An increasing number of companies are creating products that combine data with analytical capabilities. Running interactive queries on Big Data requires complex architectures to store and query data effectively, typically involving data streams, an choosing efficient file format/database and multiple independent systems that are tied together through custom-engineered pipelines. In his session at @BigDataExpo at @ThingsExpo, Tomer Levi, a senior software engineer at Intel’s Advanced Analytics group, covered the challenges, architectural considerations, best practices, and frameworks available to enable interactive analytics integrated into a Big Data platform.

read more

The Federal Communications Commission announced that it will vote on December 14 to enact the exceptionally misleadingly titled “Restoring Internet Freedom” order. If passed, it will do the opposite of restoring anything resembling freedom — it will repeal the current net neutrality rules which were enacted to ensure that Americans would have equal access to the Internet.
If you’re reading this, chances are you’re already interested in the topic. Still, some quick background:
Renamed “Open Internet” a while back, net neutrality provided a regulatory framework that specifically prohibited:

read more

The 22nd International Cloud Expo | 1st DXWorld Expo has announced that its Call for Papers is open. Cloud Expo | DXWorld Expo, to be held June 5-7, 2018, at the Javits Center in New York, NY, brings together Cloud Computing, Digital Transformation, Big Data, Internet of Things, DevOps, Machine Learning and WebRTC to one location. With cloud computing driving a higher percentage of enterprise IT budgets every year, it becomes increasingly important to plant your flag in this fast-expanding business opportunity. Submit your speaking proposal today!

read more

The 22nd International Cloud Expo | 1st DXWorld Expo has announced that its Call for Papers is open. Cloud Expo | DXWorld Expo, to be held June 5-7, 2018, at the Javits Center in New York, NY, brings together Cloud Computing, Digital Transformation, Big Data, Internet of Things, DevOps, Machine Learning and WebRTC to one location. With cloud computing driving a higher percentage of enterprise IT budgets every year, it becomes increasingly important to plant your flag in this fast-expanding business opportunity. Submit your speaking proposal today!

read more

“CHEETAH is not just a training company. What we are trying to do is something fun – how to learn the cloud in a fun way. So you can learn Docker, Cloud Foundry, a lot of complex technologies but in a fun way,” explained Etienne Cointet, CEO of App2Cloud, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at 21st Cloud Expo, held Oct 31 – Nov 2, 2017, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.

read more

Digital technologies have altered how people and businesses interact. The potential for dislocation from ongoing digital transformation has created unprecedented levels of C-suite discussion. The decisive market leaders have heeded the warnings and taken bold actions.

That said, if you’re one of those chief technology officers (CTO) that previously responded to this scenario by making small incremental adjustments to your IT agenda, then you’re potentially at risk. Any relief from those prior tweaks tend to be short lived. The same issues will likely resurface.

An introduction to digital reinvention

Back in 2013, the IBM Institute for Business Value (IBV) introduced the concept of ‘Digital Reinvention’. Why is that concept noteworthy? Markets had evolved from organizational centricity, in which manufacturers and service providers defined a predictable state, into a radically different environment described as the everyone-to-everyone (E2E) economy.

The E2E economy has four distinct characteristics, which are now more important since the original IBM study was published. E2E is orchestrated, and based on open ecosystems which are collaborative and inclusive. Orchestration reflects coordination, arrangement and management of complex commercial environments.

E2E is symbiotic, where everyone and everything are mutually interdependent. Meaning, collaborative partners engage in co-design, co-creation, co-production, co-marketing, co-distribution and sometimes co-funding. Moreover, the E2E economy is cognitive, characterized by data-enabled learning and predictive capabilities.

Customer experience-based innovation

Emerging technologies are expanding customer influence. A new generation of tech savvy customers demand more sophisticated and tailored experiences. According to a recent global survey of executives focusing on emerging business ecosystems, 54 percent believe customer buying behavior is shifting from a products- and/or services-based to an experience-based approach.

Seventy-one percent of global CEOs are now intent on treating customers as individuals rather than market segments – that’s a 29 percent growth in only two years. And, 81 percent of global CEOs say they want to apply technology to develop stronger customer relationships.

What’s changed? Digital reinvention rethinks customer and partner relationships from a need-, use- or aspiration-first perspective. Digital reinvention helps organizations create unique, compelling experiences for their customers, partners, employees and other stakeholders.

These benefits arise even if fulfillment of the experience involves direct provision of products and services, or orchestration of products or services from partner organizations by way of a business ecosystem. The most successful digitally reinvented businesses establish a platform of engagement for their customers – acting as enabler, conduit and partner.

Pathway to digital reinvention

According to the IBM IBV assessment, to succeed in this disruptive environment, organizations must offer compelling new experiences, establish new focus, build new expertise, devise new ways of working and embrace the digital drivers.

