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5 Common Cloud Migration Pitfalls and How to Avoid Them

Posted on February 14, 2025 by Jay

Cloud migration is a strategic business decision that enables organizations to move data, applications, and infrastructure to the cloud. This can unlock enhanced scalability, agility, and cost efficiency.

On the other hand, the process has many challenges. Organizations face pitfalls that can derail projects, leading to increased costs, operational disruptions, and security vulnerabilities.

In this blog, we will explore the top five most common cloud migration pitfalls and provide actionable strategies for avoiding them.

1. Inadequate Planning and Strategy

The Pitfall

One of the most significant mistakes organizations make is diving into cloud migration ventures without a pre-defined roadmap or strategies.

Rushing into it without thorough planning could result in misaligned goals, inefficient processes, and increased dependencies.

Without the right plan, you risk facing unexpected technical challenges, budget overruns, and operational inefficiencies.

Why It Happens

Lack of Clear Objectives: Many businesses don’t have a clear objective about what they want with the migration such as cost reduction improved performance or enhanced security.
Insufficient Stakeholder Involvement: When teams make decisions without taking inputs from business leaders the migration activities may not be productive for the business.
Underestimating Complexity: Businesses often underestimate the complexity of migrating their legacy systems and application modernization activities.

How to Avoid It

Develop a Comprehensive Migration Strategy: Start with a clear understanding of the business goals. Identify what you want from your migration venture. You should also consider developing a detailed framework including timelines, milestones, and responsibilities.
Conduct a Thorough Assessment: Perform a comprehensive audit of your environment. Determine the dependencies, applications, data sets, and workflows that will be impacted. This audit process should determine the existing legacy systems as well as dependencies to avoid complications.
Engage Stakeholders Early: Include all the team members and relevant stakeholders when deciding on the migration process. A cross-functional team can provide diverse perspectives which will ensure that your efforts align with the business strategies.
Create a Detailed Roadmap: You can also break down the migration process into multiple phases. This will define the various checkpoints as well as lay out the various contingency plans to address the issues when they arise during the process.

By strategizing your efforts beforehand you can reduce the risk of unexpected hurdles.

2. Underestimating Data Complexity and Legacy Systems

The Pitfall

Project data is the single most valuable asset for any organization. Migrating it from a legacy system is a complex process and takes time.

Organizations oftentimes underestimate the complexities involved in transferring data accurately and securely.

These legacy systems can present compatibility issues which can complicate the migration process.

Why It Happens

Data Silos and Disorganization: Oftentimes data remains scattered across multiple systems and formats, which makes it hard to integrate into modern cloud platforms.
Legacy Application Dependencies: Many legacy systems rely on outdated technologies that don’t integrate effectively with cloud environments. This can lead to compatibility and performance issues.
Volume and Velocity: Large data sets and the need for real-time access can affect migration efforts which can lead to data loss and corruption.

How to Avoid It

Conduct a Data Audit: Determine the structure and volume of the data you want to migrate. Find the data silos as well as establish a data governance framework.
Plan for Data Transformation: Not all data can be moved in its original format. You need to clean, transform, and reformat data to ensure that it’s compatible with the cloud platform.
Leverage Automated Tools: Leverage migration tools and platforms when handling large data volumes; also minimize manual errors by automating data mapping processes.
Test Extensively: Pre-migration testing will enable you to identify potential issues such as data compatibility and performance; which will in turn fine-tune your approach.

3. Overlooking Security and Compliance Requirements

The Pitfall

Security and compliance are necessary to adopt cloud solutions and need to be strategized beforehand. Yet, if you are overlooking these aspects your organizations will face significant risks.
When it comes to cloud environments, you need to configure them to prevent data breaches and avoid creating compliance violations and other cyber threats.
Why It Happens

Assumption of Provider Responsibility: Some organizations believe that the cloud provider should exclusively take care of the application’s security. However, the cloud service providers provide robust security measures but the organization should themselves configure and manage security appropriately.
Rapid Migration Pressure: Don’t skip security configurations and compliance checks to complete a migration
Complex Regulatory Landscapes: Ensure to meet industry-specific regulations and standards such as GDPR, HIPAA, or PCI-DSS.

