The Internet of Things will put IT to its ultimate test by creating infinite new opportunities to digitize products and services, generate and analyze new data to improve customer satisfaction, and discover new ways to gain a competitive advantage across nearly every industry. In order to help corporate business units to capitalize on the rapidly evolving IoT opportunities, IT must stand up to a new set of challenges. In his session at Internet of @ThingsExpo, Jeff Kaplan, Managing Director of THINKstrategies, will examine why IT must finally fulfill its role in support of its SBUs or face a new round of disruption that could fundamentally reshape the function of IT forever.
One funny thing about DevOps is that it is often touted that constant, on-the-fly changes are the way of the future in operations, and DevOps enables those changes. While this sounds really good, and some organizations are actually doing this type of DevOps, I think it is time that, for the enterprise, we strongly question that premise. While it is really very cool to think about moving an entire web server from a farm to the cloud with just a script, upgrading a system while it’s hot, or spinning up more instances of a server without having to configure anything, I propose that, for the average enterprise, it is simply not necessary.
CodeFutures, a provider of agile Big Data technologies, on Tuesday announced the release of Cory Isaacson’s newest book, “Understanding Big Data Scalability.” Isaacson is the CEO/CTO for CodeFutures and an industry-leading innovator of data management software. “Understanding Big Data Scalability” focuses on how to apply Big Data scalability to common applications with the wide selection of database management system engines available today. “We’re very excited about this opportunity to introduce a whole new perspective to Big Data,” Isaacson said. “’Understanding Big Data Scalability’ is the next step in how we approach data management moving forward. As the sheer amount of data continues to grow exponentially in today’s applications, taking an agile, scalable approach to the data tier is a step that simply must be taken.”
Cloud Computing is evolving into a Big Three of Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure. Cloud 360: Multi-Cloud Bootcamp, being held Nov 4–5, 2014, in conjunction with 15th Cloud Expo in Santa Clara, CA, delivers a real-world demonstration of how to deploy and configure a scalable and available web application on all three platforms. The Cloud 360 Bootcamp, led by Janakiram MSV, an analyst with Gigaom Research, is the first bootcamp that introduces the core concepts of Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) based on the workings of the Big Three platforms – Amazon EC2, Google Compute Engine, and Azure VMs. Bootcamp attendees will get to see the big picture and also receive the knowledge needed to make the best cloud decisions for their business applications and entire enterprise IT organization.
“Vote early and vote often.” Back in the 1920s and ’30s, when neither election technology nor oversight were as effective as they are today, and the likes of Al Capone were at work gaming the system, this phrase wasn’t a joke. It was a best practice. If you want guaranteed results, what better way than to get people to the polls early, and then repeatedly, to vote for your candidate? None of this sitting around until the end of the day, hoping that the election goes the way you want. Capone would tell you, “That’s for saps.” What does this have to do with cloud computing? All too often we see IT teams taking a “buy it and hope it works” strategy when it comes to adopting cloud-based apps. They migrate their entire user base to the cloud on faith, assuming that they can worry about performance and availability issues later, if ever. After all, everybody in the company accesses the Internet today without issues so your cloud apps should work just fine, right?
I like this word re-imagination from Mary Meeker’s Internet Trends presentation. We are seeing so many aspects of our life being transformed by the internet. Take for example, ordering a cab to go somewhere. Either we phone for a yellow cab here in California or if you are in New York city, then you stand and wave for an incoming yellow cab to stop. The new game-changer is Uber. All you do is touch your smartphone screen for UberX or Black car and you get an instant message about the car coming in less than 5 minutes time with the driver and car info. It is cheaper and you pay by card (pre-registered in your Uber account). This is re-imagining the transport sector. Uber, a San Francisco company is worth about $17B and is operating in 70 cities around the world. Quite a disruptive force!
This white paper digs deep into the reasons testing mobile apps is fundamentally harder than traditional web or desktop applications. A collaboration by Tina Zhuo and Dennis Schultz from IBM along with Yoram Mizrachi from Perfecto Mobile and John Montgomery from uTest, these experts explore the complexities of mobile test environments, the value of the mobile device cloud, the unique role crowd sourcing can play, and how teams can leverage automation to help deliver quality apps.
