Promise and peril line utilities path to cloud computing

U.S. power utilities are crafting strategies for shifting their operations to the cloud, a once-unthinkable move filled with promise but dogged by questions about security and compliance. Cloud technology uses a virtual layer of software to marshal physical computing resources like data servers, allowing users to quickly draw the exact amount of processing power they need. Utilities are seeing benefits to using virtual machines, virtualization and cloud computing in other parts of their IT areas, so the question is being asked Cant we also achieve these efficiencies in the grid said Howard Gugel, vice president and director of engineering and standards at the North American Electric Reliability Corp.the nonprofit grid overseer that sets and enforces binding security and reliability standards for U.S. utilities. That's causing people to scratch their heads.

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Virtual Desktop Tools, Desktop

Epson Announces New Ultra Compact Desktop Solutions Offering Document Management Perfect for Remote and Hybrid Workers

PR Newswire | September 26, 2023

Epson, the best-selling retail scanner brand in North America,1 today announced three new compact and lightweight document scanning solutions – the WorkForce® ES-C220, ES-C320W, and ES-C380W. Featuring an intuitive design and exceptional flexibility, these modern scanners boast a new footprint that saves 60 percent of desk space,2 ideal for tight spaces. Designed for fast and easy document management, the ES-C320W and ES-C380W offer comprehensive wireless scanning to smartphones, tablets, computers, and the cloud,3 enabling small business owners, hybrid employees and busy professionals to work efficiently and streamline tasks. "With the work environment shifting to a hybrid and remote workforce, compact and lightweight solutions that easily integrate into home offices and tight workspaces are essential for today's workflow needs," said Carrie Fox, director of product marketing, Scanners, Epson America. "Professionals and consumers alike can easily conquer clutter and reclaim office space with the new compact WorkForce scanners, designed for productivity and peace of mind. These unique and flexible solutions offer single step scanning, organizing software and a vertical paper path to help customers accomplish more and streamline active workdays." These high-performance workhorse scanners offer features to keep home offices and business organized. The ultra-compact solutions deliver fast speeds with an innovative, space-saving design and vertical scan path that saves 60 percent of desk space2, making it easy to place virtually anywhere, even when space is limited. With two-sided scanning, and a 20-sheet Auto Document Feeder, the new scanners can efficiently handle stacks of paper in one fast pass at speeds up to 30 ppm/60 ipm.4 Intelligent image adjustments such as automatic cropping and paper skew correction help ensure amazing image quality with each scan. The flexible scan path provides remarkable versatility and the ability to scan most document types, from standard paper to invoices, greeting cards, business cards, and passports.5 Touting robust software, all three scanners include Epson ScanSmart® Software6 allowing users to preview, email and upload scans as well as save valuable time with automatic file name suggestion for streamlined file management and OCR. To enhance workflow efficiency, the WorkForce ES-C380W includes ScanWay® for scanning directly to a USB drive,7 mobile device3 or upload to popular cloud storage services7 Dropbox®, Evernote®, Google Drive™ and OneDrive® using the scanner's bright 2.4" LCD touchscreen, no computer needed. About Epson Epson is a global technology leader whose philosophy of efficient, compact and precise innovation enriches lives and helps create a better world. The company is focused on solving societal issues through innovations in home and office printing, commercial and industrial printing, manufacturing, visual and lifestyle. Epson's goal is to become carbon negative and eliminate use of exhaustible underground resources such as oil and metal by 2050.

