While cloud may have formally entered the enterprise in 2006, it’s now a reality for nearly every company. The Cloud Era got its start with Software as a service (SaaS) offerings that paved the way for innovations in CRM and email deployments, to create new opportunities for the likes of Salesforce and Microsoft Office 365. Still in its “early stages,” cloud now encompasses legacy applications, backups, disaster recovery, security/audit log management and so much more. 2017 will be full of continued maturation and will give way to a whole new generation of cloud-native applications.
Keeping pace with advancements in software delivery processes and tooling is taxing even for the most proficient organizations. Point tools, platforms, open source and the increasing adoption of private and public cloud services requires strong engineering rigor - all in the face of developer demands to use the tools of choice. As Agile has settled in as a mainstream practice, now DevOps has emerged as the next wave to improve software delivery speed and output. To make DevOps work, organizations must focus on what is most relevant to deliver value, reduce IT complexity, create more repeatable agile-based processes and leverage increasingly secure and stable, cloud-based infrastructure platforms. In his session at @DevOpsSummit at 19th Cloud Expo, Flint Brenton, CEO of CollabNet, outlined strategies for unifying a continuously changing, fragmented and disparate set of technologies and processes within common community architecture.
Central to the idea of DevOps is collaboration between all of the teams involved in IT applications and infrastructure. Developers, Operations, Quality Assurance, Security, and more, all have stakes in the delivery of a product or service. So, what does collaboration mean when it comes to monitoring in the world of DevOps? In the past, different teams involved in creating or maintaining an application would first finish their portion completely before passing it on to the next team. For example, the Development team would first write code for the entire app, or specific features in the app, before passing it to the Quality Assurance (QA) team. The QA team would then do their testing and analysis before sending it forward to Operations, and so on.
As companies adopt the cloud-to-streamline workflow, deployment hasn’t been very seamless because of IT concerns surrounding security risks. The cloud offers many benefits, but protecting and securing information can be tricky across multiple cloud providers and remains IT’s overall responsibility. In his session at 19th Cloud Expo, Simon Bain, CEO of SearchYourCloud, addressed security compliance issues associated with cloud applications and how document-level encryption is critical for supplementing existing enterprise security solutions. He drew from case studies, outlined best practices for businesses and demoed how data can be transported and stored to and from the cloud already encrypted and securely accessed no matter where it’s stored.
The emergence of hyper-scale Infrastructure as-a-Service (IaaS) platforms such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) is challenging the traditional Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) value proposition. SaaS CEOs, investors and SaaS buyers must carefully evaluate the implications of “all-in” migration to hyperscale IaaS platforms that offer value-added platform services that go beyond simple infrastructure services. This article provides a point of view and insights into changes in the SaaS market, which has three principal drivers 1) technical, 2) business, and 3) security and compliance.
Over the past few years, the use of artificial intelligence has expanded more rapidly than many of us could have imagined. While this may invoke fear and dread in some, these relatively new technology applications are clearly delivering real value to our global society. This value is generally seen in four distinct areas:
Businesses are struggling to manage the information flow and interactions between all of these new devices and things jumping on their network, and the apps and IT systems they control. The data businesses gather is only helpful if they can do something with it. In his session at @ThingsExpo, Chris Witeck, Principal Technology Strategist at Citrix, discussed how different the impact of IoT will be for large businesses, expanding how IoT will allow large organizations to make their legacy applications and systems more useful by leveraging an increasingly disparate ecosystem of technologies, users and devices to create actionable business intelligence.
Workspot VDI 2.0 is the industry’s first cloud-native, multi-tenant, infinitely scalable VDI solution, when combined with a customer’s datacenter infrastructure, can have desktops and apps up and available to their users in a day. First, Workspot VDI 2.0 is the industry's first cloud-native, multi-tenant, infinitely scalable VDI solution, when combined with a customer's datacenter infrastructure, can have desktops and apps up and available to their users in a day.Now, Workspot DaaS 2.0 is the industry's first full-cloud Desktop as a Service solution combining Workspot VDI 2.0 with Microsoft Azure to deliver thousands of desktops in a day, in any part of the world and with zero CapEx.
