Have you seen people wandering around in public spaces, eyes glued to their smartphones, pausing and turning in different directions as if seeking some invisible landmark? Chances are you’ve spotted someone playing Pokémon GO, a location-based augmented reality game that is taking the world by storm.
Released just last month, Pokémon GO has already smashed previous records for mobile game downloads while inspiring millions to leave their homes in search of virtual Pokémon creatures. The creatures are invisible to the naked eye, of course, but they appear on user’s screens as if occupying real-world space.
Monthly Archives: August 2016
Synchronoss Launched Secure Mobility Platform | @CloudExpo @Synchronoss #Cloud #Security
Synchronoss announced the general availability of its Secure Mobility Platform (SMP) – the combination of a highly secure application container and integrated productivity suite that together improves the productivity and performances of enterprise mobile workforces.
Designed and built using secure enterprise mobility technology contributed by Goldman Sachs through the venture announced last November, Synchronoss SMP consists of:
Synchronoss Lagoon – a secure device container which encrypts the enterprise’s data on the device and over the air
AWS, Microsoft, Google and IBM continue cloud market dominance
New research from Synergy states while the cloud market is growing at a healthy rate quarter-by-quarter, the four dominate cloud brands are continuing to pull away from the pack, controlled more market share month-by-month, reports Telecoms.com.
Data from Synergy Research claims the four companies now collectively control more than 50% of worldwide cloud market share (IaaS, PaaS and Hosted Private Cloud), with AWS maintaining its lead at the top of the leader board controlling almost a third of worldwide share. Over the course of the second quarter of 2016, the top four grew revenues by 68%, while the next 20 players, who roughly account for a quarter of the market share, grew 41%. All other vendors in this space grew by a collective 27%.
“In a variety of ways Amazon and the other big three players have distanced themselves from the competition in this market and continue to widen the gap,” said John Dinsdale, Research Director at Synergy Research Group. “What marks them out as different is their global presence, marketing muscle, ability to fund huge investments in hyper scale data centres and, in most cases, a determination to succeed in the market.
“The ranking of the next 20 largest cloud providers features some interesting companies, with Alibaba and Oracle growing particularly strongly, but they are all starting from a long way behind Google, which is itself growing by well over 100% per year and yet remains only a sixth the size of Amazon.”
Although AWS is still the dominant market player, growth is slowing. Google and Microsoft both posted growth figures of more than 100%, though it is far too soon to write AWS’ obituary, as it still controls more than three times the market share of its nearest rival, Microsoft Azure.
Microsoft has been going through a number of transformation projects in recent years, and while the market share for cloud shows it will still be some time before it catches AWS, the team are finding success in other arenas. According to additional research from Synergy, in the data centre infrastructure market, HPE and Cisco may be leading the way for public and private cloud hardware, but Microsoft now accounts for just over 40% of cloud software share, with VMWare its nearest competitor at roughly 20%. The research including share for servers, server OS, storage, networking, network security and virtualization software.
“With spend on cloud services growing by over 50% per year and spend on SaaS growing by over 30%, there is little surprise that cloud operator capex continues to drive strong growth in public cloud infrastructure,” said Jeremy Duke, Synergy Research Chief Analyst. “But on the enterprise data centre side too we continue to see a big swing towards spend on private cloud infrastructure as companies seek to benefit from more flexible and agile IT technology. The transition to cloud still has a long way to go.”
Microsoft Azure to deliver 2016 Olympics
Microsoft has announced it has partnered with broadcaster NBC for its Azure cloud platform to help deliver cross-platform multi-streaming coverage of the 2016 Olympic Games, reports Telecoms.com.
The Azure cloud platform will help NBC deliver more than 4,500 hours of coverage from the Rio de Janeiro Olympic Games throughout August. According to Microsoft, it will be providing cloud encoding and hosting with video workflows for the NBC Olympics’ production of the Games, and will assist with live and on-demand multiplatform streaming coverage.
The NBC app will host all of the content and will be available on most devices and platforms including Android, iOS, the US’s biggest selling smart TV set top box Roku, Amazon Fire TV, any device running Windows 10, including Xbox, as well as PC and Mac.
“We always strive to deliver more content in real time to more channels and devices around the world,” said Scott Guthrie, executive vice president of the Cloud and Enterprise Group at Microsoft. “During the Sochi Olympic Games, NBC Olympics had more than 1 million concurrent live viewers watching a collective average of 600,000 hours of coverage per day. We are planning for even greater viewing numbers for Rio, and are excited to power the experience again using Microsoft Azure.”
“The Rio Olympics have nearly three times as many events per day as the Sochi Games,” said Rick Cordella, senior vice president and general manager, Digital Media, NBC Sports Group. “With the Azure cloud platform, Microsoft is partnering with us to deliver the secure, scalable cloud we depend on to bring the Games to millions of viewers on whichever device they prefer, via end-to-end live streaming entirely in the cloud.”
