O365 vs GSuite – Which is Best For Your Business?
“Productivity” and “Collaboration” are the two buzz words in every industry today. As consultants, everyday we learn about the vision for increasing the productivity and workforce efficiency from the top management of many industry leaders which explicitly calls out for a single platform to collaborate. For instance, more than one employee working on a single document, communicating with each other simultaneously over chat, making iterations is a very typical example of collaboration. In other words, parallel execution of tasks with efficiency leading to higher productivity is collaboration. The two industry rivals, Microsoft and Google, have been proactive in pushing and promoting their cloud business productivity as a leading collaboration tool. Microsoft’s Office 365 has been a known cloud solution amongst market leaders, whereas Google Apps (now G Suite) has managed to attract start-ups and small-scale industries. Two factors, reach and price has played a significant role here, Google wins on price and Microsoft wins on its reach. Beating Microsoft Office is very tough for any other business tool with similar capacities. There is a list of features and functionalities which are common, and some which have been the key differentiation points between two solutions, giving advantage and disadvantage over each other. Feature Microsoft Office 365 Google Apps for Work (G-Suite) Offline Applications Traditional offline Office applications are available to be installed and used locally on PC and MAC No Offline versions, Google Docs, Sheets and Slides could be used only online Cloud Storage Microsoft provides 1 TB of space in OneDrive as Cloud File storage, for each user Google Apps provides 30 GB space on cloud for file storage and email storage. However, google provides unlimited storage for accounts with at least 5 users on $120 per user per year plan Email Services Exchange Online provides a separate 50 GB of inbox for every user No separate space for Gmail, shares space provides with Google Drive i.e. 30 GB per user Collaboration Platform SharePoint Online – Cloud platform for collaboration and intranet solutions Sites – cloud platform for collaboration Online Meeting & Instant Messaging Online meeting through Skype for Business (maximum 250 Users). Enterprise plans allows PSTN configuration and Hosted PBX. Online meeting through Hangouts (maximum 25 Users). No Hosted PBX or Voicemail available Enterprise Social Yammer Google+ A study by Okta Inc. showed that Finance and Construction sectors are pretty much inclined to use Office 365, whereas Marketing firms look confident and happy with Google Apps. A screenshot of stats below: Image Source: Oka study on “Business @Work, March 2016.” Apart from the complex figures and comparison, Microsoft leads the race on the nature of innovation in the simplest form, which has been not appealing in G Suite. Recently introduced Flow, Stream, Planner, Delve, and Team are such small yet powerful services additions in Office 365. Stream appears to be Youtube for Enterprises whereas Flow allows people to build actionable workflows by their own without knowing a piece of code. G Suite has been typical of the services included in the package, and not much increment or innovation was seen, apart from “Android for Work” which shall be appreciated by enterprises for mobility. To conclude, Google apps has attracted businesses that need basic functionalities and features; most of the industry owns Office 365 due to trust, familiarity and compatibility with Office applications. On commercials aspects, G Suite wins the race by keeping two simple plans for any number of users; Office 365 has six variety of plans targeted to different user group and features.
5 cloud TCO tools and how much they are helpful
Cloud adoption is becoming mainstream among businesses, which reduces upfront costs of investments and lowers down the running costs. However, is it easy to choose a cloud service provider merely based on calculations? Recently I got an email from a large cloud provider to try and discover how to lower the total cost of ownership by reducing high upfront investments and move to a lower pay-as-you-go cost model. In the past, we at Advaiya have developed various TCO and ROI tools for large ISV and did some business value assessments. These evaluations are for cloud migration, ROI comparison between different vendors and different solutions like public vs. private cloud. When we were doing a high-level assessment, I got curious to check the state of current tools and to what extent they are helpful in making a decision? (Please read the full disclosure about myself before you read further) I am covering here a list of publically available tools and calculators related to public cloud costs (mostly IaaS). Some calculators are also providing costs for the private and hybrid cloud but mostly focussed on TCO of public clouds. My objective is to provide an overview of each tool, although this is not a comparison or exhaustive analysis of various cloud providers. AWS TCO Tool (https://awstcocalculator.com/) AWS released a new version of this tool in May 2014, and you can do an apple-to-apple comparison between on-premises infrastructure and AWS. This tool has two options – Basic and Advanced. In Basic, this hides all the details that only a seasoned network or IT professional is familiar to like IOPS, network bandwidth, % utilization of machines, etc. It is pretty good with a neat layout and requires minimum information. Another good thing about this tool is that, it supports around eleven currencies including Indian Rupee. Environment to compare against – There are two options, on-premises and colocation service provider; there is no change in inputs but costs for $/Rack/month are calculated differently for these options. For both the options, price is calculated based on space, power and cooling; in case of colocation additional cost is added in case hardware is leased. AWS TCO Calculator checks cost for physical servers as well as for virtual machines. In case of VMs – there are limited options for hypervisors – currently VMware and KVM/Xen, no option for Hyper-V. The same case is for guest operating systems – only Linux is listed. For storage types, this tool has options for SAN, NAS and object storage. Results: AWS TCO Calculator provides results for various cost heads including Server, Storage, Network and IT-Labour. The calculation does not provide any cost