Just a few months ago I wrote a blog post about healthcare data on the cloud (HIPPA Cloud Storage) and the security concerns surrounding this very sensitive and valuable data. I mentioned that as with many industries, more healthcare data is being moved to the cloud, but the healthcare industry has remained a few paces behind others in terms of securing online data. The safety of personal healthcare information on the cloud continues to be an important topic, specifically in regards to government-issued guidelines. There are new requirements going into effect this year that expand on how HIPAA and HITECH standards regulate healthcare data on the cloud. For years, HIPAA has required healthcare organizations to maintain confidentiality of electronic health information that can be linked back to an individual. More recently, HITECH provisions further strengthened HIPAA penalties and criminal enforcement.
In a previous post, I demonstrated how to add more depth to the analysis of a Compuware APM Web Load Test by combining the external load results with the application and infrastructure data collected by the Compuware PureStack Technology. But, now that we have tested the system once, what would happen if we tested it again after we identified and “resolved” the issues we found? Would running a test using the same parameters as in the initial test show a clear performance improvement? Would the system be able to achieve the desired load of 200 virtual users with little or no performance degradation? This article takes you through the steps you should follow in order to directly compare the results of two load tests and measure the performance improvement (or degradation) that occurred with the fixes put in place.
Before talking about the cloud of tomorrow, in his General Session at 12th Cloud Expo, Kevin Clarke, Director of Cloud Platform Engineering for Verizon Terremark, describes what core characteristics compose the cloud of today, and discusses three fundamental features: independent architectures, multi-tenant infrastructures and the concept of ‘different controls. He explores the challenges that exist in running enterprise applications, or what he calls the “hard stuff” and the ideal features future cloud offerings should provide enterprises. Kevin Clarke is the Director of Cloud Platform Engineering for Verizon Terremark. He is responsible for building the Verizon cloud platform that brings “Cloud without Compromise” computing to the Enterprise. Prior to joining Verizon, Kevin was the Director of System Engineering in the midrange storage division of EMC, where he ran System Architecture, Performance and Security. Kevin spent 21 years working in Silicon Valley for Sun Microsystems in Cloud Computing, Solaris Operating Systems and Storage. He holds a BSCS and MBA from Northeastern University in Boston.
Microsoft held a Build conference targeting developers and showed significant their cloud capabilities. This note summarizes their strengths and challenges. When you think of IT vendors and cloud computing, companies like Amazon and Google first come to mind because they are very successful with start-ups that leverage their cloud services. HP, IBM and Oracle are making big strides primarily by targeting large enterprises with private cloud solutions. Cisco, EMC and Intel are primarily technology vendors serving as arms providers to cloud service providers. Microsoft falls in a unique category that dominates certain IT segments and covers customers ranging from start-ups, consumers and large enterprises. The recent Microsoft Build conference provided many opportunities to learn about a range of the company's cloud computing capabilities.
“Health care has so much on its plate, whether it’s regulatory or technology. We really believe that health care will jump the other industries in its adoption,” stated Frank Nydam, Director of Healthcare Solutions, Office of the CTO, at VMware, in this SYS-CON.tv interview with Cloud Expo Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan at the 12th International Cloud Expo, held June 10–13, 2013, at the Javits Center in New York City. Cloud Expo 2013 Silicon Valley, November 4–7, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA, will feature technical sessions from a rock star conference faculty and the leading Cloud industry players in the world.
Paris-based open source cloud computing company eNovance, the world’s seventh-largest contributor to the OpenStack initiative, has gotten a $7.78 million investment from Entrepreneur Venture, BNP Paribas, Oséo and its long-time backer Odyssée Venture. The money is earmarked to support eNovance’s strategic priorities including growing its internal team – expanding its operations throughout North America – R&D, internationalization through increased access to US and Asian markets and targeted strategic acquisitions. It figures the round confirms its business model and growth potential, putting it “squarely among the few credible players on the market.”
“NaviSite has a long history in managed hosting, co-location, and cloud services for the large enterprise and business market and it was a nice way for the parent company [Time Warner Cable] to expand into the cloud space,” stated Sandra Palumbo, Director of Product Marketing at Navisite, in this SYS-CON.tv interview with Cloud Expo Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan at the 12th International Cloud Expo, held June 10–13, 2013, at the Javits Center in New York City. Cloud Expo 2013 Silicon Valley, November 4–7, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA, will feature technical sessions from a rock star conference faculty and the leading Cloud industry players in the world.
What’s an e-commerce tycoon to do after funding everything from nuclear fusion startups to commercial spaceflight ventures? Why, help develop a museum exhibit to inspire young folks and teach them about innovation, of course. After more than two years of development and $10 million from Jeff Bezos’ own pockets, the Museum of History and Industry will open the doors to the Bezos Center for Innovation on October 12th. Not only does the center aim to help visitors learn about “the importance of innovation” through interactive exhibits, but it will toot Seattle’s horn for being “the birthplace of so many trailblazing companies.”
