Todas las entradas hechas por Business Cloud News

Alex Hilton, APM Group, Cloud Industry Forum, Enterprise IT, News & Analysis, Richard Pharro

CIF: ‘Lack of trust holding back cloud adoption’

CIF: 'Cloud users are still citing the same inhibitors'

CIF: ‘Cloud users are still citing the same inhibitors’

Security, privacy and lack of control are still the leading inhibitors holding enterprises back from adopting cloud services, according to the Cloud Industry Forum’s latest research.

The CIF, which polled 250 senior IT decision-makers in the UK earlier this year to better understand where cloud services fit into their overall IT strategies, said when asked about their biggest concerns during the decision-making process to move to the cloud, 70 per cent cited data security and 61 per cent data privacy.

Both are up from the 2014 figures of 61 per cent and 54 per cent, respectively.

“Hybrid will be the modus operandi for the majority of organisations for the foreseeable future, being either not yet ready to move everything to the cloud, or unwilling to. There are a number of contributing factors here: fear of losing control of IT systems, security and privacy concerns, and lack of budget currently stand in the way of greater adoption of cloud by businesses,” said Alex Hilton, chief executive of the CIF.

“The primary issue relates to trust: trust that cloud-based data will be appropriately secured, that it won’t be compromised or inadvertently accessed, and that businesses will be able to retrieve and migrate their data when a contract terminates.”

About 40 per cent of respondents were also concerned they would lose control/manageability of their IT systems when moving to cloud, up from 24 per cent last year.

Richard Pharro, chief executive of APM Group, the CIF’s independent certification partner said cloud providers need to improve how to disclose their privacy and security practices in order to inspire more confidence among current and potential users.

“Some Cloud providers are opaque in the way that they operate. The prevalence of click-through licenses, some of which are littered with unrealistic terms and conditions,” Pharro said, adding that improving public disclosure in cloud contracts could go some way towards improving trust and confidence among customers.

Apache, Beth Smith, Big Data, Hadoop, IBM, Internet of Things, News & Analysis, Spark

IBM calls Apache Spark “most important new open source project in a decade”

IBM is throwing its weight behind Apache Spark in a bid to bolster its IoT strategy

IBM is throwing its weight behind Apache Spark in a bid to bolster its IoT strategy

IBM said it will throw its weight behind Apache Spark, an open source community developing a processing engine for large-scale datasets, putting thousands of internal developers to work on Spark-related projects and contributing its machine learning technology to the code ecosystem.

Spark, an Apache open source project born in 2009, is essentially an engine that can process vast amounts of data very quickly. It runs in Hadoop clusters through YARN or as a standalone deployment and can process data in HDFS, HBase, Cassandra, Hive, and any Hadoop InputFormat; it currently supports Scala, Java and Python.

It is designed to perform general data processing (like MapReduce) but one of the exciting things about Spark is it can also process new workloads like streaming data, interactive queries, and machine learning – making it a good match for Internet of Things applications, which is why IBM is so keen to go big on supporting the project.

The company said the technology brings huge advances when processing massive datasets generated by Internet of Things devices, improving the performance of data-dependent apps.

“IBM has been a decades long leader in open source innovation. We believe strongly in the power of open source as the basis to build value for clients, and are fully committed to Spark as a foundational technology platform for accelerating innovation and driving analytics across every business in a fundamental way,” said Beth Smith, general manager, analytics platform, IBM Analytics.

“Our clients will benefit as we help them embrace Spark to advance their own data strategies to drive business transformation and competitive differentiation,” Smith said.

In addition to joining Spark IBM said it would build the technology into the majority of its big data offerings, and offer Spark-as-a-Service on Bluemix. It also said it will open source its IBM SystemML machine learning technology, and collaborate with Databricks, a Spark-as-a-Service provider, to advance Spark’s machine learning capabilities.

