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Top 3 cloud deployment models: public cloud vs private cloud vs hybrid cloud

Top 3 cloud deployment models: public cloud vs private cloud vs hybrid cloud

cloud computing

Let’s explain the difference among the 3 main deployment models of cloud computing: public cloud, private cloud and hybrid cloud.

The cloud can be effectively deployed in many ways by businesses of any size and industry. There are 3 main cloud deployment models that organisations can leverage based on their needs, namely public, private and hybrid cloud.

1. Public Cloud

Public cloud is the most adopted model among enterprises. According to RightScale’s report, the deployment of public cloud increased to 92% in 2018. Under this model, cloud resources are owned, maintained and managed by a third-party provider and can be securely accessed by and shared with many users at once, meaning it operates in a multi-tenant environment. The leading public cloud providers are Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and the Google Cloud Platform. For instance, Tanaza is hosted on Amazon Web Services, which guarantees the highest levels of reliability available on the market, and runs on a reliable, secure, highly-available (99,99%) and redundant cloud infrastructure.

The main benefits of public cloud are:

  • Cost-effectiveness: you don’t pay for the hardware/software but only for the resources you use. Also, you save time as you don’t need to worry about maintenance;
  • Reliability: public cloud allows you to host data and services on more than one cloud provider. This way, services can be replicated to avoid failures and outages;
  • Flexibility: people can access the public cloud services remotely from anywhere, no matter where the offices of a company are located, and from any internet-enabled device.

 

2. Private Cloud

Private cloud is a type of cloud computing that delivers services to a single organisation through a specific, dedicated architecture. Under this model, the company itself is responsible for and bears the costs of the acquisition, deployment and maintenance of the cloud resources. According to RightScale’s report, the deployment of private cloud increased to 75% in 2018. The most popular vendors providing private cloud solutions are Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE),  VMware and Dell EMC. Private clouds are generally used among organisations that handle sensitive data and need to critically keep under control their operations, such as government and financial institutions (hospitals, ministries, banks…), big telecommunication carriers, etc.

The main benefits of private cloud are:

  • Total control and customisation of the cloud environment based on the business specific needs;
  • Higher scalability compared to public cloud – at a higher price;
  • Improved security over its data, applications and resources, as private cloud operates on a physically isolated and dedicated architecture.

 

3. Hybrid Cloud

The third model is hybrid cloud, which is a combination of both public and private cloud and allows companies to be more flexible and use more services. In general, a hybrid cloud occurs when a business operating on a private cloud expands and starts using a public cloud, generating in this way a combined environment. Enterprises adopting this model can benefit from the high control and security levels for their operations offered by private clouds and, at the same time, use the additional resources offered by public clouds when they need. Nevertheless, using a combination of both public and private models requires strong IT management and, accordingly, higher investments.

Based on the nature, the size and the scope of your organisation, you can choose the cloud deployment model that better fits your business needs and take advantage of cloud technology.

Are you a carrier or a public institution operating on a private cloud, or you are forced only to use private cloud in your country, and you are interested in using Tanaza? We can help you installing Tanaza on your private cloud! For more information contact us at sales@tanaza.com.

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https://www.classichotspot.com/blog/why-your-business-needs-cloud-based-wi-fi-management/

 

New feature available: bandwidth control on a per user-level

New feature available: bandwidth control on a per user-level

Bandwidth Control One a Per User Level

Tanaza just released a new feature: the bandwidth control on a per user-level.

Tanaza already features the bandwidth management per SSID, which means that WiFi administrators can limit the total amount of bandwidth available for one SSID.

  • Example: in a Hotel with only two guests.
    A WiFi administrator configures an SSID with a maximum bandwidth of 10 Mbps.
    If the first guest could use 7 Mbps, the second guest will only be able to use the 3 Mbps remaining.
    The bandwidth is not shared equally among WiFi users.

 

What is the difference with the bandwidth control per user?

The bandwidth control per user means that a network administrator can limit the amount of bandwidth one user can use on the WiFi network.
The limit is set at the user level and not, at the global level (SSID). 

The capability to specify the bandwidth users can access will guarantee the same users’experience; the bandwidth is divided equally among WiFi users. Also, Tanaza’s Bandwidth Control per Client feature comes with a “boost” function, which allows hotel guests to exceed the bandwidth limit for a few seconds when they use a WiFi service.

