New research commissioned by CA Technologies and conducted by Vanson Bourne shows the role of IT is changing -- and not to benefit IT leaders in many cases. The survey of 1,300 senior IT leaders worldwide revealed 39% of respondents now see IT as a service broker or consultant to the line of business rather than a full-service provider of all IT services; and 35% of IT spending is occurring outside of the IT department today - and that number is expected to grow to 44% in three years. Other disturbing findings show that just 11% see the role of IT as a developer of new, innovative services and only 14% consider IT as a driver of new business initiatives.
Performance is the intersection of power, agility, control, and choice. If you value performance, and more specifically consistent performance, you need to look beyond simple virtualized compute. Many factors need to be considered to create a truly performant environment. In his General Session at 14th Cloud Expo, Marc Jones, Vice President of Product Innovation for SoftLayer, will explain how to take advantage of a multitude of compute options and platform features to make cloud the cornerstone of your online presence.
Are you interested in accelerating innovation, simplifying deployments, reducing complexity, and lowering development costs? The cloud is changing the face of application development and deployment, with enterprise-grade infrastructure and platform services making it possible for you to build and rapidly scale enterprise applications. In his session at 14th Cloud Expo, Gene Eun, Sr. Director, Oracle Cloud at Oracle, will discuss the latest solutions and strategies for application developers and enterprise IT organizations to leverage Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS) to build and deploy modern business applications in the cloud.
Securing your data comes down to making both physical and virtual changes to your data center. From interior and exterior surveillance systems to software that detects system-level changes across remote and distributed locations, you must make use of any and all available strategies to secure your data from interior and exterior threats. You need to upgrade your data center for a number of reasons, from reducing risk to increasing service availability. The recent attacks on financial services and online retailers give you another reason to rethink your data security measures. Learn how to implement sound ideas and strategies to protect your data and keep your data center secure against potential threats.
American comedian Louis C.K. once observed on Late Night with Conan O’Brien that ”everything is amazing and nobody is happy.” And you know what? He’s right. He riffs about people complaining about the uncomfortable seats on a plane – despite the fact that they are partaking in the miracle of human flight. “You are in a chair – IN THE SKY,” he says. But it is human nature to take such things for granted once they become the norm. Nowadays if you’re watching YouTube and the high-resolution video struggles to buffer without pause, there’s a good chance you’ll skip that video and move on to another one, or another site. The same goes for any over-the-top or cloud-based services. If opening a file, email or video has even the slightest of lags, we are quick to jump to judgment on the service as “too slow.” The reason the complaints occur is because the network, for the most part, hasn’t mattered in the minds of anyone for the better part of a decade.
Hybrid cloud refers to the federation of a public and private cloud environment for the purpose of extending the elastic and flexibility of compute, storage and network capabilities, in an on-demand, pay-as-you go basis. The hybrid approach allows a business to take advantage of the scalability and cost-effectiveness that a public cloud computing environment offers without exposing mission-critical applications and data to third-party vulnerabilities. Hybrid cloud environments involve complex management challenges. First, organizations struggle to maintain control over the resources that lie outside of their managed IT scope. They also need greater infrastructure visibility to help reduce maintenance costs and ensure that their company data and resources are properly handled and secured.
As organizations continue expanding their adoption of the public cloud, many IT and security professionals are beginning to see that they need improved cloud-monitoring and cloud-auditing capabilities. By cloud monitoring, I’m referring to the process of identifying cloud use within an organization and then evaluating if there are data privacy and/or compliance risks that need to be mitigated. Cloud monitoring includes the idea of fully understanding what clouds are being used and how employees are accessing and updating information, from where and when. This becomes more complicated with the proliferation of BYOD policies as well as the growing trend of Shadow IT groups within corporations that assist business units in deploying clouds without “Official” IT knowing about it. But steps can still be taken to manage the operational and legal risks associated with sending sensitive data outside of the corporation’s firewall while simultaneously enabling operating units to use the cloud as required to drive business results.
The purpose of this article is to describe the steps involve to configure Datapower service for the Database communication. The service will parse the incoming parameters from the request, construct a SQL query string and returns the data from the Database, based on the constructed query. For the demonstration, the following table "DataPowerTest" is created in MS SQL Server. The following columns and data were added as well.
