Periodically, we turn over control of the CenturyLink Cloud blog to members of our Marketplace Provider Program to share how their technology on the CenturyLink Hybrid IT Marketplace provides customers with low-friction solutions to solve complex business challenges. This edition’s guest author is Taylor Hyams, Channel Marketing Manager at StreetSmart.

With great pressure to innovate and differentiate themselves from the competition, companies big and small across all verticals are in the middle of a digital transformation. This new era changes how work is completed, and one major piece of that transformation is mobility.

Organizations with field service have been at the forefront of mobilization in the workplace, and the ability to anticipate real-time visibility and better engage customers would be a game-changer for their field workers and dispatchers. Most organizations that are looking to implement field service are focused on scheduling or visibility and location of resources. However, this is only a small portion of the benefits associated with a mobility solution like StreetSmart.

A Better Approach to Field Service

StreetSmart, a product of ClickSoftware, has been empowering companies to gain visibility, improve productivity, and better engage customers with its turnkey mobile workforce management solution that can automate administrative tasks and back office APIs.

StreetSmart...

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Periodically, we turn over control of the CenturyLink Cloud blog to members of our certified technology Ecosystem to share how their technology on the CenturyLink Marketplace provides customers with low-friction solutions to solve complex business challenges. This edition’s guest author from the CenturyLink Marketplace Provider Program is George Symons, COO, at Sureline Systems.

I would like to thank CenturyLink for the opportunity to leverage its blog to tell you about a new solution we have for data management of Office 365 e-mail on the CenturyLink Cloud. Sureline is known for our award winning SUREedge® enterprise-class software solutions for Cloud Migration and Cloud Disaster Recovery. SUREedge works with a wide variety of on-premises hypervisors and cloud systems and provides automated transformation of virtual servers to target environments. It reduces risk through encryption and provides efficient data transmission through deduplication and compression technologies. SUREedge technology allows CenturyLink customers to rapidly migrate any workload from physical or virtual systems into the CenturyLink Cloud, use the CenturyLink Cloud as a DR site, and now manage Office 365 Email data on CenturyLink Cloud. SUREedge and CenturyLink Cloud offer a flexible Office 365 e-mail data management solution for enterprises. The solution allows you to take...

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Periodically, we turn over control of the CenturyLink Cloud blog to members of our certified technology Ecosystem to share how their technology on the CenturyLink Marketplace provides customers with low-friction solutions to solve complex business challenges. This edition’s guest from the Cloud Marketplace Provider Program is Server General.

The General Data Protection Regulation, or GDPR, replaces the Data Protection Directive (“Directive”), which has been in effect since 1995. The GDPR became law in April 2016, but organizations were given a two-year grace period to comply. The effective date for compliance is on May 25, 2018. The GDPR enables all EU nations to have a single set of rules that apply to all organizations that process personal data of EU citizens. The underlying idea is that every EU citizen has a fundamental right to privacy. To ensure compliance the GDPR employs two tiers of financial penalties; up to 2 percent of annual global revenue/10 million Euros for violations such as failing to notify a supervisory authority and affected parties about a data breach or for failing to appoint a Data Protection Officer (DPO) if one is needed; the penalty could increase up to 4 percent of annual revenue/20 million Euros for violations...

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Periodically, we turn over control of the CenturyLink Cloud blog to members of our certified technology Ecosystem to share how their technology on the CenturyLink Marketplace provides customers with low-friction solutions to solve complex business challenges. This edition’s guest author from the Cloud Marketplace Provider Program is Russ Zilles, VP Testing Solutions for IR.

Assess, tune, and verify the Customer Experience (CX) delivered by your UC and/or Contact Center technology with StressTest™ load/performance testing and HeartBeat™ experience testing and alerting, two cloud-based offers from IR available on the CenturyLink Marketplace. No need to purchase hardware or software; we test from the outside-in, without adding any products to your infrastructure.

StressTest goes beyond component level testing to deliver comprehensive performance verification of production systems and environments. Test calls are generated remotely and access your system via the Public Telephone Network, just like real Customers, following a carefully defined test case script to access and interact with your communications technology. By testing UC, IVR, and contact center systems from the outside-in, StressTest reveals the customer perspective of system performance under real-world conditions.

Whether it’s a new service, recovery after repair, or upgraded or expanded self-service capabilities, StressTest allows you to proactively identify issues and manage...

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Periodically, we turn over control of the CenturyLink Cloud blog to members of our certified technology Ecosystem to share how their technology on the CenturyLink Marketplace provides customers with low-friction solutions to solve complex business challenges. This edition’s guest author from the Cloud Marketplace Provider Program is Robert Black, Director of Marketing for Panopta.

Organizations of all sizes, across the globe, are all in some stage of a digital transformation. A huge part of this journey is finding the right cloud technologies for reducing operational expenses, increasing security, visibility, and maximizing employee productivity. Even the most reliable cloud infrastructures are subject to downtime and performance degradation, which have a tremendous impact on the quality of the end-user experience. A comprehensive monitoring solution is paramount to ensure that the server, application and network infrastructure is operating optimally. A robust infrastructure monitoring solution not only saves time and resources, but also reduces data center overhead and ensures service availability.

Panopta: Powerful Monitoring Solutions

Panopta is excited to join the CenturyLink Marketplace as an Ecosystem Partner to provide CenturyLink customers with advanced infrastructure monitoring available as a SaaS offering through direct provisioning on existing CenturyLink Cloud infrastructure. Regardless of how much infrastructure you need to monitor, Panopta...

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Periodically, we turn over control of the CenturyLink Cloud blog to members of our certified technology Ecosystem to share how their technology on the CenturyLink Marketplace provides customers with low-friction solutions to solve complex business challenges. This edition’s guest author from the Cloud Marketplace Provider Program is Steven Umbehocker, CEO of OSNEXUS.

QuantaStor SDS, developed by OSNEXUS, was created to solve complex storage needs across many industries and brings game-changing technology to the software defined storage market. QuantaStor, a unified file, block, and object software defined storage platform, is designed to scale up and out to make storage management easy while reducing enterprise storage costs. The platform addresses a broad set of storage use cases including server virtualization, big data, cloud computing, and high-performance applications through both physical and virtual storage appliances. Companies in industries including Life Sciences, Media & Entertainment, High-Performance Computing, Energy & Utilities, Financial Services, Healthcare, Law Enforcement, have deployed QuantaStor SDS to solve their unique data storage use cases and business demands. QuantaStor’s grid-scale technology is a key feature that sets it apart from competitors in the software defined storage market. The grid technology enables the scaling of storage up and out to 64 physical or virtual storage appliances...

