February has been associated with romance and love since time immemorial. It’s the time of year where we go that extra mile for our loved ones to show our appreciation (goes without saying that this should be year-round, but some extra TLC never hurts). If you’re a business, is it any different? Your one true love is most definitely your data – you’re inseparable! But do you give it the attention it requires and undeniably deserves?
An effective backup strategy is critical if you really care about your data (you should). With BMIT’s recent release of its new Backup-as-a-Service solution, implementing a robust strategy is easier than ever. The question is, why should you?
Growth and planning ahead
Your business is thriving, and with growth come numerous challenges. New employees are coming in, bringing with them more devices and generating new data within the organization. There’s new clients on-board as well, so additional data is being created from multiple sources.
All this growth, while positive, can jeopardize data especially when companies just try to keep up with the rest of the industry and customer expectations, without planning ahead. Is your current backup strategy and infrastructure scalable for long-term growth or will it create gaps in your data if you keep expanding? If the answer is no, you’re risking potentially costly data losses which would far outweigh the cost of a scalable solution.
Additionally, as businesses grow, so do the demands for regulatory compliance such as long-term data retention. Any data backup system needs to be flexible enough to scale up and out, and vice versa.
The impact of data loss
Data backups are not a luxury, even for the smallest of businesses. On the contrary, they're a necessity if a business is seeking growth and momentum. An effective backup strategy is essentially insuring your business to make sure progress doesn’t come to a grinding halt in case of disruptions to your data.
Losing your data can have far-reaching effects. Employees’ productivity is impacted immediately and the company’s reputation takes a hit, possibly resulting in lost customers. Moreover, you’ll have to incur additional costs to recover your data, which might not necessarily be 100% successful.
Never too careful
There are multiple factors separating a good backup strategy from an excellent one, one of them being the backups’ location. Data redundancy is crucial to protect the business against the worst of disasters. Off-site backups in multiple locations ensure your data is secure,no matter what. BMIT’s Backup-as-a-Service supports backups for workstations, servers & virtual machines while also providing you the ability to back upon the cloud, in our multiple data centre facilities or your own premises.
We have partnered with Veeam and packaged a solution aimed at simplifying and centralizing the management of your backup strategy. This allows you to give it all the love and attention it deserves. Encrypted backups start from less than €5/month with no upfront cost – what’s more, they’re available on our online store.
BMIT have added a new backup solution, Backup-as-a-Service, to their ever-increasing product portfolio. This addition follows their recent announcements of their new partnership with Microsoft and the building of their new €10m state-of-the-art purpose-built data centre facility in Malta.
Backup-as-a-service is a flexible backup solution, allowing customers to deploy it within any setup, be it on the cloud, in BMIT’s data centre facilities or within the client’s own premises. BaaS supports multi-platform backups with workstation backups starting from less than €5/month while requiring no upfront investment.
“One of our main drivers at BMIT is the dedication to keeping customer’s data constantly safe and accessible. The introduction of our new BaaS solution further reinforces this commitment. We’re giving our clients even more flexibility and control in how they implement their backup setup” stated Jack Mizzi, BMIT’s Chief Marketing Officer, further commenting, “We’ve pitched this new solution during our meetings here at ICE 2019 and the feedback has been very encouraging. We’re excited to start working with these new customers and not only improving their backup system, but also simplifying the management of it”.
This article was featured on the Day 3 ICE Daily issue, published during ICE 2019 which is being held between the 5th and 7th of February.
The first day of ICE 2019 saw BMIT announce that they have extended their hybrid cloud offerings, including the addition of Microsoft’s Azure suite of services to its portfolio. This news follows yesterday’s announcement of a new €10m data centre facility and builds on the strategic partnership struck between the company and Microsoft a few weeks ago.
BMIT’s partnership with Microsoft provides the company with the capability to not only provide Azure services, but also give the global cloud solution a local flavour through a dedicated support team and great prices. Additionally, BMIT’s team of solution architects can guide customers towards the right setup, minimizing costs while ensuring redundancy and smooth operations.
