CIOs cited reducing enterprise costs; improving IT applications and infrastructure; improving efficiency; and improving business processes among the top 10 business priorities, according to a Gartner Executive Program Survey conducted last year. To address these business priorities, many CIOs are rethinking how they architect their IT infrastructure to better deliver applications and services to end users. A study conducted by IDG Research Services[1] in 2013 surveyed 333 IT directors or higher titles at enterprise companies with more than 500 employees and reported that 77% of IT leaders globally believe data center transformation will play a highly important role in delivering business goals to their organizations.
The cloud ecosystem for information technology today is an interesting mix of companies, products and solutions. Information Communications Technology (ICT) refers to the convergence and expansion of telecommunications with information processing and storage. In short, ICT and the cloud mean a combination of compute, storage and network, running a variety of applications. These resources have been commonly located on premise by businesses, ranging from a few racks of equipment in a room for small businesses to football-field size facilities for large companies. Separately owned data center facilities, called Multi-tenant Data Centers (MTDC) enable organizations to augment on premise resources by placing equipment in a rented MTDC space without owning the facility.
Enterprise Cloud Analytics and Business Intelligence enables organizations to leverage the Cloud and provide end to end data aggregation and analysis capabilities. The objective is to develop Analytics on the Cloud to support Business Intelligence and Analysis capabilities. Effective strategic and operational business decisions can be made based on the search, analysis, drill down and visualization of data in real-time to get actionable information for making effective business decisions. In addition predictive analysis can be very useful to predict trends and patterns. In his session at 14th Cloud Expo, Ajay Budhraja, CTO at the Department of Justice, will discuss enterprise cloud analytics and business intelligence management, solutions, best practices, challenges, trends and specific examples. He will go over the development of a road map, architecture and a data-driven strategy for cloud analytics and business intelligence at the enterprise level for public, private and hybrid solutions. He will also cover approaches to making data accessible through analytic capabilities and the governance, methodology, architecture, security, privacy aspects.
Everybody's got a plan. Until they get punched in the face. It’s go time. You knew it was coming. Now what? VictorOps opens an incident that puts your customized company and personal escalation policies into play. Push notifications to our native mobile apps, SMS messages to your phone, or (gasp!) an actual phone call. We won’t stop until we find you. Drill down to an insane amount of detail without leaving your life. With a swipe of our native Android or iOS mobile app, you’re up to speed on the situation. Are you the one person that sees a pattern in the data that the others don’t? Simply add a post to the timeline to get everyone else on the same page. Never pay SMS or phone overages.
Responsive design, a relatively new concept, uses the same code while targeting different types of devices. The introduction of mobile devices rocked the e-Commerce world. Instead of knowing that potential customers would use a laptop or desktop, those running web-based stores had to begin to account for users with devices with screens of all sizes; from smartphones, to tablets, to full-size monitors. In addition, many of these devices lack keyboards or accurate cursor devices. As a result, many started creating second sites made for mobile devices. However, new techniques have supplanted this strategy, the most popular of which is responsive design.
Introducing the concept of the Service Factory as a Service (SFaaS ), a ground breaking advance over conventional solution and service delivery practices which can deliver transformation to and realization of an agile business architecture without major up-front investment. The service factory concept has been in vogue for some time. As long ago as July 1989 the Harvard Business Review published a seminal article by Chase and Garvin titled The Service Factory[i]. They argued that "The factory of the future is not a place where computers, robots, and flexible machines do the drudge work . . . the next generation, then, will compete by bundling services with products, anticipating and responding to a truly comprehensive range of customer needs."
Virtualization offers cost-value, performance and security benefits by reducing hardware costs, providing virtualized applications that you can reconfigure easily and meeting all regulatory and compliance guidelines. You don't need to make a prohibitive capital investment, and easy expansion into cloud storage and new technologies means that you have virtually limitless scalability. You can use one physical server to run multiple virtual servers, which drastically reduces equipment costs and operating expenses. Most servers today have more multitasking capabilities than most hosting applications use, and installing a multicore server allows you connect four, six or 12 cores to a single CPU. Choices of virtualization software allow you to run dozens of virtual servers with fewer CPU resources. If you use two or more servers for business, then switching to virtual servers helps you meet the challenges of cooling server rooms, containing costs and upgrading computing capacity as hosting demands increase.
