The era of Big Data is upon us. Data is growing in volume, variety and velocity. At the same time, cybercrimes, breaches and advanced persistent threats are increasing at an alarming rate. As a result, the pressure is on to protect critical data and demonstrate compliance to a growing body of regulation. Security Intelligence transforms the playing field and shifts the balance in favor of the good guys. In this webcast, learn how to blend Big Data technologies that address speed and flexibility and are ideal for ad-hoc data exploration, discovery analysis of unstructured data in motion with traditional structured data suitable for repeatable tasks, to build a security intelligence platform across your enterprise. Leveraging Big Data analytics to uncover hidden threats within massive amounts of data in motion provides actionable insights to detect unknown threats and prioritize actions.
When we made our 2013 predictions for the realm of APIs, our premise was that API adoption and use was still a relatively nascent area, but one about to explode once smart people figured out its potential. We were certainly spot-on in that regard, but few believed us when we suggested that the API Economy was about to get as vibrant as it did. It may be safe to say that 2013 was the year that APIs really caught the business world’s attention. In these past 12 months, we’ve seen major acquisitions of API enablement companies, new industry conferences dedicated to the business of APIs, and talk of API management is on the lips of leading business executives. Untold billions of dollars have been transacted, all enabled by APIs, and innovation is making the world an easier place to transact as a result of applications, mash-ups and APIs. As we predicted, the discussion and decision-making about how to use APIs to increase customer and user engagement through channels has moved to now include both the technical and business sides of an organization.
Database change management is a unique challenge when adopting an agile development practice or implementing DevOps patterns. It really straddles two groups: the developers and the DBAs. Developers design and author the application schema changes based on the needs of the business. DBAs are on the hook for providing a secure and high performing data platform and protecting the integrity of the organization’s priceless data. In companies where these two groups are isolated, the goals of each can soon become opposed and forward progress can grind to a halt. Because of this unique division and its impact on the application lifecycle, implementing DevOps patterns to nurture understanding and collaboration between these two groups is crucial to the success of companies that are trying to adapt to a market that expects better value of services provided, through more frequent releases at a high level of quality. In framing the discussion, I relied heavily on “The Three Ways” of DevOps. The Three Ways are the principles that underpin the DevOps patterns that Gene Kim discusses in detail in his novel “The Phoenix Project” and in the“The DevOps Cookbook”, written by John Allspaw, Patrick Debois, Damon Ewards, Jez Humble, Kim, Mike Orzen, & John Willis. Here’s a quick summary of The Three Ways: • The First Way: Systems Thinking – This Way stresses the performance of the entire system of value delivery. Instead of becoming laser focused on the part of the process for which an individual or team is responsible, the individual or team works to understand the entire process from requirements generation to customer delivery. The goal is to eliminate the delivery impediments that arise when a project transitions from one isolated silo to another. Understanding the entire system allows business, development, and operations to work towards a common goal in a consistent manner. • The Second Way: Amplify Feedback Loops – This Way deals primarily with facilitating easier and faster communication between all individuals in a DevOps organization. The goals of this step are to foster better understanding of all internal and external customers in the process and to develop an accessible body of knowledge to replace the dependence on “tribal knowledge.” • The Third Way: Culture of Continual Experimentation & Learning – This way emphasizes the benefits that can be realized through embracing experimentation, risk taking, and learning from failure. By adopting this kind of attitude, experimentation and risk taking lead to innovation and improvement while embracing failure allows the organization to produce more resilient products and sharpen skills that allow teams to recover more quickly from unexpected failure when it does occur. Database change management is a unique challenge when adopting an agile development practice or implementing DevOps patterns. It really straddles two groups: the developers and the DBAs. Developers design and author the application schema changes based on the needs of the business. DBAs are on the hook for providing a secure and high performing data platform and protecting the integrity of the organization’s priceless data. In companies where these two groups are isolated, the goals of each can soon become opposed and forward progress can grind to a halt. Because of this unique division and its impact on the application lifecycle, implementing DevOps patterns to nurture understanding and collaboration between these two groups is crucial to the success of companies that are trying to adapt to a market that expects better value of services provided, through more frequent releases at a high level of quality. I will dive more deeply into each of the Ways as they pertain to the database change management in subsequent blog posts. Until then, checkout Gene Kim’s blog post on “The Three Ways.”