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Backup and Disaster Recovery

Minimize the Cost and Downtime of Disaster With Scale Computing's Business Continuity/Disaster Recovery Planning Service

PR Newswire | October 25, 2023

Scale Computing, a market leader in edge computing, virtualization, and hyperconverged solutions, today announced its Business Continuity/Disaster Recovery (BCDR) Planning Service, designed to help organizations establish a comprehensive, regulated plan for responding to unforeseen downtime. The service provides Scale Computing customers and partners with the tools, guidance, and resources to create a playbook for data backup and recovery, enabling businesses to endure a disaster scenario with minimal loss. Scale Computing also recently announced that it is a finalist for the Business Continuity/Disaster Recovery Project of the Year in the 2023 SDC Awards for its work with Austrian managed service provider GiGaNet and its long-time partner the Zillertaler Gletscherbahn group. Voting for the SDC Awards is open at sdcawards.com/vote until November 10th, 2023. Data breaches are one of the biggest and most costly contributors to downtime for businesses. In 2023, the average cost of a data breach globally reached an all-time high of $4.45 million, a 15.3% increase from 2020. Simultaneously, the average length of business disruption following a ransomware attack in the United States reached 24 days last year, up 60% from just two years prior — a significant increase when downtime costs exceed $300,000 per hour for over 90% of mid-sized and large enterprises. For more than half of those businesses, the hourly outage costs range from $1 million to over $5 million. Recovery from an outage adds additional expense from which many enterprises are unable to bounce back. "Disaster can strike at any time, and every organization needs a consistently regulated playbook for how the business will respond — from action plans to recovery plans for bringing online the mission-critical servers businesses depend on," said Jeff Ready, CEO and co-founder, Scale Computing. "Knowing what systems need to be protected, planning for the ability to recover them, and having a full action plan for recovery should be at the forefront of every IT department's agenda, at the beginning of any infrastructure addition. With Scale Computing Platform, the plan for disaster recovery starts before equipment is even put into production, so IT leaders have a plan in place from day one that they can enact to ensure their business stays up and running, with minimal loss, should disaster strike. Our Business Continuity/Disaster Recovery Planning Service enables businesses to proactively classify systems based on their importance and implement a robust action plan, ensuring that our customers' and partners' critical systems are protected, validated, tested, and ready for recovery at any time." Whether a minor data loss or a business-wide shutdown, having a well-defined business continuity strategy is crucial to minimize financial impact, ensure continuous employee productivity, meet compliance and regulatory requirements, decrease liability obligations, reduce downtime, and minimize the risk of negative exposure. Scale Computing's BCDR Planning Service includes planning, deployment, documentation creation, and disaster recovery testing, covering every aspect to keep businesses prepared and resilient. The service is offered to Scale Computing Platform customers, which brings simplicity, high availability, and scalability together to replace existing infrastructure for running virtual machines with an easy-to-manage, fully integrated platform that allows organizations to run applications regardless of hardware requirements. About Scale Computing Scale Computing is a leader in edge computing, virtualization, and hyperconverged solutions. Using patented HyperCore™ technology, Scale Computing Platform automatically identifies, mitigates, and corrects infrastructure problems in real-time, enabling applications to achieve maximum uptime, even when local IT resources and staff are scarce. Edge Computing is the fastest-growing area of IT infrastructure, and industry analysts have named Scale Computing an outperformer and leader in the space, including being named the #1 edge computing vendor by CRN. Scale Computing's products are sold by thousands of value-added resellers, integrators, and service providers worldwide.

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Server Virtualization, VMware

StorMagic Introduces Edge Control Software to Simplify SvSAN Monitoring and Management

