Category: Uncategorized

CRN Recognizes Clear Technologies on 2022 Solution Provider 500 List

Posted on by Admin Clear

 

Addison, Texas, June 7th, 2022 — Clear Technologies, trusted advisors in data management, IT managed services, and cyber security, today announced that CRN®, a brand of The Channel Company, has named Clear Technologies to its 2022 Solution Provider 500 list.

CRN’s annual Solution Provider 500 ranks North America’s largest solution providers by revenue and serves as the gold standard for recognizing some of the channel’s most successful companies. With a combined revenue of more than $434 billion, this year’s list represents an impressive amount of influence and impact wielded by these companies on today’s IT industry and the technology suppliers they partner with.

“We’re proud to be recognized once again on CRN’s Solution Provider 500 list. Clear Technologies takes pride in our services organization, it’s really what sets us apart in the reseller industry. As the trusted IT advisor for our clients for nearly 30 years, we are always finding new ways to expand our services offerings”, said Phil Godwin, President, and COO of Clear Technologies. “This past year we announced the addition of Capacity Planning to a long list of customized services packages. I’m excited to see how our team continues to grow and support clients with their IT optimization journey.”

“The Solution Provider 500 list from CRN serves as the benchmark for the top technology integrators, strategic service providers, and IT consulting firms, making it an invaluable resource for technology vendors seeking to partner with today’s top-performing IT solution providers,” said Blaine Raddon, CEO of The Channel Company. “My congratulations go out to each of these companies for their extraordinary contributions to the continued growth and success of the IT channel.”

CRN’s 2022 Solution Provider 500 list is available online at www.CRN.com/SP500 and a sample from the list will be featured in the June issue of CRN Magazine.

About Clear Technologies

Clear Technologies partners with enterprise organizations to deliver customized IT solutions designed to increase operational efficiency. Unlike other solution providers, Clear Technologies utilizes Visual One Intelligence® to help enterprises discover performance insights, simplify storage management processes, and increase ROI. With over 29 years of experience and a premier offering of cloud-based infrastructure and services, combined with Visual One Intelligence®, Clear Technologies is the preferred partner in digital transformation. www.cleartechnologies.net

About The Channel Company

The Channel Company enables breakthrough IT channel performance with our dominant media, engaging events, expert consulting and education, and innovative marketing services and platforms. As the channel catalyst, we connect and empower technology suppliers, solution providers, and end-users. Backed by more than 30 years of unequaled channel experience, we draw from our deep knowledge to envision innovative new solutions for ever-evolving challenges in the technology marketplace. www.thechannelcompany.com 

Follow The Channel Company: Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook.

© 2022 The Channel Company, LLC. CRN is a registered trademark of The Channel Company, LLC. All rights reserved.

Clear Technologies Contact:
Meredith Wardell
Clear Technologies
mwardell@cleartechnologies.net

The Channel Company Contact:
Jennifer Hogan
The Channel Company
jhogan@thechannelcompany.com

 

The Great Resignation: Maintain Business Continuity Through Staffing Disruption

Posted on by Admin Clear

 

“I’m quitting”, “two weeks’ notice” and other terms related to an employee resigning can be the worst phrase a manager hears. But it’s happening all too often with a surge of people leaving their current jobs for new opportunities. Corporate America has been experiencing a movement termed ‘The Great Resignation’ since mid-2021 and there are no signs of it trailing off.

Staffing disruptions are happening at a high rate, especially in the healthcare and technology industries. With a constantly evolving landscape, IT jobs are opening left and right. IT leaders are faced with the challenge of keeping the team members they have, filling open positions and maintaining normal workloads to keep the business running as usual. How does an IT team survive the spiraling effect?

IT leaders need a reliable solution for keeping infrastructure operations running smoothly during a staffing transition. Understanding your current environment and increased capacity needs for business growth is imperative to finding the best solution for maintaining business continuity. A trusted IT advisor can establish recommendations for implementing and maintaining data center projects including migrations, monitoring tools, plus regular maintenance and support services.

