Keep accelerating your growth in the Cloud with the best of AWS re:Invent 2021

Let’s recap: Find in our selection of AWS re:Invent valuable materials, information, and examples on how you can accelerate the success of your business by leveraging AWS services.

As you remember, AWS re:Invent last December 2021 brought together the best of the Cloud community for its partners and customers. In the tenth edition of this event, AWS took advantage of the Cloud’s versatility to offer multiple scenarios, topics, and speakers during the days of the event covering the most exciting and pressing topics for its guests.

Luckily, it’s not too late to take advantage of the best of AWS re:Invent! The information is available to all users after a simple registration. Intcomex Cloud wants to make your business successful with agility and efficiency. That’s why we have selected a series of sessions that took place during AWS re:Invent, which we know will be very useful for you to find new ways to see the business and meet the challenges of everyday life. Best of all, as always, you can count on our experts to help you deliver the best of AWS to your customers:

IoT

• FleetWise
• AWS IoT RoboRunner
• FreeRTOS out-of-the-box
• AWS IoT Greengrass & Systems Manager
• AWS IoT Greengrass Software Catalog
• AWS IoT SiteWise Hot/Cold Storage Tiers
• AWS IoT Fleet Indexing enhancements
• FreeRTOS extended maintenance

Did you enjoy our selection? If you would like more information on leveraging AWS services with your customers, contact us at [email protected]. Also, keep visiting the Intcomex Cloud Blog, where we will be sharing selected sessions from AWS Re:Invent 2021, so you don’t have to wait until the next edition.

Cloud computing has a wide reach, which allows to  improve the experience of customers and users. 

Cloud-based services have significant advantages over services with traditional structures. Cloud computing offers services, tools, and applications that deploy more agile and flexible performance, resulting in greater satisfaction for customers and users. 

Not surprisingly, the growth of the cloud industry is of such proportions that Gartner estimates that by 2025, 85% of organizations will be enjoying its benefits, strongly improving their operational efficiencies. 

One of the significant advantages of the cloud industry is the possibility of offering solutions “as a service,” which allows improving the results obtained by reducing investment and risk. 

“Call Centers” are typical beneficiaries of all the advantages of the cloud. CCaaS or Call Centers as a Service get the following benefits for their users when performing in the cloud: 

• Seamless omnichannel experience: For companies with various customer service channels, phone lines, websites, chat, messaging applications, etc., users may perceive the lack of connection between these media. This difficulty stems from having many customers contact channels to facilitate the service. The cloud allows eliminating these disconnections by providing access from a single platform, providing a real omnichannel experience. In addition, no matter which channels the customer has generated the contact, the response is unified, improving the user experience. 
• Reduced call times: This is one of the features that most impact the consumer experience. Long wait times make users feel dissatisfied, even if their requests are finally met. The service centers based on cloud platforms allow functionalities such as better call routing, automation, and use of artificial intelligence, to speed up the response to the client, improve its quality and reduce their time spent on the line. They also allow organizations to optimize the use of human resources. 
• Permanent and continuous interaction with customers: nowadays, users expect increasingly long opening hours. The different models of work and study make it necessary to offer permanent care, ideally 24/7. Organizations can rely on chatbots, powered by artificial intelligence, trained to handle frequently asked questions. This option frees up the time of service agents to handle more complex queries, leaving routine questions in the hands of chatbots. Additionally, in addition to improving customer service, this tool enriches the work of service agents, as it leaves everyday tasks for automated tools and personalized attention for special cases. 

These are just some examples of how cloud computing is a fundamental piece today to improve the customer experience while also increasing the operational efficiency of organizations, making cloud platforms the answer to multiple needs of modern organizations. At Intcomex Cloud, we have the best solutions in the cloud, with subscription consumption models, so that while delivering benefits such as those mentioned here to your customers, you grow your business. Let’s talk! 

• As cloud technologies evolve and the adoption of multi-cloud infrastructures allows end-customers to pick and choose the solutions that better meet their requirements, it becomes more evident that having access to premium-level services they can extend to their clients is paramount for resellers to build a successful cloud practice.  