for software or guest OS as in their assumption AWS is considering only free versions of Linux, and not any of the commercial operating systems. There is an option to download the report, but for downloading you have to provide your information by filling up a form. Google Cloud Platform TCO Tool (https://cloud.google.com/pricing/tco/) Google started with the App Engine in past and in recent years it has build various cloud services including compute, storage, networking, and other services under their cloud platform. In this tool, Google is comparing costs of its compute engine with AWS. Thus, this is a cloud vs. cloud TCO comparison. In this tool, predefined values are filled by using some pre-defined scenarios like – ‘Mature App’, ‘New Startup’ and ‘Static Enterprise App’. When you change a value in a parameter, the prices instantly change, and you can compare the costs with AWS on-demand instances and reserved instances over a period of one to three years. The uniqueness of this calculator is – it also considers cost of capital/year and impact of Moore’s Law on future prices. These apply to both Google Cloud and AWS. The limitations are that there are no parameters to change if you want to compare a particular instance type, memory or storage. This calculator works on predefined instances and workload; you can only change instance numbers or CPU cores for doing the cost comparisons. Also, guest OS in all scenarios is free Linux, not any commercial OS. When ‘break it down’ is clicked, you can see the detailed pricing calculator for all services, where you can create different estimates, and there is an option to save and email estimate. In case of saving, this tool copies URL to the clipboard that can be used to share with others. For email, one has to fill a form with all details. After doing detailed pricing calculation, there is no option to compare costs with AWS. Microsoft Azure TCO Calculator: Previously (in the year 2010-2012), Microsoft released a TCO calculator for comparing cost of ownership between on-premise and cloud environment, but now this calculator is being discontinued. From some sources, it is evident that Microsoft is providing this calculator to their premium partners and field as an offline version, but this is not available to general public. Incidentally, Microsoft has another tool termed as – Microsoft Datacenter TCO Analysis Tool This tool can be used for two purposes – Migrating virtualized environment from VMware vSphere to Hyper-V and if the organization is already using Hyper-V as a virtualization platform Cost saving from migrating to a hybrid cloud (i.e. Microsoft public cloud aka Azure). Focus of the tool is to justify costs of Microsoft Datacentre or Private Cloud offerings. This tool requires minimal inputs to produce a cost comparison between VMware private cloud vs. Microsoft Private Cloud. Whether you select Microsoft or VMware as your primary virtualization platform, when calculating you can compare costs against VMware. There is an option to print the report without requiring any details from the user. VMWare TCO Comparison Calculator (http://www.vmware.com/go/tcocalculator/index.html) Similarly, VMWare provides an online calculator to compare costs of VMware server virtualization and private cloud solutions in comparison to Microsoft. The objective of this tool is to provide cost comparison between Microsoft and VMware solution. If the customer is already using VMware, then there are options of comparing costs of upgrading to
Benefits of cloud based load testing
Standard on-premise testing can no longer provide the required level of performance surety essential to compete in the current global marketplace. Cloud based testing tool can be leveraged to evaluate the performance of the application from any geographical location. The performance tests can be run with the load generators/agents across any location with hundreds of thousands of users. Cloud based load testing gives you complete load testing flexibility in both development and production environment. Tests can be conducted quickly and continuously with real-time insights of end-to-end performance. It helps in determining how fast some aspects of a system work under a particular workload regarding responsiveness and stability. Below are some of the several benefits of cloud based load tests that enable thorough testing of business-critical applications without breaking the bank. Ease to use: All you need to get started is a Team Foundation Service account. You can simply connect to this account from Visual Studio and get started instantly, without any pre-requisites. On-demand scalability: This property allows to increase or decrease the user load/test load to configure as per the production requirements, whether from 1000 to 5000 users or from 5000 to 50 users. Such scalability enables you to measure the actual performance of the application and allows you to create a replica of the production environment. Same tests work on-premises and on the cloud: All tests you have authored on-premises -load tests, declarative web performance tests, coded web tests or unit tests, can be run on the cloud. Real world condition and load: It covers all ideal conditions for testing behind firewall, third side traffic, disconnection and DNS errors, which you can never find after deploying your application on a live production server. It also covers other values as response time, throughput, and average page time, among others. Cloud testing makes use of cloud-computing resources in order to simulate real users who come directly from the Internet. Save capex or space: It reduces the capital expenditure with the following added advantages: No need to buy new hardware; same hardware can be used. No support engineer needed for hardware. Most enterprises have made significant investments in data center infrastructure, which directly impacts the capex. Thus, the cloud is a better approach to save capex. Save time: It involves fewer efforts and thus saves time. Agility: Cloud testing allows you to run tests from anywhere. This allows flexibility in scheduling task and reducing the risk of failure as it provides the testing environment up to the breakdown points. Get deeper insights about performance: You can get complete server and client diagnostics when you simulate real-time load patterns for your application. Free load testing: Cloud based testing using Visual Studio allows 20,000 virtual user minutes per month to load test at no extra charge.
