Clearpath’s Blog on IT Infrastructure, Hybrid Clouds and IT Security

Clearpath Solutions Group announced today that CRN®, a brand of The Channel Company, has named Clearpath to its 2019 Solution Provider 500 list. This annual list ranks the largest North American IT channel partner organizations by revenue. The Solution Provider 500 is the industry standard for recognizing the highest performing technology integrators, strategic service providers and IT consultants. It is the industry's predominant channel partner list, serving as a valuable resource for technology vendors looking to partner with top solution providers.

Data is an asset to your business, but it’s also a threat. Your employees are demanding access to your work resources from more devices, and more outside networks than ever. This puts pressure on IT, increases your attack surface, and exposes your corporate network to threat vectors.

Another great Dell Technologies World conference has come to a close. Hosted over four days – April 29-May 2 – in Las Vegas, this annual event brought together 14,000 partners and customers to discover Dell’s vision for the future, meet up with tech gurus, and learn new skills and capabilities.

Today’s workforce is no longer desktop-bound. Your company’s employees have become digital nomads, constantly seeking new tools and technologies to work successfully from anywhere. They have a variety of devices to choose from, but, at the end of the day, IT must still manage and protect every endpoint, PC, macOS, user, app, and bit of data – even when they sit outside the traditional corporate network.

As part of Cisco’s commitment to securing access for the network perimeter, late last year it added Duo Security to the Cisco family. Duo is a leading provider of unified access security and multi-factor authentication delivered through the cloud.

Clearpath Solutions Group announced today that CRN®, a brand of The Channel Company, has named Clearpath to its 2019 Managed Service Provider (MSP) 500 list in the Elite 150 category. This annual list recognizes North American solution providers with innovative approaches to managed services. These services help customers improve operational efficiencies, maximize return on IT investments, and continuously help them navigate the complexities of IT solutions.

Clearpath Solutions Group’s Managed Services Practice continues to expand. Our core Clearpath custom IaaS, DRaaS, and Hybrid Cloud offerings have seen increased demand as many organizations are looking to move from on-premises to public and hybrid cloud infrastructure but need operational support for day to day IT management. Clearpath’s portfolio of managed services offerings has expanded to include Monitoring as a Service, Communications as a Service, Security as a Service and Cisco Meraki Managed Services.

We live in a digital age, where consumers order products, apply for business loans, and book vacations at the click of a button. But as these digital experiences have got simpler for us, for the companies behind these experiences it’s getting more complex to stay ahead of customer expectations.

The rise of connected devices, distributed architectures, and multi-clouds have increased the complexity of application environments. Companies need insight into the health of every application and every transaction in order to keep up with the pace of change. Cisco, through its acquisition of AppDynamics, may be the answer to these challenges.

What is AppDynamics?

AppDynamics is a single application and business monitoring platform that empowers the world’s largest enterprises, including Barclays Bank, United Airlines, Salesforce, AT&T, and others to build and run the applications they need to thrive.

With AppDynamics, enterprises can watch every line of code and understand its impact on user experience and application performance, while providing real-time insight into the digital business. It strips complexity and drives insights since teams have a single source of truth to focus on end-to-end performance in the context of the customer experience, instead of monitoring individual services.

In a bid to improve productivity, drive efficiencies, accelerate business initiatives, and learn more from big data, organizations are putting more thought into their digital business strategy. Of course, your network is at the heart of this unstoppable evolution, powering communication to and between the applications driving the digital economy.

The increased sophistication of malware attacks, the rapid expansion of IoT, and the growing use of mobile devices to access enterprise and guest Wi-Fi networks is leaving even the best-equipped security teams struggling to keep up.

Part of the struggle is that existing security solutions are siloed and don’t integrate or share intelligence in a programmatic way. Security teams are also understaffed. The 2018 Cisco Annual Cybersecurity Report found that a lack of security personnel prevents many organizations from implementing new cyber capabilities – this can limit the ability to deploy, manage, and scale security solutions to combat the growing threat.

Consider one of the most exploited vulnerabilities in many networks – DNS blind spots. Currently, 97% of malware use DNS as part of the attack. However, most security teams (75%) don’t filter DNS traffic for malicious internet connections, hence the blind spot.

Good news! A new integration addresses this security vulnerability and solves the challenges of deployment and support – making your security team’s jobs a lot easier.

If you’re like most organizations, you’re looking to leverage the cloud—but in way that makes sense for your business.  Sometimes that includes building a private cloud—or running workloads in a public cloud.  The challenge can be uniting both worlds in a way that makes sense—and works with the direction you’ve already taken with your data center strategy.

Whether starting from scratch from bare metal or looking to leverage your existing infrastructure investments—there’s just a lot of guess work involved with creating your cloud strategy, especially since most organizations want a hybrid cloud approach.  But what if there were ways to remove most of that guesswork and achieve some really remarkable results by using an integrated solution that’s already solved most of your challenges?

In fact, VMware has created such an integrated solution, VMware Cloud Foundation, that can help you:

• Accelerate your time to market up to 15x faster time by eliminating complex processes around system design, testing, bring-up, configuration, and provisioning
• De-risk your cloud deployment with quick, repeatable, secure deployments
• Lower TCO of private cloud deployments by up to 30-40%*
• Future proof infrastructure by running any app, both traditional and cloud-native in containers