Since the internet became available to the public a quarter of a century ago, the world has been going through an unprecedented process of constant, fast-pacing changes to the point that it is easy to forget how things were before we were all connected by the web. Today, thanks to this global information network, we are able to achieve things that were regarded as science fiction not that long ago. 

The things and everyday practices the internet has fundamentally changed or simply condemned to extinction are too many to list. Still, one of the most notable examples is Information Technologies.  The volume of data we generate nowadays is so massive, and the speed at which it is transmitted is so fast that the good-old physical server and on-premise infrastructures are now on the way of the dodo. Only the computing power, security, storage, and data-management capabilities cloud computing can provide are up to the task. 

Now, as it became clear that the cloud was the place to be in terms of modern computing, an aggressive race towards cloud technology domination started; and like in an arms race, where each of the competing forces focuses their resources and might to develop the next greatest system to one-up the capabilities of their adversaries, in the race for cloud domination, the competitors keep coming with new creative tools and solutions that give them the edge. 

More than a race, the competition between the IT giants has morphed into an evolutionary process; for each ground-breaking innovation a party makes, the other will develop an even edgier one, or at least one that is just as great. 

You win

It’s hard to predict what brand will rise as the commanding force in the cloud universe and for how long. However, what is clear is that in the evolution of Information technologies, the absolute winners are all of us, the end-users. 

Put in real estate or stock exchange terms, cloud computing is “a buyer’s market” now, meaning that in this evolutionary race, it is the end customer who has the upper hands, and Multi-cloud is a clear example of this. In the current environment, with so many options to choose from, many of them of extraordinary quality, the organizations are no longer limited to one vendor.  

Today, any business or institution can benefit from choosing services across several cloud environments. A multi-cloud architecture allows for utilizing two or more public clouds and private clouds, eliminating the dependence on any single provider. Multi-cloud does not require unified or coordinated operations between cloud environments providing visibility and operation smoothness across domains –an ideal scenario for obtaining the most value out of an IT strategy.   

Additionally, to the power of tailoring the services they buy to fit their requirements like gloves, a multi-cloud strategy puts an organization in a much more solid position to face service outages. No matter how bad things go, compute resources and data storage will always be available in a multi-cloud environment, reducing downtimes and avoiding disastrous scenarios. As a result, governance, risk management, and regulatory compliance standings will improve. 

This end-customer favoring context aligns perfectly with what we, at Intcomex Cloud, set as our ultimate goal: to provide the best cloud solutions available to satisfy every end-customer’s specific needs. 

With great joy, in 2021, we announced the incorporation of Amazon Web Services and Cisco into our portfolio. By adding these two world-class vendors to our already broad range of cloud solutions from leading brands, such as Microsoft Azure, Acronis, AvePoint, Dropsuite, and many more, we achieved our objective of providing our resellers (and the end-customer through them) with an actual multi-cloud offering comprised by the best services and solutions available. 

Nevertheless, bringing the best cloud solutions to the Latin American and Caribbean markets is only the head of the spear. For us, ensuring the success of our distributing partners is just as crucial as providing top-notch solutions, so behind the portfolio comes a staunch commitment to offering resellers all the resources and tools they need to leverage the managed services business model into a sustainable, profitable, successful cloud practice. 

At Intcomex Cloud, the measure of our success is determined by the success of our partners, so accompanying them in their transition to an ‘as-a-service’ model and helping them build their core competencies is at the top of our priority list.  

Through us, our partners and their customers gain access to the resources offered by vendors such as Microsoft over the Azure Migration Desk, or AWS Migration Hub. Although different in approach, both offer customers comprehensive guidance on creating and implementing strategies to achieve success in the cloud.  

Furthermore, we have put together our own state-of-the-art commercial and technical teams throughout Latin America and the Caribbean, so our partners’ needs in areas such as training, commercial strategy, pre and post-sales, marketing, finances, and support are fully satisfied, fast. Additionally, the Intcomex Cloud Platform grants resellers access to our entire portfolio of world-class cloud solutions and provides them with the freedom to self-manage their business, from quotation to billing, licenses, number of seats, and every detail in between. 