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Periodically, we turn over control of the CenturyLink Cloud blog to members of our certified technology Ecosystem to share how their technology on the CenturyLink Marketplace provides customers with low-friction solutions to solve complex business challenges. This edition's guest provider from the Marketplace Provider Program is Alert Logic.

Businesses' top priorities are to provide a service that meets the needs of its customer base, grow in their respective markets, generate revenue, and protect their investments. Ensuring that your company has an adaptive and comprehensive security model is one of the best ways to protect the company’s investments, data, customers, and reputation.

Security threats are nothing new and only continue to evolve, getting harder to detect and eliminate. To ensure that a business is continuously secure takes time, effort, resources, and expertise. This can be a challenge for companies who are trying to manage their security posture while still supporting the day-to-day business operations. IT infrastructure is more dynamic than ever, with on-premises data centers, cloud and hybrid environments, and an ever-changing threat landscape. Without a clear line of sight into your entire infrastructure environment, how can you protect your data and applications from compromise?

A Better Approach to Security

Alert Logic's Security-as-a-Service offering...

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Periodically, we turn over control of the CenturyLink Cloud blog to members of our certified technology Ecosystem to share how their technology on the CenturyLink Marketplace provides customers with low-friction solutions to solve complex business challenges. This edition's guest author from the Cloud Marketplace Provider Program is Sid Prasanna, CEO, at FlexSecure.

Passwordless Authentication Made Easy

FlexSecure solves a unifying problem -- the need to dynamically secure access to resources and data, based on the user and their level of authorized access. Many solutions exist for granting access in a static way, but no easy-to-use solution exists that can adjust the security authentication requirements in real-time, based on dynamic factors in the security equation.

By adding FlexSecure to their existing authentication or access control systems, organizations can adopt multi-layered authentication options. Multi-layered authentication enable organizations to add significant levels of security to protect their data from hackers and prevent unauthorized access.

FlexSecure is a flexible user authentication platform, providing Passwordless and Pin-based authentication, without the need to install an application. This platform enables organizations of all sizes to mix and match appropriate user authentication methods to protect applications on their Cloud, Mobile, and IT infrastructure. The FlexSecure platform is easy and secure and offers...

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Periodically, we turn over control of the CenturyLink Cloud blog to members of our certified technology Ecosystem to share how their technology on the CenturyLink Marketplace provides customers with low-friction solutions to solve complex business challenges. This editions guest author from the Cloud Marketplace Provider Program is Eric Wolff, Senior Product Marketing Manager, at Thales e-Security. Thales e-Security acquired our long-term partner Vormetric earlier this year.

Downtime – nobody likes it. Unplanned downtime is almost always expensive. A 2015 report from IDC even revealed that for the Fortune 1000, the average total cost of unplanned application downtime is $1.25 billion to $2.5 billion per year.

Planned downtime is also a pain. Before I was in the security business, I marketed network solutions that were “bumps on the wire” which required planned downtime for deployment. There were ways to minimize or even reduce the downtime, but they were complicated.

These same downtime obstacles present themselves with encryption. There's a great return on investment (ROI) – you can sleep better knowing that data thieves get nothing they can use (and how happy you’re making the compliance team). But, for enterprise-class encryption, there’s almost always a planned downtime period while tens of thousands of files or...

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Periodically, we turn over control of the CenturyLink Cloud blog to members of our certified technology Ecosystem. This editions guest author is Nathan A. Treska, Director Global Strategic Alliances, at Dynatrace.

Building Strategic Alliances

2017 marks the 9th year of partnership between CenturyLink and Dynatrace. It’s been an amazing journey together, but what’s next you may ask? Good question… both companies continue to evolve and innovate, because if we don’t, customers and the competitive landscape will evolve around us before we know it! The mission of our alliance is to help our customer’s applications perform to their maximum business objective, via the execution venue that fits each customers respective business demands. Ensuring application performance for new initiatives is one of the most critical steps for any digital transformation.

As the complexity of applications and platforms continues to grow and cloud adoption continues to expand, IT teams are rethinking how they monitor and manage their distributed, web scale applications and dynamic infrastructures. Application performance drives customer experiences, employee productivity and revenue – making a comprehensive application monitoring and management strategy increasingly critical for every organization.

Digital transformations accomplish the most dramatic change in status for businesses. With digital technology driving the business, you can move faster, serve...

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Periodically, we turn over control of the CenturyLink Cloud blog to members of our certified technology Ecosystem to share how they leverage our platform to enable customer success. This week’s guest author from the Cloud Marketplace Provider Program is Chad Zerangue, CEO, at Simplicity Health Systems.

Health information is becoming increasingly difficult to manage as clinical and financial requirements and regulations become more stringent and partnering relationships become increasingly complex. This is especially the case when it comes to sharing information with ancillary services like pharmacies, radiology departments, medical laboratories, third-party providers, and specialist providers. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Office of Civil Rights (OCR) has a growing HIPAA Audit Program. HIPAA-covered entities will be required to make sure their systems are compliant with the HIPAA Privacy Act or face heavy fines, jail time, or both. Many small and medium sized healthcare businesses can’t afford multi-million dollar health information systems that larger hospitals and other large health entities can. In turn, they resort to non-compliant tools such as email, fax machines, eFax, RingCentral, Box, and DropBox. Simplicity Health Systems is disrupting that paradigm with a system that allows healthcare businesses to easily share information with their partners,...

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Periodically, we turn over control of the CenturyLink Cloud blog to members of our certified technology Ecosystem to share how they leverage our platform to enable customer success. This week’s guest author from the Cloud Marketplace Provider Program is Matt Pley, VP Carrier & Service Provider Group, at Fortinet.

Cloud computing is becoming increasingly popular among enterprises looking to take advantage of quick deployment, unprecedented scalability, and cost savings. Both public cloud adoption and private cloud infrastructure, including virtualization and software-defined networking (SDN), are rapidly transforming data centers worldwide. Evolving your infrastructure means your security must evolve as well. If your security can’t keep up with the agile public, private, and hybrid cloud environments of today, gaps in protection will occur. The Fortinet Security Fabric has integrated next-generation firewall (NGFW) technology with the CenturyLink Platform to help businesses achieve end-to-end security without the complexity.