The proliferation of cloud-based applications for the enterprise grows each day, and more and more professionals have grown dependent on these apps as the consumerization of IT flourishes in today’s mobile enterprise. With the consumerization of IT, employees have become their own IT experts and demand that their IT departments add cloud services or enable them to use a particular app with the corporate network. IT departments, naturally, want to use the latest technologies to make the entire company more efficient and productive – and they see how the cloud can help accomplish this. What employees don’t often see is that there are roadblocks to rolling out a new service or enabling an app to work with the network. Everything from budget to security to integration issues may cause the IT department to turn down the requests. However, unlike in the past, employees now have the power and the means to just use these services anyway, without IT’s approval.
Transformation, or more specifically ‘technology transformation,’ has become something of a de facto accepted term within the technology industry today. But how did the transformation to transformation happen? Is it down to the vendors trying to champion their business and application transformation wares? Or is it really down to the real concerns and actions of users, practitioners and customers (call them what you like) who need to execute these types of procedures upon their installed base of IT?
A recent post by John Wilmes on the TM Forum website caught my eye for drawing a parallel between the Uber car service business model and the telecom service provider business model as network functions virtualization (NFV) becomes a reality. Wilmes uses this metaphor to remind us of the potential value of dynamic pricing as a tool in carrier efforts to match supply to demand. He also cautions service providers to be careful how they sell the message of dynamic pricing to their customers. So far, so good. However, this gave me pause: “NFV will let them [operators] create more of almost any part of their infrastructure on the fly, and turn it off when no longer needed, but that too comes at a price – one that is proportionately much higher than what Uber faces. While Uber needs only to make minimal investments in drivers who furnish their own cars, operators also have to buy the ‘cars’ up front, or at least reserve them from infrastructure providers.”
As more applications and services move "to the cloud" (public or on-premise), cloud environments are increasingly adopting and building out traditional enterprise features. This in turn is enabling and encouraging cloud adoption from enterprise users. In many ways the definition is blurring as features like continuous operation, geo-distribution or on-demand capacity become the norm. At NuoDB we're involved in both building enterprise software and using enterprise cloud capabilities. In his session at 14th Cloud Expo, Seth Proctor, CTO of NuoDB, Inc., will cover experiences from building, deploying and using enterprise services and suggest some ways to approach moving enterprise applications into a cloud model.
Digital transformation is impacting most every industry and revolutionizing many. It is forcing enterprises to rethink their strategies for customer interactions and engagements, and to consider how IT infrastructures and business models must evolve to support them. In his session at @ThingsExpo, Kevin Benedict, Senior Analyst for Digital Transformation at Cognizant, will discuss how the IoT along with transformations in social, mobile, analytic and cloud technologies are producing massive quantities of new data that is being collected and analyzed for meaning-making. This meaning-making is what businesses are using to develop new business models, products and services, and to create competitive advantages.
Cloud and Big Data present unique dilemmas: embracing the benefits of these new technologies while maintaining the security of your organization’s assets. When an outside party owns, controls and manages your infrastructure and computational resources, how can you be assured that sensitive data remains private and secure? How do you best protect data in mixed use cloud and Big Data infrastructure sets? Can you still satisfy the full range of reporting, compliance and regulatory requirements?
APIs - application programming interfaces -- are an old technology that has become today's hottest method for getting critical data to mobile apps. APIs are good for business. APIs drove $2 billion in business for Expedia by securely exposing valuable content to its affiliate network. But there are hidden dangers to using APIs. APIs share many of the same threats that plague the web, but APIs have unique risk profile that must be managed. It is a mistake to think we can secure APIs the same way we secure the web. But there are some really simple things that anyone implementing an API can do, right now, that will minimize the risk of APIs. Here's one I've pulled from a new eBooklet by Scott Morrison of CA Technologies called Five Simple Strategies for Securing Your APIs. The tip? Turn on SSL for your API and keep it on.
SYS-CON Events announced today that NuoDB, Inc., the leader in distributed database technology, has been named “Bronze 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, New York. Everyday businesses face challenges with application deployments, maintaining business continuity and providing outstanding application performance. NuoDB leads the industry with a cloud database management system to solve these problems. NuoDB provides scale-out performance, continuous availability and active/active operation. It’s a single, logical database easily deployed in multiple locations simultaneously. This unique capability is unavailable in any other SQL product.
For an example of just how dramatically storage has changed over the past fifteen years, consider your music collection. At one point, you had a collection of cassettes that stored the song files on tape. As the years went on, your hairstyle changed and you bought a CD player that used a spinning disk to store more song data at a higher quality than tape could. Spinning disks flourished well into the MP3 player era, surviving even the initial introduction of flash storage due to its competitive cost. Eventually, however, your newest smartphone or iPod shipped with flash storage instead, as manufacturers bowed to its improved performance over disk storage and its increasingly competitive price point. This is an example of a sea change taking place at a much bigger scale as well. Instead of gigabytes, think petabytes.