We are convinced that a multi-cloud strategy is the most effective way for end-customers to leverage best-in-breed cloud solutions, increase resilience, and meet regulatory requirements when -and only when- it goes hand in hand with premium-level support. 

Professionals who will be successful in the future understand the potential of the cloud and prepare themselves to take advantage of its full capacity

Cloud computing has revolutionized the way IT is consumed and used. Beyond the impact of the hybrid work boom accelerated by the pandemic, this technology has profoundly transformed the use and consumption of computing. The cloud has democratized access to technological resources, removing previous investment barriers and changing how organizations and individuals rely on it to generate value.

Today, more and more organizations of all sizes have access to the resources that support hybrid work, optimize their computing costs, and accelerate the growth of their companies. In addition, the possibility of accessing new services with the pay-as-you-go option, subscription services, software, platforms, and infrastructure as a service that increases their information processing capacity and takes advantage of it significantly accelerates their digital transformation.

Organizations are facing an environment genuinely different than the one they envisioned a short time ago. Therefore, professionals who will lead businesses in the future must prepare to understand the cloud’s potential for their companies and achieve maximum benefit, going beyond the traditional uses presented at an early start. In this context, professionals from all disciplines need to understand the impact of this cloud technology on business and seek related training.

AWS, aware of its role as a leader in cloud computing, has committed to training 29 million people in this field by 2025. Their goal is to end barriers to entry to this industry.

True to this goal, AWS opened the AWS Skills Centre in downtown Seattle last November. In this new learning space, AWS provides free face-to-face training for all types of potential cloud users, creates networking and job search opportunities in the industry for all those who believe in the impact that this technology holds for the future.

This is just the first of several centers opening initially in the United States and later globally. Users will enjoy spaces to learn about the impact of the cloud on robotics, sports, space, smart homes, video games, machine learning, and many other fields of everyday life that are impacted by applications of this technology.

Additionally, at the AWS Skills Centre, AWS will be supporting the community through organized spaces for networking and exploring career opportunities in the industry. As evidenced by the materialization of this initiative, AWS’s commitment to the development of the cloud computing industry is contagious! At Intcomex Cloud, we offer you AWS services to support your customers in their digital transformation process, getting the most out of the cloud.

The cloud gives you the ability to develop the experience that your customers and consumers are waiting for today. Are you ready to take on this challenge?

Customers and consumers are increasingly demanding more. They seek consistent, continuous, fluid experiences with minimal adaptations or concessions on their part and favor those that offer a personalized commitment or relationship. What a great challenge!

They are not just more demanding. They have also changed the way they choose and approach products or services. Today digital interactions reign. These channels, which were considered complementary until recently, must focus on building a relationship with them. This digital experience is made easy by the cloud. It occurs through applications, products designed as digital from their conception, and omnichannel experiences that, supported by the cloud, deliver to users exactly what they’re expecting.

This new digital experience is present in all types of industries and all business sizes. For example, 83% of large companies had their workloads stored in the cloud during 2020. In addition, users of these companies have reported that an average employee uses approximately 36 cloud-based services in a typical workday.

Companies around the world can deliver experiences that guarantee security and control costs for customers. But they don’t stop there. Consumers take these benefits for granted. But, today, they are looking for meaningful connections to products.

The cloud helps ensure that business development is focused on these customer expectations. It is the key to leveraging customers’ information through their interactions to generate relevant insights. In this way, each client’s journey and relationship with the brand will be meaningful and develop a customer or consumer commitment to said brand.

The ability to effectively analyze data, powered by the cloud, facilitates scalability, fosters innovation and agility, and enables trust-building transparency in interaction. In this way, thanks to the cloud, it is possible to offer subscription services designed so that the customer experience is based on a deep connection with the brands while generating recurring income for the business—ideal for both parties. If the customer experience is significant, they will continue to connect with the brand, and the relationship and consumption will continue, the ultimate goal of business.

Find Intcomex Cloud solutions in the cloud so that your clients of all industries and business sizes can design and develop the experiences that their clients are looking for and, in this way, grow and achieve stable and consistent success.

