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.
Archivo mensual: abril 2017
Cloud Computing: Is Your Cloud Getting Smarter? ‘Power Panel | @CloudExpo #Cloud #Analytics #CognitiveComputing
Automation is enabling enterprises to design, deploy, and manage more complex, hybrid cloud environments. Yet the people who manage these environments must be trained in and understanding these environments better than ever before. A new era of analytics and cognitive computing is adding intelligence, but also more complexity, to these cloud environments. How smart is your cloud? How smart should it be?
In this power panel at 20th Cloud Expo, moderated by Conference Chair Roger Strukhoff, panelists will look at the evolving nature of hybrid cloud, how it affects enterprise IT staffing requirements, and what skills are needed to be successful.
SoftBank leads $16.5m funding round for Dome9 Security
Dome9 Security, an Israeli cloud infrastructure provider, has announced the close of $16.5 million (£12.8m) in series C funding led by Japanese tech giant SoftBank.
Alongside the funding, SoftBank will also be the leading distributor of the Dome9 Arc cloud infrastructure security platform in the Japanese market.
Dome9, which was founded in 2010, aims to provide verifiable infrastructure security for every public cloud, including the primary suspects of Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform. Dome9 Arc is a software as a service platform which enables organisations to visualise their security posture, identify and mitigate risks at all times across public cloud infrastructure environments. The platform also enables greater integration and security for DevOps teams.
The move indicates a further shift by SoftBank towards cloud technologies. In December last year, the company announced a venture alongside Chinese firm Alibaba, offering packaged Alibaba Cloud services for the Japanese market under the name of SB Cloud.
“As enterprise adoption of the cloud continues to accelerate, there is a growing need for cloud-native solutions that simplify security operations and compliance,” said Masayuki Motoshima, director of cyber security business development at SoftBank Corp in a statement. “Dome9’s strong traction in the enterprise market attests to the value the technology delivers, and led to our decision to invest.”
This publication first shone a spotlight on Dome9 in 2011, arguing the company was ‘one of several to crowd an increasingly busy market sector’. The company has won several awards since then, including being named as a 2016 emerging vendor by Computer Reseller News. The company’s total funding now stands at $29 million.
Microsoft Buys Deis
Microsoft wants to expand its cloud computing presence and it believes the best way is to bring in more cloud computing developers into its fold. To this end, it has acquired a cloud container specialist called Deis from a cloud orchestration company called Engine Yard. The financial details have not been disclosed.
Deis is a technology that works well with cloud containers. If you’ve never heard this term before, container means independently deployable code that accomplish a specific task. Each of these containers are discrete and require little to no interaction with other container components. The entire logic for a single functionality is contained within it.
This container is the fundamental building block of virtualization environments. In addition, a container knows how much of processing power it needs and the calls it has to make through the respective Application Programming Interface (API).
These containers are the most essential for an agile cloud-based development environment as they can be quickly deployed when compared to monolithic architecture. Also, microservices architecture that is based on these containers, is catching up in a big way because of the need to have short deployment circles on the cloud and also to overcome the many disadvantages that come with monolithic architecture.
Handling these container components is the cornerstone of Deis’ operations. It provides three open-source tools for managing all kinds of Kubernetes deployments. These three container services are:
- Workflow – this is the technology that allows developers and organizations to deploy and manage container components.
- Helm – this is a Kubernetes manager that handles different components
- Steward – this is a Kubernetes-native broker that enables communication between different containers, on a need basis.
Since Deis specializes in creating such components, it makes sense for Microsoft to bring it under its fold before other companies get to it. Also, such a container-based environment can work well for Azure too, and this is one of the main reasons for Microsoft to make this move. With this acquisition, Microsoft hopes to catch up with AWS in terms of cloud market share.
Also, Microsoft believes this acquisition can give it a lead over other players such as Google and IBM that are fast catching up. Through this move, Microsoft has also filled a gap in cloud skills development and this can give it an edge over other players in the long run, provided other companies continue in the same state of operations.