With the technology advancements of phones, tablets, glasses, clothing and machines over the last year, there are volumes of unstructured and multi-structured data collected from machines and connected devices, and it’s growing at a dizzying pace. The Internet of Things is quickly turning into the Internet of Everything – in today’s always-on, always-connected world, and machine data is everywhere. If 2013 could be classified as the year of the Internet of Things, what will 2014 bring? Looking ahead even further, IDC has estimated that in 2020 there will be 26 times more connected things than people. Wikibon issued a forecast of $514 billion to be spent on the “Industrial Internet” in 2020, and Gartner estimates 20 billion connected devices by 2020, a 30-fold increase from today.
The phrase "Mind the Gap" was first introduced in 1969 in London as a warning for passengers to watch for the gap between the train door and the station platform. The need to warn passengers is and was the result of some stations being located on curves and at varying heights relative to the tracks. The warning is intended to prevent injuries. Mind the gap is also a relevant warning for organizations today. The gap I am referring to is the one between your customers' expectations and your ability to meet those expectations given your current IT infrastructure and legacy systems.
Mission-critical functions at the heart of your business – such as order entry, finance, human resources, customer relationship management, and enterprise resource planning – frequently depend on “always-on” and scalable Oracle Database functionality. In the past, many businesses have selected HP-UX/Itanium systems as the backbone of an Oracle Database infrastructure because they could supply the throughput and availability needed for key database workloads. The life cycle of an HP-UX/Itanium infrastructure for Oracle Database, however, is rapidly coming to an end. On July 1, 2013, Oracle announced the availability of Oracle Database 12c. Because cloud deployments are the projected direction for IT services, Oracle Database 12c follows a multi-tenant architecture that facilitates cloud delivery of database services. It seeks to simplify database management tasks by managing multiple co-located databases as one, while simultaneously enabling data isolation and database resource prioritization. Changes to existing Oracle database tables and applications are not required. However, Oracle supports this new release only on Solaris, Windows, and Linux® operating systems – and not on HP-UX. This means that current HP-UX customers must migrate to a different platform to take advantage of Oracle Database 12c and its ability to ease the transition to a database service cloud.
CPUs drive all software and are often the first target for systems performance analysis. Modern systems typically have many CPUs, which are shared among all running software by the kernel scheduler. When there is more demand for CPU resources than there are resources available, process threads (or tasks) will queue, waiting their turn. Waiting can add significant latency during the runtime of applications, degrading performance. The usage of the CPUs can be examined in detail to look for performance improvements, including eliminating unnecessary work. At a high level, CPU usage by process, thread, or task can be examined. At a lower level, the code path within applications and the kernel can be profiled and studied. At the lowest level, CPU instruction execution and cycle behavior can be studied.
I have been blessed with the opportunity to conduct digital and mobile strategy workshops and speak in many places around the world. Because of the frequency of these trips, I often don't have time to research in advance the locations I will be visiting. That can be both good and bad. I am often pleasantly surprised to stumble upon a famous historical landmark with little or no knowledge that I was in its vicinity. Surprises are fun. The downside is stumbling upon a recognizable landmark or building, but having little knowledge as to why it is recognizable, and having no time to look it up. There is now a useful app for that!