How to Avoid It

Adopt a Security-First Approach: Integrate security considerations into every stage of your migration process. Develop a detailed security policy that covers data encryption, access controls, and incident response strategies.
Understand Shared Responsibility: Define the right security responsibilities for your organization against those of the cloud providers. You need to configure all security settings such as firewalls, identity management, and monitoring tools.
Ensure Regulatory Compliance: Team up with legal and compliance teams to map out all other regulatory needs that are relevant to the industry. Also, conduct regular audits and use compliance management tools to remain aligned with the regulations.
Implement Continuous Monitoring: Once your data is in the cloud, it becomes imperative that you continuously monitor for vulnerabilities and unusual activity.

By addressing this security and compliance proactively, you can mitigate risks as well as ensure that your cloud environment is safe and compliant.

4. Mismanaging Costs and Budget Overruns

The Pitfall

Cost management is a significant factor when migrating to the cloud. If you have not planned out your budget, unexpected expenses can quickly add up.
Many organizations find themselves facing budget overruns due to hidden costs and unexpected operational expenses.

Why It Happens

Underestimating Operational Costs: Many organizations focus on initial costs but don’t account for operational expenses. These expenses include data transfer fees, storage costs, and also cloud service management.
Resource Misallocation: Without learning how cloud resources are used, companies may overestimate, leading to wasted resources and higher costs.
Lack of Visibility: Lack of monitoring and reporting can lead to over budgeting which can make it difficult to manage expenses.

How to Avoid It

Conduct a Detailed Cost Analysis: Before you migrate, you need to perform a cost-benefit analysis. You also need to consider the initial migration costs as well as long-term operational expenses. Also, integrate cloud cost calculators provided by top cloud providers.
Adopt a Cloud Cost Management Tool: Integrate tools that will provide visibility to your cloud migration efforts. These tools can enable you to monitor resource usage, optimize costs as well as find areas where you can cut unnecessary expenses.
Right-Size Your Resources: Work with the IT team to ensure only the necessary resources. This includes solutions such as auto-scaling, resource optimization strategies, etc.
Regular Audits and Reviews: Determine the best method for auditing. To achieve this you need to determine the cloud spending as well as adjust various strategies to avoid budget overruns.

5. Insufficient Training and Change Management

The Pitfall
It’s worth noting that when implementing new technology and processes you need to adapt as well. Without the right training and change management teams can struggle to utilize the new systems effectively. This can lead to operational inefficiencies, reduced productivity, and frustration among employees.

Why It Happens

Over-Reliance on Technology: Many organizations focus so much on the technical aspect of migration that they oversee the importance of educating the workforce to adapt.
Resistance to Change: Employees accustomed to legacy systems may even resist new tools and processes.
Inadequate Training Programs: If you skimp on training and support you can leave teams feeling unprepared and overwhelmed by the cloud environment.

How to Avoid It

Develop a Comprehensive Training Plan: Invest in training programs that can cover both the technical and operational aspects of the new cloud environment. These training programs could include workshops, webinars, and hands-on training sessions.
Communicate Benefits Clearly: Assist your team in understanding how the migration will make their work easier and more efficient. Stress upon improvements such as collaboration, scalability, and performance.
Implement a Change Management Strategy: A strategic change management can assist you in a smooth transition. This involves clear communication, phased rollouts, and greater feedback and support.
Provide Ongoing Support: You need to ensure that the support you provide is readily available during and even after the migration process. This also includes dedicated help desks, online resources, and regular check-ins to address concerns and gather feedback.

Prioritize training and change management, so that you can empower your employees to embrace the new cloud environment and also ensure that your migration activities are up to the specs.

Conclusion

Cloud migration can push businesses into a new era of agility, scalability, and innovation. But the path is riddled with various pitfalls such as inadequate planning and data complexities.

By understanding these common pitfalls and implementing the strategies outlined you can avoid costly mistakes and ensure a smooth and efficient migration.

With the right planning, continuous monitoring, and proactive management, your organization can avoid common pitfalls so that you can reap the benefits of modern organizations.

What Privacy Policy Stands in SaaS Application Development?

Posted on January 18, 2021 by Jay

Recently, WhatsApp has updatedits user data privacy policy and this update creates so much hush between end-users.

Even tech giant Elon Musk also tweeted about it.

