SYS-CON Events announced today that Juniper Networks (NYSE: JNPR), an industry leader in automated, scalable and secure networks, will exhibit at SYS-CON’s 20th International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on June 6-8, 2017, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY.
Juniper Networks challenges the status quo with products, solutions and services that transform the economics of networking. The company co-innovates with customers and partners to deliver automated, scalable and secure networks with agility, performance and value.

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Adobe and Microsoft have announced the first set of joint solutions to ‘help enterprises transform their customer experiences’, with Adobe’s Experience Cloud combining alongside Microsoft Azure, Dynamics 365 and Power BI products.

Those with good memories will recall an announcement made last September which confirmed Azure would become the preferred cloud platform for Adobe’s marketing, creative and document clouds, with Adobe’s Marketing Cloud doing similarly for Dynamics 365 Enterprise, Microsoft’s enterprise resource planning offering.

Adobe said this latest change builds on the previous partnership. “Bringing together Adobe’s and Microsoft’s sales, marketing and customer intelligence solutions enables brands to better understand and engage with their customers across all touch points,” said Abhay Parasnis, Adobe EVP and CTO.

What this means in terms of product is a combined Adobe Analytics and Microsoft Power BI for the enterprise audience, an integration between Adobe Campaign and Microsoft Dynamics 365 for marketing teams trying to create a single customer view, and the concisely named Adobe Experience Manager Sites Managed Service – web content management, in other words – available on Azure.

“We believe the combined power of our technologies will allow enterprise businesses to harness their data in new ways, unlocking critical business insights and actionable intelligence,” said Scott Guthrie, Microsoft EVP in a statement. “Together, we are delivering compelling and personalised experiences that will drive brand loyalty and growth.”

In addition, Adobe unveiled a series of enhancements to its Cloud Platform product, including a new common data language, XDM, quicker time to market for developers with Launch, and partner integrations with Acxiom, AppDynamics, MasterCard, and more.

The press release summed it up nicely. “Advancements in cloud services have fundamentally altered the computing landscape. The next decade will bring even more disruptive changes in how brands create, immerse and engage their customers in their experiences,” it offered. “A modern experience platform that addresses these expectations needs to be designed with a common data language founded on content and data, an open ecosystem to enable others to build on and innovate, and intelligence at its core with AI, machine learning and deep learning.”

Picture credit: Adobe

Next month will mark the 47th anniversary of Apollo 13. The film that recounts the story is a favorite of mine, probably because it so masterfully captures the incredible suspense, fear, and hope felt by people everywhere, that I personally recall very well. I also know how an organization’s digital transformation can generate similar reactions!
Apollo 13 was likely a casualty of the space program’s incredibly aggressive schedule. NASA, with U.S. political and military leaders, was motivated by competition from the U.S.S.R. and fear of the potential consequences of not being first. Urgency often overruled caution. A good plan today is better than a perfect plan tomorrow.

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The good news: enterprises are beginning to use technologies such as software defined networking (SDN) and containers in production scenarios. Yet according to a new study from Dimension Data, management of hybrid IT environments remains a key challenge with automation the key.

The report, which polled 1,500 IT decision makers across four continents, found different motivators by region for utilising hybrid IT – defined here as ‘the usage of multiple deployment models to deliver a single workload or application as part of their data centre and cloud strategies’ – from end-user demand in the UK, US and Hong Kong, to cost for respondents in France, Singapore and South Africa.

Almost half of respondents (48%) said their migration processes were manual – and labour-intensive as a result – while 38% said they use automation for quicker application migration. “Hybrid IT is a becoming a standard enterprise model, but there’s no single playbook to get there,” the company warns.

44% of respondents said they found it challenging to migrate workloads to new locations, as well as assessing which option was best for a particular workload.

“With data and processes shifting across multiple cloud and non-cloud environments, a new approach to management is called for,” said Jason Goodall, Dimension Data group CEO. “IT managers are under tremendous pressure to seek new ways to manage and secure multiple IT environments in an effective manner.

“Automation is important because it helps reduce the operating costs, as well as the pain caused by the growing complexity of business processes and management tasks,” Goodall added. “It is simply no longer appropriate or cost-effective for these tasks to be done manually.”

Speaking to this publication this time last year, Michael Allen, VP EMEA at digital performance monitoring provider Dynatrace, said “very few enterprises” were actively doing SDN and software defined data centres, but many were “looking at it.” From this research, it would appear small steps are at least being made.

