Virtualized and private cloud infrastructures are all about sharing resources – compute, storage and network. Optimizing these environments comes down to the ability to properly balance capacity supply and application demand. In practical terms, this means allocating the right amount of resources and putting workloads in the right places. These decisions are critical to ensuring performance, compliance and cost control. Yet most organizations are using antiquated methods such as home-grown spreadsheets and best guesses to determine which infrastructure to host workloads on and how much capacity to allocate. Not only do these approaches hinder operational agility, but as hosting decisions become more and more complex, they are downright dangerous. The typical strategy employed to stave off risk is to over-provision infrastructure, and the thinking behind this is that having an excess of capacity on hand will ensure that enough resource is available to avoid any performance problems. This is not only expensive, but it actually doesn’t prevent key operational issues and many of the performance and compliance issues that are caused by incorrectly combining workloads.
It used to be called a business plan. But management-speak and a few decades of PC-fueled innovation changed that simplistic approach. Bill Gates famously entitled his first book The Road Ahead and although this didn’t officially help coin or endorse the phrase “roadmap,” it didn’t do it any harm either. Today we define a strategic technology roadmap as: … a plan and schedule designed to describe, project and plot an organization’s identifiable (and anticipated) business needs in relation to technology available today and those emerging technology platforms, devices and use cases that are still-nascent but emerging enough to be considered worthy of inclusion in the current planning phase.
In recent years, we have seen a reduction in marketing hype and a transition to more tangible requirements for cloud adoption. We are still very early in the adoption lifecycle, but the barriers to main stream enterprise are slowly coming down. A contributors to crashing through the wall of enterprise decision making is Big Data. More and more industries are finding out that what was the realm of Google and Facebook and be applied to many traditional business models. Whether it be the Intelligent machines and Industrial Internet promoted by GE, or a desire to understand customers after years of building online customer relationship models. This rise in demand is recognized by all the major analytics companies, but they are quickly being caught by a tsunami interest in commodity big data.
Technology is integrated into the DNA of business and of society itself. Some of the most recent entrants are cloud computing, Big Data, and mobile. By putting these technologies together, we arrive at an intersection that creates a "sweet spot" where innovation can be enhanced within your organization. In his session at 5th Big Data Expo, Michael Gendron, professor of Information Systems at CCSU, will put those pieces together and give you tools to move your organization toward that sweet spot. He will provide an overview for each of the key components and an explanation of how these components support the BI Sweet Spot. The best practices discussed in this presentation represent the first-of-its-kind work in BI research that considers the inter-relationships and the combined effect of mobile, cloud and Big Data.
It’s time to play a game of connect the dots by diving into DevOps and how the big picture is really about people and processes and transformation through technology. While it’s awesome fun treating infrastructure as code, there’s a method to our madness that has the potential for greater IT and business transformation if we’re able to look at the big picture: process improvement. In her session at 2nd DevOps Summit, F5 Networks’s Lori MacVittie will dive into how you quantify improvements wrought by your all-night infrastructure hackathons and turn them into measurable proof of the awesome power of DevOps.
The physical world holds the key to unlocking unseen business opportunities that expand revenue, optimize operations and delight customers and users. What if you could turn normally hidden bits of information in your business’ physical assets into valuable insights that fuel growth and drive intelligent, automated action? By leveraging the Internet of Things, you can realize previously inaccessible value, but for many companies, understanding how to do this is a complete mystery.
A trendsetter in intimate women’s apparel, Frederick’s of Hollywood, needed a cloud strategy that merged stability, security and PCI compliance needs with the ability to scale up during retail busy season. In her session at 14th Cloud Expo, Malorie Lanthier, VP of Information Technology at Frederick’s of Hollywood, will discuss how migrating to the cloud enhanced the scalability, resiliency and flexibility of Frederick’s of Hollywood’s IT infrastructure while elevating the ability to address company-wide business objectives. She’ll also share her cloud evaluation process, successful practices used to make the wholesale move to the cloud and advice for organizations looking to develop and execute a holistic cloud plan quickly and effectively.
Cloud environments have created situations that allow users, customers, consumers, and employees to access Public, Intranet, and Extranet applications from different locations, devices, and as different personas. The focus of all the Internet and enterprise front-end applications today is to enhance the user experience. In addition, with advances in mobility and BYOD, the line between public and private becomes a deep shade of gray. At the same time, organizations are leveraging SaaS applications, such as Google Apps and DropBox, for their internal business communication and collaboration. This opens up challenges in providing a universal identity for the user, while at the same time retaining the flexibility to segregate access depending on the scenario. While cloud computing environments may offer different levels of abstraction to its users, federated identity management does not leverage these abstractions; each user must set up her identity management solution. This situation is further aggravated by the fact that no identity federation solution is able to integrate all abstraction layers (i.e., IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS). The overwhelming challenge is to manage the user’s identity effectively and in a compliant manner while retaining the richness of the user experience.