Managed Services

In the event of a staff departure or support gap, working with a Managed Service Provider ensures your core business applications continue running smoothly. With operational services like daily job queues, monitoring, capacity planning, and virtualization management, Clear Technologies’ service experts are an extension of your IT team. Data protection services including Backup and Recovery and DRaaS safeguard your systems in the unfortunate event of a breach.

Clear Technologies offers health checks and assessments for IBM i to ensure your environment is current. As your trusted advisor, our experts make recommendations for cost optimization and architectural services to improve availability and decrease unplanned downtime. With flexible SLAs, we offer a fully customizable services package to meet the current and future needs of your IT team.

Hybrid Cloud

As an organization with an evolving IT landscape, migrating to the cloud is a major undertaking for internal IT teams. Clear Technologies has an extensive partner ecosystem to bring flexibility and scalability to your hybrid cloud solution. With cloud-based services, our experts provide consulting, migration services, and monitoring for your cloud environment. This allows your team to focus on higher priority projects and trust the administration needs are taken care of in the event of a staffing disruption.

Storage Monitoring & Capacity Planning

Implementing a storage reporting and capacity planning tool helps your IT team fully optimize your storage environment and improve budgeting accuracy. With Visual One Intelligence®, you can trust that storage management won’t fall to the wayside during a turnover gap. Visual One collects and displays all of your storage infrastructure data into one dashboard including performance, capacity, and utilization. Not only does this give you the ability to reclaim space, but you can also improve data accuracy and prevent unnecessary purchases.

With consolidated alerting, Visual One warns you of any anomalies – helping prevent shortages, outages, and even security breaches. Visual One Intelligence® provides expert insight into your storage environment with comprehensive email reports from a Visual One expert who knows your organization and storage environment.

Confidently maintain business continuity with help from Clear Technologies. Find out what solutions are best for your IT environment by speaking with one of our technical advisors today! Learn More.

Encryption at Rest: Best Practices for Data Protection

Posted on by Admin Clear

Data protection is top of mind for businesses of all sizes. Attackers are looking for every opportunity to access unsecured data whether it be in a large Fortune 500 company, mid-market, or small business. Sensitive company data and personal data is at risk. When a data breach happens, IT teams scramble to determine what was lost, how to recover, and how quickly they can maintain business continuity. Learning about how your data is secured is critical for building and maintaining a Cybersecurity resiliency plan. We’re here to help! Let’s break down how hardware encryption is evolving, highlight the new standards for data protection, and provide some helpful best practices for becoming cyber resilient.

Back to Basics: What is Encryption? Data encryption is the process of translating one form of data into another form of data that unauthorized users can’t decrypt. For example, you saved a copy of your customers’ credit card information on your server. You do not want that to fall into the wrong hands. By encrypting data at rest, you’re essentially converting your customer’s sensitive data into another form of data. Only authorized personnel will have access to these files, thus ensuring that your data stays secure. Encryption at rest is designed to prevent an attacker from accessing unencrypted data by ensuring the data is encrypted. Once the attacker obtains a hard drive with encrypted data, but not encrypted keys, the attacker must defeat the encryption to read the data. This creates a more complex attack and requires other resources. Encryption at rest should be a high priority for all organizations and is required for data governance and compliance. Organizations adhering to industry and government regulations such as HIPAA, PCI and FedRAMP are required to enforce safeguards for data protection and follow encryption requirements.

Evolving Encryption: Then vs Now Much like everything in our digital world, encryption practices are evolving to meet the security measures necessary to avoid a data breach. The Data Encryption Standard (DES), created in 1977, is a symmetric-key algorithm for the encryption of digital data. Although its short key length of 56 bits makes it too insecure for applications, it has been highly influential in the advancement of cryptography. The Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) is a symmetric block cipher chosen by the U.S. government to protect classified information. AES is implemented in software and hardware throughout the world to encrypt sensitive data. It is essential for government computer security, cybersecurity, and electronic data protection. The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) started development of AES in 1997 when it announced the need for an alternative to the Data Encryption Standard (DES), which was starting to become vulnerable to attacks.

AES: The New Standard AES includes three block ciphers: Each cipher encrypts and decrypts data in blocks of 128 bits using cryptographic keys of 128, 192 and 256 bits, respectively. Symmetric, also known as secret key, ciphers use the same key for encrypting and decrypting. The sender and the receiver must both know — and use — the same secret key. The government classifies information into three categories: Confidential, Secret or Top Secret. All key lengths can be used to protect the Confidential and Secret level. Top Secret information requires either 192- or 256-bit key lengths. There are 10 rounds for 128-bit keys, 12 rounds for 192-bit keys and 14 rounds for 256-bit keys. A round consists of several processing steps that include substitution, transposition and mixing of the input plaintext to transform it into the final output of ciphertext.

Are you prepared? Work with Clear Technologies and IBM to determine your cybersecurity resilience strategy. Start with a Cyber-Incident Response Storage Assessment (CIRSA) using the NIST Framework to evaluate the vulnerability of your storage environment. By developing a cyber resilience strategy, you can ensure you will prevail in the event of a security breach. Clear Technologies is your trusted partner for improving storage performance and cyber resilience with IBM FlashSystem. Schedule a meeting with us today!

Your 2022 IBM i Strategy Starts Here

Posted on by Admin Clear


New year, new you… right? Your company has big expansion goals for 2022, but you’re stuck with the same resources you had last year. How will your IBM i environment maintain peak performance and evolve to accommodate new needs for your organization?

We’re here to help you understand the needs of your IBM i environment and build a customized service approach to not only enhance the capabilities of your internal staff but also fill the gaps of IBM support.

Where do you start? Step one is to gain valuable insight into your IBM i system. Our IBM i Health Check provides a comprehensive overview of your IBM i environment. With this assessment, our IBM experts examine the vulnerability, accessibility, and reliability of your IBM i system. Gain the assurance of knowing the current state of your system and proactively identify infrastructure issues. Plus, create a plan for future expansion to meet the needs of your company’s growth initiatives.  

A complete check-up reviews the following:

  • Hardware & Software Problems
  • System Connectivity Issues
  • Fix Level
  • IBM Library Capacities
  • Output Queues
  • Journal Receivers
  • Outdated Software Products
  • Backup/Recovery Strategy
  • User Profile Status
  • System Value Settings

Once the IBM i Health Check is complete, a full executive review document is presented to you with recommended improvements for your system. Our IBM experts take into consideration the necessary improvements paired with anticipated enhancements needed to accommodate future capacity growth. Receive a comprehensive plan of action for your IBM i environment without taking your internal staff away from their normal workloads.

A tailored service plan customized to meet the needs of your system.

Clear Technologies offers a robust managed services program for IBM i environments. Implement a fully customizable service plan to augment IBM support gaps while saving time and money. Our clients have seen an overall savings of 40% compared to the cost of internal staffing. As your IBM i trusted advisor, Clear Technologies helps you build an IT strategy that increases ROI and lowers TCO.

Confidently manage your critical business applications and free up your IT teams with Clear Technologies IBM i (iSeries, System I, AS/400) managed services. Support for the full IBM i stack includes infrastructure, software, operations, data protection, business continuity, and security. 

For a limited time, we are offering a FREE IBM i Health Check ($5,000 value). Take advantage of this complimentary service and learn more about the full suite of IBM i Managed Services options from Clear Technologies. 

 

 

Newly Released Assure MIMIX 10 Provides 4 Key Benefits for Organizations with IBM i

Posted on by Admin Clear

 

Precisely recently launched the latest IBM i HA and DR product, Assure MIMIX 10. In a press release, Precisely highlighted new capabilities including the ability to expedite data recovery by replicating data to production servers in near real-time – resulting in better protection for businesses from the high costs associated with downtime.

Clear Technologies specializes in helping clients run Assure MIMIX 10 for IBM i systems. With a wide range of services including implementation, health checks, MIMIX audits, role-swap services, and more, Clear Technologies is recognized by Precisely as a leading solution provider for Assure MIMIX 10.

SPEAK WITH OUR ASSURE MIMIX 10 EXPERT!

