Cloud Resources
Search our cloud resources for information on cloud-based solutions, trends, whitepapers from leading industry professionals, and more.
Remote Desktop Foundational Services: Azure Windows Virtual Desktop
Remote Desktop Foundational Services help you transition from standard desktops or an existing on-premises RDS deployment to Microsoft Azure, providing you the blueprints necessary to set up the Windows Virtual Desktop environment, integrate with Azure native services, and train your team on how to create custom images so your organization can fully adopt Windows Virtual Desktops and enable your distributed workforce.
Remote Desktop Foundational Services: Amazon WorkSpaces
Remote Desktop Foundational Services help you transition from standard desktops to Amazon WorkSpaces, deploying a WorkSpaces Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), connecting to your existing networking infrastructure, and creating custom profile images so your organization can fully adopt Amazon WorkSpaces and enable your distributed workforce.
VMware Cloud on AWS Workshop
2nd Watch’s VMware Cloud on AWS Workshop is a 4 hour, complimentary, on-site, introductory overview of VMware Cloud on AWS and appropriate use cases. A brief assessment with 2nd Watch Subject Matter Experts will help you understand how the VMware cloud on AWS platform can further enable your enterprise’s hybrid cloud adoption.
VMware Cloud on AWS Environment Discovery
2nd Watch’s VMware Cloud on AWS Environment Discovery is a 2-hour, no-cost consulting engagement to help you learn about VMware Cloud on AWS, along with a brief assessment with 2nd Watch Subject Matter Experts to understand how the VMware Cloud on AWS platform can further enable your enterprise’s cloud adoption.
Cloud Cost Optimization
Cloud cost optimization doesn’t have to be time consuming and challenging. Start your cost optimization plan with a Discovery Workshop. In this free 2-hour session, our team of professionals will expose the details surrounding cloud cost optimization so that you can choose where to start.
CI/CD Pipeline
Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) is a necessary step to accelerating infrastructure and application deployments while reducing re-work. Our CI/CD Pipeline includes DevOps Assessment and Strategy, CI/CD Tooling Implementation, and Team Upskilling to allow you to accelerate delivering results to your customers and stakeholders.
Cloud Migration Factory
The 2nd Watch Cloud Migration Factory is a solution for completing mass migrations to the cloud easily and smoothly without business interruptions. Our Migration Factory reduces the complexity within IT operations and provides a comprehensive set of services and tools to assess, design and migrate either entire data centers or individual workloads to the cloud.
Security Assessment & Remediation
How does your cloud security posture stack up against industry standards? 2nd Watch’s Security Assessment and Remediation is an in-depth, hands-on service that evaluates your current cloud infrastructure and processes against 2nd Watch and industry security standards to help you develop a mature cloud security posture. With our service, you can rest assured your data, users and organization are protected.
Configuration Compliance Service
The 2nd Watch Configuration Compliance service reduces the risk of audit failures through continuous compliance monitoring, and helps you save cost and time preparing for internal and regulatory audits. With this 4-step, program-based approach, you can build and maintain control over critical cloud configurations and improve time-to-value by proving control.
Compliance Assessment & Remediation
The 2nd Watch Compliance Assessment and Remediation service is designed to evaluate, monitor, auto-remediate, and report on compliance for your current public cloud infrastructure. Industry standard policies assessed include CIS, GDPR, HIPAA, NIST, PCI-DSS, and SOC2.
Managed Governance & Compliance Services
The 2nd Watch Managed Governance and Compliance Services are designed to help your Chief Security and Compliance Officers (CISCO) maintain visibility and control of what is happening in your public cloud environment at all times. From assessment to remediation and maintenance, we help ensure ongoing, continuous compliance.
Machine Image Factory
The use of the 2nd Watch Machine Image Factory reduces the time to deploy an updated and hardened custom machine image by up to 95% and reduces the time to implement a solution by 75%. Customers will receive a tested, proven and trusted framework for automation of the image creation process.
Don’t Fail Fast in Production; Embed Monitoring Earlier in Your DevOps Cycle
Gartner says, "DevOps initiatives improve speed and agility, but monitoring often starts during production. This research identifies monitoring practices that I&O leaders should embed in the preproduction phase of DevOps cycles to address needs across application development and release management."
