Archivo mensual: agosto 2015

News, Services

Intel Leads Investment

Intel has begun to dive into the world of cloud services, leading a $100 million round of funding in a pure play OpenStack company. This investment into Mirantis will aid in the company’s optimization of its enterprise features and will drive industry adoption. OpenStack cloud software, first introduced in 2010, is built by a team of expert open source contributors under management of OpenStack. Under a relatively small time frame of just five years, OpenStack has become the fifth most popular cloud platform among global companies according to research done by Forrester Research Inc. This round of investment is set to coax adoption of cloud services by allowing it to be both installed and integrated into data centers easier.
Diane Bryant, senior vice president and general manager at Data Center Group, Intel, has stated, “As enterprises embrace public, private and hybrid cloud strategies, they need choices in their infrastructure software. OpenStack is an ideal open solution for cloud-native applications and services, and our collaboration with Mirantis is well placed to ensure the delivery of critical new enterprise features helping to create of tens of thousands of clouds.”
Intel, Goldman Sachs, August Capital, Insight Venture Partners, Ericsson, Sapphire Ventures (formerly SAP Ventures) and WestSummit Capital have all invested in this most recent round of funding. However, Intel appears to be going the extra mile, collaborating with Mirantis on technical features. Intel’s deep technological insight will increase capability of enterprise deployments. The goal of this collaboration is to create thousands of new clouds to serve under Intel’s Clouds for All initiative. This collaboration will address issues such network integration and support for big data.

mirantis
Alex Freeland, co-founder and president of Mirantis, is excited to exemplify that open design, open development, and open licensing are all important features in the future of cloud infrastructure software. “Every industry is being disrupted by software. Smart enterprises are embracing the cloud to grow top line revenues and get new services to market faster.”
Zeus Kerravala, principal analyst at ZK Research, also gave his opinion on the collaboration: “Obviously, Mirantis is trying to make headway in the OpenStack space. There are a lot of other IT vendors, including IBM and HP, that have all jumped on board as well and there’s a clear commitment to the OpenStack market. In order for the cloud really to take off it requires a collective effort from all the vendors involved. There’s really a who’s who now in the OpenStack space. This is a good commitment from Intel.”

The post Intel Leads Investment appeared first on Cloud News Daily.

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Finance sector looking further to the cloud – but beware security risks

(c)iStock.com/BlackJack3D

More proof arrives that financial organisations are becoming more comfortable with cloud technologies: according to the latest industry outlook from Skyhigh Networks, the average financial services company uses more than 1,000 cloud services, with collaboration tools the most popular type of application used. But is it a good thing?

The report, which focuses on real life data from 3.7 million employees at banks, insurance companies and credit card firms among others, found the average employee uses 31 separate cloud apps. On average, this comprises eight collaboration services, five file sharing services, three social media services, and three content services. Those with a keen eye for numbers will note those figures do not add up to 31, so it’s worth pointing out that among the others, four apps used on average are from – usually unwanted – marketing analytics and advertising services.

The risk does not end there, however. According to the report 15.5% of financial services have at least one compromised credential, more than any other industry, while 88% of those analysed showed behaviour indicative of an insider threat during the last quarter. The number across all industries which have one compromised credential or more is at 11.2%, while the report also found 94.3% of financial services companies have exposure to compromised credentials – again higher than the overall average of 91.7% from all industries.

Going with current trends, Microsoft Office 365 remains the most popular enterprise cloud app in financial services, followed by Concur and Salesforce, while on the consumer side Facebook rules the roost, followed by Twitter then LinkedIn. Yet the overall consensus from Skyhigh is that of risk rather than reward.

“While financial services companies take special care in assessing the security controls of cloud services, employees can also introduce cloud services into the workplace, creating “shadow IT”, the report warns. “As sensitive data moves to the cloud, these companies must also meet strict regulatory requirements.”

