A Globally Distributed Storage Cloud with Disaster Recovery

Like electricity, compute resources can readily scale up and burst, and workloads can easily operate geographically. Storage however is more like water, where moving large amounts of data can be very challenging, especially over distance.
In his session at 14th Cloud Expo, Joe Arnold, CEO of SwiftStack, will cover architectures and approaches for storage clouds deployed across geographies. He will break down failure scenarios and disaster recovery behaviors (staying available during catastrophic failures), and the benefits that multi-site access can have to reduce application latency. Fast access that never goes down = happy users.

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Moving Mission-Critical Applications to the Cloud

Taking mission-critical applications out of their current data center environments and moving them to the cloud is usually not a simple matter of lift and shift. Companies leading the way in deploying customer-facing applications to either a public or a private cloud have learned the hard way that they must rethink how their applications are developed, deployed, instrumented and managed to maintain the level of service their customers expect.
In this panel at 14th Cloud Expo, Nathan Anderson, an IT Leader – Innovation at GE Capital, Kacy Clarke, VP and Principal Cloud Architect at Cloud Technology Partners, and Shane Shelton, Sr. Director of Application Performance and Development Operations at McGraw-Hill Education, will discuss why typical data center oriented systems monitoring and operations are not sufficient for the distributed architecture of the cloud.

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How should governments go cloud first?

Dr Steve Hodgkinson, Chief Analyst, Global Public Sector

Three Australian state governments have recently released updated ICT strategies that include cloud-first policy positions. However, each state has taken a different approach to driving cloud services adoption. This raises interesting questions about the impact of cloud services on the logic of whole-of-government ICT strategy.

Our view is that central agencies should focus on leadership and enablement. They should be mindful of the risk that too much top-down strategy too early on will kill the golden goose of decentralized cloudy innovation that is created when agencies are simply empowered to buy services that already work.

NSW government agencies are already evaluating cloud-based services when undertaking ICT procurements

The New South Wales (NSW) state government’s ICT Strategy was published in 2012 with an implementation update released recently. The 2012 policy statement on cloud services remains unchanged:

NSW Government agencies will evaluate cloud-based …

Cloud as a Growth Engine for Business

The cloud opens up new possibilities for businesses to continuously deliver software-driven innovation and enables new ways of collaboration. At 14th Cloud Expo, IBM, SoftLayer, an IBM Company, and Cloudant, an IBM Company, offer numerous sessions that cover many aspects of cloud and Big Data from how to leverage a cloud architecture, make Big Data cost effective, to how to take advantage of a multitude of compute options and platform features to make cloud the cornerstone of your online presence

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Five Questions to Ask Before Moving Your Data into the Cloud

No doubt, the world of cloud storage has evolved over the past several months in terms of broader interoperability, increased features and functionality as well as lower overall costs. Whereas the questions posed about cloud storage used to center on integration with (or in place of) existing storage infrastructure, these questions have been answered by countless successful deployments using cloud-integrated storage. In their place are far more sophisticated inquiries, indicating a broader familiarity with both the benefits and concerns of storing corporate data in the cloud.

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Cloud Computing in Government

Congratulations to my friends at “On The FrontLines Magazine” for an EXCELLENT presentation of important operational and managerial cloud computing transition lessons. This issues showcases cloud computing leaders from government and the private sector that share their views on this critical topic.

Matt Goodrich, FedRAMP Program Manager, GSA – “The first one is security is largely not a technical issue. If you look at any sort of management of anything, technical things and problems are usually pretty easy to solve and there’s a quick ability to do that.” The second is management of people is hard. “If you look at management classes anywhere, it’s never management of technical things, it’s always managing the people who run cloud environments; and managing those processes is always really the harder portion of this.”

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Field Notes from Expeditions in the Cloud

In his General Session at 14th Cloud Expo, Matt Wood, GM of Data Science at Amazon Web Services, will discuss some observations, themes and stories gathered from over eight years of providing cloud computing services to customers. He’ll discuss expeditions companies have made to the cloud, along with the business drivers, outcomes and technical requirements of delivering large scale, utility computing for any workload, within any organization.
Matt Wood leads scientific and technical computing at Amazon Web Services in Seattle, Washington, where he drives programs around high performance computing, data-intensive science and big data.

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A Cloud Odyssey

Join Oracle at 14th Cloud Expo on a journey to Terranuvem, the cloud planet, where you will learn key success factors for your own journey to the cloud. From Big Data Management Systems to Platform-as-a-Service, the following sessions from Oracle will provide attendees with the latest solutions and strategies.
Day 2 Keynote | Cloud Odyssey: A Hero’s Quest – June 11, 9:10 – 10:10 am
Sandra Cheevers, Principal Product Director, Cloud Product Marketing at Oracle.
The time has come for humanity’s first interstellar trek to Terranuvem, the cloud planet, and Chief Engineer Cyrus Agarwal has been chosen to ready a ship for the voyage. He must make the right architectural choices to transform the ship for the long journey and be prepared for the unknown. He will be tested and overcome challenges during the mission. Join Cyrus and the crew of the Stratus for a unique, sci-fi movie experience while learning key success factors for your own journey to cloud.

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Plug into the Cloud: Your Blueprint to Database as a Service

Enterprise IT is under increasing pressure to deliver better services to the business faster, at lower cost, and with higher quality of service. Now, there’s a new page in the CIO playbook – delivering enterprise Database as a Service.
In his session at 14th Cloud Expo, David Swanger, Senior Director of Oracle Database Product Marketing at Oracle, will discuss how a Database as a Service (DBaaS) solution delivers on a broad range of requirements including simplified database consolidation and,self-service provisioning. He’ll discuss how Oracle’s new multitenant architecture provides a superior enterprise database platform with new levels of flexibility, resiliency, and efficiency.

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