Why does the Cloud Hosting provider choice matter?
Migrating business operations, emails, or document storage to the cloud will significantly reduce the cost of running a business, streamline operations, and eliminate the need for in-house IT solutions.
The right cloud hosting provider should ease remote employee collaboration and access to critical business data. In summary, cloud hosting allows SME and Large Enterprises to focus on their core business, as the cloud hosting provider takes care of all the heavy lifting, and handles the IT infrastructure.
Today there are many companies offering cloud hosting services, choosing the right provider for your business is a lengthy and complex process. Like any other business, hosting providers have varying aptitudes, services, and expertise.
The best cloud hosting provider offers secure, reliable, and cost-effective services.
Here are the top attributes you should look into when choosing a cloud service provider.
1. Security
Before shortlisting any cloud hosting provider, assess your security requirements, and ensure that the security level of your candidate hosting providers is at least equal if not higher to your security terms.
Besides, it is crucial to have a good understanding of the responsibilities of each party.
You must understand which security features are offered for free, which ones are paid-for features from the hosting provider.
You should also confirm with the cloud provider that it is compatible with third-party security solutions that you plan to implement in the mid-term as per your IT roadmap.
Find out how GDMS can help you secure your cloud workload with NSX Network and Security Platform.
2. Compliance
When looking for a cloud hosting provider, it is crucial to choose a company that meets your industry-specific compliance needs.
In Laos, GDMS cloud infrastructure is operated from government data center facilities that comply with international build standards.
In Myanmar, GDMS cloud infrastructure is hosted in a private data center facility Tier3 by design.
3. Technologies and Support
Every cloud stack is different. When choosing a cloud hosting provider, ensure that the cloud hosting company uses a cloud infrastructure that is designed for public cloud hosting, is fit for multi-tenancy, with 24/7 vendor support.
Before finally closing the deal with a specific cloud services provider, request to see the architecture design, ask to trial the environment.
GDMS is a VMware certified cloud service provider, the cloud infrastructure is deployed as per VMware Validated Design ensuring that the cloud stack is built as per industry standard of compliance, security, and reliability.
GDMS also offers migration support and assistance, to make the process easy on your part.
4. Reliability and Performance
Downtime can lead to significant monetary losses, especially for companies that rely on cloud services to transact. It is crucial to assess the cloud service provider’s reliability.
To assess the service reliability, ask the cloud provider for its SLA document.
GDMS offers 99.99% on its cloud infrastructure. We offer a comprehensive and transparent SLA agreement that is proof of our commitment to provide a reliable service to your business.
Downtimes are inevitable, what matters is how companies deal with the problem and have processes in place to solve it quickly. GDMS follows the ITIL framework for its support process and has a complete escalation chain in place to ensure smooth and rapid recovery in the event of an outage.
5. Self-Service User Interface
When choosing your cloud service provider, make sure that your environment has an out-of-band interface (management portal) for you to access your applications even in case of an issue.
GDMS leverages vCloud Director Self-Service Portal, a powerful management portal designed for service providers willing to offer self-service capabilities to their tenants. With the portal, users can spin up their virtual machines, scale up and down, create networks and security policies without any intervention from the service provider.
Thanks to a policy-driven approach, end users have isolated virtual resources, independent role-based authentication, and fine-grained control. This meets the current market demand in which users request resources without the involvement of the service provider.
6. Cloud Services
Cloud service providers offer different types of services. The primary kind includes Infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), which many people think of as the cloud.
The Infrastructure-as-a-service can be cut down into private and public cloud depending on how the infrastructure is shared or managed. GDMS can offer both private and public cloud infrastructure to their customers in Laos and Myanmar.
Public and private cloud offers different levels of privacy, security, and cost suggestions, and can either be managed or unmanaged. GDMS offers by default 24/7 support service. Customers can opt-in for managed services if required.
7. Experience In Migration, Integration, And Configuration
You need to dig a little deeper to find out exactly how much experience your potential cloud hosting service has. The more competent they are, the more likely there will be processes, measures, and contingencies in place.
If you want to make your project a success, run smoothly, and almost free from glitches, choose a provider with in-depth experience.
A solid cloud service provider shall be able to spot potential issues and give you recommendations based on best practices. A reliable cloud provider is passionate about technology and constantly releases new products and services to improve customer experience, service availability, and reliability.
