Jéssica has over 15 years’ experience working in marketing and communication roles for large companies. She was responsible for leading the entire process of positioning Ascenty in the market, from its entry as a startup to today as a leader in the segment.
She has an undergraduate degree in Social Communication, and a graduate degree and an MBA in marketing from Fundação Getúlio Vargas (FGV).
Adriana has 30 years’ experience in Accounting, Financial Planning and Treasury. She has worked for large groups such as Vicunha, DuPont, and Vivax SA, a cable TV and broadband internet provider, where she worked for 8 years from the company’s inception to its IPO.
At Ascenty, she has worked in LATAM Treasury management since 2011, focusing on cash flow management, financing and derivative operations.
She holds a degree in Accounting with specialization in Corporate Finance from Fundação Getúlio Vargas.
Gustavo has held executive positions at large Brazilian companies, such as CEO and CFO/DRI at Cielo,
CFO/DRI at Klabin, CEO and CFO/DRI at CPFL Renováveis, Controller, Treasury, Investor Relations and Tax Officer at Companhia Siderúrgica Nacional and Controllership Officer at Banco do Brasil. He holds an MBA from Columbia Business School, a Master’s degree in Economic Business Management from the University of Brasília, an MBA in Financial Administration from Fundação Getúlio Vargas and a degree in Business Administration from the Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte.
At Ascenty, he has been CFO since August 2022.
Rodrigo has worked at Ascenty since 2018, and helped deploy the first “Built to Suit” data center infrastructure projects built on Ascenty’s own land.
He oversaw construction of several data centers in Brazil and Mexico. He has extensive experience in project design, planning, management, and construction. He earned a degree in Architecture in 1991 and has an MBA in “Technology and Management in Building Production” from USP Politécnica.
José Roberto has extensive experience in administration and logistics. For 20 years, he was in charge of logistics management at Goodyear Brazil, integrating the management team responsible for the storage and shipping of all domestic and international production.
He then took over as head of the administrative and logistics units at Vivax, a cable TV and broadband internet provider, since the company’s start-up.
At Ascenty, he has been in charge of the logistics and administrative units since the company’s inception.
José Roberto has an undergraduate in business administration and a graduate degree in business management from Centro Salesiano Universitário de São Paulo (UNISAL).
Stéfano has 10 years’ experience in accounting, finance and planning. He has an undergraduate in Finance and Entrepreneurship from Texas Christian University and a graduate degree in Business Administration from Fundação Getúlio Vargas.
He began his career at Ernst & Young auditing domestic and publicly traded companies. After some time, he turned his focus to the FP&A area at Kemin, a U.S. company with operations in more than 90 countries, where he was responsible for South American companies over a period of 2 years.
He started in theFP&A unit at Ascenty in 2018 and partook in the company’s growth and expansion in recent years.
Focusing on the excellence of services delivered, quality management ensures to clients and suppliers a standardization based on a set of technical standards outlining a quality management model. To ensure superior efficiency, a documentation management process was implemented to reach specific quality goals, creating processes and procedures to boost efficiency and quality in our staff’s activities.
The benefits of the ISO 9001 extend across multiple business areas. Evidently, market expansion and visibility is one of the most sought after, but it is important to remember that “Quality” applies to all meanings, both professionally and personally.
This is an undisputed truth: cloud computing has taken the market by storm. Its benefits are, besides offering financial relief to companies, a way to boost their business performance. More security and agility in the digital world. However, some providers may deviate from this path and offer a service that the client, i.e. your company, cannot escape — Cloud Vendor Lock In.
Therefore, it’s important that organizations study and prepare to avoid being trapped in a contract.
At times when flexibility – something that Multicloud offers – is key to being competitive, it’s essential that your company understands everything about the subject, avoiding possible great losses in the case of a service migration.
In this content, we will explore a bit more about Cloud Vendor Lock In, its drawbacks, how to avoid it, and also an incredible tip on how to take advantage of an entire cloud infrastructure without the risk of a Cloud Vendor Lock In.
Learn more ahead!
Today, the SaaS (Software as a Service) market is huge. According to a Gartner study, this segment alone is expected to be worth more than US$151 billion by 2022. As Sid Nag, VP of Research at Gartner, states in the study, “at this point, adopting cloud computing is par for the course.”
