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Startups are an enjoyable but demanding professional experience. A host of entrepreneurially dedicated professionals pursue their passion and dive into the world of launching their own company with meteoric growth from businesses. E.g., Facebook, Uber, and Airbnb.

It is noted that in the fast-paced world of startups, there are a lot of challenges that are not faced in the regular office environment. From infrastructure to marketing, all processes of a startup must be built from scratch which becomes difficult for a new company, mainly due to a lack of investments. While the employee count can be subsequently low at the beginning with individuals being from multiple cities or even countries, the major issue arises when a proper structure is required to manage the work of each member.

With Cloud Computing above risks can be reduced.

First, let us understand what is cloud computing?

Cloud Computing is a network of computing services like servers, storage, databases, networking, software, analytics, and intelligence. You only pay for the cloud services you use which helps in reducing operational costs & runs your infra more efficiently. It follows a Pay as you go (PAYG) cost model for cloud services, which is much more beneficial than the traditional IT cost model that has a lot more upfront capital expenditures for both hardware and software requirements.

Read More:- Storage on Cloud

Read on as we discuss the reasons why adopting cloud computing systems can benefit your startup business.

Many people tend to think that life in the world of startups is very fascinating & exciting, still, it cannot be denied that it has its own set of risks and demerits. In a report presented by the Small Business Administration (SBA) Office of Advocacy’s (2018) Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ), it was stated that the number of Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) that are able to sustain through the five-year mark, range from only 45.4% to 51%.

 All bodies of startups have many risks: founders, investors, customers, and partners. But by following a proper approach such risks can be avoided.

As discussed, startups face the following few problems:-

1. Employee location. (different cities/countries/regions)
2. Lack of funds.
3. Stability.

Here are the major benefits of adopting cloud computing for your startup:-

1. Data Protection: Cloud Solution Providers put forward a group of technologies & services which help in data protection. Daily backups and snapshots on secure servers will secure your data.
2. Speed & Low Cost: Cloud Computing enhances the flexibility of your business. With just a few taps, it offers you a creative IT infrastructure at low costs. It is easy, quick, and requires minimal investment. You only pay when you use the server.
3. Effective Collaboration: With Virtualization now being the ‘new normal’, all the employees can work more profusely without the need for large spaces. Also, decreased infrastructure costs, power usage, maintenance, upgrades, hardware, installation services, and support expenses – all of which are immeasurably valuable savings for a startup. Cloud Computing allows all the employees of a firm to access various documents, files & other data from anywhere, anytime via Internet-enabled devices.
4. Scalability: A Cloud storage platform allows the organization to scale resources up or down in a flexible and cost-effective manner. Contrary to the conventional approach, where human intervention is necessary and costly, sophisticated software and hardware can be inserted or removed according to your convenience. The virtual existence of the cloud increases the usability and availability of service additions. The cloud’s versatility, usability, flexibility, and competitiveness to entrepreneurs are thus critical to the long term success rate of today’s marketplace.

The mobility, accessibility, affordability, and productivity that the Cloud provides is extremely beneficial for startups.

If you have any more ideas on how cloud computing can help startups, do share in the comment section. To read more blogs by Mismo Systems, click here.

1. Azure Compute

Azure compute is an on-demand computing service for running cloud-based applications. Azure compute service can be divided broadly into three categories.

• Infrastructure as a service

Virtual Machine: It is an IaaS service that allows us to deploy and manage VMs inside a virtual network (VNet). The most fundamental building block is the Azure virtual machine. We don’t need to buy any physical hardware and bear its maintenance cost. Using Azure virtual machine, we are able to deploy different services such as Windows, Linux within the Azure cloud. All this gets done within a few minutes. When we implement a virtual machine, every virtual machine will have an associated OS disk and data disk (if we want).

• Platform as a service

App Service: It is a managed PaaS offering from Microsoft Azure for hosting web apps, mobile app back ends, etc. With this, we can simply upload our code and it deploys the application for us.

• Serverless services

Infrastructure provisioning and management are invisible to the developer, hence the name serverless.

Azure Functions: With azure functions, we can run small pieces of code (“functions”) without worrying about the application infrastructure.

Azure logic apps: Azure logic apps are similar to azure functions, just that we don’t have to write code. With this, we can schedule, automate and orchestrate tasks, etc.

2. Azure Site Recovery

Azure Site Recovery is Azure’s built-in disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS).