  • Example: in a Hotel with only 5 guests.
    A WiFi administrator limits the bandwidth of the Hotel SSID at 10Mbps.
    Besides, he limits the bandwidth per WiFi users at 2Mbps.
    Each guest will have the possibility to use until 2Mbps while browsing. The bandwidth is shared equally between guests.

This new feature should solve issues especially for WiFi networks deployed in hotels where the WiFi users experience is significant.

 

Bandwidh control per user

How to improve hotel WiFi with bandwidth control per client

How to improve hotel WiFi with bandwidth control per client

hotel WiFi with bandwidth control
Hotels should provide reliable Internet bandwidth to improve the overall guest WiFi experience. Tanaza allows increasing hotel WiFi network performance thanks to its newly-released Bandwidth Control per Client feature.

According to a recent survey carried out by Forbes, almost 50% of hotel guests consider free WiFi a top priority. Leisure travellers expect to find fast guest Internet access to browse the web, to stay in contact with their friends and family on Whatsapp and social media, to upload pictures of their vacation on Instagram and Facebook, to stream music and video content on Youtube and Netflix, etc. At the same time, business tourists expect reliable WiFi services to share files on Google Drive, perform video conference calls (VoIP and Whatsapp calls and real-time communication on Skype), access their email accounts, etc. As guest satisfaction is key to improve guest loyalty and hotel bookings, it is crucial to allocate hotel bandwidth properly.  

In general, bandwidth consumption depends on a range of factors, mainly the environment of the hospitality venue, the number of concurrent users being connected to the hotel WiFi network and the type of Internet applications guests are using – from low bandwidth apps, i.e. web surfing and instant messaging, to bandwidth-hungry apps, i.e. video calls and video streaming. Given the increasing amount of WiFi-enabled devices per user, together with the proliferation of different internet applications, it is difficult to provide a smooth WiFi experience to all hotel guests at the same time. Tanaza helps hoteliers overcome this problem.

Tanaza has just released its innovative Bandwidth Control per Client feature, which allows hotel network administrators to set a per-user guest WiFi bandwidth limit.

Tanaza allows to limit bandwidth both per SSID and per user, at the same time. For instance, if the hotel IT manager has a total bandwidth of 25Mbps available, he might decide to allocate 20Mbps for guest WiFi on an SSID and the remaining 5Mbps for the hotel staff on a separated SSID. At the same time, considering the 20Mbps of bandwidth available for guest WiFi, he can decide to provide each hotel guest with 300Kbps.

With this new bandwidth control tool, network admins can now enable bandwidth upload and download limitations per user, at the SSID level. This means that all guests being simultaneously connected to the hotel network benefit from the same WiFi performance.

A unique aspect of Tanaza’s per-client bandwidth control feature is its ability to avoid “bandwidth hog”, the term used to identify users consuming more bandwidth than other concurrent users on the same WiFi network. In fact, Tanaza’s Bandwidth Control per Client feature comes with a “boost” function, which allows hotel guests to exceed the bandwidth limit for a few seconds when they use a WiFi service. For instance, let’s suppose that the hotel network admin configures an SSID for guest WiFi with a bandwidth limit of 3Mbps. When a hotel guest performs an online activity, i.e.  streaming a video on Netflix, he will be temporarily allowed to use bandwidth over that limit. At the same time, for a few seconds, he will consume more bandwidth than other concurrent guests.

bandwidth control per client

Thanks to Tanaza’s Bandwidth Control per Client capability, all hotel guests connected to the same SSID will benefit from the same fast and reliable WiFi experience, independently from their Internet usage. By successfully meeting guest expectations regarding WiFi performance, hoteliers can enhance guest loyalty and attract more visitors.

>> Do you want to estimate your hotel network bandwidth need? Try our free Access Point Selector!

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https://www.classichotspot.com/blog/in-wall-wi-fi-access-points-innovative-solution-hotels/

Tanaza for Wifi assurance and centralized consolidated management of wireless networks

Tanaza for Wifi assurance and centralized consolidated management of wireless networks

WLAN

Tanaza is a platform allowing you to ensure your wireless equipment is working correctly at any point in time. Tanaza helps you maintain WIFI Assurance and identify mistakes in your configuration, which might result in disconnections, degraded performance, and WLAN outages.

