Shivon Zilis is an investor at Bloomberg Beta, a very interesting early stage venture capital fund. I knew I would like Bloomberg Beta when I saw how they do their website. It is smart and reflects very well on their leadership team: They decided to leverage GitHub for their site. Doing so puts them one step closer to the creators that a VC in their space needs to know and is a great way to step out in a trust-based relationship. It is also a great way to be more transparent- they use GitHub to provide their entire operating manual for all to see.

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Many types of web applications are running on the Internet today. There are also as many ways to manage and maintain the infrastructure that powers those applications. IBM® Bluemix™ delivers quick and easy cloud capabilities to deploy and maintain your web application, with minimal hassle and overhead. As you follow along with two lab-style scenarios, this IBM Redpaper™ publication demonstrates how to create and deploy a web-based collaboration application on IBM Bluemix

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Over the years, one of my favorite pastimes has been working on the family genealogy. I first started work on it in the early 1990s. At that time, records were not digitized and research involved going to libraries, newspapers, and various local, state, and federal archives. There one would have to sift through reams of old records, documents and microfiche. If you were lucky, someone had created printed indices of the information contained in those documents. These indices, when they existed, were based on manual transcription of the data, and prone to the data quality. This is inherent in transcribing information from what frequently were old handwritten documents. The challenge was then trying to find those nuggets of information that would relate and connect to individuals you were trying to locate in your research.

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Everything will be on the cloud. It almost sounds like overstatement even in 2016 doesn’t it?
Could we really get ourselves to the point where we regard the cloud layer as our first, primary, default and de facto location for data? The answer is: yes, we do already… although perhaps not all of us have even realized it yet.
When we do start to fully appreciate what the cloud computing layer of data storage and application services can really do for us, we will find ourselves almost ‘set free’ from our previous notions of how we use the computers, laptops, tablets and smartphones that we regard as our most trusted devices today.

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You can’t seem to have a conversation about cloud technology and its impact on the business without the topic of Shadow IT coming up. The two concepts at times seem so tightly intertwined, one would think there is a certain inevitability, almost a causal linkage between them. Shadow IT tends to be an emotional topic for many, dividing people into one of two camps. One camp tends to see Shadow IT as a great evil putting companies, their data and systems at risk by implementing solutions without oversight or governance. Another camp sees Shadow IT as the great innovators that are helping the company succeed by allowing the business to bypass a slow and stagnant IT organization. Does going to the cloud inherently mean there will be Shadow IT? If it does, is that necessarily a bad or good thing?

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The Federal Government’s “Cloud First” policy mandates that agencies take full advantage of cloud computing benefits to maximize capacity utilization, improve IT flexibility and responsiveness, and minimize cost. The Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP) is a mandatory government-wide program that provides a standardized approach to security assessment, authorization, and continuous monitoring for cloud products and services. Advantages for business include being able to market to many federal agencies after a single FedRAMP review following the government’s “approve once, and use often” approach.

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