It has been a challenging year full of news at CloudFire.
Much of the enthusiasm and electricity that characterized it is also your work, as you are part of our network of partners and customers, and who place your trust in us every day.
We changed our approach during the year with the aim of achieving more sustainable and efficient results for you who use our services; we focused even more on technologies that are gradually becoming the standards of the Cloud Native world, consolidating partnerships that will lead to unique projects and solutions on the Italian scene, of which we are extremely proud.
Let's see together some facts and what guided us during the Our 2022.
A perception of the Cloud towards Automation
The Cloud and its related services, especially on the Italian scene, are exploding and growing at rapid levels. However, the approach to this world often involves high skills and effort, time and money, which are not always bearable. Relying on consultancy projects guarantees in most cases the necessary expertise, while remaining linked to factors such as timing, flexibility during the project and, finally, the cost factor. The automation of these processes makes it possible to achieve all this, in a self-service mode, without giving up highly technological and valuable solutions.
It is on this basis that in 2022 we consolidated a Change of approach which we had been thinking about for some time, and which has resulted in direct improvements and changes on our portal and on our services.
Our mission always remains the same: accelerate IT innovation by making available powerful and scalable Cloud solutions with automated processes for the user. Precisely for this reason, during the year, the Cortex portal and the ecosystem of services within it have been revolutionized and made even more of a unique tool to achieve this goal. Concretely, to date, subscribing to our portal and starting to use it are steps that every user can do simply and in complete autonomy.
To continue to grow, you need to act challenging objectives and ambitions. Precisely for this reason We're not stopping, on the contrary, we work every day to achieve and exceed our and your expectations.
That said, in the last year Cortex has been the protagonist of several transformations that have led it to be even more of an intuitive and simple tool for managing services, monitoring consumption, administering your account and much more.
To learn more about the improvements made to Cortex during the year, just consult the section What's new of our Blog.
“It's not a question of if but of when“Let's talk about security
La threatens of attacks of various kinds, in particular ransomware, has been a constant in our sector, especially in the last year.
Riding the wave of”It's not a question of if, but of when it will happen” we have increased the tools useful for better protection of your data. I am the proof of this:
- Multi-factor authentication to add an additional level of security, in addition to a username and password, by entering a one-time code. We recommend that you activate it for all users of your Cortex account, if you haven't already done so.
- Immutable Storage to make the data hosted in your repository unalterable for a defined period of time. This allows you to deal with malicious activity, data corruption or accidental deletion.
Optimization remains a priority
We assume that to request better and optimized results of services is as much as yours as it is our priority. This is why we have focused our efforts on performances, costs and environmental impact.
A concrete example regarding performances It was definitely the modification of thePublic Cloud architecture, through which you have flavors designed specifically for Enterprise and mission-critical applications, to obtain maximum performance in each type of application. The same applies to Scalable Storage; thanks to hard work and study we were able to Triple your performance of our Ceph.
Surely the new infrastructure has also allowed for lateral optimization costs, always pay per usage and on an hourly basis, which make it possible for our partners to reach ever higher margins.
Finally, we rely on certified datacenters, increasingly innovative and sustainable. On the environmental side, in fact, the datacenters in question guarantee a improvement of the ecological footprint, through plans useful for the continuous reduction of energy consumption. Data4 in particular, is designing additional buildings that are more efficient and have a lower environmental impact than the previous ones, which shows the importance attached to it.
Cloud Native Community and Partnership
The Power of the World Open Source I am the Community And the constant enthusiasm to face new challenges, in the search for technologies and in the continuous study of new efficient and rapid solutions; for this reason, collaborating is an indispensable step in creating new ideas to propose to you.
In 2022 we had the pleasure of participating in several manifestations organized by Cloud Native Community And get to know reality and persons with our own desire to do and innovate. The events that most involved and inspired us were: OpenInfra Summit 2022, KubeCon Valencia 2022, KuBeCon North America 2022.
A constant at the center of the various discussion tables in which we participated, was certainly Kubernetes And the world Cloud Native. This recurring theme confirms how K8s is the de-facto standard for running applications in the Cloud, and how collaborations and studies in this regard can bring the results we are expecting for the year 2023. Among these, we consider important the one already established with Clastix, with which several projects are in the pipeline.
Looking to next year, we are sure that Cloud Native issues such as micro-services, containers, Platform Engineering, GitOps and Infrastructure-as-a-Code and many others that we have started to address, are becoming increasingly the supporting technologies of our sector.
Cortex news
Each of the factors listed above has led to concrete implementations in Cortex and the services contained within it. The main ones concern:
- Cortex: to improve the user experience, the platform is now divided into three portals: the first dedicated to managing your account, the second dedicated entirely to partners and the last dedicated to the operational management of services.
- Public Cloud: are available new flavor architectures, specifically Intel Xeon Gold Scalable on Dell Power Edge hardware for both Enterprise and business critical applications. In addition, to respond more precisely and flexibly to different needs and optimize costs, you can use two types of disk resources: Scalable Storage and Direct Attached Storage SSD or NVME. Of the first, in particular, we have increased the number of IOPS and reduced disk latencies, further increasing its performance. Regarding the Networking component, new bandwidth profiles are available for each IP with always unlimited download.
- Talky Time: the tool that revolutionizes Concept of business communication, providing a single access to answer any telephone need. With SIP Talky Time Account you can request numbers, individual and GNR, national and international, new or portable. With Talky Time Direct Routing Instead, associate your numbering with the Microsoft Teams® suite, enabling calls directly to your Microsoft tenant.
- Cloud Native Apps — 3CX apps: directly from the CloudFire marketplace, you can deploy and activate one or more in a few minutes 3CX APP and request the necessary licenses directly.
- Veeam Cloud Platform: we launched a important update for the service. This now allows you to: monitor your backup and disaster recovery resources, manage advanced features such as limiting network traffic and managing WAN acceleration, and request monthly licenses of any edition.
- Acronis Cyber Backup: various functionalities have been added, such as the possibility of choosing the most advantageous model between pay per usage and pay per allocation, so as to guarantee you maximum flexibility to pay for pre-allocated resources or only for actual consumption. Depending on your needs, you can also select between two Billing modes: per GB and per workload.
In conclusion, although 2022 was a year full of challenges, we are growing and we are very proud and excited about how we are tackling them. ☁️🔥
This year's results confirm that the path taken is right, at least up to now, and the credit for all this is also yours. 💖
