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Google has announced the launch of PerfKit, an open source cloud benchmarking tool aimed at aiding developers evaluating performance features.

The search giant claims it has worked with over 30 leading researchers, companies and customers in developing this tool, as well as educational institutes: Stanford and MIT will be having quarterly discussions on default benchmarks and settings on the back of this development.

Google claims PerfKit is unique because not only does it report on standard metrics such as peak performance, is also measures end to end time provision resources in the cloud. PerfKit also comes with a visualisation tool, PerfKit Explorer, to help developers interpret the results.

Picture credit: Google

“PerfKit is a living benchmark framework, designed to evolve as cloud technology changes, always measuring the latest workloads so you can make informed decisions about what’s best for your infrastructure needs,” the Google Platform Performance Team posted in a blog.

“As new design patterns, tools, and providers emerge, we’ll adapt PerfKit to keep it current,” they add. “It already includes several well-known benchmarks, and covers common cloud workloads that can be executed across multiple cloud providers.”

There are plenty of cloud benchmarking tools out on the market at the moment. CloudHarmony is one of the best known, and the company updated its metrics in January to provide a list of the most reliable public cloud providers. Amazon Web Services, Google and SoftLayer were the most reliable according to CloudHarmony, while Aruba Cloud’s storage facility clocked up a whopping 407 outages across five regions in 2014.

Given Google’s perspective as one of the most reliable cloud providers for performance, it makes sense that they want to move into the benchmarking game. Google’s Cloud DNS had a 100% record, while Cloud Storage suffered eight outages at an SLA of 99.9996%, App Engine suffered just one outage and Compute Engine had 66 outages for a 99.982% SLA.

You can find out more about PerfKit here.

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Risk management consulting provider Leviathan Security Group has released a whitepaper discussing the issues in choosing local and cloud storage, as well as potential vulnerabilities and risks.

The paper on the value of cloud security, and vulnerabilities in storage, assumes three scenarios, based on small, medium and large businesses, and outlines solutions based on their business needs:

• For a small consultancy scenario, the nature of their work means they are unlikely to connect back to the office during the work day, although many will synchronise files from home using an in-house VPN service when they return. The storage space they require for 50 employees is 15TB. Leviathan notes the Dell PowerVault NX400 would be ideal as a storage server, with Windows 2012 R2 as an operating system, backup needs met by a Drobo 5D system, and Symantec Endpoint Protection leverage for protection against malware. Total three year cost for local storage is $48,000, while cloud is $60,000.
• A mid sized regional corporation, which would require around 150TB of storage accessible from the internal LAN as well as for VPN users, would be ideally suited for a Storinator Redundant NAS as a storage server, powered by an Intel Dual-core i3-3240 and 90 Seagate 4TB disks, and a Dell PowerEdge R520 Server as backup with Windows 2012 R2 as OS and 83 LTO-6 backup tapes. Malware protection would be handled by another Dell PowerEdge server, alongside Symantec Endpoint Protection. Total three year cost is $276,000 for local, $377,000 for cloud.
• For a big corporation, 750TB of storage space would be necessary, with 24/7 support requirements and a four hour replacement part guarantee. For this, Leviathan recommends a Petarack High Availability SAN as a storage area network, with two Intel Xeon E5 Sandy-Bridge Processors. Backup solution would be a Tandberg Data T160+ Tape Library, consisting of a Dell PowerEdge R720xd server, Windows 2012 R2, and 2013 LTO-6 backup tapes. A single Symantec console managing Symantec Endpoint Protection, installed and run on a Dell PowerEdge R725xd, would be more than enough to handle malware. Total three year cost is $1.75m for local, $1.86m for cloud.

It’s worth noting here that the researchers are not advocating any of these vendors, just that these vendors were able to provide the best fit for pricing. «As is commonly the case in real-world purchasing, the vendor that was able to provide the most accurate and timely pricing for a solution that met our needs was selected,» they explain.

The report also assesses the different types of vulnerabilities in these kinds of solutions. While CloudTech has examined in-depth data loss and cloud vulnerabilities in the past, this report offers a few interesting insights. Vulnerabilites highlighted include process failure, malicious insiders, and hardware and software failure among others. Cloud-specific threats include a lack of monitoring and audit capabilities and problems with internet connectivity, while local storage threats include a loss of local knowledge, natural disasters, which this publication examined earlier this week, equipment scarcity and geographical restrictions.

The overall aim from the report is to show how capricious choosing a cloud storage solution is. «A simple price calculation – even one that contains significant detail and technical depth – cannot be the deciding factor for organisations with significant storage needs,» the report notes.

«An organisation should consider its predicted rate of expansion, its technical requirements, its appetite for capital outlay, its ability to establish a long-term supply chain, and its ability to recruit adequate technical and security personnel as criteria equal to or more significant than price.»

You can read the full 37-page paper here.

