Get To Know the Citrix Product Lifecycle Matrix — You’re Going To Need It! Citrix is a leading provider of virtualization solutions for businesses of all sizes. During its 25 years in the industry, Citrix has partnered with technology giants such as Microsoft and Cisco to create highly secure and reliable virtual network solutions. Along […]
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Thank you to all of you for 10 amazing years, and more to come! Parallels Desktop for Mac is officially 10 years old! Holy crow! We send heartfelt gratitude for the immense amount of support shown by our over seven million loyal customers worldwide. Since the inception of Parallels Desktop in 2006 we have stayed […]
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More research has arrived detailing the importance of embracing shadow IT as opposed to cordoning it off, this time from NTT Communications, which has found almost four in five (78%) of organisations have employees using cloud services without the knowledge of IT.
The research, which polled 500 IT and business decision makers across the EU, found that more than half (57%) believe shadow IT practices are happening across at least half of the departments in their organisation, while a similar number (56%) admit they have no idea where their shadow IT data is being stored. Three quarters (77%) of IT decision makers are aware that shadow IT practices are going on in their organisations.
62% of respondents argued that ease of set up was their primary motivation for subverting IT rules, while almost one in three (29%) said shadow IT was a cheaper alternative to the official option.
The findings are particularly eye-opening because, in the case of not knowing where data is being stored, such oversights would fail to pass muster in the new EU General Data Protection Regulation, leaving organisations at risk of major fines.
“Our recommendation is that IT departments jettison the ‘ministry of no’ approach and instead work with their business colleagues to understand why the shadow IT solutions they are currently using are better than those that the IT department can offer,” said Len Padilla, NTT Europe VP product strategy. “This consultative approach will enable organisations to get a full view of their IT estate.
“This will effectively create an amnesty with which to achieve compliance – while retaining the edge employees are looking for to carry out their jobs and ensure the success of the business,” he added.
Earlier this week, research from cloud security provider CloudLock found that more than a quarter of cloud apps connected to corporate environments were seen as high risk, creating security as well as compliance fears.
Chef has launched a new open source project called Habitat, which it claims introduces a new approach for application automation.
The team claim Habitat is a unique piece of software which enables applications to be freed from dependency on a company’s infrastructure. When applications are wrapped in Habitat the runtime environment is no longer the focus and does not constrain the application itself. Due to this USP applications can run across numerous environments such as containers, PaaS, cloud infrastructure and on premise data centres, but also has the intelligence to self-organize and self-configure, the company claims.
“We must free the application from its dependency on infrastructure to truly achieve the promise of DevOps,” said Adam Jacob, CTO at Chef. “There is so much open source software to be written in the world and we’re very excited to release Habitat into the wild. We believe application-centric automation can give modern development teams what they really want — to build new apps, not muck around in the plumbing.”
Chef would generally be considered a challenger to the technology industry’s giants having only been founded in 2008, though the company has made positive strides in recent years specializing in the DevOps and containers arenas, two of the more prominent growth areas. Although both of these areas are prominent in marketing campaigns and conference presentations, applications into the real-world have been more difficult.
The Habitat product is built on the idea that infrastructure dictated the design of an application. Chef claims by making the application and its automation the unit of deployment, developers can focus on business value and planning features that will make their products stand out rather than on the constraints of infrastructure and particular runtime environments.
“The launch of Habitat is a significant moment for both Chef and the entire DevOps community in the UK and EMEA,” said Joe Pynadath, GM of EMEA for Chef Software, Chef. “It marks our next evolution and will provide an absolutely transformative, paradigm shift to how our community and customers can approach application management and automation. An approach that puts the application first and makes them independent of their underlying infrastructure. I am extremely excited to see the positive impact that our Chef community and customers throughout Europe will gain from this revolutionary technology.”
Facebook, Bethesda Softworks and Sony are among the names to have announced new made-for-VR games at E3, reports Telecoms.com.
