Infor recently announced that independent energy company Gulfsands has deployed Infor SunSystems Cloud as its financial platform via Infor Gold Channel Partner Progressive TSL. Gulfsands is already seeing increased security, reduced risk, and improved functionality and performance. Per the press release, with a multi-tenant model, the smaller IT footprint will minimize administration and task duplication, enabling easier, more consistent access across the world, and a sharper, more-informed focus on its core business goals. It also eliminates the environmental impacts of maintaining an in-house IT infrastructure. Gulfsands, being London based and with recent openings in Abu Dhabi, UAE, opted for a cloud deployment to take advantage of having no physical servers, with reduced risk, cost and improved security as a result, as well as the updated functionality and capabilities in the latest version of SunSystems. Further, the cloud delivers a much easier way of supporting an increasingly dispersed workforce, as users can now access the system seamlessly from wherever they are in the world, which will be a huge benefit as the company scales.

For Full Article, Click Here

LNS, the world leader in peripherals and services for machine tools, recently opted to deploy Infor M3 CloudSuite, an enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution powered by Amazon Web services (AWAS) that is specifically designed for manufacturers and distributors of products and after-sales services. A 15-year customer of Infor, this latest project is part of the company’s wider digital transformation plan and aims to achieve greater standardization at a global level to improve the quality of work, optimize access to information and improve collaboration between users. “As we prepare to switch to the multi-tenant cloud, our objective is to rewrite our processes entirely to simplify, standardize and industrialize them, and thus promote collaboration and exchange between our employees worldwide,” says Stéphane Englert, CIO of LNS. Per the press release, Infor M3 CloudSuite is the backbone of LNS’ information system and manages most of its main functions (purchasing, production, logistics, sales and finance). Additionally, the company has developed, often at the request of its users, some 30 internal applications designed to simplify their work. Englert adds, “We have high expectations of this project, the main objective of which is to have common tools interfaced with our different websites, in order to facilitate the exchange of data between our different sites and employees.” A go-live is expected by October 2024.

For Full Article, Click Here

With growing technology means growing companies. The hot topic today is moving to the cloud. The latest trend with this is adopting a multicloud strategy, a move that comes with multiples benefits  – if done right of course. There are challenges involved in a multicloud strategy, but none that cannot be tackled head on to prevent future issues. Member of the Forbes Technology council share some of the challenges that can come with managing a multicloud strategy, with advice on how to help businesses through each issue to ensure multicloud success.