What it does is when primary infrastructure goes down then it directs to the secondary infrastructure until it comes back again. It helps in business continuity.

As an organization, you need to adopt a business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR) strategy that keeps your data safe when planned and unplanned outages occur.

Simple to deploy and manage:

We can set up Azure Site Recovery simply by replicating an Azure VM to a different Azure region directly from the Azure portal. Azure Site Recovery is automatically updated with new Azure features as they’re released.

Reduce infrastructure costs:

It reduces the cost of deploying, monitoring, patching, and maintaining on-premises disaster recovery infrastructure by eliminating the need for building or maintaining a costly secondary datacenter.

Testing without disruption:

 You can easily run disaster recovery drills, without affecting ongoing replication.

RTO and RPO targets:

The recovery time objectives (RTO) and recovery point objectives (RPO) are within organizational limits. Site Recovery provides continuous replication for Azure VMs and VMware VMs, and replication frequency as low as 30 seconds for Hyper-V.

3. Azure Content Delivery Network (CDN)

Azure CDN delivers high bandwidth content to users by caching their content at strategically placed nodes across the world. It lowers the latency to a great extent and reduces the file download time.

CDN stores the cached content on edge servers in POP (Point of Presence) locations that are close to end-users.

4. Azure Cost Management

 While the cloud made it easy to deploy and manage thousands of resources, it’s also important to manage the cost. Microsoft Azure Cost Management delivers cloud business management solutions to multi-cloud enterprises so that they can grow the cloud with confidence. It helps organizations effectively manage and optimize cloud spend across Azure and other clouds.

Azure Cost Management is a SaaS offering that helps organizations to monitor, allocate, and optimize cloud spend in a multi-cloud environment (Azure, AWS and Google Cloud Platform, etc.).

• Service on by default
• Set budgets, track, and get alerts.
• Maximize cloud potential.
• Free to manage azure costs.
• Integrated with the azure advisor.
• Optimize cloud spending.

Have questions? Let us know in the comments section below!

We see all businesses small or big, consuming cloud technology in one or another way. The pandemic has increased the adoption substantially and before that security was one of the drivers of moving to the cloud.

While we help businesses to realize the benefits of cloud technologies, we are concerned about their misunderstanding (especially small & medium) that moving to the cloud will take away their responsibility and everything is managed by cloud provider including security.

It is super important to have a clear understanding of everyone’s responsibility. Some examples below:

• In case of SaaS services (e.g., Microsoft 365), you need to ensure that you are following the best practices to keep your account secure. Some of these are:
• Implementing Multi Factor Authentication (MFA).
• Disabling the services & accounts that are not required including legacy authentication.
• Have right process & procedures (onboarding & offboarding).
• Use Single Sign On/Single Identity to reduce the attack surface.
• Use premium security offerings like Advanced Threat Protection (ATP), Azure AD Premium, Intune etc.
• In case of Cloud platforms (IaaS & Pass):
• Make sure that you have opened only the required network traffic.
• Patching your servers regularly.
• Using offerings like Web Application Firewalls, DDoS protection etc. to protect your workloads.
• Protect database servers by isolating then in a different network.

Here is a diagram from Microsoft to help you understand the shared responsibility.

Another very important factor is to have regular monitoring & audit of the environment. This preventive approach helps you avoid security breaches and downtime. You can use the services of a Cloud Solutions Provider to do this for you.

It is the responsibility of cloud solution providers to share this information and making sure that customer is aware of this. To tackle this, we at Mismo Systems has decided that all of the customers will be managed. This will make it a little difficult for us to compete in the market due to the increased cost of adding managed services by default. However, we think it’s the only way and is in the best interest of our customers.

You can read about Mismo’s Managed Services here.

Let’s understand our responsibility and have safe cloud computing!

Cloud has bloomed over the last decade, according to Goldman’s analysts almost 23% of IT workloads now live on Public clouds, and expected to reach 45% in the next 4 years, with the cloud service market reaching a valuation of $1 trillion.

What is the driving force behind this immense growth?

The major factors are Cost, Security, and Accessibility. Cost is the main factor that most of the enterprise consider before making any decision. IT workloads can either be on Cloud or on-prem Data Centres.

On-Prem Data Centres: On-premises data centres are a group of privately owned & controlled servers. It is based on Capex (Capital Expenditure) model which means the enterprise must require in-house server hardware, software licenses, integration capabilities, and an in-house IT team to control, administer and maintain the data centre and resolve potential issues that may arise. This does not even factor in the amount of maintenance that an enterprise is responsible for when something breaks or does not work. Enterprise with a huge growth potential must also factor in the cost of future upgrades, which are going to be needed with increased workloads.