It enables stable, dependable streaming services. It hosts digital tools that make it possible to create next-generation space crafts. Fortune 500 companies leverage its computing power to analyze their data. It stores some of the most sensitive information from countries all over the world. Even Amazon’s competitors in the e-commerce industry rely on it to make sure their websites won’t crash during traffic surges. And it all began as the back end of a visionary book-selling platform that would transform the way we buy and sell goods.

Since its inception, AWS has been at the forefront of the digital revolution, but why? How did an offshoot of the largest retail business on the internet become the dominating force in the cloud computing sphere?

A little history first

Founded in 1994, Amazon started as an online book buying and selling platform that many in the tech industry saw as a simple novelty, not something to make much about. However, it didn’t take much time for the company to prove that it was here not only to stay but to take the book business by storm, and it wasn’t stopping there. In less than a decade, Amazon was already the largest online retailer in the world, selling music, videogames, electronics, software, clothing, furniture, toys, and basically everything under the sun that could be bought or sold. By the dawn of the new millennium, Amazon was the largest internet-based business the world had ever seen; it still is today.

But making this larger-than-life retail monster run smoothly required a variety of resources like the world had never seen before, all at an unprecedented scale. It was not only about maintaining a broad selection of products for the customers to choose from; that was the easy part (if someone can ever say that); the challenge was at the other end of things. Everything, from logistics, inventory, databases and storage, to computing power, had to work flawlessly so the buyers could get what they ordered as they ordered it.

How to make such a complex machine work when some of the necessary parts hadn’t even been created, or they didn’t exist at the scale required? The most complex easy answer: by making them themselves so they could control all the variables.

From the IT side of things, specifically, in the early 2000s, the founder and then CEO of Amazon, Jeff Bezos, and his executive team started to bring more and more software engineers on board, knowing that they had to develop their own tools and solutions to secure the reliable, scalable, cost-effective digital infrastructure services Amazon needed to sustain its vertiginous upwards trajectory. A case of “if you want it done right, do it yourself.”

They did it, and they did it right. In an interview with Intelligencer Magazine, in late 2018, Andy Jassy, former CEO of AWS, said that during a meeting at Jeff Bezos’ house, in the summer of 2003, while analyzing what they regarded at the time as Amazon’s core competencies, they concluded that the company had become so good at developing its own digital solutions that they might be sitting in a goldmine.

“We started off with fairly obvious things, like we were good at having a lot of selection in retail, and we were good at fulfilling that selection, but when we looked into it more deeply, we realized that in building Amazon’s consumer business as fast as we had in the first eight years, we’d gotten really good at operating infrastructure services, things like computing and storage and database,” Jassy recalled.

According to the former AWS CEO, they became remarkably good at running reliable, scalable, cost-effective data centers at the right scale and price. So confident they felt about the infrastructure they created that they started to explore the possibility of offering it to developers and enterprises alike.

What if they provided their web-based infrastructure services to companies for them to develop their own applications? That idea would require the internet to become the operating system, but did the key components for an internet operating system exist at the time? They found out quite quickly that they didn’t, so in typical Amazon style, they decided to build them.

Bezos, Jassy ant their team knew that there was a need out there for their idea; the question was, would the market buy storage, database, computing services from the online bookstore turned e-commerce juggernaut?

Now we know the answer to that. By launching Amazon Web Services (AWS) in 2006, Amazon started an ongoing technological revolution, changed computing for good, and created the US $300 billion -and growing- industry we now know as cloud computing.

He, who strikes first…

With AWS, Amazon not only was the first in the game, but it also created it and wrote the rules, which gave it an undeniable edge over its competition. In fact, it took its closest competitor six years to develop a response.

Such a head start gave AWS much-needed time to perfect their technology without having to look over their shoulder to see what the other players were doing. It also established them as the household name and gave them years of invaluable feedback from software developers, engineers, and architects all over the world.

But while the adage says, “he, who strikes first, strikes twice,” it doesn’t mention anything about winning the fight.