SYS-CON Events announced today that Ambernet Technologies, the innovative “Cloud Management Center” company, 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. Ambernet Technologies is a leading global provider of cloud management software (CloudTruOps) and IT professional services to the enterprise, service provider and government markets. CloudTruOps is the industry’s first infrastructure-independent and service-aware software solution that provides a fully transactional single pane of glass for cloud service provisioning & orchestration, governance, policy, security, performance, self-service storefront, and billing/chargeback for multiple clouds. Ambernet's IT professional services provide consulting services, solutions, and support. Ambernet is a global company with headquarters in Dallas, Texas and regional offices in Toronto, Canada, and Bangalore, India.
Google Analytics, Adobe Omniture, IBM Coremetrics, and most of today's state of the art Web Analytics products can only tell you the last or first touch of your customers. In his session at 5th Big Data Expo, Joel Horwitz, Product Strategist and Experienced Analytics Professional at Alpine, will use advanced analytics attribution analysis and clickstream data collected from toolbars and web browsers to discover more touchpoints in the customer journey. He'll show example use cases with Hive, Hadoop, and Alpine to illustrate how this analysis was completed in less than two weeks’ time.
When was the last time you had a technology conversation that did not include the word ‘cloud’ in it? Gartner predicts that by 2016 the bulk of IT spend will be for the cloud. Gartner also believes that ‘nearly half of large enterprises will have hybrid cloud deployments by the end of 2017.’ Cloud technology continues to evolve at breakneck speeds and business wants to move to the cloud equally as fast. This presents significant challenges for technologists who need ensure the business doesn’t go crashing into a brick wall while moving at these speeds.
There are people who take life slowly, accept it on its terms, meditate, read about meditation, and internalize books like "Wherever You Go, There You Are," a bestseller by a guy with a hyphenated name. I'm more of a Malcolm Gladwell fan -- Outliers or his newest book “David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants." Maybe I'm just naturally the type that will spend 10,000 hours practicing, sharpening, mastering, thinking about the advantages a startup has over leaders in the market, getting back in the game. I've been in enterprise software for 30 years and the cloud since its formation. A long time ago, I faced the fact that I don't have the basketball gene (although I do coach several boys' sports teams) and I'm pretty sure meditating will not increase my productivity as a start-up CEO. I could be wrong on the meditating part.
The Eclipse IoT community is growing community of open source projects focused on providing the building blocks for the IoT industry. The goal of the community is to provide open source implementations of important IoT standards, frameworks that implement key services for IoT applications and tools to make it easier for developers to create IoT applications. If IoT is going to achieve success and interoperability then the industry will need these basic building blocks. In his session at @ThingsExpo, Ian Skerrett, Director of Marketing at the Eclipse Foundation, will introduce the Eclipse IoT open source community. He will provide a detailed introduction to the 12 different open source projects already at Eclipse, including support for IoT standards such as MQT, CoAP, One M2M and Lightweight M2M. He will also discuss how companies and individuals can use the Eclipse open source building blocks to build IoT applications.
Cloud computing brings a myriad of benefits for any enterprise, but it is also a cause for concern in a world where, according to InformationWeek, cyber criminals are now targeting "any company where they can find data to resell, disrupt or exploit." Moving your company's sensitive data into the hands of third-party cloud providers expands and complicates the risk landscape in which you operate every day. In order to understand what concerns should be given emphasis in your cloud security strategy, you need to understand what you can't afford to lose and what can protect you.
Just by its mere name, virtualization conjures up images of expensive, complicated technologies that for the most part only the largest companies can grasp, when in fact there are many benefits that virtualization can bring to small businesses, two being IT efficiency and cost savings. The likes of VMware Workstation and Oracle's VirtualBox both have brought this technology well within the budgets of small businesses. The following suggestions will help you gain the most benefit of virtualization within your small business.
The theme for this year’s International Women’s Day is Inspiring Change. As one of Europe’s leading cloud companies iomart has long championed the employment possibilities that working in the field of technology offers to women. Sadly current statistics show that our industry is still falling short. According to research by e-skills UK, only 17% of employees in IT & Telecoms are female. I had the pleasure of interviewing iomart's Group Technical Manager, Anne Bryson, about her career and her thoughts on this major issue.
In my last blog, I discussed how today’s Internet is vastly different than the Internet envisioned at the start of the net neutrality debate. As promised, I’d now like to get into some fictional examples that paint the picture of why this is such a polarizing topic for so many. Example 1: Perhaps one day I will find that while I can make a Skype call from the office, it doesn’t work from home. Then I find that I’ve lost access to all my Skype contacts who live in an area served by a certain phone company. When I go to Facebook it’s the other way around – I can access my Facebook account from home, but not when I’m visiting a friend who lives in a different area with a different carrier.
