SYS-CON Events announced today that China Unicom will exhibit at the 19th International Cloud Expo, which will take place on November 1–3, 2016, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
China United Network Communications Group Co. Ltd («China Unicom») was officially established in 2009 on the basis of the merger of former China Netcom and former China Unicom.
China Unicom mainly operates a full range of telecommunications services including mobile broadband (GSM, WCDMA, LTE FDD, TD-LTE), fixed-line broadband, ICT, data communications, domestic and international communications facilities, satellite service, network access service, value-added and system integration services with a modern communication network characterized by nationwide coverage and extensive global reach.

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The campaigns were closely fought. Polls indicated it would be close. Still, many businesses assumed that the UK would stick to what they knew and vote to remain in the European Union (EU). In the aftermath of the vote to leave, and with the heat and hyperbole having largely dissipated, what new challenges does Brexit bring?

The Leave campaign was always a broad coalition of different interests, many with competing ideas. With a Brexit vote secured, some of those will fall by the wayside, while others become government policy. In the meantime, companies in the tech sector, dependent on investment to maintain their position, must live with the thing most likely to restrict it: uncertainty. 

The greatest uncertainty concerns access to markets and trade conditions. EU politicians have stated, repeatedly, that unrestricted access to the single market is conditional on Britain maintaining freedom of movement. Meanwhile, Brexit-supporting politicians in the UK believe that this is negotiable. It seems unlikely that the EU will reward Britain’s decision to go it alone with a uniquely advantageous arrangement, but it would be wrong to think that there is a single European stance. Much depends on whether the European Council or the European Commission takes the lead in negotiations. The Council is more likely to be pragmatic; the Commission may take a harder line.

Whatever happens, the UK won’t lose access to the single market – actually a single regulatory regime with a common set of technical standards, which benefit businesses outside the EU as much as those within it. UK exports may become subject to tariffs, but these average 2.3% for non-agricultural products: significant, but less so than movements in exchange rates, for example.

Tariffs may be reduced or removed by free trade agreements, which have been secured by every non-EU European country other than Belarus. British negotiators are likely to focus on key service industries, such as finance and technology. The size of our economy and its value to the EU, which enjoys a trade surplus of £88.7 billion with the UK, gives us a relatively strong bargaining position. Furthermore, the costs arising from new barriers in Europe could be offset by concluding trade agreements with countries outside the EU. According to Eurostat, over 56% of UK trade is with non-EU states, up from 38% in 2002. Among EU members, only Malta does a higher proportion of its trade outside the bloc, so the EU’s lack of success in forging external trade agreements has affected Britain disproportionately.

A second risk for the tech sector relates to the free movement of data. The EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which sets common rules on storage and transfer of personal data, comes into effect in May 2018. The GDPR won’t exclude British providers from handling EU data, provided they comply with the regulation. However, the regulation would have applied automatically had the UK remained in the EU. Now, either Parliament must pass new laws to bring Britain into line with the new standards, or UK companies will need to be assessed by the Commission. This is an unwelcome hindrance, but most data processing companies will already meet the standards, if they are already ISO 27001 certified.

A third risk, particularly relevant to the technology sector, is energy security and cost. Recent governments have under-invested in new generating capacity, but a new nuclear plant at Hinkley Point was expected to address that. Hinkley Point could provide 7% of the UK’s supply, but the project has been beset by problems, delaying completion from 2017 to no earlier than 2025. The principal contractor, EDF, is 85% owned by the French government and struggling under billions of euros of debt. In the aftermath of the Brexit vote, reports in the press suggested that the deal is under threat. EDF will no longer be investing in an EU partner country, and the French unions, concerned about the company’s ability to take on more debt, have used the opportunity to argue against it.

Hinkley Point is also dependent on large subsidies from the British government, which will support EDF. The European Commission agreed to these in 2014, but it’s possible that a coalition of European governments, many of which are anti-nuclear, will seek to block the deal under EU competition laws.

If Hinkley Point falls through, or if Britain is unable to sell surplus nuclear energy to the continent, the cost of power will go up and by proxy, the cost of running offices, data centres and the cloud will increase as well.

Despite the risks, Brexit provides an opportunity for UK business to change the way we trade with Europe and the wider world. As ever, we will succeed if we produce goods and services that other countries want. Britain must remain open to trade, people, data and ideas, and continue to welcome the best and brightest of everything from around the world.  The tech sector, which prides itself on being agile in the face of changing conditions, is actually well placed to benefit from the changes, even if Brexit wasn’t the result that it expected or desired. Looking forward, post-Brexit Britain could be a very exciting place to be.

In terms of GDPR specifically, the UK’s Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) has confirmed that “if the UK is not part of the EU, then upcoming EU reforms to data protection law would not directly apply to the UK. But if the UK wants to trade with the single market on equal terms we would have to prove ‘adequacy’” – in other words UK data protection standards would have to be equivalent to the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation framework starting in 2018.”

From a contingency perspective therefore, most big companies and especially cloud hosting firms are acting as if the GDPR will come into effect on the May 28 2018, to ensure that, even after we exit the EU, we can still trade as effectively, and legally, as we would if we remained a part of the Union.

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Amazon Web Services (AWS) has announced it has signed a criminal justice information services (CJIS) agreement with the State of Oregon, enabling AWS GovCloud services available to the state’s law enforcement officers.

Oregon joins California, Colorado, and Minnesota among others in signing up to AWS’s cloud services. The provider has two availability zones in its US GovCloud data centre.

“We are committed to doing our part as a cloud service provider by giving our customers the means, through our services, to comply with CJIS requirements within their IT environments,” an AWS statement read. “Customers can deploy applications, data, and services, all of which securely comply with CJIS Security Policy requirements.”

“The Oregon State Police is pleased to announce to the Oregon CJIS community that OSP and Amazon have agreed to a security control agreement that meets every requirement of the FBI’s CJIS Security Policy,” said Major Tom M. Worthy, Oregon State Police CSO, in a statement. “This agreement gives Oregon agencies additional hosting options that enhance security, while meeting their business requirements pertaining to criminal justice information.”

Elsewhere, research from IT services provider Eduserv has found a slightly different tone on UK public sector cloud adoption. According to the figures, 12% of all UK council authorities – some 50 councils – account for 90% of G-Cloud local government spend, while eight councils represent 57% of G-Cloud spend to date. More than a quarter (27%) of UK councils say their procurement policy does not allow them to use G-Cloud, while 61% of councils insist they do not have a cloud IT policy in place.

“The big picture behind this research is that only a minority of councils appear to have a deep appreciation of how IT must change to support service redesign and new technologies in the future,” said Jos Creese, Eduserv principal analyst and report author. “Local government is of course already using cloud, often in ‘shadow IT activity’ outside the IT department, and cloud will inevitably form an increasingly important role, given its prevalence and growth.

“Given this, and the data risks to be managed with cloud, it is therefore critical that councils have some sort of policy guidance around how and when it could or should be considered,” added Creese. “It is surprising and somewhat alarming that this is not the case.”

Many IT organizations look to the private cloud to improve agility and simplify business operations. More and more are introducing converged and hyperconverged infrastructure solutions to support cloud initiatives and agile development practices. But there is too often a road block — legacy data center networks.

Private clouds require a new multipurpose data center network to support diverse applications and workloads without sacrificing performance or service quality. Fully programmable and highly adaptable, the next-generation network easily integrates with service orchestration tools and DevOps systems to enable elastic services and self-serve IT. And it supports seamless workload mobility within and across data centers to ensure high availability for business-critical applications.

The post PlexxiPulse— Eliminating Private Cloud Networking Barriers appeared first on Plexxi.

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Adopting storage innovation protects the Nebraska Medical Center from data disruption and adds operational simplicity to complex data lifecycle management.
To describe how more than 150 terabytes of data remain safe and sound, we’re joined by Jeff Bergholz, Manager of Technical Systems at The Nebraska Medical Center in Omaha. The discussion is moderated by BriefingsDirect’s Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions.

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SYS-CON Events announced today that Secure Channels will exhibit at the 19th International Cloud Expo, which will take place on November 1–3, 2016, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
The bedrock of Secure Channels Technology is a uniquely modified and enhanced process based on superencipherment. Superencipherment is the process of encrypting an already encrypted message one or more times, either using the same or a different algorithm.

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SYS-CON Events announced today that Pulzze Systems will exhibit at the 19th International Cloud Expo, which will take place on November 1–3, 2016, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
Pulzze Systems, Inc. provides infrastructure products for the Internet of Things to enable any connected device and system to carry out matched operations without programming.
For more information, visit http://www.pulzzesystems.com.

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Slack has been ranked as the number one private company leading cloud computing in 2016, according to research conducted by Forbes.

The messaging app provider, which was noted by Netskope in recent research to be among the top 20 cloud apps used by businesses for the first time, finished ahead of cloud storage firm Dropbox (#2) and electronic signature provider DocuSign (#3). Payments infrastructure company Stripe and data management platform provider Cloudera rounded off the top five.

The research was produced alongside Bessemer Venture Partners and Salesforce Ventures, which aims to ‘recognise cloud companies for the financial health and growth of their business’. The hundreds of submissions were presented to 27 public cloud CEO judges who made their verdict for the inaugural report.

Naturally, plenty of companies have been putting forward their acknowledgement of being placed in the top 100. Zuora, a subscription billing and commerce provider, issued a statement arguing the importance of this validation not just for the company but for the market in general.