Yes, in technology development, a six-year head-start could be counted in dog years, but traditional tech companies have been at it with all their might for years, trying to catch up, reminding AWS that their reign is not a given. Now, AWS has reasons to be on the lookout as competition steepens, but they are not slowing down.

Today, that little concept Amazon created in the early 2000s that we now know as ‘cloud computing’ has become the backbone of the global economy; every bit of information that matters goes through the cloud in one way or another. Why? Well, in a nutshell, as the internet developed, broadband access became the norm, and mobile connectivity took off, the amount of information being generated and disseminated through the web grew exponentially, creating new problems for organizations:

1. Where to store all that data

2. How to compute it without crashing their systems

3. How to keep it secure.

Traditional on-premise infrastructures came up short and proved inconvenient and outdated. On the other hand, the cloud offered the possibility of storing limitless amounts of data at scale, with no need for organizations to dispose of the physical space required to store servers, or the resources necessary to maintain, manage, and keep systems updated.

The same applies to computing power. Companies experiencing constant surges in traffic now had all the computing power necessary to keep their business running during peak times; on off-peak times, they could just downscale as needed so they wouldn’t have to pay for services they weren’t using.

The thinking heads at Amazon were right from the beginning; the need was there; the world just didn’t know it then.

According to the research and analysis firm Canalys, in Q2 2021, global cloud infrastructure services spending increased 36% to US$47.0 billion. Compared to Q2 2020, cloud expenditure increased by over US$12 billion as workload migration and cloud-native application development accelerated.

Q2 2021 results marked the fifth consecutive quarter to register an increased growth rate compared to the previous quarter. Once again, Amazon Web Services (AWS) came on top, accounting for 31% of total spending, after growing 37% annually. As AWS grows, its market share accounts for that of its two closest competitors combined, something that has stayed a constant for the past five quarters.

“The guts of Amazon”

Undoubtedly, timing played an essential role in AWS hegemony, but it can’t be credited as the sole reason for its success; especially, when the other runners in the race are some of the biggest names in the tech industry.

From the beginning, Bezos and his team knew that at its core, AWS should be above all about service, so the attention to customers’ needs became the hallmark of the AWS value proposition.

In the words of Jeff Bezos, “There’s a hidden Amazon, just under the epidermis, the guts of Amazon, this is all the stuff we have to do on the back end to make this work.”

In a nutshell, with AWS, Amazon made their secret sauce available for the world to have as a service. The premise was simple, what’s good for Amazon had to be just as good for any organization, so with the launch of services like S3 and EC2 in 2006, and basically every product and service since, the company has been making publicly available what they developed, tested, and perfected for their own business first.

Amazon’s confidence in AWS products and services lies in its own experiences, its failures and successes during the developing process, giving them a clear focus on the solution architects, builders, and implementers through a service-oriented architecture, with business logic and data accessible over application programming interfaces (APIs).

AWS’s current catalog comprises more than 200 services. Admittedly, it is extensive, but the level of choice it offers has proved an invaluable resource for application builders and implementers alike. For instance, while other cloud providers offer a single database service, AWS has four from where to choose.

As a natural consequence of such a broad, complex portfolio, AWS support teams and sales force need to be highly versed in the technical aspects of the business, which makes the pre-sales, purchase and implementation processes much friendlier to the customer.

Additionally, AWS is constantly creating innovative services for Amazon and then making them available in the public cloud. Lambda is a good example. Amazon initially developed this event-based, serverless computing platform for Alexa, its AI-powered, highly successful virtual assistant. Only after proving ready for prime time was it incorporated into the AWS service portfolio.

But a pioneering, costumer-oriented outlook is only part of the story; there’s more to the success of AWS. The other two essential components to keep AWS as the world’s #1 cloud service provider are pricing and security.

AWS services are cost-effective but also more convenient thanks to the pay-as-you-go pricing model the company pioneered -and the competition would eventually adopt. Accessible pricing, paired with how reliable and scalable the company’s cloud storage and computing services have proven to be, undeniably makes up for a very tough-to-beat proposition. Nonetheless, in a world where for every technological breakthrough there are evermore advanced cyberthreats been created, to stay competitive in the long run, cloud providers need to make their solutions not only secure but future-proof. That’s no easy task, and AWS takes it very seriously.

