Today, mobility plays a significant role in the growth of many sectors, may it be the health, education, tourism or IT sector. Day-by-day as the new technologies like cloud computing are emerging, more people are traction by it. With the help of emerging technologies banks worldwide are now able to offer home-based online banking and mobile banking services, providing customers with a handier manner to manage their banking transaction, saving their precious time, while at the same time improving efficiency and the quality of service.

Among the fast growing technologies are BYOD and Mobile Banking. Today, mobile devices are expanding and being used for complex processes such as internet surfing, online shopping as well as for banking.

The BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) is one of the current trends people are going crazy about. It is a concept that enables users to make use of their own mobile devices to access any kind of information and perform various tasks. It proposes to take benefits of these chances to better the performance of bank customers and, therefore, the efficiency of bank processes.

The main advantage of BYOD is that it supports a mobile and cloud-centric IT strategy, which can offer a lot of benefits the end-user as well as organizations. Especially with collaboration, customers would be able to make financial transactions from their own compatible device through a fully secure and encrypted network.

Whether BYOD has been authorized or not, but when you manage it in a proper way, it isn’t really any big security deal. Also, though the online banking seems to be a convenient way for customers, but there are some disadvantages of online banking.

Cyber criminals are targeting the online banking accounts frequently due to which the fraud schemes are becoming more complex. Since the security threats are rising daily, consumers are very concerned about the mobile banking security as well. As a result, banks require executing sufficient security measures or security layers to protect themselves and diminish the security concerns from consumers mind.

Nowadays, many banks are implementing cloud-based solutions in place for utilizing services such as email filtering, anti-virus and to promote products via streaming media. But, can cloud solutions overcome the fear of mobile banking security?

Does Cloud Hosting Really Help with Mobile Banking Security?

Since, cloud hosting has appeared in the industry, it has been considered as the best and cost-effective solution benefiting various sectors. Basically, the cloud hosting enables users to have access to their data and perform tasks at anytime, from any place, via any mobile devices supporting internet connectivity.

Cloud technology plays a very important role in Banking Sector and offers various benefits without compromising the security. Even though security is the biggest concern for banks and their customers, cloud hosting can still overcome the security issues by implementing multiple security layers, making mobile banking a safer way for customers to make financial transactions.

Within banks, it’s all about the banking application and data. Since both the things are very critical and confidential for banks, it requires implementation of proper security measures or a fully secured cloud strategy to ensure the security of the data and application from hackers. While making a cloud strategy, banks can ensure the following things:

• Find out the most important business functions that can be run in various cloud environments and organize the information by sensitivity.
• Create a complete list of requirements relating to the business functions the bank will be operating in the cloud.
• Additionally, banks can have a fully secured private cloud, as it is stronger than the public cloud and can help banks to retain control over their IT, apply accurate security and while offering reduced complexity, greater flexibility, and all other advantages associated with cloud computing.
• Also, banks can choose to keep their databases inside and move only the SOA-based and multi-tenant architecture applications used by customers and internet staff under the private cloud infrastructure. It can help bank tellers and managers of branch to have access to the required products and applications using a single system or device. It also decreases the requirements such as branch servers as well as the bank staff doesn’t require the latest desktop PC hardware.
• Also, as the private clouds are set up within the banks firewall, the security threats are totally eliminated.

Though cloud & virtualization are the buzzing words in the industry, however, still there are many people are who are still confuse about the concepts of cloud and virtualization. They are still not sure about the differences between both of them.

The concept of cloud hosting and virtualization is very common today. Most of the times people tend to link them with same things. However, the truth is that, both the concepts are different.

The virtualization is an new  IT model that has an ability to separate the core computing functions and technology implementations from the physical hardware of a dedicated server. While, the cloud is a service where computing resources, software’s or data as a service are shared via the Internet as completely opposed to virtualization, which is a part of a physical infrastructure.

Today, many companies are quickly moving on the cloud just with a hope that they will find a solution to all their issues, especially for reducing costs and infrastructure management. But, blinded by the offers provided by some cloud providers, companies don’t realize that some are already partially tied in their own private cloud.

