As cloud and storage projections continue to rise, the number of organizations moving to the cloud is escalating and it is clear cloud storage is here to stay. However, is it secure?
Data is the lifeblood for government entities, countries, cloud service providers and enterprises alike and losing or exposing that data can have disastrous results.
There are new concepts for data storage on the horizon that will deliver secure solutions for storing and moving sensitive data around the world.
In his session at 18th Cloud Expo, Scott Sobhani, CEO and cofounder of Cloud Constellation Corporation and the SpaceBelt, Information Ultra-Highway, attendees learned about new best practices to bypass the Internet.
Archivo mensual: julio 2016
Chef launches ‘flagship’ product Automate, aims for greater enterprise DevOps rollouts
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IT automation software provider Chef has announced the launch of Chef Automate, claimed to be a flagship software product which ties together all of the company’s product portfolio.
Chef Automate aims to give users comprehensive visibility across all applications and their supporting environments, providing a single dashboard with access to analytics, trending data and health status of Chef-managed resources.
Other key features include a unified workflow, essentially a shared pipeline – previously known as Chef Delivery – which provides a fixed and reusable workflow when changing infrastructure or applications, monitoring progress and changes as workflows move from development to product. Chef Automate also offers proactive compliance to ensure companies are operating according to their security policies.
The product is available immediately through an annual subscription, and includes commercial support for open source projects Chef, InSpec and Habitat.
“Velocity is the ultimate goal of every business and in today’s software-driven economy, that can only happen through IT automation,” said Ken Cheney, VP business development and product marketing at Chef. “However, many organisations are still forced to choose between speed and security.
“We think that’s absurd. Chef Automate allows businesses everywhere to stop trading off between velocity and safety – you can have both,” he added.
Chef claims its client has been downloaded more than 37 million times, with more than 80% of its revenue coming from enterprise organisations. Total booking have grown more than 80% year over year in the second quarter of 2016, according to the company.
Chef has also announced the launch of a certification program, offering training and credentials for developers, IT and system admins. The regular missives which arrive in this publication’s inbox regarding key tech job skills invariably mention DevOps and automation; according to Rackspace last month, jobs requiring DevOps skills went up a ‘modest’ 53% over the past year, with 3,723 jobs available. The managed cloud provider argued this was indicative of the area moving more into the mainstream.
Tour the #Agile #DigitalTransformation Roadmap | @CloudExpo #IoT #Cloud #DevOps #BigData
Since we launched our Agile Digital Transformation Roadmap poster two weeks ago, several hundred people around the globe have downloaded it – but it’s not clear how many of them have taken the time to work their way through it.
Haven’t seen it yet, you say? No worries – you can download the poster for free at AgileDigitalTransformation.com.
OK then – everyone have the poster handy? Good. Here’s how to make sense of it.
Why cloud and mobile bring growth – and new challenges – to the mainframe
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There is abundant evidence that prove the mainframe remains the world’s most reliable, scalable and secure computing platform today. Does the adaptability, scalability and low entry costs offered by the cloud compete for its workload?
Short answer: no. Rather, cloud has increased the mainframe workload. Cloud, mobility, and the explosion of the application economy are directly responsible for driving growth in mainframe utilization. In fact, our mainframe customers have reported an average 8% to 9% growth in their mainframe workloads.
This might seem ironic to some – the popular storyline in technology is that new technology replaces what came before it. There are two reasons why mainframe is the exception to the rule: 1) more than 70% of corporate data still resides on the mainframe and 2) the mainframe remains a spectacularly reliable, scalable, secure, and cost-effective platform. So the more that enterprises deploy cloud and mobile, the more they use their mainframes. Furthermore, according to IBM, 55% of all enterprise apps, which are mushrooming, touch the mainframe in one way or the other because if they didn’t those apps would be static, shallow and quickly abandoned.
Given this reality, here are three imperatives for every IT leader, whose company has a mainframe, to build the right foundation in the application economy.
Commit to mainframe growth
Many IT leaders have neglected their mainframe environments as they’ve focused more on distributed, cloud and mobility initiatives. However, unless you’re going to undertake the costly, disruptive, and extremely risky path of massive application “re-platforming,” your mainframe environment is going to keep growing—which means its potential value to your business is going to keep growing too.
Smart IT leaders will re-invest in the mainframe to ensure that it can keep delivering reliable, secure, and cost-efficient computing services that underpin their mobile/cloud apps for the foreseeable future. Specifically, for those net-new critical workloads, consider designating your mainframe as the platform of choice, especially Linux workloads that can run very cost-efficiently at scale on IBM’s Linux on z Systems implementation.
Mainframe-enable your next-generation IT staff
As you build the foundation for your IT environment in the application economy, it’s also critical to enable your developers and ops teams with the right skills. Few if any of your younger developers have ever written a line of COBOL. Nor is it likely that anyone under 30 on your ops team knows anything about flattening mainframe workload peaks to keep MSUs down. Because you will be updating your mainframe apps, tuning your mainframe databases, and managing your mainframe environment, you therefore need to invest in tools and training that will enable a new generation of IT professionals to perform all the DevOps tasks you need them to perform including those on your mainframe.
