Could Your Network Benefit from a Cloud Accelerator?

Remember when you accessed computer software from a server connected to your network or a local copy installed on your computer’s hard drive? Back then, application performance relied on the performance of your network and computer. While you may still access some applications on a physical network or computer, cloud applications and software as a service are becoming increasingly common. With this move to the cloud, application performance often relies on external processes and equipment beyond your control. However, cloud accelerator services have emerged with promises of dramatic application performance improvements (Source: Cloud Accelerator by Aryaka).
Though numerous cloud accelerators exist, they work by delivering content from the original servers over a privately controlled delivery path rather than the public Internet. Because the cloud accelerator service provider controls the connection, it becomes possible to optimize it for faster application deliver and performance.
Cloud acceleration isn’t just for application delivery. Cloud accelerators can be used to deliver applications, VoIP, live video, remote desktops (virtualization), web pages, images, and other interactive and dynamic content.
Some of the benefits you could expect by choosing a cloud accelerator are:
  • Improved application performance – Companies offering cloud acceleration claim increased application performance by as much as five to 100 times. TCP optimization techniques can also be used to deliver improved TCP application performance.
  • Reduced bandwidth consumption – By removing redundancies and using bandwidth scaling, cloud accelerators can reduce bandwidth consumption dramatically – by up to 98 percent. This translates into lower bandwidth costs.
  • Better user experience –Whether you’re concerned about employees having faster access to cloud-based software in order to perform their jobs or customers being able to navigate and use your site, improving application performance with a cloud accelerator can lead to a significantly better user experience.
Most cloud accelerator providers charge for the service using a “as a service” model. This means you pay as you go out of operational funds rather than investing upfront using capital funds.

CMMS allows The City of Richland to Stand Tall

For some time prior to the sequestration, many municipalities have been feeling the strain of budget cuts and making due with skeleton crews.  The sequestration, which is slated to kick in in early May and continue through 2014, will result in furloughs for government employees and budget cuts across “every program, project, and activity”, according to the Washington Post.  Given this climate, The City of Richland’s (in Eastern Washington) efforts to become a model of efficiency and economy are truly prescient.  Towards that end, it launched a five-year strategic plan, girded by seven guiding pillars.  Central to the plan are the two pillars to use collaborations to more cost-effectively minimize investments in existing assets and ensure a sustainable long-term maintenance program for existing facilities and infrastructures.
Pillars of the Community
Richland’s Parks and Facilities Manager, Tim Werner, foresaw that implementing the pillars would be extremely difficult without building maintenance software. To find a suitable solution, the City Manager asked the Parks and Recreation department to launch a pilot program.   The project sought a computerized maintenance management software (CMMS) system that could provide long-term asset life-cycle reporting by tracking maintenance costs and associating them to specific buildings and other assets, allowing the team to make “maintain vs. repair” decisions, analyze data in the cycle, and track expenses relative to the budget.
Werner had a large task ahead of him: the assets for all 10 city-owned buildings had to be matched to the city time keeping system, and, for each specific building ID and room #, each asset had to be accounted for, including: electrical equipment, roofing, and floors and walls, down to the square footage of carpet and sheet rock.   By setting up the CMMS in this way, an unprecedented level of asset integrity was created.  Now the team is rapidly able to initiate any work that needs to be done, procedures have been standardized across all sites, expenses can be easily traced to the exact location and staff member who performed them, and managers can accurately assess whether it is more cost-effective to maintain or replace a facility. The City of Richland continues to see the benefits of implementing eMaint’s CMMS & preventative maintenance software across all its facilities and buildings, which was instrumental in realizing the five-year plan’s seven pillars.
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