Business Wire | October 18, 2023

StorMagic®, solving the world’s edge data problems, today announced the immediate availability of a new Software as a Service (SaaS) tool that allows users to easily monitor and manage all of their SvSAN clusters around the world. StorMagic Edge Control simplifies the process and tools required for day-to-day SvSAN cluster administration. SvSAN customers with multiple locations can significantly reduce the time spent managing their edge sites, whether they are using VMware, Microsoft or KVM hypervisors. “ESG research shows increasing demand for data storage at the edge which fuels an increased need for monitoring solutions that can help address the complexity of storage at the edge,” said Scott Sinclair, practice director at Enterprise Strategy Group. “SvSAN customers can greatly benefit by adding StorMagic Edge Control into their toolkits; the dashboard views and list formats will make centralized data management much easier and more accessible.” Edge Control delivers centralized administration for SvSAN environments of all sizes. Customers can now manage all SvSAN deployments in any location from a single pane of glass. Dashboard and system views provide a fast but comprehensive status of all of their virtual storage appliances (VSAs), allowing them to keep their environment up-to-date more easily and react faster as needed. “StorMagic customers of any size can now manage their entire SvSAN estate, whether it’s one site or thousands of sites around the world,” said Bruce Kornfeld, chief marketing and product officer, StorMagic. “Edge Control is particularly interesting for customers who are considering switching from VMware to Microsoft or Linux KVM because SvSAN and Edge Control are both hypervisor agnostic.” Pricing and Availability Edge Control version 1.0 is available today from StorMagic. SvSAN customers can download and begin using the software immediately, free of charge. About StorMagic StorMagic is solving the world’s edge data problems. We help organizations store, protect and use data at and from the edge. StorMagic’s solutions ensure data is always protected and available, no matter the type or location, to provide value anytime, anywhere. StorMagic’s storage and security products are flexible, robust, easy to use and cost-effective, without sacrificing enterprise-class features, for organizations with one to thousands of sites.

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Backup and Disaster Recovery

Expedient Announces Partnership with Kyndryl to Deliver Disaster Recovery as a Service

PR Newswire | October 03, 2023

Expedient, a Full-Stack Cloud Service Provider, announced a partnership with Kyndryl the world's largest IT infrastructure services provider. Through this collaboration, Expedient's robust data center colocation and cloud infrastructure will enhance Kyndryl's industry-leading cyber resilience offerings to customers. By joining forces with Kyndryl, Expedient is extending the reach of its state-of-the-art data center colocation and cloud infrastructure known for its reliability, scalability, and security capabilities. Expedient's award-winning infrastructure is an integral element of its Cloud Different™ multi-cloud services and is delivered across a nationwide network of highly interconnected data centers. Infrastructure is available in dedicated, private cloud, and VMware-based Expedient Enterprise Cloud configurations to meet the needs of customers and prospects across regions and industries. This partnership will enable Expedient and Kyndryl to extend the reach and effectiveness of security and cyber resilience services to a wider range of customers, helping organizations across various industries strengthen and fortify their cybersecurity posture while further mitigating the risks associated with data breaches. "We are excited to partner with Kyndryl, a company known for its excellence in cybersecurity services, cyber resilience services and Disaster Recovery as a Service," said Dennis Musolino, Chief Revenue Officer of Expedient. "Expedient has a more than 20-year history and expertise in delivering unmatched disaster recovery and data center infrastructure solutions. We are proud and excited to be providing our data center and cloud infrastructure to help augment the comprehensive resiliency services that Kyndryl delivers to its array of clients nationally. Together, we will empower businesses to proactively protect their digital assets and maintain operational resilience in an increasingly complex digital landscape." "We're dedicated to helping customers navigate their ever-evolving cybersecurity challenges," said James Carrigan, Jr., VP, US Security Practice Leader at Kyndryl. "Partnering with Expedient will allow us to further provide our customers with access to a flexible, robust and security-rich infrastructure that supports their cybersecurity and cyber resilience needs and enables the uptime and availability of their most critical applications." About Expedient Expedient is a full stack cloud service provider, helping companies transform their IT operations through award-winning multi-cloud solutions and managed infrastructure services including enterprise cloud, disaster recovery, virtual desktop infrastructure, data center colocation, edge computing, security and compliance, and more. The company's Cloud Different™️ approach provides an on-ramp to the cloud, supporting the optimization and delivery of all applications. Named VMware's Americas Cloud Partner of the Year and acknowledged in Gartner's Magic Quadrant for Disaster Recovery as a Service, Expedient eases a customer's transition to the cloud by providing curated and bundled best of breed solutions backed by "white glove" services and support. Expedient data centers are compliant with a variety of regulatory mandates, including the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) as well as the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) service.

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