SYS-CON Events announced today that Windstream, a leading provider of advanced network and cloud communications, has been named “Silver Sponsor” of SYS-CON's 16th International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on June 9–11, 2015, at the Javits Center in New York, 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.
As cloud gives an opportunity to businesses to buy services externally – how is cloud impacting your customers? In his General Session at 15th Cloud Expo, Fabio Gori, Director of Worldwide Cloud Marketing at Cisco, provided answers to big questions: Do you see hybrid cloud as where the world is going? What benefits does it bring? And how does Cisco connect all of these clouds? He also discussed Intercloud and Cisco’s investment on it.
Cloud computing is now being embraced by a majority of enterprises of all sizes. Yesterday's debate about public vs. private has transformed into the reality of hybrid cloud: a recent survey shows that 74% of enterprises have a hybrid cloud strategy. Meanwhile, 94% of enterprises are using some form of XaaS – software, platform, and infrastructure as a service. Cloud Expo is the single show where delegates and technology vendors can meet to experience and discuss the entire world of the cloud. Only Cloud Expo brings together all this in a single location: Cloud Computing | Big Data | IoT | DevOps | WebRTC
In today's application economy, enterprise organizations realize that it's their applications that are the heart and soul of their business. If their application users have a bad experience, their revenue and reputation are at stake. In his session at 15th Cloud Expo, Anand Akela, Senior Director of Product Marketing for Application Performance Management at CA Technologies, discussed how a user-centric Application Performance Management solution can help inspire your users with every application transaction.
The Internet of Everything (IoE) brings together people, process, data and things to make networked connections more relevant and valuable than ever before – transforming information into knowledge and knowledge into wisdom. IoE creates new capabilities, richer experiences, and unprecedented opportunities to improve business and government operations, decision making and mission support capabilities. In his session at @ThingsExpo, Gary Hall, Chief Technology Officer, Federal Defense at Cisco Systems, will break down the core capabilities of IoT in multiple settings and expand upon IoE for both technical and non-technical audiences.
The 16th International Cloud Expo has announced that its Call for Papers is open until February 28, 2015. 16th International Cloud Expo, to be held June 9-11, 2015, at the Javits Center in New York City brings together Cloud Computing, APM, APIs, Security, Big Data, Internet of Things, DevOps and WebRTC to one location. With cloud computing driving a higher percentage of enterprise IT budgets every year, it becomes increasingly important to plant your flag in this fast-expanding business opportunity. Submit your speaking proposal today!
Our guest on the podcast this week is Erik Sebesta, Co-Founder and CATO of Cloud Technology Partners. We discuss recent Internet of Things projects, including those of two healthcare intelligence companies, and explore exactly what it takes to delivery real-time data, safely and efficiently to end consumers. Listen in to learn how we’re building the next generation of IoT platforms and helping companies leverage this emerging technology.
Bottom line up front, IDC estimates that application downtime costs the collective Fortune 1000 an average of $1.25 to $2.5 billion per year. More granularly, IDC estimates the average hourly cost of an infrastructure failure at $100,000/hr., and puts the hourly cost for the failure of a critical application between $500,000 to $1 million.
CommVault has announced an arrangement with NaviSite, Inc., to extend the data protection capabilities of Simpana® software to NaviSite's NaviCloud® portfolio. CommVault will provide data protection and management capabilities for customers using NaviCloud Director, an enterprise-class cloud Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) solution offered directly to customers via an intuitive self-service portal, and also delivered in conjunction with NaviSite's broad portfolio of managed services. "Our clients come to us for solutions that can readily scale to meet their enterprise level requirements, while reducing risk and providing value back to the business," said David Grimes, chief technology officer, NaviSite. "Simpana software satisfies our requirements and provides the capabilities of multiple point products we were evaluating within a single solution -- providing a great degree of flexibility for our clients, while resulting in less complexity and costs for our internal organizations."
I’m writing this blog on Monday, February 9th, late afternoon with a very full stomach. Last week we launched Vormetric Tokenization with Dynamic Data Masking and today we took the engineers out for a big lunch to celebrate. Now feeling full and contemplative, I thought I’d join the club and write about the big industry news: Anthem’s massive loss of customer and employee data.
Dynatrace monitors your entire application delivery chain. All of your transactions are tracked end-to-end, from user clicks to individual lines of code, using Dynatrace PurePath technology. Dynatrace constantly monitors your servers’ host and process health, and will automatically notify you if your business-critical transactions are running slower than normal with automatic baselines. Dynatrace comes with several incidents configured out of the box, but you can also create custom incidents to get as granular as you want. However, even with all of this information, alerts are only as good as how well you can respond to them. Too often, missed or ignored incidents can lead to severe consequences, so it’s important to make sure every incident gets noticed.
I recently poured over F5’s “The State of Application Delivery in 2015” and InformationWeek’s “2015 App Dev Priorities Survey” that they presented with Dr. Dobb’s. The similarity of their titles, and even their release dates made me wonder how unique each of their findings would be, and I challenged myself to flush out any interesting findings or patterns that emerged from their collective research. Both reports were really well done, and I would recommend them to anyone looking to see if your organization is on the right path of change, or to anyone who knows you’re not on the right path, but you’re willing to get on it—if you could just figure out where it is.
"We help companies that are using a lot of Software as a Service. We help companies manage and gain visibility into what people are using inside the company and decide to secure them or use standards to lock down or to embrace the adoption of SaaS inside the company," explained Scott Kriz, Co-founder and CEO of Bitium, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at 15th Cloud Expo, held Nov 4–6, 2014, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
Log data provides the most granular view into what is happening across your systems, applications, and end users. Logs can show you where the issues are in real-time, and provide a historical trending view over time. Logs give you the whole picture. Modern infrastructure constantly generates log data at a rate faster than humans can easily analyze. And now that data centers can be built and torn down with scripts, the amount of activity and data is exponential.