Use Signal

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) January 7, 2021

By the way, we do not want to make any comment on that nor want to make any comparisons.

But any user data of any application is a primary concern in today’s market. Service providers must satisfy their end-users by making much-required transparency of data privacy policies.

A few years back, there was only a fundamental shift in how companies do business online, and about data privacy. But after the intervention of cloud-based business strategy things have changed.

Now building credibility as a cloud-based business is harder than ever.

Let’s take the SaaS market. To make the subscription payments option available, the SaaS companies need a strong focus on keeping customer data secure and communicating that security to their users.

Just letting strengthen the privacy concerns are not enough though – the SaaS Application builders need concrete security measures in place that customers can easily understand.

Here we have put together some of the basic information and best practices on data security policies to help you get started with securing your SaaS application. Let’s dive in!

Basic things about SaaS security

SaaS security refers to the data privacy and safety of user data in subscription-based software i.e. Orangescrum, Wakeupsales, etc.

Each day, SaaS companies access, and analyze various data of customers. Even including the credit and debit card details.

As a SaaS founder, If you fail to keep those data safe, it will have a direct and lasting impact on your user retention and business growth.

With high-profile leaks like Cambridge Analytica happening more often, customers are increasingly concerned with their data privacy.

Concerning the customer data safety, different country’s regulatory bodies have issued various security guidelines like GDPR, EU-US and the Swiss-US Privacy Shield Frameworks, etc. These are mandatory to follow as a SaaS company.

And all these guidelines declares “Doing so ensures that whatever data your product has access to, it’s kept secure in a way that customers can understand—whether you’re dealing with internal or external issues.”

Also, the SaaS companies need to consider the data leakage.

As well as keeping secret your customer data you need to protect these customer data from outside attacks also. Or I can say you need to create a secure environment to run your SaaS application.

So, you need to make a dedicated strategy for your SaaS product during the development process.

The best practices to ensure data privacy and security:

Whether you’re developing a new SaaS product or rolling out a new feature, it’s important to consider how these changes will impact your SaaS Application’s security.

Image Source: Profitwell

Keep the following best practices in mind to ensure your data privacy and security.

Encrypt your data

Encrypting the internal or user data should be the top priority through every layer of your technology stack.

A proper encryption ensures that the customer data isn’t immediately out there for all to see.

And let this know to your customers that your product is always keeping all sensitive billing information safe by communicating your encryption policies.

Not to mention, there are many common encryption protocols to use, each ensuring that the data you rely on isn’t stored in plain text.

Make privacy a priority

Privacy and security statements are required by most compliance and regulatory protocols, but that’s not all they’re good for.

By creating a robust statement for your own product, it educates both your team and your customer in how to handle valuable data.

Work with your development and legal teams to define the specific information that should be included in your own privacy policy.

Educate your customers

According to Gartner research, customers will be responsible for 95% of cloud security failures by 2020.

Whenever you onboard new customers or push important updates to current ones, make sure that you’re actively reaching out to let people know how it will impact their security.

More and more SaaS companies are moving to an entirely cloud-based infrastructure and most customers don’t understand the implications of this move.

Make sure your customers know how to keep their information safe to minimize security issues.

Backup user data in several locations

Lots of businesses aren’t prepared for data breaches, which makes effective customer data management very important.

Backing up your data in several locations ensures that no single system failure will damage your security.

Many cloud platforms SaaS companies rely on will provide this functionality as a part of their product, but you need to be diligent with backups to avoid potentially disastrous losses of customer data.

Consult a cyber-security firm

Third-party security firms can provide valuable industry insight into what you need to do to keep your platform secure.

Their testing protocols ensure that your software, network, and infrastructure is kept safe at all times.

As you’re building out your product, these third-party providers can also help you create plans for if/when a breach occurs.

Require stronger passwords

Even when they understand the risk of this practice, many people still use the same password for every login.

Prevent users from making their data vulnerable by requiring strong passwords when they create accounts.

Consider setting up authentication protocols and case sensitivity guidelines.

As the subscription economy continues to mature, a focus on security will only become more important. Always evaluate your current protocols to make sure you’re staying compliant as your company grows.

Takeaways

With a strong focus on SaaS security, you build trust in your product and foster an ecosystem that customers feel comfortable using.