I hear it often; I need to acquire more customers like my “most valuable” customers. But what makes a customer “most valuable”? What are the characteristics and/or behaviors that make a customer “most valuable”? This simple question is anything but simple. Let me explain through an exercise. Let’s say that you work for an airline (note: this exercise works equally well with other customer-centric industries such as hospitality, gaming, entertainment, retail, credit cards, financial services, telco and insurance). You have been asked to identify the airline’s “most valuable” customers. This information will be used to prioritize marketing, sales, support and product development efforts. As part of your analysis, you identify three different customer scenarios and need to determine which of these customer scenarios is “most valuable”:
Whether they’re located in a public, private, or hybrid cloud environment, cloud technologies are constantly evolving. While the innovation is exciting, the end mission of delivering business value and rapidly producing incremental product features is paramount. In his session at @DevOpsSummit at 19th Cloud Expo, Kiran Chitturi, CTO Architect at Sungard AS, discussed DevOps culture, its evolution of frameworks and technologies, and how it is achieving maturity. He also covered various styles and stacks in DevOps with examples and live demos – on AWS using tools/techniques for continuous integration, configuration management and delivery orchestration.
Whether they’re located in a public, private, or hybrid cloud environment, cloud technologies are constantly evolving. While the innovation is exciting, the end mission of delivering business value and rapidly producing incremental product features is paramount. In his session at @DevOpsSummit at 19th Cloud Expo, Kiran Chitturi, CTO Architect at Sungard AS, discussed DevOps culture, its evolution of frameworks and technologies, and how it is achieving maturity. He also covered various styles and stacks in DevOps with examples and live demos – on AWS using tools/techniques for continuous integration, configuration management and delivery orchestration.
I hear it often; I need to acquire more customers like my “most valuable” customers. But what makes a customer “most valuable”? What are the characteristics and/or behaviors that make a customer “most valuable”? This simple question is anything but simple. Let me explain through an exercise. Let’s say that you work for an airline (note: this exercise works equally well with other customer-centric industries such as hospitality, gaming, entertainment, retail, credit cards, financial services, telco and insurance). You have been asked to identify the airline’s “most valuable” customers. This information will be used to prioritize marketing, sales, support and product development efforts. As part of your analysis, you identify three different customer scenarios and need to determine which of these customer scenarios is “most valuable”:
Businesses are struggling to manage the information flow and interactions between all of these new devices and things jumping on their network, and the apps and IT systems they control. The data businesses gather is only helpful if they can do something with it. In his session at @ThingsExpo, Chris Witeck, Principal Technology Strategist at Citrix, discussed how different the impact of IoT will be for large businesses, expanding how IoT will allow large organizations to make their legacy applications and systems more useful by leveraging an increasingly disparate ecosystem of technologies, users and devices to create actionable business intelligence.
The emergence of hyper-scale Infrastructure as-a-Service (IaaS) platforms such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) is challenging the traditional Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) value proposition. SaaS CEOs, investors and SaaS buyers must carefully evaluate the implications of “all-in” migration to hyperscale IaaS platforms that offer value-added platform services that go beyond simple infrastructure services. This article provides a point of view and insights into changes in the SaaS market, which has three principal drivers 1) technical, 2) business, and 3) security and compliance.
Most of us already know that adopting new cloud applications can boost a business’s productivity by enabling organizations to be more agile and ready to change course in our fast-moving and connected digital world. But the rapid adoption of cloud apps and services also brings with it profound security threats, including visibility and control challenges that aren’t present in traditional on-premises environments. At the same time, the cloud – because of its interconnected, flexible and adaptable nature – can also provide new possibilities for addressing cloud security problems. By leveraging the power of the cloud with a data science and machine learning cloud-based solution, security and risk professionals can solve many of the traditional security challenges found in popular apps like Office 365, Google Drive, Salesforce and Box.
@DevOpsSummit has been named the ‘Top DevOps Influencer' by iTrend. iTrend processes millions of conversations, tweets, interactions, news articles, press releases, blog posts - and extract meaning form them and analyzes mobile and desktop software platforms used to communicate, various metadata (such as geo location), and automation tools. In overall placement, @DevOpsSummit ranked as the number one ‘DevOps Influencer' followed by @CloudExpo at third, and @MicroservicesE at 24th.
Workspot VDI 2.0 is the industry’s first cloud-native, multi-tenant, infinitely scalable VDI solution, when combined with a customer’s datacenter infrastructure, can have desktops and apps up and available to their users in a day. First, Workspot VDI 2.0 is the industry's first cloud-native, multi-tenant, infinitely scalable VDI solution, when combined with a customer's datacenter infrastructure, can have desktops and apps up and available to their users in a day.Now, Workspot DaaS 2.0 is the industry's first full-cloud Desktop as a Service solution combining Workspot VDI 2.0 with Microsoft Azure to deliver thousands of desktops in a day, in any part of the world and with zero CapEx.
@ThingsExpo has been named the Top 5 Most Influential Internet of Things Brand by Onalytica in the ‘The Internet of Things Landscape 2015: Top 100 Individuals and Brands.' Onalytica analyzed Twitter conversations around the #IoT debate to uncover the most influential brands and individuals driving the conversation. Onalytica captured data from 56,224 users. The PageRank based methodology they use to extract influencers on a particular topic (tweets mentioning #InternetofThings or #IoT in this case) takes into account the number and quality of contextual references that a user receives.
A number of retailers, especially small businesses, are moving away from these expensive systems to cheaper, yet a lot more sophisticated cloud alternatives. A typical cloud PoS system should cost retailers between $50 to $200 a month. Point of Sale (Pos) systems typically haven’t required an internet connection. These devices come with a cash register, a barcode scanner and a card reading machine that connects to the bank via a fixed line connection. In addition to this, the higher end PoS systems come with inventory tracking and management tools as well. All of this does not come cheap and the hardware for these devices can cost anywhere between $2000 to $4000. This is not including the monthly support fee of between $25 to $100 that PoS providers charge businesses.
With an estimated 50 billion devices connected to the Internet by 2020, several industries will begin to expand their capabilities for retaining end point data at the edge to better utilize the range of data types and sheer volume of M2M data generated by the Internet of Things. In his session at @ThingsExpo, Don DeLoach, CEO and President of Infobright, discussed the infrastructures businesses will need to implement to handle this explosion of data by providing specific use cases for filtering, cleansing, enriching, storing and analyzing granular data at the edge that will help businesses achieve powerful insights from the many use cases of the Internet of Things.
President Obama recently announced the launch of a new national awareness campaign to "encourage more Americans to move beyond passwords – adding an extra layer of security like a fingerprint or codes sent to your cellphone." The shift from single passwords to multi-factor authentication couldn’t be timelier or more strategic. This session will focus on why passwords alone are no longer effective, and why the time to act is now. In his session at 19th Cloud Expo, Chris Webber, security strategist at Centrify, discussed how we can move away from passwords towards better, more secure methods of identity verification.
The Internet of Things will challenge the status quo of how IT and development organizations operate. Or will it? Certainly the fog layer of IoT requires special insights about data ontology, security and transactional integrity. But the developmental challenges are the same: People, Process and Platform and how we integrate our thinking to solve complicated problems. In his session at 19th Cloud Expo, Craig Sproule, CEO of Metavine, demonstrated how to move beyond today's coding paradigm and share the must-have mindsets for removing complexity from the development process, accelerate application delivery times, and ensure that developers will become heroes (not bottlenecks) in the IoT revolution.
As companies adopt the cloud-to-streamline workflow, deployment hasn’t been very seamless because of IT concerns surrounding security risks. The cloud offers many benefits, but protecting and securing information can be tricky across multiple cloud providers and remains IT’s overall responsibility. In his session at 19th Cloud Expo, Simon Bain, CEO of SearchYourCloud, addressed security compliance issues associated with cloud applications and how document-level encryption is critical for supplementing existing enterprise security solutions. He drew from case studies, outlined best practices for businesses and demoed how data can be transported and stored to and from the cloud already encrypted and securely accessed no matter where it’s stored.
Software delivery was once specific to the IT industry. Now, Continuous Delivery pipelines are used around world from e-commerce to airline software. Building a software delivery pipeline once involved hours of scripting and manual steps–a process that’s painful, if not impossible, to scale. However Continuous Delivery with Application Release Automation tools offers a scripting-free, automated experience. Continuous Delivery pipelines are immensely powerful for the modern enterprise, boosting production and even customer satisfaction.
A number of retailers, especially small businesses, are moving away from these expensive systems to cheaper, yet a lot more sophisticated cloud alternatives. A typical cloud PoS system should cost retailers between $50 to $200 a month. Point of Sale (Pos) systems typically haven’t required an internet connection. These devices come with a cash register, a barcode scanner and a card reading machine that connects to the bank via a fixed line connection. In addition to this, the higher end PoS systems come with inventory tracking and management tools as well. All of this does not come cheap and the hardware for these devices can cost anywhere between $2000 to $4000. This is not including the monthly support fee of between $25 to $100 that PoS providers charge businesses.