• Increased time dedicated to revenue-generating endeavors instead of dealing with the management of the data center infrastructure (generators, UPS’s, cooling, network redundancies, personnel)
• Scalable network capacity, such as adding additional cabinets on demand without much logistics
• Meeting your specific compliance criteria needs, particularly with data-sensitive industries such as healthcare and financial firms
• Reliance on the data center provider to manage the entire colocated infrastructure up to the application layer

Based on these benefits, you must engage your IT department and other stakeholders to identify your goals and needs. Fully-equipping yourself with the right knowledge will streamline the entire process. Understanding the topics cover below, will give you an idea of what to consider and what to look out for while preparing for your colo provider search.

Capacity & Scalability

You should ask yourself “What are my current network, power and space demands? Will this remain consistent, or will it fluctuate?”. Most colocation providers have great flexibility in all of these factors. While flexibility is great, discussing your growth plan with your colocation provider can be very helpful. Moving your equipment into a data center blind to what they are capable of can limit your company’s growth.

Providing your growth plan gives a more realistic idea of how a data center can best support your needs. After all, moving into a space to only move out a few months later is just a waste of time and resources. Knowing that the chosen data center has both the capacity and scalability will only help you in the long run.

Location

Location, location, location… you all heard it before. Where your data center resides is a crucial factor when shopping for a colocation provider. While remote amenities like remote hands and KVM are nice, staying close to the data center has its own benefits. Factors like latency and uptime are typically better the closer you are to the facility.

Although, if your facility is in an area prone to natural disasters, it might be best to find another location. Sure, the structure itself can withstand a hurricane but let’s say the power goes out with your office in proximity of the data center. Now that your office and servers are down, operations seized, and the clock ticking, you now start to worry about the financial hit you’re going to take. When you choose a provider that is on a different power grid, you mitigate the risk of having your servers go down. 

One last thing to consider is accessibility for your IT team. With your data center close by, you will eliminate travel costs and expenditures when you need to have your system upgraded. Regardless if you want to stay close or far away, each has its benefits and it’s important to know the following when you look for a colocation provider:

• Is the facility located in an area prone to natural disasters?
• Do they offer remote amenities such as KVM or remote hands?
•  Is the data center easily accessible?

How Much Power do you Need?

You’ll want to ensure your colocation facility has the power capacity to handle not only your needs for today but also for the future. After all, you would not want to move into a facility that cannot support your daily business needs. Regardless of your situation, you want to know and understand your power density per rack, especially for high-data processing applications.

Why this is Important

Let’s say you want to create an AI model for your next project. However, due to the complex calculations that this model has to perform, it then becomes a high-processing application.

This poses you with the challenge of optimizing the data center’s infrastructure to meet the AI model’s processing requirements. More specifically, you need to address the issue of the power density per rack. Or rather, the amount of electrical power that the hardware within a single rack consumes. 

Since the AI model requires powerful GPUs and specialized equipment to speed up computations, it results in generating a lot of heat and requires a lot of electrical power. Now, if the power density per rack is too high, it can lead to overheating and hardware failures, as well as reduce the lifespan of your equipment.

To help mitigate these issues, the engineers at the data center will need to redesign your rack space to provide your equipment with proper airflow and cooling. With your new setup, you can run your AI model without damaging your equipment.

Careful considerations like this example are pivotal to maintaining a healthy environment for your hardware. It will not only increase its lifespan, but it will prevent bottlenecks and help ensure that you continue your business operations without any worry.

Power Requirement Formula

This begs the question “How do I know how much power I need?”. Knowing how much power you need and how much power your provider can give are equally important. Luckily, it is pretty simple to find out how much power you need. You can use this formula to calculate your power requirement:

• watts = volts x amps

An important note is that due to legal reasons, data centers in Washington are required to only use 80% power. For example, if you have 20 amps you can only use 16 due to Washington’s fire code regulations.

What about Security & Support?

You should always be able to fully trust your colocation facility with safeguarding your enterprise. Not only does this include the physical security and confidentiality of the actual premises, but it may also include being able to support your organization in the way of providing services that enable further security within your own infrastructure via the provider’s managed services.

When you reach out to a data center be sure to ask “Does your organization have a team of experts who can handle all aspects of network security and supporting your infrastructure?” Knowing that they have a team of experts at the ready provides you access to inside knowledge on how you can scale and grow your business without having to go through the process of trial and error. Additionally, investing in a third-party colocation provider with its own managed security services is a great cost-effective option when you cannot afford to have a team of 24x7x365 experts on your own payroll.

Disaster Recovery & Backup Protocols

Just as much as proactive security is a concern, so should disaster recovery & backup methods. A common saying amongst Network Security Specialists is “It’s not if you get attacked, it’s when you get attacked.” This is a necessary factor that you should address with any provider prior to signing with them. This is because the average cost of a single outage is $5,600 per minute.

Financial losses aside, these issues could result in PR nightmares or loss of reputation, or even valued client business. A worthwhile company will work with you to establish customized DRaaS solutions or backup plans for your peace of mind.

Ultimately, when you start to search for your Seattle colocation provider, be sure that you understand how location, capacity, and scalability factor into your business continuity. Also, understanding the basics of how power works and what your organization needs to function are important when finding your ideal colocation provider. With this knowledge, you should have no trouble finding a data center that will help your company reach its next level.

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IAM Key Components

IAM involves several key components, including authentication, authorization, and user provisioning and de-provisioning. Authentication is the process of verifying the identity of a user or device that is requesting access to a cloud resource. This can be achieved through various methods, such as passwords, security tokens, and biometric factors like fingerprints or facial recognition. By verifying the user’s identity, organizations can ensure that only authorized users have access to their cloud resources.