1. Managing Data Security And Compliance. “One challenge in managing workloads across multiple cloud environments is ensuring data security and compliance. Businesses can prepare for this by implementing robust security policies, utilizing encryption and access control measures and conducting regular audits to ensure adherence to industry standards and regulatory requirements.” – Remo Peduzzi, ICR Informatik AG
2. Avoiding Data Fragmentation. “In today’s business landscape, scaling your company naturally leads to an increase in the amount of data generated, processed and stored, making cloud environments a necessity. However, this growth in data can result in fragmentation, making it crucial to take control of your data through automation and standardization before it becomes unmanageable.” – Daniel Korogodski, First Bridge
3. Ensuring Reliable Tenant Access And Resource Security. “Leveraging cloud technology across multiple cloud environments will enable business continuity in the event of downtime in any one of the environments. Two of the challenges l see will be maintaining access to the tenants and possible security issues. To prepare for this change, businesses should ensure that tenant access and resources within multiple cloud environments are adequately secured.” – Nihinlola Adeyemi, ErrandPay Limited
4. Ensuring Integration And Compatibility Between Different Platforms. “Ensuring seamless integration and compatibility between different cloud platforms is an understated challenge. With the increasing popularity of multicloud and hybrid cloud strategies, businesses may find themselves using multiple cloud providers, each with its own set of tools, APIs and interfaces—blending all of them is a gargantuan engineering hurdle in itself.” – Prashanth Balasubramanian, Striga
5. Getting The Most Out Of A Multicloud Strategy. “Taking cloud-native approaches to developing applications and incorporating good design principles from the beginning can help companies make the most of multicloud services. Instead of focusing on managing workloads, it is better to design applications to take full advantage of the capabilities of cloud services. Embracing containerization through infrastructure as a service instead of traditional workload management can be beneficial when serverless architectures are not suitable.” – Brad Mallard, Version 1
6. Monitoring Permissions. “In my experience, basic controls are still an issue for many cloud deployments. Monitoring permissions for corporate data stored in AWS, Azure and other platforms is a fundamental control that is often reviewed only annually. This leaves corporate data at risk if permissions are not set correctly.” – John Bruggeman, CBTS
7. Managing FinOps. “Organizations are on multicloud platforms to avoid vendor lock-in or to manage business demands (or sometimes even by accident). Whatever the reasons for a multicloud strategy might be, FinOps—matching the available cloud budget with costs across the divisions within an organization—is the pinnacle of all the multicloud challenges organizations face. CFOs often lack a real-time, “single pane of glass” view of the budget versus spending trends across cloud platforms.” – Srini Gajula, Sage IT INC
8. Controlling The Cost And Complexity Of Collaboration. “One problem with multicloud setups is the cost and complexity of making them work together. Many providers make it prohibitively expensive to move data out of their clouds. In such cases, multicloud setups are not truly multicloud, as people are unable to take advantage of what each cloud offers. This makes simplicity, support, documentation and an open platform important, particularly for startups.” – Yancey Spruill, DigitalOcean
9. Balancing Cost And Carbon Optimization.  “One challenge that comes with a multicloud strategy is trying to balance minimizing costs and carbon optimization. The pace of change and agility demands faster analysis of where to place a workload to minimize both the cost and the carbon footprint.” – Travis Greene, Micro Focus
10. Supporting Both On-Premises And Cloud Applications. “We’re witnessing fragmentation across the data landscape in terms of technologies, vendors and use cases. Organizations can’t operate in silos anymore; we have to be ready to support applications that are hosted both on-premises and in the cloud. Only with common tools and approaches will we see the efficiency gains this offers, allowing us to improve productivity and spend more time creating value.” – Jakub Lamik, Redgate Software
11. Auditing Infrastructure Security. “When data is scattered across multiple clouds, it is vulnerable to data breaches. As cloud providers constantly add new features to meet customer needs, IT teams must continuously audit and manage their infrastructure to ensure their cloud environments meet security requirements. Some best practices include strong encryption and automated monitoring tools to simplify the audit process.” – Parvinder Walia, ESET
12. Coping With Increased Security Complexity. “While a multicloud strategy comes with many benefits in terms of the ability to use the best cloud service provider for the workload, technology and cost, it increases complexity in terms of security. Since each cloud platform is different, cloud defenders need to learn multiple technologies, and they often end up using separate security tools for each provider, complicating policy alignment and increasing workloads.” – Avi Shua, Orca Security
13. Managing Machine Identities. “Managing machine identities is a significant challenge for multicloud environments. Modern workloads driven by DevOps, containerization or Internet of Things devices often require an extremely large number of machine identities in the form of digital certificates or keys. Without robust management, oversight and automation, outages, security problems or even breaches can occur.” – Ted Shorter, Keyfactor
14. Optimizing For The Strengths Of Different CSPs. “Companies using multicloud strategies or delivering cloud-native technologies must be thoughtful in optimizing for the strengths of different cloud providers, seeking out the best models for data storage, GPU performance, tightest integration with end-user suites and, of course, support for security capabilities and tools. There are differences, and prioritizing usage based on need is critical.” – Devin Redmond, Theta Lake
15. Overcoming Data Gravity. “Data gravity is the newest challenge. It can make moving data between cloud providers difficult, leading to delays and complexity in workload management. By building microservices with high availability in each cloud environment, businesses can optimize data processing and storage for each environment, reducing the need for data movement.” – Darren Person, Circana
16. Codifying Infrastructure. “As cloud environments grow more complex, infrastructure as code becomes more and more important. Codifying your infrastructure means you can tear an environment down and spin the entire thing back up with the click of a button. By codifying your infrastructure now, you will position yourself well to manage workloads that span multiple cloud environments in a scalable and secure way.” – Tim Mitrovich, Artisan
17. Managing Cognitive Load. “Cognitive load is becoming more of a challenge as the answer to every question continues to be “shift left.” Where will enterprises turn to find employees who can set up and secure networks while also writing code and managing deployed applications? Some estimates indicate that developers spend 20% of their time working on infrastructure rather than writing code that solves business problems.” – Rick Kilcoyne, CloudBolt Software

For Full Article, Click Here