That means that if any company is not already on the cloud, it must be in a hurry to migrate to it.
The problem is that, in some cases, the promise of freedom and flexibility for your company to grow in a scalable and organic manner is not fulfilled. And so, some providers started to “lock” their clients into contractual clauses and development requirements that prevented them from migrating to another server.
Imagine the following scenario:
Company A hired SaaS from Provider X. Upon reaching a certain period of its journey, Company A identified the need to migrate its operation (or part of it) to Provider Y, which better fits its demands.
However, due to contractual impediments — which make this operation expensive and technically complex — Company A is helpless and unable to migrate its workload.
That is Cloud Vendor Lock In.
Besides SaaS, it can occur when contracting PaaS (Platform as a Service), in which the client develops its own applications — and that can represent another impediment for migration.
For these providers, Cloud Vendor Lock In can be justified as a way to retain clients in their solution environment. However, the practice does not take into account the clients’ own need to make their operations more flexible and improve deliveries. Sometimes, a provider’s capacity does not meet the client’s needs.
Therefore, once a provider has implemented the Cloud Vendor Lock In, performing necessary migrations becomes very costly for the client.
Besides the financial impact, these restrictions also hinder future migrations and integration of applications — due to the development characteristics of each PaaS.
So, how can this problem be solved? The good news is that Cloud Vendor Lock In is not an industry standard. It can be avoided, even if it requires some commitment to studying certain issues.
To make it easier, we have listed some key considerations. Ready to escape Cloud Vendor Lock In? Check below:
Sounds obvious, right? Nevertheless, it’s the first step of the journey.
Check your provider’s flexibility: can you move your app to other clouds, or migrate the service from another provider, if necessary? If not, does the provider set conditions under which this is possible (such as faults)?
Also, if you need to build apps that require complex customization, make sure you have a backup plan. Even better, if you can afford it, is to have an alternative cloud to run your code as a backup.
One alternative is to split the risk. That is, use resources from multiple PaaS providers.
If they are not dependent on a single cloud to deliver their applications and businesses, you can set out to explore the options of the PaaS you control.
This requires some genuine interest, so ask your providers questions and try to understand how the PaaS runs and how your risk management is set up (especially in the case of a large centralizing cloud).
Try to fully understand your software architecture and system redundancy with the help of your cloud provider. This comprehension will give you more autonomy when negotiating with the provider.
A good look at the architecture diagrams of the cloud environment can provide in-depth information about system reliability — and whether or not it’s possible to escape Cloud Vendor Lock In.
Ascenty’s ACCX, part of Cloud Connect, is a turnkey solution for companies searching for this exact flexibility between service providers and cloud platforms.
Ascenty Cloud Connectivity Exchange is a solution that integrates different distributed data environments in several public clouds (AWS, Oracle Cloud, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud and IBM Cloud) to a single platform, integrated with your data network (IP/MPLS).
It’s an ecosystem that integrates the environment of multiple layer-3 public clouds into your infrastructure.
This way, you have full integration potential of IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS solutions. With ACCX, clients reallocate their workload to the public cloud that best meets their demand according to their strategy, besides creating an easier network integration with their private structure.
The platform enables interconnection between Cloud Providers, guaranteeing simplified migration or simply ensuring that through low latency interconnection there can be interdependencies between applications and clouds, so you have gains in time, in availability and can take advantage of full interoperability of different public clouds at a fair price.
Cloud Vendor Lock In can be an issue for your company. Therefore, it’s ideal to choose a partnership that eliminates these risks, enabling the free use of the cloud resources that your business requires.
So, talk to Ascenty and understand how ACCX can serve your organization today!
Remote work, which seemed distant to some companies before the Covid-19 pandemic, is now part of the daily life of many. What was supposed to be an emergency solution will likely have a lasting impact on how people work. This is what a study by professor André Miceli, ofFundação Getúlio Vargas (FGV), points out, concluding that the format should grow about 30% when activities return to normal. In this scenario, in which online operations are increasingly present, one of the actions that should be prioritized is the cybersecurity of systems and applications.
