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In my previous post about how you can have better conversations with your customers about the cloud, I wrote about the fact that speed and agility were the primary drivers for cloud adoption. We also discussed about the multiple cloud deployment models, their definitions, and the future of these models. In this post, I am going to share with you, ten mantras that you can use to have successful conversations with your enterprise customers.

1. Articulate the value that you bring: Enterprises that are looking to move to the cloud may be doing so because of a business mandate or because of a technology enthusiast having recommended a cloud alternative. It is your responsibility to talk to them about all things cloud – the technology and how it works, the business value that it delivers, how it is going to change the roles and responsibilities within IT, and how it will impact user experiences.
2. Help your customers understand your services: Even though cloud computing is no longer a new concept, enterprises and their staff may not understand everything about the way you deliver your services. Explain to them about why and how it makes sense to move a function (possibly in-house) to the cloud, what value that brings, and what the requirements, costs, and benefits are. If there is a need for new infrastructure, competencies, or investments, or if the firm is not yet ready for moving the function to the cloud, it is your duty to let them know. It is better not to make a sale and have a happy future customer than acquire an unhappy customer.
3. Help your customers choose the right option: Many companies still do not understand the difference between the various cloud alternatives, the value of each, and when they are best put to use. Take the time to talk to them about when to use private, public, and hybrid deployment models. Talk to them about when it just makes sense to use an on-premise solution and not move it to the public cloud or how a hybrid approach could be the best solution for their business needs. Help your customers understand the difference between a fully managed service and a cloud service. You'll be surprised to know that not many people understand the difference!
4. Talk to your customers about your SLAs: Your customers need to understand the value that you provide to them across the various value drivers – so provide them SLA measures around the economics of using the cloud, about how it increases agility, and quality. If you can share with them metrics from other successful customer deployments especially a similar company – same vertical, same size – that is the best validation you can provide. A success story trumps speeds n'feeds every time!
5. Provide input to the cloud business case: Your enterprise customers may be looking at you to provide them with all the information to build a strong business case that they can use to sell to their managers and executives. If you want to make the sale, you need to make sure that your pitch to the people that you meet can help them build out a strong case.
6. Be cognizant of the people costs: As service providers you already know that your services may be causing changes to your customers' IT organizations. That may mean that some of their staff may need to be retrained or moved to take on new responsibilities. Make your case carefully to ensure that you do not hurt the sensitivities of people that may need to experience some of these changes.
7. Define governance mechanisms: As your customers will need to start engaging with you on a day to day basis for something that they may have traditionally executed in-house, there is a need for you to ease them into the process. Provide them information about possible governance mechanisms, workflows, and escalation paths – these need not be final, but they need to know that you have it thought out. This will help them overcome some of their worries about losing control.
8. Know technology futures: Your enterprise customers will want to make sure that you have the technology to support not just their current needs but also their future needs. It is therefore critical that you are able to articulate your thoughts on the future of the technology area and how the technology platform that you are offering has what it takes to make them successful not just today but also in the future.
9. Have relevant case studies: As people, we tend to lend credence to the thoughts of others who are very similar to us. Since people buy from people enterprises are no different, they tend to live by that same philosophy so it is important to manage relationships appropriately. Make sure you have case studies or examples of firms that are very similar to the firm that you are meeting with – and remember similarity goes beyond just being in the same vertical space. Look hard enough and you will find similarities emerge in patterns – so, don't worry if you don't have too many customers in the same industry vertical or geography. Similarity can be found beyond that.
10. Don't stretch the truth: Never exaggerate and don't ever sell more than you can deliver. Remember, it is always good to think big, but never good to over promise and under deliver. It doesn't take too much for a seasoned executive to call your bluff. Remember, your enterprise customer is possibly speaking to others as well and can see through your exaggerated claims. And in today's Internet enabled world, there are really no secrets. Start small, deliver on your promises and it won't be long before your doing more with the customer than you could ever have imagined.

Let us know if you found these tips useful. We are always eager to hear from you. Are there tips that you would add to this list based on your experiences?

I am sure you all have been through a POC that turns into the never ending science experiment. You're not alone, we all have. However, these situations can be avoided by following the six steps outlined below to provide a much more effective experience for both parties.