MultiCloud Connect by BMIT also allows customers to securely connect their IT infrastructure or private cloud set-up to Azure or a number of other leading global public cloud providers to minimize latency and improve performance.
“As technology grows more complex by the day, no two businesses will find themselves in the same situation. Every company is different and has unique requirements – be they security, risk mitigation, regulatory considerations, asset depreciation, or simply their internal culture and skill set – making a move to Public Cloud not always a feasible option. In fact, for many having the best of both worlds through a hybrid cloud setup is the ideal solution. BMIT’s infrastructure caters for both, providing public cloud as well as private cloud solutions, allowing customers to pick and mix in order to create their own custom hybrid setup”, commented Nick Tonna, BMIT’s Chief Commercial Officer.
This article was featured on the Day 2 ICE Daily issue, published during ICE 2019 which is being held between the 5th and 7th of February.
BMIT, Malta’s largest data centre, cloud and managed services provider, has announced the building of its newest data centre in Malta, further reinforcing their status as the leading multi-site data centre on the island. The company, trusted by over 250 Malta-based gaming operators, is set to open this new state of the art purpose-built facility in Żejtun by next year, with works already well underway.
BMIT’s Żejtun data centre will have a total capacity of more than 400 racks and will be fully certified to Tier 3 standards by the Uptime Institute. The data centre will be located on a newly built campus which will also house the company’s main technical, commercial, administrative and management teams. The €10m facility follows a number of other investments done in the past three years, including a new data centre in SmartCity Malta, a private high-capacity international network and the acquisition of a company providing managed on premise IT services.
“We look forward to providing our esteemed customers and potential clients with even more capacity in what will be one of the best equipped facilities on the island. Part of our commitment to customers is to keep investing in new technologies and infrastructure to ultimately provide the best possible service. While we’re also expanding our portfolio of IT solutions, we are still focusing on improving on what we’re already established in”, commented Gordon Bezzina, BMIT’s Chief Technical Officer.
This article was featured on the Day 1 ICE Daily issue, published during ICE 2019 which is being held between the 5th and 7th of February.
Microsoft Azure products will become more accessible to local businesses following a strategic partnership between Microsoft and BMIT Technologies, which incorporates BMIT Limited and Kinetix IT Solutions Limited. This partnership will enable a host of new services to customers, including the possibility to purchase Microsoft’s Azure services directly from BMIT.
The formal announcement of the strategic partnership was made during a workshop event organised by Microsoft for several gaming companies in collaboration with the Malta Gaming Authority and EY.
“The strategic partnership is the positive outcome of our discussions between Microsoft and BMIT, always with the scope of bringing together Microsoft as a worldwide leader in cloud services and BMIT, whom we consider as one of Malta’s leading IT and cloud managed services provider, perfectly able and equipped to drive cloud-based innovation among Maltese businesses,” said Peggy Antonakou, Microsoft’s CEO for Greece, Cyprus and Malta.
Expressing his satisfaction at this important development, Christian Sammut, CEO of BMIT added that this strategic partnership will create additional synergies between BMIT Technologies and Microsoft.
“We already enable a good number of organisations by leveraging our local infrastructure and our expertise to deliver a variety of cloud-based scenarios including public, private and hybrid cloud infrastructure and productivity solutions. This closer collaboration will take such efforts to a new level, allowing us to deliver a broader range of emerging technologies based on Microsoft Azure and Microsoft Office 365 to both our Malta-based and international customers”.
“Our agreement with BMIT forms part of this commitment to work and collaborate closely with trusted and responsible partners so that they can apply the right technologies that help the community achieve economic and social prosperity,” added Antonakou.
As more companies adopt Hybrid Cloud solutions and store their data across on-premise private cloud structures and public off-the-shelf cloud services, the need for well-defined strategies for the correct management of data becomes increasingly vital.
Interestingly, according to Microsoft’s 2017 State of the Hybrid Cloud survey, 18% of those companies are not even fully aware they are operating a hybrid cloud model.