End-to-end Next Adaptive Security Protection

The award winning Fortinet Security Fabric network security solutions provide end-to-end security across the entire network. FortiGate enterprise firewalls are optimized for internal segmentation, perimeter, cloud, data center, distributed, and small business deployments. Organizations can simplify their security posture with one security solution across your physical, virtual, and cloud deployments.

Organizations can choose individual services,...

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Periodically, we turn over control of the CenturyLink Cloud blog to members of our certified technology Ecosystem to share how they leverage our platform to enable customer success. This week’s guest author from the Cloud Marketplace Provider Program is Ross Gray, VP at Cloudsoft

Cloudsoft Application Management Platform (AMP) is software which streamlines the development and operation of applications. AMP orchestrates services, platforms, and infrastructures to ensure they directly meet the needs of applications, dynamically and in real time. This results in more reliable operations, productive development, and greater agility for IT to respond to their business needs. Now, Cloudsoft AMP is available on the CenturyLink Platform via Blueprint. CenturyLink Cloud works with Cloudsoft to provide agility and reliability throughout the application lifecycle, and provide users with the ability to build applications across any cloud, or across many clouds.

Behind the Cloud AMP Technology

AMP is built on a foundation of Apache Brooklyn, Clocker, Apache jclouds and other open source technologies. AMP collects and packages the open source projects Apache Brooklyn and Clocker. AMP’s autonomic policy-based management transforms cloud operations and liberates applications from infrastructure, allowing you to mix-and-match bare metal, virtual machines and containers.

Cloud AMP utilizes autonomic computing, a framework which allows...

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Periodically, we turn over control of the CenturyLink Cloud blog to members of our certified technology Ecosystem to share how they leverage our platform to enable customer success. This week’s guest author from the Cloud Marketplace Provider Program is Alexander Negrash, Director of Marketing , at CloudBerry Lab.

The evolution of cloud technology saw cloud storage as a great tool to offload on-premise storage economics into the cloud. Thanks to ever-increasing Internet bandwidth and declining storage prices, keeping backups in the cloud has become a viable alternative to traditional on-site data storage for small and medium sized businesses.

However, many companies often overlook key considerations when it comes to online backup:

Reliable Storage

When moving backup data off-site, a company should ensure the cloud storage service is reliable and cost-effective, yet high-performing.

Data Security

Security is a top concern when business data is taken to the cloud. A company's private data could be compromised if the solution lacks the right features.

Restore Capabilities

Backup data stored at a remote facility should always be set at a recoverable state, be accessible at any time, and allow point-in-time object-level restore.

Companies migrate to cloud platforms like CenturyLink Cloud, leaving behind their own IT-infrastructures with costly hardware and labor-intensive maintenance....

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Periodically, we turn over control of the CenturyLink Cloud® blog to members of our certified technology Ecosystem to share how they leverage our platform to enable customer success. This week’s guest author from the Cloud Marketplace Provider Program is Tom Coffing, President and CEO at Coffing Data Warehousing.

Experts say that up to 75% of the entire world’s data will be on Hadoop by the year 2020. Yes, that’s right — 75%! This means a huge influx of data over the next several years, which translates into a huge opportunity for your organization! This means data not captured today will become commonplace over the next several years.

What is Hadoop, Where did it Come From, and why is it so Popular?

Hadoop was created by the genius minds at Google to analyze massive amounts of web data. It was then utilized and expanded by Yahoo! who began working with the open source community. The name Hadoop came from Doug Cutting, chief architect of Cloudera and one of the original creators. Cutting's son, then 2-years old, was just beginning to talk and called his beloved stuffed yellow elephant "Hadoop".

Hadoop is so popular is because it is all about unstructured data. As much as...

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Periodically, we turn over control of the CenturyLink Cloud® blog to members of our certified technology Ecosystem to share how they leverage our platform to enable customer success. This week’s guest author from the Cloud Marketplace Provider Program is Tom Coffing, President and CEO at Coffing Data Warehousing.

Become a Cloud Rock Star

The best kept secret in cloud computing just might be the Nexus Chameleon software. It has been designed and developed for over a decade to integrate all databases as if they were one giant system. Coffing Data Warehousing is excited to be providing its amazing service on the Century Link Cloud platform.

One of the best complements we ever received was from a Vice President at the world’s largest bank who said, “Nexus is so powerful and easy-to-use that it puts the business user on the same playing field as the Data Scientist”.

The Challenges Solved by the Nexus Chameleon

The Nexus Chameleon has automated the most difficult challenges in today’s computing environment by doing things nobody else in the world is doing, but yet doing so with the click of the mouse.

Imagine that you have transactional legacy systems such as DB2, Oracle, and SQL Server and, on top of that, you...

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Periodically, we turn over control of the CenturyLink Cloud® blog to members of our certified technology Ecosystem to share how they leverage our platform to enable customer success. This week’s guest author from the Cloud Marketplace Provider Program is Mike Kane, Sr. Product Marketing Manager, for Dyn.

We’ve all done it at one time or another. You know… drawing a fuzzy arrow between two system components without really knowing exactly how the data is going to get from point A to point B. Almost every reference architecture scribbled on a white board has at least one such cloudy arrow. If the information has to travel between customers and users, as well as cloud and data center assets, typically the path is usually not well understood. Yet these paths can have as much impact on service performance as anything else. The situation requires deeper examination.

The chances are, unless you’re specialized in network operations, you may not be completely aware of the nuances and challenges involved in moving data and procedure calls on the Internet. It’s time to get on it though. As your organization transitions from on-premises infrastructure to cloud-based and Hybrid architectures, you will likely find yourself relying on...

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Periodically, we turn over control of the CenturyLink Cloud® blog to members of our certified technology Ecosystem to share how they leverage our platform to enable customer success. This week’s guest author from the Cloud Marketplace Provider Program is Gautam Thockchom for Sureline Systems.

