by Go2Cloud Team | | blog
Ask your customers, or any customers for that matter, what they value most from their provider of choice and the most common answer you will get:
“Communication”
At this point, you’re likely asking yourself: “So, if Cloud can help improve communication, I’ll improve my customer service?”
Well, yes, but it’s not quite that simple. Opening up new communication channels is only valuable if the information shared through those channels is relevant.
Customers who feel informed, feel empowered.
That means, the question you should really be asking yourself is: “How do I empower my people with the right information, at the right time to ensure that their communications leave customers feeling informed?”. Now you’re onto something!
This is the exact question that two Go2Cloud partners, Vinewave and ECMPlus asked themselves and then answered with a collaboration that resulted in their latest product, named “In-Store Communicator”.
ECMPlus Director, Philippe Morin “We simply couldn’t accept that a dusty black book was the most effective way to capture customer requests in-store, but we also acknowledge that heavyweight software systems aren’t going to do much better.”
Looking at the “In-Store Communicators” onscreen interface reminds me of the saying “Simplicity, is in itself genius”.
The team have focused on delivering valuable information to the end user through an interface which is unintimidating and direct, even for inexperienced PC users (judge for yourself below). It even works across a wide range of devices including tablets, laptops and desktops.
The “In-Store Communicator’s” simple interface that can be tailored to meet any brand or information requirement.
More exciting than the beautiful interface, which is rebranded for each customer, has to be the speed at which this solution is deployed.
“Running the In-Store Communicator on top of the Go2Cloud platform allows us to rapidly deploy a custom, secure solution for each of our customers within a very short space of time. We get to focus on adding value for our customers, secure in the knowledge that the platform and performance are taken care of.” says Lawrence Cawood of Vinewave.
The simple answer to the title question has to be, if your goal is to improve customer service within a very short space of time, look to the Cloud to make rapid, positive changes for your business, your people and most importantly, your customers.
by Go2Cloud Team | | blog
It’s easy!
A little time and a lot of imagination, oh and don’t forget two PhD’s and one Masters in Computer Science.
Those are the magic ingredients that cross platform mobile development house “Appceptional” already have in their basket.
If you aren’t sure that those ingredients are magic, perhaps 4th place in the Nokia Create4Millions worldwide awards or 2nd place in the SIMagine Developers Contest and Vodacom App Stars competitions will convince you.
Still no? Seriously?
Okay, how about the close on 50 000 users who have chosen to interact with Mobiraba, just one of the apps built by the brainy team
Left to right, Mileta Postic, Sanja Postic,Lorenzo Boccetti, Warren Hodgkinson, David Vannucci, Megan Russell, Chris Kieser, Jurgen Meekel
Based on the internationally known game, Morabaraba, the cleverly named Mobiraba allows users across multiple platforms to either play against the computer or better yet, against another user. The smart engineering behind Mobiraba means that users don’t even have to be on the same platform to compete against each other.
In a world of platform dedicated apps, Mobiraba reminds us of that “ubiquitine” dream that web developers once held in such high regard, the ability to surface a similar end user experience no matter what the users platform of choice. No small feat in today’s multi OS ecosystems.
Co-founder of Appceptional, David Vannucci was quietly apprehensive at the initial launch of Mobiraba on the MXiT platform. “Mobiraba was already available to users on Nokia and Android platforms and based on this history we were expecting a manageable organic growth of new users”.
The Appceptional team could not have been more wrong.
“We released Mobiraba to the MXiT eco system late on Tuesday the 3rd of January 2012. Within 48hrs our external web traffic spiked so aggressively that we thought something must be broken.” Vannucci commented.
Proof that the growth of registered users was anything but organic growth.
Investigation revealed that the while nothing was actually “broken” the number of Mobiraba games played via MXiT was simply astounding.
With a wry smile Vannucci now comfortably comments, “Growth like this is usually every businesses dream and every infrastructure managers nightmare. It is a true testament to the power of the Cloud that we were able to remain up and running by instantly scaling to meet the demand.”
Appceptional leverage the Go2Cloud platform to manage a number of key elements that included the messaging relay for Mobiraba. Go2Cloud’s elastic cloud hosting capability provides customers and partners with instantly scalable compute capability. In addition local data centers ensure low latency and avoid any complications with data ownership often associated with providers in other geographies.
Go2Cloud Director and co-founder, Paul Slade, said in response “The amazing uptake of Mobiraba is fantastic. Seeing our customers go from concept through to such a successful product launch really is inspiring. The Go2Cloud team feel privileged to play a small part in powering Appceptional’s success”.
Since scalability is obviously no longer a concern for Appceptional, the focus must turn to “What next?” a question the team are no doubt continually ask themselves.
Vannucci’s obviously considered answer is a swift one, “This is simply the beginning of our plans. We have had over 22 000 user requests for Mobiraba tournaments, which will be our next feature. Of interest to our team at the moment is the number of brands looking to sponsor and brand the Mobiraba boards for these tournaments. Not surprising when you consider specific age groups and demographics are easily targeted and game play lasts over 8 minutes on average. That beats any billboard on the side of the road.”