Still some people from the industry don’t realize that they are already in the cloud, just due to the virtualization infrastructure they have developed. Big players like Google, Salesforce, Azure, Amazon, AWS, OpenStack, Hyper-V and VMware offer various tools to build a cloud. These are not the ones that offer cloud services; the word “cloud” covers an array of offers provided by different providers.

The concept of cloud have thrilled many organizations and enterprises, as they don’t need to buy their own hardware or don’t need to hire a professional and highly experienced staff to manage their infrastructure. The main thing that attracted companies was the idea of full data center floating on air, however, they didn’t realized the real drawbacks of moving their data in the public cloud.

It’s not like cloud hosting services cannot benefit companies, but moving into the type of cloud model makes a big difference in terms of advantages. It is a reality that moving your data in the public cloud increases the costs as the term of the service increases.

Also, some of the people think that due to Patriot Act, there is a big risk of hosting their data with cloud providers in USA, as the Act allows the U.S. government to have access to your data anytime they want. However, let me tell you that people have many misconceptions about the U.S. Patriot Act and Data Security, which I will be clearing in my next article.

One more issue that should be considered is regarding the failure of systems. What happens if the system goes down? In such a case, the custody of the company data goes under the provider, the company won’t have any relationship with the data, unless it pays for the data storage service.

Despite the few drawbacks, the cloud services also have a positive side. It can offer a service that would be out of reach with their virtualization platform.  For example, some big cloud players allow organizations to have worldwide servers in various availability zones, which simply mean that if there is an outage, the consequences will be less.

Many people that are not aware about the real concept of cloud and virtualization associate them, however, in reality it is more of a step on the way to it.

eNlight Enterprise Cloud

The shared cloud is offered to promote affordable cloud hosting that is accessible to users of all abilities and businesses of any size so that they are able to reap the benefits of the reliability and security that the cloud platform can provide. eNlight cloud hosting from Bodhost utilizes one of the core principles of promoting affordability in the shared cloud – the pay-per-use concept; the definition of ‘pay-per-use’ in this context is that you will be paying for the resources that you wish to have allocated to your server or are using and nothing beyond that. Furthermore, the eNlight platform allows for the expansion of virtual machines with just a few clicks so that resources are assigned immediately; with this feature we can assure you that no downtime will be incurred when adjusting the resource arrangement on one of your virtual machines.

Offering low unit prices for each of the resources that form an eNlight virtual machine is another feather in the crown of the platform; although affordability can be achieved by allowing customers to specify the units that they require of each individual resource, it is important to offer competitive resource pricing so that even customers with low budgets are able to obtain a reasonably powerful VM for the price. The major benefits of the enterprise cloud hosting can also be whittled down to:

• A 99.95% uptime guarantee is provided with all Bodhost enterprise cloud hosting plans because the architecture of the cloud introduces a high level of redundancy that ensures that there are no single points of failure in the network or hardware architecture
• As all cloud servers communicate with one another via an internal network, you can be assured that your data is hosted in a secure environment and that it will be very hard for hackers to intercept these communications
• The eNlight platform can be managed directly from our web interface where you can order additional resources for your existing VMs as well as create new virtual machines to ensure that your demands are constantly fulfilled.

More often than not even the largest of businesses won’t be able to fully utilize what a private cloud can offer in terms of capacity and the shared cloud often has more than enough clout to offer – Bodhost is always adding additional capacity in the form of extra hardware to ensure that our eNlight clusters are able to improve the performance of their virtual machines then necessary. Auto-scaling is also available for situations where demand can’t be predicted and where you may not be in a position manually increase the resources of your virtual machine(s); auto-scaling will automatically allocate the resources that your VMs require to remain stable when they are put under a high load, with these additional resources then withdrawn once demand subsides.