8. Pricing
Before settling on a specific cloud service provider, it is essential to have a solid understanding of the price structure. Many providers will offer low-cost and alluring offers, but the devil is in the details, or in the footnote in our case. Check what services they are offering, review all the price points, and anticipate your growth for the next few years. While it does not mean all affordable cloud services are questionable, they can become extremely expensive in the long run as your estate grows.
GDMS offers a clear and transparent pricing structure with no hidden fees. Our offering including pay as you grow, reserved price as well as burst price option. No matter your company size, we have a pricing model that will suit your budget.
9. Datacenter locations
If you plan to use the VPS as a front-end server for your online customers or end-users then the datacenter locations do matter a lot.
Even if there is only one location available, there must be one that is close to your visitors. The round trip time between your server can be anything between 10ms and 300ms, 10ms within the country for example, and 300ms between the US east coast and Australia. A typical website will require at least 3 sequential round trips before the first page can begin rendering. That may not be the biggest factor delaying the page display but the impact of round trip time should not be overlooked.
GDMS Cloud Infrastructure is deployed in facilities respectively in Vientiane, Laos, and Yangon, Myanmar. Our data center facilities have been selected for their dense peering with domestic networks to ensure your applications are accessible with low latency no matter from which network you try to connect from.
GDMS also offers CDN (Content Distribution Network) services to cache static files and accelerate the delivery of your web applications. A CDN will improve the user experience and reduce the load on your servers.
Find out more about our VPS solutions in Myanmar
Find out more about our VPS solutions in Laos
FInd out more about our cloud backup services
Interested by Colocation? Check out our guide to choose a datacenter facility.
Shift your enterprise communications to VoIP
With the pandemic hitting South East Asia, companies had to go through a brutal transformation of their organization to accommodate employees working from remote locations sometimes with unexpected notices.
To prevent the spread of COVID-19, Governments in Myanmar and Laos have enforced lockdowns with such short notice that some companies see their business disrupted because they were not prepared to shift to work from home.
Even if the era of lockdowns seems to be a thing of the past, it could happen for employees to catch COVID-19 and need to isolate themselves. To ensure business continuity, it is crucial for every company to ensure employees can work seamlessly from home.
Customer Care and Tech Support, one of the top challenges of the pandemic
Working from home can be pretty easy for those that do not work in a customer-facing position. What is really needed is a good Internet broadband, a VPN to access the enterprise network, and shared drives.
The biggest challenge lies in departments that need to deal with customers on a daily basis. How do you ensure that inbound customer calls are routed to your customer care no matter where the team is at the moment. How do you make sure that people get the support they are entitled to when your team mostly works from home?
Some of the customer channels are easier to adapt to the new normal, such as instant messaging, emails, or chat boxes. These can easily be accessed by customer agents from home.
But a lot of customers still have the habit to pick up the phone when they bump into an issue. If the company phone number is tied to a physical line that ends in an empty office, the customer will face a very disappointing experience.
Shift your Customer Service to Voice over IP (VoIP)
What if you can dissociate the phone number from a physical location? What if a phone number can just be a virtual entry point to your customer service no matter where your agents stand?
According to Wikipedia, Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), also called IP telephony, is a method and group of technologies for the delivery of voice communications and multimedia sessions over Internet Protocol (IP) networks, such as the Internet.
Shifting to VoIP services ensure your customer call will always be picked up. How? Because a number is not tied anymore to a physical location but to an intelligent PBX -that could sit in the cloud- that will route the call to your employees no matter where they are.
By using VoIP services, your customer service can be reached from anywhere:
You can create policies to ensure that calls get rerouted in case the agent is not reachable. You can also create advanced IVR (Interactive voice response) to route calls to the right department.
GDMS offers VoIP services in Laos and Myanmar. We have partnered with leading telecom operators in both countries and can lease long and short numbers (also called DID or Direct Inward Dialing) to your business.
Interested to know more about VoIP? Read our article about SIP Trunk and DID numbers
GDMS also offers Cloud PBX capabilities with advanced features such as
All these features can be offered “as a service” with no investment from your end. GDMS can design, implement and operate a complete call center and VoIP solutions letting the customer focus on what matters the most: his business.
The shift to Unified Communications
Unified Communications (UC) refers to a phone system that integrates multiple communication channels within a business.
UC is the next level that helps companies consolidate their support channel into one single platform. With UC, customer service can access customer information in real-time from one interface with powerful integrations.
UC can fully integrate multiple communication channels such as Instant Messaging, Voice, SMS or Chatbox.