Cloud: Cloud works on Opex (Operational expense) model which means a third-party provider owns the infrastructure which includes hardware & software and enterprises can subscribe to services and manage their account over the internet, this allows enterprises to pay on an As-Needed basis and effectively scale up or down depending upon overall usage and user requirements.

(Read More:- A quick look at the 4 Most Used Services on Microsoft Azure)

Following are some of the parameters to compare the cost of both:

Infrastructure: – Since the on-prem data centre is a Capex which means enterprise must spend a huge sum of money on hardware, software licensing, data backup, IT staff, and space for the housing data centre. In cloud computing a third-party CSP pays for all of these and enterprises can choose from monthly or annual subscriptions. So, on-prem have an enormous upfront cost and cloud computing has none.

Compliance: – Enterprises in the health and finance sectors must be compliant with HIPPA, CCPA, etc. Enterprises having on-prem data centres need to recruit staff with proper knowledge about regulations to take care of compliance-related matters. Servers need to be properly configured and maintained to stay compliant, if something went wrong then the whole burden falls on the enterprise itself. Unlike on-prem, Cloud providers (Amazon, Microsoft, Google) spend a huge sum of money to stay compliant. Although the responsibility will be yours if your CSP is not compliant, you can trust the word of big CSP’s like Microsoft, AWS, Google Cloud, etc

Backup: – Enterprises having on-prem data centres are more prone to data loss because data is stored in internal servers and backup as well. Many enterprises choose to use cloud services for data backup even after having on-prem data centres, which is an overhead for enterprises. Enterprises are offered various services to avoid data loss in the cloud such as redundancy (LRS, GRS, and ZRS), retention policy, snapshots, etc. Data is everything nowadays so losing data could be a huge cost for enterprises.

Deployment: – Deployment cost is something that must be born in both solutions. Although Cloud deployment costs can be lower by outsourcing the deployment service to a CSP partner which is specialized in doing so.

Scalability: – Scaling up or down according to your workloads in on-prem requires capital, time, and manpower, however, it can be done with just a few clicks and at a comparatively lesser cost.

Monthly Management: – When it comes to operating costs in on-prem, it is somewhat fixed. It includes rent for space, electricity cost, and in-house IT staff salaries. In Cloud, you can outsource the management of cloud servers to a CSP partner at a significantly less cost.

If you still have questions about whether cloud computing is a solution to your complex IT problems? Call Mismo Systems today!

Cloud computing has established itself as the inevitable future when it comes to IT services. This picture becomes much clearer when we take a glimpse at some of the prominent cloud statistics such as, “one-third of companies’ total IT budget is allocated to cloud services” or Cisco’s statement saying that “94% of the world’s workload will be run on the cloud by 2021”.

If we take a brief look at the road that cloud computing has traveled so far, we can find that the concept first came into being in DARPA’s (the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) quest of developing a breakthrough technology that allows a “computer to be used by two or more people, simultaneously” in 1963.

As soon as the late 1990s came the years when Salesforce took a huge direction and giving rise to a whole new way of providing services to the globe i.e., SaaS (Software as a Service) when they made available their application to anybody with just an internet connection.

Since then, cloud computing has become a behemoth of a platform, far-reaching the imaginations of its progenitors, taking its modern form in 2006 when Amazon came up with AWS (Amazon web services) offering a fleet of VMs dubbed as EC2 (Elastic Cloud Computing).

At present, there is a multitude of major players in this segment starting from Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform to IBM Bluemix and Alibaba. All having their unique specialty and benefits.

Now that we have covered the ground of the cloud’s existence so far, let’s get back to the future. SaaS seems to be the ultimate stop for any IT offering and the statistics solidifying this argument is the latest forecast from Gartner, which predicts the SaaS revenue to be $113 Billion and some change just for 2021, higher than any other form of cloud offering. This surge can be seen not only in SaaS but in IaaS and PaaS as well.

The trust in the cloud is so profound at the present and strengthening by the day so much so that organizations feel highly confident in moving all of the Infra to the cloud, making it the fastest-growing service with ‘Cumulative Annual Growth Rate (CAGR)’ of 33.7%.

