As a business communications tool, email is the dominant option, and many corporations have policies that allow the use of personal email on corporate computers. In a recent Adobe Systems commissioned online survey of 400 U.S. white-collar, adult workers, more than 90 percent of them admitted checking personal emails at work. The workers questioned in the poll estimated they spend 6.3 hours a day checking emails, with 3.2 hours devoted to work emails and 3.1 hours to personal messages. Nearly half of the respondents also said that their use of emails for work will increase in coming years with 19 percent saying it will go up substantially.
Archivo mensual: septiembre 2015
Hewlett-Packard to decimate its workforce as major split announced
Hewlett-Packard is to cut 10 per cent of its workforce, which could mean up to 30,000 redundancies, as plans to divide the company in two unfold.
The losses will come when Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) splits from the printer and PC business. The jobs cull will cost $2.7bn to carry out but will save the same amount in running costs every year, says HP.
The new structure proposed by chief executive Meg Whitman would steer HP Enterprise’s focus onto enterprises and government agencies while the PC and printing divisions would concentrate primarily on the consumer market.
Details have not been released about where the job cuts will be made, but Whitman told Wall Street analysts that the plan involves changing the nature of the workforce. The proportion of workers in what HPE calls ‘low-cost locations’ is expected to rise from today’s figure of around 42 per cent to to 60 per cent by 2018.
“We’ve done a significant amount of work over the past few years to take costs out and simplify processes,” Meg Whitman told a meeting of shareholders and Wall Street analysts, “these final actions will eliminate the need for any future corporate restructuring.”
Since the height of the dot com boom in 2000 Hewlett Packard’s stock has lost 60 per cent of its value. However, Hewlett-Packard remains one of the world’s largest technology companies, with revenues this year expected to top $50bn.
Earlier this year HP cut 55,000 jobs. These will not be the last of the job cuts, predicted Charles King, analyst at the Silicon Valley IT consulting firm Pund-IT. “The number is sadly larger than some people might have expected, but I think it’s a reflection of how much trouble HP has been having with its services,” said King.
Gemalto’s cloud-based encryption now available in Microsoft Azure marketplace
Security vendor Gemalto is to sell its SafeNet ProtectV encryption system on the Azure Marketplace. This means Microsoft’s Azure users will find it easier to encrypt and protect data and applications in the cloud and meet compliance regulations, it claims.
Gemalto says SafeNet ProtectV simplifies the protection of data. It encrypts each virtual machine created in the cloud in its entirety and extends this protection to attached storage volumes. By automating this process it saves users from the aggregated admin burden of configuring each virtual machine individually. Though the process is automated, SafeNet ProtectV allows customers to separate security administration duties. This means security enforcers can exert ‘granular’ levels of control and establish clear accountability with audit trails and detailed compliance reporting, it claims.
Maryland-based SafeNet was bought by Gemalto in August 2014 for US$890 million. SafeNet technology protects 80 per cent of the world’s intra-bank fund transfers and it employs 550 cryptographic engineers. Gemalto specialises in the protection of data, digital identities, payments, and transactions, at all points from the point of sale to the data centre.
The cloud infrastructure services market is on target to be a $42.7 billion industry in the next four years, said Gemalto’s encryption product VP Todd Moore. But, he said, that momentum will only be maintained if cloud services like Azure can meet the top levels of security and compliance.
“Easy implements of strong data protection and security in the cloud are a major consideration when moving sensitive workloads,” said Moore. Gemalto’s strategy is to make robust encryption frameworks simple so companies can move to the cloud with confidence – and ProtectV provides the audit controls, according to Moore.
Adding companies with cloud-based data encryption, like Gemalto, will convince more companies that it’s safe to use the cloud, according to Nicole Herskowitz, Senior Director of Product Marketing at Microsoft Azure. “Azure Marketplace provides customers with choice, flexibility and access,” said Herskowitz.
Join @SoftLayer at @CloudExpo Silicon Valley | #BigData #DevOps #API #Microservices
SYS-CON Events announced today that SoftLayer, an IBM company, has been named “Gold Sponsor” of SYS-CON’s 17th International Cloud Expo®, which will take place November 3–5, 2015 at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
SoftLayer operates a global cloud infrastructure platform built for Internet scale. With a global footprint of data centers and network points of presence, SoftLayer provides infrastructure as a service to leading-edge customers ranging from Web startups to global enterprises. SoftLayer’s modular architecture, full-featured API, and sophisticated automation provide unparalleled performance and control. Its flexible unified platform seamlessly spans physical and virtual devices linked via a worldwide network for secure, low-latency communications.
Accenture to buy Cloud Sherpas to help enterprise clients navigate the cloud
Accenture is to acquire advisory firm Cloud Sherpas, for an undisclosed fee, in a bid to beef up its cloud consultancy as more enterprises seek help with their hybrid computing strategies.
If concluded, the takeover will add 1,100 new staff to Accenture’s newly created Cloud First Applications team, which helps enterprises make their first moves towards a shared computing model.
Atlanta-based Cloud Sherpas has a similar mission statement, offering to guide enterprises through their cloud migrations. Since its creation in 2007 it has grown a global presence with offices in Australia, India, Japan, New Zealand, the Philippines, Singapore, United Arab Emirates and the UK. With its main focus on helping companies to adopt off-premise software-as-a-service (SaaS) systems, its major technology partnerships are with Google, Salesforce and ServiceNow.
Cloud Sherpas has been recognised as a Salesforce Global Strategic Consulting Partner and is one of four ServiceNow Master Partners in the world. It has won Google’s Work Partner of the Year on four occasions.
Accenture, one of Salesforce’s first global partners, currently has 2,700 certified professionals. The acquisition of Cloud Sherpas could bring a further 500 certified professionals to its team. It claims to run 13,000 cloud computing projects, with a clientele that includes three-quarters of the Fortune Global 100. It has a total of 17,000 cloud computing professionals.
“Cloud Sherpas was born in the cloud and we are perfectly aligned with Accenture’s cloud first agenda,” said Cloud Sherpas’ CEO David Northington, “The new organisation should prove a good fit for Accenture’s cloud first push.”
Accenture needs the new intake in order to keep up with the rapid pace of cloud adoption by enterprises, according to Paul Daugherty, chief technology officer of Accenture: “We’ve reached a tipping point as our clients rapidly adopt cloud systems.”
Salesforce president Keith Block welcomed the combination of the firm’s two strategic partners. “It’s proof positive of the momentum around our customer success platform,” said Block.
Customer Story: Parallels is a Lifesaver—Literally!
The following post is a customer story submitted to our Advocacy program by Jim S. from West Palm Beach, Florida. We are incredibly thankful to Jim for sharing his experience with us and allowing us to share it with you. Read on for Jim’s experience choosing and using Parallels Desktop. Unfortunately, there are a few […]
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Meet the Parallels Team at the Arizona Technology Summit
Today, the Parallels team is exhibiting at the Arizona Technology Summit conference in Phoenix, AZ (Booth 138) and demoing the latest version of Parallels Remote Application Server (RAS). Parallels RAS is one of the most effective broker connections for VDI & RDS with an unbeatable price and a seamless end-user experience, while also lowering costs and reducing complexity. […]
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SalesForce Internet of Things
Salesforce has announced the development of the Salesforce Internet of Things Cloud. This was announced at its large customer conference, Dreamforce, in San Francisco. To accommodate this new IoT cloud, an all-new thunder platform was developed. This platform joins the ranks of Lightning, Salesforce 1, and Wave.
Salesforce has seen a connection between its customers and the data that is generated from various sources. As a result, the company wishes to help edify customers of the many functions of this increasing amount of information that is accumulating. Dylan Steele, senior director of product marketing for the App Cloud at Salesforce, has told tech website TechCrunch, “We are watching the increasing volume of data coming off of connected devices, and we are thinking about how we can help customers deal with those massive amounts of data.” However, salesforce wishes to utilize this tool to help companies further their customers understanding of this massive amount of data that is coming from a multitude of sources: apps, web data, etc.
“When you look behind all of this, there is a customer generating all of this data,” he said. In theory, the more data you have about a customer, the more you can pinpoint their requirements and react to their needs. In practice, however processing all of this data is massively complex and many companies struggle with it today. Essentially, the latest Salesforce product provides what Salesforce has always done from its earliest days when it put CRM in the cloud. It’s doing the heavy lifting and saving customer from setting up and maintaining their own hardware, while giving them a set of tools to do the job in the cloud. Processing big data, however, is a bit more complex than dealing with customer and marketing data. Salesforce has its work cut out for it, but it believes it can help simplify a complex set of big data processing tasks related to the Internet of Things. You can buy this as a service, and you don’t have to worry about the different types of technology to manage the complex processes.”
In addition, the IoT cloud also brings a more industrial purpose; the IoT cloud will absorb more data from the Industrial IoT, which is being sent information sources such as factories, warehouses, and wind turbines.
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How a hybrid cloud architecture stops the data loss and shadow IT threat
(c)iStock.com/Erik Khalitov
Cloud computing continues to evolve at a fast pace, while having a large impact on modern businesses. Many organisations are considering or trialling cloud adoption, with Gartner predicting cloud computing as one of the 10 strategic technology trends for 2015, once again, showing its continuing momentum.
Cloud provides organisations with many benefits, such as the potential to reduce costs while increasing value by allowing the more efficient use of IT resources. It also has the ability to increase capacity while reducing the need to purchase capital equipment. Whilst there are many benefits, there are also some concerns around protecting data and applications from any possible vulnerabilities and threats, including shadow IT.
Cloud migration
Many believe that migrating data from existing data centres to the cloud means foregoing security, data ownership and weakening internal controls and audit trails. With a private cloud, data should be as secure as it is in an existing data centre, while with public and service provider clouds, security can be assured if sensible precautions are taken. However, the problem is that many migration projects are often rushed or not completed properly due to pressure from the business to simply ‘get it done’.
Before any migration project, it’s important to understand the current business environment, why data and applications need to be migrated and to examine any configuration requirements, particularly around the definition of user and system roles which are often far too broad in a traditional data centre setup. Organisations can do this by conducting a full audit and clean-up of the organisation’s security environment before starting the migration progress. This should include scope-based and role-based access requirements – in other words, who needs access to what and what they can do to it.
The easiest and most secure way to migrate data is through a two-stage migration process. This means attaching non-virtual, physical, existing servers to cloud storage – treating this as storage-as-a-service – then migrating the compute workload as and when the business is ready.
Shadow IT
IT departments no longer have control over all IT solutions implemented within the organisation, in fact their control risks being reduced as increased business flexibility is demanded. A shadow IT ecosystem has emerged where every single employee has the potential to act independently from the IT department, implementing cloud applications that may be convenient to them, but could pose a significant threat to their organisation’s information security and availability, potentially impacting its customers and consequently its revenue.
In some cases, customers may leave if you have a sustained outage or loss of client data. In turn, if end-users who’ve deployed rogue cloud apps leave, taking passwords with them, the enterprise can become locked out of their account. If this were to happen, the loss of client data or, more importantly, the loss of enterprise data presents a real risk to both reputation and security.
Enterprises can mitigate some of the issues of shadow IT by adopting hybrid cloud architecture. This provides the flexibility demanded by business units while also being structured and secure, maintaining control and assuring data governance. As enterprise IT evaluates the best technical approach for hybrid IT management, it’s vitally important that the speed, flexibility and agility drawing end users to public clouds in the first place be preserved in the hybrid model. Although you can’t be 100 per cent sure that the information you store on the cloud is safe, you can use these protective measures in order to make sure it is as secure as possible.
[session] Backup as a Service By @Vervaets | @CloudExpo #Cloud
Learn how Backup as a Service can help your customer base protect their data.
In his session at 17th Cloud Expo, Stefaan Vervaet, Director of Strategic Alliances at HGST, will discuss the challenges of data protection in an era of exploding storage requirements, show you the benefits of a backup service for your cloud customers, and explain how the HGST Active Archive and CommVault are already enabling this service today with customer examples.