Andolasoft puts user data security first

At Andolasoft, we are compliant with EU and US privacy regulations, we never sell your valuable customer data, and regularly perform security audits and penetration testing.

Check out our security statement for specific information on how we keep our SaaS business secure.

As people become more well-versed in their personal security, more secure products will also be more attractive to buyers.

Want to discuss more on SaaS Application data privacy? Let’s discuss!

How To Minimize Cloud Security Risks For SaaS Application

Posted on May 31, 2019 by Jay

Software as a Service (SaaS) has grown to become the world’s most popular software delivery model and is showing no sign of slowing down.

Most modern businesses want to work with a set of applications that don’t require them to have their own storage, backups, and server rooms on site.

As a SaaS provider, you need to store plenty of sensitive data for both information and customer-related as well.

In this complex world that seems to see new cyber-attacks and data breaches every week, all SaaS apps and businesses must take measures to keep their internal as well as customer data safe and secure and need to learn on how to minimize cloud security risks for SaaS application.

As security technologies are changing fast and hackers inventing new ideas, how can SaaS companies keep up?

SaaS is literally taking over the cloud computing market.

So, it is no surprise to find that the global public cloud service market is projected to grow to more than $200 billion in 2019, up from $175.8 billion in 2018, according to Gartner.

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For medium-size organizations, SaaS is primarily a hassle-free and cost-effective alternative that offers new possibilities, flexible costs, as well as easy maintenance and deployment.

In case, if you have been running with a limited budget there are still many free and open-source tools are available to execute your security strategy.

Now before we get into the best practices for securing SaaS application, let’s discuss the security challenges.

Security Challenges For SaaS:

Today, enterprises are focusing on data and business processes like records, pricing information, transactions, etc.

If your SaaS provider is leveraging a public cloud computing service, all the data is possibly being stored with other SaaS applications.

So here’s the list of 9 common SaaS security challenges;

Data access risk
Instability
Lack of transparency
Identity theft
Uncertainty of your data location
Paying upfront and long-term
Not sure what you agreed to
How your data is actually secured
No direct control over your own data

The study says, “By 2021, 27% of corporate data traffic will bypass perimeter security, up from 10% today.”

Data stored in the SaaS application needs careful analysis of the security controls and processes in each platform for efficient protection. However, as the huge number of SaaS apps are being used, SaaS App Security is what needed the most.

Securing SaaS Applications:

Cloud-based SaaS security is more manageable.

Cloud-based security makes it easier for you to manage 4 major components of securing SaaS applications like; visibility, control, threat protection, and data governance.

The following key security elements should be carefully considered as an integral part of the SaaS application development and deployment process:

1. SaaS Deployment Model:

Today, product leaders are rushing to meet the market release deadlines.

That’s why product security often takes a backseat. The SaaS security challenges vary according to the deployment model by the vendors.

SaaS vendors may choose to deploy the solution either by using a public cloud vendor or host it themselves.

Dedicated public cloud providers help to build secure SaaS solutions by implementing infrastructure services that help in ensuring security.

2. Data Security:

To ensure a high level of security, all interaction with servers must happen over SSL termination.

In a traditional on-premise application deployment model, the sensitive data of each enterprise continues to reside within the enterprise boundary and is subject to its physical, logical and personnel security and access control policies.

However, in the SaaS model, the enterprise data is stored outside the enterprise boundary, at the SaaS vendor end.

Consequently, the SaaS vendor must adopt additional security checks to ensure data security and prevent breaches due to security vulnerabilities in the application or through malicious users.

This involves the use of strong encryption techniques for data security and fine-grained authorization to control access to data.

3. Network Security:

In a SaaS deployment model, sensitive data is obtained from the enterprises, processed by the SaaS application, and stored at the SaaS vendor end.

All data flow over the network needs to be secured in order to prevent leakage of sensitive information.

4. Data Backup:

The SaaS vendor needs to ensure that all sensitive enterprise data is regularly backed up to help quick recovery in case of failures.

In the case of cloud vendors, the data is not encrypted automatically. The users need to separately encrypt their data and backups so that it cannot be accessed or tampered with by unauthorized parties.