Log data provides the most granular view into what is happening across your systems, applications, and end users. Logs can show you where the issues are in real-time, and provide a historical trending view over time. Logs give you the whole picture. The Internet of Things (IoT) is really the morphing of physical devices into a software world. This means a lot of the same things you would do with applications and servers, you can now do with devices, including leveraging data to respond faster to issues, track trends, and improve your roadmap. The Internet of Things, Internet of Everything, Machine-to-Machine (M2M), Smart Systems etc. all refer to devices or gadgets that are intelligently connected to their users and the web, in order to provide additional value. And these devices are data hogs. They leverage an array of data gathering components: embedded sensors, actuators, etc. that generate mounds of useful information. Which means there is a huge opportunity to use this data to improve future versions, and respond to the experience and needs of users.
You may have seen last week that we partnered with Cloudera, certifying the Plexxi Switch on Cloudera’s Enterprise 5 platform. This partnership, while exciting for us and our partners, plays a larger role in the IT landscape as a whole. According to an article this week by Arthur Cole of Enterprise Networking Planet, this move embodies Cole’s belief that networking infrastructure development is increasingly being driven by Big Data applications. He cites the key challenge as not finding somewhere to store all the data (e.g., storage) but rather how to make it available to “diverse and disparate sets of resources quickly and at a relatively low cost.”
Can the spatial component of your Big Data be harnessed and visualized, adding another dimension of power and analytics to your data? In his session at Big Data Expo®, John Meza, Product Engineer and Performance Engineering Team Lead at Esri, discussed the spatial queries that can be used within the Hadoop ecosystem and their integration with GeoSpatial applications. The GIS Tools for Hadoop project was also discussed and its implementation to discover location-based patterns and relationships in Big Data to enable better decision support. This was followed by a demonstration of GIS Big Data on a live cluster with expressive web mapping visualization.
What happens when the gadgets you wear also control the things around you? No doubt you’ve heard of various internet-connected things like light bulbs, coffee makers and thermostats making their way into our homes. And no doubt, you’ve probably heard of such devices that you wear (or insert) to track your fitness, sleeping or even blood sugar levels. But when that sleeping monitor can alert the light bulb and coffee machine that you are about to wake up, that’s called the Internet of Self. Data from your body that is used to control the objects around you. Your body controls the your environment, without you even knowing. Cool and for me, a bit unnerving at the same time.
How much time does it take between collecting data and taking meaningful action based upon the insight you are able to glean from those data? Depending on the technology, it might take a week to a month or more. Today, of course, we can do better than a week. As our technology improves, we can reduce this data-to-action delay to a day or so. Every new tweak carves off an hour or two, and each improvement brings with it incremental value to the business.
They say that you are only as secure as your weakest firewall. But then is it just firewalls that protect our network and the information therein, or is it the framework the policies and the processes that have cracks that let the vulnerabilities seep through? Hackers will be hackers and you really can't blame anything on them. They are doing what they are meant to do. i.e Hack. Now that’s a completely different topic as to why unethical hacking is bad and so on. That’s next time. Right now, let’s talk about what we can do on our side. In addition to getting the best IT security systems, firewalls, more firewalls, anti-hacking everything and so on, it’s also essential that with moving times, or let’s say more intelligent hackers, address the foundations of the problem. Here are three best practices to consider.
But is DevOps really a significant trend, or merely a fad? International Data Corporation (IDC) believes that DevOps will be adopted -- in either practice or discipline -- by 80% of Global 1000 organizations by 2019. IDC released a summary the findings from their "2014 DevOps Benchmark Survey" which is designed to help organizations assess their maturity level against industry benchmarks. IDC believes that DevOps offers organizations an opportunity to transform how they develop, deploy, and manage IT services.
Certainly it will include the megatrends of cloud, mobility, Big Data and the Internet of Things, which we previously explored in, The Future of Retail and What it Means for CIOs. These are hugely important topics that will disrupt all industries. The winners will be those companies that leverage automation to drive agility and deliver fast business value. This is particularly relevant for retailers looking to engage with their customers. The key questions I believe needing to be answered are whether such organizations are equipped to meet fast-paced customer expectations, and whether speed or cost are more important?
Due of the rise of Hadoop, many enterprises are now deploying their first small clusters of 10 to 20 servers. At this small scale, the complexity of operating the cluster looks and feels like general data center servers. It is not until the clusters scale, as they inevitably do, when the pain caused by the exponential complexity becomes apparent. We've seen this problem occur time and time again. In his session at Big Data Expo, Greg Bruno, Vice President of Engineering and co-founder of StackIQ, described why clusters are so different from farms of single-purpose servers that reside in traditional data centers, and why without an automated solution that can address the cluster requirements, real pain is coming and failure is certain.
Are your applications getting in the way of your business strategy? It’s time to rethink your IT approach. In his session at 16th Cloud Expo, Madhukar Kumar, Vice President, Product Management at Liaison Technologies, will discuss a new data-centric approach to IT that allows your data, not applications, to inform business strategy. By moving away from an application-centric IT model where data integration and analysis are subservient to the constraints of applications, your organization will be better poised to integrate data regardless of source, volume, and variation.
Utilizing data-driven intelligence across the enterprise requires solutions that enable interactive, self-service ways of working with historical and near real-time data. Core Hadoop platform has already solved many of the fundamental (legacy) Big Data access and availability problems. With the addition of standalone query engine Apache Drill, data analysts finally have the freedom to follow their data queries easily across multiple data sources, on demand.