The key to an effective proof of concept is to ground the POC in outcomes that achieve both the technical and business objectives, ensuring that both parties understand the business case and how to measure the success of the Proof of Concept. In addition to verifying the technology works as advertised, you will need to be measuring the business value that they need to achieve to make a decision to move forward.

6 Steps to an Effective Proof of Concept (POC):

1. Identify mutual objectives and BANT (Budget, Authority, Need and Timeline) criteria upfront before you even start talking about the POC.
2. Understand why the prospect or customer wants to enter into the POC – what are the business outcomes that they want to achieve throughout the POC.
3. Eliminate or sideline the competition by highlighting your strengths and their weaknesses during the POC process
4. Connect to your prospect's culture - understand the people and their personalities, their processes, how they measure success, and how they treat their vendors.
5. Evaluate if the prospect is a serial technology shopper who puts vendors through multiple proof of concepts without ever making a decision, or their decision making process takes multiple years.
6. Always, always document the test plan including business objectives, technical requirements, individuals involved, key milestones, and conditions for a decision; and obtain sign off on a formal document from the economic buyer before starting the POC to avoid scope creep.

The most important aspect of a POC is to understand the buyer's goals and how they measure success. If you are not clear on how they measure success, this could lead to months of frustration and become the dreaded science experiment. Always make sure to get commitment with the key stakeholders on their desired outcome and their success criteria.

David Smith, VP Partner Sales, Asigra

Gone are the days of being able to store your precious data on backup tapes - what with the new advances in backup/recovery software, tapes are just too time consuming, cumbersome and a hassle to manage compared to the alternatives. Unfortunate and unpredictable natural disasters are teaching businesses that they need to have a disaster recovery/business continuity plan in place that does not include or augments tape backups kept on-site or close to the data center.

With a property portfolio comprised of 164 properties and totaling approximately 16.9 million square feet of gross leasable area, including 143 shopping centers, ten development/redevelopment properties, five non-retail properties and six land parcels, Equity One, Inc. has a lot of data to manage.

Equity One Inc. was faced with protecting their data at several locations and ensuring business continuity for their operations. They turned to RestorePoint powered by Asigra, a technology company providing data protection and disaster recovery solutions for critical customer data.

"Working with RestorePoint and Asigra gives me confidence in my data protection plan," said Ivan De Moya, IT Director of Equity One, Inc. "I know that if I ever need to restore, it will take a few minutes rather than several hours. It's about the recovery, not only the backup, and I know that Asigra and RestorePoint will keep my data safe."

A feature that appealed to Equity One, Inc. with RestorePoint services was Asigra's agentless architecture, which means Asigra agents don't have to be installed on every machine that requires backup. Instead, Asigra software is installed on a single machine (physical or virtual) and backups everything on the network, from user files to ERP databases.

To learn more about Equity One and how a cloud backup service powered by Asigra allows them to ensure increasingly large amounts of data are recoverable in case of a disaster, view the complete case study.

Managing data has become one of the most important and complex IT challenges for businesses of all sizes. Organizations are creating and saving data in unprecedented quantities. This amassing accumulation of data represents a company's most valuable asset and it must be backed up wherever its location, protected/encrypted, stored and made available to the organization whenever and wherever it is needed. Watch this video Asigra Version 12: Recover NOW from ANYWHERE to learn more about how your data should be protected.

Businesses using traditional tape back-ups rather than cloud-based alternatives could unknowingly have a major gap in their disaster recovery plans, according to research conducted by Icomm Technologies.

Leading IT service provider Icomm Technologies surveyed 121 SMEs in the UK about their back-up solutions – finding that 73% use old-fashioned tapes to back-up data. Tapes, which are increasingly being replaced by cloud-based storage, are more prone to failure and are more subject to human error than newer options of protecting and recovering enterprise data. Additionally, the research also showed that 90% of SMEs using tapes never ran a test backup to ensure their backup method was in proper working order and that data was recoverable in case of user error or a disaster-like event.

Icomm's, Ian Callens, Sales Manager said: "The words 'disaster recovery' usually conjure up images of fire, theft and terrorism but a simple server failure is much more likely and can be just as disruptive... our new findings suggest that many businesses would not only lose data but also face delays of several days to restore their back-ups if they had an IT failure."