2nd Watch broadens reach, adds cloud-native adoption services
According to 451 Voice of the Enterprise (VotE) survey, research shows customers have a strong desire for third-party assistance in workload modernization and migration efforts. Download the report for 451 Research's take on our cloud-native adoption capabilities.
DevOps Survey Results
Despite the fact that many companies have begun moving to more DevOps-type processes and adopting tools that fit into a DevOps framework, nearly 80% of respondents said their organizations continue to have separate teams for managing infrastructure/operations and development, demonstrating that enterprises have a long way to go in their DevOps transition. Download our infographic for more findings.
2nd Watch Managed Cloud Foundational Services
2nd Watch’s Managed Cloud Foundational Services provides a simplified, flexible set of core services to manage single and multi-cloud infrastructure with the opportunity to utilize premium services to better control resource usage, spend, and utilization. The all-in-one offering maintains simplicity while addressing the key needs to better manage spend, utilization, and operations.
Enterprise IT Procurement Patterns Favor Cloud Technologies
This infographic helps to understand the organizational emphasis and strategic focus of modern enterprise IT departments based on tech services consumed and spend. Our research shows that many enterprise IT organizations today are bimodal, with their focus split between stability and agility,
Architecting Secure Environments in the Cloud
Moving to the cloud means changing the way you work. Securing the cloud means you need to design a scalable security infrastructure – one that’s able to work with new applications and services as they become available. The public cloud may have security built into it, but you still need to build it into your applications. The tools cloud vendors provide help secure connections and manage users, but there’s a lot more that still needs to be done. Download our white paper to learn about building secure environments in the cloud.
AWS Scorecard – Q2 2015
In our Q2 AWS Scorecard, we found more customers using medium EC2 instances and fewer using small, while there was a shift from the US-East to other regions, including EMEA and US West. AWS Directory Service use increased – an indication that enterprise customers are enabling shared services to be utilized by cloud workloads and that companies are extending on-premise directories to the cloud to enable authentication and authorization for infrastructure and applications hosted in AWS.
Big Data, IoT & Digital Marketing
Latest trends from our survey show Big Data, Internet of Things and the Cloud are driving digital marketing initiatives among enterprise companies. Respondents say they’re likely to expand use of these technologies to support digital marketing, and many plan to divert resources from other projects in order to facilitate. Download our Big Data, IoT & Digital Marketing infographic to learn more.
Digital Marketing in the Cloud: Analysis of IaaS Critical Capabilities Shows Significant Advantages
The line between digital and traditional marketing continues to blur. Your digital marketing programs can directly interact with millions of customers, resulting in resource demands that are highly visible and highly variable, yet often temporary.Today’s digital marketing is a critical business function that demands reliable, scalable infrastructure. Download our white paper to learn more about why digital marketing properties are ideal candidates for cloud deployments.
Big Data Survey
80% of companies polled in our 2015 Big Data Survey are already engaged in or will soon begin a big data project, with a large portion of those companies spending as much as $100,000 on big data projects this year. Download our Big Data infographic to find out more from the survey results.
Enterprise Big Data Enablement: Risks & Rewards
Batch processing remains an important tool in helping you make better decisions on how to run your business. However, with the increasing quanitity of data to process and the complexity of the jobs, many enterprises face the challenge of ballooning infrastructure costs when it comes to High Performance Computing. Download our white paper to learn about why many organizations are now turning to the public cloud to address their HPC batch job needs.
Modern Enterprise Cloud Architect Profile
Enterprise Cloud Architect, the coolest job of the 21st century, requires a combination of multidisciplinary skills ranging from intersection of an instructor, strategic advisor, broad domain knowledge, business knowledge and inventor. Download our cheat sheet to see who the modern Enterprise Cloud Architect really is.
The Digital Enterprise: Transforming Business in the Cloud
Public cloud adoption is on the upswing because companies are seeing benefits that positively affect revenues and benefit customers. Companies that complete the transformation to becoming a Digital Business and public cloud-based enterprise will find powerful new ways to interact with and serve customers and gain agility from end-to-end automation that saves money and time. Learn more with our Digital Business white paper.