Big Data, Enterprise IT, Honest Café, IBM, Mark Summerill, News & Analysis

IBM, Revive Vending set up London Café that brews analytics-based insights

Honest Café is an unmanned coffee shop powered by Watson analytics

Honest Café is an unmanned coffee shop powered by Watson analytics

IBM is working with Revive Vending on London-based cafés that use Watson analytics to help improve customer service and form a better understanding of its customers.

The ‘Honest Café’ – there are three in London, with four more planned – are all unmanned; instead, the company deploys high-end vending machines at each location, which all serve a mix of health-conscious snacks, juices, food and beverages.

The company is using Watson analytics to compensate for the lack of wait staff, with the cognitive compute platform being deployed to troll through sales data in a bid to unearth buying patterns and improve its marketing effectiveness.

“Because Honest is unmanned, it’s tough going observing what our customers are saying and doing in our cafes,” said Mark Summerill, head of product development at Honest Café. “We don’t know what our customers are into or what they look like. And as a start-up it’s crucial we know what sells and what areas we should push into.”

“We lacked an effective way of analyzing the data,” Summerill said. “We don’t have dedicated people on this and the data is sometimes hard pull to together to form a picture.”

“Watson Analytics could help us make sure we offer the right customers the right drink, possibly their favorite drink,” he said.

It can leverage the buying patterns by launching promotional offers on various goods to help improve sales, and it can also correlate the data with social media information to better inform its understanding of Honest Café customers.

“We identified that people who buy as a social experience have different reasons than those who dash in and out grabbing just the one drink,” Summerill said. “They also have a different payment method, the time of the day differs and the day of the week. Knowing this, we can now correctly time promotions and give them an offer or introduce a product that is actually relevant to them.”

“Having direct access to Twitter data for insights into what our buyers are talking about is going to help augment our view and understanding of our customers even further,” he added.

Barracuda Networks, Brivo, Dean Drako, Eagle Eye Networks, M&A, News & Analysis, video surveillance

Eagle Eye Networks CEO Dean Drako acquires cloud access firm for $50m

Eagle Eye's CEO and former Barracuda Networks president is buying a cloud access and control company for $50m

Eagle Eye’s CEO and former Barracuda Networks president is buying a cloud access and control company for $50m

Dean Drako, president and chief executive of Eagle Eye Networks and former Barracuda Networks president has wholly acquired Brivo, a cloud access control firm, for $50m.

Brivo said its cloud-based access control system, a centralised management and security system for video surveillance cameras, currently services over 6 million users and 100,000 access points.

The acquisition will give Eagle Eye, a specialist in cloud-based video surveillance technology, a flexible access control tool to couple with its current offerings, Drako said.

“My goal was to acquire the physical security industry’s best access control system,” Drako explained.

“Brivo’s true cloud architecture and open API approach put it a generation ahead of other access control systems. Cloud solutions provide exceptional benefits and Brivo is clearly the market and technology leader. Brivo is also committed to strong, long-standing relationships with its channel partners, which I believe is the best strategy for delivering extremely high customer satisfaction.”

Though Eagle Eye will remain autonomous from Brivo, Drako will serve as the company’s chairman; Steve Van Till, Brivo’s president and chief executive, will continue serving in this capacity.

He said Eagle Eye will work to integrate Brivo’s flagship solution, Brivo OnAir, with its cloud security camera system, which will help deliver video verification and natively viewable and searchable video.

“We are extremely excited that Dean Drako has acquired Brivo and is serving as chairman. In addition to Dean’s experience founding and leading Barracuda Networks to be a multi-billion dollar company, he has grown his latest company, Eagle Eye Networks, to be the technology leader in cloud video surveillance,” Van Till said.

“We both share the vision of delivering the tremendous advantages of cloud-based systems to our customers,” he added.