 

Centralization of wireless networks management

 

Thanks to Tanaza, managing wireless networks and ensuring high-quality services to customers is a child’s play. No more fragmented wireless assurance tools: network administrators will be able to consolidate their networking infrastructure monitoring, using one single centralised dashboard, and receive automated alerts in case of problems.

 

BYOD

 

Digital enterprises and companies are increasingly allowing employees to use their personal devices at work, but BYOD – Bring your own device – policies are not easy to implement, and devices can quickly get out of control. With its couponing feature, Tanaza allows creating temporary and permanent credentials for internet access, so that each employee has their own password to access the network.

For example, in the picture below, you see three types of coupons created:

  • the green wifi voucher, valid for 1 year for up to three devices, will be given to employees
  • the purple wifi voucher, valid for 30 days for up to three devices, will be given to temporary workers/freelancers/consultants
  • the red wifi voucher, valid for 1 day, will be given to guests

 

coupon

 

Furthermore, the network administrator can easily invalidate existing coupons to deny further access to unwanted clients. When a voucher is deactivated, access to the internet will be automatically prohibited to any device using that voucher to connect. 

 

coupon wifi

 

Security, Krack and IoT

 

In enterprises environments, you will probably have many users and devices connecting to your wireless networks: employees, guests, but also printers, shared laptops, smart TVs, etc.

Thanks to Tanaza, you can easily isolate WLAN clients between each other and also isolate them from LAN resources. For example, guests should not be able to see the printers in the building in the network resources.

Given that employees use critical applications and business services and companies implement policies for work in mobility, security is a primary concern for all network administrators. Tanaza has created a secure cloud infrastructure that separates instances of each customer and isolates the access points’ management traffic and connection to the cloud from the clients’ traffic, as well.

Tanaza is at the forefront in providing security updates for all its devices promptly. For example, the patch for the WPA2 breach known as “Krack” was released in less than 24 hours from the hack’s discovery, allowing all Tanaza Firwmare’s users to secure the wireless connection of all their clients connecting to the wireless LAN in no time.

In the case your enterprise uses wirelessly-connected devices, such as point-of-sale system (used in retail) and sensors (smart cities, hospitals, etc.), Tanaza makes your Wireless LAN secure and provides you with reliable management software. IoT initiatives launched by enterprises pose unprecedented security issues to wireless networks. Tanaza is creating tools to solve this problem, including the newly released Rogue Access Point detection system, which allows identifying devices broadcasting and SSID named as yours, trying to steal your clients’ data and in the worst cases, to sniff their traffic.

Tanaza allows you to detect and analyse these WiFi faults and problems.

 

Improving the network performance and avoiding interference

 

Network administrators need to deliver coverage and performance, ensuring to their users WIFI assurace, health and performance. Tanaza provides tools to improve your network performance, such as the automated channel selection avoiding interference. You can use Tanaza to scan beacons around your Access points and choose the channel accordingly. Also, you can let Tanaza do the job on your behalf and select automatically the channel with less interference any time the device reboots.

Reboots can be done manually through a command in the cloud interface, and they can also be scheduled so they happen during the night, without service outages for users and applications.

Tanaza’s intuitive monitoring tool also allows you to check in real-time the quality of the signal for each connected client so that you can identify coverage and interference problems within your network in no time.

Furthermore, this and other data is also available through APIs, so that you can build your own alerting system and troubleshoot the network before problems are noticed by other people. Tanaza allows you to be proactive in building a reliable and solid network, even if you’re using low-cost devices. For example, you might create your own web service which sends you push notifications on your phone in the case the MAC address of the CEO has bad signal, or when an access point has more than 20 people connected, when an access point has an excessive load, etc.

WiFi troubles won’t keep you up at night, as everything will be under control.

 

Unlimited scalability and reduced costs

 

With wirelessly-connected devices increasing at a rapid rate, and mobile devices becoming the most used ones to connect to the internet and work, WLAN is expected to transmit most of the internet traffic in the future.

The application layer, providing guest authentication, WiFi location-tracking services, and many other services, should run on reliable networking infrastructure. However, the costs of creating it are usually very high.

We understand that the increasing expectations of users conflict with the lack of budget and resources troubling network administrators. Users have very low tolerance for problems and performance issue, and solutions’ prices increase each year. Also, most solutions in the market lock you to a vendor’s brand, therefore preventing you from switching to another provider.