To learn more about disaster recovery plans and Icomm's total research findings, read the full article

In November, Asigra, the first enterprise-class cloud backup software to achieve NIST FIPS 140-2 certification and to provide support for everything from data centers to servers, desktops, laptops, tablets and smart phones, launched their newest version of Asigra Cloud Backup™ software; the industry's first enterprise cloud backup and recovery software solution to backup corporate data residing in SaaS and PaaS platforms.

According to Eran Farajun, Executive Vice President, Asigra, Asigra Cloud Backup protects more than 550,000 sites around the world through an extensive partner network of service providers who deliver cloud backup and recovery services as private, public or hybrid cloud deployment models to enterprises. View the video now to hear more about the innovative features in the current release, and how Asigra allows you to recover now from anywhere.

Features and advantages of Asigra include:

1. Virtual Disaster Recovery
   
   1. Allows customers to recover data instantaneously
2. Ability to Manage Snapshots directly from disk to array
   
   1. Make sure customers can identify data in unique user cases/scenarios
3. Expanded Mobile Device Support
   
   1. Providing you with the ability to backup and recover different file types
4. Enterprise Cloud to Cloud Backup and Recovery for Saas and PaaS Applications
   
   1. Data protection and immediate support for cloud-based applications such as Salesforce.com

These advances just scratch the surface. Asigra Cloud Backup™ comes with all the same security and recovery and restore assurance (R2A) features that are hallmarks of the Asigra platform. Asigra Cloud Backup enables recovery NOW from ANYWHERE in the enterprise. To learn more about Asigra view the product brochure.

How cloud technologies and providers can help in the transition to new IT paradigms

Newton's laws of motion work even beyond the world of physics. Nowhere do you see them more at work than in today's enterprise IT departments. As users have begun to demand increasing flexibility in the choice of devices, operating platforms, and service options, buoyed by the rise of concepts such as bring your own device (BYOD), consumerization of IT, and self-service provisioning, enterprise IT departments have been slow to respond to change – sometimes even resisting change. This is a classic case of the law of inertia in action. However, even as enterprise IT departments scramble to respond to the changes in the way people work, they have very little choice but to go along with what is fast becoming the new ways of working.

Fortunately for them, cloud computing as a technology has matured significantly and is finding widespread acceptance in enterprise environments. This is good news as using cloud technology and partnering with a cloud services provider is the fastest and painless way to ease into the new realities of the enterprise IT workplace. Why do I say this? Let me explain.

Enterprises are laggards in the adoption of new technologies and paradigms. (Of course, this statement does not apply to every organization, there are always some who are free spirits or early adopters, but for the most part the enterprise tends to be resistant to change). It is here that cloud technology and service providers can help provide the levers to ease the transition to a new approach.

By itself, cloud computing as a technology is inherently flexible. From cost to location and technology, the cloud opens up new vistas and provides options that might not have existed. For example, the cloud can obviate the need for new capital expenditure offering you a "pay as you go" alternative. And there is no lock-in of any kind. Should you change your mind, it is always easy to migrate to a new model or federate your data and applications across clouds and even cloud providers. And for those that fear about the security of the data, cloud technology today provides better options than mainstream approaches. One example of this is for enterprises to look for technologies that have obtained accreditation from well known industry affiliations or government approvals such as the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) FIPS 140-2 certified encryption that is provided to enterprise cloud backup and recovery solutions that provides assurance that data is encrypted both in-flight and at rest and provides enterprises with methods to protect data in all endpoint devices such as laptops, smartphone and tablets. As part of the due diligence process, enterprises need to ask to ensure they are selecting and deploying technologies that have been tested and have received industry accreditation from the appropriate standard bodies.

Cloud service providers help ease the process of transition. Well versed in new IT paradigms, they bring skills and expertise that they glean from their many customer implementations. This helps enterprises add capabilities to their IT department without incurring the costs and efforts of hiring new employees or the time needed for newly hired or trained employees to ramp up. It also helps change mindsets and culture – accelerating the fostering of the services paradigm in IT and in bringing renewed accountability and service level agreement driven operations. Such cultural changes may take much longer and may be much tougher to implement in-house. Other than these softer benefits, of course, are the more tangible and well known benefits of lower cost and higher returns on the invested dollar.

"If I have seen farther than others, it is by standing on the shoulder of giants", said Isaac Newton, the inventor of the laws of motion (which includes the law of inertia). Cloud technologies and service providers are big and powerful giants in today's world. Enterprises that want to go far in the future and stay ahead of competition need to take the leap!