Sureline is leading the way with a complete, easy-to-deploy application mobility solution that is flexible, provides the highest quality recovery points and replicates them remotely for safety, delivers zero data loss failover and failback, and provides the ability to test disaster recovery (DR) plans easily and frequently without locking the customer to a specific cloud. We're an industry leader in cloud migration, DR software, and business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR) solutions. Sureline fundamentally solves the problem of any-to-any DR and migration, enabling seamless data migration and DR from any environment -- physical or virtual -- to CenturyLink Cloud.

In our experience moving customers to the cloud and protecting thousands of machines on the cloud, we've noticed that customers are quite serious about beginning the conversion process. However, a lot of cloud projects are slow to start because of a simple reason -- the question of how to move to the cloud is typically not answered clearly.

In order...

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Periodically, we turn over control of the CenturyLink Cloud® blog to members of our certified technology Ecosystem to share how they leverage our platform to enable customer success. This week’s guest author from the Cloud Marketplace Provider Program is Jean Masters, Customer Relationship Manager for Symas Corporation.

LDAP Directory Service Overview

Symas is pleased to announce that Symas OpenLDAP Silver, an OpenLDAP-compatible Directory-as-a-Service (DaaS) product, is available on CenturyLink Cloud via Blueprints. This product highlights our commitment to cloud technologies by providing developers with rapid access to a high-performance, enterprise-scale LDAP directory service that runs in CenturyLink’s standard Cloud Servers.

OpenLDAP Features

Designed for Enterprise and small and midsize business (SMB) customers, Symas LDAP Database Service includes:

• Availability in most CenturyLink data centers
• Performance-leading directory server based on OpenLDAP
• Enterprise-grade commercial Technical Support
• Ultra-efficient Lightning Memory-mapped Database (LMDB) and server core
• Full ACID semantics
• Flexible Provisioning – choose CPU, RAM and storage right for you
• Self-Service - scale CPU, RAM, and storage as your needs grow
• Daily backups with configurable backup time
• Replication option with auto-failover for high-availability
• SSL Certificate to encrypt connection and data in transit
• Built on enterprise-grade cloud infrastructure

Enterprise-grade cloud infrastructure is critical for database performance. The CenturyLink Cloud Platform out-performed other high profile competitors in an independent benchmark study conducted by...

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Periodically, we turn over control of the CenturyLink Cloud blog to members of our certified technology Ecosystem to share how they leverage our platform to enable customer success. This week’s guest author from the Cloud Marketplace Provider Program is Sid Prasanna, CEO of FlexSecure Inc.(www.flexsecure.co).

As cyber attacks and data breaches continue to make headlines, Security-as-a-Service offerings are becoming more valuable by the day. In the IT world, there is now a fundamental understanding that any business with an on-line presence needs to think about data security for both their business and their customers. FlexSecure has joined with the CenturyLink Cloud Marketplace to make the process of providing robust, solid, and capable authentication easy and painless for any customer, regardless of their technical abilities.

Solution Overview

The FlexSecure platform enables organizations of all sizes to choose and combine user authentication solutions based on the individual needs of their company. Companies and developers can add pin and passwordless security to their existing authentication mechanisms. Users can also change authentication methods in near real-time through an easy-to-use interface.

Layered Security

Some of FlexSecure's primary advantages are:

Custom user and device authentication: The authentication standards can be "turned up or down" to suit the needs of the users. For...

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CenturyLink Cloud has an impressive track record over the past few years of delivering new features and functionality to its platform. To wit: Frost & Sullivan recently recognized CenturyLink as its Company of the Year for the North American Cloud Industry. The report details how CenturyLink is meeting the needs of the next generation of technical and line-of-business cloud users.

One aspect of CenturyLink Cloud’s approach worth highlighting is the simplicity of deploying add-on tech to complete a complex, hybrid cloud solution.

CenturyLink Ecosystem

CenturyLink introduced its Partner Ecosystem in early 2015. Since then, partners have introduced over 200 solutions that solve specific business needs.

What’s more, these solutions can be deployed instantly by using CenturyLink’s built-in orchestration framework called Blueprints. Blueprints are pre-packaged workflows that can be defined and re-played at any time on the platform. Custom configuration settings are entered in minutes during deployment.

How can this Ecosystem work for you? Let’s start with Disaster Recovery (DR), a common workload for enterprises just beginning their cloud journey. Public cloud is great for DR for three key reasons:

• No CapEx: No new capital outlays are required in the form of new hardware or a build-out of a secondary data center.
• Easy to Get Started: Point-and-click to

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Periodically, we turn over control of the CenturyLink Cloud blog to members of our certified technology Ecosystem to share how they leverage our platform to enable customer success. This week’s guest author from the Cloud Marketplace Provider Program is Muhammad Umair, VP of Software for VDIWorks.

Desktop-as-a-Service(DaaS) with VDIworks and CenturyLink Cloud

With tens of thousands of licenses sold globally, VDIworks’ VDP is an end-to-end VDI management system that enables DaaS for your business.

By now you have probably read dozens, if not hundreds of articles touting the benefits of virtualized desktops. Most pundits agree virtual desktops lower costs of IT support through enhanced proactive management processes, mitigation of unplanned downtime via more reliable services, extend equipment lifecycles, and make it possible to achieve a nearly 50% reduction in desktop delivery costs. Imagine how that would feel.

What small, medium, or even large enterprise CIO wouldn’t relish the elation of knowing their organization had achieved a level of competence that eludes so many of their peers and competitors? Your organization, regardless of its size, can achieve a transition from the old PC-centric model of desktop delivery to employees and turn to a modern, state-of-the-art computing workspace. With cloud-based Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI), you can...

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Periodically, we turn over control of the CenturyLink Cloud blog to members of our certified technology Ecosystem to share how they leverage our platform to enable customer success. This week’s guest author from the Cloud Marketplace Provider Program is Jacob Himmelstein, Partner Manager for CloudBerry Lab.

CloudBerry Lab has integrated their backup technology with the CenturyLink Platform. This integration allows the user to achieve rapid time-to-value for this Backup to Cloud Object Storage solution.