ISUG-TECH wants to let their Gold Members know that they can attend SAP's TechEd Conference in Las Vegas, October 21-25, 2013, for a special discounted price! SAP has made available a limited number of special "lecture only" passes that can be purchased for just $1695, a $1100 savings of the cost of the full conference pass. These passes are available only to ISUG-TECH Gold Members, and enable the pass holder to attend all keynotes, lecture sessions and special events at the conference, along with access to the exhibit hall and clubhouse. (Holders of the pass will not be able to register for or attend any hands-on workshops.)
Australian Government agencies have some new regulations to consider when they are contemplating moves to the cloud, particularly clouds hosted outside of Australian borders. These guidelines, known as “The Australian Government policy and risk management guidelines for the processing and storage of Australian Government information in outsourced or offshore ICT arrangements”, are part of the broader Protective Security Policy Framework announced earlier this year and are aimed at protecting data being stored and processed in cloud environments. The Framework document clearly acknowledges the benefits that Australian Government agencies can gain from moving to cloud environments but points out that privacy, security, integrity and availability of personal information cannot be sacrificed in pursuit of these benefits. In particular, “offshoring” of information (e.g., using US-based cloud services) is highlighted as a situation that creates a number of challenges in this arena, and the Framework is meant to help agencies determine when to use these services on a case-by-case basis.
“We basically simplify infrastructures. We use the latest devops and SDN technologies to make it simple for people to operate virtual infrastructures,” stated Mathieu Lemay, President and CEO of Inocybe Technologies, in this SYS-CON.tv interview with Cloud Expo Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan at the 12th International Cloud Expo, held June 10–13, 2013, at the Javits Center in New York City. Cloud Expo 2013 Silicon Valley, November 4–7, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA, will feature technical sessions from a rock star conference faculty and the leading Cloud industry players in the world.
Asigra, the Toronto backup and recovery house that set the industry standard for capacity pricing back in 1992, aims to do it again but this time make it harder for rivals like Symantec, HP, EMC and CA to follow its example without paying it a tax since it’s got a patent pending on its new pricing model. Asigra’s brainstorm comes in response to the explosion in Big Data that’s making data recovery ridiculously expensive and unlikely to get any cheaper without a little leadership. It claims current pricing is completely unfair and that it’s figured out a game-changing scheme it calls the Asigra Recovery License Model (RLM) that for the first time separates backup and recovery licenses and “aligns pricing with the true value of backup – data recovery.”
Cloud computing is steadily working its way into the U.S. federal government, potentially simplifying access to information for the public, but also creating some consternation over who ultimately controls that data. Some federal agency managers are reluctant to hand over their data to cloud computing providers, for fear of diminished security or potential hassles should they need to switch vendors, according to an article on FederalTimes.com. But the government’s growing appetite for collecting information is forcing agencies to consider the promised benefits of cloud computing, such as storing and managing their data for less money and the ability to access data from any device over the Internet. The latter is a major tenet of the Obama administration’s push to make more data accessible to the public, and to increase productivity by allowing employees to access systems and files remotely, or via the cloud.
Folks at MapR Technologies have made MapR M7, their Big Data platform for NoSQL and Apache Hadoop applications, available at Amazon Elastic MapReduce (EMR). M7 is supposed to offer ease of use, dependability and greater performance for NoSQL and Hadoop. Amazon EMR is said to make it easier and more cost-effective to deploy and operate elastic Hadoop clusters on AWS. In a few mouse clicks or a single line of code, customers can launch a dynamically scalable M7 cluster on Amazon EMR to store or process vast amounts of data.
“We have just recently launched a new product called Mission Critical Cloud, which is a VMware-based public cloud solution. We did that because we are seeing more and more demand to outsource and to outsource in a cloud fashion from larger enterprises,” stated Robert Miggins, Senior Vice President of Business Development at PEER 1 Hosting, in this SYS-CON.tv interview with Cloud Expo Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan at the 12th International Cloud Expo, held June 10–13, 2013, at the Javits Center in New York City. Cloud Expo 2013 Silicon Valley, November 4–7, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA, will feature technical sessions from a rock star conference faculty and the leading Cloud industry players in the world.
For many companies with whom I talk, there isn’t a lack of IT talent when it comes to security--just a lack of hours in the day, computing resources and necessary headcount with specific expertise to change the culture from reactive to proactive and strategic risk management. Executives simply expect IT security to do more with less. But the ability to recruit and retain security experts is an issue in itself. At the MSPAlliance meeting this week in Orlando, it was reported that the unemployment rate for such professionals is less than 1%. The salary for these specialists has doubled in the past three years. No wonder there is a critical shortage to feed this growing monster. And executives are still wary to spend budget on security line items-including staffing. It is still regarded (mistakenly, I might add) as a cost center.