From Deis perspective, this is the best thing that can happen to it. In general, small companies expect to get acquired by one of the larger players, so being acquired by Microsoft is in many ways an honor for Deis and its parent company Engine Yard.
So what does this acquisition mean for the cloud market as a whole? Well, not much really.
AWS is so widespread and pervasive that it doesn’t see these developments as a threat to its competition and existence. For the others, it’s simply more food to the party.
The post Microsoft Buys Deis appeared first on Cloud News Daily.
Database Performance Analyzer | @CloudExpo @SolarWinds #VM #APM #SDN #Cloud
Quickly find the root cause of complex database problems slowing down your applications. Up to 88% of all application performance issues are related to the database. DPA’s unique response time analysis shows you exactly what needs fixing – in four clicks or less. Optimize performance anywhere. Database Performance Analyzer monitors on-premises, on VMware®, and in the Cloud, including Amazon® AWS and Azure™ virtual machines.
Bridging the data fragmentation gap left by SaaS and the cloud
Software as a service (SaaS) undoubtedly holds major benefits, but unfortunately they continue to be accompanied by major data headaches.
SaaS first really started taking hold in 2007 and most organisations have never looked back since – after all, it offered the promise of significant savings, total cost ownership, and a simplified IT environment. The delivery model is now considered utterly vital to the running of those organisations, thanks in part to the disruptive assets that have only become clearer with time – agility, responsiveness, and a hands-off approach to IT. In fact, on average, enterprises now have hundreds of SaaS applications in use.
However, there has been a significant legacy – the challenge of integration with both enterprise applications and data sources which SaaS and the cloud have failed to resolve. Instead, they have produced a complex network of disparate applications and hybrid environments where data is constantly produced but not meaningfully managed, and in some cases duplicated, leading to further problems. Challenges have also been experienced by many in keeping business processes flowing smoothly.
Fragmentation has thus resulted, particularly from applications not performing well enough when exchanging data during real-time transactions. Furthermore, staff have been able to too easily adopt and then abandon applications, meaning that key data is also discarded on SaaS servers in untracked data centres. Fundamentally, data has been difficult to move, but then too easy to lose as well.
SaaS may be effective in its purest form, but when it comes to the tracking of trusted, actionable data, it’s quite simply failing, even exacerbating data fragmentation through its ‘access anywhere’ ethos.
In such a scenario, the effective leveraging of data insights for future projects is hugely compromised and may be setting you up for failure when you do embark on that new programme.
Moreover – and this is vital – data may be incompatible across the various SaaS and cloud apps in use at any one time, and thus the situation will require prompt intervention if that’s important to your business, as it almost certainly will be.
The adoption of SaaS irrevocably means that effective data aggregation and subsequent insights can only be achieved by combining information from a variety of disparate systems, which is a major challenge by anyone’s yardstick. Complex coding has been required to connect business apps in many cases, with the resultant time wastage and unnecessary cost which that has entailed.
Ultimately, this complexity continues to stand in the way of those looking to make big gains from the cloud.
Nevertheless, clearly this disconnect also represents an opportunity for those who can satisfactorily meet the challenge. A marked evolution is therefore required and automation of manual data entry in many SaaS products and integrated offerings should therefore be a priority, along with the separation of data from application.
Bridges can undoubtedly be built in the fragmented SaaS space, and the right solution may well be closer than we think.
The key themes underpinning the continued momentum for UK cloud adoption
I recently read with interest the results of the latest Cloud Industry Forum research survey into UK Cloud adoption and a couple of aspects jumped out at me, undoubtedly mirroring the experience iland is having within the UK market.
Overall cloud adoption rates among British businesses now stand at 88% and the rate of cloud adoption has increased by a whopping 83% since 2010, with an increase of 5% since last year. In fact, today, we rarely speak with a customer that isn’t using some type of cloud service and that’s reflected in these results. The difference now is that, rather than taking an adhoc approach, companies of all sizes in the UK are taking a more strategic, planned approach to cloud adoption in recognition of its importance to business transformation.