To assure end-to-end operational support to its customers, no matter what, AWS has scattered its infrastructures throughout the world, placing its servers in secret locations accessible only on an essential basis.

Today, AWS spans 245 countries and territories with 81 availability zones in which its servers are located; each of these zones is divided so that users can set geographical limits on their services if required, but also to increase security by diversifying the physical locations where data is hosted. In addition, the company actively works in fine-tuning its cutting-edge Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning products to create cybersecurity products capable of predicting, adapting, and neutralizing anything the cybercriminals might come up with, now or in the future.

Brace for a vibrant race

But what can the things we know right now tell us about the future of the race for cloud dominance? Can AWS sustain its leadership position much longer?

One thing is clear, for the past two years, cloud providers, in general, have registered significant growth, and the trend is predicted to continue. In some cases, their gains are fueled by the increased demand from existing customers` need to migrate their infrastructures to a cloud environment. In other cases, growth comes primarily from an emphasis on hybrid and multi-cloud environments and sectors such as retail, healthcare, and government investment.

The race is changing, but so is the playing field. According to the research firm Gartner, in 2020, IT spending worldwide accounted for $3.8 trillion, which means that the cloud infrastructure market represented only 7% of the world’s total IT spending, leaving a lot of room for growth in the immediate future.

The cloud industry is a universe in expansion, not a limited pie from which each participant’s gains imply a loss for the others. Gartner’s numbers show that although the top-five providers account for 80% of the revenue, virtually every participant is growing.

With public cloud market maturity, it becomes more apparent that we are bound to an environment where, above the underlying technology, organizations will prioritize things like the providers` customers approach, the strategic alliances they hold with other vendors, their ability to cater to industry-specific needs, and the kind of partnership they can build together. More than mere providers, cloud offerors are beginning to be seen as strategic partners, allies with whom to create a shared future.

In such a context, its service latitude and maturity, customer-oriented philosophy, real-world-tested-before-launch technology, and its already-in-place advances on edge computing, AI, and 5G implementation give AWS a good chance to stay ahead in this expanding playing field for the foreseeable future. However, more likely than not, it will be the providers` ability to build solid long-term partnerships with their customers and smoothen their adoption of new technology through managed services that will determine who will lead the curve and who’ll be left behind. To learn more about how AWS cutting-edge technologies combined with the value offer of Intcomex Cloud can catapult your business to the next level in productivity and efficiency, visit https://cloud.intcomex.com/en/aws/

Hand in hand with the leading experts in the industry

The Acronis #CyberFit Summit was held in Miami on October 25-28, 2021, as part of the Acronis World Tour. MSPs, Resellers, and partners worldwide had the opportunity to meet in Miami, combining face-to-face and virtual participation, reaching nearly 250 in-person participants and more than 2000 virtual participants.

The Summit brought together the world’s leading experts in cyber protection and integration. In addition, participants had the opportunity to interact with leading panelists and speakers to learn and reflect on the future of cyber protection.

Participants were able to enjoy sessions focused on achieving objectives. With this goal in mind, the following topics were discussed: automation as a means of generating revenue, profit, and growth in the MSPs business; analyzed and presented Case studies about the business of successful and profitable MSPs; Disaster Recovery as an essential tool for successful cyber threat mitigation and regulatory compliance was analyzed from the knowledge of expert speakers; sessions related to reducing risk and incidents originating in e-mail and the challenge of better endpoint cyber protection among many other topics.

An event of this magnitude could not have been successful without having world-class speakers, including:

• Patrick Pulvermueller, recently appointed Acronis CEO, reflected on the challenge of delivering cyber protection technologies to Resellers and Partners, increasing their opportunities to support the growth and success of thousands of businesses relying on Acronis solutions to meet needs related to the cyber protection of its customers.
• Alexis Ohanian, co-founder of Reddit and Venture.
• Chris Voss, negotiation expert, and CEO of Black Swan Group

Participants also enjoyed the panel “Women in Technology,” led by Brooke Baldwin and featured Amy Luby and Katya Ivanova from Acronis, Amy O’Connor of IAMF, Ann Cloyd — co-founder of Deep Tech, and Wanda Eugene of the University of Miami. This meeting was a unique networking opportunity for the participants, enjoying these panelists’ extensive knowledge.