Main Steps for Managing Data in Hybrid Cloud
Enterprises can avoid wasteful, problematic and unsecure data sprawl across various systems, by adopting the following steps:
The creation of a strategy for worst-case scenarios.
The use of proven analytics to deliver business intelligence with confidence.
The enablement of deep learning, analytics and intelligent applications across on-premises and cloud-based data.
Focusing on data consistency to ensure better security.
Strategy for Worst-Case Scenarios
Whilst unkempt data sprawl is undesirable, the planned replication of data ensures rapidity and high availability when one needs to recover from a catastrophic IT disaster. The near-limitless storage capabilities of public cloud systems give enterprises the ability to better protect their data by creating multiple backups, potentially at different geophysical locations.
When shopping for a solution, one should look out for a cost-effective approach that offers bottomless storage, and integration with the on-premises private cloud with minimal code changes.
Using Analytics to Deliver Business Intelligence
If an enterprise’s data is spread across various systems and infrastructures, analytics will only make sense if the methodology is the same across those systems. By creating the right hybrid cloud infrastructure, a proven analytics engine would create one source of verifiable business intelligence from an enterprise’s relational and non-relational data sets.
Enabling Deep Learning across On-Premises and Cloud-Based Data
In creating a hybrid cloud solution, a business makes it possible for its IT team to develop a common, reusable set of transportable skills and run-anywhere tools – using open-source and extensible tools like R and Python – to analyse both structured and unstructured data through deep-learning techniques.
Focus on Data Consistency for Better Security
An unplanned conflation of on-premises and public cloud systems could create nooks of potentially invisible data that are insecure both in terms of access and also in terms of inclusion in systemic backup and recovery plans. A single, coordinated data set can be consistently encrypted, protected and backed up, ensuring compliance with various requirements.
Click here for more information about our latest Azure product offerings
Proponents of blockchain can be certain that the day will come when articles will not start with a round of definitions
Maybe we are not quite there yet, but I don’t intend to add my definitions to those already out there, so for blockchain, distributed ledger technology (DLT), Cryptocurrencies and Smart Contracts Wikipedia offers a decent introduction.
Definitions aside, I firmly believe that these terms are well on their way to becoming as ubiquitous as another tech-term of recent times (epic, baritone voice)… ‘The Cloud’.
Now considered mainstream, Cloud and its multitude of use cases, applications and nuances continues to grow apace. Household names such as Microsoft, Google and Amazon dominate with their ‘as-a-service’ solutions and leading brands like Netflix made the move long ago, reaping the benefits to this day.
Maybe the definitive yardstick is that my Mum can offer a pretty good explanation of what The Cloud is (maybe less baritone, no less epic).
Of course, it wasn’t always so, and the early days of Cloud technology saw frenetic activity and a great deal less clarity.
A stampede of nebulous ideas burst from The Corral of The Traditional Way We Do Things, and as the dust settled businesses first adopted then adapted their approach to the cloud.
Elastic resources and OPEX commercial models brought about a shorter time to market for greater product range and choice. Service industries grew around the core tenets of Flexibility and Customer Choice. We now see Cloud Service Providers, Cloud Brokers and Cloud Consultants thriving in delivering vital advice, support and knowledge.
Now blockchain has knocked down the gates of its pen and is on a disruptive cross-vertical rampage. Whilst Bitcoin rapaciously consumed the column inches like a misbehaving Hollywood starlet, the Healthcare, Logistics, Legal and Manufacturing industries all embraced new decentralised processes and methodologies. The notorious cryptocurrency may have calmed in recent months, but many developments continue for blockchain elsewhere.
Some things however will not change. The decentralisation of transactions does not remove the need for connected, secured, and supported networks. The need for flexible, elastic and easily deployed IT resource does not cease to exist. Having knowledgeable, capable and experienced suppliers to provision, monitor and manage the underlying infra remains vital, and in some instances becomes even more crucial.