Pursue a new focus: Leading businesses will develop new ways of realizing and monetizing value and spawn new business models, new forms of financing and better, more holistic ways of conducting risk assessments. Leaders will also engage the market in deeper, more compelling ways. They will create strategies and execution plans to deliver deep, contextual, compelling experiences, and find new ways to monetize customer Interactions.

Build new expertise: Leading businesses will digitize products, services and processes that help them redefine the customer experience. They will augment these steps by applying predictive analytics, cognitive computing, the Internet of Things and automation to create a fully integrated, flexible and agile operational environment necessary to support and enable deep experiences.

Establish new ways of working: Leading businesses identify, retain and build the right talent needed to create and sustain a digital organization. The most successful among these take measures to create and perpetuate an innovation-infused culture incorporating design thinking, agile working and fearless experimentation.

Leaders contextualize organizational priorities within business ecosystems, seeking new forms of partnering and new ways to build value within overall systems of engagement. They think deeply and strategically about how customer priorities might evolve, seeking opportunities to create engagement platforms to the benefit of their customers, their partners and themselves.

Embrace digital drivers: Leading businesses combine open innovations to create organizations that can build the deep, compelling experiences customers desire. Rather than incrementalism, digital reinvention provides a path for visionary organizations to adopt an experience-first approach to planning, employing the strengths of ecosystem partners to create experiences that are truly unique.

Study conclusion: Reinventing the future

Digital technologies have redefined how people live, work and play. Pervasive technology is already changing traditional industry structures and economics and is reinterpreting what it means to be a customer and a citizen within the Global Networked Economy.

To thrive in a rapidly changing business environment, the most successful organizations will offer compelling new experiences, establish new focus, build new expertise and devise new ways of working – all based upon a foundation of the latest digital drivers.

The fearless market leaders advance this process by embracing digital reinvention. They envision possibilities, create pilots, deepen capabilities and orchestrate new ecosystems.

Amazon won’t have the cloudy news agenda all its own way this week: Microsoft has announced a partnership with SAP which aims to ‘provide enterprise customers with a clear roadmap to confidently drive more business innovation in the cloud’, as the companies put it.

The move will enable organisations to run SAP’s private managed cloud service, SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud, on Microsoft Azure, as well as some internal use cases; Microsoft will deploy SAP S/4HANA on Azure for its internal finance processes, while SAP will move key internal business critical systems to Azure.

“Building on our long-time partnership, Microsoft and SAP are harnessing each other’s products to not only power our own organisations, but to empower our enterprise customers to run their most mission-critical applications and workloads with SAP S/4HANA on Azure,” said Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella in a statement. SAP CEO Bill McDermott added that the companies were taking their partnership “to the next level with this new capability.”

SAP’s most recent financial results, published last month, saw the company raise its outlook with cloud subscriptions and support revenue and new cloud bookings up 22% and 19% respectively from this time last year. The company cited this quarter was all about ‘waiting for the big brands’ to come through, with Shell already on board and two ‘global brand[s] of massive significance’ in the near future.

From Microsoft’s side, there have been a couple of major customer wins in recent weeks. Energy provider Chevron signed a seven-year partnership deal with the company last month, while United Technologies, which owns brands such as Otis and Pratt & Whitney, signed up earlier this month.

In a separate announcement, Microsoft said it was ‘reinventing its supply chain’ by teaming up with SAP Ariba and Intrigo Systems. The company in a recent webinar explained how the collaboration helped scale and support the manufacturing of its most popular products, including the Xbox and Surface.  

Targeted attacks on the network of a business can be big trouble. A business should know where to look and what to look for to stop the attacks.
Businesses are aware of the dangers of hackers. They know that a hacker can steal private information that hey store on their computer networks. They recognize that hackers can create problems for the business and the business’s computer systems through a variety of different ways.

read more

McAfee is acquiring cloud security provider Skyhigh Networks with the aim of ‘establishing the leading company to provide the cybersecurity architecture of the future.’

Skyhigh, alongside other organisations such as Netskope, is in the ‘cloud access security broker’ (CASB) space, defined by Gartner as “on-premises, or cloud-based security policy enforcement points, placed between cloud service consumers and cloud service providers to combine and interject enterprise security policies as the cloud-based resources are accessed.”

In other words, CASBs are gatekeepers ensuring traffic between on-premises devices and cloud providers are compliant. Skyhigh secured a total of $106.5 million in funding across four rounds, with the most recent being a $40m series D. At the time, the company said it would use the money to ‘carry [itself] to productivity’.

