The Internet of Things (IoT) is growing rapidly by extending current technologies, products and networks. By 2020, Cisco estimates there will be 50 billion connected devices. Gartner has forecast revenues of over $300 billion, just to IoT suppliers. Now is the time to figure out how you’ll make money – not just create innovative products.
With hundreds of new products and companies jumping into the IoT fray every month, there’s no shortage of innovation. Despite this, McKinsey/VisionMobile data shows «less than 10 percent of IoT developers are making enough to support a reasonably sized team.”
Archivo mensual: noviembre 2015
Delivering the Honeywell User Experience Through OnPrem Monitoring | @CloudExpo #Cloud
Being able to ensure a positive experience for your customers and end users is one of the hallmarks of any great company. Yet with all of the different internal and external online systems needed to do that, early detection and rapid response to performance issues becomes harder and more expensive.
Join us for the OpsCast, Delivering the Honeywell User Experience Through OnPrem Monitoring, to learn how Honeywell International, one of the world’s largest producers of commercial and consumer technology, has deployed synthetic OnPrem agents throughout their global networks. Citing specific examples of obstacles that the company has faced, Paul Fries, Monitoring Leader at Honeywell, will show how their customers benefit from synthetic OnPrem monitoring.
Blue Coat Systems Acquires Elastica
Blue Coat Systems as recently announced its agreement to acquire Elastica , Inc. for $280 million.
Because of the unprecedented rate with which cloud applications have been adopted, there is also an unprecedented necessity for increased security and protection for such applications. Due to the mixed use of cloud and on premise applications, Blue Coat Systems has found it difficult to efficiently manage its security. With the addition of Elastica, Blue Coat will be able to offer a global security platform with across the board data level security. This will make Blue Coat the only company to deliver the requirements that resulted from post-infrastructure. By combining the talents of Blue Coat with Elastica’s Cloud Access Security and Analytics, Blue Coat will provide a solution to the problems associated with cloud security requirements. Elastica’s CloudSOC provides tools such as threat scoring powered by machine learning, user and end-point behavior modeling, natural language-based cloud DLP, and analysis with remediation in a cloud application SOC. Elastica delivers such tools through its CASB gateway and API controls for cloud security management and enforcement.
Greg Clark, Blue Coat CEO, has commented: “This acquisition gives Blue Coat customers access to Elastica’s CloudSOC, which brings an unprecedented level of elegance and innovation to something that is rapidly becoming a complex challenge for organizations to solve. As we evaluated many CASB players, it was clear that Elastica’s technologies represent the future of the CASB space. Segmented CASB players have survived through their dependency upon existing on-premise infrastructure. As the industry’s leading web security platform, it is natural for Blue Coat to be the first to deliver an extended spectrum of CASB capabilities while also delivering them with our cloud protection solutions.”
Mike Fey, Blue Coat president and COO, also added, ““Our customers cannot tolerate a world where the performance and security of cloud applications are spread across a tangled web of solutions leaving them powerless to manage the threat and deliver the SLA which their users have come to expect. Corporations are facing a dissolving perimeter. The traditional infrastructure-centric way of protecting users cannot support the cloud age. We have made it our mission to solve this challenge by delivering an entire solution from the cloud, specifically built for the cloud.”
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How to Resize Your Parallels Desktop Virtual Machine
Guest blog by Paul Christopher Nathaniel, Parallels Support Team Living in today’s world of “Big Data,” the size of the files we create, share, and store doesn’t matter so much anymore. Do you remember those times when we had to shrink the size of pictures just to save some hard disk space? These days, most PCs […]
The post How to Resize Your Parallels Desktop Virtual Machine appeared first on Parallels Blog.
Our Favorite Smartphone Accessories
It seems like everyone today makes a branded phone accessory, and way too many of them generate that “This device is not supported” error when you plug them into your phone. Looking for some good accessories for the magic-computer-that-also-happens-to-make-phone-calls that’s always in your pocket? Here’s a list of some of my favorites that have all somehow […]
The post Our Favorite Smartphone Accessories appeared first on Parallels Blog.
DevOps skills continue to be in high demand, survey shows
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A survey from Puppet Labs shows DevOps engineers earn “noticeably higher” salaries than the majority of other job titles.
More than half (55%) of those polled in the 2015 DevOps Salary Report earn $100,000 per year or more, according to the research. The only job role which is more likely to provide greater remuneration is architect, which includes cloud or infrastructure architect and systems architect.