Tanaza provides a multi-vendor software that runs on top of low-cost to high-end access points, allowing any business, from SMBs to large enterprises, to benefit from a reliable networking infrastructure. Businesses using Tanaza reduce their CAPEX and are free to switch from one vendor to another, with no switching costs, when they need to. Furthermore, Tanaza’s management and monitoring platform work in the exact same way with all devices, stores the device configuration in the cloud for quick replacement of access points, is offered with a pay-as-you-go formula and is affordable for businesses of any size. Tanaza reduces OPEX and provides the flexibility you need in your fast-paced role.

Tanaza offers unlimited scalability in the number of access points and immediate provisioning and deployment. You will not need hardware controllers anymore, as the controlling layer will be in the cloud. Tanaza Cloud grows with your business and its features and compatibility list are continuously improving.

Why you should schedule your SSID access

Why you should schedule your SSID access

Why you should schedule your SSID access
Tanaza features a captive portal that allows you to create up to 8 SSID by access points, a way for the network administrator to secure and separate accesses to the WiFi network. Indeed, each SSID should be set up according to the usage of the network.

For example, when deploying a WiFi network for a restaurant, the WiFi administrator might want to create different network access for the staff and the guests. To do so, the WiFi administrator can create a first SSID protected by a password for the staff, and another SSID for the guest with access through email authentication or social media. In this way, customers will access the SSID through a different door. However, a problem might occur when customers connect to the WiFi network within the closed hours of the restaurant, enjoying a free WiFi connection without any counterpart for the owner of the restaurant.

To solve this problem, we strongly encourage you to schedule your SSID access by setting hours of network’s availability.

Indeed, SSID time restriction allows you to deactivate your SSID when your shop closes so that nobody can access the internet through your Wi-fi network during the night for example.

The SSID availability is not currently featured by Tanaza but still, you can deactivate your SSID by going through your access points settings remotely.

Solution 1: enter to your cloud.tanaza.com account and click on the access point that you want to deactivate.
Click on “settings”, then “SSIDs”. Finally, switch the on/off button to turn off your access point.
Remember to activate it again when you want your SSID to be available.
Why you should schedule your SSID access
Why you should schedule your SSID access
Solution 2: another possibility for you is to deactivate the SSID by making him invisible.
Go on your SSID settings, click on “wireless security” and switch the button enable/disable to make your SSID invisible
Be careful, the SSID will be invisible only for new WiFi users, while WiFi users already registered will still access to your WiFi network if they are in the network area
Why you should schedule your SSID access
Why you should schedule your SSID access
Alternatively, this could be done by showing the SSID name on clients’ devices, while replacing the splash page with a message saying “WiFi guest access is available only between 9 AM and 6 PM at this location”.

In any cases, we strongly advise you to secure your WiFi guest access and to use a web content filtering to avoid any bad usage of your WiFi network.

Your opinion is valuable to us, so please let us know what you think about this feature idea.

 

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Update 2018: Facebook social login and social actions with Tanaza splash page

social login-01

Let’s suppose that you were asked to deploy a Wi-Fi network in a restaurant and that your customer wants to collect their Wi-Fi clients’ data to promote their events and special evenings.

In order to collect this type of data easily and quickly, we encourage network admins to enable an easy way for users to login to the Wi-Fi, avoiding complex and long forms to fulfill.

There are two preferred social login flows to achieve this:

  • Facebook login 
  • Facebook social actions (Like or Check-in)

Facebook login

This social login flow consists of asking Wi-Fi clients to “Log in with Facebook.

UX: After connecting to the Wi-Fi, the Wi-Fi clients will see a splash page, that can be customized with the customer’s logo, their preferred background, and type of advertising. In order to log into the network, they must click the button “Log in with Facebook” on the splash page which will give Facebook permission to access their data. If they accept to provide their complete anagraphic information (or a part of them) to the app “Access Internet”, they will connect to the internet.

PROS: No complex permission needed, no Facebook review needed. Super-easy login flow for the user. You can collect user data (name, surname, hometown location – country and city, birthday, e-mail, age, gender).

CONS: Because not everyone has a Facebook account, you should enable an alternative way to log in (e.g. e-mail, Twitter, Google+).

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