GDMS built strong partnerships with UC technology leaders in order to help companies in Laos and Myanmar transition their phone systems to Unified Communication.
Interested to shift your enterprise communications to Voice over IP? Contact us for a private conversation!
GDMS, a strategic player in the transition to the local cloud
The public cloud, which is currently making record profits, is reaching its limits. More and more companies are considering repatriating their data as close as possible to their business center. The reasons are diverse: economic, ecological, sovereignist, or pragmatically for performance.
Yesterday, Wednesday, March 30, the French Business Club in Laos met at Metisse Restaurant. Mathieu Ploton from Global Digital Management Solutions presented how GDMS supports businesses and the Lao government in their transition to the domestic cloud.
GDMS Cloud Services Presentation for the French Business Club in Vientiane, Lao PDR
GDMS Cloud Services Presentation for the French Business Club in Vientiane, Lao PDR
Why a local cloud?
Data Privacy and Data Sovereignty
Nowadays, US and Chinese companies dominate the public cloud market. AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud represent two-thirds of the public cloud market share.
Public Cloud Provider Market Share in Q4 2021
The Clarifying Lawful Overseas Use of Data Act or CLOUD Act allows U.S. federal law enforcement to request data from U.S.-based technology companies regardless of geographical location. It means that data hosted in leading cloud companies such as AWS or Azure can by warrant be handed over to the US government. This could represent a sovereignty issue when it is related to sensitive data such as personal information.
As for Chinese companies, there are only a few cases where China compelled public cloud providers to release customer data.
Companies in Lao PDR and the government shall take this risk into consideration when selecting a location to store customer or citizen personal data. The best location will only be to host this data locally with a local company hence solely subject to the local law.
Local Cloud significantly improves user experience
There are two network parameters that impact the performance of web applications. Bandwidth and Latency. A common belief is that the former is the most impactful but it is actually not the case.
Page Load Time as Bandwidth/Latency Increase
Latency is the time for a packet to leave someone’s computer, reach the destination server and come back. When a user attempts to load a webpage, there are multiple sessions involved hence multiple back and forth between the user computer and the server.
The nearest public cloud provider from Laos is Singapore which represents a return trip of 40-50ms between the local user and the remote server. From a webpage loading perspective, it translates into 1s of load time between the time the user press enters and the time the webpage starts to load. This is quite significant, especially for users that work on business applications such as CRM or ERP which constant interaction to a remote web server.
By hosting a business application locally, the latency can be reduced from 45ms to less than 5ms. The impact on the user experience is immense and for business users, it also means a significant improvement in productivity.
Edge Computing, the future of cloud computing?
What Is Edge Computing? Edge computing is a distributed IT architecture that moves computing resources from clouds and data centers as close as possible to the originating source.
To foster the development of edge computing, it is crucial to develop in-country infrastructure. Datacenters of various sizes, fiber networks, local internet exchange. Edge computing in essence is deployed as close to the user as possible. A large data center in the city capital will not be sufficient to deploy edge computing but it is definitely a start.
Edge Computing Forecasted Value per Industry
Edge Computing enables the development of new applications: Smartgrid, Remote monitoring of assets, Predictive maintenance, In-Hospital Patient Monitoring, Traffic Management, Virtualised radio networks, and 5G, Cloud Gaming…
GDMS, an international company with a local reach
GDMS is the very first cloud service provider in Lao PDR. Our technology stack is deployed in a local data center facility in Vientiane that complies with international standards of availability and performance.
We partner with international vendors to offer cutting-edge cloud services to our customers in Lao PDR.
GDMS Cloud Services and Products
We have the ambition to deploy additional cloud availability zones in Lao PDR in the near future to enable Edge Computing Applications.
GDMS Cloud Infrastructure passed CISA audit in Laos
Global Digital Management Solutions Laos is proud to announce that it has passed its CISA audit.
For GDMS customers and partners, information system availability is of exceptionally high importance. Passing the CISA audit demonstrates GDMS’s commitment to information system availability also to its continuous improvement of products and services.
To pass the CIA audit, GDMS went through an extensive datacenter-wide audit by CBA. The audit included demonstrating GDMS datacentre and cloud infrastructure in Laos have achieved a high level of availability and performance over the past 6 months, assessed the implications, and have implemented systemized controls to secure business continuity.
The auditor has identified zero shortcomings, which is considered an excellent result. To pass the CISA audit once again, GDMS will need to continuously improve its information system availability and performance going forward.