I’ve worked with the team at AndolaSoft on multiple websites. They are professional, responsive, & easy to work with. I’ve had great experiences & would recommend their services to anyone.

Ruthie Miller, Sr. Mktg. Specialist

Salesforce, Houston, Texas

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Conclusion:

The major benefits offered by the SaaS model, such as improved operational efficiency and reduced costs are reason enough to adopt this powerful model.

However, to overcome your fear about SaaS application security, ensure the vendor you go with.

These measures will help identify any security issues upfront and ensure the safety of your data.

To Build a Risk-free SaaS Application, let’s discuss!

Top Reasons To Choose Amazon Web Services To Grow Your Business

Posted on October 1, 2018 by Jay

With an ultimate record of $2.53bn in Q2 in 2018, Amazon Web Services (AWS) doesn’t stop to amaze people and businesses. Despite the recent growth of Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure, AWS still commands nearly 40 percent of the cloud computing market share.

The dominance of AWS in the IT industry as well as in growing demand for profitable cloud computing services has remained enormous from the very first day.

For the first-timers, Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a cloud computing platform that is not only comprehensive but also very much scalable and flexible to the world by the leading e-commerce giant, Amazon. AWS offers a blend of Infrastructure as a Service (laaS), packaged software as a service (SaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS) offerings.

In 2006, the official launch year of AWS, Amazon.com has build AWS from the internal infrastructure in order to handle its online retail operations.

Amazon Web Services can be simply described as a highly demanding cloud computing platform offering a broad set of global compute, storage, database, analytics, application, and deployment services that help organizations to move faster, lower their IT costs, and scale applications.

In addition to providing greater speed, agility, scalability, security, availability, reliability, and flexibility, AWS enables you to save on the total cost of ownership of your IT infrastructure. Join us to learn about the tools and best practices that many customers use to optimize their AWS environment and reduce costs. Some of these include Amazon EC2 right-sizing, scheduling Amazon EC2 and Amazon RDS, storage optimization, reserved instances, tagging, and cost visualization.

Peter Shi, Commercial Architect, Amazon Web Services

(Source: aws.amazon.com)

So, now you might think how AWS will help you in your business growth? Over a year, more than a million customers are using and AWS is offering more than 70 wide-ranging services to meet nearly every business needs. Let’s have a look at the top reasons to choose AWS for your business.

Benefits of Using Amazon Web Service for Business

1. Global Presence:

Amazon has targeted the entire global audience. AWS has grown to be a worldwide leader in cloud computing. Now it’s operating in 44 zones and 16 geographic regions around the world. Thus it enables you to deploy your web application in multiple regions and helps to lower the latency with a better web experience for your targeted audience at a minimal cost.

2. Pay-As-You-Go Pricing:

AWS is a server-based service and flexible cloud-computing platform which allow users to automate routine tasks and quickly scale capacity up or down as needed. The most important point is Amazon is extremely flexible and offers pay-as-you-go approach with the flexible pricing structure.

Thus business owner can stop and start the instances as needed for the growth of the business bottom line. AWS easily adjust the server storage and infrastructure during the slow time. Small and mid-level organizations can also influence its services as you have to pay for only the resources consumed with pay per hour facility.

3. Security:

Since data storage and data security are significantly important to businesses, when switching to a cloud provider or service storage provider, it makes sense that security would be a highly sought-after feature.

AWS’s security is robust enough to tackle every possible challenge coming upfront whether you are the one-man startup or an enterprise-level AWS provides the same level of world-class security.

The data center maintains a high level of security resources like IAM (Identity and Access Management) which manage dozens of infrastructure compliance to keep secure the real-time instances on suspicious activity.

4. Scalability:

AWS is very much fit and healthy for all size of businesses. Because of its flexibility system, AWS has become the most demandable cloud computing infrastructure.

All the services communicate with your application automatically and handle the situations accordingly. With powerful API it manages the server instances in quick time and shut down the instances when they are no longer needed. Businesses will get more traffic in the first phase.

Amazon Web Services will also start supporting your business and in return, offer you flexibility, scalable e-commerce and storage solutions.

5. Customizable:

Amazon Web Services will allow you to choose the programming language, database, operating system, and other assets as per your knowledge and choice. This is to aid you in creating a solution that works not just best but outstanding for your team.