Finally, participants had the opportunity to attend professional training led by the experts in Acronis cyber protection solutions, enabling them to gain more extensive management and in-depth knowledge of Acronis solutions.

Only a true expert like Acronis has been able to host an event of this magnitude, providing MSPs, Resellers, and Partners with the knowledge and support they need to be ready to lead their customers’ path to cyber protection. Seize the opportunity to have the winning Cyber Protection solutions that Acronis offers, provisioning them through the Intcomex Cloud Platform, and be part of the incredible world of Acronis cyber protection.

Have you considered the power of the cloud to strengthen your business’s environmental responsibility plan?

Nowadays, businesses are not measured solely by their financial results. Instead, more and more companies include the measurement of their impact on the environment in their performance parameters. In addition, they have accountability programs and efficiency indicators that reflect their performance in this field.

There are several reasons why cloud computing is an option that offers more benefits and benefits for businesses every day while helping to meet the goals of reducing an organization’s environmental impact and carbon footprint. The UK’s Ministry of Business, Energy, and Industrial Strategy has recently advised UK businesses to accelerate cloud adoption to support carbon reduction strategies.

In addition to the security, reliability, agility, efficiency, and availability benefits that the cloud offers for a business, we can also highlight benefits from other angles. For example, utilizing business clouds such as Microsoft, Amazon, and Google efficiently affects resource utilization. Consolidating the storage of thousands of companies in global data centers allows the number of on-premises computers to be dramatically reduced and replaced with better performing equipment, used more efficiently. In the end, we can say that a smaller volume of equipment is used, and they are better used.

The three largest cloud computing service providers, AWS, Microsoft, and Google, which according to CloudTech, reach 61% of global infrastructure, invest in renewable energy, and combine its use with local grid energy, aiming to achieve 100% renewable energy in the future. In this way, customers of cloud services are decreasing their impact on the environment. Microsoft, for example, offers its Azure users the ability to use the sustainability calculator, which provides them with a report on the emissions generated by resources purchased in the Azure cloud.

In addition, the cloud offers the ability to reduce or eliminate document printing, improving data availability and security in organizations. This reduction in paper usage combined with more efficient cloud storage options is added to the benefits mentioned above, with positive implications for organizations’ energy management and waste management.

The cloud offers benefits in all respects for your business and that of your clients. So, what are you waiting for to grow your business while maximizing performance benefits and increasing the positive impact you can generate on managing climate change?

Multi-factor authentication or MFA is an additional layer of security that requires users to verify their identity in two or more ways before allowing access to a system. Although initial critics of this security complained of burdening users with additional responsibilities or procedures every day, there are more and more advocates of such protections for business information.

There are many reasons why systems, applications, and organizations, in general, must decide as soon as possible to implement this type of security. Using MFA provides simple and effective protection for users, systems, and the network.

How does MFA help reduce an organization’s risks? It’s simple. The solutions used to protect information typically leave a door open for users to enter the systems. Unfortunately, it is not only users who enter through this door. Attacks, cybercriminals, and all sorts of threats come in as well. Therefore, adding a layer of protection at the access point to the system is vitally important to ensure information security.

This extra layer of protection doesn’t have to be a burden on users. On the contrary, relying on applications of agile and straightforward use, users can meet this requirement and thus contribute to the security of systems.

In the hybrid environment that currently prevails in organizations, the need to offer additional layers of security becomes more relevant. It is well known that cyberattacks are the order of the day. In the Threat Intelligence Report, published by Check Point Research, we find alarming information: organizations in Latin America have been attacked on average 968 times a week in the last six months.