Conducted in February 2017, the research, polled 250 IT and business decision-makers in large enterprises, small to medium-sized businesses (SMEs) and public sector organisations. The survey found that 67% of users expect to increase their adoption of cloud services over the coming year – again, this matches our experience – particularly for companies in highly regulated sectors such as Financial Services and Bio-tech/pharma. These organisations may have been slow to the cloud adoption trend but adoption rates have now started to speed up. I think that is because there is now growing realisation that higher levels of IT security and industry compliance can be achieved in the cloud than on-premises and new cloud use cases are emerging as a result.
Here at iland, what we have seen is a more significant increase in cloud adoption amongst small and public sector organisations – cloud security levels have come a long way and this, combined with the cost-effectiveness of cloud models, has attracted both small companies and public sector organisations to the cloud. The survey results showed a similar pattern with small and public sector organisation adoption rates now standing at 82% for both, up from 54% and 62%, respectively, a year ago.
Cloud-based disaster recovery solutions mean that even small and medium organisations can achieve a business continuity strategy previously only available to large enterprises. A great example of this is the East Thames public housing association who have kicked off their ‘cloud-first’ strategy with a successful DRaaS project.
The research also highlighted that 70% of respondents are either currently seeing or anticipate seeing their organisation have a competitive advantage from utilising cloud services – we hear this again and again from our customers. The benefits of cloud adoption surpass their expectations and drive competitive advantage. Many iland customers have even discovered unexpected use cases from cloud services such as using DR cloud capacity for development and testing.
So, the survey results are encouraging and the only way is up for the UK cloud industry (just as long as we deal with both the Brexit and GDPR issue which are undoubtedly both big concerns for UK organisations). However, I was surprised by one of the results that the survey uncovered about cloud migration. The survey advised that: «On average it took 15 months to migrate applications to the cloud, with 90% experiencing difficulties when migrating to a cloud solution.”
The reasons given for these migration difficulties included complexity of migration (43%) and lack of internal skills/knowledge (32%). Clearly, more planning and expert assistance is needed up front to prepare for cloud migrations.
After all, there are very few companies who can make either the monetary or time investment required to develop new cloud implementation and management skills and a partnership between the customer and cloud service provider based on mutual understanding of responsibilities needs to fill that gap. Indeed, as UK cloud adoption levels continue to rise, the complexity of cloud projects will only increase and a high-touch, consultative approach from cloud providers will become much more important.
[video] Many IoTs Panel | @ThingsExpo #IoT #BigData #DigitalTransformation
The Internet of Things is clearly many things: data collection and analytics, wearables, Smart Grids and Smart Cities, the Industrial Internet, and more. Cool platforms like Arduino, Raspberry Pi, Intel’s Galileo and Edison, and a diverse world of sensors are making the IoT a great toy box for developers in all these areas. In this Power Panel at @ThingsExpo, moderated by Conference Chair Roger Strukhoff, panelists discussed what things are the most important, which will have the most profound effect on the world, and what should we expect to see over the next couple of years.
Digital Transformation Driven by ITaaS | @CloudExpo #Cloud #ITaaS #DigitalTransformation
When executing an effective digital transformation strategy, management is tasked with placing the right workload into the most appropriate IT environment. This represents a shift from buying parts for self-assembly to composing services through self-serve consumption and pay-per-use models. Quite often this transition also leads to the adoption of software defined environments across the enterprise infrastructure.
Announcing @Peak_Ten to Exhibit at @CloudExpo | #DataCenter #Storage
SYS-CON Events announced today that Peak 10, Inc., a national IT infrastructure and cloud services provider, will exhibit at SYS-CON’s 18th International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on June 6-8, 2017, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY. Peak 10 provides reliable, tailored data center and network services, cloud and managed services. Its solutions are designed to scale and adapt to customers’ changing business needs, enabling them to lower costs, improve performance and focus internal resources on core competencies.