Cloud Security: Things you need to know
More and more organizations are embracing cloud for their own advantages such as cost effectiveness, easy setup, easy accessibility, scalability, unlimited storage, backup and recovery, agility, flexibility and business continuity. Cloud computing certainly offers these benefits to small and large organizations, but it also has its downsides in respect to security. Also, with modern business workers accessing the enterprise networks from multi-platform devices and various geographical locations, cloud security becomes paramount for any business. Cloud hosted applications open up the door for hackers, and the traditional monitoring solutions do not work anymore. With increased cloud adoption, many forces are driving the need for immediate cloud security solutions to be in place. Forces driving cloud security Protect against known and unknown threats – Sophisticated cyber threats and data hacking attempts are increasing day by day. Now, organizations are looking towards complete protection against persistent threats and attacks. Businesses want to secure web and email with increasing malware threat and data breaches to reduce downtime. They are looking for real-time protection and prevention system against advanced malware. Quickly respond to incidents – Threat intelligence and automated threat response needs to be in place to analyze the threat events and quickly respond during attacks. Privacy and data control – Organizations want to have policies in place to protect sensitive data, determine database assets and risks, and keep information safe and compliant with governance and regulations. With the increase in number of mobile workforces accessing the private network, identity and access management have become crucial. Employees go for cloud applications to remain highly productive, but as discussed above, this becomes a gateway to data breaches. Hence, organizations essentially need a robust data loss prevention system to safeguard sensitive data from breaches. Safeguard against network attacks: Mobile workforce across the globe demand security solution for protecting various devices such as laptops, smartphones, PDAs from attacks and malwares. Also, the complex IT infrastructure requires robust solution to secure network from outside attacks. Protecting applications and data in virtualized environment – Organizations have started adopting flexible, on-demand infrastructure to provide virtualized environment, which raises the need for protecting applications and data stored in private, public or hybrid environments. Hence, manageability and security becomes an utmost requirement in virtualized environment. Aspects of Security Organizations, before moving business-critical data to the cloud, need to make sure that various aspects of security are in place. Here are several security solutions that enable organizations to take control of their cloud security. Web Security – Web security helps organizations to provide complete protection against web threats with antimalware and advanced threat protection. IDS/IPS – Intrusion detection and prevention system enables a comprehensive layer of security and provides efficient monitoring and prevention of vulnerability exploits over network or system. SIEM – Security Information and Event Management is crucial for businesses across the globe and organizations need threat intelligence and analytics in place to analyze the activities before, during and after a log event. Network Security – Network Security enables organizations to continuously monitor assets and network traffic to eradicate attacks and stop them from being spread across the network anytime and wherever they appear. DLP – Data Loss Prevention protects sensitive data in organizations from unauthorized access and from moving it outside the corporate network. Encryption – Encryption enables organizations to fully protect sensitive data, whether in transit or storage and ensure security and compliance. The data or text is transformed using encryption algorithms thereby protecting it from data breach incidents. Virtualization Security – Virtualization security enables protection of data and applications stored in public, private or hybrid environments from threats. Database Security – Database security enables organizations to determine database assets and risks, and protect sensitive data in compliance with governance and regulations. IAM/IDAAS – Identity as a Service (IDaaS), offers identity and access management functions such as user provisioning, authentication, authorization and single sign-on to have secure and controlled access to applications and data on cloud based on defined IT policies. BCDR – BCDR ensures business continuity over the cloud, be it public, private or hybrid, by enabling all the disaster recovery options and data protection they need. In response to the market need for cloud security solution, many vendors are investing in providing security services for cloud. Some of the top vendors providing next generation cloud security solutions include Trend Micro, Cisco, Veracode, Netskope, CipherCloud, Zscaler, Palo Alto Networks, Hytrust, and Akamai. These vendors are helping organizations to adopt one or the other aspects of security as discussed above. Advaiya has an extensive knowledge of building the right cloud strategy and implementing cloud solutions to meet unique needs of customers. We provide guidance to smartly choose the cloud vendor and their services and help in cloud migration phases and activities, keeping the long term goals and objectives in mind. We are also working with various cloud security vendors to help them position and market their offerings based on dynamic market trends.