In a previous blog on Cloud Services Brokerage (CSB), I promised to return briefly to the topic of CSB monetization. The term CSB can refer to both to the activity of brokering cloud services, or to the software application (or suite of applications) used to manage that activity. The activity of brokering cloud services can be carried out within an enterprise, as an internal support function, or performed as a paid-for service by a third party. So just to be clear, the discussion in today’s blog is all about the monetization of CSB as a service when provided by a CSB service provider. The scope of CSB need not be limited to Software-as-a-Service (SaaS). To provide a complete cloud service, a broker might also offer IaaS and/or PaaS. The CSB service might also include desktop tools to help the customer, and also some good old-fashioned consulting.
IT organizations face the constant challenge of juggling two almost opposing priorities: continuously delivering business-critical application services while keeping IT expenses in line with budget constraints. The primary function of IT departments is to supply core infrastructure and applications to attract new business, generate revenue, and facilitate profitability – and IT managers strive to meet this goal in spite of flat or shrinking IT budgets. According to an article in Computer Weekly, approximately 80% of IT expenses are spent on maintenance and support for the existing infrastructure.1 Beyond maintaining current platforms and mission-critical applications, IT must also address new mandates, such as reporting requirements for regulatory compliance or corporate “green” IT initiatives. In addition, IT managers must allocate budget to tackle emerging strategic initiatives that are needed for future success. By decreasing the total cost of ownership (TCO) for infrastructure systems, IT managers can potentially free budget dollars, re-allocating them to other essential or more pressing projects. The challenge lies in figuring out how to reduce TCO by increasing IT efficiency and driving down operational costs – or, to put it simply, how to do more with less.
The major strides achieved in IT in 2013 are possibly a hint of what to expect in 2014. The leading players are expected to introduce new and advanced cloud-based solutions, and at the same time keep testing, improving the efficiency of the existing services. Here are some of our top predictions for cloud services in 2014: The raging debate over which cloud service – private vs. public – is superior and/or suitable for enterprise IT architecture might finally be settled. The rapid growth in hybrid cloud solutions, which are essentially a combination of the two main architectures, is expected to provide an answer for businesses that have hitherto been reluctant to adopt cloud computing. On the one hand, hybrid cloud services offer the same cost-effective, scalable and powerful benefits as public cloud services. On the other, the hybrid architecture offers the high level of security similar to that of private clouds. As such, we foresee a significant growth in the use of hybrid clouds in enterprise IT since they enable businesses to implement a wide range of customizable solutions without sacrificing the security of their data and/or networks.
Cloud Expo, Inc. has announced today that Larry Carvalho has been named Tech Chair of Cloud Expo® 2014. 14th International Cloud Expo will take place on June 10–12, 2014, at the Javits Center in New York City, New York, and 15th International Cloud Expo® will take place on November 4–6, 2014, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA. “We are excited that Larry Carvalho is joining us as Cloud Expo Tech Chair. Our upcoming event in June will offer the best sessions and faculty to date,” said Carmen Gonzalez, co-founder and CEO of Cloud Expo, Inc. “Since the 13th international conference in November we have received the highest number of sponsorship and exhibit inquiries for Cloud Expo 2014.”
SYS-CON Events announced today that the Web Host Industry Review has been named “Media 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, and the 15th International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on November 4–6, 2014, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA. Since 2000, The Web Host Industry Review has made a name for itself as the foremost authority of the Web hosting industry providing reliable, insightful and comprehensive news, reviews and resources to the hosting community. TheWHIR Blogs provides a community of expert industry perspectives. The Web Host Industry Review Magazine also offers a business-minded, issue-driven perspective of interest to executives and decision-makers. WHIR TV offers on demand web hosting video interviews and web hosting video features of the key persons and events of the web hosting industry. WHIR Events brings together like-minded hosting industry professionals and decision-makers in local communities. TheWHIR is an iNET Interactive property.