Facebook has launched 30 made-for-VR games for the Oculus Touch as it continues efforts to diversify its portfolio. Aside from those being released in the coming months, the Oculus team have also stated it has ‘hundreds’ more titles in the pipeline, though it hasn’t established when the Touch motion controllers might ship. The announcement also included the launch of Oculus Ready PCs, made by Alienware, Lenovo, and HP.
Bethesda Softworks also claims its Fallout 4 will become first big open-world game to get an official, studio-released virtual reality mode, as well as Sony announcing its Resident Evil title will receive the ‘full VR experience’.
While the shift towards VR and AR offers healthy potential for brands and gaming companies alike, it could present the same challenges for network players as the rise of mobile. VR could provide similar stress on the network as smartphone mass-adoption and the subsequent reduction in the price of data did. Deloitte estimates 2.5 million VR headsets and 10 million game copies could be sold in 2016 alone.
From a VR perspective, the gaming industry represents a healthy opportunity for brands such as Oculus. Research from intelligence firm Newzoo estimates gamers worldwide could generate a total of $99.6 billion in revenues in 2016, up 8.5% compared to 2015. Mobile will account for $36.9 billion, exceeding PC revenues for the first time, and growth is expected to continue at a healthy 6.6% CAGR through to 2019, potentially reaching $118.6 billion in total.
One of the main challenges for the VR industry currently is the levels of adoption and normalization of the technology itself. Currently the hardware is generally perceived as a luxury item and VR revenues will remain marginal for the short- to mid-term future until uptake has moved into the mainstream market. Newzoo expect the majority of revenues to be generated by hardware sales, spectator content, and live viewing formats, though this is likely to be the platform where consumers communicate with each other and interact with content in the long run.
Elsewhere in the industry, Sony has confirmed its first steps into the world of high-end VR, by announcing the release of PlayStation VR. The headset will be available later this year; October 13th and will be priced at $499 when bundled with the camera and Move controllers it needs to be fully functional.
While Sony is slightly later to the market than the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive, should the team be able to capitalise on strong performance in recent months the move could prove to be a successful venture. During the final quarter of 2015, Sony’s gaming division reported a 10.5% year-on-year increase revenue brought on by strong PlayStation hardware and software sales totalling $4.89 billion. Operating income for the gaming unit was 45.5% higher owing partly to the fact the company sold more than sold over 35 million PlayStation 4 consoles.
Research from Barclaycard claims cyber security is not being prioritized by small businesses, putting numerous organizations at risk of attack.
The findings state only 20% of the organizations surveyed believe cyber security is a top business priority, with 10% claiming their team has not invested in cyber security at all. The average attack costs UK businesses between £75,000 and £311,000 according to HM Government’s 2015 Information Security Breaches report, as more than 50% of the respondents believe their organization is at risk of a breach within the next 12 months.
“Businesses of all sizes face a constant and growing threat from cybercrime,” said Paul Clarke, Product Director at Barclaycard. “As our research shows, many small businesses are failing take the necessary precautions, either because they don’t know how to protect themselves or, more worryingly, because they don’t think they need to. At Barclaycard we work with our customers to ensure they are aware of the growing threats they face and understand how they can protect themselves from cyber threats.”
Worryingly for business owners throughout the UK, only 13% of those who completed the survey believe they have the relevant skills to adequately protect themselves online. This statistic, combined with the lack of prioritization around security, may indicate decision makers believe their organization is safer, as cyber criminals would target the larger and more data heavy businesses in the UK.
While this may be considered a perception held by small businesses, the findings claim just under half have been hit by at least one cyber-attack in the past year, with a tenth experiencing more than four attacks.
“Cybersecurity is not a one-off investment that can then be forgotten about, especially as criminals are becoming increasingly sophisticated in the way they target businesses,” said Clarke. “For fifty years we’ve been working in partnership with customers to ensure they are not only putting the right measures in place from the outset, but are also continuously reviewing their policies to keep up with the latest industry developments.”
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In one form or another, businesses have always employed data analysis to inform decision making. But today’s state of the art big data analytics platforms like Hadoop have taken things to a whole new level.