Authorization is the process of granting or denying access to a specific cloud resource based on the user’s identity and access privileges. Access privileges are typically assigned based on the user’s role or job function within the organization. For example, a user with administrative privileges would have access to more sensitive data and systems than a user with a basic user role.

Added Layer of Security

Multi-factor authentication (MFA) is becoming increasingly popular as an added layer of security for the authentication process. MFA requires users to provide more than one form of authentication, such as a password and a security token, to verify their identity. This helps to prevent unauthorized access by ensuring that a potential attacker would need to possess more than just one factor of authentication to gain access to cloud resources.

Role-based access control (RBAC) is a model for managing access to cloud resources based on the user’s role or job function within the organization. RBAC allows organizations to manage access to resources more efficiently and securely by limiting access to only those users who require it to perform their job duties. This reduces the risk of data breaches and other security incidents that may occur due to unauthorized access.

User provisioning and de-provisioning are crucial components of IAM that ensure that users are provided with the necessary access privileges when they join an organization, and those privileges are removed when they leave the organization. This helps to prevent former employees from retaining access to sensitive data and systems after they have left the organization.

Conclusion

Ultimately, IAM is a critical aspect of cloud security that allows organizations to manage the digital identities of their users and control their access to cloud resources. By implementing IAM frameworks, organizations can reduce the risk of data breaches and other security incidents that may occur due to unauthorized access to cloud resources. IAM provides organizations with greater control over their cloud resources, ensuring that only authorized users have access to sensitive data and systems. As more and more organizations move their operations to the cloud, IAM will become increasingly important in ensuring the security of cloud-based data and systems.

Let’s start the conversation today! Click here to discuss how Wowrack can enhance your organizations security.

The post A Brief Overview of Identity & Access Management (IAM) appeared first on Wowrack Blog.

Transparency and Accountability

One of the main benefits of open data is transparency and accountability. By making data available to the public, cities can increase transparency in their operations and decision-making processes. This can help build trust between the government and its citizens and can also lead to more effective and efficient governance. Having public information like this can also be used to hold governments accountable for their actions, as citizens can use that information to track the performance of government programs and services.

Open Data Helps with Informed Decision-Making

Open data can also help businesses and individuals make more informed decisions. By providing access to data on various aspects of city life, such as crime rates, housing prices, and transportation options, individuals can make more informed decisions about where to live, work, and play. Businesses can use the data to identify new market opportunities and to make more informed investment decisions. This can lead to more efficient and effective use of resources and can ultimately improve the economic well-being of cities.

Open Data Promotes Innovation

Open data can also promote innovation. By making data available to the public, cities can encourage entrepreneurs and innovators to develop new products and services that address city problems. For example, public knowledge on traffic patterns and congestion can be used to develop new transportation services that are more efficient and cost-effective. Similarly, open data on energy consumption can be used to develop new energy management systems that reduce energy consumption and costs.

Challenges

While the benefits of open data are clear, there are also challenges to implementing initiatives. Such as ensuring data quality and reliability. Open facts and statistics can only be useful if the information is accurate and up to date. Another challenge is protecting individual privacy. Initiatives must balance the need for transparency with the need to protect the privacy of individuals. Finally, there is also the challenge of ensuring that this kind of information is accessible to all members of society, including those who may not have access to the internet or technology.

In conclusion, open data is a trending topic in data cities, and it has the potential to revolutionize the way cities are managed. By providing transparency and accountability, promoting informed decision-making, and encouraging innovation, having publicly made stats and facts can help cities become more efficient and effective. However, there are also challenges to implementing initiatives, and cities must be aware of these challenges and work to address them in order to fully realize the benefits.

You can learn more about the latest news by exploring our blog! Follow our link to learn about How Smart City Technologies are Transforming Urban Living!

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How does this Improve Efficiency?

Dedicated server architecture involves assigning one physical server for each application within an organization. This allows for improved application efficiency and better management of issues that may arise.

This architecture can also improve efficiency for web hosting services by dedicating one server to each customer’s website.

A dedicated server architecture refers to a server setup where a single server is dedicated to serving a single client or organization.

Here is an example:

1. A company decides to host their website on a dedicated server, instead of a shared server or a cloud server.
2. They rent a physical server from a hosting provider, which is located in a data center and connected to the internet.
3. The company configures the server with the necessary software and applications to run its website, such as a web server, a database server, and any custom applications they need.
4. The company has full control over the server and its resources, including the operating system, software, and hardware configurations.
5. Visitors to the company’s website access the server over the internet, and the server serves their requests by dynamically generating web pages and serving data from the database.
6. The company is responsible for maintaining and securing the server, as well as managing any upgrades or changes to its configuration.

In this scenario, the dedicated server architecture provides the company with more control and resources than a shared server, but also requires more technical expertise and resources to maintain and manage.

How do I Implement a Dedicated Server Architecture?

Before making a giant change, you are going to want to be sure that the efficiency improves with the applications that you use. A good way to test this is to move one smaller application to a dedicated server and see if it produces the results you need.

Ultimately, the goal of implementing a dedicated server architecture is to maintain one dedicated server for each server application running in an environment. Albeit, the improvement to efficiency is quite beneficial, it’s important to keep in mind the cost to change a server architecture type.

If have any questions or would like to know more about dedicated server architecture, you can contact us today and one of our friendly staff will reach out to you!

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