CISA is world-renowned as the standard of achievement for those who audit, control, monitor, and assess an organization’s information technology and business systems.
How to choose a colocation facility?
Choosing the right data center for your IT infrastructure is not a decision to take lightly.
The wrong choice can put your security, resiliency, availability, and services at risk. It is very important to think carefully and choose wisely your data center location so you don’t jeopardize your service availability and your business reputation.
A data center strategy is not something to take lightly and considering the effort to relocate your workload from one facility to another, it should be a long-term plan that should take into account your business growth over the years to come.
Criteria to consider when choosing a data center location
Location is one of the top criteria when choosing a datacenter facility. And it does not only mean choosing a location close to your office.
Prior to moving forward with your data center location, consider the following :
What are your data center objectives?
What do you expect from a datacenter facility? How will it help your company launch new services, reduce risk, improve availability while cutting down on costs? You need the datacenter to be a playground where you feel at ease to innovate. The facility shall not be a constraint to your growth.
For instance, if today you require 2 racks 3 KVA each, you should ask yourself what will be your requirements in 1 year, 3 years or 5 years? With hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI), high-density racks are a must and you should be able to increase the power at ease. It would be also interesting to ask the datacenter facility what the current capacity is and how fast you can extend your colocation area to additional racks.
What is your data center’s role?
One of the top things to define is whether this datacenter facility will be used for your test, UAT, prepod, or production? You also need to consider disaster recovery. If this datacenter is meant to host production, where will be the disaster recovery site? Is this datacenter the primary or secondary site?
Upon the definition of this role, you should consider carefully the datacenter connectivity to the outside world. a good datacenter facility shall be carrier-neutral and host multiple carriers.
Ideally, this datacenter shall accept and welcome third-party telecom providers selected by the customer.
For instance, if your office and branches telecom connectivity is provided by Unitel, ask yourself if the said datacenter is also connected to Unitel. Having all your sites on the same network will help reduce latency, improve performance and possibly keep the costs to the minimum.
if this datacenter facility is used for testing purposes, you also should consider site access as a very important factor. Testing means building and putting down the environment constantly. Depending on your architecture, you may need to send technicians onsite to do so. How easy is it to access the facility? How long do you need to ask in advance to grant permission? Can you access the facility at night or during the weekends?
Do you have access to a staging area or a hot desk for you to work onsite? These questions are crucial before choosing your datacenter provider.
Do you need remote hand service?
Using colocation services is not as easy as the cloud. If your server freeze or crash, you need someone onsite to reboot it. Depending on the data center location, it can take some time to reach the site and perform the manual action.
Some datacenter facilities provide smart hand service. In such a case, you simply have to open a ticket with your datacenter provider and they will send someone onsite to act.
What are your restrictions?
In today’s business world, customers expect to access services day and night at lightning speed. Can your datacenter meet this requirement? What is the average latency between the datacenter facility and your customers? Can the datacenter facility offer redundant connectivity that will protect you in case of fiber failure? Does the datacenter facility have a comprehensive service level agreement (SLA)?
What is your security or risk profile?
Does the selected location meet your compliance requirements? How is the facility secured against natural disasters?
If your company hosts customer personal data, you may also check with the country regulation if it is preferred/required to host this data in the country.
GDMS has secured data center facilities in Myanmar and Laos that comply with local regulations.
Interested in Cloud Hosting Services? Check out our guide to choose your Cloud Hosting Provider.
Cybersecurity is key so is physical security
Nowadays, companies are fully aware of cybersecurity threats. IT departments are responsible to ensure that company data and customer data are never compromised. But what if someone can simply walk into your office and steal documents or files from a computer? You can have the best IT security in the world, you also need a physical security plan.
It goes the same for your datacenter facility. When choosing the right colocation area, make sure the provider has 24/7 onsite security. If you schedule a data center visit, pay attention the all the details during your admission. Is someone asking for your ID when accessing the facility? Do they know you are coming today? Do they have a record of your visit explaining why you are here and what area you are allowed to access?
It is also very important to have multi-layers of access control in the datacenter itself with role-based access. Ultimately, you need to make sure that only fully qualified and selected personnel have access to your rack.
A good security practice for datacenter is also to make sure that the provider has the policy to escort the customer to their rack and that the datacenter personnel attends the visit at all times.
GDMS is your datacenter, ICT, and cloud provider of choice for your business in Myanmar and Laos.
Contact us for a private conversation about your digital transformation projects.
Secure your cloud with GDMS Network and Security Platform
GDMS as a VMware cloud service provider leverages network, and security platform NSX to provide secure networking services to its customers.
As companies in Myanmar and Laos increasingly turn to digital transformation via the cloud, they’re relying on partners like GDMS to help them migrate their apps and workloads to the cloud without sacrificing performance and mitigating risk.
By subscription to GDMS cloud services, you get access to the complete NSX suite giving you the possibility to centrally define, implement, and manage perimeter security gateway services, such as DNS, DHCP, and NAT. NSX allows customers to control North-South traffic quickly and easily without any hardware dependencies.
“Never Trust – Always Verify”
Security is an ongoing challenge for organizations with today’s dynamic and distributed workforce, growing BYOD, and the continued expansion into the cloud. While the cloud is often safer than a company’s own data center, it is still crucial for organizations to own and control who and what is allowed access to their applications and data – no matter where they are running.
With Zero-Trust, network security is set up to assume that you have already been compromised and any traffic, even behind the firewall, is considered “untrustworthy” until it’s proven to meet the right criteria.
Inside your network perimeter or DMZ, smaller segments of the network are protected by their 4 own tiny perimeters (called a “micro perimeter”).
This allows a security administrator to add an extra layer of security around the company’s most important data, assets, applications, and services.
To access any individual segment in a Zero-Trust architecture, users must pass strict identity and device verification procedures. A “least-privilege” model is recommended, which limits access to only needed resources.
The first step in implementing a Zero-Trust network is to secure individual parts of the network using micro-segmentation. Micro-segmentation should be adopted in addition to network perimeter security controls. When you have both perimeter controls, as well as micro-segmentation, not only is traffic inspected and controlled as it enters your network (North-South), it’s also inspected as it moves laterally (East-West) between VMs and systems.
GDMS provides critical software-defined networking firewall capabilities for both perimeter,
or edge firewalls, as well as services for micro-segmentation, also known as distributed firewalls.
By offering these services at the software layer—decoupled from hardware—they are:
VMware Edge Gateway (ESG)
The ESG gives you access to all NSX Edge services such as firewall, NAT, DHCP, VPN, load balancing, and high availability. You can install multiple ESG virtual appliances in a data center.
GDMS offers a number of professional services to help you design and deploy your edge firewall. We can help with setting up least-privilege rules and other gateway configurations to support your Zero-Trust security goals.
Edge Gateways come in 4 sizes: Compact, Large, Quad-Large and X-Large.
A reference table around the different specifications available for each size of VMware NSX Edge Gateways.
Distributed Firewall
Micro-segmentation, also known as distributed firewalling (DFW), is an approach to defining network and security policies that allow organizations to segment and control workloads based on application profiles.
Distributed Firewalling is available with our cloud offering through either a self-service portal or as a managed service.
Features:
Why Use GDMS Distributed Firewall:
As networks become virtualized and micro-segmentation becomes a strategic advantage for security teams, data inherently becomes segmented into buckets to allow teams greater visibility and control over information on the network. Segmentation can be used to separate day-to-day business data from sensitive or proprietary data.
From there, security and risk teams can place the proper security and access controls on sensitive data segments using micro-segmentation.
Enable network security controls
Network admins can more quickly identify and adjust privileges for certain data
types through micro-segmentation, enabling:
Achieve better data visibility and protection
If organizations understand where data exists, and which users are supposed to
have access to it, then:
Stop lateral spread of threats
Network segmentation automatically interweaves connections and services to
create micro-perimeters around specific sets of data and information. This:
Layer 4 Protection
By default, our distributed firewalls offer protection up through layer 4 of the OSI
network stack, enabling:
Layer 7 Protection
Application context-aware
If organizations understand where data exists, and which users are supposed to
have access to it, then:
Professional Services
GDMS offers professional and managed services to help you design, deploy, and manage your distributed firewalls.
Advanced Insights
GDMS offers additional advanced insights into traffic patterns to determine where you
can benefit the most from a context-aware firewall. This helps you to lower operational expenses
while focusing on these advanced capabilities where they’re needed most. This is available self-service or as a managed service.
Ready to learn more?
Contact Us
GDMS Webinar: Essential Cloud Management Platform
VMware vCloud Suite is an enterprise-grade cloud infrastructure and management solution that combines the industry-leading VMware vSphere compute virtualization platform and the VMware vRealize Suite multi-cloud management solution, delivering the modern infrastructure automation and operations capabilities you need to deliver traditional and modern infrastructure and apps.
VMware Cloud Foundation supports both traditional enterprise and modern apps and provides a complete set of highly secure software-defined services for compute, storage, network, security, Kubernetes and cloud management Increase enterprise agility and flexibility with consistent infrastructure and operations across private and public clouds.
Please join in to learn More about : managing a private cloud with vRealize Suite and VMware Cloud Foundations capabilities.
SIP Trunk and DID, what is the difference?
SIP trunk and DID are not competing with each other. Both are parts of a completed phone system and work together.
But it’s important to know how they integrate, as you’ll need to obtain and configure both of them to set up an operational IP phone system.
GDMS is offering VoIP services to enterprises in Myanmar and Laos. If you are interested to connect your enterprise PBX to the public network, we have a solution for you. If you do not have a PBX or it is near the end of support, we can easily replace your physical PBX with a cloud-based PBX that will achieve the same purpose and enrich your communication with video calls, IVR, and conferences.
What is DID?
A DID (Direct Inward Dialing) number is a virtual phone number that can connect to one or multiple phones without the need to dial an extension or operator assistance. DIDs enable your staff to have a direct long number that is directly connected to their phone.
If you run an office with hundreds of phones, you could possibly assign a DID number to each phone, rather than having a single phone number and requiring external callers to dial an extension to reach a specific phone in the office. It creates a seamless experience.
How does DID – Direct Inward Dialing really Work?
A DID number connects over the internet, using a SIP trunk. The call path using a DID looks like this:
Caller > SIP trunk > Internet > PBX > Receiving PBX phone
If you only have one phone, you do not need to have a PBX in place and calls would go straight from the internet right to your IP phone.
Popular Use Cases
The principal advantage of using DID numbers over traditional phone numbers is that it’s much faster and more cost-effective to add phone numbers. Expanding traditional phone infrastructure requires running new physical wires. On the other hand, you can scale up many DID numbers on a single internet connection, as long as you have the bandwidth to support the concurrent calls from and to all your phone numbers.
Here are a few popular uses cases for DID numbers, to add clarity:
SIP Trunk vs DID Providers
GDMS is a SIP trunking and DID provider covering Myanmar and Laos. Customers can leverage our in-country VoIP gateway to connect their enterprise PBX to the PSTN network. If the customer does not own a PBX, GDMS offers cloud-based IPBX solutions that are both cost-effective and extremely scalable.
Contact Us for more information about our VoIP services.
How to choose a Cloud Hosting Provider?
Why does the Cloud Hosting provider choice matter?
Migrating business operations, emails, or document storage to the cloud will significantly reduce the cost of running a business, streamline operations, and eliminate the need for in-house IT solutions.
The right cloud hosting provider should ease remote employee collaboration and access to critical business data. In summary, cloud hosting allows SME and Large Enterprises to focus on their core business, as the cloud hosting provider takes care of all the heavy lifting, and handles the IT infrastructure.
Today there are many companies offering cloud hosting services, choosing the right provider for your business is a lengthy and complex process. Like any other business, hosting providers have varying aptitudes, services, and expertise.
The best cloud hosting provider offers secure, reliable, and cost-effective services.
Here are the top attributes you should look into when choosing a cloud service provider.
1. Security
Before shortlisting any cloud hosting provider, assess your security requirements, and ensure that the security level of your candidate hosting providers is at least equal if not higher to your security terms.
Besides, it is crucial to have a good understanding of the responsibilities of each party.
You must understand which security features are offered for free, which ones are paid-for features from the hosting provider.
You should also confirm with the cloud provider that it is compatible with third-party security solutions that you plan to implement in the mid-term as per your IT roadmap.
Find out how GDMS can help you secure your cloud workload with NSX Network and Security Platform.
2. Compliance
When looking for a cloud hosting provider, it is crucial to choose a company that meets your industry-specific compliance needs.
In Laos, GDMS cloud infrastructure is operated from government data center facilities that comply with international build standards.
In Myanmar, GDMS cloud infrastructure is hosted in a private data center facility Tier3 by design.
3. Technologies and Support
Every cloud stack is different. When choosing a cloud hosting provider, ensure that the cloud hosting company uses a cloud infrastructure that is designed for public cloud hosting, is fit for multi-tenancy, with 24/7 vendor support.
Before finally closing the deal with a specific cloud services provider, request to see the architecture design, ask to trial the environment.