Valentine’s Day is around the corner and most of us fall into one of the following categories: 1) In a relationship and gifts/dates have been purchased/planned for weeks; 2) In a relationship but you don’t care to celebrate the holiday; or 3) Single and avoiding every drugstore greeting card and seasonal gifts section.

Then there are those of us who fit somewhere in between. Perhaps, like me, you’re in a relationship but just haven’t found the time or have no clue what to give for a gift. Or maybe you’re dating someone but unsure of whether it’s closer to casual or serious so you don’t want to come off too strong or not strong enough.

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Imagine the scenes from any of the last few Black Fridays with people lined up for days to grab the new flat screen TV or a new iPhone. The moment the gates open up there is usually a crowd of people swarming like bees, trying to get their hands on what they can, and yes there were also many reported cases of snatching, grabbing and what not. If only the world of cloud storage could be so dramatic!

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Good food is not the most important attribute for a restaurant. Cleanliness is. It doesn’t matter how great your dishes are – if patrons catch even a glimpse of a roach, they won’t stick around to sample your cooking.
The same principle applies to your company’s digital experience. You may have great products at a great price. But if customers have a bad experience with your digital channels, they won’t buy from you. In fact, studies show that 73-82% of customers abandon intended purchases because of a poor online experience.

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“With easy-to-use SDKs for Atmel’s platforms, IoT developers can now reap the benefits of realtime communication, and bypass the security pitfalls and configuration complexities that put IoT deployments at risk,” said Todd Greene, founder & CEO of PubNub.
PubNub will team with Atmel at CES 2015 to launch full SDK support for Atmel’s MCU, MPU, and Wireless SoC platforms. Atmel developers now have access to PubNub’s secure Publish/Subscribe messaging with guaranteed ¼ second latencies across PubNub’s 14 global points-of-presence. PubNub delivers secure communication through firewalls, proxy servers, and on unreliable mobile networks with a security model that guarantees no open ports on IoT devices. Developers can now implement important features like remote device control, firmware upgrades, and device provisioning using PubNub’s suite of IoT building blocks that includes realtime device presence detection, stream storage & playback, and data stream syndication.
“PubNub’s realtime global data stream network combined with our embedded solutions helps IoT developers reduce time-to-market and solve the challenges of reliable IoT deployments,” said Reza Kazerounian, SVP and GM of Microcontroller Business Unit at Atmel. “By removing complexity and focusing on developer-centric tools and services, PubNub shares Atmel’s philosophy of driving competitive advantage for our customers.”

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“Solr or Elasticsearch?”…well, at least that is the common question I hear from Sematext’s consulting services clients and prospects. Which one is better, Solr or Elasticsearch? Which one is faster? Which one scales better? Which one can do X, and Y, and Z? Which one is easier to manage? Which one should we use? Which one do you recommend? etc., etc.

These are all great questions, though not always with clear and definite, universally applicable answers. So which one do we recommend you use? How do you choose in the end? Well, let me share how I see Solr and Elasticsearch past, present, and future, let’s do a bit of comparing and contrasting, and hopefully help you make the right choice for your particular needs.

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Our guest on the podcast this week is Erik Sebesta, Co-Founder and CATO of Cloud Technology Partners. We discuss recent Internet of Things projects, including those of two healthcare intelligence companies, and explore exactly what it takes to delivery real-time data, safely and efficiently to end consumers. Listen in to learn how we’re building the next generation of IoT platforms and helping companies leverage this emerging technology.

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We all like to complain about services going down when bad weather strikes. The ‘wrong kind of snow’ can wreak havoc with trains and the road network can get snarled up fast, while power lines can come down in more remote areas. Where are the backup and recovery plans, we ask – but could our own customers or internal sponsors and colleagues be saying the same about us if we fail to deliver as we should?

The uncomfortable truth is many smaller businesses are unprepared for business continuity in the event of a disaster. The Federation of Small Businesses (FSB) has recently found that three out of five (59%) of the small businesses they questioned did not have a plan in place to deal with extreme weather conditions such as floods and snowstorms.

That’s just one of many stats that doesn’t seem to have improved much over the past few years. Another survey, by telecoms provider Daisy Group, has suggested that despite the boom in mobile technologies, “adverse weather conditions prevent an estimated three million UK workers from completing their normal work responsibilities each year”, and that a third of UK businesses were affected by transport problems, power cuts or broadband and phone line failures caused by inclement weather over the past two years.

So the word ‘disaster’ is relative – your head office could be intact, but failure to get vital collateral to a sales meeting or a rep on the road could mean the loss of a much prized contract. A field service engineer could have no means of ordering a key spare part. Many organisations will simply be unprepared for a sudden demand on bandwidth from people working remotely, with all that entails in secure access to company networks. And any downtime on core IT systems and lack of network access from anywhere can rapidly unravel workflows and damage reputations, as the productivity and morale of staff often depends on having reliable tools for their jobs. How many times are you told by other organisations that ‘Our systems are down’?