This platform allows a high level of customizations to meet the business requirement like cost tracking, organization security, and automation.

6. Free Tier:

Most of the IT professionals are little bit worry about the use of EC2 because if its cost factor. They have very less knowledge on AWS because EC2 is not like the traditional hosting solutions and it has designed to bring the server online and offline quickly as needed.

The free tier provides credit to run an EC2 micro instance. It comes with S3 storage, EC2 compute hours, Elastic Load Balancer time, and much more. This gives developers a chance to try out AWS’s API in their software, which not only enhances their software but also ties them to AWS, which benefits Amazon in the long run.

Andolasoft has the excellence on AWS is remarkable throughout and can assure growth in online sales through exclusive Amazon Web Services.

How Andolasoft Plans for Your Business Success with Premium AWS?

Andolasoft the web and mobile application Development Company USA is well-known in providing comprehensive AWS Management Services. We have a team of experienced and highly knowledge-holders to work on the collection of remote computing services that together make up a cloud computing platform powered by Amazon.

Andolasoft is the consulting partner of Amazon Web Services and expertise in IT infrastructure management services like Elastic Block Store (EBS), Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Elastic Load Balancing (ELB), Simple Storage Service (S3), Relational Database Service (RDS), DynamoDB, Auto Scaling, CloudFront, Route53, CloudWatch, Elastic MapReduce (EMR) and ElastiCache.

We have helped to reduce the It infrastructure cost of our customer PRIMP.

Let’s have a look at how we are helping others in managing their business,

We are the recognized AWS Managed Services Provider.
Reduced Risk using experienced consultants.
We have an experienced and skilled team of AWS experts.
Deployment and Operations mentoring.
Years of experience in support and maintenance to demanding enterprise customers.
Focus on where we provide the most value.
We are having expertise in application migration.
Effective post-implementation support.
Our cloud services are available to create cross-over solutions that combine AWS with private clouds, dedicated servers, and collected equipment.

We rank the top flutter developers by Designrush.

Conclusion:

Amazon Web Services is one of the best cloud computing services for IT infrastructure management. As your business grows you may need big data application for the smooth operation of the business and AWS helps the quick scale of any big data and you can access many resources according to your requirements.

Why Move your Business to Cloud?

Posted on June 1, 2016 by Jay

Cloud Computing is undoubtedly a growing revolution within IT, bringing unprecedented benefits to organizations. In the coming days, this is going to play a major role in the technological domain. However, with its huge number of vendors in the marketplace, IT decision makers need to be well appraised of the issues around pricing, performance & reliability of their chosen suppliers while moving their Business to Cloud.

With cloud computing, you eliminate managing the utility services because you’re not managing hardware & software anymore—that’ll be the responsibility of an experienced vendor; like Andolasoft. You only pay for what you need. Upgrades are automatic & scaling up/down is easy.

With a cloud based app, you just open a browser, log in, customize the app & Voilà! Cloud is built to perform & the apps can be up-n-running in days or weeks, even costing you less.

Andolasoft Cloud Computing Services: a Better Way

Get Great Benefits:

We provide best-in-class Cloud management and Support services with Proactive maintenance, Monitoring, Server support and Backup & Recovery services. Our remote system admins can execute numerous tasks based on your needs and work together interacting with you every day.

Our Range of Cloud Management Services:

Linux Server Management
Amazon EC2 Cloud Management
Cloud Environment setup
Domain management & Hosting
Periodical Backup & Restore
General Application Support & Maintenance
Server setups for various technologies such as Ruby on Rails, ASP.NET, CakePHP/PHP
Cacti setup (Complete RRD Tool based Graphic solution)
Real-Time Web App Performance Monitoring with New Relic
Version Controlling Server deployment (such as gitosis)
IT Infrastructure Monitoring services with Nagios
Installation of Ruby on Rails, PHP, MYSQL, CakePHP, Apache, NGINX
Deployment of various applications using Jenkins & Capistrano
Setup of IT Asset Management Software Customizing OCS/GLP

Try the Cloud with Andolasoft, I’m sure you’ll love it.

Get customized Service Level Agreements (SLAs) & robust support from Andolasoft’s Cloud Services experts. Contact us for anything in Cloud! We would love to get in touch with you.

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