GDMS is a VMware certified cloud service provider, the cloud infrastructure is deployed as per VMware Validated Design ensuring that the cloud stack is built as per industry standard of compliance, security, and reliability.
GDMS also offers migration support and assistance, to make the process easy on your part.
4. Reliability and Performance
Downtime can lead to significant monetary losses, especially for companies that rely on cloud services to transact. It is crucial to assess the cloud service provider’s reliability.
To assess the service reliability, ask the cloud provider for its SLA document.
GDMS offers 99.99% on its cloud infrastructure. We offer a comprehensive and transparent SLA agreement that is proof of our commitment to provide a reliable service to your business.
Downtimes are inevitable, what matters is how companies deal with the problem and have processes in place to solve it quickly. GDMS follows the ITIL framework for its support process and has a complete escalation chain in place to ensure smooth and rapid recovery in the event of an outage.
5. Self-Service User Interface
When choosing your cloud service provider, make sure that your environment has an out-of-band interface (management portal) for you to access your applications even in case of an issue.
GDMS leverages vCloud Director Self-Service Portal, a powerful management portal designed for service providers willing to offer self-service capabilities to their tenants. With the portal, users can spin up their virtual machines, scale up and down, create networks and security policies without any intervention from the service provider.
Thanks to a policy-driven approach, end users have isolated virtual resources, independent role-based authentication, and fine-grained control. This meets the current market demand in which users request resources without the involvement of the service provider.
6. Cloud Services
Cloud service providers offer different types of services. The primary kind includes Infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), which many people think of as the cloud.
The Infrastructure-as-a-service can be cut down into private and public cloud depending on how the infrastructure is shared or managed. GDMS can offer both private and public cloud infrastructure to their customers in Laos and Myanmar.
Public and private cloud offers different levels of privacy, security, and cost suggestions, and can either be managed or unmanaged. GDMS offers by default 24/7 support service. Customers can opt-in for managed services if required.
7. Experience In Migration, Integration, And Configuration
You need to dig a little deeper to find out exactly how much experience your potential cloud hosting service has. The more competent they are, the more likely there will be processes, measures, and contingencies in place.
If you want to make your project a success, run smoothly, and almost free from glitches, choose a provider with in-depth experience.
A solid cloud service provider shall be able to spot potential issues and give you recommendations based on best practices. A reliable cloud provider is passionate about technology and constantly releases new products and services to improve customer experience, service availability, and reliability.
8. Pricing
Before settling on a specific cloud service provider, it is essential to have a solid understanding of the price structure. Many providers will offer low-cost and alluring offers, but the devil is in the details, or in the footnote in our case. Check what services they are offering, review all the price points, and anticipate your growth for the next few years. While it does not mean all affordable cloud services are questionable, they can become extremely expensive in the long run as your estate grows.
GDMS offers a clear and transparent pricing structure with no hidden fees. Our offering including pay as you grow, reserved price as well as burst price option. No matter your company size, we have a pricing model that will suit your budget.
9. Datacenter locations
If you plan to use the VPS as a front-end server for your online customers or end-users then the datacenter locations do matter a lot.
Even if there is only one location available, there must be one that is close to your visitors. The round trip time between your server can be anything between 10ms and 300ms, 10ms within the country for example, and 300ms between the US east coast and Australia. A typical website will require at least 3 sequential round trips before the first page can begin rendering. That may not be the biggest factor delaying the page display but the impact of round trip time should not be overlooked.
GDMS Cloud Infrastructure is deployed in facilities respectively in Vientiane, Laos, and Yangon, Myanmar. Our data center facilities have been selected for their dense peering with domestic networks to ensure your applications are accessible with low latency no matter from which network you try to connect from.
GDMS also offers CDN (Content Distribution Network) services to cache static files and accelerate the delivery of your web applications. A CDN will improve the user experience and reduce the load on your servers.
Find out more about our VPS solutions in Myanmar
Find out more about our VPS solutions in Laos
FInd out more about our cloud backup services
Interested by Colocation? Check out our guide to choose a datacenter facility.
GDMS partners with Conversant to deliver Next-generation CDN services in Myanmar and Laos
Local cloud services provider Global Digital Management Solutions (GDMS) partners with Conversant Solutions, a Singapore-based digital media solutions provider to offer the first software-defined Enterprise Content Delivery Network (CDN) service in Myanmar and Laos.