This new level of business functionality, called converged infrastructure, optimises business processes across an entire enterprise by grouping multiple IT components into a single computing package.
For example, converged infrastructure may include components like servers, storage, networking equipment, and software for IT infrastructure management, automation, and orchestration. That’s a lot of moving parts—a lot of data storage and processing power. And data analytics platforms like Hadoop route all that power and data through a central user interface allowing massive amounts of data to be crunched faster, easier, and cheaper. That may sound pretty incredible, but that neat little description falls short of demonstrating how big a deal converged infrastructure really is. So let’s take a look at how the online real estate giant, Trulia, is doing it.
One of the largest online residential real estate marketplaces around, Trulia claims more than 55 million unique site visits per month. Trulia is an online real estate marketplace whose service model centres on providing relevant and unique insights about properties, neighbourhoods, commute times, and school districts. Trulia’s insights are available at every level of the real estate industry including home buyers, sellers, and renters. But Trulia’s core strength is data.
Back in 2012, Trulia unveiled its new service to help real estate agents identify the best leads by tapping a trove of data the company had started analysing the year before, according to Reuters. Trulia Insight, as the service is called, shows real estate agents which potential buyers have pre-qualified for a mortgage and whether they are looking to buy a home in the next six months. And with the help of Hadoop, Trulia updates its website with new insights every night. A recent article on CIO.com explains that “every night, Trulia crunches more than a terabyte of new data and cross-references it with about two petabytes of existing data to deliver the most up-to-data real estate information to its users.”
In that same CIO.com article, Zane Williamson, one of Trulia’s senior DevOps engineers explains how their daily, terabyte data processing includes information from public records, real estate listings, and user activity. «We process this data across multiple Hadoop clusters and use the information to send out email and push notifications to our users,” Zane said. “That’s the lead driver to get users back to the site and interacting. It’s very important that it gets done in a daily fashion. Reliability and uptime for the workflows is essential.»
Two years after Trulia converged its IT infrastructure through the Hadoop platform, the company was acquired by its largest competitor, Zillow, for $3.5 billion. By 2015 Q4, Zillow announced that they had finished integrating the Trulia platform. In the wake of their merger with Trulia, Geekwire.com reported Zillow’s 2015 earnings increased seven cents per share, after analysts had projected a three cent loss.
Now Trulia and Zillow are moving forward with the same Hadoop-based data analytics platform, and according to Trulia’s vice president of data engineering, Deep Varma, they’re moving toward providing real-time data to users while enhancing the emotional aspects of their user experience. At the same time, according to siliconangle.com, Trulia and Zillow are working toward leveraging California’s Open Data Movement to further enhance their real estate insights with crime scores and public transit systems.
What comes to mind when you think of Parallels? Probably, our most well-known product, Parallels Desktop for Mac. But did you know we also have other powerful software tools? In this blog, I will be talking about Parallels Remote Application Server and the differences between versions 14 and 15. Shifting to Parallels Remote Application Server […]
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Cloud servers bring with them distributed hosting and the ability to anonymize identities and that has enabled cloud becoming a breeding ground for criminals and even terrorists.
The cloud brings unique advantages to individual and business users alike and this explains the exponential adoption rate that cloud has seen in the past decade. There are also numerous security challenges with the cloud especially in the areas of privacy and data theft that has concerned stakeholders for a long time. However, with sophisticated encryption technologies, the instances of cloud data getting stolen is only going to get fewer in future.
Enterprises must rethink network management in the cloud computing world. This new reality is driven by the rise of software defined networking, the virtualization of everything and a business imperative to create and deploy even newer information delivery models. With the entire infrastructure stack now fully programmable, the need to integrate the network with cloud compute services is essential. Another important environmental change is that both servers and applications have joined data with respect to mobility. This leads to an increased need to categorize those assets and apply appropriate security controls with respect to business/mission functions, data user role, location of access, legal/regulatory guidelines and user devices. In meeting the challenges of mobility and globalization, enterprises must address their lack control or complete visibility into the networks they use.