“Now that organisations are learning the benefits of DevOps, we’re seeing additional salary data that reveals just how much demand there is around the world for highly qualified IT and DevOps practitioners,” said Nigel Kersten, CIO at Puppet Labs. “It’s encouraging to see these positions continue to grow, and we look forward to watching the market evolve and adapt to the growing urgency around making IT a competitive advantage.”
The research also revealed a divide between the sexes which still exists, but is not a chasm; even though more men (47%) reported earning $100,000 or more than women (36%), the situation was reversed with regard to the $50,000 to $100,000 bracket (59% of women, 47% of men).
Previous Puppet Labs research, on the state of DevOps implementations, found a ‘pathological, power-oriented culture’ makes employees burn out faster. Managers should be encouraged to incorporate a culture of ‘continuous learning’, as well as implement a blame-free environment, such as post-mortems following outages which don’t exist to point the finger at someone.
Back in October a study from Appvance, conducted by Vanson Bourne, found 91% of CIOs agreeing that executing a DevOps strategy was a top priority for their organisation. Almost nine in 10 (89%) said ensuring confidence in the quality of their releases was key to success, while 87% advocated increasing velocity and productivity as their main priorities.
Identity management in the cloud: What does it actually mean?
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Identity management in the cloud? What does this actually mean to us? We don’t yet have an established definition of cloud identity management – and there is not even a Wikipedia page yet, although identity management is well founded. That says it all. I’m going to attempt to draw up a definition.
Using cloud applications has now become commonplace for many organisations. Certainly in education, cloud applications have been used for years, such as Office 365 and various electronic learning environments. Educational institutions are far ahead of other organisations when it comes to using cloud applications.
To stay within the context of identity management, these are mainly target systems that run in the cloud. Just to be clear, an identity management process encompasses one or more source systems – often the HR system or school information system, where the identity is registered, personal and contract details are maintained – the identity manager, and the target systems. The target systems are those where the identity must be ascertained and access must be granted.
Business applications to the cloud?
When the target systems are mainly cloud-based but the source systems are still not, I don’t believe we can yet speak of cloud identity management. In fact, this is a hybrid situation where a number of applications are running in the cloud, but the most critical business applications are still running on-premises.
Why don’t the critical business applications move to the cloud? Quite simply, they are just too critical. Consider the electronic health record, for instance. This is packed with confidential information and patients would feel uncomfortable knowing that their medical details are in the cloud. At the same time, many organisations, particularly those involved in corporate service provision, have heavy legacy business applications that were developed for them years before, and which would involve too much effort and expense if they were to be made cloud-based. New arrangements would have to be made with suppliers, and this is often not the suppliers’ priority.
When these target systems are probably not going to be offered as cloud-based in the near future, there’s also no necessity for organizations to nevertheless move their source systems to the cloud. Yet there are a few suppliers of source systems (HR systems) that are introducing the step to the cloud. They are now offering their applications either for the cloud or on-premises, but in the future will probably only offer a cloud version.
Alongside the source and target systems, there is the identity manager, the system which has to ensure that the digital identity is revealed in the various target systems, so that the authentication and authorisation for the identity is managed easily and uniformly. There are not yet many suppliers offering identity management in the cloud. In general, totally in the cloud is also not fully attainable. To be able to perform the processes, a small agent always needs to run on-premises. The business logic does then run centrally, and is thus outsourced.
Full cloud identity management
But what then is total identity management? Unfortunately, we still don’t have an answer for this. I believe that total identity management is only possible when alongside the source and target systems and the identity manager, the primary log in (authentication) for and by the user is also done in the cloud.
This means that the source against which the user is being authenticated, the Active Directory, must be in the cloud. An Azure Active Directory is generally also associated with outsourcing the entire management duties for the Active Directory to a third, outsourced party. This party could then also be responsible for ‘having control’ over the data, in other words managing the data and delivering the required reports for audits. SLAs would have to be agreed with such a party, involving the logical access security standards.
For now, complete identity management, where the source and target systems and the identity management system are partly in the cloud, along with the Active Directory, is only achievable for educational institutions and the SME sector. Using an Azure Active Directory has now become very common in these sectors. Complete cloud identity management offers many possibilities. For instance, it would be easier to offer users single sign-on. With a one-time registration, from any device they could gain access to thousands of cloud applications. With WebSSO, users could employ their company credentials to launch applications from a portal or a mobile app. This means users would not have to remember the log-in details for all the different cloud applications.
Unfortunately total cloud identity management including a cloud Active Directory is not going to be the way ahead for every organisation – but the possibilities are certainly coming steadily closer.
Machine to Container (M2C) Teleports Existing Enterprise Apps to the Cloud
It’s been a busy time for tech’s ongoing infatuation with containers. Amazon just announced EC2 Container Registry to simply container management. The new Azure container service taps into Microsoft’s partnership with Docker and Mesosphere. You know when there’s a standard for containers on the table there’s money on the table, too.
Everyone is talking containers because they reduce a ton of development-related challenges and make it much easier to move across production and testing environments and clouds. Containers are the technology that, many believe, deliver on the long-promised portability in the cloud to avoid vendor lock-in, and put developers, system administrators and their enterprises in the driver’s seat.
Avere-Microsoft joint effort enables Azure hybrids
Enterprise storage vendor Avere Systems is to work with Microsoft so that its Virtual FXT Edge filers can be used with Microsoft Azure.
The hardware maker, which specialises in creating storage devices that caters for hybrid cloud set ups, says the two vendors are collaborating to make it easier and cheaper to get the qualities of the cloud from IT infrastructure that is situated ‘on premise’.
The system aims to simplify the task of creating a system for providing computing power, memory and storage on demand for enterprise IT staff who are not specialists in running cloud services. The Avere technology is designed to make data that is held on network attached storage (NAS) more readily accessible to Azure, so that users don’t experience any latency.
The rationale is that many companies want the liquidity of cloud computing but are not allowed to move their data off the company premises, according to Avere. Its solution was to invent a ‘virtual NAS’ system that is easy for an enterprise IT department employee to install and manage. Meanwhile the system is sophisticated enough to provide multi-protocol file access (including NFS and SMB) and clusters, making it powerful enough to deliver high availability, scalable performance and capacity.
As hybrid cloud systems become the de facto standard for enterprises, it’s important that they are easy enough for IT department employees to manage, according to Nicole Herskowitz, Microsoft Azure’s Senior Director of Product Marketing, Microsoft Azure.
By adapting the system to work smoothly with Azure, enterprise IT department managers can deploy thousands of Azure HPC instances on-demand to crunch data with low latency and no data migration. This means businesses can tap into hyper-converged infrastructure of Azure with ease, without breaking the bank, Avere claims.
“At Avere, we’ve been dedicated to shattering the myth that organizations can’t have enterprise NAS performance in the public cloud,” said Rebecca Thompson, VP Marketing of Avere Systems, “with Microsoft we’re helping enterprises harness the computing power of Microsoft Azure, which is used by 57% of Fortune 500 companies for big data applications.”
Getronics buys Colt’s Managed Cloud business
IT services provider The Getronics Group has bought Colt’s Managed Cloud business to add it to a portfolio that includes Getronics, GWA and Connectis. Service provider Getronics said it will now extend the range of offering to a client based it previously serviced on behalf of Colt.
The deal includes the acquisition of Colt’s cloud technologies and support services across the UK, France, Germany, Spain, the Netherlands, Belgium, Italy, India, Romania and Switzerland. The Getronics family of companies will now run the managed cloud services supplied to Colt’s customer base, using Colt’s own network, voice and data centre capabilities.
Colt Managed Cloud has 600 customers across multiple verticals including financial services, media and government. It employs staff working across operations, transition and engagement, presales, service management and support functions.
The Getronics Group, owned by Aurelius since its acquisition in 2012, has previously acquired the Spanish application services divisions of Thales, Telvent and Steria Iberica and NEC’s unified communications direct sales and services divisions in four countries. The Colt Managed Cloud was named as a market leader in Cloud enabled Hosting for three consecutive years by analyst Gartner, in its Magic Quadrant reports.
The Getronics Group has 6,000 employees in 18 countries across Europe, Asia Pacific & Latin America. The IT service provider division of the group has had a long running arrangement with Colt to run its services to its clients and the deal represents a formal transfer of ownership, according to Getronics CEO Mark Cook. “Today’s announcement demonstrates our commitment to offering the latest, best of breed IT services to our customers. We are looking forward to welcoming the transferring customers and employees into the Getronics family in the new year,” said Cook.
The financial terms of the deal are undisclosed. The completion of this transaction is subject to regulatory and competition clearances and compliance with local labour laws.