Despite all the news about hackers infiltrating major corporations, most businesses continue to leave themselves woefully unprotected. Some surveys estimate more than 70% of businesses perform vulnerability tests on less than 10% of their cloud, mobile and web applications. A majority also confess they have been hacked at least once in the last two years. While most large businesses have begun application vulnerability testing, there is still a long way to go. After all, you are only as strong as your weakest link; hackers will undoubtedly find and attack any application without sufficient defenses. Although testing and creating protection for high-value and mission-critical applications is better than not doing anything at all, leaving low-priority applications unprotected is still a major risk. If hackers can exploit just one application, that means they can then access the rest of your infrastructure. They’ll eventually figure out a way to also attack your high-value applications.
If you listen to the persistent murmur in the market surrounding the Internet of Things right now, you'd believe that it's all about sensors. Sensors and big data. Sensors that monitor everything from entertainment habits to health status to more mundane environmental data about your home and office. to a certain degree this is accurate. The Internet of Things comprises, well, things. But the question that must be asked - and is being asked in some circles - is not only where that data ends up but how organizations are going to analyze it and, more importantly, monetize it. But there's yet another question that needs to be asked and answered - soon. Assuming these things are talking to applications (whether they reside in the cloud or in the corporate data center) and vice-versa, there must be some way to identify them - and the people to whom they belong.
Scott Jenson leads a project called The Physical Web within the Chrome team at Google. Project members are working to take the scalability and openness of the web and use it to talk to the exponentially exploding range of smart devices. Nearly every company today working on the IoT comes up with the same basic solution: use my server and you'll be fine. But if we really believe there will be trillions of these devices, that just can't scale. We need a system that is open a scalable and by using the URL as a basic building block, we open this up and get the same resilience that the web enjoys.
While working on the second edition for my Java 24-hour Trainer book I’m re-writing some of the code samples to use lambda expressions. Today I was re-writing an example for wait/notify for the chapter on multi-threading. Beside illustrating the wait/notify, I used a closure in this example. Since Java closures are not well presented in the blogosphere, I decided to write a quick blog on the subject. My goal was to write a program that starts a thread and waits for the notification from that thread until its execution is completed. When the main thread receives the notification from the second thread it continues processing.
Like most maturing industries, standards are required to achieve broad adoption and maximum value. For the cloud, in particular cloud Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) offerings like Amazon Web Services and Rackspace Cloud, it’s time for a standard method for presenting these services so buyers can reasonably compare and contrast and make better buying decisions. At the moment, purchasing IaaS is similar to how groceries were bought decades ago – very difficult to compare – both the product contents and the price/value vary from one vendor to another. A recent study conducted by the Open Data Center Alliance (ODCA) – involving Intel, Appnomic Systems and a number of other ODCA enterprise members – illustrates just how difficult the situation is today.
up.time, from uptime software, monitors performance, availability and capacity across all servers, virtual machines, applications, IT services, and the network. Proactively find IT system performance issues before they happen, report on total capacity, easily identify troublemakers, trouble-shoot server and application problems fast, create and report on SLAs, and more. A unified IT Dashboard that monitors and reports on all server and application health (performance, availability and capacity). A GUI that is easily customizable, with a drag and drop dashboard design. In minutes, create private dashboards, team dashboards (server team, application team, capacity team, etc.) and a NOC for the entire datacenter.
A newly established firm sent out some basic information collateral to introduce itself this summer – and a new type of business model would seem to be emerging. The company here in question described itself as a non-integrated silo-based business that was disparately fragmented into a variety of separate business units each with their own non-standard information stream. Working across an international base of operations, the new business promises to evidence “innovation through diversity” by using a wide variety of operating systems and software applications.