Secure offsite backup is a must, enabled with cloud storage

Apart from staff, of course, IT is the lifeblood of most modern organisations, no matter what sector they are in. IT and communications are likely to be the underpinning infrastructure that keeps an organisation in business. But while it may be impossible to have a plan that keeps you operating fully during a major disaster, too many organisations do not also have a day-to-day set of procedures that will help cope with less demanding events such as a prolonged spell of bad weather.

Business continuity plans cover factors such as mapping your locations, assets and operations, and identifying the critical processes you need to operate and what minimum resources are needed. Staff need to be covered for emergencies – for example, do your salespeople or other mobile professionals have an emergency kit in their cars?

There are key considerations for IT and communications:

• Secure offsite backup is a must, enabled, say, with cloud storage.
• Managed servers and cloud computing can help ensure your organisation’s network and applications are available independently if your office isn’t open.
• Network access from a range of devices, including people’s own smartphones and tablets, could be useful. The so-called ‘bring your own device’ movement means that you can be more flexible in remote working.
• Virtual secure networking from home and other remote computers, say in serviced offices, is certainly advisable for core systems such as accounts.
• Audio, video and web conferencing systems allow you to set up virtual meetings – a dial-in system for telephone calls could be top of the list.
• There are many in-car and portable gadgets, such as those that set up an instant Wi-Fi hotspot for a group using a mobile phone network.
• A sensible option is dual Internet provision. Having an alternative cable, DSL or mobile Internet service in the office to call on could be vital if the primary service is down.

You can really go to town on business continuity planning and risk management. There are several international and British standards and guidelines, many training courses, and one piece of guidance produced by the Cabinet Office – ‘Business Continuity for Dummies’. That sounds rather insulting, but it may be what you need to help put a practical plan in place to suit your organisation.

If you think you already have a good plan, there’s one thing you should do now: test it before it’s needed. This year’s Business Continuity Awareness Week, 16-20 March, has ‘testing and exercising’ as its theme, as here’s another stat to make you sit up: less than a third of organisations have tested their plans in the last year, notes the Business Continuity Institute. And what about all those without plans at all?

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Amazon Web Services (AWS) remains the most popular enterprise cloud service, according to the latest quarterly report from Skyhigh Networks, while the number of cloud services used by firms continues to rise.

According to the report the average employee uses 27 apps at work, while the average number of cloud services in use per company was 897 in Q414, which compares favourably against 831 in Q3 and 626 in Q413. The biggest rise in app type was development, which saw a 97% spike in usage year on year. Collaboration went up 53%, file sharing 20%, business intelligence 18% and social media 17%.

As this publication reported back in October, Amazon continues to assert its dominance in enterprise cloud services. For Q414 figures, AWS finished top ahead of Microsoft Office 365, Salesforce, Cisco WebEx, and ServiceNow. Yammer, Box and Zendesk also made the top 10 while Workday was in the top 20, leading Skyhigh to comment: “Representing a new generation of enterprise software players, four companies in the list went public in the last 36 months.”

The top file sharing service, as it has been for the past year, was Dropbox, with Google Drive, OneDrive, and Box behind. Office 365 continues to be the most popular collaboration service, ahead of Gmail, Yammer, Yahoo Mail and Cisco WebEx.

Yet the report had an interesting undercurrent, and proposed the concept of the “enterprisation of consumer IT”. Never mind the consumerisation of the enterprise, Skyhigh argues: Facebook, Dropbox, Google Drive and Gmail, frequently used by consumers, now offer enterprise versions which provide greater controls for businesses. The top consumer cloud services, according to the report, are Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn and Pinterest.

There’s a problem however; four of these top five consumer apps also appeared in the list of top apps which don’t encrypt data at rest. 37% of users in Q414 uploaded at least one file containing sensitive or confidential data to a cloud service, while 22% of files uploaded overall contained private data.

The Q3 report briefly touched upon this, arguing how companies are struggling to block consumer products. Yet there’s been a shift in thinking. Whereas shadow IT – employees bypassing IT admin controls to use their own cloud services for greater productivity – was once a disaster, CIOs are now beginning to see the positive side, as sister publication Enterprise AppsTech has explored in depth.

The Skyhigh research also examined the fastest growing cloud services, with Loggly, Todoist and ToutApp in the top three – the latter two appearing on the fastest growing list for two consecutive quarters.

 “From the perspective of the end-user, there is an unprecedented amount of choice, and people are inclined to use things that help them while discontinuing their use of things that either don’t help them or are inferior to other solutions,” the report notes.

“It is this idea that led us to think that, by measuring usage patterns across thousands of cloud services, we could help identify the up-and-coming solutions that are on the path to mainstream adoption based on their growth rates.”

You can find the full report here.