In the manufacturing industry, there are two main priorities for protecting your data: cloud security and disaster recovery. The beginning of 2019 is a great time to evaluate your current situation and conduct an overall analysis – How secure is your data? How prepared are you for a targeted security attack? What is your process for handling power outages?

Why Are Manufacturing Companies Particularly Susceptible to Cyber Attacks?

In the age of targeted security attacks, manufacturers need to have steps in place to mitigate the damage that can result from unauthorized access to data and/or security breaches. In particular, small and medium-sized manufacturing organizations are more susceptible to cyber attacks and data loss due to slow integration with new technology such as managed cloud solutions. As other industries have more quickly adapted to this new model of housing data, this leaves manufacturing companies as one of the few remaining industries that are considered low-hanging fruits as targets.

Historically, manufacturing companies have not been a big target for cybersecurity as they hadn’t housed particularly sensitive information. However, as that has changed over the years, cyber attacks have become more frequent in order to steal a companies’ intellectual property and/or to disrupt operations in order to cause loss of productivity and cause significant disruptions due to downtime.

How Can Managed Cloud Providers Keep Manufacturers Safe?

There are many benefits to utilizing a managed cloud service provider, but undoubtedly, some of the biggest benefits directly relate to security. A specific type of cloud service provider called Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) is a business that allows for the utilization of both their cloud and personnel resources in order to support a businesses’ applications and overall corporate cloud environment. With both a knowledgeable team of experts and a secure infrastructure, manufacturing companies can rest assured that their data and performance are well taken care of.

What Type of Cloud Environment is Best for Manufacturing Companies?

When you meet with a cloud service provider such as Wowrack, it’s important that they fully understand the needs and goals of your company. Everything regarding the custom environment they present to you should specifically be built based on those needs, and reflect that through the implementation of certain security and compliance measures.

To that end, a managed private cloud or a managed hybrid cloud environment are the two most utilized infrastructures for manufacturing businesses. They contain a baseline level of security that is crucial for these organizations (such as network isolation) while allowing for certain customizations to seamlessly integrate with their existing processes. Private and hybrid cloud solutions, similarly, are scalable without providing a weak point for targeted attacks.

How Can Manufacturing Companies Prepare for Disaster Recovery?

While not necessarily initiated by people, outages can oftentimes occur – and when they do, the fallout that results could cause chaos for your organization. Having a team on-hand to respond to these incidents is mission-critical in avoiding loss of productivity, revenue, or even overall data. Unfortunately, many manufacturing businesses do not have the level of expertise in their IT teams to handle these disasters. Or, if expertise isn’t an issue, availability is.

It doesn’t take long for outages to cause large amounts of monetary loss, so an IT response team has to be ready to act at a moment’s notice. When utilizing a managed cloud service provider, your company receives the benefits of a dedicated team monitoring the status of critical systems such as:

• UPS
• Generators
• Multiple Network Carriers
• Redundant Cooling
• Data Center Security

Or, similarly, ensuring efficient use of time to focus on items that can provide disaster mitigation through the following tasks:

• Routine maintenance
• Troubleshooting
• Managing backups
• Updates/patches
• Management of the corporate cloud infrastructure
• Maintaining an up-to-date disaster recovery plan
• Executing a disaster recovery plan to reduce losses when necessary

Wowrack’s elite team ensures that not only are you covered 24/7/365 if an outage occurs, but that your servers are performing at optimal speed – thereby granting the ability to carry on your day-to-day with confidence, and at top performance levels.

Whether your manufacturing company is considering migrating to a corporate cloud environment, or if you would like to discuss adding to your current infrastructure, we provide free consultations in order to determine a custom plan of how we can meet your needs. Contact us today to learn more.

The post Security & Disaster Recovery in the Cloud for Manufacturing Companies appeared first on Wowrack Blog.

Cloud Computing 101: What is a Cloud Service Provider?

There are a variety of services available that offer utilization of the cloud. Here are the primary categories:

Which Cloud Service Provider is Superior? IaaS.

