A good cloud storage site

Why should you consider a good cloud storage site? Your file are you. The cloud will know more about your personal life because you will store files over there, your documents, photos and videos. While working between your local and cloud storage, a good cloud storage site should enable you to move file easily by drag and drop features. You would prefer sending an email link to recipients of files instead of sending those file over the email. Of course with an internet connection reaching out to your files you should not be a complex process. When you assign your files to the cloud a good cloud storage site is your partner, it will help you stay out of trouble when you lose your data. Let us consider Upthere cloud storage for the purposes of this article.

Western Digital is always acquiring products that give existing and prospective clients good results. Recently, the company acquired a good storage site for personal use. The Upthere will transform the experience of users with cloud storage systems and take to a new and exciting level. Moreover, Upthere is capital intensive project by Western Digital using technology to take improve services to clients. Although Western Digital Company did not disclose the amount that is spent in acquiring Upthere, it is obvious that the service is worth the cost. It must have been a reasonably hire amount.

A good cloud storage site provides consumers with a platform where they can store their store their media files with easy access from wherever place they can be in the world. The cloud storage system can enable consumers to store photos, videos or any type of media like documents. Moreover, a good cloud storage site makes it easier for individuals to access their files using any device. The cloud storage site should have a mobile application or a site that easily adjusts to the device that the consumers are using. Users should not struggle search for files in cloud, after all they move to cloud seeking for efficiency.

Storing your information in a local disk on your personal computer may seem a better option only until you lose your information when the Trojan gives you an uninvited visit. Professionals, companies, and organization are making every effort to stay up to date with technology. It is easy to compromise the security and gain access to information on a notebook computer. The fear of unauthorized access to classified information, the fear of losing hard gain files is pushing people to seek alternative for their challenges in deal with information. A good cloud storage site is the solution to the uncertainties that come with data handling. Almost everything in the corporate world is going cloud. With a good cloud storage site, storage of information is easier. There is a couple of cloud service providers out there, but finding the correct provider can be a challenge.

A good cloud storage site provides reliable information to consumers. Users of the cloud service will always desire to sign up for a cloud service that makes their work easier. A good cloud storage site must be available whenever and wherever a user needs the service. Although there are scam cloud storage services, you can still get a good cloud storage site for your files.

What is Chatbot and how it can help a Business

Artificial intelligence evolution is now in of full swing and chatbots are only a continuous splash on a huge wave of progress. Which contributes to the current technology being one step further.Ours is an age of modern science.

And this modern era continues through the successful triumph of science. This generation is floating in the tide of modern stimulation. But communication between this generation is imaginative.

Because the whole world is now in the hands of people. At the moment people know all the news in the world. In this article is talking about the chatbot and how it can help for business. Bot is an automated system of communication with users.
Artificial intelligence evolution is now in of full swing and chatbots are only a continuous splash on a huge wave of progress. Which contributes to the current technology being one step further.

There are a huge number of users of messaging app. Actually, they are using like whatsapp, messenger, Slack, Skype etc. Such of messaging app facebook is one of them. It has more than over 1.2 billion users monthly.

Chatbot is just not only save our time but also efforts by automating customers support. People are not only used for talking but they also used for business tasks, like collecting information about the users, helping to organize meetings and reducing the overhead costs.
It is like an assistant for communicate all of us through text message. The users can get news through a short time. For this we think we are so closer to the customers.

There are two types of chatboot. They are simple chatbot and smart chatbot. Simple chatbot is worked for the best on pre-written keywords that they are understand.

If the users are asked a question without a single keyword then the robot cannot understand it and so response as a rules like message “sorry”. But smart robots are artificial intelligence when they communicate the users. The users can do any relevant question or other. The robot can reply with the suggestions.

Its not an easy task to make a chatbot. I think chatbots are the future of engagement between a fan and a brand or celebrity. It is the best option who does not like their customers are wait for their questions answer, waiting for the line etc. It is very important to a business company who want to increase their customer and build up their company gowth would be strong.

For example if any business company has a chatbot then their business will be increasable with day by day.
Because the users can get all of their questions answer with suggestion in a single moment. So that the customer will think about the company with cheerful feelings. And it is the best positive topic for a good ranking.

People are used it any time easily. So that once a moment in future the company is known by all of the world for its bright shine.