With the cloud offering a highly agile and flexible landscape, organizations are making the best of various strategies while moving to the cloud. One of the most popular ones being the hybrid cloud, which is the best of both worlds – Private and Public Cloud with 84% of the enterprise making use of this strategy.

It’s clear, looking at the picture above that cloud will come with various innovations as we go along and how companies make use of it will be equally interesting to watch. The stage has been set for the unprecedented level of modernization across the globe. We all as earthlings are set to reap benefits from this technologically revolutionary and green campaign and once more we all get the opportunity to bear witness to the future unfolding right in front of us.

Read more blogs from Mismo Systems here.

Azure Firewall is a managed, cloud-based network security service that protects your Azure virtual network resources.

You can centrally create, enforce the network connectivity policies across subscriptions and virtual networks.

Firewall features

Built-in high availability: No additional load balancers are required because High availability is built-in so, you don’t need to configure anything.

Availability Zone:  Azure firewall can be configured during deployment to span multiple Availability Zones to increase the availability, availability Zones increases the availability up to 99.99% uptime.

There is no additional cost for a firewall deployed in the availability Zone, However, there are additional costs for inbound and outbound data transfer associated with availability Zones.

Unrestricted  Cloud Scalability:  Azure Firewall can scale up as much as you need to accommodate changing network traffic flows, so you don’t need to budget for your peak traffic.

Application FQDN  filtering rules:  you can limit outbound HTTP and HTTPS traffic or Azure  SQL traffic to a specified list of fully qualified Domain names (FQDN) including wild cards. This feature doesn’t require TLS terminations

Network traffic filtering rules: you can centrally create allow or deny network filtering rules by source and destination IP address, port, and protocol. The Azure Firewall is fully stateful, so it can distinguish legitimate packets for different types of connections.  Rules are enforced and logged across multiple subscriptions and virtual networks.

FQDN tags: make it easy for you to allow well–known Azure Service network traffic through your firewall. For example, say you want to allow windows to update the network through your firewall. You create an application rule and include the windows update tag. Now network traffic from windows update can flow through your firewall.

Service tags:  A service tag represents a group of IP address prefixes to help minimize complexity for security rule creation. You can’t create your own service tag, nor specify which IP address is included within a tag. Microsoft manages the address prefixes encompassed by the service tag, and automatically updates the service tag as addresses change.

Threat intelligence:  Threat intelligence-based filtering can be enabled for your firewall to alert and deny traffic from/known malicious IP addresses and domains. The IP Addresses and Domains are sourced from the Microsoft Threats intelligence feed.

Outbound SNAT support: All outbound virtual network traffic IP addresses are translated to the azure Firewall public IP (Source Network address translation). You can identify and allow traffic originating from your virtual network to remote internet destinations. Azure Firewalls doesn’t SNAT when the destination IP is a private IP range per IANA-RFC-1918. If your organization uses a public IP  address range of private network, Azure Firewall will SNAT  the traffic to one of the firewall private IP  addresses in AzureFirewallSubnet. You can configure Azure Firewall to not SNAT your public IP address range.

Inbound DNAT Support: Inbound internet network traffic to your firewall public IP address is translated (Destination Network address translation) and filtered to the private IP addresses on your virtual networks.

Multiple Public IP addresses:  You can associate multiple public Ip addresses (up to 250) with your firewall.

This enables the following scenarios:

DNAT – you can translate multiple standard port instances to your backend servers. For example, if you have two public IP addresses, you can translate TCP Port 3389 (RDP) for both IP Addresses

SNAT- Additional Ports are Available for outbound SNAT connections, reducing the potentials for SNAT port exhaustion. At this time, Azure Firewall randomly selects the source Public IP address associated with your firewall. Consider using a public IP address prefix.

Azure Monitor logging:  All events are integrated with Azure Monitor, allowing you to archive logs to a storage account, stream, events to your event hub, or send them to Azure Monitor logs.

Forced Tunnelling: you can Configure  Azure Firewall to route all internet–bound traffic to a designated next hop instead of going directly to the internet.

For more details, contact us!

Cloud computing provides users with access to files, applications, data, and services from their Internet-connected devices, such as smartphones, laptops, and computers. Cloud computing also allows data collection and storing in a role that is independent of end-users. How Cloud Computing Can Boost Your Enterprise? This method is intended to allow companies of any size to make use of advanced software and information technology infrastructure to become more predominant and versatile, as well as to compete with much larger companies. Cloud computing, unlike traditional software and hardware, encourages companies to remain at the forefront of new tech without the need to make major investments in making purchases. In general, cloud computing requires being able to view and store services and data over the Internet rather than over hard drives.