“You need innovations that are going to continue to come out, and you need a cloud that will keep taking them on,” Ginni Rometty, IBM CEO, told attendees at the Armonk giant’s InterConnect event in Las Vegas. “There’s a long pipeline coming, and that’s what an enterprise cloud does – it embraces that.”

Chief among this pipeline is blockchain and quantum computing, with IBM’s recent announcements playing into these trends in a serious way. Earlier this week, IBM unveiled its ‘blockchain as a service’ offering, while a new API for its Quantum Experience program – enabling developers to build interfaces between its cloud-based quantum computers and classical equivalents – arrived earlier this month.

Rometty spoke of the three key tenets of IBM’s cloud; being ‘enterprise strong’, ‘data first’, and ‘cognitive at its core’. “You’ve got to be more secure than on-prem and have a very solid roadmap and pipeline of innovation for the future,” the IBM chief exec explained. Being enterprise strong, Rometty added, was not just about geography – albeit in the same breath reiterating the recent move with Wanda to enter the Chinese cloud market – but data sovereignty and industry.

IBM’s moves in blockchain, for a technology in the midst of hype, have touched on a plethora of industries, from tackling food safety with Walmart, to the supply chain with Maersk. The total is some 400 projects. “I believe blockchain will do for trusted transactions what the internet has done for information,” Rometty said. “You can exchange anything in a safe and secure way.” As far as quantum computing was concerned, Rometty described that as going to a ‘new era of business, doing things you’ve never done, [and] solving problems you never knew you had.’

The announcements made yesterday were varied and vast; 19 in total on March 20. Among the highlights on the cloud side were collaborations with Veritas and Red Hat on data management and hybrid cloud adoption respectively, as well as additions to its Cloud Object Storage family and IBM Cloud Integration, which aims to ‘solve the integration challenge of bringing together enterprise data and applications across on-premises, private and public cloud environments’.

Naturally, friends and partners joined Rometty on stage. Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce discussed the rising tide of artificial intelligence (AI); not especially surprising given IBM and Salesforce’s recent partnership to combine their Watson and Einstein systems respectively.

“Artificial intelligence is something we’ve all dreamed about, but when you look at things like machine learning, machine intelligence, things like deep learning, there’s an acceleration going on,” he said. “It’s honestly surprised me – I can’t believe how fast artificial intelligence is evolving and changing.”

Benioff used the example of elevator engineering firm KONE in how IBM and Salesforce are interacting; with every elevator and escalator being connected, Watson looks at predicted fail rates while the CRM side of Salesforce can put it all in a package and roll a service truck to fix issues in real time. “That’s a real big shift in how business operates,” said Benioff.

Randall Stephenson, CEO of AT&T, noted Rometty’s ‘enterprise strong’ element of IBM cloud, adding that the telco was now pushing cloud technologies into the very core of its network. “I don’t believe we’re more than three or four years away from being indistinguishable from the ‘data cloud’ to the ‘network cloud’,” he said. “We’re riding off what you guys are doing.”

Above all, however, Rometty gave this piece of advice to attendees. “Our job is to really help prepare you for what you will become,” said Rometty. “I think you will become cognitive…it will be in your applications, your processes, and you will become a cognitive enterprise; and that’s what will separate the winners and losers.”

Postscript: Stephenson suffered a noteworthy slip of the tongue when mentioning the proposed acquisition of Time Warner, instead saying rival T-Mobile. “I’ll get a Trump tweet now, won’t I?” he joked.

SYS-CON Events announced today that Cloudistics, an on-premises cloud computing company, has been named “Bronze Sponsor” of SYS-CON’s 20th International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on June 6-8, 2017, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY.
Cloudistics delivers a complete public cloud experience with composable on-premises infrastructures to medium and large enterprises. Its software-defined technology natively converges network, storage, compute, virtualization, and management into a single platform to drive unprecedented simplicity in the data center. Customers can start with a base infrastructure and scale to multi-site and multi-geo infrastructures with predictable economics and performance.

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What if you could build a web application that could support true web-scale traffic without having to ever provision or manage a single server? Sounds magical, and it is!
In his session at 20th Cloud Expo, Chris Munns, Senior Developer Advocate for Serverless Applications at Amazon Web Services, will show how to build a serverless website that scales automatically using services like AWS Lambda, Amazon API Gateway, and Amazon S3. We will review several frameworks that can help you build serverless applications, such as the AWS Serverless Application Model (AWS SAM), Chalice, and ClaudiaJS.

