IoT is fundamentally transforming the auto industry, turning the vehicle into a hub for connected services, including safety, infotainment and usage-based insurance. Auto manufacturers – and businesses across all verticals – have built an entire ecosystem around the Connected Car, creating new customer touch points and revenue streams.
In his session at @ThingsExpo, Macario Namie, Head of IoT Strategy at Cisco Jasper, will share real-world examples of how IoT transforms the car from a static product into a dynamic hub, drawing from experience at Cisco Jasper working with the world’s top 23 automakers. He will discuss how enterprises can leverage IoT to cultivate meaningful customer relationships and lucrative business opportunities.

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As applications are promoted from the development environment to the CI or the QA environment and then into the production environment, it is very common for the configuration settings to be changed as the code is promoted. For example, the settings for the database connection pools are typically lower in development environment than the QA/Load Testing environment. The primary reason for the existence of the configuration setting differences is to enhance application performance. However, occasionally there are instances where the application code is mistakenly promoted into production without changing these settings. In such cases, such promotion of code can cause performance havoc in the production environment. This blog describes one such scenario.

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Yes, Lori has been reading the Internet again. And what she’s been seeing makes baby Lori angry. It also makes this former test designer and technology editor cry. Really, I weep at both the excuses offered for such testing and the misleading headline.
I have read no less than two contrived comparisons of “HTTPS” and “HTTP” in the last two weeks purporting to demonstrate that secure HTTP is inarguably faster than its plaintext counterpart, HTTP.

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Yes, Lori has been reading the Internet again. And what she’s been seeing makes baby Lori angry. It also makes this former test designer and technology editor cry. Really, I weep at both the excuses offered for such testing and the misleading headline.
I have read no less than two contrived comparisons of “HTTPS” and “HTTP” in the last two weeks purporting to demonstrate that secure HTTP is inarguably faster than its plaintext counterpart, HTTP.

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WebRTC adoption has generated a wave of creative uses of communications and collaboration through websites, sales apps, customer care and business applications. As WebRTC has become more mainstream it has evolved to use cases beyond the original peer-to-peer case, which has led to a repeating requirement for interoperability with existing infrastructures.
In his session at @ThingsExpo, Graham Holt, Executive Vice President of Daitan Group, will cover implementation examples that have enabled early adopters to integrate and interoperate with existing Telecom, Contact Center and Enterprise Collaboration environments.

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Hostway is announcing its hybrid cloud service based on Azure – all backed by managed support for configuration and provisioning, monitoring resource utilization, virtual networks, backup, storage and much more. Now, organizations can choose the best technology infrastructure to run their business whether it’s public or private cloud or a combination.

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SYS-CON Events announced today that SoftLayer, an IBM Company, has been named “Gold Sponsor” of SYS-CON’s 18th Cloud Expo, which will take place on June 7-9, 2016, at the Javits Center in New York, New York. SoftLayer, an IBM Company, provides cloud infrastructure as a service from a growing number of data centers and network points of presence around the world. SoftLayer’s customers range from Web startups to global enterprises.

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Does a Content Delivery Network (CDN) protect against Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks? It’s a good question. A CDN by its very nature will absorb DDoS attacks for the content that it serves and this could be considered protection but, as is often the case, this is only the beginning of the story.
If we consider what is actually going on here, the CDN isn’t actually ‘blocking’ the DDoS attack – it is simply reducing its impact by throwing more resources at the problem. This means that the size of the DDoS attack a CDN can deal with is inherently dependent on the size of the CDNs infrastructure, which for some of the market-leading players means that pretty much any current attack targeting CDN served content can be ‘absorbed.’

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(c)iStock.com/Leslie Achtymichuk

The fact of the matter is thus: if you want to stay ahead of the pack, you’ll need to get your head into and around the cloud. However, the reasons and rationale behind cloud migration are very different to that which greeted CTOs in the mid-2000s, and it is this shift that businesses and their staff need to be aware of today.

According to IDC: «more than 70% of western Europe enterprise IT organisations will commit to hybrid cloud architectures by 2017, vastly driving the rate and pace of change in IT.” And just this week, a new IBM Study, ‘Tailoring hybrid cloud: designing the right mix for innovation, efficiency and growth’, documented the meteoric rise of hybrid cloud. In responses from over 1000 C-suite executives from 18 industries, 78% of them now say their cloud initiatives are coordinated or fully integrated, compared to just 34% in 2012.

Executives expect hybrid cloud adoption (in particular) to support their organisation’s growth in three main ways: by facilitating innovation, lowering total cost of ownership and by enhancing operational efficiencies and enabling them to more readily meet customer expectations.

Cloud has evolved and attitudes towards it have matured from a ‘nice to have’ technological innovation in the mid-2000s, to an integral part of business enablement strategy today.  Successful organisations understand that technologies like cloud and (moving towards the future), cognitive computing are key to improving operations, customer experiences and, crucially, bottom lines. 

But even with the rising use and acceptance of cloud technologies overall, almost half of computing workloads – 45% – are expected to remain in on premise data centres for the foreseeable future. Given this, it is imperative that companies determine and regularly re-assess which mix of traditional IT, public and private cloud best suits their needs.

Until relatively recently, cloud was viewed by many as (primarily) a cost reducing project. However, today, the realisation of what cloud can actually proactively provide has led to a more rounded and balanced overview of it as a platform for innovation and competitive advantage too. 

But once every business is in the cloud (as will be the case in due course if adoption rates are to be believed), just who will win and how is the key question many are keen to understand.

Based on its findings, the most recent study recommends three areas, all current and future adopters of the technology need to understand, if they are to drive sustainable and competitive advantage through cloud adoption:

Deepen your understanding of business implications and financial cases of cloud

A custom-made environment will be possible when employees truly understand business needs and how IT technologies can help deliver these successes.  This includes identifying key business stakeholders of cloud initiatives, selecting target improvement areas, and establishing a current performance baseline for comparison.

Strengthen your ability to manage the complexity of multiple cloud ecosystem partners

Ecosystems by design will be in continual flux as companies collaborate with value chain participants. Success will depend on fostering the next generation of business and IT hybrid talent, embracing the full cloud ecosystem as a community in which participants can deliver more value as a group than acting alone.

In establishing collaborative, long term relationships with partners through mutually beneficial opportunities, companies will be able to tap into the API economy and other ‘open’ technologies that allow them to build on top of existing innovation.

Extend the limits of compliance with security and regulation through new internal capabilities and external solutions

This requires a re-work of operations to build data protection and security measures into system and IT infrastructure by design, rather than retrofitting. It’s also imperative that you select vendors with security and compliance expertise in the cloud space. 

Hybrid cloud represents a pivotal transformation for businesses. But managing a dynamic and symbiotic cloud environment will require both a new mind-set to traditional approaches, but also new skills to deliver upon these.