Solution Overview

The evolution of cloud technology saw cloud storage as a great tool to offload on-premise storage economics into the cloud. Thanks to ever-increasing Internet bandwidth and declining storage prices, keeping backups in the cloud has become a viable alternative to traditional on-site data storage for SMBs. Many companies often overlook key considerations when it comes to online backup, with Cloudberry Lab for CenturyLink Cloud, the user can be assured that important components are available, such as:

Reliable Cloud Storage that you control: When moving backup data off-site, a company should ensure the cloud storage service is reliable, cost-effective, yet high-performing. With CloudBerry Backup, you backup to customer-owned CenturyLink Cloud Storage, which you fully control and manage. Automate files and folders backup from your Windows desktop to the CenturyLink Cloud...

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Periodically, we turn over control of the CenturyLink Cloud blog to members of our certified technology ecosystem to share how they leverage our platform to enable customer success. This week’s guest author from the Cloud Marketplace Provider Program is Ian Masters, Vice President, Cloud & Strategic Alliances at Vision Solutions

The Cloud DR market is finally maturing. I believe this is confirmed by the release of the first Gartner Magic Quadrant (GMQ) for Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS). According to the report, the Gartner estimates the size of the DRaaS market to be approximately $1.3 billion, with a related compound annual growth rate of approximately 30%. Impressive, to say the least. Interestingly, the Gartner also states that, “DRaaS vendors initially provided VM recovery primarily for VMware. However, given the rapid growth of other VM types, such as Microsoft Hyper-V, Citrix Xen, Linux-centric KVM, and Oracle VM (OVM), service instances are becoming increasingly heterogeneous.

Unified Solutions Suite

Additionally, the GMQ reports "there is an ever-increasing customer demand for more integrated support of hybrid recovery configurations – that is, recovery configurations containing both virtual and physical servers." Due to this development, it’s easy to see why Service Providers are having to use such a...

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Periodically, we turn over control of the CenturyLink Cloud blog to members of our certified technology ecosystem to share how they leverage our platform to enable customer success. This week’s guest author from the Cloud Marketplace Provider Program is Erica Brescia, from one click application tool Bitnami.

Ever wished you had an easy way to deploy Redmine, SugarCRM, Alfresco, Drupal, or your favorite app in the cloud? Preferably one that didn't involve dealing with complicated server infrastructure, cryptic configuration files and multiple software versions?

Well, now you have one. We're pleased to announce that many of Bitnami's server applications and development environments are now available to CenturyLink Cloud customers as Bitnami Cloud Blueprints. With this integration, you can deploy over 100 Bitnami pre-configured applications quickly and securely on your CenturyLink cloud server...no tweaking necessary!

At Bitnami, we've taken the data we get from our million-plus deployments each month and used it to make sure that launching complex, multi-tiered application environments with our cloud images is as painless as possible.

Here’s how:

• All our applications are pre-compiled and pre-configured with all necessary dependencies so that they work out-of-the-box.
• They’re quick and easy to install; simply sign into your CenturyLink account and select the Bitnami Cloud Blueprint of your

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Periodically, we turn over control of the CenturyLink Cloud blog to members of our certified technology ecosystem to share how they leverage our platform to enable customer success. This week’s guest author from the Cloud Marketplace Provider Program is data encryption provider Vormetric.

Enterprises have been concerned about data security long before the advent of the cloud. Throwing cloud to the mix has added fuel to the fire; yet "companies of all sizes and industries, including some of the most regulated, are finding that enterprise cloud service providers offer security that is superior to what they can provide in-house." A combination of deeply-embedded security principles and ecosystem partnerships with best-in-class security companies makes this possible.

CenturyLink and Vormetric have partnered to deliver data-at-rest security solutions for enterprises using the CenturyLink Public Cloud. Now you can encrypt your sensitive data, own your own encryption keys, and create a data protection policy that gives only authorized users, groups, and applications the ability to decrypt that data, thus creating a highly secure cloud environment. Vormetric applies the least privileged principle enabling system administrators to continue managing servers, backups, and replication services without changing their workflow. They're able to view encrypted data in clear text.

Here are...

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Periodically, we turn over control of the CenturyLink Cloud blog to members of our certified technology ecosystem to share how they leverage our platform to enable customer success. This week’s guest author from the Cloud Marketplace Provider Program is Tim Thompson of security and compliance provider Cavirin.

No business wants to be exposed to risk, fail an audit, or get breached. We can help. With Cavirin’s Automated Risk Analysis Platform (ARAP), now integrated within the CenturyLink Platform, you can elevate your security posture and add an extra layer of transparency and visibility in your cloud ecosystem, without any additional security staff or heavyweight security tools.

Strengthen your cloud infrastructure without sacrificing security or compliance.

ARAP can help strengthen your infrastructure by continuously monitoring your CenturyLink Public Cloud environment as well as on-premise environment -- seeking out configuration changes as well as new devices and grading the associated risk based on security and compliance guidelines that you apply. Our platform paints a clear picture of the risk within your dynamic IT ecosystem, so that you stay proactive, well ahead of potential risks to security or gaps in compliance.

ARAP is agentless and automated, which means cost and time savings for you.

To us, automation is just...

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Periodically, we turn over control of the CenturyLink Cloud blog to members of our certified technology ecosystem to share how they leverage our platform to enable customer success. This week’s guest author from the Cloud Marketplace Provider Program is mobile backend-as-a-service CloudMine.

Enterprise mobile development has been "hard" for awhile. As enterprises increasingly feel the pressure to create innovative experiences through mobile and connected devices, most continue to struggle with the endless complexities of modern mobility for a number of very legitimate reasons.

• Mobile expertise is hard to come by, and building mobile systems and competencies requires a variety of expertise to cover all necessary components.
• Data security policies may inhibit the delivery of successful mobile initiatives by presenting new risks to an organization, both from a privacy and compliance perspective that they are unprepared to address on a timescale that aligns with the mobile app rollout schedule.
• Finding highly responsive IT organizations geared to readily support mobile development requirements can be difficult to find as many struggle to keep up with the pace of new mobile and cloud-based technologies and application development practices.

CloudMine Simplifies Enterprise Mobility

At CloudMine, our Mobile Backend as a Service (MBaaS) platform is aimed at reducing these complexities to enable...

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Periodically, we turn over control of the CenturyLink Cloud blog to members of our certified technology ecosystem to share how they leverage our platform to enable customer success. This week’s guest author from the Cloud Marketplace Provider Program is Matt Blanchard from SoftNAS, network attached storage.