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• 78% are planning to increase the use of cloud for BI and data management in the next 12 months.
• 46% of organisations prefer public cloud platforms for cloud BI, analytics and data management deployments.
• Cloud BI adoption increased in respondent companies from 29% to 43% from 2013 to 2016.
• Almost half of organisations using cloud BI (46%) use a public cloud for BI and data management compared to less than a third (30%) for hybrid cloud and 24% for private cloud.

These and many other insights are from the BARC Research and Eckerson Group Study, BI and Data Management in the Cloud: Issues and Trends published January 2017 (39 pp., PDF, no opt-in). Business Application Research Center (BARC) is a research and consulting firm that concentrates on enterprise software including business intelligence (BI), analytics and data management. Eckerson Group is a research and consulting firm focused on serving the needs of business intelligence (BI) and analytic leaders in Fortune 2000 organisations worldwide. The study is based on interviews completed in September and October 2016. 370 respondents participated in the survey globally.

Given the size of the sample, the results aren’t representative of the global BI and analytics user base. The study’s results provide an interesting glimpse into analytics and BI adoption today, however. For a description of the methodology, please see page 31 of the study.

Key insights from the study include the following:

Public cloud is the most preferred deployment platform for cloud BI and analytics, and the larger the organization toe more likely they are using private clouds. 46% of organizations selected public cloud platforms as their preferred infrastructure for supporting their BI, analytics, and data management initiatives in 2016. 30% are relying on a hybrid cloud platform and 24%, private clouds. With public cloud platforms becoming more commonplace in BI and analytics deployments, the need for greater PaaS- and IaaS-level orchestration becomes a priority. The larger the organization, the more likely they are using private clouds (33%). Companies with between 250 to 2,500 employees are the least likely to be using private clouds (16%).

Dashboard-based reporting (76%), ad-hoc analysis and exploration (57%) and dashboard authoring (55%) are the top three Cloud BI use cases. Respondents are most interested in adding advanced and predictive analytics (53%), operational planning and forecasting (44%), strategic planning and simulation (44%) in the next year. The following graphic compares primary use cases and planned investments in the next twelve months. SelectHub has created a useful Business Intelligence Tools Comparison here that provides insights into this area.

Power users dominate the use of cloud BI and analytics solutions, driving more complex use cases that include ad-hoc analysis (57%) and advanced report and dashboard creation (55%). Casual users are 20% of all cloud BI and analytics, with their most common use being for reporting and dashboards (76%). Customers and suppliers are an emerging group of cloud BI and analytics users as more respondent companies create self-service web-based apps to streamline external reporting.

Data integration between cloud applications/databases (51%) and providing data warehouses and data marts (50%) are the two most common data management strategies in use to support BI and analytics solutions today. Respondent organizations are using the cloud to integration cloud applications with each other and with on-premises applications (46%).  The study also found that as more organizations move to the cloud, there’s a corresponding need to support hybrid cloud architectures. Cloud-based data warehouses are primarily being built to support net new applications versus existing apps on-premise. Data integration is essential for the ongoing operations of cloud-based and on-premise ERP systems. A useful comparison of ERP systems can be found here.

Data integration between on-premises and cloud applications dominates use cases across all company sizes, with 48% of enterprises leading in adoption. Enterprises are also prioritizing providing data warehouses and data marts (48%), the pre-processing of data (38%) and data integration between cloud applications and databases (38%). The smaller a company is the more critical data integration becomes. 63% of small companies with less than 250 employees are prioritizing data integration between cloud applications and databases (63%).

Tools for data exploration (visual discovery) adopted grew the fastest in the last three years, increasing from 20% adoption in 2013 to 49% in 2016. BI tools increased slightly from 55% to 62% and BI servers dropped from 56% to 51%. Approximately one in five respondent organizations (22%) added analytical applications in 2016.

The main reasons for adopting cloud BI and analytics differ by size of the company, with cost (57%) being the most important for mid-sized businesses between 250 to 2.5K employees. Consistent with previous studies, small companies’ main reason for adopting cloud BI and analytics include flexibility (46%), reduced maintenance of hardware and software (43%), and cost (38%). Enterprises with more than 2.5K employees are adopting cloud BI and analytics for greater scalability (48%), cost (40%) and reduced maintenance of hardware and software (38%). The following graphic compares the most important reason for adopting cloud BI, analytics and data management by the size of the company.