Channel, Cisco, InterCloud, Internet of Things, News & Analysis, Telco Cloud

Cisco beefs up Intercloud strategy

Cisco is bolstering its Intercloud programme by partnering with ISVs

Cisco is bolstering its Intercloud programme by partnering with ISVs

Cisco is bolstering its Intercloud strategy this week, announcing partnerships with 35 ISVs which the company said would help create and offer a wider range of cloud services based on Cisco infrastructure.

The company announced the impending launch of an Intercloud Marketplace that will be populated with apps certified to run on Intercloud infrastructure, due to go live in autumn this year.

Cisco said it is partnering with a range of commercial app and development companies including Apprenda, Active State and Docker to make their cloud developer environments work on the Intercloud platform.

The company is also partnering with big data solution providers including MapR, Hortonworks, Cloudera and the Apache Hadoop Community to offer hybrid cloud big data implementation support. Additionally, it said it would expose APIs to enable software-based control of networking and security, a move it claims will help developers create Internet of Things services more effectively.

Cisco’s Intercloud strategy has been somewhat of a slow burner, even by Cisco’s own estimates. The company has about 100 Intercloud customers and 65 partners globally, though last month Cisco chairman and chief executive John Chambers said the programme would pick up pace as it moved into “phase 2” of the Intercloud strategy, which is what the Marketplace is all about.

“The pieces that we were missing was how do you go into this new environment where each of these “public clouds in clouds” are separate? And you have to be on different vendors or different companies’ tech to have the ability to go into it. So what we’re looking at first is an architecture and it cements our relationships in service providers. And then it really comes through to how you monetise it over time,” he said at the time.

“This will just take time to monetize, but the effect we see indirectly is already huge when you talk about a Deutsche Telekom or a Telstra and our relationships with those.”

Amazon, AWS, Brent Alderfer, Community Energy, Datacentre, Green America, Jerry Hunter, News & Analysis, sustainability

AWS announces huge solar project following criticisms of its green cred

AWS announced a large solar project, part of its commitment to powering all of its global infrastructure with renewables

AWS announced a large solar project, part of its commitment to powering all of its global infrastructure with renewables

Amazon announced this week that it has teamed up with Community Energy to build and operate an 80 megawatt (MW) solar farm in Virginia, which the companies claim to be the largest solar farm in the state.

The announcement comes just one day after an environmental advocacy group hit out at AWS over its carbon footprint and energy reporting practices.

The companies said the solar farm, to be named the Amazon Solar Farm US East, will start generating approximately 170,000 megawatt hours (MWh) of solar power annually as early as October 2016 – which is roughly equivalent to the amount of energy used to power approximately 15,000 US homes for a year.

Amazon said the power purchasing agreement (PPA) is part of its long-term goal announced last year of powering all of its datacentre infrastructure using 100 per cent renewables. It said as of April this year about a quarter of its infrastructure is powered by renewables.

“We continue to make significant progress towards our long-term commitment to power the global AWS infrastructure with 100 percent renewable energy,” said Jerry Hunter, vice president of infrastructure at Amazon Web Services. “Amazon Solar Farm US East – the second PPA that will serve both existing and planned AWS datacenters in the central and eastern US – has the added benefit of working to increase the availability of renewable energy in the Commonwealth of Virginia.”

Community Energy chief executive Brent Alderfer said: “We are pleased to work with Amazon Web Services to build the largest solar farm in Virginia and one of the largest east of the Mississippi. This project, which wouldn’t have been possible without AWS’ leadership, helps accelerate the commercialization and deployment of solar photovoltaic (PV) technologies at scale in Virginia.”

Earlier this week Green America, a US-based environmental advocacy group, said Amazon is far behind other datacentre operators – including some of its large competitors like Google, Microsoft, Apple and Facebook – in terms of its renewable energy use and reporting practices. Google and Apple have been particularly strong in using or generating renewable energy to power their datacentres, with Apple committed to a number of large solar projects globally.

The group launched a campaign this week aimed at convincing Amazon to alter its environmental strategy. It is calling on Amazon to commit to full use of renewables for its datacentres by 2020 (AWS hasn’t set a target date publicly); submit accurate and complete data to the Carbon Disclosure Project; and issue and annual sustainability report.