Of all services, IaaS is undoubtedly the most comprehensive cloud service, and provides the most effectiveness towards manufacturing goals. The flexibility of Infrastructure as a Service allows accommodations regarding specific corporate network and/or cloud requirements. Specifically, utilizing a managed private cloud allows for optimized security procedures, complete control of your environment, and guaranteed quality service/performance. An added benefit is that many cloud service providers like Wowrack offer Disaster Recovery efforts such as offsite backups and 24/7/265 monitoring.

Benefits of Cloud Computing in Manufacturing

There are three main areas that utilizing a cloud computing platform can assist your specific Manufacturing needs:

• Hyper-Customized Solutions
• Maximization of Performance & Efficiency
• Effective ERP Extending to Corporate Cloud

Hyper-Customized Solutions

By working with a managed cloud provider such as Wowrack, manufacturing companies are able to enjoy the freedom of creating an infrastructure that is completely customized to their needs and goals. By combining initiatives into one platform, you can reduce human and financial resource usage through the efficiency of a hosted cloud solution.

Similarly, as your manufacturing company grows, it’s imperative that your technology is able to keep up. Undoubtedly, manufacturing companies are finding that managed cloud solutions are the method in which to do so with minimal interruptions. By working with an IaaS provider, you are able to smoothly scale up without interference in performance or security.

Maximization of Performance & Efficiency

There is a constantly-growing pressure for manufacturers to stay ahead of their competition in terms of accuracy benchmarks, increase processing speed, and optimize cross-channel interactions. This is primarily due to very small time-to-market requirements on top of fast product life-cycles.

Given this hyper-competitive environment, power outages that cause downtime or data loss can be devastating to manufacturing companies. The traditional solution to offsetting these risks has either been to have your IT team scramble when it occurs, or to build an extensive on-site environment – both costly, and ineffective methods. Through a managed cloud provider, you can gain the benefits of the on-premise infrastructure without having to expend your own employee resources to handle issues as they arise.

Alternatively, you need your infrastructure operating at 100% to always maintain optimal performance for maximum productivity. By utilizing a corporate cloud solution, this can be guaranteed by cloud service providers like Wowrack who ensure specific performance standards through service agreements.

Featured Case Study: Global Harvest

With over 250 employees, and 6 production facilities across the US, shipping hundreds of millions of pounds of bird seeds via truck and train freight, supporting 140+ different products, having critical systems functioning any less than 100% of the time is unacceptable.

 

Wowrack helped Global Harvest establish a highly-available private cloud managed infrastructure that allows for a data compression rate of nearly 50% along with helping reduce their workload by Wowrack assuming responsibility of all infrastructure related tasks.

View Full Case Study

Effective ERP Extending to Corporate Cloud

An important aspect of all businesses is how they manage their employees throughout multiple functions across different departments. By utilizing cloud computing measures, a lot of these tasks can be automated for increased productivity and automation opportunities.

The unique business model of cloud computing typically allows for a pay-as-you-go service, meaning that you do not have to spend more than you will need to use to maintain your day-to-day IT operations. This relates specifically to personnel management by maintaining up-to-date, accurate workflows and dashboards that ensure efficient communication and task management, while segmenting departments’ organizational needs.

An important aspect of utilizing a managed cloud provider is the importance of managed security and compliance. By partnering with a team like Wowrack, you can ensure that your specifications are met in a secure and monitored environment. Not only do you benefit from that added layer of security, but by knowing your company, they can recommend solutions such as private cloud or hybrid cloud to best fit your security needs in order to maintain the necessary level of control of information. While a managed cloud service provider is great to have in place when disaster strikes, it is equally important to have that support when structuring your environment to ensure compliance and strict security measures every single day.

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Whether utilizing cloud-based services is a new venture for your manufacturing company, or you are looking to optimize your usage of the platform, Wowrack’s team is able to work directly with you to ensure a customized solution that can directly address your company’s pain points. As a hybrid cloud provider, we handle any and all needs relating to a custom manufacturing cloud infrastructure for your company. Contact us today for a free estimate or to discuss further how we can assist you!

The post Top 3 Benefits of Cloud for Manufacturing in 2019 appeared first on Wowrack Blog.