Other recent research has been mixed on the topic. In March, the Cloud Security Alliance described how financial firms were accessing cloud services more readily albeit with roadblocks still to conquer, yet in July a report from CipherCloud revealed how 100% of respondents in the finance space said they put certain personally identifiable information in the cloud.

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Big data, cloud, mobility, and why IT needs to move at the speed of business

(c)iStock.com/Nikada

“We change our behaviour when the pain of staying the same becomes greater than the pain of changing. Consequences give us the pain that motivates us to change” – Dr. Henry Cloud and Dr. John Townsend

Successful businesses require the ability to change and increasingly to adapt quickly, to be agile to new approaches and technologies and be flexible to the needs of the business and customers.

We are at the wake of monumental change and how businesses service and engage with the customer and employee alike are under upward pressure from users and customers who are driving a higher expectation on their provider where brand loyalty can wane quicker than ever before.

Of the Fortune 500 firms in 1955, come 2015 89% of the list has changed, having either gone bankrupt, merged, or exist but have fallen from the Fortune 500. The Fortune 500 is fast becoming the Digital 500 with new world entrants fast displacing the legacy firms. Unicorns like Salesforce, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Uber and the like are showing how business models are innovating and enabling disruption of the status quo more quickly than we have ever seen before. In July 2015, six companies accounted for 53% of the Nasdaq’s $664 billion market value (Amazon, Google, Apple, Facebook, Netflix and Gilead), five being high tech innovative firms and four of these who have been around on average 17 years).

Users and customers expect access anywhere, anytime, any device and from interfaces that engage them and make their lives easier delivering easy intuitive interaction.

Businesses that allow themselves to be constrained and held back by legacy attitudes, technology platforms and skills or contractual constraints are going to increasingly find themselves at risk of displacement and disruption by more agile, faster moving and adapting businesses.  We have seen enough evidence of this already across industries, with new entrants changing the delivery mechanism and form factor to customers – take Blockbuster Video gone to the likes of Netflix, Kodak to digital photography and a plethora of music outlets to the likes of iTunes.

New delivery models also bring with them new ways of interacting and enthusing customers to engage. Gamification is increasingly entering our lives, even if not labelled as such to the user. Take for example Waze, a satnav free application that rewards users with points and badges for reporting traffic and incidents thus delivering accurate information without the need to deploy expensive monitoring cameras.  

To serve users and customers in a way they want and expect to be serviced is going to be key and being open to utilising new technologies such as cloud, mobility, big data and to changing again and again where needed will be critical in the new economy.

In business we already see users bringing their own devices to use at work, departments deploying their own applications from the cloud on a credit card (shadow IT) claiming IT hasn’t moved quick enough or that they can do things easier at home where they choose the best application and device for the job without the normal corporate constraints applied to them. 

Change is never easy where you have to conform to policies, security requirements, standards, decision processes and budgets and it is going to get harder with the ever higher demands and expectations of users and customers. Resisting change or finding reasons not to do it will carry less and less weight. Businesses are going to have to become agile and to find ways to offload workloads to others to allow themselves to focus on the needs of the business, to become unconstrained and more flexible.

Technology is moving at an increasing pace and introducing new concepts, approaches and capabilities that can make a big difference to the success of a business. You need to harness change to your advantage and use it as a positive tool against less capable competitors and IT needs to become a change agent, not a barrier.

Already we have a mix of new world mechanisms including cloud, virtualisation, mobility, Internet of Things (IoT), big data, gamification, social media, smart devices, 3D printing and virtual reality at the forefront with more to come as innovation accelerates.

Businesses that want to be successful in the coming years need to keep up with technology and quickly learn to use it to their advantage. If you find yourself justifying to your business or users reasons why you cannot change, ask whether you are taking the easy option for the wrong reasons.

IT needs to keep up with the speed of business and support the needs to be successful and no longer be constrained by contractual boundaries, shortage of localised skills or existing platform limitations. The need to build agility into decisions you make is going to become increasingly part of the selection process.

