VeriStor Systems has announced that CRN has named VeriStor to its 2017 Managed Service Provider (MSP) 500 list in the Elite 150 category. This annual list recognizes North American solution providers with cutting-edge approaches to delivering managed services. Their offerings help companies navigate the complex and ever-changing landscape of IT, improve operational efficiencies, and maximize their return on IT investments. In today’s fast-paced business environments, MSPs play an important role in helping companies leverage new technologies without straining their budgets or losing focus on their core business. CRN’s MSP 500 list shines a light on the most forward-thinking and innovative of these key organizations.
Electric utility companies promoting power conservation programs discovered that simply informing consumers of their electricity usage relative to neighbors lowered overall consumption. This type of normative social comparison has produced the same effects in other domains. Why does this work? How can the idea be used in Customer Success?
The origins of SAP GRC software goes back decades, but adoption has been slow. But with the rigor of modern compliance regimes like SOX, coupled with the sheer volume and complexity of online transactions, there’s been an accelerating movement away from document-centric review processes to automation.
On the one hand, AI is perhaps the most revolutionary set of innovations since the transistor. But on the other, the bad press surrounding it continues to mount, perhaps even faster than the innovations themselves. This PR storm impacts enterprises as well, as AI promises to change the role technology plays for every industry on this planet. That is, unless the killer robots do us in first.
These days we are moving more and more logic towards the user into the browser to achieve higher performance and better user experience. There are Single Page Application frameworks like AngularJS, React, Ember and others supporting this trend. If it works, everything is fine. But with this trend a JavaScript error can become a website killer. What does this mean? Below you can see the same page twice, but depending on the browser used, you get a product list from which you can make a selection…or NOT! The difference is the result of a simple JavaScript error!
Meteor is a full-stack JavaScript platform for developing modern web and mobile applications. It includes developer tools, websockets, MongoDB integration, and a package manager. Atmosphere.js is the Meteor package manager. Unfortunately, it doesn’t list many Meteor monitoring solutions. Luckily, thanks to the Meteor npm integration, it is possible to use npm packages for monitoring Meteor apps with npm based monitoring solutions, such as SPM for Node.js monitoring. SPM for Node.js collects key Node.js metrics such as Event Loop, Garbage Collection, CPU, Memory and web services metrics. All metrics are organized in out-of-the-box charts, which can be put on additional dashboards and placed next to performance charts for other parts of the application stack and their logs for doing metric-logs correlations.
On the one hand, AI is perhaps the most revolutionary set of innovations since the transistor. But on the other, the bad press surrounding it continues to mount, perhaps even faster than the innovations themselves. This PR storm impacts enterprises as well, as AI promises to change the role technology plays for every industry on this planet. That is, unless the killer robots do us in first.
In the age of global cyberattacks, corporate enterprises and government agencies that have some type of cloud-based network solutions should be looking at a strategic design focus that guarantees a very secure intelligent infrastructure unsusceptible to cyberattacks or natural disasters. Hardening an organization’s data center as well as its networks (and clouds) is a critical step to ensuring its business continuity. In today’s corporate business environment, many organizations cannot survive if their core applications are out-of-service for a couple of days.
Electric utility companies promoting power conservation programs discovered that simply informing consumers of their electricity usage relative to neighbors lowered overall consumption. This type of normative social comparison has produced the same effects in other domains. Why does this work? How can the idea be used in Customer Success?
A recent argument with folks whose intelligence I hold in high regard (like Tom, Brandon, Wei, Anil, etc.) got me thinking about the following question: What does it mean, as a vendor, to say that you support the Internet of Things (IOT) from an analytics perspective? I think the heart of that question really boils down to this: What are the differences between big data (which is analyzing large amounts of mostly human-generated data to support longer-duration use cases such as predictive maintenance, capacity planning, customer 360 and revenue protection) and IOT (which is aggregating and compressing massive amounts of low latency / low duration / high volume machine-generated data coming from a wide variety of sensors to support real-time use cases such as operational optimization, real-time ad bidding, fraud detection, and security breach detection)?
New levels of insight and intelligence into what really goes on underneath the covers of modern applications help ensure that apps are built, deployed, and operated properly. We’ll now explore how these new levels of insight and intelligence into what really goes on underneath the covers of modern applications help ensure that apps are built, deployed, and operated properly.
The essence of cloud computing is that all consumable IT resources are delivered as services. In his session at 15th Cloud Expo, Yung Chou, Technology Evangelist at Microsoft, demonstrated the concepts and implementations of two important cloud computing deliveries: Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS). He discussed from business and technical viewpoints what exactly they are, why we care, how they are different and in what ways, and the strategies for IT to transition into and take advantages of these emerging service models.
A recent argument with folks whose intelligence I hold in high regard (like Tom, Brandon, Wei, Anil, etc.) got me thinking about the following question: What does it mean, as a vendor, to say that you support the Internet of Things (IOT) from an analytics perspective? I think the heart of that question really boils down to this: What are the differences between big data (which is analyzing large amounts of mostly human-generated data to support longer-duration use cases such as predictive maintenance, capacity planning, customer 360 and revenue protection) and IOT (which is aggregating and compressing massive amounts of low latency / low duration / high volume machine-generated data coming from a wide variety of sensors to support real-time use cases such as operational optimization, real-time ad bidding, fraud detection, and security breach detection)?