This agreement is in addition to NBC’s plans on delivering more than 80 hours of content through virtual reality headsets, after it signed an agreement with Samsung last month to bring the next-generation viewing experience to mobile users with the Galaxy Gear VR and compatible accompanying handset.
AWS, Microsoft, IBM and Google own more than half of global cloud infrastructure market
(c)iStock.com/Catherine Lane
Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft, IBM and Google continue to grow more quickly than their smaller competitors and own between them more than half of the global cloud infrastructure service market.
That’s according to the latest figures put out by Synergy Research, who issued a note after Amazon and Alphabet – the parent company of Google – put out their second quarter financial results last week.
Comparing the charts for this quarter compared to Q415, Amazon’s year on year growth has slowed a little – from 63% to 53% – with a similar tale being told for Microsoft (124% to 100% yearly growth respectively). The big winner, if you could call it that, is Google, which Synergy assesses is growing at a 162% yearly clip, where it was at 108% previously. IBM’s growth (57%) is unchanged from Q4, with its strong showing mainly down to leadership in the hosted private cloud segment.
The figures reveal little in the way of surprises for those who have been following the segment.
While Synergy argues the best of the rest, including Alibaba and Oracle – which bought NetSuite for $9.3bn last month – are growing particularly strongly, their current position is miles behind Google, never mind AWS.
“Amazon/AWS remains far ahead and in a league of its own, despite some valiant efforts from the other big three cloud providers,” said John Dinsdale, Synergy chief analyst, in an email.
“Despite its huge scale Amazon is still growing faster than the market and is increasing its market share. It continues to lead in all geographic regions and most market segments.”
Dinsdale told CloudTech at the time of the Oracle/NetSuite deal going public that the move would strengthen the Redwood giant’s position in the enterprise SaaS market, and assessed Oracle as a top 10 PaaS and top 20 IaaS player. NetSuite on its own was considered by Synergy as a top 15 enterprise SaaS vendor.
The market overall grew by 51%, Synergy argues, while quarterly cloud infrastructure service revenues – including IaaS, PaaS and SaaS – have now hit the $8bn mark.
Analysing effective security management in a software-defined world
(c)iStock.com/4x-Image
Software defined infrastructure (SDx), along with use of private and public clouds completely transforms the way IT departments manage enterprise data centres and workloads. Automation is a key component of software defined networking (SDN), bringing together network, server, security management and other IT functions or teams together.
In the past, when organisations deployed new applications, the application owner needed to collaborate with several teams. For example, one team installed the required HW and OS servers, a separate team connected servers to the network, and yet another team provisioned the security and firewall rules. It was as if the stars – or functional teams – had to align in order for all of the necessary components to provision so that the application owners could start using the new infrastructure to deploy and make use of their new applications.
Today, private and public cloud infrastructures allows IT to automate these operations; virtual machines are dynamically created and deployed, operating systems are quickly and easily provisioned, and connecting new services to the network is streamlined and automatic. As a result, pre-configured templates of commonly used and well defined services are available to the application owner with a single click on a self-service portal, across multiple data centres, private and public clouds.
In this new world where new apps are instantly created or moved to a different location as the infrastructure gets provisioned, changed and elastically scaled based on demand, security officers are challenged to enforce the organisation’s security policy and retain full visibility of security incidents. As we will find out, the keys to getting control back are creating dynamic security policies, API scoping, and security management consolidation.
Creating dynamic security policies
Dynamic security policies in modern networks are achieved by close integration with network virtualisation and public IaaS solutions, such as VMware NSX, Cisco ACI, OpenStack, or AWS/Azure. By integrating with these solutions, objects defined by those systems, such as groups and tags, are learned and utilised security policies. This creates dynamic policies where changes in the software-defined environment are immediately translated and instantly reflected into an effective and active security policy that is applied to all traffic automatically – without human intervention.
Additionally, leveraging and populating this contextual information in log files gives security admins the ability to better understand and investigate any security incident.
API scoping
In order to completely automate the deployment of new applications, organisations need to grant developers access to APIs that in many cases involve modification of security policies. It is vital to ensure this access is coped or limited appropriately; otherwise, a mistake by a developer could potentially alter the security policy of the entire organisation, making it vulnerable to threats.
An example of scoping access to APIs can be seen through the printer admin. The printer admin uses an app to add printers to the network. In doing so, this involves modifying firewall rules using an API. The security policy must ensure that the printer application can only add new printers – nothing else – and is only permitted within relevant network segments.
Security management consolidation
Consolidation of management functions is necessary to gain complete and holistic visibility of security policies and incidents across the entire organisation’s infrastructure, including all north-south, east-west, virtual and physical, private and public cloud traffic. Without management consolidation, incidents are difficult to identify, correlate and analyse across the various cloud networks, making it operationally impossible to secure these environments.
CheckPoint aims to integrate with leading cloud and network virtualisation solutions, as well as allowing customers to confidently embrace automation and the cloud while retaining advanced security using effective security management for software-defined data centres and public cloud environments. You can find out more here.