Identities are everywhere today. Much more than just providing access and auditing for on-premises applications and corporate desktops, organizations are now tasked with provisioning, managing and securing identities for applications running on-premises, in the cloud and on mobile devices. This can be challenging – seemingly forcing many organizations down the path of managing identities individually on an app-by-app basis or implementing complex federated security scenarios that are difficult to maintain.
While affordable and convenient, Skype is not an acceptable platform for business communications. While it may suffice for personal use and even SMBs, enterprise organizations need more substantial services with the quality, security and interoperability to handle video conferencing smoothly around the globe. Contrarily, WebRTC has the potential to overcome the incompatibility issues that have plagued the UC market for many years, and now that the IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force) is driving the audio and video codec standards, they’ve already ratified the audio standards (i.e., Opus), and they’re getting close to choosing the video standard - this is going to be big deal for UC this year.
Traditional methods of software development went over the waterfall in a barrel and smashed on the rocks below. The Agile Manifesto was written more than a decade ago. Agile adoption has worked wonders for software development. New products leap from concept to market faster than ever before. Software updates are expected to roll out quickly into live products without disruption, the cloud is growing ever larger, and mobile technology is impacting heavily on how applications are developed. Feedback from the end user informs the design. Documentation and planning are sidelined in favor of flexibility and speed. It’s a trend that has powered the app revolution, but it’s so focused on developers that testing has been forgotten.
The time has come for humanity’s first interstellar trek to Terranuvem, the cloud planet, and Chief Engineer Cyrus Agarwal has been chosen to ready a ship for the voyage. He must make the right architectural choices to transform the ship for the long journey and be prepared for the unknown. He will be tested and overcome challenges during the mission. Join Cyrus and the crew of the Stratus at Oracle VP Rex Wang’s Day 2 Keynote at 14th Cloud Expo for a unique, sci-fi movie experience while learning key success factors for your own journey to cloud.
Big Data, cloud, analytics, wearable tech, sensors: together these technology advances have created a perfect storm of opportunity that is poised to set business processes and communications on a trajectory of massive change. In his session at @ThingsExpo, Joe Burton, CTO of wearable device pioneer, Plantronics, will deliver an overview of the technology advances already here, still required, or complementary to the space, and outline opportunities and impacts as the rise of wearables continues.
It's now clear that we are entering into a very diverse and even unprecedented work environment -- something the world perhaps has never known. Companies need to prepare for it now. But how do enterprises prepare, and how do they create the means to analyze and manage the transition to very different work environments? BriefingsDirect had an opportunity to learn first-hand at the recent 2014 Ariba LIVE Conference in Las Vegas. To learn more about hiring and acquiring talent and managing a diverse and socially engaged -- and even more knowledge-driven workforce -- we sat down with Shawn Price, President for Global Cloud and Line of Business at SAP, and the former President of SuccessFactors, now part of SAP. The discussion is moderated by me, Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions.
Assuming that your organization is well down the road when it comes to adopting the Cloud and in fact, has been utilizing the Cloud for a while, then you are likely a true believer that ultimately all of your applications will be migrated to the Cloud. It is no longer a question of "if" but more a question of "when" and "how." These days, the majority of test, dev, external websites and mobile apps are already born in the cloud. Applications make businesses run. Businesses have tons of applications ranging from purchased (commercial off the shelf) to homegrown (bespoke) and likely some customized, purchased apps that now look a lot like the homegrown ones. One of the big problems with apps is that once they are built and deployed they rarely get replaced or decommissioned. Application sprawl and aging application portfolios are among the root causes for much of the fixed cost in an IT budget and can consume close to 80% of the dollars.
Are you serving .SWF files from your web server and getting complaints from your end users that your flash app is “just slow?” Or has your Ops team wondered why you see such high web request response times for some of the web service calls executed by your Flash Client? I was just working with a bank that uses a Flash Component for one of their internal risk management applications. For years they wondered why users were complaining about very slow response times when executing, e.g., a “Credit Worthiness” check. Our teams helped them figure out the root cause of the performance problem: “Back in the day” they had turned off Apache’s Content Compression (MOD_DEFLATE) in order to avoid a known issue of content compressed flash files that are content compressed. Unfortunately they turned it off completely and not just for .SWF Files. So – all other requests – especially the heavyweight Web Service Responses were not compressed.