Big Data, Ernst & Young, Hortonworks, Mitch Ferguson, News & Analysis, Scott H. Schlesinger

EY, Hortonworks ink big data deal

Ernst & Young and Hortonworks are partnering on Hadoop

Ernst & Young and Hortonworks are partnering on Hadoop

Global consulting giant Ernst & Young and Hortonworks have inked a deal that will see the two companies partner on helping joint clients overcome their big data challenges.

The deal will see Hortonworks extend its big data platform together with EY’s data and information management professional services. Specifically, the two companies plan to guide clients on how to leverage big data technologies like Hadoop to overcome key data storage and batch analysis challenges.

“Many leading organizations are drowning in data, yet they lack the ability to analyze and drive value from the vast amount of information at their disposal,” said Scott H. Schlesinger, principle, Ernst & Young LLP and EY Americas IT Advisory. “The alliance will enable EY and Hortonworks to assist organizations in driving value from their existing technology.”

Mitch Ferguson, vice president of business development at Hortonworks said: “This alliance will strengthen EY’s ability to implement enterprise-level big data software, including HDP, to turn data into an asset, further addressing the business and technology needs of organizations.”

Dante Orsini, Enterprise IT, Forrester, iland, Opinion

Businesses are ready for cloud – but lack of transparency is limiting its usefulness

cloud puzzleDespite common perceptions, cutting costs isn’t the primary reason businesses are choosing cloud these days. The other major advantages are the agility and scalability cloud brings, enabling organisations to quickly respond to business demand. The combination of benefits is driving both IT and lines of business to rely on cloud to serve as a foundation for innovation and enablement.

But the advantages of cloud cannot be fully harnessed if transparency into the environments is compromised. Clouds that limit visibility result in significant operational and financial issues, including performance problems or outages, challenges reporting to management, and unexpected bills. In fact, challenges with transparency restrict 63% of organizations from growing their cloud usage. That’s according to a recent global survey conducted by Forrester Consulting that we commissioned. The survey sought insights from 275 IT executives and decision makers who are experienced cloud customers.

When it comes to data about cloud environments, what are organisations looking for from their providers? Clearly security and compliance information is important. Worryingly, 39% of those surveyed said they lacked security data and 47% said they lacked compliance data. Not surprisingly, the majority said they needed on-demand access to necessary reports to make compliance and audit processes easier.

That said, on-demand reporting technology only goes so far, and many respondents wanted suggestions and/or support from experts on staff at the cloud provider. In light of evolving security risks and corporate compliance concerns – especially as lines of business adopt cloud without IT involvement – cloud providers need to simplify the process for ensuring advanced security and compliance in the cloud, not get in the way.

Beyond security and compliance, performance information, historical information and clear details about costs and upcoming bills are also key. Without this, businesses find it hard to plan for or meet the needs of their end users. It also makes it extremely difficult to budget properly.

Just like with their own servers, organisations need to understand the performance of a cloud service to get the most from it, whether that means making sure resources are running properly, anticipating potential issues or preventing wasteful “zombie virtual machines.” Due to a lack of transparency from their cloud providers, more than a third of the respondents in the survey ended up with bills they hadn’t expected and 39% found they were paying for resources they weren’t actually using.

Cloud customers can use data to make better purchasing decisions. Clear information from a cloud provider will help companies discover where they need more resources, or even where they can regain capacity and maximise their spend.

Once again though, beyond the on-demand data, customers require solid support to ensure they are getting what they need from cloud. In the survey, 60% of respondents said that problems with support were restricting their plans to increase their usage of cloud. Issues like slow response times, lack of human support, lack of expertise of the support personnel and higher-than-expected support costs started with the onboarding process and only continued. Aside from preventing customers from reaping the benefits of cloud, these issues leave businesses feeling that they’re seen more as a source of revenue than as a valued cloud customer.