Create a unified cross-platform approach to application performance management (APM)
If the digital capabilities you deliver to your employees and your customers utilize data and application code across multiple platforms—including distributed, cloud, and mainframe—then it makes sense to unify your application performance monitoring across those platforms as well. Without that unified monitoring, you’ll have trouble maintaining the service levels that are critical for both customer satisfaction and a high-productivity workplace.
Of course, unified APM is easier said than done. True cross-platform APM requires much more than a bunch of separate platform-specific tools. It requires an integrated approach to monitoring, along with troubleshooting/trouble-preventing processes that treats the entire end-to-end enterprise environment as a single entity. Shy of that, the mainframe will remain highly siloed—much to the detriment of IT’s efficiency and ability to support the business.
Simply put, organizations who understand the value and criticality of their mainframe technology will continue to invest when faced with the opportunities, challenges, and uncertainties in today’s application economy. The challenges play directly into the mainframe’s classic strengths, and the community of mainframe independent software vendors continues to innovate to meet challenges head on.
To succeed, IT leaders must come to terms with the big irony of Big Iron—which is that digital innovation is making the mainframe more important, not less. Mainframe management strategies must evolve accordingly.
Read more: Why the resiliency of the mainframe is not a surprise in the cloud computing age
GE and Microsoft Collaborate
GE and Microsoft have recently announced a partnership in which GE’s Predix platform-as-a-service (PaaS) will be offered through Microsoft’s Azure cloud. This collaboration brings GE’s Internet of Things (IoT) to the software giant’s cloud. The announcement was made during Microsoft’s Worldwide Partner Conference in Toronto, Canada.
Existing Predix customers who are already with GE will gain access to Azure’s Data as well as Cortsns snd global infrastructure centers. There are plans to strengthen this partnership between the two companies by further integrating Predix into Microsoft’s products such as Azure’s IoT Suite, Cortana Analytics Suite, and Office 365.
This partnership joins Microsoft’s other cloud software space collaborations with companies including SAP and Red Hat.
About Predix: Introduced in 2015, Predix is a cloud based Platform-as-a-Service. GE utilizes the software platform to collect data from industrial machines. Predix was designed to develop, deploy, operate, and monetize Industrial Internet applications.
About Azure: Released in 2010, Microsoft Azure is a cloud computing platform intended to manage applications and services through Microsoft data centers. Azure provides Platform as a Service (PaaS) as well as Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS).
Comments:
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella: “Working with companies like GE, we can reach a new set of customers to help them accelerate their transformation across every line of business – from the factory floor to smart buildings.”
The post GE and Microsoft Collaborate appeared first on Cloud News Daily.
IoT-Enabled Services | @ThingsExpo @AAkela #IoT #DigitalTransformation
In addition to all the benefits, IoT is also bringing new kind of customer experience challenges – cars that unlock themselves, thermostats turning houses into saunas and baby video monitors broadcasting over the internet. This list can only increase because while IoT services should be intuitive and simple to use, the delivery ecosystem is a myriad of potential problems as IoT explodes complexity. So finding a performance issue is like finding the proverbial needle in the haystack.
How to Combat Security Cracks Created By Collaboration | @CloudExpo #Cloud #Cybersecurity
Cybercrime costs the global economy as much as $450 billion each year. And, the median cost of cybercrime has increased by nearly 200% in the last five years.
Meanwhile, collaboration has become the cornerstone of successful organizations. But collaboration often comes with a risk. The number of cyberattacks will grow as employees increasingly use collaboration tools to maximize their company’s productivity. This is because these tools can provide new points of entry for hackers looking to cause damage. This issue could become more serious as we will see more radical collaboration tools in the days to come. Fortunately, there are always going to be readily available solutions.
New Marketing Methods for Cloud Software | @CloudExpo #Cloud #DataCenter #Virtualization
Over the years, marketing in general has shifted from outbound “interruption-based” marketing to inbound “get found” marketing. This means demonstrating thought leadership while creating remarkable content, and sharing it through channels in which people with interest can find it. This is way more fun, and also means that marketing activities are far more measurable. The marketing A-B testing and associated analytics integrate this art form with science – a combination that makes it more cost effective, creates more expected results, and ultimately makes it something I particularly enjoy.
Cloud: Disrupting Application Architecture | @CloudExpo #SaaS #PaaS #ITaaS #Cloud
A revolutionary change in the industry was the foundation of cloud on the automation of virtualization technologies. Initially it was meant for infrastructure, but with the advent of new and innovative cloud services it has crossed the boundary of Infrastructure and invaded the application space. The concept of ‘as a Service’ model has three pillars: IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service), PaaS (Platform as a Service) and SaaS (Software as a Service). Over a period of time cloud services have grown and diversified to the extent that clubbing the services into these three pillars is not only difficult but unattainable. That’s the reason none of the public cloud providers classify their services in ‘as a Service’ model category.
[video] Private Cloud with @Accelerite | @CloudExpo #API #Cloud #DataCenter
«We have several customers now running private clouds. They’re not as large as they should be but it’s getting there. The adoption challenge has been pretty simple. Look at the world today of virtualization vs cloud,» stated Nara Rajagopalan, CEO of Accelerite, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at 18th Cloud Expo, held June 7-9, 2016, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY.