Cloud technology brings one of the most fundamental changes to the global business model in decades. Originally seen as a desirable efficiency, today cloud delivery models have become operational necessities that drive improvements in business performance and innovation. In his session at 14th Cloud Expo, Mitch Kenfield, Managing Director at KPMG, will explain how a recent KPMG survey sheds light on the ‘real’ state of enterprise cloud adoption. This includes identifying where organizations are truly realizing the expected benefits of a cloud environment and where they are still struggling, what is common in the market today and what is around the corner tomorrow. All of an enterprise’s future mobile, social, digital and analytical needs are converging in the cloud. Will you be ready?
In his session at 5th Big Data Expo, Dan Rosanova, Sr. Architect at West Monroe Partners, will examine how Big Data and cloud computing technologies will shape the emerging Internet of Things that promises to connect a trillion devices in the next decade. The sheer numbers and volume of devices and data will overwhelm existing network and data management architectures currently deployed. From network topology and architectural framework to components and platforms this talk session provide a coherent introduction to the emerging Internet of Things powered by Big Data and the cloud.
“Most on-premise vendors assume that creating a virtual deployment instance of their software and hosting it through AWS makes them a cloud provider,” noted Jeff Morris, VP of Product Marketing at GoodData, in this exclusive Q&A with Cloud Expo conference chairs Larry Carvalho and Vanessa Alvarez. “However, what they do not realize is that cloud provisioning must be more instantaneous.” Cloud Computing Journal: How are cloud standards playing a role in expanding adoption among users? Are standards helping new business models for service providers?
IT leaders and practitioners need to know how to embrace shifting business and end-user expectations, and the cloud is a vital part of everyone’s strategy to address this challenge. But how do you go about selecting the right cloud services? How do you manage them without adding new management tools for every platform? Since almost all organizations will end up with a hybrid cloud, it is imperative to know how to manage such an environment seamlessly, allowing for the efficiency and agility promises of the cloud to remain real. In their session at 14th Cloud Expo, James Urquhart, Technologist & Director of Cloud Management Solutions at Dell, and Jeremy Ford, General Manager of Cloud Services at Dell, will examine the role of IT, the critical decision checkpoints, and approaches to managing hybrid cloud computing environments. Attendees will also learn of deployment choices and constraints, the nuances of managing homogeneous vs. heterogeneous deployment environments, and how to deploy and manage applications in dissimilar environments.
“We recommend that Ops people take a Dev person to lunch and vice versa,” said Matt Selheimer, SVP of Marketing at ITinvolve, in this exclusive Q&A with Conference Chair Roger Strukhoff. “It’s a great way to build bridges, foster collaboration, and better understand what is “upstream” or “downstream” from your day-to-day work. After all, business value is only delivered when the new application capabilities are deployed and used not just when code is ready.” Cloud Computing Journal: The idea of lean and agile development has been evolving in recent years. To what extent is cloud computing in all its forms driving this evolution toward DevOps?
The MAS guidelines for Internet Banking and Technology Risk Management (TRM), issued in June 2013, identify security and risk management issues in a comprehensive manner, covering everything from identity assurance and access controls to accountability and audit. This white paper details how products from Centrify – a leading provider of Unified Identity Services across data center, cloud, and mobile – addresses critical portions of the security controls and risk management requirements defined in the MAS TRM Guidelines.
Most enterprises are concerned with security and privacy when putting data into the cloud, but what about latency? In putting data in the cloud, you need to make sure you have a sense for latency or the time it takes for messages to traverse the network (and back). If your message suffers as little as 20 milliseconds (1/1000th of a second) delay, you are looking at a 15% plunge in Web page load time. How do you avoid downtime while housing your data in the cloud, where the cost savings are tremendous? In his session at 14th Cloud Expo, David Hall, Commercial and Strategy Manager at TelecityGroup (Cloud-IX), will discuss how TelecityGroup has made the issue of latency a thing of the past with Cloud IX, which allows data center managers to seamlessly connect to and between a range of cloud partners (Amazon AWS included), physical infrastructure and networks. He will share how Cloud IX helped – among others - a leading London-based wealth management group cut its latency by over 50% and increase bandwidth by 20 times, allowing the company to provision IT workloads on demand without overinflated operational costs, while increasing the reliability and resilience of business applications.
Is crime cyclic in nature? Can we predict when it will occur in cities? How does this impact your IT operation and how can you leverage analytics? In his session at 5th Big Data Expo, Steve Surfaro, Axis Communications Industry Liaison and Chairman of the ASIS Physical Security Council, will explore the efforts of Chicago and Philadelphia, Phoenix and Dallas in new crime fighting efforts using data analytics, cloud computing, physical security and predictive policing efforts. How does a city analyze crime statistics and then execute crime prevention? Can crime mapping reveal problem locations not considered previously? Temporal crime analysis can often reveal trends for different times and locations in a city. Today's crime fighting team now often includes persons experienced in crime analysis and psychology to explain and sometimes predict a higher possibility of data center breaches, business interruption and violent crime.