Eric Zorn of the Chicago Tribune shares a great reminder about the importance of backing up your data. Unfortunately the individual below had to learn the hard way that his data was more valuable than his laptop. Which begs the question, would you pay for the return of your lost data? And how much would you actually pay? For example, if the data contained a critical project or beloved family photos, how much would you be willing to offer?

Here's what happened:

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is an agency of the U.S. Department of Commerce that develops and promotes measurement, standards, and technology. Federal Information Processing Standards Publications (FIPS PUBS) are issued by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). FIPS 140-2 is the most current security requirement for cryptographic modules, or encryption. Asigra was the first Cloud Backup and Recovery vendor to have received validation that its encryption meets these strict standards. View Asigra's FIPS 140-2 Certification. What does this mean for users of Asigra Cloud Backup™?

Business Benefits of NIST FIPS 140-2 Certification

Storing your mission critical data in a service provider's cloud is often a source of contention for enterprises as security and reliability is of utmost concern (as well it should be). What a service provider who utilizes a NIST FIPS 140-2 certified backup and recovery software provides to the enterprise and the users of the backup and recovery software is data that is encrypted at flight and at rest. Not only that but Asigra's technology ensures that the customer is provided two encryption keys – one at the account level and another one at the customer end that aggregates, encrypts and compresses the data. Only a person who knows both the keys can restore the data in unencrypted form from a secure offsite vault. Because we take security so seriously, our software is agentless meaning we don't have traditional agents utilizing a port in the firewall for every agent, creating vulnerability in the server architecture.

Award-winning Asigra Cloud Backup and Recovery is secure, trustworthy and dependable. To learn more about the business benefits of agentless backup software including increased scalability and decreased costs, view our chalk talk: Ensure Ease of Recovery with Asigra's Agentless Software.

Wouldn't it be nice if you could buy your licensing capacity in bulk to better improve your flexibility and customer responsiveness?  With the innovative Asigra Cloud License Server you can.

As a service provider, it is guaranteed that your clients will have different amounts of data and rates of data growth. You can purchase licensing capacity based on projected need and have the real time adaptability you need to respond to the changing requirements of your customers - easily distributing sub-terabyte provisioning options amongst customers based on their individual needs.

In Asigra's latest Chalk Talk, Pavan Vyas, Product Marketing Manager explains this innovative technology and its business benefits for Managed Service Providers (MSPs). MSPs who utilize this feature are able to:

• automate licensing capacity management
• automatically meet the backup and recovery needs of your clients
• minimize disruption to your clients' work through failover protection
• reduce the staff time devoted to managing each client
• support multiple deployment models including public, private and hybrid clouds

In the traditional world of data protection, backups and snapshots were considered as substitutes or alternates - and that doing one meant that you didn't need to do the other. Due to the fact that snapshots took birth in the world of storage, it remained an arcane technology to backup administrators; managed and controlled by the storage administrator. However, this separation of responsibilities led to the creation of islands of data protection. Many times the storage administrator and the backup administrator both protected the same data leading to inefficient use of resources and a lot of confusion when looking to restore the information at the time of a data loss.

With the growing popularity of big data and with rapid growth in data volumes, the need to protect data using a quick and efficient approach is becoming ever more important. This need is exacerbated by the fact that businesses are becoming global and backup windows are shrinking. Snapshots offer a perfect solution with their rapid hardware based data protection capabilities which ensure that large data backups can complete in very short time intervals. We're not alone in holding this view. Jason Buffington from ESG also spoke to this very idea in his blog post regarding snapshot based data protection.

And so, at Asigra we have been making enhancements to ensure that the two approaches come together in our software. In V11.2 we announced support for software based methods for snapshot data protection. In V12, we have gone a step further introducing the support for hardware based snapshot data protection in our platform. And with the aim of aiding the integration of snapshots into the role of the backup administrator, we have built in the Snapshot Manager interface which provides the capabilities to the backup administrator to schedule, manage, and control the entire snapshot process using the familiar Asigra interface.

At Asigra we believe that in this world where convergence is the new mantra and where silos are being torn down every day, this change needs to permeate the backup world as well. A true enterprise class software solution needs to provide backup administrators with all the tools, technologies and methodologies needed for data protection without building in additional barriers to its adoption. It is for this precise reason that the Snapshot Manager is integrated into our platform with no additional licensing.