Customer Demands at the EDGE Webinar Series

Customers and consumers have come to expect and rely on applications that are always available when they want them. We all expect optimal performance. If an application buffers too long or a WebEx session doesn’t open right away, we get edgy (pardon the pun), and irritated. In this environment, latency is the enemy. That reality is driving demand for computing power closer to where the users who need it are located, and fast reliable networks to connect them. In this session, we talked about the role standardised, redundant physical infrastructure plays in enabling companies to quickly deploy reliable edge solutions. It’s the kind of infrastructure that partners can help customers implement in a repeatable fashion to address edge requirements wherever they may be in a distributed environment.

Customers have lots of decisions to make as they feel their way through the changing IT landscape. Which infrastructure and applications should stay on their own premises (if any) and what can they safely move to the cloud? This 2nd webinar in our webinar series is focused on ways partners can help customers answer these sorts of questions and, in the process, become trusted advisors. Trends like IoT are driving a need for resiliency in local edge environments, meaning compute & storage capacity is now coming back on premise for many applications – especially in industries like Healthcare, Retail, Finance, and Education We’ll go over how to use tools suite to analyse customer traffic and help them decide the best home for each application, whether on-premises or in the cloud.

Edge environments by nature are often in branch or remote offices that have few if any IT staff. As a result, they need remote management capabilities, along with someone to fix problems as they are identified – before they cause disruptions for users. It’s a situation that represents a big opportunity for VAR partners to make the transition to becoming managed service providers (MSPs), performing remote management on behalf of customers. We’ll go through some of the new APC products that enable partners to remotely manage power infrastructure and discuss the Managed Service Program that helps partners develop and monetise managed services.

As distributed edge environments become more critical, physical security becomes more important. Nobody would leave their data centre wide open for anyone to enter, but that’s exactly how many organisations treat their edge computing sites. Often, they consist of a rack or two of gear in a non-dedicated location, perhaps a janitor’s closet, with little to no physical security. In this 4th and final webinar series, we’ll discuss physical security best practices, including environmental issues such as temperature and humidity monitoring. We’ll also update partners on the physical security features of the latest APC racks and the NetBotz line of security and environmental appliances, cameras and sensors.