“There is a real shift that’s going on in the data center and it’s accelerating, moving away from these big iron, legacy architectures toward something that looks much more like Amazon, Google and Facebook,” stated Kevin Brown, CEO of Coraid, in this SYS-CON.tv interview with Cloud Expo Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan at the 12th International Cloud Expo, held June 10–13, 2013, at the Javits Center in New York City. Cloud Expo 2013 Silicon Valley, November 4–7, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA, will feature technical sessions from a rock star conference faculty and the leading Cloud industry players in the world.
Development and software testing work hand-in-hand; the risks associated with pushing testing as far back in the software development lifecycle (in order to save on resource costs) might not be cost-effective in the long run. In addition, if you fail to create a process, or perhaps a testing strategy as part of the development, then chances are you'll incur more costs and further delay shipping your product. Test automation necessitates that both developer and software tester identify and assign conventions for Selenium locators, for example, at the onset. These locators allow software testers to find elements on a page that can be used in automated tests. If the developer changes that locator (in the next iteration), then the tester then has to make edits, which is typically more time-consuming versus starting from scratch. In addition, it is not a trivial task to uniquely identify locators, but tools such as Firebug come in really handy.
“We were early starters in Big Data. We cover everything around Big Data – from real time to analytics to visualization. We believe in taking on challenging problems and then solving them, bringing not only our expertise to the table but our experience as well,” explained Sanjay Sharma, Principal Architect at Impetus, in this SYS-CON.tv interview with Cloud Expo Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan at the 12th International Cloud Expo, held June 10–13, 2013, at the Javits Center in New York City. Cloud Expo 2013 Silicon Valley, November 4–7, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA, will feature technical sessions from a rock star conference faculty and the leading Cloud industry players in the world.
Today’s end users demand highly satisfying and interactive web experiences, such as automatically populated search suggestions and dynamic menus. To make applications more engaging, technologies like AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) have emerged. AJAX works by dynamically displaying and allowing users to interact with presented information – think of when you enter a Google search and results are produced as you type. AJAX does this by sending data to, and retrieving data from, a server asynchronously in the background, without interfering with the display and behavior of an existing page. While AJAX can make websites and web applications seem faster and more engaging, it also results in more application logic sitting in the web browser than ever before. This produces a greater impact for browsers overall on end-user experiences, which makes it critical to measure and optimize the performance of dynamic web applications at the browser level.
As the volume and purpose of data and business intelligence has dramatically shifted, older notions and misconceptions -- what amount to myths about data infrastructure -- need to updated and corrected, too. Debunking myths around big data should be a first step to making better business decisions for improving data analysis and data management capabilities in your company. As the volume and purpose of data and business intelligence (BI) has dramatically shifted, older notions and misconceptions -- what amount to myths about data infrastructure -- need to updated and corrected, too. So we're here to pose some better questions about data, and provide up-to-date answers for running data-driven businesses that can efficiently and repeatedly predict dynamic market trends and customer wants in real time.
With the C-suite, innovators, developers and IT all pushing for the cloud, albeit for different reasons, there is no doubt that cloud computing is the next or fifth wave. As the cloud computing market continues to mature, explaining the platform shift gets easier and more succinct. There are a wide variety of benefits to this next wave of computing, each resonating in shape, tone and strength depending on the listener's role in an organization. C-level and financial people like the economic drivers of the cloud. Limiting capital investment by converting CAPEX to OPEX; paying for what the business needs with scalable, success-based pricing; and enabling efficient use of limited internal resources. These are a few of the benefits that strike a chord with this part of the organization.
Cloud computing is the #1 topic for most CIOs this year. In her Lunchtime Focus Keynote at 12th Cloud Expo, Krishna Subramanian, VP of Marketing & Business Development at Citrix Systems, walks you through how customers have transformed the way they do business using Citrix Cloud Solutions. Learn best practices and architecture from companies who have embraced the cloud in their datacenter environment.
“We have moved on from hosting to managed hosting to managed cloud hosting. We build and operate high performance clouds for business-critical applications,” explained Mike Donaldson, CMO of HOSTING, stated, in this SYS-CON.tv interview with Cloud Expo Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan at the 12th International Cloud Expo, held June 10–13, 2013, at the Javits Center in New York City. Cloud Expo 2013 Silicon Valley, November 4–7, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA, will feature technical sessions from a rock star conference faculty and the leading Cloud industry players in the world.
You can design a great enterprise cloud network, but it will be very restricted if you are in a building that does not support broadband connectivity or mission-critical applications. What good is a multi-gigabit design if your connection to the central office is not fiber? Or redundant? Can you even have a mission-critical network if you only have one connection to one central office? Here are five ways to tell if your building is obsolete. How receptive is your building to all the new connectivity technology exploding onto the market? Have your smartphone with you? Does it work well in your building?