Houlin Zhao, Internet of Things, IoT, ITU, News & Analysis

ITU to address IoT standardisation for smart cities

The ITU is coordinating standardisation efforts on IoT technologies for smart cities

The ITU is coordinating standardisation efforts on IoT technologies for smart cities

The ITU has set up a working group to help set out standardisation requirements for Internet of Things (IoT) technologies in smart cities deployments. The ITU said the next five years will be crucial for IoT standards development.

The new ITU-T Study Group for “IoT and its applications, including smart cities and communities” will help coordinate international standards development on the use of IoT and M2M technologies to address urban development challenges.

The organisation said it is “well positioned” to help governments and the private sector capitalise on the potential for IoT to transform city infrastructure through smart buildings, transportation systems modernisation, smart energy and water networks.

ITU secretary-general Houlin Zhao said the new ITU-T Study Group, which will initially be hosted in Singapore, will bring together a diverse selection of stakeholders including ITU’s technical experts as well as national and metropolitan administrations responsible for urban development.

Chaesub Lee, director of the ITU Telecommunication Standardization Bureau said: “The coming five years will be crucial in ensuring that IoT technologies meet their potential. ITU-T is very active in IoT standardization, and we aim to assist cities around the world in creating the conditions necessary for IoT technologies to prove their worth in addressing urban-development challenges.”

Given the nascent state of IoT there are preciously few standards, and one of the benefits that could potentially emerge from developing them within the context of smart cities is that the number of systems requiring integration, and the diversity of their requirements, is significant. While this makes the task of securing consensus on standards more complex, it could make the standards generated more robust and widely applicable to a range of use cases.

BlueStripeMicrosoft, M&A, Mike Neil, News & Analysis

Microsoft buys BlueStripe to bolster hybrid cloud monitoring

BlueStripe will bolster Microsoft' hybrid cloud performance monitoring capabilities

BlueStripe will bolster Microsoft’ hybrid cloud performance monitoring capabilities

Microsoft has acquired BlueStripe, a vendor of infrastructure monitoring solutions for applications distributed across multiple datacentres and cloud platforms.

BlueStripe and Microsoft have worked together closely over the years and the company’s solutions are often used to extend Microsoft System Centre for application infrastructure performance monitoring on a combination of Microsoft and non-Microsoft stacks.

Microsoft said the acquisition would give a strong boost to its hybrid cloud strategy.

“More and more, businesses are turning to applications to drive innovation and gain competitive advantage. To support this explosion of applications, agile cloud development environments and more componentized architectures and micro-services are growing exponentially. Applications and data are being spread across on-premises datacentres and public, private and hosted clouds as a result. While IT teams may not operate all of the infrastructure where the applications run, they still require visibility and the ability to manage these applications in order to support and protect the business,” explained Mike Neil, general manager of enterprise cloud at Microsoft.

“BlueStripe’s enterprise-class solution enables IT professionals to move from monitoring IT at the infrastructure level to gaining visibility into applications at the transaction level. The technology discovers and maps applications and dependencies, pinpoints problems for faster resolution, and helps maintain SLAs across complex underlying infrastructure. By mapping the structure of distributed applications, BlueStripe also helps in the process of updating applications to more modern platforms and migrating to the cloud.”

Microsoft said it will integrate BlueStripe’s solution into its infrastructure and ops management offerings like System Center and Operations Management Suite (OMS), but as part of the acquisition BlueStripe will cease selling its solution in the near term.

The challenge with application monitoring is it has always implied a tradeoff between flexibility and granularity. That said, BlueStripe’s FactFinder offering could give Microsoft – a strong proponent of hybrid cloud – a big boost with enterprises looking to extend their Microsoft stacks for application deployments or vice versa.