There is no doubt that Appceptional is a business to watch, and that Mobiraba is just one of the apps up the teams sleeve. While they seem to be onto a winning recipe, one could argue that the secret ingredient was their ability to avoid any disappointment for users despite the rapid unplanned growth.
Perhaps there is substance to this “Cloud” buzz after all, or maybe it’s simply the instant scalability of Go2Cloud?
Update:
The Appceptional team shared the following with us post the writing of this article:
Sunday was really busy after we updated the mobiraba mxit codebase, instantly distributing this update to all players. Players were notified about the game update and the effect was amazing, we climbed to 2365 games played, with 4855 logins, and a combined high resolution exposure to the board graphic of 285 hours.
What would we have done prior to instant scale.
by Go2Cloud Team | | blog
Right off the back of our last blog post “How to Secure your Cloud Server“, the Go2Cloud GetHelp team flagged a potential security risk for all customers and partners using Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) to access their Windows environments.
As mentioned in the previous post, security is not an issue to that we take lightly and neither should you. Vigilance and action are the keys to ensuring that your environment remains secure.
Not all threats are as tame as Mike from Monsters Inc
We recommended that you always ensure that your OS and APPS are up to date with the latest patches, bug fixes and enhancements. This tip turns out to the be the exact action which would have mitigated your the risks associated to the vulnerability.
Go2Cloud does not publicly share information about these potential risks until such time as the details have been shared with Customers and Partners, allowing sufficient time to update systems and reduce risk further. If you would like to receive these communications directly in the future, please email us (gethelp(at)go2cloud.co.za) and the team will send you a link to update your subscriptions.
Details of the RDP vulnerability:
Microsoft has recently announced a vulnerability in Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) that affected all versions of Windows from XP through the latest pre-release of Windows 8, including all Windows Server products.
This bug allows a remote hacker to execute code on a system, essentially running any software they wish, without any intervention on the part of the user. Obviously, this is a critical vulnerability and should be addressed as soon as possible by all customers who are affected.
Anyone who uses RDP to connect to their Windows machines is vulnerable to this attack unless they take steps to ensure they apply the update.
Microsoft has released Security Update MS12-020 which will patch this vulnerability.
Official information may be found at Microsoft’s TechNet blog post on the issue here
If you can¹t patch your system at present for whatever reason, the blog post linked above offers several ways to mitigate the risk. If you fall into this category, you can also disable RDP entirely and install some other remote desktop application in place of RDP such as VNC.
Microsoft states, at time of writing, that this hasn’t been seen used as an exploit in the real world yet, but expect it to only be a matter of time. They have stated that they expect to see this vulnerability exploited within a matter of days.
Go2Cloud has been advising all customers to treat this as a matter of urgency, both in your Cloud and On-Prem environments.
I hope this information was useful!
For future updates please ensure that you are subscribed to the mailing lists relevant to you, check back with our blog or follow us on Twitter @Go2Cloud
by Go2Cloud Team | | blog
We hear it again and again: “Is the Cloud really secure?”
Before we get onto that, please excuse the immediate digression, but I cant help myself:
10 years ago my dad insisted that his data was critically important. So important in fact, that he bought a dedicated workstation which would “…never see the internet!“. I remember him boasting to his mates, “That will keep my data secure!“. He was right. At least until the moment that his well meaning IT guy, decided to do him a favor while topping up the printer cartridges and connected and configured the internal modem.
An hour later all the antibiotics in the world couldn’t have cured the viruses which had infected that machine. Data was a complete mess. On the plus side, the CD drive would randomly auto eject at exactly the right time to act as a handy cup holder.
What my dad realised that day, is that it’s not about putting blinkers on and hoping that you’re okay. It’s about education and following the necessary steps (all of them) to secure your environment.
The Cloud is no different.
Besides all the hard work that the Go2Cloud team put in to secure our data centers, at it’s most basic there are three things you need to look at when securing your Cloud Server:
1) Create strong passwords
2) Properly configure firewalls
3) Update your OS and Apps often (yes “apps” includes additional threat management software)
Let’s look at that in more detail shall we:
Creating Strong Passwords
Structure strong passwords, and don’t share them with anyone.
Sounds like common sense, but it happens all too often. Passwords are given up way too easily. In some cases the individual may not have asked you for your password, but spends a little time guessing and trying out a few common options.
If these individuals get more serious about cracking your password code, they may even use software tools to work through common passwords in an attempts to gain access to your server directly. Remember that you can see these attempts as well as the IP addresses they originate from within the Event Log.
With your Cloud server, be sure to set the access passwords at both an OS level and inside the Go2Cloud control panel per server.
Note that Go2Cloud do not broadcast our policies on password choice, but would gladly provide suggestions one to one if you like.
Properly Configure Firewalls
You wouldn’t leave your on premise server “firewalless” would you? Do the same with your Cloud server.