Two weeks ago, I compiled a list of the 5 jobs robots will take first. Last week, I compiled a list of the 5 jobs robots will take last. Both previous essays are about robots replacing human workers who do cognitive nonrepetitive work (such as middle managers, salespersons, tax accountants, and report writers) that most people do not believe robots will be able to do any time soon. For those essays, I defined robots as technologies, such as machine learning algorithms running on purpose-built computer platforms, that have been trained to perform tasks that currently require humans to perform.
All organizations that did not originate this moment have a pre-existing culture as well as legacy technology and processes that can be more or less amenable to DevOps implementation. That organizational culture is influenced by the personalities and management styles of Executive Management, the wider culture in which the organization is situated, and the personalities of key team members at all levels of the organization. This culture and entrenched interests usually throw a wrench in the works because of misaligned incentives.
A Continuous Delivery pipeline as part of an Agile transformation is like spices in a meal. Without them, the food is bland and worthless. On the other hand, the right blend of spices will leave you craving more, stimulating your senses and energizing you. But as any good cook will tell you, it can be a bit difficult to find the exact right blend of spices for a specific dish.
Cloud platforms like Azure provide the best options for organizations in their digital transformation. Most organizations have multiple combination of environment needs. Provisioning on time is always a challenge. Manual operations are prone to error and delays. Difficult to size production like Environments due to resource constraints, this means most NFR (Non Functional Requirements) are not tested with the correct load and perspective.
Serverless Computing or Functions as a Service (FaaS) is gaining momentum. Amazon is fueling the innovation by expanding Lambda to edge devices and content distribution network. IBM, Microsoft, and Google have their own FaaS offerings in the public cloud. There are over half-a-dozen open source serverless projects that are getting the attention of developers. This year, expect to see new platforms emerging in
Over the past few years, IT service management (ITSM) has become increasingly important to an organization's IT strategy, and companies are seeking new ways to improve IT service delivery and efficiency via better ITSM processes. This increases the importance of tracking and measuring critical KPIs. However, due to overwhelmingly large amounts of data, users find it challenging to manually access, track and analyze critical help desk information quickly. Using advanced IT analytics, managers can identify blind spots and hidden gaps in their ITSM process as well as make accurate decisions by monitoring key metrics.
There are 66 million network cameras capturing terabytes of data. How did factories in Japan improve physical security at the facilities and improve employee productivity? Edge Computing reduces possible kilobytes of data collected per second to only a few kilobytes of data transmitted to the public cloud every day. Data is aggregated and analyzed close to sensors so only intelligent results need to be transmitted to the cloud. Non-essential data is recycled to optimize storage.
In their Live Hack” presentation at 17th Cloud Expo, Stephen Coty and Paul Fletcher, Chief Security Evangelists at Alert Logic, provided the audience with a chance to see a live demonstration of the common tools cyber attackers use to attack cloud and traditional IT systems. This “Live Hack” used open source attack tools that are free and available for download by anybody. Attendees learned where to find and how to operate these tools for the purpose of testing their own IT infrastructure. They also witnessed a cyber-attack from both sides – attacker and defender. An inside view of how indicators of compromise are researched to develop security content to be deployed for detection based on these attacks.
There is no more effective way to reduce your overall test environment spend than to migrate to cloud test environments and embrace testing and infrastructure automation. The nature of test environments is inherently temporary—you set up an environment, run through an automated test suite, and then tear down the environment. If you can reduce the cycle time for this process down to hours or minutes, then you may be able to cut your test environment budgets considerably.
The rolling thunder of digital transformation waits for no business. It will make short work of any organization that does not evolve rapidly. CEOs must quickly define where their organizations can compete for success and lead them on that journey. If they can’t—or won’t—change, they risk fading away like the slow-moving dinosaurs confronted with a habitat-destroying meteor. Leading analyst Gartner forecasts that 8.4 billion connected things will be in use worldwide in 2017, up 31 percent from 2016, and will reach 20.4 billion by 2020. There is already $1.9 trillion dollars’ worth of economic value related to the sale and usage of IoT technology.
We all know the story: a farm, a kid, a Commodore 64, and a modem maxing out at 300 bps. A few unexpected phone bills later, and young Ian Allison is figuring out how to game the system so he can keep using his newfound gateway to the world of tech. According to Ian, that is where he began building the foundation of skills for his career in computer security. At the recent All Day DevOps conference, Ian (@iallison), now with Intuit, talked about his history of being "that" security guy. You know, the one who thinks developers don't care about security or deadlines, and, really, are just plain "stupid." But, don't worry, he is enlightened now and realizes that we all have the same goal - everyone wants to build a secure system.
In his session at @DevOpsSummit at 20th Cloud Expo, Kelly Looney, director of DevOps consulting for Skytap, will will show how an incremental approach to introducing containers into complex, distributed applications results in modernization with less risk and more reward. He will share the story of how Skytap used Docker to get out of the business of managing infrastructure, and into the business of delivering innovation and business value. Attendees will learn how up-front planning allows for a clean separation between infrastructure, platform, and service concerns.