In today’s fast moving, highly complex business world, customers need reliable IT subsystems with workloads that must be dependable, homogeneous and highly customizable. These stringent requirements are even more necessary when speaking about the critical data that is housed in vast arrays of disks at data centers around the world, posing problems like:

• Massive capital expenditures on storage platforms on a 3-to-5 year recurring basis.
• Upkeep and maintenance of proprietary hardware and software.
• Highly specialized and skilled workforce needed to manage and administer storage systems.
• Monolithic architecture that makes workloads difficult to move, copy, and migrate.

Customer needs require an easy-to-use, robust storage platform that offers full-featured NAS services in a fast, cloud-integrated architecture.

SoftNAS Cloud® solves this by offering hassle-free, full-featured network-attached storage (NAS) in CenturyLink Cloud. SoftNAS transforms the typical server inside CenturyLink Cloud, giving it the ability to extend past the 4.5 TB local storage limit by adding virtually unlimited Cloud Object storage (up to 14 PB)....

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Periodically, we turn over control of the CenturyLink Cloud blog to members of our certified technology ecosystem to share how they leverage our platform to enable customer success. This week’s guest author from the Cloud Marketplace Provider Program is Josh Heller from Apptio, IT spending management service.

Cloud adoption has created many new ways for IT to add new value to the businesses they support — adapting to seasonal service demands, reduced management requirements by already over-taxed IT operations staff, increased efficiency of infrastructure deployed, and more. These benefits aren't new, but with more organizations moving to a ‘cloud-first' model, they struggle to understand the true economic impact of this change in strategy.

Moving to the cloud is causing a fundamental shift in the economic model of IT. Traditionally, new business applications were developed and deployed on servers, storage, and data centers owned by the company. This model is largely reliant on longer term capital expense (CapEx) — requiring IT to make infrastructure decisions that carry a fixed investment while the applications it supports benefit from rapid iteration. Cloud infrastructure, purchased on demand as an operational expense (OpEx), reduces the cost of this experimentation by not tying the upfront cost...

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Periodically, we turn over control of the CenturyLink Cloud blog to members of our certified technology ecosystem to share how they leverage our platform to enable customer success. This week’s guest author from the Cloud Marketplace Provider Program is Lia Gurin from Centerity, IT infrastructure monitoring and software management.

For many IT departments, system monitoring is a painful problem. Many times a specialized team is put in charge of monitoring consoles which display threshold alerts and exceptions against various thresholds. This stream of notification traffic provides IT teams with tons of data that immediately turns into a classification and organization problem. Actionable information that adds value to situational awareness is still hard to come by. The fact remains that many IT monitoring consoles, provide myriad alerts about IT components (e.g., physical, passive, virtual, cloud, application, end-user experience) yet offer no systemic clarity or relevance for 99% of monitoring use cases.

As a direct result, most IT teams look at the monitoring console as an exercise in figuring out what they should ignore.

The only practical solution for this unproductive situation is to use Business Service Management (“BSM”) views of key business processes. Only by mapping an enterprise’s important business services into process views...

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While getting ready for Cloud Foundry Summit, I sat down with Chris Sterling, and CenturyLink Cloud ecosystem head, David Shacochis, to discuss their respective efforts within the Cloud Foundry landscape and what they’re looking forward to at the upcoming event.

Q: With Cloud Foundry Summit right around the corner, what momentum do you see for the broader Cloud Foundry ecosystem?

Shacochis: Chris sent around this link the other day of Sam Ramji’s interview with Alex Williams on the Cloud Foundry ecosystem – it’s very consistent with the momentum we’re seeing around Cloud Foundry here at CenturyLink.

Sterling: Absolutely, and for anyone who hasn’t heard that podcast, it’s almost required listening if you want to better appreciate the past and future of Cloud Foundry.

Q: What stood out to you in that interview?

Shacochis: The important piece to me is the power an open-source ecosystem holds when it’s well-managed and incorporates diverse perspectives toward a shared goal. Ramji covers how many large organizations are part of the Cloud Foundry Foundation and driving innovations from their particular part of the industry into the code base. It made me think of all the work CenturyLink has been doing with the Foundation to fine-tune some of our past contributions.

Q:...

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One of the most important trends in cloud development is the emergence of the “12-factor app” style where complex systems are deconstructed into simple, scalable apps and services. An extension of this trend is the innovation and evolution we see in the database space.

Key/value stores, caching services, and all manner of NoSQL database capabilities have, in no small part, led to the explosion of innovation we commonly refer to as the “Internet of Things.” Applications and systems are collecting, storing and analyzing more data than ever, and developers increasingly embrace NoSQL options as their data store.

However, there are so many types of NoSQL databases that developers need to keep track of, and it seems like a new one emerges every day. There are dozens of database packages in the market that didn’t even exist five years ago. Each one has important tradeoffs. Is it easy to use? How does it scale? What does it take to get resilience? Developers are faced with the choice of either weaving together multiple technologies in order to get the backend services they need, or settling on a single-purpose platform that meets SOME of their requirements. There's got to be a better way, right? Orchestrate tackled...

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Periodically, we turn over control of the CenturyLink Cloud blog to members of our certified technology ecosystem to share how they leverage our platform to enable customer success. This week’s guest author from the Cloud Marketplace Provider Program is Jennifer Lankford from Orchestrate, a provider of NoSQL database services focused on developer agility.

As interest from enterprise customers began to increase in late 2014, we decided to run some benchmarks on CenturyLink Cloud and take it through its paces. The results pleasantly surprised us and should make the users of competing cloud providers take notice. Not only did CenturyLink Cloud perform consistently better than the biggest providers on all fronts, its pricing is highly competitive, and it boasts a web-based GUI that makes the user experience a breeze. So today, we’re very excited to share that Orchestrate is now available on CenturyLink Cloud, and can be deployed today through the ecosystem.

This is great news because it gives CenturyLink’s global network of Fortune 1000 companies immediate access to the flexibility and cost-savings associated with Orchestrate. The partnership makes perfect sense for both companies and especially their customers — CenturyLink and Orchestrate share a common vision for simplifying the deployment of applications to...