News & Analysis, Open Source, OpenPower, OpenStack, SuperVessel, Terri Virnig, Tsinghua University, Vendor, Wei Xu

IBM releases tool to advance cloud app development on OpenPower, OpenStack

IBM has announced a service to help other develop and test OpenPower-based apps

IBM has announced a service to help other develop and test OpenPower-based apps

IBM announced the launch of SuperVessel, an open access cloud service developed by the company’s China-based research outfit and designed for developing and testing cloud services based on the OpenPower architecture.

The service, developed by Beijing’s IBM Research and IBM Systems Labs, is open to business partners, application developers and university students for testing and piloting emerging applications that use deep analytics, machine learning and the Internet of Things.

The cloud service is based on the latest Power8 processors (with FPGAs and GPU-based acceleration) and uses OpenStack to orchestrate the underlying cloud resources. The SuperVessel service is sliced up into various “labs”, each focusing on a specific area, and is initially launching with four: Big Data, Internet of Things, Acceleration and Virtualization.

“With the SuperVessel open computing platform, students can experience cutting-edge technologies and turn their fancy ideas into reality. It also helps make our teaching content closer to real life,” said Tsinghua University faculty member Wei Xu. “We want to make better use of SuperVessel in many areas, such as on-line education.”

Terri Virnig, IBM Vice President of Power Ecosystem and Strategy said: “SuperVessel is a significant contribution by IBM Research and Development to OpenPower. Combining advanced technologies from IBM R&D labs and business partners, SuperVessel is becoming the industry’s leading OpenPower research and development environment. It is a way IBM commits to and supports OpenPower ecosystem development, talent growth and research innovation.”

The move is part of a broader effort to cultivate mindshare around IBM’s Power architecture, which it opensourced two years ago; it’s positioning the architecture as an ideal platform for cloud and big data services. Since the launch of the OpenPower Foundation, the group tasked with coordinating development with Power, it has also been actively working with vendors and cloud service provider to mashup a range of open source technologies – for instance, getting OpenStack to work on OpenPower and Open Compute-based hardware.

Honeywell, Internet of Things, John Rajchert, Menkes Development, News & Analysis, Smart buildings, Sonya Buikema

Toronto real-estate developer, Honeywell partner on IoT for facilities

Honeywell is working with Menkes to deploy IoT systems and analytics in its facilities

Honeywell is working with Menkes to deploy IoT systems and analytics in its facilities

Toronto-based real-estate firm Menkes Developments and industrial electronics giant Honeywell have announced a deal that will see the two combine Internet of Things sensors and cloud services to reduce energy and operational costs at one of the real-estate firm’s properties.

The companies will initially deploy a smart facilities system designed by Honeywell at the Telus Tower in Toronto, as well as a cloud-based analytics platform used to monitor and analyse facility performance data and offer recommendations to improve operations.

“We are committed to pushing the boundaries of smart buildings, identifying new methods to leverage connectivity and improve our facilities,” said Sonya Buikema, vice president, commercial property management, Menkes.

“Honeywell’s technology and services complement our philosophy, and expand the ways in which we’re able to drive performance and better serve our customers,” Buikema said.

The companies said they want to use the technologies to explore new opportunities for improving efficiency and environmental impact.

“Even the most advanced facilities will experience a gradual decrease in performance over time, and it can be difficult to identify and address those issues before they negatively impact the bottom line,” said John Rajchert, president of Honeywell Building Solutions. “Honeywell has the tools and expertise to make it easier for companies to not only know what is happening in their facilities, but to also take the appropriate actions to keep them operating at a high level.”

While facilities automation has been around for some time now only recently have vendors like Honeywell begun selling insights-as-a-service through various cloud-based analytics platforms.

Facilities, particularly mixed use spaces, are very complex to manage and often include a range of different systems (i.e. motion sensors, temperature control, air filtration, lighting, security systems, etc.), so it’s likely squeezing out any operational improvements or insights through the growing interconnection between these various technologies and services will play a big role in real-estate moving forward.