In order to ensure that patient outcomes are constantly being improved upon it is important that the speed of change within the biotechnology sector occurs at an exponential rate. However, this continued drive for innovation puts immense pressure on IT departments to develop new technologies at speed, while also making sure that they do this cost effectively.

Add to this the fact that, more so than other industries, biotech firms are extremely tightly regulated. As a result, IT groups within this industry are often reluctant to introduce more complexity into what is already a very complex environment. To them, expanding a data centre can often feel a whole lot easier than navigating the regulations of the cloud.  Despite this, growth in the demand for cloud computing in life sciences research and development is escalating due to the benefits it brings to the industry – benefits like exceeding regulatory requirements, for example.

At iland, we have worked with many companies in the healthcare, life sciences and biotech industries. Therefore, we know from experience that the implementation of cloud computing in biotechnology empowers organisations with the control and flexibility needed to lead the way in both the research world as well as the businesses world. For example, we recently worked with a US based biotechnology organisation on their backup and disaster recovery (DR) strategy, and were able to drive global data centre consolidation with host-based replication to the iland cloud. As a result, their DR testing and auditing processes were greatly simplified and streamlined which drove significant cost savings as well as compliance assurance.  

If you still need convincing here are three key benefits that we believe cloud brings to biotech organisations: 

Processing big data

When the Human Genome Project began it was one of the most extensive research projects in the field to date costing billions of pounds and lasting over a decade. These days, thanks largely to cloud technology, it can be done in just 26 hours. Things such as drug R&D, clinical research as well as a whole host of other areas have benefited just as much from the rapid growth of computational power. The better your technology is at crunching huge sets of data, the quicker you can innovate.

Cloud computing within the biotech sector can take big data analysis to the next level by means of performance, connectivity, on-demand infrastructure and flexible provisioning. Labs can also benefit from immense computing power without the cost and complexity of running big onsite server rooms. They can also scale up at will in order to make use of new research and ideas almost instantly.

Concerns have been voiced that so called scientific computing in the cloud may make results less reproducible. One concern is that cloud computing will be a computing ‘black box’ that obscures details needed to accurately interpret the results of computational analyses. In actual fact, by leveraging the application program interfaces (APIs) in the iland cloud, biotech customers are able to integrate cloud data back into on-premises IT systems to ensure that data analyses done in the cloud can be easily shared and consumed by other applications. Essentially, cloud computing services bring more players to the table to solve the giant puzzle. It’s a win-win situation from an economic and patient standpoint, and several big name companies are jumping on the biotech cloud bandwagon. 

Compliance and access control

Biotech companies need to maintain strong access and authentication controls, while also being able to collaborate easily. For this reason audit trails and other measures are often required to verify that information has not been improperly altered, and that good experimental and manufacturing procedures have been followed. At the same time biotechnologists need to be able to access and share data across multiple departments or even multiple companies.

Cloud computing in biotechnology makes this all possible. The iland cloud, for instance, centralises data, ensuring security and data sovereignty while facilitating collaboration. It supports extensive user and role based access control, two-factor authentication and integrity monitoring to prevent improper access and changes. In addition to data encryption, vulnerability scanning and intrusion detection, these measures facilitate security and compliance, without disrupting the internal workflow.

Real-time reporting

Complex regulatory requirements and logistics combined with niche markets make efficiency paramount within biotechnology. Even minor mistakes as a result of sloppy process management can easily result in major issues. Real-time operational reporting dramatically improves efficiency, quality control and decision making, allowing organisations to react instantly to challenges and opportunities, both internal and external.

As well as enhanced billing visibility and resource management functions, the release of our latest Secure Cloud Services means that the iland cloud now includes on-demand security and compliance reports. This advanced cloud management functionality is designed to foster strategic, self-sufficient control of a cloud environment, optimising overall cloud usage and costs to drive business initiatives and growth.

Without a shadow of a doubt, cloud technology can help biotechnology companies build the future. From research and development to marketing, computing affects everything your organisation does. With rich experience in the biotech, healthcare and life sciences sector, you should talk to iland today to find out how our cloud hosting services can give you the power to develop at the speed of thought, not the speed of compliance or processing. 

Read more: Why the cloud could hold the cure to diseases