This year like last year, XebiaLabs polled Fortune 1000 companies in banking, manufacturing, healthcare, government and IT, interviewing DevOps teams and everyone from QA to C-level suites. More than 1,000 people were asked to share their perspectives on software delivery trends. Last year the survey found that application deployments fail up to 30% of the time and that 75% of managers believe their deployment process deserves a failing grade. This year, the survey revealed little change in attitudes. Once development of a feature or fix is complete, about a third of respondents said it still takes their organization between a week (32%) and a month (36%) to go live with their applications.
Intelligent systems may share common architectures, but they can solve a variety of challenges – from increasing accuracy with a rail signaling system to improving safety with an air traffic control system. In the transportation industry, addressing these challenges is particularly critical in order to ensure safety, increase efficiency, and reduce costs. In his session at @ThingsExpo, James Kirkland, an Enterprise Solutions Architect at Red Hat, will discuss real-world use cases in the transportation industry and how open source technologies can create integrated, interoperable, and reliable systems of thousands of devices.
Last month, the Information Security Forum released their annual prediction of the top 10 information security threats they foresee for the next two years – through 2016. While I found the entire list insightful, half of the list resonated strongly with me as someone who is working with large enterprises as they wrestle with security and compliance challenges as they embark on cloud adoption. I believe this group of five predictions is particularly relevant for anyone utilizing the cloud over the next two years and I’ve added a few of my own thoughts on each. 1. Service Providers Become a Key Vulnerability I find this first prediction especially valid and timely because of some recent headlines. Service providers, given the nature of their business, are a prime “aggregation” for all types of sensitive/valuable data. Cyber criminals and hackers realize this, which puts a big target on the backs of service providers. Think about it – a successful breach equals a treasure trove of coveted information from potentially multiple tenants. And the reality is that service providers acting as a central storage point for large amounts of sensitive data will continue to increase over the next two years, so the prize will only become richer. In response and in preparation, enterprises need to takes steps to protect their most sensitive and important data and decide which data they truly need to send to public cloud service providers.
SYS-CON Events announced today that CloudPOST has been named “Media Sponsor” of SYS-CON's 14th International Cloud Expo® and Internet of Things Expo, which will take place on June 10–12, 2014, at the Javits Center in New York City, New York. CloudPOST aims to provide useful content to the Cloud community. CloudPOST was created for the sole purpose of offering timely, relevant information to cloud experts, data center and IT and managers. Today, we’re doing the very same same thing – telling you what makes today’s cloud tick, and tomorrow’s cloud as well.
“I see almost no one running hybrid clouds,” noted Seth Proctor, CTO of NuoDB, in this exclusive Q&A with Cloud Expo conference chairs Larry Carvalho and Vanessa Alvarez. “The few examples are usually public cloud deployments with backup and/or DR options in a private setup.” Cloud Computing Journal: How are cloud standards playing a role in expanding adoption among users? Are standards helping new business models for service providers? Seth Proctor: I think the only standards are de facto standards like OpenStack or the AWS interfaces. Honestly there are no "cloud standards" I know of that are fueling adoption. What have become standard are the assumptions around virtualization, provisioning tools, monitoring methods, etc.
Infrastructure-as-a-Service and Platform-as-a-Service are technologies that are fast becoming integrated, and this is good news for enterprises looking to implement private, public or hybrid clouds. The availability of resources on-demand through companies like Amazon and Google has provided developers with the ability to quickly define a scalable and highly available infrastructure to develop and deploy applications. The availability of Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) means that anyone can provision servers, storage and networking in the cloud with a high level of configurability and control and pay (in general) for the amount of resources reserved.
With the establishment of mobile web and native mobile apps, your website isn’t the only customer touch point anymore. Mike Austin, Director of e-Commerce at RoomsToGo said it best: “Our customers expect the same experience throughout all our channels no matter if it is the website, mobile site or the real physical store.” How can you measure the user experience across the various channels your customers use to interact with you? Let’s see what we can do to make the user experience quantifiable so we can make informed data-driven decisions.
“Hybrids need to coexist with private and public clouds as that’s what cloud consumers will request,” noted Chris Tella, CMO and EVP of Sales at Basic6, in this exclusive Q&A with Cloud Expo conference chairs Larry Carvalho and Vanessa Alvarez. “The best advice I’ve heard so far was from an AWS representative discussing scalability – make use of the automated tools such as ours which are designed to facilitate cloud management.” Cloud Computing Journal: How are cloud standards playing a role in expanding adoption among users? Are standards helping new business models for service providers?
How are hybrid clouds evolving to allow the coexistence of private and public clouds? What are the challenges to meeting a true hybrid cloud scenario? Businesses large and small have been at times both seduced and confused by the grand promise of the cloud. But when they talk about “hybrid cloud,” they are really just seeking the flexibility to utilize the cloud as an extension of their own data center. They also want levels of openness, transparency and ease of use – previously unattained in the enterprise – where production workloads can be easily mobilized, centrally managed and protected.