When it comes down to it, cloud customers should not settle for cloud services that limit visibility into the cloud environments. Compromises in transparency mean sacrifices to very agility, scalability and cost benefits that drive organizations to cloud in the first place. And beyond transparency, customers should not underestimate the human element of cloud. A cloud provider’s customer support plays a huge role in speeding return on cloud investment, and ultimately, in determining success and failure of a cloud initiative.

As the Forrester study states, “Whether you are a first-time cloud user or looking to grow your cloud portfolio, our research shows that your chances of success are greater with a trusted cloud provider at your side — one that gives you the technology and experts to solve your challenges.”

You can read more about the survey findings in the study, “Is Your Cloud Provider Keeping Secrets? Demand Data Transparency, Compliance Expertise, and Human Support From Your Global Cloud Providers.”

Written by Dante Orsini, senior vice president, iland

Featured, Miscellaneous IT, Tech News Recap

Tech News Recap for the Week of 8/17/2015

Were you busy last week? Here’s a quick tech news recap of articles you may have missed from the week of 8/17/2015.

Tech News RecapHackers posted Ashley Madison data. 3,000 residents in Colorado were impacted by a data breach. A hacking group believed to be operating from China hacked Indian targets. Microsoft showed off containers in a preview of Windows Server. Google now requires fewer of its own apps on Android devices. IBM will invest $3 billion for a new IoT unit.

 

Tech News Recap

Whitepaper: 10 Things to Know About Docker

 

By Ben Stephenson, Emerging Media Specialist

EasyJet, HSBC, Lacoste, M&A, marketing cloud, Maxymiser, News & Analysis, Oracle, Software as a service, Thomas Kurian, Tim Brown

Oracle boost marketing cloud biz with Maxymiser acquisition

Oracle is buying Maxymiser to boost its marketing capabilities

Oracle is buying Maxymiser to boost its marketing capabilities

Oracle has acquired Maxymiser, a provider of cloud-based marketing tools, for an undisclosed sum. The company said the acquisition will bolster its marketing cloud portfolio.

Founded in 2006, Maxymiser has over 400 employees and offers a range of cloud-based marketing tools that help its users improve customer experience and user retention through omnichannel analysis and marketing automation. Some of its higher profile customers include EasyJet, HSBC and French clothing retailer Lacoste.

Its offerings will be integrated into the Orcale Marketing Cloud, which is itself made up of a range of tools formerly acquired by the firm (Eloqua and Responsys for instance), following the acquisition.

“Companies are increasingly seeking innovative ways to differentiate their brands while increasing both ROI and loyalty based on optimized customer experiences,” said Thomas Kurian, president, product development, Oracle. “Together with Maxymiser, Oracle Marketing Cloud enables enterprises to stop guessing and start delivering what customers want across all digital channels and devices.”

Tim Brown, chief executive officer, Maxymiser said: “Our mission is to empower enterprises to use data science to systematically test, discover, and predict what customers want and deliver uniquely tailored experiences. We are excited to join Oracle and bring these capabilities to help extend Oracle Marketing Cloud.”

Over the years many large incumbents like Oracle and SAP as well as newer upstarts like Salesforce have moved quickly to strengthen their position in marketing automation through acquisition. In April this year NetSuite acquired Bronto Software, a provider of cloud-based marketing automation software for omnichannel commerce, in a deal worth about $200m.

Alex Freedland, August Capital, Diane Bryant, Ericsson, Funding, Insight Venture Partners, Intel, Mirantis, News & Analysis, Open Source, OpenStack, SAP Ventures, Sapphire Ventures, WestSummit Capital.

Intel, Ericsson bet $100m on Mirantis and OpenStack

OpenStack vendor Mirantis is raking in buy-in from investors

OpenStack vendor Mirantis is raking in buy-in from investors

Pure play OpenStack vendor Mirantis has secured $100m in new funding this week in a round led by Intel Capital, with the companies also announcing deepened collaboration in the cloud arena.

