by Joseph Landes

Businesses of all sizes are looking to move their IT infrastructure to the cloud and the most important choice to make when doing so is finding a great IT provider who will have your best interests in mind on this journey. Promises will be made about capabilities and expertise, but it is important to keep your eye on three important things to ensure your Managed Services Provider is committed to helping you transform your IT infrastructure to the cloud.

Recommending Best in Class Products

Nothing else matters if a vendor’s product is not best-in-class and it is why so many vendors lose business in the competitive cloud ecosystem. There are too many other competitive solutions combined with somewhat low switching costs to settle for something that is not phenomenal and brings massive value to your business. When moving to the cloud, does the technology provider have a strong track record of performance? Do they have the infrastructure to scale with you as your company grows? A good sign that it is time to look elsewhere is if the product your partner is offering can’t pass a basic Proof of Concept or is just feature-poor relative to other comparable solutions. This is why I strongly recommend Microsoft Office 365 and Microsoft Azure as the core building blocks for any company’s initial foray into the cloud. No other company has invested so much into empowering businesses of all sizes to do more than Microsoft.

Adding Value to Your Business

My former CEO of Microsoft, Satya Nadella, often says that a company’s past success does not define or predict their future. That each day your partner needs to come in and continue to win your business anew. This lesson holds great relevance in the burgeoning cloud ecosystem with so many vendors, replacement options, and new technologies emerging daily. The day your partner started working with you is the day the clock started ticking on their need to constantly create value that accrues to your business. The technologies they choose must help position you as a thought leader in front of your customers. They need a clear Conditions of Satisfaction that defines their relationship with you and there needs to be regular check-ins to make sure your business is growing as result of the relationship.

Driving Down Your Cost

The cloud ecosystem is a competitive space. New technologies continue to emerge with even more powerful functionality than in months prior. Startups are being born by the hundred and thousands in the cloud and the need to maintain on-premises hardware in your office is a thing of the past. One would think that while the technology gets better, it would be more expensive to move the cloud. But it is quite the opposite! Business have increasingly been able to take advantage of economies of scale the large cloud providers like Microsoft has achieved in order to drive their costs down dramatically. In the past, a company would have to shell out many thousands of dollars to buy a server and amortize that cost over time. Now the model is consumption-based, and you only need to pay for what you use just like the electricity in your home. Moving to the cloud has a number of benefits for your business—and one significant one is driving down the cost of IT.

Moving one’s IT infrastructure to the cloud should be a near-term goal of every business. Putting off the decision to digitally transform your business could be costing you customers and making you less competitive. The time to move is now and we look forward to partnering with you on this exciting journey.

Joseph Landes is the Chief Revenue Officer of Nerdio — an exciting cloud startup in Chicago that helps Managed Service Providers build cloud practices in Microsoft Azure. Prior to joining Nerdio, he spent 23 years at Microsoft leading high-performing international sales and marketing teams and helping businesses of all sizes move to the cloud. He has travelled to 108 countries and is attempting to read every NY Times Notable Book ever published.

In a very short time, the internet will become a much more secure place.

That’s because the Board of Directors for the Internet Corporation of Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has approved plans for the first-ever changing of the cryptographic key that helps protect the Domain Name System (DNS) – also known as the internet’s address book.

During a meeting in Belgium on September 16, the ICANN board passed a resolution, directing the organization to proceed with its plans to change — or “roll” — the key for the DNS root on October 11 of this year. It will mark the first time the key has been changed since it was first put into use in 2010.

“This is an important move and we have an obligation to ensure that it happens in furtherance of ICANN’s mission, which is to ensure a secure, stable and resilient DNS,” says ICANN Board Chair, Cherine Chalaby.

“There is no way of completely assuring that every network operator will have their ‘resolvers’ properly configured, yet if things go as anticipated, we expect the vast majority to have access to the root zone,” Chalaby went on to say.

ICANN notes that some Internet users might be affected if the network operators or Internet Service Providers (ISPs) have not prepared for the roll. Those operators who have enabled the checking of Domain Name System Security Extensions or DNSSEC information (a set of security protocols used to ensure DNS information isn’t accidentally or maliciously corrupted) are those who need to be certain they are ready for the roll.

“Research shows that there are many thousands of network operators that have enabled DNSSEC validation, and about a quarter of the internet’s users rely on those operators,” says David Conrad, ICANN’s Chief Technology Officer.

“It is almost certain there will be at least a few operators somewhere across the globe who won’t be prepared. But even in the worst case, all they have to do to fix the problem is turn off DNSSEC validation, install the new key, re-enable DNSSEC, and their users will again have full connectivity to the DNS.”

The changing of the DNS root key was originally scheduled to happen a year ago, but plans were put on hold after ICANN found and began analyzing some new, last-minute data. That data dealt with the potential readiness of network operators for the key roll.

Ultimately, an analysis led the organization to believe it could safely proceed with the changing of the key. As a result, the organization (after consultation with the community) developed a new plan that recommends putting the new key into use exactly one year after originally scheduled.

In the intervening time, the organization has continued extensive outreach and investigations on how to best mitigate risks associated with the key change.

“This is the first root key change, but it won’t be the last,” says Matt Larson, Vice President of Research at ICANN and the organization’s point person for the key roll.

“This is the first time, so naturally we are bending over backwards to make certain that everything goes as smoothly as possible. But as we do more key rollovers in the future, the network operators, ISPs, and others will become more accustomed to the practice.”