines shared platform economics and rich Web-based interfaces to enhance user control -- either programmatically or through a graphical user interface. So why is cloud computing currently one of the most talked-about phenomena in IT? There are a number of converging factors that have given rise to cloud computing's emergence as a new IT service delivery option. Today's shared hosting platform economics reflect continued resource infusion at the compute processor, memory, and bandwidth levels. Without this expanded capacity, the abstraction levels necessary to effectively isolate customers wouldn't be possible. Moreover, as IT research and advisory firm Gartner has observed, the combined influences of increased adoption of virtualization technologies, service-oriented architectures (SOAs), and ubiquitous computing standards have expanded the availability of lower-cost and massively scalable computing-related services.1 Additionally, feature-rich user interfaces are now easily developed and deployed, while low-cost, widespread options (usually Internet-based) ensure immediate connectivity.

The Relevance of Cloud Infrastructure to Enterprise Challenges

Even stripped of all the marketplace buildup and buzz, cloud computing services are undeniably changing IT options in meaningful ways. Still, cloud computing is neither a fundamentally new concept nor an IT outsourcing panacea, but is instead the result of the continuous evolution of hosting services to increase customer appeal and adoption of outsourced infrastructure. Further dissected, cloud computing essentially combines shared platform economics and rich Web-based interfaces to enhance user control -- either programmatically or through a graphical user interface. So why is cloud computing currently one of the most talked-about phenomena in IT? There are a number of converging factors that have given rise to cloud computing's emergence as a new IT service delivery option. Today's shared hosting platform economics reflect continued resource infusion at the compute processor, memory, and bandwidth levels. Without this expanded capacity, the abstraction levels necessary to effectively isolate customers wouldn't be possible. Moreover, as IT research and advisory firm Gartner has observed, the combined influences of increased adoption of virtualization technologies, service-oriented architectures (SOAs), and ubiquitous computing standards have expanded the availability of lower-cost and massively scalable computing-related services.1 Additionally, feature-rich user interfaces are now easily developed and deployed, while low-cost, widespread options (usually Internet-based) ensure immediate connectivity.