Key Cloud Migration Considerations

The business case has been made and you've appointed your project resources for cloud migration. It's now time to scope and plan your migration. Moving your Enterprise IT workloads to the public cloud is a big decision and immediately alters the way you operate your business. It has to be approached strategically and shouldn't to be taken lightly. There are many benefits to cloud IT, but you must carefully deliberate and plan. The wrong decision is going to cost you in more ways than you care to calculate.

Many thoughts must have cluttered your mind such as, which of the cloud service providers best meets your needs? How would you calculate the cost of cloud migration and operation? How can you ensure service continuity during and after the move? What kind of security measures should you take and what do you need to prepare for? How can you ascertain regulatory compliance? There are many more questions that you should answer prior to migrating to the cloud.

In this article, we will discuss few of the most pressing issues to consider when planning the move.

Private, public or hybrid?

One of the first things to decide when migrating to cloud is whether you will go private, public or hybrid.

On a private cloud, you will have a dedicated infrastructure for your business, managed either by your teams or third-party providers. Your organization will have its own dedicated hardware, running on your private network, and located on or off premises.

A public cloud provides its services over a network that is not your private one and it is available for others to use. Usually it is off-site and provides a pay-per-usage billing model that could result in a cheaper solution, once it efficiently shares resources over the various customers.

Hybrid cloud combines your private or traditional information technology (IT) with a public cloud. Usually it is used to scale up and down your infrastructure systems to meet demand needs for seasonal businesses, spikes or financial closings, or to handle the application apart from the data storage, such as setting up the application layer in a public environment (for example a software as a service) while storing sensitive information in a private one.

Current infrastructure utilization

This is definitely one of the things you want to evaluate when considering a move to cloud. In traditional IT, businesses usually purchase their hardware based on utilization spikes in order to avoid issues when these scenarios occur. By doing that, organizations may end up with underutilized equipment, which could result in a huge waste of money. Taking a look at your performance and capacity reports can help you address these workloads on cloud and decide whether to release unused capacity for other workloads or simply move them over and avoid new investments.

Cloud Workload Analysis

Out of your IT workloads running in your datacenter, some may not be appropriate for migrating to the cloud. It isn't always easy to generalize the criteria for selecting the right applications for migration, but you need to consider all aspects of the execution environment. Given the service parameters promised by the provider, can you achieve the same level of capacity, performance, utilization, security, and availability? Can you do better? Can you afford less?

Your future growth must be factored into the decision. Can the cloud infrastructure scale as your resource consumption grows? Will your application be compliant with regulatory rules when hosted in the public cloud? How does the cloud infrastructure address compliance, if at all?

In order to make the right decision, you should thoroughly understand your current workloads and determine how closely their requirements, both for present and future evolution, can be satisfied.

Application Migration approaches

There are multiple degrees of changes you may want to do to your application depending on your short term and long term business/technical goals.

Virtualization - This model facilitates a quick and easy migration to cloud as no changes will be required to the application. Ideal candidate for legacy applications.

Application Migration - In this case your application will go through minimal architecture and design changes in order to make it optimal for a cloud model of deployment. For example, you may choose to use a No SQL database available on cloud.

Application Refactoring - This model will require a major overhaul of your application right from the architecture. This is typically done when you want to leverage the latest technology stack.

Backup policies and disaster recovery

How are your backup policies running today? Do they fit with your cloud provider? This is also an important point that organizations have to carefully consider. Cloud providers can have standard backup policies with some level of customization. It is worth it to have a look at those and see if they are suitable for your company before they become a potential roadblock. You'll want to pay attention to retention frequency, backup type (such as full, incremental and so on) and versioning.

Disaster recovery and business continuity are important even for the smallest companies. Recovery time objective (RTO) and recovery point objective (RPO) are important values that define how much data you are willing to lose and what amount of time you are willing to allow for the data to be restored.

Licensing

Is the application licensed per VM, per core, or for total infrastructure footprint? This can have massive cost implications. If the licensing model requires that all available resources be taken into account even if not allocated to the client, licensing costs will increase if migrated to a public-cloud platform. Similarly, if the application licensing is based per core and the cloud provider does not offer the ability to configure your cloud environment per core, this will have an adverse impact on your licensing cost.

Integration

Organizations often discover application dependencies too late in the process of migrating workloads, resulting in unplanned outages and limited functionality to systems while these dependencies are addressed. Understanding the relationships between applications is critical to planning the sequence and manner in which cloud migrations occur. Can the application exist on the cloud in isolation while other systems are migrated?