The online world has become a dangerous place. According to a survey, 90 percent of all companies fell victim to a security breach in the last twelve months. Hacking and advanced persistent threats (APTs) have rendered the two-factor authentication token, now over 20 years old, essentially obsolete. Without question, a real need exists for a truly secure approach to real-time multifactor authentication to combat today’s modern threats. The use of online services has exploded in the last decade as enterprises have adopted remote access as the default way to access systems and conduct business. With the pervasive use of online access to conduct business, the threat of identity theft has increased with stunning speed and complexity. Ponemon Research surveyed more than 500 corporations and found that 90 percent had been successfully hacked in the last twelve months. This finding underscores the need for major enterprises to adopt stringent, effective security methods as a means to protect against breaches. As a result, modern mobile phone-based multifactor authentication is in high demand.
The threats facing network operators all over the world, spanning service providers, enterprises, cloud and hosting providers and mobile operators alike, are by no means stalling. While optimism is always the name of the game, we know all too well in security that trying to keep pace with the slew of attack vectors out there today is an unfortunate reality. As our 9th annual Worldwide Infrastructure Security Report reveals the magnitude of attacks is on the upswing once again and coupled with increasingly complex, multi-vector style attacks, the threat is all too real.
If your organization’s got a lot riding on the continued security of its confidential or proprietary data, then you need to stay informed on the threats and how to address them. One of the most worrying threats of late, especially when it comes to cloud data security, is government spying – both foreign and domestic. Foreign spying and corporate and economic espionage are, of course, not new concepts, but the enterprise’s increasing reliance on the Internet and cloud computing make them more of a concern than ever before. Just this week, the Wall Street Journal reported that the U.S. Justice Department has indicted five officers of the Chinese military on charges that they “hacked U.S. companies’ computers to steal trade secrets” from firms including U.S. Steel Corp. and Westinghouse Electric Co. Wang Dong, Gu Chunhui, Sun Kailiang, Huang Zhenyu, and Wen Xinyu are the first “employees of a foreign power [to be charged] with cybercrimes against American firms,” according to the WSJ, but they won’t be the last.
As a Product Manager with deep technology roots I always enjoy reading HighScalability.com. While many of the articles are technical case studies, there are frequently good business discussions as well. The other day, I read an article on data monetization, Data Doesn’t Have to be Free. In this article, the author makes the point that Walled Garden business models, where users separately give up their data in return for a free service, is not sustainable. The only monetization strategy that a Walled Garden can effectively leverage is a proprietary advertising platform and we all know how that is going. Consequently, Mr. Hoff advocates the emergence of an open market in data. He suggests businesses that collect data can in turn develop business models based on the value of that data for whoever is willing to buy it, which creates a new value-added service. Of course, where I disagree with this article is the death of privacy. Privacy is far from dead. The masses are just warming up with the privacy fight and will soon light a fire under the collective behinds of legislative and regulatory bodies. Already we see signs of this prediction by the Internet of Things (IoT) leaders, as I mentioned in my previous article. Privacy is coming, and social media aside, the volume of data that will be generated and available in these IoT platforms will likely dwarf even the likes of Facebook.
There are 182 billion emails sent every day, generating a lot of data about how recipients and ISPs respond. Many marketers take a more-is-better approach to stats, preferring to have the ability to slice and dice their email lists based numerous arbitrary stats. However, fundamentally what really matters is whether or not sending an email to a particular recipient will generate value. Data Scientists can design high-level insights such as engagement prediction models and content clusters that allow marketers to cut through the noise and design their campaigns around strong, predictive signals, rather than arbitrary statistics. SendGrid sends up to half a billion emails a day for customers such as Pinterest and GitHub. All this email adds up to more text than produced in the entire twitterverse. We track events like clicks, opens and deliveries to help improve deliverability for our customers – adding up to over 50 billion useful events every month. While SendGrid data covers only about 2% of all non-spam email activity in the world, it gives SendGrid a unique snapshot of email activity spanning from the senders to the recipients and inbox providers like gmail and yahoo. To cope with data of this scale SendGrid has designed and implemented custom data structures to store 10s of billions of items in memory on a single commodity machine.