Since the COVID-19 pandemic, many have shifted their day-to-day activities to online. To sustain the spike in Internet traffic, CDN services are now more critical than ever.
Thanks to CDN services, businesses that serve local and global markets or mobilize employees via the Internet will be able to provide their customers or users with an enhanced online experience in terms of the accessibility and responsiveness of their website or web-based applications.
Online gaming, video streaming, payment transactions as well as other digital content and media are delivered over the web with minimized lag and improved availability through CDN services.
Thanks to this partnership, the CDN solution is readily available for Myanmar and Laos enterprises through an easy subscription-based model that allows digital companies to use GDMS’s CDN services without the need to invest in hardware equipment, maintenance, and other related operational expenses.
According to Mathieu Ploton, GDMS Chief Technical Officer, “GDMS enterprise CDN services help organizations improve the security and performance of their digital assets. Slow website performance has a measurable effect on conversion rates which results in revenue loss. DDoS attacks can have disastrous consequences for an online business as well. Adopting CDN is a fundamental step for any digital business these days.”
On the other hand, Cheong Kong Wai, Executive Chairman, and CEO for Conversant Solutions said, “This strategic alliance allows GDMS to provide CDN services to its customers by leveraging on the reach and scale of our network, through our SwiftFederation Partners. We are excited to share GDMS’s commitment to helping its customers to grow and drive their brand forward in this increasingly connected world.”
In practical terms, CDN acts as an intermediary between the point of origin of data and an internet-connected device. Through a network of servers located around the world, companies can deliver digital content, such as websites or videos, faster, safer, and more reliably to end-users. This is especially beneficial to developing countries like Myanmar and Laos, where internet speed and resiliency remain an issue.
By subscribing to GDMS’s CDN offering, clients will also have access to numerous features like monitoring tools and analytics for customer insights and analysis, and be able to use it for geolocation. At the same time, the platform should be leveraged to cache and deliver the content through the nearest edge and help offload origin servers.
Thanks to Conversant CDN federation, GDMS can leverage a stable network through more than 90 POPs located worldwide, with a steady footprint in the Asian region. GDMS will provide local in-country customer support 24/7 to enterprises that desire to use its CDN services. Customers are also free to test the product and discover its resiliency before signing up.
Protect Your Business with Disaster Recovery as a Service
Gartner estimates that the cost of downtime is $5,600 a minute. As you continue to evolve into a digital business, you literally can’t afford for applications to be unavailable. But growing data, increasing the risk of cyberattacks, and more complex regulations make it a struggle to ensure business continuity.
GDMS provides cloud-based disaster recovery that:
We also offer consultative services to improve outcomes and aid you on your journey to protecting the business. Interested? get in touch with us!
Flexible, cloud-based DR
Flexible off-premises, cloud-based disaster recovery to cloud and between clouds, covers needed hybrid scenarios – designed specifically for your VMware environment.
Streamline cloud migration
Our DRaaS offers dramatically simplified, secure and cost-effective onboarding to cloud, accelerating your migration efforts.
Speed and simplicity
It’s easy to get started with zero capital investment, a short time to being protected, and no new skills required. The ability to add business resilience without increasing your skills gaps overcomes one of the biggest hurdles in adopting new technologies.
Improve business continuity
Disaster recovery is an important part of your business continuity plan. Cloud-based DRaaS provides safety from disasters that may impair your applications and infrastructure.
Leverage investments / Lower TCO
Streamline DR processes by leveraging existing VMware investments, reducing cost as well as overhead.
Benefit from a subscription-based, competitively priced solution designed with core features to minimize costs.
Managed DR reduces complexity and overhead by having a trusted partner own core DR operational work as well as make sense of regulatory and compliance mandates.
Trusted and secure
Confidently deploy a secure solution with a certified VMware Cloud Provider managing the security.
Fast, non-disruptive DR testing
Backups and DR can be worthless if organizations don’t perform regular validation to ensure they’ll work right when needed. Reduce risk with fast, clean simulated DR testing in minutes that enables regularly scheduled testing required for proper DR planning and validation without impacting your ongoing DR activity… or your IT staff.
Protect collection of VMs (vApps)
Enhanced grouping and protection workflows help preserve recovery priorities and network configurations for virtual apps (vApps), eliminating manual scripting and shortening RTOs.
Bandwidth monitoring
Get visibility into what DR is adding to bandwidth to help troubleshoot latency issues.
Capacity reporting
Get visibility into what DR is consuming in terms of storage on the target environment.