Compatible operational system

Clouds are all about standards, and you need to keep versions of your operating systems and middleware up to date when you aim to migrate them to a cloud provider. You need to take into consideration that cloud service providers (CSPs) do not support end-of-life operating systems or those that are being phased out. The same likely applies to your middleware and databases.

Hopefully this post will help you make decisions about your cloud migration.

Identity & Access Management in the Cloud

Last week I was asked to give a presentation at the IBM Tivoli User Group on Identity & Access Management In The Cloud to IBM employees, IBM Business Partners and customers of IBM Tivoli Security products. I soon realised that my first problem was going to be defining The Cloud. Not everyone I spoke to in advance of the presentation knew what The Cloud was!

So What Is The Cloud?
The Cloud seems to be a term bandied about all too readily these days and for many people it merely represents everything that happens on the Internet. Others, however, are a little more strict with their definition:


"For me, cloud computing is a commercial extension of utility computing that enables scalable, elastic, highly available deployment of software applications while minimizing the level of detailed interaction with the underlying technology stack itself."
"Computing on tap - you get what you want literally from a socket in the wall."

"Cloud computing is just a virtual datacenter."

Wikipedia, naturally, has its own definition.


Cloud computing is Internet based development and use of computer technology. In concept, it is a paradigm shift whereby details are abstracted from the users who no longer need knowledge of, expertise in, or control over the technology infrastructure "in the cloud" that supports them.
Of course, there are different levels of computing that a provider in the Cloud can offer. The usage of a particular software application (eg Google Docs) is just one such offering. Another would be akin to a software development platform (think Google App Engine, Microsoft Azure and Salesforce's force.com). Then, of course, there are the raw infrastructure services - servers provisioned "on-tap" for end-user usage (eg Amazon Ec2).

We are probably all users of Cloud services if we think about it. A quick look inside my Password Safe vault reveals almost 300 different User ID & Password combinations for services on the net including:

Blogger
Twitter
Facebook
LinkedIn
Google Docs
Gmail
Screenr
ChartGo
The Enterprise Model
While it is easy to see how personal usage of Cloud applications has grown over recent years, it may come more of a surprise to learn how the Enterprise is adopting Cloud usage.

According to EDL Consulting, 38% of enterprises will be using a SaaS based eMail service by December 2010. Incisive Media report that 12% of Financial Services firms have already adopted SaaS, mainly in the CRM, ERP & HR fields. And our friends at Gartner reckon that one-third of ALL new software will be delivered via the SaaS model by 2010.

My guess? SaaS is already happening in the enterprise. It is here and it is here to stay.

With any change to the enterprise operating model there will be implications - some real and, just as critical, some perceived.

In the Perceived Risks category, I'd place risks such as loss of control; storing business critical data in the Cloud; reliability of the Cloud provider; longevity of the Cloud provider. Of course, these are only perceived risks. Who is to say that storing business critical data in the Cloud is any less risky that storing in the enterprise's own data centre? There may be different attack vectors that need to be mitigated against, but that doesn't mean the data is any less secure, does it? And who says the enterprise has to lose control!

Real risks, however, would include things like the proliferation of employee identities across multiple providers; compliance to company policies; the new attack vectors (already described); privacy management; the legislative impact of data storage locations; and, of course, user management!

Cloud Standards
As with any new IT delivery methodology, a raft of "standards" seem to appear. This is great as long as there is wide-spread adoption of the standards and the big suppliers can settle on a specific standard. Thanks goodness for:

The Open Cloud Manifesto (http://www.opencloudmanifesto.org/)
The Cloud Security Alliance (http://www.cloudsecurityalliance.org/)
These guys, at least, are attempting to address the standards issue and I am particularly pleased to see CSA's Domain 13 on Identity & Access Management insisting on the use of SAML, WS-Federation and Liberty ID-FF.

Access Control
And on that point, the various Cloud providers should be congratulated on their adoption of security federation. Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) has been around for over 6 years now and is an excellent way of providing a Single Sign On solution across the enterprise firewall. OpenID, according to Kim Cameron, is now supported by 50,000 sites and 500 million people have an OpenID (even if the majority don't realise it!)

The problem, historically, has been the problem of identity ownership. All major providers want to be the Identity Provider in the "federation" and Relying Parties were few and far between. Thankfully, there has been a marked shift in this stance over the last 12 months (as Kim Cameron's figures support).

Then there are the "brokers". Those companies designed to make the "federation" process a lot less painful. The idea is that a single-authentication to the broker will allow wider access to the SaaS community.