Inside our control panel we offer you a general software based firewall capability. This allows you to specify which ports you want to enable on your servers. Feel free to treat this as a supplementary security layer if you also have an additional firewall in place.
Most operating systems, such as Windows, have firewall capability built in. I know that the Go2Cloud technical team often recommend that it’s a good idea to start off by blocking everything and only opening ports when needed. It is also possible to restrict access on certain ports and protocols to certain IP addresses.
For multi-server setups you can take advantage of the private VLAN capability inside the control panel and have a server acting as a dedicated firewall. All other servers on your VLAN could then have their public nics disabled.
Remember that there are many great firewall software packages out there. ForeFront TMG is good option in the Microsoft space and for Linux we often suggest tools like Untangle.
Update your OS and Apps Often
Ever wondered what happens to those error reports which you so diligently send back to the vendors and community? Well, they actually go somewhere, get checked out by smart people and result in software updates.
This means that if any threat, loophole or bug is flagged in a current release, the future updates will work on addressing them
We all know that managing updates can be a bit of a pain, but it is a must.
For those Go2Cloud customers running Windows environments, you may have already noticed how quickly these updates download. This is because our smart technical team have done great work to ensure that updates are caching locally rather than having to be drawn from international servers all the time.
FYI – Rebooting and updating servers is “blazingly fast” (quote from an actual customer) on the Go2Cloud platform which should all contribute to making updates easy.
So there you have it, a few basics on how to improve the security of your Cloud servers.
As always, if you have any questions or comments, feel free to reach out to our team!
by Go2Cloud Team | | blog
The number one request we get from IT service providers is:
“Can we partner with Go2Cloud?”
The simple answer is … Yes.
There are already a number of businesses in South Africa who leverage Go2Cloud’s partner/reseller model. Frankly we have been amazed at the innovative ways in which these partners are adding value on top of the Go2Cloud platform for their customers. I guess you could say that they are delivering value added services which are “Powered by Go2Cloud“.
“Powered by Go2Cloud”
There is one caveat though. Go2Cloud, does not accept all comers. The team is selective about the partners we work with.
After all, in many cases customers approach us directly in order to request a referral to a specialist service provider, and just as with our platforms “100% uptime guarantee”, we need to feel 100% confident in the partners we work with and refer customers to.
Over the next few months, we will be focusing on sharing some of the fantastic success stories that customers and partners have already shared with us.
These solutions cover everything from MXiT Games and instant scalability under load, all the way through to CRM, ERP, Mobility and so much more.
If you would like to find out more about partnering with Go2Cloud’s please email by clicking here.
by Go2Cloud Team | | blog
Yes, that is Windows Server booting on an iPad:
Windows Server via Jump Desktop on iPad 2
VNC, RDP and SSH are defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as …
Just kidding!
Let’s get simpler than that.
Accessing Go2Cloud, whether it is a server or perhaps the awesome new Windows 8 Consumer Preview that you spun-up yesterday after following our blog post (which can be viewed here) can be done as follows.
Deciding which access options you will use, requires that you answer two questions:
1) What operating system is your server running (Windows or Linux based)?
2) What device are you using to access the server?
Lets deal with the first point first (usually a good place to start):
When setting up your server for the very first time, regardless of the OS chosen, you will need to use a VNC (Virtual Network Computing) client. This allows console level access to your server. Think of this as if you were plugging in a screen and keyboard into a brand new computer and watching it boot up for the first time.
Since you get console level access with VNC, you will be able to follow the set-up prompts during the install and configuration process without any issue.
Once your server is booted up, and ready to use, you may then configure the server to allow an alternative access option which is dependent on the OS you chose.
For Windows servers, RDP (Remote Desktop Protocol) and for Linux based servers
SSH (Secure Shell).
At this point, you may be wondering why would you even bother using RDP or SSH when VNC looks to work just fine.
The simple answer is that RDP and SSH allow for richer functionality and better performance when interacting with your sever. For example RDP allows: drive sharing, copy paste, printer connections, sound playback etc.
Second point second:
Depending on your device you likely have a number of VNC, RDP and SSH clients or apps to choose from.
Remember that you can use any option that you feel comfy with, but some of the Go2Cloud teams favorites are as follows:
iOS and Android devices: Check out our friends at Jump Desktop (which supports both VNC and RDP in one app)
MacOS: JollyFastVNC and Jump Desktop (currently in Beta). We have also used Remote Desktop Connection which installs by default with Microsoft Office for Mac 2011
Windows: TightVNC and the Windows Remote Desktop Client built into Windows natively.
Linux: Krdc and Remmina are both recommended by our Linux users.
Once you have these clients/apps in place, all you need is your servers IP Address and Password, both of which you can see inside the
Go2Cloud control panel.
IP and Password easily accessible from the control panel
Please note that we did not differentiate between paid and free apps. In all cases there are free versions available for your choice of Server OS and device but if you find one that you really like, and will be accessing Go2Cloud often, we can highly recommend purchasing your choice of app.
I hope that you agree, accessing your Go2Cloud environment is really simple, once you know how.