The latest round, which comes less than a year after Mirantis secured $100m in series B funds from investors, also included participation from new investor Goldman Sachs and existing investors August Capital, Insight Venture Partners, Ericsson, Sapphire Ventures (formerly SAP Ventures) and WestSummit Capital.

Mirantis said the cash will be used to bolster its partnerships with vendors and other organisations innovating with OpenStack.

“With Intel as our partner, we’ll show the world that open design, open development and open licensing is the future of cloud infrastructure software. Mirantis’ goal is to make OpenStack the best way to deliver cloud software, surpassing any proprietary solutions,” said Alex Freedland, co-founder and president of Mirantis.

“Every industry is being disrupted by software. Smart enterprises are embracing the cloud to grow top line revenues and get new services to market faster. Mirantis is the only vendor 100 per cent committed to only OpenStack,” Freedland said.

At the same time, Intel and Mirantis announced the two companies would deepen their partnership and work together on Intel’s Clouds for All initiative, a series of partnerships with ISVs announced earlier this summer which are intended to accelerate cloud interoperability and boost deployments.

“Our investment in Mirantis is the next step in bringing open cloud infrastructure to the entire industry as part of Intel’s ‘Cloud for All’ initiative,” said Diane Bryant, senior vice president and general manager, Data Center Group, Intel.

“As enterprises embrace public, private and hybrid cloud strategies, they need choices in their infrastructure software. OpenStack is an ideal open solution for cloud-native applications and services, and our collaboration with Mirantis is well placed to ensure the delivery of critical new enterprise features helping to create of tens of thousands of clouds,” Bryant said.

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Why cloud MSPs are software companies

(c)iStock.com/barcin

By Jason Deck, vice president of strategic development, Logicworks

When your infrastructure is code, the art of developing great software applications and building great infrastructure systems start to look similar.

Many of the best practices of software development — continuous integration, versioning, integration testing — are now the best practices of systems engineers. In enterprises that have aggressively virtualised data centres or moved to the public cloud, servers, switches, and hypervisors are now strings and brackets in JSON.

The scripts that spin up a server (instance) or configure a network can be standardised, modified over time, and reused. These scripts are essentially software applications that build infrastructure and are maintained much like a piece of software. They are versioned in GitHub and engineers patch the scripts or containers, not the hardware, and test those scripts again and again on multiple projects until they are perfected.

Cloud MSPs build up a library of automation scripts over time, but it is not a plug and play system

Providers that build and manage cloud infrastructure for clients accumulate entire libraries of these scripts. These libraries are a cloud MSP’s core intellectual property, and what differentiates one MSP from another. And this software is a main reason why enterprises need MSPs in the first place.

Why automation software?

Engineers can easily be trained to perform the basics of cloud management manually. Anyone can launch an EC2 instance from the AWS console. But when you need to deploy an instance that has fully configured security groups, subnets, databases, etc. and is HIPAA compliant, it becomes harder to find and/or train this talent. Even fewer enterprises have the in-house staff capable of writing scripts that help developers or systems staff who can launch instances automatically.

It would take multiple, senior-level level automation engineers working for months to develop a script that spins up perfectly configured instances for a variety of applications from scratch. If cloud MSPs can run a script (created beforehand) to spin up a new environment in days, that is a huge value add for enterprises.

Why not just train engineers on the lower-level manual cloud configuration tasks? Because enterprises do not just want to turn manual data centre work into manual cloud console work. An infrastructure as code transition is also usually accompanied by a transition to a DevOps culture, part of which usually means helping developers to work faster. Business leaders do not want developers to wait for systems engineers to push new features. They want more experimentation and faster product lifecycles. Ideally, they want developers to have tools at their fingertips to deploy code without having to worry about the infrastructure at all.

Infrastructure automation makes a DevOps transition possible. Developers can get their code tested and in production in minutes. Automation empowers cost-effective experimentation. Tools like containerisation create a common language for both systems engineers and developers to communicate.