Sauce Labs Selects @SumoLogic for Machine Data Analytics | @CloudExpo #Cloud #DevOps #BigData
Sauce Labs has selected Sumo Logic to troubleshoot and better track log performance issues to predict potential issues before they occur. With Sumo Logic, Sauce Labs now has the ability to better help its customers accelerate the software and development cycle.
Sauce Labs provides a high-performance, cloud-based automated testing platform that is optimized for Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) workflows. Catering to fast-moving companies that employ modern development techniques that support DevOps, Sauce Labs creates a large amount of internal log data, with log volumes ranging up to 600 GBs on some days. It’s critical for the company to be able to keep pace by offering scalable, yet secure, automated testing in the cloud.
Top Five Most-Valued Companies Are Tech – Almost | @CloudExpo #IoT #Cloud #BigData
The big move is Amazon’s beating Exxon Mobile (used to be number 1 for many years) to the fourth spot. The switch came after Amazon posted its fifth straight quarter of profits last week as the oil giant’s profits tumbled 59 percent during the same rough period. If Exxon continues its drop, then Facebook will beat it in days.
Three major run-time performance hurdles to avoid
Every investment in major IT transformation arrives with its own set of structural and institutional challenges, not least migrating to a virtualized infrastructure. Get it wrong from the outset and you will be faced with the mother of all headaches. If the issue of performance is not addressed at inception, your data centre and its services – although being able to run – will be increasingly plagued by service problems, poor user satisfaction and inadequate Return on Investment. So, companies looking to transform their virtualised infrastructure should look before they leap and consider three major hurdles.
#1: The heavy lifting of remedial actions
Shift happens. Seasonal traffic spikes, buggy drivers, fluctuating head counts, updated applications, worn out drives and a thousand other factors all contribute to the constantly shifting foundation upon which your infrastructure must stand and thrive. But in any dynamic environment, the unforeseen throttle will inevitably occur and issues will need fixing.
End-user issue remediation actions are exceedingly important, so when a VDI (Virtual Desktop Interface) user calls or files a trouble ticket, IT must have the tools for translating complaints into troubleshooting. Pinpointing problem sources manually can take hours; sometimes even days or weeks, because virtual infrastructure tools tend to be designed for high-level observation, not granular examination of what exactly is, or isn’t, going on. If multiple problems crop up from different sources, the burden of remediation magnifies, potentially risking an organisation’s business continuity.
#2: Isolated end-user experience metrics
Amazon famously publicised how each 1/10th of a second of added site latency sacrificed 1% in sales. Nothing will persuade a worker not to use a cloud-based software tool, particularly on a new rollout, quite like staring through a login hourglass. Of course, management feels the same pain. Aberdeen Research found that poor application performance can slice up to 9% from corporate revenue.
Citrix proposes that there are five key, measurable metrics that constitute the lion’s share of poor user experiences within virtualised environments:
- Launch time
- Logon time
- Load time
- Latency
- Operations such as printing, screen updates, etc.
Clearly, most issues will stem from obstructions in resource flow, but determining the root cause or causes of any decline in these metrics can be arduous.
#3: Inefficient allocation of IT resources
Virtual infrastructure resource utilisation wastes mountains of money when it runs too cold and throws up bottlenecks and failures when it runs too hot. Efficiency is the relationship between performance and resource utilisation and maximum efficiency does not mean maximum utilisation. The physical underpinnings of your virtual infrastructure are a mesh of CPU, memory, storage, network and – particularly in VDI and HPC deployments – GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) assets. The key is to deduce not only utilisation levels but overall efficiency within each resource type, network region and entire organisation.
The solution for companies looking to jump these hurdles is to invest in better predictive analytics-driven strategic levers. They enable the reduction or even elimination of persistent IT problems. To prevent the heavy lifting of remedial actions the tool needs to increase real-time prevention of problems and in cases when prevention is not enough, step in with automated remediation. Either way, the end result is massive savings in resolution time as well as a much improved chance for IT, and thus the whole organisation, to meet its SLAs (Service-Level Agreements). The ability to help pinpoint the problem’s source and whenever possible, cross-silo insights for balancing load optimisation to alleviate bottlenecks is crucial to prevent isolated end-user experience metrics.
In order to combat inefficient allocation of IT resources you must be able to monitor the real-time characteristics of these physical resources and how end-points and applications are using them across the network. Clarity of vision is a strategic lever not only to utilisation levels but overall efficiency within each resource type, network region and entire organisation.
Written by Atchison Frazer, CMO at Xangati
CTPs Improve Outcomes by Giving Users a Say | @CloudExpo #API #Cloud #Virtualization
The Citrix Technology Professionals Program, or CTP, gives participants a larger say in essential strategy initiatives such as enabling mobile work styles.
As an example, we will explore how the Citrix Technology Professionals Program, or CTPs as they are referred to, gives participants a larger say in essential strategy initiatives such as enabling mobile work styles.