Many mid-market companies have invested significant time and resources to secure and back up their servers, client computers, data, and overall network infrastructure in what was the traditional client-server setup. Now, what were considered emerging technologies just a few years ago, cloud computing and virtualization have arrived on the scene, bringing both significant benefits and new challenges. Find out more about this transition to get the most out of your virtual environment.
In 2011 Wiley (Wrox) published my book “Java Programming. 24-Hour Trainer“. To be honest, I don’t like the title because it misleads people as if this book promises that the reader can learn Java within 24 hours. But creators of this series (many titles were published under this umbrella) meant to say that this book was like your personal instructor; 24 hours a day. Whatever. It’s not my call. But earlier this year I got a call from the publisher stating that they’re happy with the book sale numbers and want me to update the book and release the second edition reflecting the latest changes in the Java Language. I agreed because with the latest release Java became more interesting than ever. The magnitude of changes to the Java 8 language and APIs can be compared with Java 5 that was released back in 2004. It’s exciting to program in Java again.
How do we blaze a better path to a secure mobile future? How do we make today’s ubiquitous mobile devices as low risk as they are indispensable? As smartphones have become de rigueur in the global digital economy, users want them to do more work, and businesses want them to be more productive for their employees -- as well as powerful added channels to consumers. But neither businesses nor mobile-service providers have a cross-domain architecture that supports all the new requirements for a secure digital economy, one that allows safe commerce, data sharing and user privacy.
Another week, another cloud storage price drop. The barrier of price is slowly melting away as the cloud storage wars rage and prices drop into the pennies per gigabyte per month. Not familiar with the price wars? Here’s an abridged version: In 2013, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, Google, and Rackspace dropped prices a combined 25 times. So far in 2014, AWS, Google and Azure have all continued to engage in price wars, dropping storage pricing more than 50 percent. New entrants like IBM Softlayer recently got in the game with a price drop of up to 65 percent on storage
Windows XP is living on borrowed time: Microsoft officially ended extended support for it on 8 April 2014. It was inevitable, but now many companies and organizations across the world face the unenviable task of removing XP from their organizations without disrupting regular business activities. One of our customers, a bank with multinational operations, took this opportunity to implement XenDesktop, Citrix’ Virtual Desktop Integration (VDI) package, and make managing their employees’ computers cheaper and easier going forward. The technical team within the bank responsible for the rollout set themselves up for success by doing two things: first of all, they tested their implementation on small groups of employees before the main rollout. Initially they deployed XenDesktop to an offshore office where everything worked fine. Then they deployed it to a bank branch near their headquarters, and there were a few user complaints. The VDI introduced an extra stage in delivering applications to end-users, and at this point the technical team realised they didn’t have visibility into its performance.
In Part 1, I looked at what could be behind Facebook’s acquisition of WhatsApp and subsequent purchase of Oculus Rift. How are these seemingly different acquisitions related? There is no question that both Facebook and Google are in a race to build the next-generation computing/communications platform (after mobile) and the battle lines are being drawn between the over-the-top (OTT) players and telecommunications companies. After all, both Facebook and Google count on telcos to deliver services to their customer base. How will the WhatsApp and Oculus Rift acquisitions shape Facebook and impact the rest of the market including Google and mobile? Facebook did not pay $19 billion for WhatsApp simply because it’s an SMS replacement, a Skype and Twitter competitor, because it could grow its international subscriber base, or could attract customers among the coveted millennial demographic – although these reasons are icing on the cake. Facebook’s WhatsApp acquisition was a shot across the bow to telcos: we will be masters of our own destiny and not be reliant on you to reach our customers. With the addition of voice calling to WhatsApp, this puts even more pressure on mobile providers who are already feeling the heat from WhatsApp, which has cost them billions in lost SMS revenue. Now, they have to worry about an even bigger impact on their bread and butter voice business if that follows a similar pricing pressure trajectory. With an already 450 million strong WhatsApp subscriber base added to Facebook’s own customer base, Facebook has the ideal launch pad for the next-generation communications platform provided by Oculous Rift. While Facebook and Google have similar business (new subscribers and advertising revenue) and personal (secure a place in the history books) motivation that is driving both companies overall strategy, their approach is quite different.