Assure MIMIX 10 provides 4 valuable benefits for businesses with IBM i:

  • Helps eliminate downtime with flexible, scalable, and automated replication, and failover
  • Prevents data loss through maintaining real-time replicas of data to on-premise, hosted, or cloud environments
  • Automates administration of high availability and DR with simple interfaces
  • Provides workload balancing and enhances IBM i mirroring solutions

Automation is key with the latest release of Assure MIMIX 10. With new automation capabilities, users can automate reliable configurations to run the product with minimal manual intervention.

“Clear Technologies, a leading solution provider of IT consulting, server, storage, and software products, welcomes these new updates: ‘Customers running Assure MIMIX on IBM i with a dynamic journal environment will greatly appreciate the automated journal-driven configuration support. Configuration is simplified, and dynamic changes to the journal environment are automatically handled, resulting in greater confidence in the replication environment,’ said Neil Clark, Technical Consultant at Clear Technologies.” – Precisely

“As a service provider for many customers running IBM i high availability solutions, the automated journal-driven configuration support in Assure MIMIX 10 will really help make our job easier,” said Neil Clark, Technical Consultant at Clear Technologies.

 

REQUEST AN ASSURE MIMIX IBM i HEALTH CHECK!

Clear Technologies’ team of IBM Champions works with clients to ensure Power systems running IBM i are fully prepared for disaster recovery. With our Assure MIMIX IBM i Health Check, you will gain critical insight into the performance, replication, and recovery abilities of your IBM i system.

Ensure your Power system running IBM i is fully prepared for disaster recovery, speak with an Assure MIMIX specialist today!

CLEAR TECHNOLOGIES | 2021 Finalist – IT Systems Reseller/Managed Service Provider

Posted on by Admin Clear

We’re Finalists! 

Clear Technologies is proud to be recognized as a finalist for the top IT Systems Reseller/Managed Service Provider of The Year Award by SDC!

The SDC 2021 Awards celebrate the high achievements of end-users and solution providers in the IT industry. Nominees and finalists are recognized for successful achievements centered around digital transformation.

As an IT Systems Reseller/Managed Service Provider of The Year finalist, Clear Technologies is being recognized for our extensive experience delivering IT Solutions to our clients for over 25 years. Our solution experts specialize in a wide variety of platforms and vendors and work to create customized solutions to meet the client’s needs.

You can help us WIN IT Systems Reseller/Managed Service Provider of The Year.

Voting is now open! Click Here
Voting closes on November 17th.

Learn more about Clear Technologies’ IT Solutions HERE. 

CLEAR TECHNOLOGIES | Increase Your Power to Innovate with IT Modernization

Posted on by Admin Clear

In today’s fast-paced world of continuous change, IT decision-makers are being challenged to maintain existing IT systems and create a foundation for future innovation. The challenge to migrate legacy operations and adapt for the future while improving overall productivity and business performance proves difficult for many IT teams.

The goal of IT modernization is to get more out of your IT investments while freeing budget and time to prepare for the future. By shifting to modern software, platforms, and processes, you can accomplish faster delivery of software and services to meet internal and external demands. Modernization is an essential transition for success in the digital world.

Standardization

A complex IT environment requires additional time, resources, and budget to manage. Inconsistent processes impact the opportunity for growth and cause a need for reactive maintenance. Multiple platforms require increased training, support, and operational budget. By implementing a standardized operating environment (SOE) with Red Hat, you can achieve consistency across your organization. This allows IT teams to reduce costs and accelerate IT while supporting innovation.

New technologies including hybrid and private cloud connectivity, cloud-native development, and containers are supported on a modern solution. Standardization also provides enhanced security and compliance with policies and regulations. Centralizing the life-cycle management of your platform supports increased speed of installations, upgrades, and patching.

Digital Transformation

Digital transformation has many different meanings across IT environments. But one thing remains constant, all IT teams are facing the need to digitally transform their platforms, processes, and resources to maintain business continuity and adapt to evolving technology. By modernizing your IT environment, you can free up budget and resources for innovation in the age of digital transformation.