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In February 2015 Dynatrace, a leading player in the field of Application Performance Management (APM), launched integration with the CenturyLink Platform. Dynatrace APM is laser focused on the details that matter for application performance, starting with 100% visibility into of the End-User transactions and spanning both Pre-Production and Production environments. Dynatrace provides integration with automation frameworks like the CenturyLink Cloud blueprints, Ansible, Chef, and Puppet, as well as many ticketing and notification systems. As cloud adoption increases across SME and Enterprise organizations, teams must fundamentally rethink the way they monitor scaling applications and dynamic infrastructure.

Some of the most common use cases for APM in the Cloud include

• Dev/Test - Development and Test teams are moving faster than ever to support business needs, even shipping code releases multiple times per day. Reduce risk by measuring and comparing performance in every build and test in conjunction with real browser synthetics from around the world
• Cloud Benchmarking - Baselining how applications perform in the cloud vs. their native compute habitat provides organizations with quantitative metrics to make the optimal infrastructure decision the first time, instead of iteratively guessing and testing
• Dev/Ops - Managing the performance of applications in a cloud environment requires the ability to quickly

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Like most people, I have a mobile phone that is representative of my personality and productivity needs. Carefully chosen phone cases, background images, apps, and settings all create a level of personalization within the boundaries defined by my phone provider. My phone is basically a platform for delivering what I want, how I want it. Why can't your cloud behave the same way?

CenturyLink Cloud has offered a deep set of channel-friendly features for years. This month, we went even further to make sure that all our customers have greater control over their cloud experience. What does it mean to make our cloud your own?

Control the Appearance

Change how the CenturyLink Cloud Control Portal looks to your customers and users. Alter not only the color scheme and logos, but go deeper with modifications to listed support phone numbers, email addresses, and Knowledge Base links. Tweak the outbound email templates so that new users get a personalized message when they join the account.

Control the Access Point

With this latest software release, it's easy to use a non-CenturyLink branded domain to access the Control Portal. All customers can immediately use {account alias}.cloudportal.io to see a personalized login page with their logo. Soon, we'll make it...

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Periodically, we turn over control of the CenturyLink Cloud blog to members of our certified technology ecosystem to share how they leverage our platform to enable customer success. This week’s guest author from the Cloud Marketplace Provider Program is Jessica Rampen from FoundationDB, a provider of polyglot database services focused on simplifying the database layer.

When CenturyLink announced their Hyperscale offering in early 2014, they were clearly focused on helping customers with their implementation of scale-out, NoSQL technologies. The proliferation of NoSQL databases is one response to the needs of modern applications, where not all data is best managed in a relational model. One challenge we've seen customers struggle with while experimenting with different database models: database bloat.

"If you're trying to choose a database technology for your application it can be really tough. The database market is evolving rapidly. From NoSQL, to NewSQL, to the mature relational systems, there's no shortage of solutions to sort through." – Stephen Pimentel, FoundationDB

Trying to run different databases together to power an application is an operational nightmare. Each has its own storage and retrieval requirements, and each requires developer and DBA skills that can be hard to find.

Why a multi-model database

We're one of the...

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It's great to have a thriving Cloud Development Center where we crank out new features for our platform, but we know we can’t do it all ourselves. As Al Gore once said on 30 Rock, “there's an old African proverb that I made up – If you want to go quickly, go alone. If you want to go far, go together. We need to go far, quickly.”

Integrating with CenturyLink Cloud

We’ve been cultivating a technology ecosystem that we think will help our users go far, quickly. You can visit our newly-published CenturyLink Cloud Marketplace Provider Program to learn more. This new initiative supports integrations with a wide range of partner technologies who can "plug in" to the CenturyLink Public Cloud as part of their user experience.

Technology partners can choose from three different types of integration patterns, one of the most flexible in our industry:

• An Application Programming Interface (API) for automated interactions between any management system and the CenturyLink Public Cloud.
• Our Blueprint orchestration engine. This powerful tool enables automated provisioning workflows for partner technology that combine dozens of configuration steps into one single click.
• An Add-On framework (coming soon) for automating sign-ups to popular web services, while binding these external services to the

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A comprehensive disaster recovery architecture requires careful planning and robust technology. To make this easier for CenturyLink customers, we’re excited to announce the acquisition of DataGardens Inc., a Disaster Recovery-as-a-Service (DRaaS) provider based in Edmonton, Alberta. This is big news for our customers because it gives them a cost-effective and innovative way to mirror physical or virtual machine data to a highly available cloud environment. The acquisition announced today brings a proven disaster recovery offering into the CenturyLink Cloud portfolio and lets us more fully integrate this innovative toolset into our product suite.

Listen to any CIO and you’ll hear that business continuity is a critical component of a healthy IT portfolio. However, only 23 percent of technology professionals think that they can get their IT systems back up and running after disaster. This might explain why Forrester is seeing a growing number of enterprises turn to cloud and Disaster Recovery-as-a-Service (DRaaS).

CenturyLink and DataGardens have a longstanding partnering relationship and formed a closer cloud relationship earlier this year. DataGardens’ flagship software suite, SafeHaven, provides cloud-based disaster recovery by creating an offsite virtual data center in locations such as CenturyLink Cloud. Customers can define recovery point objectives and recovery time objectives, and...

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Today we are excited to release six managed Cloudera Blueprints, the newest managed service in the CenturyLink Cloud big data Blueprints portfolio, which also includes Cassandra and MongoDB solutions.

The Apache Hadoop open-source project solves all sorts of big data problems, but for many it’s difficult to deploy and manage. Cloudera solves this problem by provisioning and managing Hadoop components in a manner that allows users to focus on their data sets. And now, with the CenturyLink Cloud Blueprint for Cloudera – a deployable configuration that brings the new environment online in a couple of clicks—users can take all of the complexity of Hadoop and shrink it down to one black, err blue, box:

Running Hadoop with Cloudera and CenturyLink Cloud combines simplicity, superior performance and flexibility, allowing businesses to utilize their data to drive innovation faster than ever before. By deploying Cloudera on CenturyLink Cloud, customers get all of the expected benefits of hourly pay-as-you-go self-service, agility, elasticity and governance. Given that the service is also managed, customers can also take advantage of software updates, patching and general cluster management. It’s an easy way for IT pros and database administrators to get their cluster provisioned and managed.

Making Managed Cloudera Easy

Automating a...

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In a few weeks, CenturyLink Cloud will roll out the first phase of visual changes to our Control Portal cloud management software. These changes are not only visually stunning, but functionally significant for our customers. Why are we making these changes, and what should you expect? This blog post dives into our motivation for the changes, and provides a sneak peek into what’s coming in the months ahead.