AlephCloud has developed proprietary technology that enables secure collaboration without the need for a trusted third party. This “zero knowledge” model makes sure only authorized parties are privy to the information exchanged and stored, while nobody else has visibility, not even AlephCloud. We provide federated data privacy and policy controls that attach directly to the data to protect it while also ensuring ease of use and the flexibility for businesses to utilize a wide range of cloud service providers.
“Edward Snowden’s leaks have heightened awareness of the risks in cloud. However, the word is still not viral yet that it’s now possible to apply Searchable Strong Encryption – that delivers AES -256- bit encryption, the highest commercially available level to protect data in cloud applications while preserving cloud functionality and usability.” CipherCloud enables companies to accelerate their adoption of cloud applications while ensuring visibility and control of their data. CipherCloud delivers data privacy, regulatory compliance, and data residency in the Cloud through an open platform that provides comprehensive data discovery, protection (AES encryption, tokenization, data loss prevention, key management, and malware detection) and activity and anomaly monitoring services.
As promised in our earlier post, here are the final predictions we saw making the rounds in the blogosphere at the start of the year. Many are predicting that Microsoft will get more serious about the cloud. Amazon dominated the cloud news in 2013, but 2014 will be a good year for Microsoft and Google, said Dan Sullivan on Search Cloud Computing. "Microsoft is paving the way for hybrid clouds with Windows Server 2012 R2 and Windows Azure Pack. By the end of 2014, we should have a better understanding of good practices for managing workloads across hybrid Azure clouds. Bernard Golden on CIO echoes the sentiment. "In a way, AWS has had a free ride to this point. Most of its competition has come from the hosting world, and, as noted, is unable to take a software approach to the domain. The inevitable result: AWS has improved, and grown, much more rapidly than other CSPs. That unopposed free run will end in 2014. Both Google and Microsoft have AWS in their crosshairs and are rolling out serious competitive offerings, designed for an all-out battle royale."
Recording and maintaining good evidence of testing is growing more important all the time. The ability to document what actually happened during the development of hardware or software is vital in many industries. Medical equipment is a great example, as any failure could lead to unexpected complications or even death. In the event that this occurs, auditors must be able to review the original manufacturing process and track the usage and maintenance of the machine during its lifecycle. Evidence of testing importance can be neatly summed up by considering the difference between an eyewitness memory and a video of an event. Our expectations and our circumstances can exert a great deal of influence on our recollections. Testers frequently note down what they were expected to do, rather than what they actually did.
I am excited to share a guest blog article today from my colleague Rob Brown who works at The Center for the Future of Work at Cognizant. In this article he shares his insights on the future of smart machines, analytics and code halos. Gartner's Tom Austin presented a webinar titled "The Emerging Era of Smart Machines Changes Everything" recently (www.gartner.com). The scenario he paints canvasses where automation and robotics will be taking business processes - not to mention society and employment - in relatively short order.
Esrange Space Centre is a rocket range and research centre located above the Arctic Circle in the north of Sweden, near the mining town of Kiruna. It is owned by SSC, a comprehensive space industry active in many fields of space technology and services, and the base launches sounding rockets and high altitude balloons for scientific research purposes. Safety is paramount at the Esrange Space Center and it has therefore chosen to use Axis’ IP cameras, installed by Axis partner Insupport Nätverksvideo, to get a better operational overview of the base. “We have used Axis cameras for different purposes in the past, and when we decided to integrate cameras into our safety system, all suppliers we contacted recommended Axis cameras. In other words, it wasn’t a difficult decision for us”, says Martin Hedqvist, project manager at Esrange Space Center.