Web Hosting vs. Cloud Computing

As an enterprise web hosting company, Bodhost is able to offer one of the best shared cloud platforms in the US and we believe that our cloud hosting plans are some of the most affordable and offer a number of additional benefits over traditional web hosting plans. Even though the cloud may be a more expensive endeavor for some, the additional cost is there to cover the extra hardware that is used to provide a stable hosting environment; traditional web hosting plans that use single-server configurations often fail to meet an uptime level of 99.95% because there is no redundancy in place to handle server failures.

Cloud computing as a technology is being slowly adopted by businesses of all sizes because it allows for the centralized storage of documents and application data so that users are able to create a consistent experience between all of the devices that they use to access the cloud, whether these are computers or mobile devices. In the context of web hosting, the cloud introduces the concept of having full control of your virtual machines along with other external factors; IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) platforms such as eNlight not only provide you with virtual machines, but these VMs can be adapted as you see as necessary and you can adjust external settings and setup features including firewalls and vLANs between eNlight VMs.

For an unmatchable enterprise cloud hosting experience, you should look into Bodhost’s eNlight hosting services and see how USA cloud hosting can save your business money.

Cloud web hosting can be used for the hosting of powerful virtual machines that can mimic the performance of a dedicated server to some extent and the cloud is being seen as a more affordable option to dedicated server hosting by businesses of all sizes. The eNlight platform used by Bodhost for enterprise cloud hosting allows you to specify the precise units of resources that you would like to form the heart of your VM; this is designed as a method that can provide good value for money because you will only ever be paying for the resources that you want and are using, whilst if a virtual machine is going to be replacing a physical server then you can configure the resources of the VM to match those of the original dedicated server.

Bodhost offers ones of the most reliable cloud platforms available, with our eNlight hosting services being accompanied by a 99.95% uptime guarantee so you can be assured that your servers and website will always be accessible when you need them to be. Our cloud clusters are designed with the following architecture to maximize the availability of resources and uptime:

• The storage of content on your virtual machines is delegated to central SANs (Storage Area Networks) that are designed to provide a more secure data hosting service
• Your virtual machine will pull resources from a central pool that is formed of resources from multiple servers, therefore meaning that even if one server in the cloud crashes, the uptime and availability of your virtual machine(s) won’t be compromised
• We offer auto-scaling for times when your virtual machines may be running low on resources due to excessive loads, this means that resources will be automatically allocated so that the load can be managed properly and the stability of your VM isn’t compromised.

Bodhost offers eNlight hosting in two different forms: you can choose enterprise cloud hosting, which will enable you to make use of the shared cloud for affordable cloud hosting and is the ideal solution if you aren’t looking to use many virtual machines; we can also offer larger businesses an eNlight-based private cloud hosting solution that will offer you the same benefits as the shared cloud, albeit with full control over the entire cloud and greater room to create powerful virtual machines.

If you are concerned about your demands from cloud hosting being too much for a shared cloud environment, as may be the case if you are wanting to migrate multiple dedicated servers to the cloud, then you should contact the Bod sales team who can provide you with advice on how to go about moving from dedicated hosting to the cloud.

Web Hosting Migration

Once you have selected the most appropriate cloud service for your needs from Bodhost, you will need to begin the process of planning the migration of the data from your dedicated and on-site servers to identical cloud virtual machines. By choosing the cloud over physical servers, you will be able to introduce cost savings into your business, as the cloud will be cheaper to run. The following methods are seen as best practice when migrating servers of any kind:

• Capturing an image of the hard drive of the server at the beginning of the process ensures that this can be used to image a new virtual machine so that all settings and files are transferred over and are available once the new virtual machine has been provisioned professionally
• If you are going to be using a web hosting control panel such as cPanel at both ends of the migration process then these applications generally have their own migration facilities built-in that will transfer data between servers for you automatically and will complete the account setup process automatically
• It is important for you to take a full back up of the original data before you begin the migration process because if an issue occurs during the data migration then you could be faced with an issue where the data and servers at both ends becomes corrupted, the result of which could be mass data loss.

If you are unsure of how to pursue the migration of your physical servers into the cloud then Bodhost’s 24×7 support team are here to assist you in any way they can.