We've been tracking the progress of WebRTC (real-time communication) since the API standard was first announced by Google two years ago, and in that time we've seen lots of predictions and promises about how this standard is going to disrupt the UC world. To make sense of these myriad views, it's important to understand two other business trends, namely BYOD (bring your own device) and the growing remote workforce. BYOD may conjure up images of employees bringing their devices to work, but it's important to recognize that more and more work is happening outside the four walls of the business office. Although business owners want to accommodate employees' needs to work remotely and their desires to use their own smartphones and tablets to access email and other business applications, the need for secure and reliable voice and video communications remains imperative. Now more than ever, businesses need to collaborate with remote workers to achieve their business objectives. With these trends and business needs in mind, we can begin to see where WebRTC will have its greatest impact.
SYS-CON Events announced today that IBM has been named “Day 1 Lunch Keynote Sponsor” of SYS-CON's 14th International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on June 10-12, 2014, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY. IBM has helped more than 30,000 clients around the world with 40,000 industry experts. Since its acquisition in 2013, IBM SoftLayer has served 4,500 new cloud clients. Today, IBM has 100+ cloud SaaS solutions, thousands of experts with deep industry knowledge helping clients transform and a network of 40 data centers worldwide. Since 2007, IBM has invested more than $7 billion in 17 acquisitions to accelerate its cloud initiatives and build a high value cloud portfolio. IBM holds 1,560 cloud patents focused on driving innovation. In fact, IBM for the 21st consecutive year topped the annual list of US patent leaders. IBM processes more than 5.5M client transactions daily through IBM's public cloud.
SYS-CON Events announced today that ScaleMP™, a leading provider of virtualization solutions for high-end computing, will exhibit at SYS-CON's 14th International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on June 10–12, 2014, at the Javits Center in New York City, New York. ScaleMP is the leader in virtualization for high-end computing, providing maximum performance and lower total cost of ownership. The innovative Versatile SMP™ (vSMP) architecture aggregates multiple independent systems into a single virtual system, delivering an industry-standard, high-end symmetric multiprocessing computer. Using software to replace custom hardware and components, ScaleMP offers a new, revolutionary computing paradigm.
Companies are bracing for the challenge of upgrading hundreds or thousands of servers ahead of the "end of life" of Windows Server 2003 in July, 2015. Join this informative webinar to hear Microsoft's recommendations and see a demonstration of AppZero, the only automated way to "uplevel" applications off WS2003 and onto newer operating systems. AppZero is a fast, flexible way to move server applications to and across the cloud, without code change or lock-in. Encapsulating Windows applications in VM/OS-free packages, AppZero's patented software moves complex server applications with ease. AppZero allows you to move from an old operating system to a newer one, with the click of a button - modernize and move to the cloud in one step.
SYS-CON Events announced today that Peak 10, a leading IT infrastructure and cloud provider, will exhibit at SYS-CON's 14th International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on June 10–12, 2014, at the Javits Center in New York City, New York. Peak 10 provides hybrid infrastructure services including data center services, private and public cloud infrastructure, and managed services, primarily for mid-sized enterprises. Peak 10 solutions are designed to be simple, reliable, and secure, enabling customers to increase agility, lower costs, improve performance and focus internal resources on their core competencies.
SYS-CON Events announced today that Infor, a leading provider of business application software serving more than 70,000 customers, has been named “Platinum Plus Sponsor” of SYS-CON's 14th International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on June 10-12, 2014, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY. Infor is fundamentally changing the way information is published and consumed in the enterprise, helping 70,000 customers in more than 200 countries and territories improve operations, drive growth, and quickly adapt to changes in business demands. Infor offers deep industry-specific applications and suites, engineered for speed, and with an innovative user experience design that is simple, transparent, and elegant. Infor provides flexible deployment options that give customers a choice to run their businesses in the cloud, on-premises, or both.
“As the cloud service provider market place grows, and cloud standards evolve to support interoperability and transparent migration capabilities, the corporate business risk concerns will be addressed and then, and only then, we may see the cloud architecture move toward replacing on-premise operations,” said Dave Peters, Manager, Systems Integration at ESRI, in this exclusive Q&A with Cloud Expo Conference and Tech Chairs Larry Carvalho and Vanessa Alvarez. Cloud Computing Journal: How are cloud standards playing a role in expanding adoption among users? Are standards helping new business models for service providers?
The sharing of resources and capacity within virtualized infrastructure is the single biggest cause of operational and performance issues, and even inefficiencies in these environments. Traditionally IT operations teams have seen this challenge as a “capacity management problem,” something that is left to another group to sort out with the right hardware spend. But in today’s production environments, these capacity-related challenges and their solutions go well beyond available hardware and are very much integral to the roles and responsibilities of operations teams including virtualization administrators.