Realizing the many benefits cloud computing provides to organizations and enterprises, we may make a strong argument that cloud infrastructure is also becoming a modern trend. Cloud infrastructure allows the world to address potential issues such as the management of big data, quality control, and cybersecurity. (Read:- How moving to the cloud reduces your impact on the environment?)

We at Mismo Systems have laid down a few important benefits of cloud computing that would help your business in increasing productivity!

Budget-friendly operations

You do not have to pay a penny on data upkeep, fuel costs, updates, or app licenses. This influence is the primary explanation of why a significant proportion of start-ups and small businesses use cloud computing to lower their costs.

24/7 Data Backup

If you want to secure your data and you do not have access to stable infrastructure, you need to implement a cloud storage backup plan.

If you want to keep your backup records on-site or want to access your finances from anywhere at any moment, cloud storage is the perfect way to protect your data.

In emergency conditions or system faults, such as flooding or burning, the data will never be destroyed as cloud storage immediately saves the data to their secure database servers. Or, if unexpected situations arise, you can quickly back up the data in minutes. In addition, it provides geo-redundancy measures in order to protect the data in a variety of centres in different locations.

Magnified Teamwork

Cloud technology helps enhance collaboration by helping different groups of people to compile a report remotely and effectively in real-time and via shared storage. This effect can reduce the amount of time on the market and enhance services and customer development.

In addition, you can save a huge amount of cash that you have to waste on upgrading the devices. By funding cloud computing providers with a low monthly charge, you can perform your company transactions effectively. It would also enable you to reduce your expenses by eliminating new users by using more restricted storage capacity to help decrease your running costs.

Improved Actions

You will be able to manage the business processes on a timely basis by running cloud computing programs. This feature will not only alert you as to what is latest, but it will also help you save a substantial amount of time. As a result, you can spend your precious time improving your efficiency.

With a variety of servers, cloud infrastructure allows customers to run their enterprises without any issues. We all recognize that individuals who are important members of the team will be able to access cloud services from different areas of the world in minutes.

Amplified Output

We also understand that we require balanced capital to increase productivity. Since cloud storage firms would work together better by storing information and records on the cloud, the productivity of each team member will gradually increase. This influence is the reason why companies carry out all their cloud-based initiatives to offer connectivity to those who are core components of their ventures.

You may change access conditions, and you can easily delete any limitations if any team members have permission to work on the project from other areas. Therefore, if you are still looking for something that can improve performance and competitiveness, then you need to choose this modern method.

Protection and uptime are usual for Office 365 in the cloud.

Companies are generating data at an utterly impressive pace these days, and there’s no reason to believe that’s going to change. Although some of this info is not very relevant, there are other forms that could harm an enterprise if it ends up in the wrong hands.

That is why it is so important to realize where your company’s data is stored: on the premises or in the cloud. Although all have their relative benefits, security is the most critical factor in this period of persistent data breaches.

If the company has growing security staff, companies will hardly bring together a staff that is big enough to discover and defend against the hundreds of potential warnings that come in each day. When you move to Office 365, it will serve as an extension of your security team. The data centres of Microsoft were designed with a scale in mind.

The cloud is a network of servers, each of which has a different purpose. A few of the data is processed. Others are running programs. You have certainly noted that, more and more, you don’t buy the apps in a shop box; you pay a subscription charge to use the web platform; that’s one iteration of the cloud in motion.

Another famous example is the posting of a photo on social media. If you take it on your computer, the picture will be saved on the internal memory drive of your device. When you post it to your social media account, it will be placed on the company’s cloud servers.

At the enterprise level, the cloud will be used to store the whole organization’s records. Simply put, these organizations no longer need their own on-site hosting data centre. It also allows it possible for workers to reach the company’s network from anywhere using a variety of different gadgets.

In order to keep Office 365 secure at the highest of industry expectations, the committed compliance team uses a wide variety of procedures, including the Security Development Lifecycle; traffic throttles; and the avoidance, monitoring, and mitigation of breaches at the organizational level.

Microsoft Office 365 has a 99.9 per cent financial backup assurance for uptime. To defend from potential threats, Office 365 offers you the ability to use Advanced Threat Protection to secure mailboxes from complex attacks in real-time. Each email attachment or linkage is immediately analyzed for fraudulent behaviour, and the malicious data is nullified before danger can occur.