Organizations have opened their businesses to drive growth and operational improvements. They’ve done this by incorporating cloud services and mobility, by opening their business to partners and customers and by externalizing APIs to accelerate application delivery. All of this demands security, and CA believes the best way to manage and secure today’s open enterprise is by focusing on identity.
Finansbank in Istanbul has developed an impressive record of managed risk and deployments, with an eye to greater automation over time. Governance, risk management and compliance (GRC) form a top-tier of requirements for banks anywhere in the world as they create and deploy applications. A close second nowadays is speed to market, and rapid responsiveness to changing customer expectations and demands. So when Finansbank, an Istanbul-based bank, knew they had to better manage risk -- but not lose time-to-market advantages -- they did a thorough analysis of available IT products and services. The result was an impressive record of managed risk and deployments, with an eye to greater automation over time.
Data management is undergoing a major shift as more and more enterprises are discovering the benefits of Big Data and venturing headfirst into a dynamic new era of innovation and data explosion. Today, there are more opportunities for businesses to gain insights from valuable data than ever before, but they must embrace change to do so. Organizations across the world are embracing this change and beginning to implement big data programs. However, with an overwhelming array of moving pieces to consider, some remain puzzled as to where to start. Well, here's some valuable advice on beating the curve and finally gaining traction in the realm of big data.
For a number of years, analysts at Forrester, Gartner, and other research firms have heralded the growing importance of the product development services (PDS) market in helping companies accelerate time-to-market and product innovation. Forrester analysts John McCarthy and Charles Green published a report last year on a growing trend – that of non-tech companies becoming more and more reliant on software products to connect with consumers. In 2013, IPOs from PDS companies like Globant and Epam brought the growth of the relatively nascent PDS market further into the public spotlight. Globant, which provides outsourced software development services for companies like Google, LinkedIn, and Orbitz, filed for an $86 million IPO in August of last year. Epam, the subject of a Bloomberg article on the proliferation of “Eastern bloc” software development companies, builds software products for companies like Expedia, Sephora, Coca-Cola, and Adidas.
As businesses aspire to move more and more application workloads outside of the boundaries of their private cloud data centers, public cloud service providers are increasingly implementing a private cloud staple: resiliency. In his session at 14th Cloud Expo, John Roese, SVP and Chief CTO at EMC Corporation, will summarize the key architectural tenets of resilient private cloud architectures. These tenets can be implemented in any service provider cloud implementation, regardless of hypervisor choice (e.g., VMware, Hyper-V, Xen), cloud orchestration software (e.g., vSphere, OpenStack), network implementation (e.g., SDN, NFV), or storage implementation (file, block, object). A resilient public cloud will naturally attract increased workload migration, and the rest of the session will describe foundational technologies that facilitate not only secure and seamless application workload migration, but secure and seamless data set migration as well.
Two words that are continually brought up in conversations at company meetings are “integration” and “cloud.” According to leading analyst firm Gartner, by 2016 the growth of cloud computing will increase to become the bulk of new IT spend. The relative cost of cloud services as compared to handling integration in-house has historically hindered executives’ decisions to implement cloud services and brokers. However, the undeniable benefits to cloud-based integration have now come to the forefront of consideration for C-level decision makers looking to relieve their companies of compliance challenges and security risks, while increasing the speed of data being transferred and analyzed. Putting the two words together, cloud integration is now more important than ever to tackle increasingly complex integration challenges. As such, 2014 will be a disruptive year for integration providers, cloud services, Big Data and C-level executives looking to take full advantage of what data integration has to offer. Below are three trends companies can expect to see and incorporate into their businesses in the next year.