Hybrid or remote work environments pose additional risks to organizations. Unsecured Wi-Fi networks connect users, and the risk of having unguarded devices is higher than in traditional offices. The protection that MFA provides is effective in these cases while still being simple to apply. Intcomex Cloud Platform incorporates MFA to protect your cloud operations center. Relying on the Microsoft Authenticator application, available for iOS and Android, MFA on ICP offers an excellent protection for information handled in the cloud from the moment of entry to the platform.

Learn how to take advantage of this benefit starting in late August by downloading the MFA guide for ICP.

How the need to solve the challenges that the pandemic imposed on organizations of all types and around the world, is accelerating the adoption of cloud technologies.

The train of digital transformation not only left the station long ago but is running full speed ahead. When talking about the adoption of cloud technologies by the organizations that make up the global productive fabric -from small businesses to governments- the question changed from “when will it happen?” to be “how fast will it happen?”;”; the data already points us towards an answer.

If we use the United States, the world’s largest computer market as a barometer, the trend is clear. According to newly published figures from the research firm Canalys, during the four quarters of 2020 and the first half of 2021, investment in cloud services grew steadily by more than 30%. Only in the first quarter of the current year, the US invested more than $ 18 billion, 29% more than in the previous quarter, which represents the highest number in the last two years, making clear a trend of rising demand.

But if we want to get an idea of ​​how fast this train will go, we will have to analyze what is the fuel that impulses it. According to Canalys´ data, this acceleration of digital transformation projects is directly related to the COVID-19 pandemic, or rather, to the mechanisms that organizations, almost without exception, have had to implement to stay afloat in the midst ofduring the complete disruption of productive activities caused by the pandemic. Now that world economies are beginning to recover, companies of all sizes and productive activities are not only reactivating migration projects that had been put on hold due to the crisis, they are also stepping on the accelerator, dedicating more resources to accelerate the processes. To this must be added the impetus that the sanitary confinement gave to the adoption of commerce and the consumption of entertainment from remote platforms.

But if there is something that has fanned the flames of digital transformation, it has been remote work; or, in many cases now that we have left confinement behind, the work schemes that combine the office duty with remote work. As companies reopen their premises to workers, many are putting in place a hybrid workforce model in which employees combine work from home, the office, or elsewhere.

The shift towards these modalities has forced companies to rethink practically everything workforce-related, from the physical spaces to the productive resources they require, and of course, the need for collaboration solutions in the cloud that are agile, stable, secure, and reliable has become a priority.

And as has happened throughout the history of humanity, great needs flourish great innovations. An example of how to innovate agilely and quickly in the midst ofin the midst a crisis is Cisco and the arsenal of new cloud solutions that it has been able to develop, fine-tune, and bring to market in the midst ofduring thethe pandemic.

Solutions such as Cisco Webex, the most visible example, have come to facilitate a successful implementation of new work models by offering more stable, secure, and reliable remote collaboration experiences, thus promoting efficient collaboration both between colleagues and organizations.

In this context, those three words: “stability, safety, and reliability”, are the correct additives to optimize combustion in the engine that makes the train of digital transformation move faster and faster.

Cisco has not only succeeded in making more stable and reliable remote collaboration products available to companies, organizations, and governments, such as Webex Calling or Webex Meetings, it has also managed to create solutions that make that collaboration more secure against the cybersecurity threats that have proliferated.

Cisco Umbrella, a cloud-native security service built around the renowned SASE architecture, is a formidable first line of defense against Internet threats. Secure Cloud Analytics – formerly known as Stealthwatch Cloud – takes care of monitoring private networks, public cloudsclouds, or hybrid environments, to detect and neutralize any possible violation, while Cisco Secure Email Cloud Mailbox keeps the transmission of malicious software infections via email -the hackers’ favorite way to carry out ransomware attacks- at bay.

This combination of the need to adapt quickly to unforeseen circumstances with the rapid development of technological solutions that fully meet that need is allowing the digital transformation to go full steam ahead into the future.

It remains to be seen whether and for how long the adoption of cloud technologies will continue to increase. Naturally, it is predictable that as more organizations successfully complete their migration processes, the locomotive will reach a stable cruising speed. What is clear is that this train is not going back and that those who fail to catch it in time at one of its stations will simply be left behind.