To have an idea of the current dimension of cybercrimes, data from Fortinet Threat Intelligence Latin America show that, in the month of March alone, when the coronavirus pandemic led to social isolation mandates, there were approximately 600 new phishing campaigns per day in most countries. The attacks occur through malicious links, which lead the user to provide personal data on fake pages or download files through illegal software. The goal is to control devices and steal information.
This situation is aggravated by professionals working remotely using their home networks. But that’s not where the problems end. There are several other types of virtual attacks that can compromise operations and cause millions in losses for companies. Therefore, it’s essential to protect yourself.
Cybersecurity: 9 valuable tips for enterprise information security
As mentioned above, organizations can suffer from numerous cyber attacks that are facilitated by remote work, such as spyware, ransomware, hijack, and DDoS. Thinking of helping to ensure the security of their data and applications, we have compiled a list of 9 things you should do to promote cybersecurity both now and in the future :
1. Creating policies and raising employee awareness
The first steps to guarantee that information security measures are successful are to establish clear policies and make employees aware of the importance of following them. In addition, you need to continuously train the teams about the threats that can hinder processes and what precautions to take to protect themselves from each of them, as well as to clearly and directly show how harmful cyber threats can be for employees and company.
2. Investing in cryptography
Cryptography solutions for e-mails and files can significantly help with cybersecurity. The benefit is that their implementation is simplified and does not depend on high investments by companies. For those who don’t know, the practice refers to building and analyzing protocols that prevent malicious users from reading private messages.
3. Installing a VPN
Installing a Virtual Private Network (VPN) which, as the name implies, creates communication networks between computers and devices with restricted access, is also a good strategy for protecting data during remote work. To do that, you can use the infrastructure that already exists in operating systems or open solutions.
4. Using authentication solutions
The two-factor or two-step authentication consists of the user entering a password, followed by a code provided through SMS, tokens, or other resources. Because the codes change constantly, cybercriminals cannot gain access to systems and data.
5. Installing good antivirus software
While working from home, many employees use their own computer and other devices to work. Therefore, they should be encouraged to install antivirus software as well as monitor antivirus updates and new subscriptions to ensure that their systems are operating properly.
Although these systems do not guarantee absolute protection against cybercrime, they already prevent a good deal of attacks, and may even notify you of the presence of suspicious activities such as malware, trojan viruses, worms, and possible changes to the registry and file system of operating systems, for example.
6. Implementing tracking software
Another situation that can compromise the cybersecurity of organizations is the loss or theft of devices provided to employees. To avoid this type of situation, installing tracking tools that locate each device and delete the data remotely is advisable.
7. Creating backups
Even with remote work, maintaining the backup routine (safety copies) to minimize unforeseen events is important. An interesting alternative for companies is to invest in hiring cloud data centers, which ensure efficiency and protection and facilitate remote access to their data.
8. Keeping systems and software up-to-date
Another action that must be taken to promote cybersecurity in companies is to keep operating systems and software up to date. This is because many updates already bring security improvements, as well as new tools and functionalities that can make the corporate day-to-day easier.
9. Watch out for criminals posing as colleagues
Individuals working at home should be extra careful about cybercriminals who may pose as co-workers. They may take advantage of employees, access the professional network of contacts and thus request details about the operation or confidential data, negatively affecting the company, both in terms of business continuity and financial loss.
It’s also worth noting that, along with the practices that optimize the organization’s cybersecurity, preserving the physical integrity of machines and devices used for work is necessary. To this end, professionals should always keep the equipment stored in safe places, even when indoors.
Even though at this moment the contact between people is restricted, minimizing the movement of strangers at home can avoid damage that could take time or cost the company.
Moreover, it’s important that the IT teams take human error into account when implementing cybersecurity solutions. The reason is that, no matter how much training helps in assertive conduct, one is never completely free from criminal acts.
With these measures, your organization can enjoy all the conveniences of remote work, while at the same time having the necessary protection of data and applications.
So, do you like our tips? Want to know more about how we can help your company to increase the level of cybersecurity? Get in touch with one of our consultants.
Enables organization to identify key issues that can impact operations both positively and negatively, in order to manage its occupational health and safety responsibilities towards its employees, deliver services with excellence and safety, and focus on zero-incidents across the entire staff.
