As every year begins, several experts and analyst firms like to make predictions. Let us try to make some observations in an area much talked about lately – Big Data. So here goes: Big Data quandary will continue as companies try to understand its value to business. Just dumping all kinds of data into a data lake (read Hadoop) is not going to solve anything. There has to be business value on what insights are needed. Therefore much like the Data Warehousing era brought additional tools in the ETL space, there is need for data curation and transformation for practical use besides the analytics piece.
Were you surprised with that new car in your driveway sporting a huge bow this holiday season? Yea, me neither. But we did get a new gaming console that doesn't require you to hold a controller in your hand. You know The One. It has a camera that picks up your body movements and turns that into action on your screen. It'll even scan your face and create a digitized, animated You right in front of your eyes. You can then choose your You to play games. Now I realize some of you have had these for several years but we've been stuck in 2010 at our house...at least with gaming consoles.
Most of today's technology was designed and developed for static, stationary environments. Even today, in a mobile world, mobile apps are most often developed based on assumed static endpoints. Why is that a problem? We are rarely static people. Let's consider two people in a vehicle. The driver, assuming they use their smartphone only when safely parked, searches for places, locations and directions based on a static starting point. However, if the person searching for places, locations and directions is a passenger in a moving car, a different set of information is appropriate. One based on movement, speed, direction, intersections, changing distances, etc. How should those variables change the way mobile apps are designed?
There's no doubt that there's a lot more "connected things" these days and that means a lot more data. Specifically, technology is moving out of the consumer's hands and into Healthcare, Oil & Gas, Transportation, Aviation and more. The spread of smart devices and sensors creates new forms of value and brings challenges for enterprises seeking to exploit this technology. However, while this boom in data has the potential to advance the industrial space in ways never before thought possible, few companies today have the right technologies in place or the right business models that can truly utilize the power of IoT.
Gartner predicts that number of IoT devices in use worldwide will grow from an estimated 5 billion in 2015 to some 25 billion connected devices by 2020. The best business strategies will perfectly balance the ever-growing IoT market opportunities versus a rapidly evolving threat environment. To help IoT solution providers define their 2016 product roadmap, here are some of INSIDE Secure’s top IoT predictions for the year.
If a slow or unresponsive application on your mobile device or PC has ever left you feeling angry, frustrated and unproductive, you're not alone. Business success in today's digital age relies on application performance. Yet according to the Riverbed Global Application Performance Survey 2015, nine out of 10 organizations suffer from poor performance on a regular basis. Executives say the poor performance of enterprise applications has negatively impacted their work on a regular basis. Consequently, this performance gap between the needs of the business and IT's ability to deliver leads directly to delays, missed deadlines, angry customers and damaged brands.
Gartner predicts that number of IoT devices in use worldwide will grow from an estimated 5 billion in 2015 to some 25 billion connected devices by 2020. The best business strategies will perfectly balance the ever-growing IoT market opportunities versus a rapidly evolving threat environment. To help IoT solution providers define their 2016 product roadmap, here are some of INSIDE Secure’s top IoT predictions for the year.
As every year begins, several experts and analyst firms like to make predictions. Let us try to make some observations in an area much talked about lately – Big Data. So here goes: Big Data quandary will continue as companies try to understand its value to business. Just dumping all kinds of data into a data lake (read Hadoop) is not going to solve anything. There has to be business value on what insights are needed. Therefore much like the Data Warehousing era brought additional tools in the ETL space, there is need for data curation and transformation for practical use besides the analytics piece.
A brilliant business often starts with an entrepreneur dreaming up a fantastic business idea. Most entrepreneurs at the beginning of their journeys are often strapped for cash, and according to a recent study, 95% of seed-stage founders thought it would either remain the same or get harder to raise money. Even access to Angel funds at the very start (idea stage) is generally uncommon. Startups want to sprout their ideas fast, and the last thing they want is to spend their time and energy is to find the ground, dig the soil, remove the weeds before sowing the seed, and water it till the idea breathes life.