Why the Change?

We’ve all heard the saying “if ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” CenturyLink Cloud constantly receives positive recognition for our Control Portal, and Gartner recently lauded our “easy-to-use self-service portal” that showcases an “excellent, highly differentiated set of features.” Why are we moving forward with some substantial modifications to the user experience? We’re focused on five reasons:

• Improve Application Performance. Web applications need to be fast to maximize utility, and so too does our Control Portal. We want our users to spend _less time _in our interface, create and manage complex environments, and more time solving strategic business problems. We’re constantly tweaking the current software experience to squeeze out performance improvements, but needed to take a new approach if we wanted to speed up the experience _and achieve new embedded analytics functionality. Our

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Are you an MSP, VAR, or systems integrator? Do you want to start offering cloud services to upsell existing customers, while attracting new ones? CenturyLink Cloud is here to help. Last week, we announced a Reseller Edition of our cloud and we offer unique expertise in partnering with companies that want to quickly add cloud services to their product portfolio. In this blog post, we’ll walk through 8 quick steps to follow in order to get up and running as a cloud reseller.

1. Investigate the market and select a reseller.

We recently did a reseller-focused webcast with the folks at Talkin’ Cloud and a spot survey showed that over 75% of attendees were actively looking for a cloud partner. Clearly, a large number of telcos, SIs, and regional service providers are scouring the market and aggressively assessing whom to partner with.

If you are looking for a partner, what should you be asking each vendor? How can you ensure you are partnering with an innovative, differentiated provider that can bring you new revenue over the long-haul? Here’s a great starting point:

Does the provider have a global set of data centers?

WHY THIS IS IMPORTANT: Your customers are more global than ever,...

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In the coming months, CenturyLink Cloud will launch new, enterprise monitoring capabilities, powered by ScienceLogic and New Relic.  We wrote a guest blog post for ScienceLogic, describing our approach to monitoring, check it out here.

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There is nothing worse than getting that email or error warning you that provisioning has failed. And inevitably this happens at the very last stages of getting an environment automated.

#### With Blueprints, even failure is amazing…

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New Relic has made their technology available as a Blueprint on the CenturyLink Platform, resulting in a simple yet robust deployment and monitoring system that is available at the push of a few buttons. New Relic Standard is accessible through CenturyLink Cloud’s management control portal or its API, making it easy for organizations to monitor end-user experiences and PHP, Ruby, Java, .NET, and Python applications in real-time. Watch the introductory video to learn more about CenturyLink Cloud’s New Relic Blueprint:New Relic has done a tremendous job of taking the monitoring to a new level. Monitoring has always been a core offering of the CenturyLink Platform, but now that monitoring holistically looks at the application—the bread and butter of a solution—thanks to New Relic’s technology. You used to get network data, SNMP gathered CPU, Memory and IO data, as well as the database and its handling of queries. At that point you had to look at these disparate forms of data to infer what could be wrong with your app, finally trying multiple things to see if the pain points disappeared. New Relic turns this process on its head to provide the end user with very valuable data with all the...

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As you may know, CenturyLink Cloud has partnered with New Relic to provide a suite of application performance management tools for your applications running on the CenturyLink Cloud enterprise cloud. With the release today of two exciting new features, customers who have deployed a New Relic blueprint on CenturyLink Cloud will have even deeper insight into their applications. (Check out this page to learn more about CenturyLink Cloud’s New Relic blueprint and watch a demo on how to deploy your own.)

The first new feature in New Relic’s lineup is the App Speed Index. This removes the guesswork around the response time of your application. The data is provided via their dashboard, pulled from insights from their more than 55 billion performance metrics. This trending will help you identify where and when your application is having performance issues or if your application is just blazing along.

In addition to the metrics, with App Speed Index you will be able to classify your application into a Peer Group of similar applications (e.g. eCommerce, SaaS, Gaming, and Consumer Internet applications) and benchmark your app with industry peers. Find out your percentile rank within your peer group for end user and application response times, error...

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We knew that Environment Engine, our recently-announced cloud environment deployment solution, would be a big hit with our customers. After all, by automating the design, discovery, configuration, and deployment of best practice-optimized “Blueprints,” Environment Engine makes it easier than ever to roll out environments and applications to the cloud. But it’s not just customers who are recognizing the benefits of Environment Engine: now the media is taking notice, too. Tier 1 Research reports “customers will like what the Environment Engine can do,” saying the toolset represents a “significant” step forward for CenturyLink Platform. A platform that, according to the research group, is built using “solid development practices” which allow developers to automate anything that can be done through the web interface via a robust API. Even technical users, however, will appreciate that the GUI is “friendly and clean, and almost has an Apple-like quality to its straightforward intuitiveness.” According to an article published by Read Write Web and picked up by the Wall Street Journal, Environment Engine “is uniquely aimed at enabling the creation and use of best practice templates… This saves costs and enables applications to be deployed faster, more consistently and with less possibility of human error.” Moreover,...

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Companies team to deliver enterprise-class hybrid cloud solutions

Redwood City, Calif. and Bellevue, Wash. — March 27, 2012 — Equinix, Inc. (Nasdaq: EQIX), a provider of global data center services, and CenturyLink Cloud, the enterprise cloud platform provider, today announced a partnership to create an enterprise-ready gateway to the cloud by offering CenturyLink's Enterprise Platform via Equinix International Business Exchange™ (IBX®) data centers. The partnership enables enterprise customers to take advantage of the business agility and cost efficiency cloud technologies offer by using CenturyLink Cloud’s enterprise-grade Infrastructure as a Service across Platform Equinix™. Initially, CenturyLink Cloud’s solution will be available in Equinix’s Chicago and New York data centers with plans to expand globally, first into Europe and later to Asia.

“Platform Equinix provides secure, scalable and highly interconnected data center services across 38 strategic global markets. Our network choice combined with access to a wide array of leading cloud services solutions, gives customers a rich environment to build and integrate private, public, and hybrid cloud solutions,” said Chris Sharp, general manager, cloud and content for Equinix. “Our partnership with CenturyLink Cloud further strengthens Equinix’s position as the destination of choice for enterprise cloud deployments through high availability, security and business continuity required...

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