The role of Product Owner, at once strategic and tactical, is misunderstood by many companies transitioning to Scrum or Agile approaches. The product owner serves as both organizational change agent and bridge between the business side and the project team. Here’s a basic primer on this indispensable role. In a Scrum-Agile project management environment, the product owner acts as a catalyst of change in the organization, enabling value creation through projects and products. Product owners create the required link between how the business would look like in the future and the current state. The product owner is a key facilitator within the organization in bridging the client and the business community with the Agile development team. Most of what a product owner performs can be defined in the broader sense as: 1) Creating and increasing value for the business, and 2) Eliminating and reducing costs for the business. The product owner is required to identify business needs and determine solutions to business challenges. We can characterize the role description of the product owner as related to the above tasks into several key responsibilities.
Government organizations, utility companies and private individuals are using big data to fight crime, maintain bridges and prepare for natural disasters. Unless you are an IT manager, understanding all of the technical details of how big data technology — such as Hadoop Hive or Apache Pig as a Service — works isn’t as important as understanding how big data can be used to improve lives. Public safety, whether it’s reducing crime rates or maintaining roads and bridges, is a huge undertaking with serious consequences when mistakes are made. Big data can provide additional insights (such as the connection between home games and crime rates discussed below) to governments and businesses to help them keep cities safe, and better respond to disasters when they strike.
Compuware Corporation has announced the 2013 winners of its annual Best of the Web awards, honoring top performing sites across five major industries. A comprehensive report featuring all category winners and detailed results of each winner's performance can be downloaded here. Compuware APM's fifth annual Best of the Web awards recognize the top performing companies across five major industries – banking, brokerage, insurance, retail and travel. Winners in each industry are awarded Gold, Silver, and Bronze based on their performance for the entire year across three key measurements - availability, response time and consistency of response time - for their mobile and web home pages and key user transactions. This year's awards have been expanded to include Gold, Silver and Bronze mobile award winners for the first time in recognition that mobile is now a dominant digital touch point with mobile transactions set to quickly eclipse traditional desktop web interactions.
The Netflix culture highlights the transformation we see within forward thinking IT organizations today. Netflix’s use of public cloud and ‘No Ops’ is renowned in the industry and a poster child for the next-generation IT. In his session at 2nd DevOps Summit, Mike Kail, VP of IT Operations at Netflix, will discuss how he aims to develop the same culture within Netflix’s own IT organization. As the organization undergoes its own transformation, he focuses not only on the technology, but also on hiring and training the right talent.
Fueled by the global economic situation, the government's focus on datacenter consolidation and the "Cloud First" initiative, Cloud Computing continues to be the buzzword of the year. As government agencies start to adopt cloud computing, additional challenges including security in the cloud have become prominent barriers to adoption. In his session at 14th Cloud Expo, Majed Saadi, Director of the Cloud Computing Practice at SRA International, will focus on providing a quick Cloud Computing technology update with an emphasis on current Cloud Computing security trends and drivers. Examples of these trends include: the utilization and evaluation of Clouds in both active and passive surveillance systems and the use of High Performance Clouds for expanding scientist ability to access data. He will also introduces best practices and lessons learned for securing both public and private cloud environments. It offers insight into how Cloud Computing coupled with other technical advancements in mobility and security are changing government IT organizations and provides general guidance and best practices for developing practical and pragmatic cloud strategies.
It is human nature to try and relate new information and new ways of doing things to something that we know, something we are familiar with. Often when we talk about the way we fit traffic onto a Plexxi mesh network, the reaction is “I know what you mean, you are doing traffic engineering like we (used to) do in MPLS”. The response to that is usually “kinda, but not really”. In the most basic meaning, everything that has to do with the placement of traffic onto links, routing and forwarding choices being programmed etc would be part of Traffic Engineering. But like too many words and phrases in our networking dictionary, traffic engineering has taken on a very specific meaning, very much related to the way traffic is mapped onto MPLS and like networks. For us, its a bit different. We build ethernet and IP networks that use packet by packet forwarding rules and while individual flows may have a hop by hop crafted path through the network, a very large portion of traffic travels using regular L2 and L3 forwarding tables. We just construct those tables differently than the typical network. Dare I say we engineer the tables to ensure forwarding occurs the way we calculated it to go.