“As the standard subscription finance platform for the cloud computing industry, we’re honoured to be included,” said CEO Tien Tzuo. “It’s a huge validation for Zuora, as well as the subscription economy. While we have lots of clients on this list, we’re looking forward to helping many more amazing cloud companies turn their customers into subscribers.”

Fuze – formerly ThinkingPhones – finished just inside the top 20, and was recently named as a leader in the Gartner unified communications as a service (UCaaS) Magic Quadrant. “On behalf of Fuzers worldwide, we are thrilled to be named to the inaugural Forbes 2016 Cloud 100,” said Steve Kokinos, Fuze CEO in a statement. “Our mobile-first user experience is designed to delight today’s digitally empowered workforce, while our powerful suite of business analytics integrates with other cloud services to make our solution an indispensable tool for business and technology leaders.”

“The Forbes Cloud 100 companies represent the very best private companies in cloud computing,” said Byron Deeter, partner at Bessemer Venture Partners. “We will see big IPOs and category killers emerge from this list as cloud computing continues to propel the trillion-dollar software industry.”

This report represents an interesting examination of which privately held cloud companies are leading the charge in their respective fields; yet related research from Glassdoor and Battery Ventures released last month paints a different picture. Taking into account employees’ verdicts on their CEO, as well as a ‘positive business outlook’, seven companies came out on top, including Chef Software, which scored 100% in both categories, and Asana, a productivity app led by Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskowitz.

Of the companies which led the way in the Forbes research, Dropbox and Zuora only scored 71% and 77% respectively in terms of business outlook, while DocuSign fared a little better, with 90% positive outlook rating and 97% approval for CEO Keith Krach.

There are some enterprise applications that were born to be in the cloud. Customer relationship management (CRM) applications were an early favorite because salespeople (the primary consumers of CRM) are decentralized and mobile. Web applications and personal data storage are also ideal cloud applications because they allow enterprises to scale up easily while driving down costs. Enterprises have held on to their communications, however, making it one of the last applications to move into the cloud.

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Editor’s note: This is the second part of a two-part series following up on the July piece ‘How the public cloud can benefit the global economy’, which drills down into two of the four areas outlined – better coordination of efforts between international entities, and increased speed of international transactions. The below is an image created by Chef Software which outlines the four towers. You can read part one, focusing on new business models and data sharing and collaboration, here.

Better coordination of efforts between international entities

In my July article on the cloud and the global economy, I used an example of international security entities scrambling to track threats across borders.

In the past, when these and other governmental entities agreed to coordinate data efforts, multi-billion dollar projects taking many years were commissioned. These projects would try to standardise application development efforts and data access methods.

The overriding attitude was that by standardising everything, the security could be strengthened. Unfortunately, this gave rise to two major problems. The first was the extremely high cost – in both development and time – of developments and changes. The second issue was that once any one of the systems accessing the data was breached, all other systems could be accessed.

Enter the public cloud. Once access and security standards have been agreed upon, a big data, unstructured service can be hosted in the cloud. The participating governments – or for that matter, corporations – can then responsibly access the data through the use of their own methods and data science-based applications, without the need for huge coordination efforts.

Another benefit of this looser style of coordination is the global accessibility of public cloud resources. Wherever in the world the entities (governmental, corporate, NGO, and so on) are located, they can gain access to the data. So for example if an NGO employee needs to get information on a given topic – assuming that he or she has proper credentials to view that data – that access is then available from wherever they find themselves.

Increased speed of international transactions

Volume of financial transactions is critical to the economic growth. The more financial activity generated by a particular country, the more capital is in play with which to grow the economy. If this is relevant to a single country, it should be even more so when speaking of global economic growth. The faster international financial and corporate entities can move money and complete transactions, the greater global economic volume.

So what cloud technologies, or more specifically public cloud technologies, can be used to improve financial performance? The answer: microservices application architectures, rapid scaling, and globalised service and data accessibility.

Microservices architectures and services, such as AWS Lambda, allow for new data to be processed rapidly, through serverless infrastructure models that scale up or down to meet performance needs. Microservices also allow for the secure transfer of information from the public cloud back to an on-premise data service. This allows sensitive data to be securely accessible through cloud-based services while keeping them under secure lock and key.

Other than the scaling available through microservices, the very nature of public cloud infrastructure services is geared towards automated and rapid scaling of cloud infrastructure to meet demand. Data and application services in the cloud are easily globally distributed and globally accessible. When public cloud content distribution services, such as AWS Cloudfront, are utilised, the services and data associated with them can be made accessible globally with predictable performance characteristics.

Conclusion

Advances in technology have always had an impact on economic conditions. With the increase in flexibility, elasticity, scalability and resilience in cloud technologies, the public and hybrid cloud can continually enable a positive impact on the global economy.