Everyone is talking about the Cloud, whether on the news or in advertisements from top-tier tech companies, such as Microsoft, Google, and Apple. More important, the small and medium business (SMB) community has embraced the Cloud. Specifically, more than half of SMBs in the US currently use cloud storage, according to a new survey from Clutch. Cloud storage's increased popularity in the SMB market arises from the numerous benefits the service offers, such as the reduced cost of data storage, backup and recovery, improved workforce productivity from file sharing and collaboration, and additional disaster protection. These factors make cloud storage appealing to SMBs and will increase the rate of cloud storage service adoption in 2016.
Automating AWS environments is important for all businesses as it simplifies creation and setup of cloud resources, facilitates otherwise complex processes, and streamlines management. The benefits of automation are clear: accelerate execution, reduce human error and unwanted consequences, and increase the enterprise’s ability to rapidly adapt, all while reducing the overall cost of IT operations. In his session at 17th Cloud Expo, Patrick McClory, Director of Automation and DevOps at Datapipe, delved deep into the technical specifics of automation for AWS including a discussion of best practices and real world use cases for PCI compliance, application management, continuous integration, CloudFormation and auto-scaling.
Today’s software defined and driven business requires fast changes in business models, this permeates successful businesses. What this means is that almost every company is learning how to make small rapid changes and adjustments within their business, especially within software systems. The result of this is that IT is feeling immense pressure to evolve, the net result is a major uptick of private cloud (especially Apprenda, Pivotal Cloud Foundry, RedHat OpenShift) and public clouds (especially Amazon and Microsoft) within our install base of large enterprises. These new platforms enable faster development, testing, and releasing of software. Enterprise customers are getting much smarter, by using automation to drive the software lifecycle including continuous integration, and even experimenting and beginning to use continuous release processes. This is no longer a startup scenario, it’s a strategy for our large enterprise customers. These companies trying to build agile development and operations teams, by changing people, process, and technology to enable a DevOps feedback loop:
The traditional, on-premise computing model has established processes, accreditations, certifications, governance and compliance rules - FISMA, NERC CIP, HIPAA, PCI-DSS, IRS 1075. While the security industry is aggressively addressing the technical security gaps in cloud-driven services, many organizations using cloud services are struggling to implement and adapt strategic processes, procedures, and controls for cloud governance and due diligence.
Happy 2016. To help you think about the Environment Management year ahead, we've assembled a collection of resolutions for you to try out. Resolution #1 - I will plan ahead for environment requirements. Many environment managers operate in a reactive mode. They make some wildly inaccurate forecasts about future demand and they sit on excess capacity throughout the year. When a project needs a new environment they dole out VMs or physical machines to projects, but they rarely think ahead and they rarely base estimates on easily predictable demand.
The post Enterprise Release Management Resolutions for 2016 appeared first on Plutora Inc.
The application performance monitoring industry underwent a lot of big changes in 2015. And 2016 won't be any different. From changing consumer behavior to new tools and developments in the application performance space - there's a lot to keep an eye on in the New Year. Here are five ways application performance monitoring will change in 2016: Changing consumers and the device mesh
In the Gartner white paper Taming the Digital Dragon, they define the Hybrid Cloud model as an enabling blueprint for digital transformation and leadership. They give it such an elaborate name because their definition goes far beyond the normal industry use of the term, a mix of on-premise and public Cloud computing, whereas Gartner instead defines a Hybrid Cloud business model.
According to a study, 82 percent of federal IT professional respondents reported that they were using the NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology) cybersecurity framework to improve their security stance. The survey also demonstrated that the document is being used as a stepping stone to a more secure government. When I first read this, my immediate reaction was a resounding, “So what!” These results tell me that US Federal Government agencies are using US Government guidance to do their US Government job. Isn’t that what you would expect? Making an impression on me would require a study across multiple industry verticals. If other industries were voluntarily using the NIST Framework, that would be saying something!
Manufacturing connected IoT versions of traditional products requires more than multiple deep technology skills. It also requires a shift in mindset, to realize that connected, sensor-enabled “things” act more like services than what we usually think of as products. In his session at @ThingsExpo, David Friedman, CEO and co-founder of Ayla Networks, discussed how when sensors start generating detailed real-world data about products and how they’re being used, smart manufacturers can use the data to create additional revenue streams, such as improved warranties or premium features. Or slash maintenance costs by replacing parts before they fail. Or learn from the data to iterate better products that give customers what they really want.
The application performance monitoring industry underwent a lot of big changes in 2015. And 2016 won't be any different. From changing consumer behavior to new tools and developments in the application performance space - there's a lot to keep an eye on in the New Year. Here are five ways application performance monitoring will change in 2016: Changing consumers and the device mesh
Happy 2016. To help you think about the Environment Management year ahead, we've assembled a collection of resolutions for you to try out. Resolution #1 - I will plan ahead for environment requirements. Many environment managers operate in a reactive mode. They make some wildly inaccurate forecasts about future demand and they sit on excess capacity throughout the year. When a project needs a new environment they dole out VMs or physical machines to projects, but they rarely think ahead and they rarely base estimates on easily predictable demand.
The post Enterprise Release Management Resolutions for 2016 appeared first on Plutora Inc.
In the Gartner white paper Taming the Digital Dragon, they define the Hybrid Cloud model as an enabling blueprint for digital transformation and leadership. They give it such an elaborate name because their definition goes far beyond the normal industry use of the term, a mix of on-premise and public Cloud computing, whereas Gartner instead defines a Hybrid Cloud business model.
The Microservices architectural pattern promises increased DevOps agility and can help enable continuous delivery of software. This session is for developers who are transforming existing applications to cloud-native applications, or creating new microservices style applications. In his session at 17th Cloud Expo, Jim Bugwadia, CEO of Nirmata, introduced best practices, patterns, challenges, and solutions for the development and operations of microservices style applications. He discussed how application container solutions can be used to efficiently deploy and operate these applications in a highly scalable and flexible manner. He also included a live demonstration of how microservices applications, packaged in Docker containers, can be deployed and managed across public and private clouds in a fully automated manner.
Containers have changed the mind of IT in DevOps. They enable developers to work with dev, test, stage and production environments identically. Containers provide the right abstraction for microservices and many cloud platforms have integrated them into deployment pipelines. DevOps and containers together help companies achieve their business goals faster and more effectively. In his session at DevOps Summit, Ruslan Synytsky, CEO and Co-founder of Jelastic, reviewed the current landscape of DevOps with containers and the benefits. In addition, he discussed known issues and solutions for enterprise applications in containers.
Looking back at 2015, this past year saw significant changes in the software industry. Increasingly, software is more and more pervasive in nearly all aspects of our everyday lives, from business, government and education to shifts in the way we travel, parent, and monitor our health and our homes. Three major shifts further towards the mainstream that happened within our industry are the advent of the Internet-of-Things (IoT), the rise of Microservices architecture and Container technology, and the advancement of DevOps as an extension of Agile practices.
You’ve probably read a lot on what the new year has in store for the enterprise when it comes to digital transformation. The statistics are overwhelming; it’s clearly not an option to maintain your legacy framework in the next generation of innovation and enterprise. IDC reports in its latest research report, “IDC FutureScape: Worldside CIO Agenda 2016 Predictions“, that only 25% of CIOs actually feel prepared to drive new strategy towards digital innovation. The majority are stuck in trying to make legacy IT frameworks work for a rapidly evolving industry without the proper budget or resources. Today, your CIO requires insight into the scope of the enterprise and its existing technology to be able to understand an end-user’s growing capabilities and needs. As their role develops to bridge the gap between business and technology, the objective relies on honing in on an end-user’s experience. Gartner’s CEO survey stated that customer experience management is the highest priority across CEO’s with 37% of them making it a major push in the next 5 years. Thinking ahead of the customer is a key way to keep the customer engaged. This is accomplished by making small changes to applications and measuring the way users interact with the new change versus the old change. In order to remain customer obsessed and understand customer preferences, these small experimentations are necessary.