One caveat, however: cloud MSPs build up a library of automation scripts over time, but it is not a plug and play system. Various automation scripts have to be customised for the packages required to run those applications, and they need to be tweaked to meet the unique security demands of each client. That is just in the effort to get the infrastructure build-out process automated; a great cloud MSP will also orchestrate multiple automated systems across multiple environments, and these usually require a combination of custom jobs and cloud orchestration software.

Cloud orchestration

As we have discussed previously, infrastructure orchestration is a key missing element on many cloud projects. CTOs and CIOs struggle to coordinate projects across hundreds of data centres and multiple clouds, and compliance officers struggle to monitor and audit them. Lengthy governance processes are getting cut, but enterprises still have serious compliance and governance obligations that now must be met in even more complex systems.

Unfortunately, cloud orchestration software is not yet mature. MSPs are the only vendors that have developed true cloud orchestration software through a combination of custom programming and third party APIs.

Here is an example of one such application. When an engineer logs into their MSP-provided cloud software, they can:

  • See a complete overview of what is running across multiple environments
  • Monitor cloud costs (through a 3rd party application like CloudCheckr)
  • Monitor security alerts
  • Spin up new instances in a few clicks (perhaps using Docker)
  • File repair/upgrade tickets
  • See status of current tickets
  • Read Wikis
  • Pay bills
  • Integrate with existing security monitoring software, antivirus, and logging systems, and even with monitoring of their on-premises virtualised environments.  

Developing such systems requires quite a bit of complex integration and software development. This is usually custom per-client. But this level of transparency across environments is exactly what enterprises need.

Next-generation cloud software

The services AWS and Google offer are constantly changing. AWS has released hundreds of major updates to its services in 2015. It is experimenting in mobile development software. It has created services that make complex cloud automation tasks easier.

We predict the next wave of software development will include the services that an MSP currently performs more or less manually, and that have limited or no software options on the market

Every six months, AWS releases services that have the potential to disrupt entire software industries. At the same time, AWS Marketplace has become the destination for cloud ISVs developing cloud-based software, including automation and other functions.

In other words, there is a fertile and rapidly shifting cloud ecosystem that appears to be swallowing up traditional software market channels. This has allowed newcomers to shape entire industries and forced old players to adapt.

We predict that the next wave of software development will include the services that an MSP currently performs more or less manually, and that have limited or no software options on the market including the following:

  • Predictive, big data-crunching software that determines you are going to need more infrastructure before something like AWS CloudWatch knows
  • Fully automated backups and disaster recovery
  • Automated destructive testing that empirically proves the infrastructure is highly available, currently done manually with something like Netflix’s Simian Army
  • More sophisticated multi-cloud integration software between AWS and other clouds
  • More sophisticated hybrid cloud identity and access management, currently managed somewhat manually with AWS IAM and Active Directory
  • More Docker-like packages of code with “built in” compliance, like HIPAA and PCI

Together, cloud automation and orchestration software have the potential to drastically reduce the effort in migrating to the cloud, reduce the risk of human error, guarantee that developers maintain compliance, and increase speed of development. Cloud MSPs will become software companies as well as curators of a dizzyingly complex software marketplace, and help enterprises put the latest cloud innovations to work.

The post Why Cloud MSPs Are Software Companies appeared first on Gathering Clouds.

Case Study, Citrix, Parallels RAS, Parallels Remote Application Server, RAS, Remote Application Server

Case Study: Orchestr8 Chooses Parallels RAS to Replace Citrix

“Parallels Remote Application Server has been the most reliable component within the whole system. It has never failed to do its job. The main driving factor was the cost of licensing, with Parallels Remote Application Server being considerably cheaper for concurrent users than Citrix,” ~ Stuart Watton, Systems Manager at Orchestr8 Orchestr8 chose Parallels Remote Application […]

The post Case Study: Orchestr8 Chooses Parallels RAS to Replace Citrix appeared first on Parallels Blog.