As we enter a new year, it is time to look back over the past year and resolve to improve upon it. In 2014, we will see more service providers resolve to add more personalization in enterprise technology. Below are seven predictions about what will drive this trend toward personalization. The Internet of Things turns into the Internet of Agents. M2M connections and multi-agent systems will result in an increasing number of highly personalized, value-added branded services. The latest Gartner forecast for the Internet of Things (IoT) predicts that by 2020, there will be $309 billion in incremental revenue opportunity for IoT suppliers, mostly in services. Everything-as-a service (XaaS) will lead us toward more complex services, more bundles and more options. Individual users will use agents whose sole job is to create functional services for individuals, out of everything available in the connected service universe. As we move closer toward XaaS, we will become familiar with the concept of “agents” in the delivery of those everything services via SaaS, PaaS and IaaS. Agents can reside as modules within SaaS service offerings or they can be tools embedded in the service provider infrastructure or operating systems. Agents can exist in cloud-connected devices, or in the management software within the evolving smart device ecosystem. Any service delivery platform (SDP) can contain agents that add functionality to the supported services by collaborating with other agents on other platforms.
Enterprise IT organizations today often are bypassed as employees and LoBs use cloud services; in fact cloud computing is considered the revenge of the business unit. 2014 will be year that the Enterprise IT organizations move from role of helpless bystander to role of strategic partner to the business unit. It will be the year that the CIO carves out a new role of strategic importance, namely the enabler of cloud apps that drive agility, productivity and competitive advantage for their business units. In 2014, CIOs and IT departments will use rapidly emerging cloud security solutions to accelerate the adoption of SMAC (social, mobile, analytics and cloud) within the enterprise and will embark on security transformation.
"Everybody is sharding because the data is getting bigger and bigger so there are just more ways to do it. The thing about sharding is you have to take Big Data and spread it across a lot of servers – that’s the most important thing," explained Cory Isaacson, CEO/CTO of CodeFutures Corporation, maker of dbShards, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at the 13th International Cloud Expo®, held Nov 4–7, 2013, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA. Cloud Expo® 2014 New York, June 10-12, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY, will feature technical sessions from a rock star conference faculty and the leading Cloud industry players in the world.
People care a lot about technology augmentation, refinement and fine-tuning. We talk about performance acceleration, pushing processing power and the required levels of storage we need to underpin modern IT needs. It’s a never-ending cycle of regenerating work all focused on producing the optimal performance out of our technology stack at any one moment in time. The ‘optimal’ word is important; it has produced a technology term that falls into a sub-classification all its own. Arguably more than any other single word exposed to the transatlantic incongruence which sees the use of the letter S replaced with a Z, the term optimisation (or indeed, optimization) is one we fight over with a passion. This passion is a result of the close feeling of ownership we attribute to optimisation. We care about it and it’s a sensitive thing. But what does it mean?
SYS-CON Events announced today that Windstream, a leading provider of advanced communications, has been named “Silver 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. Windstream (Nasdaq: WIN), a FORTUNE 500 and S&P 500 company, is a leading provider of advanced network communications, including cloud computing and managed services, to businesses nationwide. The company also offers broadband, phone and digital TV services to consumers primarily in rural areas.
SYS-CON Events announced today that TelecityGroup, Europe’s leading provider of premium carrier-neutral data centers, 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, NY. TelecityGroup is Europe’s leading provider of premium carrier-neutral data centers, operating facilities in city locations across Europe. TelecityGroup’s data centers provide secure and highly connected environments for the IT and telecoms equipment that powers the digital economy. Our data centers are enabling environments in which the separate networks that make up the internet meet and where bandwidth intensive applications, content and information are hosted.
It’s been a great 2013. Out of the global $1.2 trillion dollars’ worth of business conducted online in 2013 across the globe, SOASTA is trusted with protecting 10% of that figure – or $150 billion. Based on the hundreds of brands SOASTA worked with this year and listened to the challenges they face, there are five predictions that are pretty clear as we look ahead to 2014. Hint: Simplify, the User Experience, and M-commerce will be buzz words for successful enterprises and e-commerce vendors. The Top 5 Predictions for 2014 are: Acquisitions vs Innovation Drive Legacy Tech Companies into New Frontiers We’ll see the larger legacy vendors take a proactive approach to buying into social, mobile, cloud, and Big Data environments. They’ll begin to buy into the Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) space. “With the changing face of application development, I suspect we’ll see increased M&A activity and increased consolidation in the market for cloud -based and social-based tools.”