Designing a business solution considering the cloud and mobile devices
The role of IT is not just limited to keeping the lights on. IT is also responsible to continuously provide solutions to enhance the business capabilities and to support business processes. With the evolution of mobile devices and cloud computing the solution architects/ designers now need to expand their thought process and at the same time take care of new factors. The cloud computing provides new possibilities of capabilities that business solutions can provide. The mobile devices can now be end points and part of the solutions to make it more available and convenient to use. Before jumping in to create various solutions in the new evolving paradigm the solution architect/designer should consider the following: Understand the organization’s policies and readiness The cloud adoption is not universal. Various organizations have adopted the new paradigm at different levels. Even within a company, different departments may have different adoption and readiness levels because of various factors. Every organization / IT has several policies regarding usage of various cloud and models devices. There are policies and requirements for public, private, and hybrid cloud use. There are various compliance and legal requirements for data access and security. A thorough understanding of the landscape is a must while designing any solution. New opportunities and capabilities using public cloud services The cloud not only provides alternatives for hosting but it also provides access to various capabilities and data that is not provided or hosted within your IT. This is where an architect needs to think beyond the boundaries. For example, a sales enablement or a marketing solution can make use of services and data provided by various social platforms like LinkedIn or Twitter. They can enhance the value of their solutions by providing the intelligence about their customers/leads from the internet. Various business solutions can now make use of mapping and traffic services to enhance the value of solution. Consider the usage of these kinds of services depending on the nature of solution being designed. New opportunities and capabilities with Mobile devices Usage of mobile devices is not a new concept but the rapid adoption of smartphones and tablets by majority has transformed it to a platform that is very significant while designing any solution. With mobile end points a solution can be made available where it is needed or used most. Mobile devices not only makes the solution more available but it also can provide new capabilities to your solution. For example, a fault reporting solution can make use of device’s camera and GPS to provide better reporting of problems. So while architecting/designing a solution, consider using capabilities like location awareness and camera. The use of some new mobile peripherals like wearable(s), mobile printers and projectors can further enhance the value. Think future While designing any solution, think about not only how this solution can deliver the current needs but also how it can keep up with the future demands. The factors to consider while thinking about the future usage of the solution are scalability, extensibility, new capabilities and end points. With these considerations, the solution design may need to incorporate future migration or adoption of different kinds of cloud architectures. This may be due to change in policies or scalability requirements. The solution architecture may need to be open enough to add new capabilities or link it to any new or existing systems. Considering these at the time of architecting and designing the solution can increase the life and value of the solution. Think cost There is no doubt that cost is an important factor for any solution design. The availability of various cloud paradigm can alter the cost in either ways. So considering the cost implication of various cloud models can help in meeting the budgetary needs. Also consider different ways to deliver mobile solutions. For example, native mobile apps can be replaced by mobile web application to allow for lower cost solution. Considering various options available financially can help control the cost of the solution to a desired level. Think lifecycle Application lifecycle elements are very important for a quality solution. Various architectural and design decisions should be made considering time available to develop and release. Sometimes a solution may not be valuable if not delivered within a certain time window. Also considering the other lifecycle elements like testing, deployment process, user acceptance and training, update process and sunset process especially considering the cloud elements and mobile devices is very important while designing/architecting a solution. Think boundaries and understand trade offs Every architectural and design decision will affect various elements of the solution. Before making any architectural or design consider the necessity of each feature. Sometimes an important architectural decision is made for not so real requirement. Consider the life of the solution. Consider the users of the applications. Consider the reliability and availability requirements. Consider the limits and availability of cloud based services being planned to be used. Consider the limit of online usage and offline capabilities with the mobile solution. Consider the compliance and security requirements with data capture and access. Not every solution need to be on premise or on the cloud. Not every solution need a mobile end point. Think about the usage of the solution: What time during the day will the solution will be used; where will it be used; what is the readiness and capabilities of the users. IT architects/designers should keep the magic of innovation alive with new solutions. With the new capabilities of cloud and mobile end points, a thorough thinking and analysis is required before finalizing the design. Keeping in mind the boundaries and the above considerations, these capabilities can provide infinite value to business.