Symplified and Ping Identity seem to be the thought leaders in this space and their marketing blurb comes across as comprehensive and impressive. They certainly tick the boxes marked "Speed To Market" and "Usability" but again those perceived risks may be troublesome for the wary enterprise. The "Keys To The Kingdom" issue rears its ugly head once more!

Identity Management
SPML is to identity management as SAML is to access management. Right? Well, almost. Service Provisioning Markup Language (SPML) was first ratified in October 2003 with v2.0 ratified in April 2006. My guess? We need another round of ratification! Let's examine the evidence. Who is currently using it? A Google search returns precious little. Google Apps uses proprietary APIs. Salesforce uses proprietary APIs. Zoho uses proprietary APIs. What is the point of a standard if nobody uses it?

Compliance & Audit
Apparently, forty times more information will be generated during 2009 than during 2008 AND the "digital universe" will be ten times bigger in 2011 than it was in 2006! Those are staggering figures, aren't they? And the bulk of that data will be quite unstructured - like this blog or my tweets!

The need for auditing the information we put out into the digital universe is greater than ever but there is no standards based approach to Compliance & Audit in the Cloud!

Service Providers are the current custodians of the Compliance & Audit process and will likely continue to do so for the time being. Actually, the Service Providers are quite good at this as they already have to comply with many different regulations across many different legislative jurisdictions. Typically, however, they present Compliance & Audit dashboards tailored to vertical markets only.

It's understandable, I guess, that for a multi-tenancy service there will be complications separating out relevant data for the enterprise compliance check.

Moving To The Cloud
There are providers out there who claim to be capable of providing an Identity Management as a Service (IDaaS) which sounds great, doesn't it? Take away all that pain of delivering an enterprise robust IdM solution? In practice, however, it works well for enterprises who operate purely in the Cloud. These solutions already understand the provisioning requirements of the big SaaS operators. What they can't do quite as well, though, is the provisioning back into our enterprise systems! It's not enough to assume that an enterprise runs everything from their Active Directory instance, after all. Also, we have to remember that using an IDaaS is akin to giving away the "Keys To The Kingdom". Remember our perceived risks?

An alternative is to move the enterprise IdM solution into the Cloud. Existing installations of IBM Tivoli Identity Manager or Sun Identity Manager or {insert your favourite vendor here} Identity Manager could be moved to the cloud using the IaaS model - Amazon EC2. The investment in existing solutions would be retained with the added benefit of scalability, flexibility and cost-reduction. Is this a model that can be adopted easily? Most certainly, as long as the enterprise in question can get its head around the notion of moving the "Keys To The Kingdom" beyond its firewall.

Conclusion
The next generation of user is already web-aware - SaaS is here to stay - and SSO is finally within our grasp with only a handful of big players dragging their heels when it comes to implementing standards such as SAML v2.0. It was also intriguing to play with Chrome OS last week (albeit an early prototype version). Integrating desktop sign on with the web just tightens things that bit further (in a Google way, of course).

Provisioning (whether it is Just-In-Time or Pre-Populated) is still the pain-point. Nobody seems to be using SPML and proprietary APIs abound. Nailing this is going to be critical for mass adoption of SaaS solutions.

While Provisioning is the current pain-point, however, Governance, Risk & Compliance will be the next big-ticket agenda item. The lack of standards and proliferation of point solutions will surely start to hurt. Here, though, I run out of ideas.... for now. Seems to me that there is an opportunity for a thought leader in this space!

VPSDeploy - VPS Deployment Software For Web Based Applications

VPSDeploy is a "cloud" VPS deployment service released in 2018. It's designed around providing users with the ability too "deploy" web based applications to their own server infrastructure that can be rented for extremely low prices from the likes of DigitalOcean, Vultr and AWS.

The difference with "cloud" VPS servers, as opposed to traditional "VPS" servers, is that they are basically containerized systems running across a large number of servers - typically in a central data warehouse.

Amazon were really the innovators of the technology, launching their EC2 platform in 2010. This has now become a multi-billion dollar business for them.

The point is that "cloud" VPS servers are not tied to a centralized hardware stack. Traditional VPS solutions are basically a case of renting a part of a static server (typically half or a quarter of it).

This means that if you're looking to grow a web-based application, or business, you are not only tied into one provider - but also have to ensure that your underlying setup is able to operate with many different pieces of functionality.