Lower your total cost of ownership and achieve a return on investment and deliver self-serving capabilities to IT users by automating processes with Red Hat Ansible Automation. Modern software not only improves IT efficiencies but also prepares you to adopt cloud-native and container-based development practices to help you become more agile. With an optimized hybrid cloud environment, you can increase flexibility and efficiency by replacing old infrastructure without downtime. 

Strategic Migration

Modernization is ongoing and requires IT decision-makers to continuously assess and migrate to new solutions with increased IT and business value. The adoption of a new technology platform poses obstacles concerning infrastructure, security, and deployment. Migrate what makes the most sense for your environment.

Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform helps you develop, deploy, and manage existing and container-based applications seamlessly across physical, virtual, private, public and hybrid cloud infrastructures. With Red Hat OpenShift, you can increase operational efficiency, enforce security and compliance standards, and ensure uptime and availability.

Red Hat Consulting

As a premier partner in digital transformation, Clear Technologies offers the expertise needed to help manage your multi-site environment efficiently and securely. Whether you are looking to automate your IT processes with Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform or accelerate application delivery with RedHat OpenShift, let Clear Technologies help modernize your IT environment.

Take the next step in modernizing your IT environment. Schedule time with a Red Hat consultant today.

 

Clear Technologies Announces Revolutionary New Service for Transforming Storage Optimization

Posted on by Admin Clear

 

Dallas, Texas – [September 21st, 2021] – Clear Technologies, a leading solution provider of IT consulting, server, storage, and software products, today announced the unveiling of a new service offering, Capacity Planning-as-a-Service, taking their storage expertise to the next level. In partnership with Visual One Intelligence®, the Capacity Planning-as-a-Service (CPaaS) solution is a significant advancement in the future of storage optimization.

Digital transformation heightens the need for continuous storage capacity analysis for determining critical IT infrastructure, application and financial resource needs. The CPaaS solution provides on-demand, comprehensive, actionable insight into the utilization and performance of any storage environment. CPaaS also eliminates the costly risk of over-provisioning cloud storage. With CPaaS, IT executives can ensure staff resources remain focused on normal workloads and suspend manual capacity planning. Paired with the human intelligence of Clear Technologies’ storage experts, IT executives will be well equipped to confidently make decisions for provisioning on-prem and cloud storage capabilities, at scale.

“We’re committed to building a strong, service-oriented relationship with our customers. In some of our discussions, we noticed customers conducting manual capacity planning outside of normal business operations and utilizing outdated tools. With turnover, the skillset and intricate excel spreadsheets were left to team members without the knowledge or time to complete manual reporting. We identified a strong need for accurate, on-demand capacity planning to help these customers save money and maintain normal workloads,” said Phil Godwin, Clear Technologies President and COO. “We’re excited to unveil the new Capacity Planning-as-a-Service offering to ensure customers are optimizing their storage environment and making confident, data-driven decisions for the future.”

Key Capacity Planning-as-a-Service Benefits:

  • Proactive Analysis – Actualize storage capacity needs on-demand with one centralized tool. Make confident, data-driven decisions in a timely manner.
  • Human Intelligence – Optimize storage capacity based on expert analysis and recommendations. With CPaaS, storage experts will factor in plans for acquisition, data migration or storage refresh.
  • Operational Equity – Build a risk-free IT Operations forecast by eliminating the financial pain of extended time and additional resources caused by manual capacity reporting.

“Developing the Capacity Planning-as-a-Service solution enhances the capabilities of the Visual One Intelligence® tool,” said Van Symons, Visual One Intelligence® Chief Technology Officer. “We created Visual One Intelligence® as a client-driven tool to continuously meet the needs of our clients’ storage environment. Capacity Planning is the future of storage optimization, and we are helping clients take a modern, proactive approach.”

About Clear Technologies

Clear Technologies partners with enterprise organizations to deliver customized IT solutions designed to increase operational efficiency. Unlike other solution providers, Clear Technologies utilizes Visual One Intelligence® (SRMaaS) to help enterprises discover performance insights, simplify storage management processes, and increase ROI. With over 25 years of experience and a premier offering of cloud-based infrastructure and services, combined with Visual One Intelligence®, Clear Technologies is the preferred partner in digital transformation.