Digital Business Survey Summary
In an effort to better understand the relationship between cloud computing and digital business in large organizations, our latest research has uncovered a stronger than expected connection between cloud technologies and digital sales and marketing programs. Half of all survey respondents said that moving to the cloud would be their most important digital initiative in 2015, and 60% say cloud tools will support digital sales and marketing programs, but issues still exist.
Digital Business Survey
In an effort to better understand the relationship between cloud computing and digital business in large organizations, our latest research has uncovered a stronger than expected connection between cloud technologies and digital sales and marketing programs. Half of all survey respondents said that moving to the cloud would be their most important digital initiative in 2015, and 60% say cloud tools will support digital sales and marketing programs, but issues still exist.
AWS Scorecard – Q4 2014
In the second of our quarterly Amazon Web Services scorecards, we found some interesting insight into what services and instances are being used by Amazon’s customers. Among our user base, we found a significant uptake in network access storage (NAS) products. Amazon EC2 is the most popular service, with 98% of customers using it, followed by Amazon S3 (97%), and Amazon SNS (65%), among other stats on usage trends.
2015 Trends & Predictions
Our survey shows that most companies plan to increase public cloud spend by at least 15% in 2015, indicating greater confidence in cloud infrastructure and expanding budgets for public cloud workloads. Consistent cost savings derived from the use of public cloud infrastructure versus corporate-owned datacenters was cited as the biggest potential benefit to running more public cloud workloads in 2015.
Managing Public Cloud Workloads
Despite untapped promise in the public cloud, our survey found that enterprise IT says managing public cloud workloads is just as difficult as managing internal systems and that commercial third-party tools and services are necessary to help reduce complexity with their public cloud environments. We take an in depth look at the challenges and best practices in managing public cloud workloads.
Public Cloud Workload Management
Despite untapped promise in the public cloud, our survey found that enterprise IT says managing public cloud workloads is just as difficult as managing internal systems and that commercial third-party tools and services are necessary to help reduce complexity with their public cloud environments.
AWS Scorecard – Q3 2014
In the first of our quarterly Amazon Web Services scorecards, we found some interesting insight into what services and instances are being used by Amazon’s customers. Among our user base, Amazon S3 is the most popular AWS service with 94% of our customers using the storage service, among other stats on usage trends.
Enabling Enterprise Adoption-Build or Buy Considerations
Many enterprises contemplating public cloud deployments go through a classic decision-making process applied to many new infrastructure technologies: do I build it myself or do I buy it from the professionals? To develop the right strategy and frame the build or buy debate, several considerations need to be made when it comes to Infrastructure as a Service (Iaas), and in particular Amazon Web Services. We see very common themes around four major decision point areas: design, construction, ongoing maintenance and insurance.
Enterprise Cloud Demand
The Cloud Demand survey indicates that a large majority of enterprise business units are using cloud-based services, and that most of those are choosing, managing and funding them on their own rather than waiting for IT departments to create and deploy applications that can help them to achieve their goals. Almost half plan to develop cloud services brokerage models in their quest to deliver cloud services by 2016.
2W MGZN Summer 2014 Issue
Join the cloud conversation with this issue of the 2W MGZN. Find out what the future of cloud pricing models holds, dig into the build versus buy discussion, learn about the next generation of private cloud, and find out how Iris Autograph™ achieves enterprise-level security and cloud scalability with AWS and 2nd Watch.
Cloud Price Wars
According to our survey, cloud provider price cuts are driving increased investment and innovation in cloud-based projects. However, despite ongoing price competitiveness among cloud infrastructure providers, a majority of survey respondents said features and performance were more important than price in deciding which vendor to engage.
2W MGZN Fall 2013 Issue
Find out what the future of cloud computing holds in this issue of our 2W MGZN, with helpful articles on overcoming cloud uncertainty, best practices for autoscaling your application, and Adobe’s Business Catalyst’s story on shutting down three global data centers and migrating to AWS with 2nd Watch.