As with the Cloud beforehand, technology providers will evolve and adapt to this nascent technology
BMIT are Malta’s leading provider of Cloud, Data Centre and Managed Services, operating our own PCI-DSS and ISO:27001 compliant Public Cloud, Private Network and Data centres. From spinning-up a single VM to hold your wallet, to hosting your platforms and applications, we offer unparalleled expertise and experience in keeping online businesses online.
Old wisdom can still teach us a lot in how we handle modern technology: fail to plan, plan to fail; an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. We could go on and on, but here’s a list of the top 5 reasons why disaster recovery planning is so important for your business.
Reason #1: It can happen to everyone, even your business
IT disasters are an inevitability in modern technology. It could happen to you at some point. Be it fire, flooding, corrupted data or a hacking attack: whatever the cause, your data can be the victim of a catastrophic event that puts revenues and customer satisfaction at risk.
Reason #2: Failover quickly
An ideal disaster is an oxymoron, but if there was it would simply cause your systems to failover to a separate disaster recovery site instantly without interruption to your service. Only your IT data centre managers would realise that the service previously running in one data centre now runs in the failover centre on the other side of town.
Reason #3: Minimize long-term negative impact
In the event of a disaster, your company’s continued operations depend on the ability to replicate your IT systems and data. Disaster recovery is a roadmap that will restore operations while minimizing the long-term negative impact on the company.
A disaster recovery plan lays out how you will prepare for a disaster, what your response will be, and what steps it will take to ensure that operations can be restored.
Reason #4: Machines and hardware fail.
While modern IT hardware is fairly reliable, it could still fail at some point. No one is immune to hard disk or internet connection crashes. Having a disaster recovery plan that eliminates all points of failure in your IT infrastructure is the only way to ensure that a hardware or software failure doesn’t interrupt your service or cause data loss.
Reason #5: Keep your customers
Customer retention is costly, but customer re-acquisition is devastatingly expensive. IT incidents are usually a very disruptive event for end-users too. It takes a lot to earn customers’ trust, but after you lose their data or are even temporarily unable to offer them your service, trust quickly evaporates. So get a disaster recovery plan - it is far less expensive to prevent a disaster than try to re-acquire lost customers after one has occurred.
When an unforeseen event causes day-to-day operations to seize, a company will need to recover and resume operations fast. Downtime is one of the biggest IT expenses that businesses face.
With a disaster recovery plan in place, a company can save itself from risks including reputation loss, data loss, and the negative impact on clients and customers. Find out how BMIT can protect your business.
BMIT are looking to the East in a search for growth that has taken it to global gaming expo G2E Asia 2018 in Macau. The G2E Asia trade show is of critical importance for the gaming industry and BMIT pulled out all the stops at their stand, where they showcase all their latest, cutting-edge services to delegates from the gaming and entertainment industry.
What is G2E Asia?
The G2E Asia summit is widely regarded as the marketplace for the Asian gaming and entertainment industry, and BMIT was present this year alongside other key industry players.
Held in Macau, the G2E Asia event is an annual expo organised by the American Gaming Association (AGA) and Reed Exhibitions. From its debut in June 2007, in a little over ten years, this expo has become the leading industry event in the Asian market, allowing professionals to network, discuss innovations, share knowledge and ideas, and exchange experiences on this dynamic industry.
Why is it important?
As happens every year, G2E Asia welcomed over 95% of all Asian casino operators, offering the perfect access point for European investors and operators who want to tap into the Asian market. The exhibitor list is a “who’s who” of industry players, ranging from compliance, to payment processing, to training consultancy providers, with a healthy dose of gaming content, software and technology thrown in.
How did it go?
BMIT’s cloud-based IT-outsourcing services drew a lot of interest from summit attendees and investors. By all accounts, the event was a roaring success for both organisers and exhibitors alike.
“The company has its sights fixed firmly on the Asian market” said Nick Tonna, CCO at BMIT. “During our three days in Macau we received very positive feedback and look forward to serving Asian operators seeking to establish presence in the EU and acquire a Maltese Remote Gaming license”, Mr Tonna added.