Cybersecurity Resilience: Preemptive Protection for Your Storage Environment

Posted on by Admin Clear

Cybercrime continues to grow at an alarming rate. Companies have seen the highest average financial impact due to ransomware attacks in 2021, increasing from 3.86 million USD to 4.24 million USD.  Many companies are faced with the question of “When?” and not “If?” an attack will happen to them. Stop wasting time thinking about what could happen and focus on the reality of what to do when it happens. Is your cybersecurity resilience strategy airtight?

Protect your most valuable assets and mission-critical applications during the recovery of a cyberattack. Build a multi-level strategy to reduce downtime, save money and decrease human error.

Analyze Your Storage Environment
The first step in defining a cybersecurity resilience strategy is being able to recognize warning signs such as certain changes in your storage environment. Identify risk by utilizing Visual One Intelligence® (Visual One), a storage resource management service (SRMaaS). Visual One simplifies your storage management process by organizing independent data elements into a unified, visual analysis across your multi-vendor storage environment. With a single-pane-of glass-dashboard, you can view current and projected storage capacities. This level of insight helps detect unexpected activity – some of which can be a sign of security breaches.

Visual One Intelligence® – Risk Detection for Your Storage Environment 

Protect Your Data
With immutable copy, your data is encrypted as a read-only copy. If data cannot be changed, then it cannot be encrypted by ransomware. Attackers often target backups and snapshots first, limiting your recovery options. Once an attack happens, IT security teams need to work quickly to identify where it’s coming from to prevent the encryption of an entire network. Immutable copy reduces the impact of an attack because it is unaffected.

Clear Technologies – IT Security & Compliance Solutions

Maintain Business Continuity
Cybersecurity attacks will continue to evolve, and your storage environment must remain vigilant to maintain business continuity. Your storage infrastructure is regularly tested by utilizing IT Security and Compliance services from Clear Technologies to ensure confidence and compliance with the right resources.

The cost of ransomware and manpower is extreme. Cyber resiliency is priceless.

Be proactive about your company’s cybersecurity resiliency. Schedule time with one of our Security Experts.

Contact Us Today! 

[Career Opportunity] Hybrid Cloud Sales Specialist

Posted on by DeMond Adkison

Hybrid-Cloud Sales Specialist:

Looking to make a dramatic change in our company’s strategic plans moving forward while taking advantage of one of the industry’s best commission plans?  If so, this position is for you.

We are seeking a Hybrid-Cloud Sales Specialist to lead in the development of the technical solution or offering and in translating the business needs into technical requirements. The right person will be able to identify gaps, strategic impacts, financial impacts and the risk profile in the technical solution or offering and be able to relay these to clients and prospects. 

As a Hybrid Cloud Sales Specialist, you’ll be constantly learning about new technologies and how they can be applied to solve enterprise challenges.

Primary Responsibilities

  • Play a key role in building a cloud practice.
  • Prospecting to SMB to large enterprise clients to drive meetings (virtual or in person)
  • Meet quantitative performance expectations.
  • Collaborate with the sales organization to advance key infrastructure and cloud management opportunities.
  • Contribute to sales and marketing strategies in the infrastructure and cloud management solutions portfolio.
  • Present at events or webinars to raise awareness of Clear’s infrastructure and cloud solutions portfolio.
  • Partner with distributor and manufacturer partners to drive new opportunities.

Required Skills

  • Strong understanding of data center technology and cloud
  • Effective influencing and negotiation skills
  • Client oriented approach
  • Business communication, leadership and project management skills
  • Innovation skills and vision
  • Business architectural, analysis and planning skills
  • Excellent verbal and written communication skills

Required Experience

  • 5+  years of experience in solutions sales role
  • Extensive experience in technical sales in data center infrastructure, cloud, and cloud management solutions
  • Good communication and technical skills that enable customer relationship development to all  levels

In order for our team to consider you for employment, you MUST fill out this Pre- Employment survey below:

https://portal.cultureindex.com/public/survey/p/k9985R1nv4OTr4Z93eGu

Please copy and paste this link into your browser and take our survey now! Applicants who do not fill out our survey will NOT be considered for employment!