Rajiv Gupta, Skyhigh CEO, will run McAfee’s new cloud business unit, with Skyhigh’s existing organisational structure remaining ‘generally intact’, McAfee said. The move can also be seen in the wake of McAfee’s structure; the company announced in April it was operating as a new standalone company, in the process closing the funding put in place by Intel, who purchased the security provider in 2011 and called it Intel Security for the past three years.

“Becoming part of McAfee is the ideal next step in realising Skyhigh Networks’ vision of not simply making the cloud secure, but making it the most secure environment for business,” said Gupta in a statement. “McAfee will provide global scale to further accelerate Skyhigh’s growth, with the combined company providing leading technologies and solutions across cloud and endpoint security – categories Skyhigh and McAfee respectively helped create, and the two architectural control points for enterprise security.”

Financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.

A research report from BMC Software argues organisations are struggling to manage multi-cloud environments – with four in five respondents saying current multi-cloud management approaches need rethinking.

The study, which polled 1,000 IT decision makers across 11 countries, found that drivers of multi-cloud strategies were less than clear. The most popular reason was cost optimisation, cited by 45% of respondents, with agility (44%) and mitigating risk (40%) also highly cited.

It may however not be as much of a surprise that the drivers were unclear if the definition of multi-cloud is unclear. Just over half (52%) of those polled agreed that the term multi-cloud ‘includes a combination of public and/or private clouds as well as on-premises solutions’. 23% of respondents said it must encompass all three.

Wait, you may be asking: isn’t that hybrid? More on that shortly. Yet the most worrying finding from the study is around costs; even though 45% of respondents said cost optimisation was the biggest driver in multi-cloud, 40% admitted they did not know how much their businesses were spending on cloud services.

“IT leaders must consider new ways to manage multi-cloud environments to ensure they are getting the expected benefits from public cloud in terms of cost savings, automated performance optimisation, and increased security and governance,” said Bill Berutti, BMC president of enterprise solutions.

The report goes on to note the different approaches organisations can take, with automation high on the list. Yet it may be worth taking a step back here.

Analysis

Let’s take an extremely basic definition of multi-cloud – in this instance “the use of two or more cloud computing services”. This often refers to a mix of public infrastructure as a service (IaaS) environments. For instance, organisations could use Amazon Web Services (AWS) for compute, and Microsoft Azure for storage. A looser definition could be utilising different cloud providers for different product sets. Security provider Symantec appears to have done this, using Azure to power its Norton anti-virus product suite, and AWS for many other workloads.

The other definition of multi-cloud is around avoiding vendor lock-in; something which, as TechTarget notes, drove many early strategies but is being slowly subsided, as previously mentioned, for organisations’ broader business or technical goals. Writing for this publication in August, Jay Chapel, CEO of ParkMyCloud, argued risk mitigation was not the most significant driver, while vendor lock-in could be mitigated in other instances. Chapel argued he sees customers using a multi-cloud strategy ‘to design and build applications in the clouds best suited for optimising their applications’. “You can then use this leverage to help prevent vendor lock-in,” he added.

In April, analyst firm 451 Research said that around half of AWS houses in Europe were also using Azure, and vice versa. More recent figures released by the company show more than two thirds (69%) of survey respondents were planning to have some type of multi-cloud environment by 2019.

The cloud providers themselves are of course more than aware of this – and in certain instances trying to get organisations to bridge the divide. Earlier this year Microsoft, whose aggressive strategy in cloud is unmistakeable, published a lengthy guide comparing AWS and Azure services. As Melanie Posey, 451 research vice president, told this publication at the time, while the guide notes the importance of multi-cloud for organisations in terms of greater choice and flexibility, the real aim is most likely to ‘translate’ AWS services into Azure, and showing organisations how to migrate from one to the other.

Another much more recent example, albeit not both in the public cloud, can be seen with Microsoft and VMware. Today saw the launch of Azure Migrate to all Azure customers, aimed at helping organisations migrate VMware-based applications to Azure, integrate them with Azure, and deploy VMware virtualisation on Azure hardware. VMware responded by saying it could not support customers who went down that route as the Microsoft service had neither been certified nor supported by the company. Indeed, VMware has an official partnership with AWS in place with the marketing touted at combining the ‘world’s leading’ private and public cloud providers respectively.

Whichever definition of multi-cloud you take and the reasons for taking it on, there are tangible benefits. But as ever, plenty of due diligence needs to take place to make sure your organisation gets a solution which both offers technological advantage as well as saves costs.

In its report, BMC offers five recommendations for organisations in successfully managing multi-cloud environments: gain increased visibility into cloud assets to get the complete picture; get a clear picture of cloud costs as not everything may need to be in the cloud; take a proactive stance to harden a broader attack surface and ensure compliance; rethink management approaches and simplify and automate as much as possible; and explore AI and machine learning, which has the potential to remove repetition out of the multi-cloud management process.

You can find out more about the report here (pdf).