In other words, it means that the service is very expensive, rigid and not very well supported. It works for websites that have received large amounts of traffic, but not for new-age web based applications which typically need larger amounts of infrastructure - such as third-party databases, load balancing and redundancy.

"Cloud" VPS services are actually very good at solving those problems They run across servers, meaning that you don't need to pay anywhere the price that a traditional system would cost.

This has lead a large number of developers & businesses upgrading to the new "extensible" infrastructure - meaning they are both able to handle more traffic and build out more intricate server-setups without actually changing their workflows.

Whilst this is great news, there is one major issue - the "deployment" mechanisms for these services is almost entirely void. There's no way to provision, build & deploy applications, especially with the likes of GIT. This means that if you're looking to upgrade to the new "cloud" VPS services - you'll typically end up having to build out a large amount of backend architecture to get it working.

This "build and deploy" problem is what VPSDeploy was built to solve.

In order to appreciate if it actually works - looking at how the system functions and the various features it brings to the table is of utmost importance...

To begin with - the most important thing you need to realize is that VPSDeploy doesn't exist in a void. There are a number of services which exist to do what it does... namely the likes of Heroku, Chef/Puppet and Capistrano.

These services work well, but they have one massive problem - they are very limited in scope. They don't really provide people with the ability to manage the backend infrastructure alongside the "deployment" mechanism, leading them to be quite ineffectual in terms of how they're able to make progress.

VPSDeploy ties directly into the various VPS providers, meaning that you're basically able to manage the underlying way in which the overall solution works. This is not possible with any other system, except for Microsoft Azure stack - but that's *only* for its own infrastructure.

The following explains VPSDeploy's position:

Heroku
Service designed to "deploy" web based applications to AWS EC2 instances. You never see the backend infrastructure - Heroku was designed to cover it up. This presents a number of problems. Firstly, Heroku is not very flexible. Each time you deploy an application, the system only really supports one framework. This means that if you're looking at deploying the likes of an AngularJS frontend with Rails backend, you'll typically need two "apps" in their platform - which costs. Secondly, Heroku does not provide much by way of custom domain management. Even if you add a custom domain, they still have a "herokuapp" subdomain available. This means that if you're looking at building a REAL production level infrastructure, you're going to look quite amateur with the way in which you're running your app on a subdomain. It's like having a successful blog on a "WordPress" subdomain.

Chef/Puppet
This is more akin to what VPSDeploy is/does, but has a major difference - it has to install server-side software in order to manage the various "nodes" in a network. There's nothing wrong with this, but it's just cumbersome. If you're going to deploy an application, you'll have to play around with the build scripts and other Chef-centric systems to get it to work. What you need is a simple system which uses SSH to access the server, installing the required applications natively. This ist he most efficient, allowing you to get the most out of the system.

Capistrano
Despite being for Ruby/Rails only, this is somewhat like what VPSDeploy should be - a system focused around the deployment of infrastructure for the system. Unfortunately, Capistrano is one of the biggest undocumented projects in the web development world. Not only does it prevent users from being able to effectively deploy their application, but you also need to have a strong infrastructure *already* set up. Capistrano is not very easy to use, and generally lacks the dexterity required to deploy more intricate applications. This is predominantly why many people have begun looking for alternatives.
The system has 3 major pieces of functionality.

These include an "Endpoint Manager", "VPS Dashboard" and "GIT Deploy Mechanism". Together, they provide not only the underlying functionality for the system, but the ability to create extensible and immersive applications...

Endpoint Manager
Solution to integrate different levels of infrastructure into web based server-software. For example, you may wish to add a WordPress blog, or email system to a domain. This can be handled separately by VPSDeploy's endpoint system.
VPS Dashboard
Next, a central dashboard gives users the opportunity to add ancillary web services to their overall build pipeline - allowing them to add the likes of analytics, server monitoring, email, domain information & more to their experience.
GIT Deploy
Finally, they're able to push the latest versions of their applications to the build & deploy infrastructure. This not only means they are able to get the most out of the system, but keep all their endpoints entirely up to date.
Ultimately, the underlying reason why people would use the above services is because they either wish to create an immersive application (which typically requires more than just a single framework), or they are trying to integrate a much larger set of functionality into their web service (and hence need to be able to manage different endpoints).

To this end, VPSDeploy works extremely well. It not only ensures that underlying infrastructure is fully up-to-date and working properly, but allows users to add extra "services" to their dashboard, as well as build out any further underlying assets they may have.