One of the most often questions/feedback we get regarding Windows 8.1 is where is my start menu. These conversations can get very passionate, and usually turn into a commentary around on how much we miss our start menu. I am sure some folks want to punch the screen. I totally understand your frustration and I went through this as well. While Windows 8 does provide a big change to how we do things in the interface, it did make me re-think why I used my start menu. What I learned from my own usage and talking to all you wonderful folks, is that the start menu is used for small common set of minimum tasks. Here is a list of the most common things folks like yourselves have told me, and I personally had problems finding in Windows 8.1: •Shutdown and Sign Out •Search •Launch and Find Recently Installed Applications Like all of you once I learned how to get around Windows 8 and find these basic tasks, I found that I will never need my start menu again. In this article, I am here to help show you how to accomplish these tasks with ease in Windows 8.1. In the end I hope you learn some new tips and tricks to improve how you use Windows 8.1,
HP experts explain how enterprise IT operators and planners can keep their data centers from spinning out of control despite new requirements, leverage the best of converged systems, and improve efficiency. As software-driven data centers have matured and advanced to support unpredictable workloads like hybrid cloud, big data, and mobile applications, the ability to manage and operate that infrastructure efficiently has grown increasingly difficult. At the same time, as enterprises seek to rationalize their applications and data, centralization and consolidation of data centers has made their management even more critical -- at ever larger scale and density.
Learn how the Norwegian Red Cross used WebRTC to build a service that allows high school student to meet volunteer tutors and get help with their school assignments just by visiting a web page in their browser. In his session at 2nd WebRTC Summit, Svein Willassen, founder and CTO of appear.in, will discuss how this solution has greatly increased the reach of the tutoring service run by the Red Cross, allowing students to get the help they need without leaving their homes.
The goal of a load test is to replicate the traffic & conditions your app experiences in production as realistically as possible As a tester, you understand how important it is to create the most realistic load test possible to provide confidence that your web application won’t fail in the field. But how do you know where your load should come from to produce realistic results? Load testing from dedicated infrastructure inside your own datacenter is the most common and typically the most accessible way to wring out performance issues in your applications. This type of testing should be performed as part of your regular testing process.
Disaster recovery is about being able to get your business back up and running as quick as you can after the disaster happens. Throughout this series, my teammates have focused on the Infrastructure side of the house, servers, virtual machines, etc. You can see the full series here: Disaster Recovery Planning for I.T. Pros However I have a question, what about the desktops? As a reminder my good friend Jennelle posted series of questions in part 1 of this series: Disaster Recovery for IT Pros- How to Plan, What are the Considerations- However I have a question, what about the desktops? As a reminder my good friend Jennelle posted series of questions in part 1 of this series: Disaster Recovery for IT Pros- How to Plan, What are the Considerations- Here are my three main questions to get started: 1.What is the most important application or services in each business unit or for the business overall? 2.How much downtime is acceptable? 3.How much data loss is acceptable? These questions still apply to desktops and for the users on them, however desktops have always been tricky. Generally speaking we have focused on the last question, how much data loss is acceptable and would look something like this: •Payroll Data Spreadsheet: Not Acceptable •Pictures of Fluffy the Cat: Acceptable
Over the last three years, the number of IT decision makers who believe their business has more applications than it needs has increased from just over a third (34 percent) to nearly half (48 percent). Apps bloat is a huge problem. Especially when the apps are non-mission critical, or context rather than core applications. We may very well be at a tipping point, because new mobile apps and more use of SaaS and clpoud apps forces a rethinking of an organization's entire applications strategy and approach. In order to modernize successfully, enterprises may need to first identify and cull out extraneous applications.
According to a recent KPMG report, SMAC, or Social, Mobile, Analytics and Cloud Computing, comprises around 80% of total ICT (Information & Communications Technology) spend. SMAC is not only promising a modern way for enterprises to leverage information technology, but it’s also revolutionizing the way business will be done in the future. However, getting there is not as easy as S, M, A, and C. Enterprises need to fully understand the power and potential of these technology areas in order to make sense of their intended dominance in the next few years ahead.
DevOps, when done right, usually goes unnoticed. It’s only when something breaks that all eyes turn to IT. If your boss only sees you when the app is down, however, that’s not really doing your career any favors. In his session at 2nd DevOps Summit, Dustin Whittle, Developer Evangelist at AppDynamics, will talk about how to prove your value to the organization by looking at the positive side – that is, how much money you’ve saved your company. He’ll take a look at how you can use tools like Chef, Puppet, Sensu and Logstash to quantify your value to your company. After this session, you’ll be able to walk into a meeting with your boss ready to talk about your value to the company (and to ask for a raise).