Cloud Expo, Inc. has announced today that Vanessa Alvarez has been named conference chair and Larry Carvalho has been named Tech Chair of Cloud Expo® 2014 14th International Cloud Expo® will take place on June 10–12, 2014, at the Javits Center in New York City, New York, and 15th International Cloud Expo® will take place on November 4–6, 2014, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA. “We are thrilled to see Vanessa Alvarez joining Cloud Expo as conference chair and Larry Carvalho as Tech Chair. Our upcoming event in June will offer the best sessions and faculty to date,” said Carmen Gonzalez, co-founder and CEO of Cloud Expo, Inc. “Since the 13th international conference in November, we have received the highest number of sponsorship and exhibit inquiries for Cloud Expo 2014.”
Businesses have IT because apps deliver value to their customers. This can be direct value - a user-facing app. Or it can be indirect - an internal app for managing sales, marketing, or even HR transactions. Either way, the idea is that the app will make the business more efficient and responsive. The purpose of IT used to be to develop, purchase and operate these apps. But today, every team in the business is writing apps, and every part of the business depends on the apps that they run. These apps have gotten bigger. They have become more complex. There are more apps everywhere, and they are more mission critical than before. In fact, we are long past the point where any modern application is a single piece of software. Most apps these days run on top of a collection of common services - such as web servers, database servers, queue servers - even the storage space and network connections are increasingly consumed as-a-service, by apps.
If the changes rapidly occurring in the enterprise mobility market were mostly hidden from view in 2013, they will be center stage with a spotlight on them in 2014. The Yankee Group predicts these changes will be so huge that entire categories of enterprise mobility like the MADP (mobile application development platforms) may transform into something new and different. The traditional vision enterprise mobility platform vendors have chased for so long now seems to be fading away. The business plans they embraced depended upon a customer buying the mobile platform, staying on it and maximizing the numbers of users. The cost per user, while expensive upfront, would over time become reasonable with economies of scale. Once customers rolled out large numbers of users the barriers-to-migration would become so high that customers would in effect be locked-in, not necessarily by technology but by the cost of changing. This is where the mobile platform vendor would theoretically achieve profitability. In reality, however, not enough customers bought mobile platforms and rolled out large numbers of users at the rate required to deliver on the business plans of many mobile platform players.
Over the past few years, the cloud evolution has answered all questions on the cloud being the right strategy. The key challenge that remains now is leveraging cloud capabilities and features in such a way that they can be used to innovate as well as solve business problems. If we relate different cloud migration strategies executed over time, we’ll find many similarities. There has been focus on cloud assessment as well as a consideration for application development approaches. Even though business cases are different, we can still link the proposed or implemented cloud-based solutions with a set of design patterns. If we have to define a design pattern, the most common definition states it as, ‘A widely used concept in computer science to describe good solutions to re-occurring problems in an abstract form.’ Any abstract solution to recurring problems in the domain of cloud computing can be referred to as a cloud computing pattern that is independent of concrete providers, products and programming languages.
Recently large numbers of consumers in the US were understandably upset and angry when online purchases that they made in the days just prior to Christmas were not delivered in time. Yet it was not so long ago that online (and traditional mail order) purchases almost always took a very long time, often weeks, to arrive. Order-to-delivery times of a few days, now considered normal, were unheard of and overnight was almost impossible to achieve. This is just one more example of the many ways in which instant gratification has become the norm rather than the exception. People expect answers and results immediately, whether they are online or operating in the physical world. In information technology, Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) is another evolution toward faster, “instant” gratification. PaaS offers a new way to support and deliver applications, leveraging cloud technology. It is still enabling the same activities involved with development and deployment that we have always practiced in IT, but with the cost, agility and scalability benefits of the cloud.