Seth Bostock is CEO of IndependenceIT, a company that encourages its users to “think outside the boxes.” It is a pioneer in the idea of Desktop-as-a-Service (which can also be though of as Workspace-as-a-Service). Its core service is Cloud Workspace, designed to deliver apps, desktops, and entire corporate IT systems as a high-performance, secure cloud service. Cloud Workspace users can work from anywhere at anytime, and on any device with the same experience, in this environment. We had a few questions for Seth about the company and what it does: Cloud Computing Journal: How have you seen the idea of Workspace- or Desktop-as-a-Service grow over the past few years?

Seth Bostock: IndependenceIT has seen tremendous growth—337% through mid-year 2014)– in Workspace-as-a-Service.

Scale and integration have been key challenges for IT Administrators when implementing application and desktop virtualization. This has limited the promise of what the technology can deliver for many organizations.

The Cloud Workspace Suite solves this problem up front with a single pane of glass to manage all workloads across any public, private or hybrid cloud.  Coupled with the powerful API set for ease of integration with our customers’ existing operations and business support tools, simplifying deployment of the CWS platform while speeding time to market.

CCJ: What are the most important aspects of DaaS to your customers?

Seth: As our Customers are the Channel and IT Administrators, the most important aspects of DaaS is how to effectively scale and manage workloads across multiple platforms and domains. IndependenceIT’s automation is focused on taking all of the common, repetitive, time consuming and complicated tasks associated with a virtual environment and making them simple and efficient
 
IndependenceIT focuses its automation in three areas:

Initial platform installation, to speed time to market with new single tenant or multi-tenant deployment
New end user deployments, to rapidly deploy the entire end user environment in minutes speeding time to revenue
Operations and management of the environment, to simplify IT administration and user management for greater efficiency and scale.

CCJ: How is the continued proliferation of phones and tablets driving the need for workspaces and desktops in the cloud?

Seth: The influx of mobile devices throughout the enterprise, pervasive access to high-speed connectivity and more distributed workforce environments are causing companies to look to the cloud for desktop and application enablement.

The Cloud Workspace Suite provides location and device independence, allowing organizations to capitalize on the productivity advantages of mobility – all without compromise to security, performance or control.

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InMage earlier this year announced the release of Scout 7.1, enabling customers to leverage the public, hosted and private cloud as a target for backup and/or disaster recovery (DR). This next generation solution for hybrid cloud backup, recovery and migration is available in three form factors – software, SaaS and the InMage 4000 Series appliance. «We’ve always been ahead of the pack with our award winning technology, but with the addition of public and private cloud support for backup and DR, we’re now truly in a class of one,» said Kumar Malavalli, CEO, InMage Systems.

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When you plan your migration to the cloud, and the cloud security best practices to secure it, there is no need to reinvent the wheel.  Here is some advice from the Fortune 500. Use these tips to learn from others’ successes and to avoid their failures – maybe their companies can afford “valuable” learning lessons, […]

The post Cloud Security Best Practices of the Fortune 500 appeared first on Porticor Cloud Security.

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The cloud is expanding. More applications are being run online. More data is being stored online. More businesses are relying on public, private, and hybrid clouds for their apps, records, and backups. And more hackers are taking advantage. Why Security Breaches Happen in the Cloud Hackers aren’t attacking the cloud; the cloud is their access […]

The post Cloud Security Breaches and How to Avoid Them appeared first on Porticor Cloud Security.

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Think Big has demonstrated expertise in implementing open source big data technologies such as Hadoop, NoSQL databases including HBase, Cassandra and MongoDB, and Storm for real-time event processing. The consulting teams have deep-domain knowledge with a variety of Hadoop distributions such as Hortonworks, Cloudera, and MapR. In addition, Think Big provides a set of pre-built application components for Customer and Clickstream Analytics, Distributed Device Data Management and Analytics, and Risk and Trading Analytics.

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A central challenge for any digital transformation initiative is dealing with the ever-increasing pace of change – in the marketplace, in the technology environment, and in the world at large. Clearly, as customer expectations accelerate, our technology must keep up. Squeezing every last millisecond of performance leads to the demand for real-time – technology with no delays whatsoever, moving at the speed of thought itself. If we examine this real-time requirement more closely, however, important nuances emerge. First, real-time never actually means instantaneous, as it always takes a certain amount of time for bits to find their way to their destination. But even more important for any digital professional to understand, the concept of real-time has several subtly different meanings – and understanding the differences is critical for making effective technology decisions.

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Due of the rise of Hadoop, many enterprises are now deploying their first small clusters of 10 to 20 servers. At this small scale, the complexity of operating the cluster looks and feels like general data center servers. It is not until the clusters scale, as they inevitably do, when the pain caused by the exponential complexity becomes apparent. We’ve seen this problem occur time and time again.
In his session at 15th Cloud Expo, Greg Bruno, Vice President of Engineering and co-founder of StackIQ, describes why clusters are so different from farms of single-purpose servers that reside in traditional data centers, and why without an automated solution that can address the cluster requirements, real pain is coming and failure is certain.

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Syncsort, a global leader in Big Data integration solutions, announced the results from a multi-stage industry survey conducted over the first half of 2014 which show enterprise IT decision makers are making serious strategic commitments to Big Data migration and analytics programs, signaling an industry evolution from trial to action. Syncsort polled over 100 IT decision makers, ranging from data scientists, data architects, developers and IT managers at the recent Hadoop Summit in San Jose and the Cloudera Session in Boston. The majority of respondents were from medium to large enterprises who indicated that 5% or more of their current budgets were allocated to Big Data projects, much of that effort focusing on offloading data warehouse data for enterprise wide use through analytics. These results show, regardless of Hadoop distribution preference, decision makers have transitioned their focus from test or stealth projects to real world execution of Big Data strategies.

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With cloud computing there’s no longer a question about whether you should encrypt data. That’s a given. The question today is, who should manage and control the encryption keys? Whether talking to an infrastructure provider like Amazon or Microsoft, or a SaaS provider, it’s imperative to have the discussion about key control. The topic is […]

The post Encrypted data in the cloud? Be sure to control your own keys appeared first on Porticor Cloud Security.

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Is your organization struggling to deal with skyrocketing volumes of digital assets? The amount of data is growing exponentially and organizations are having a hard time managing this growth.
In his session at 15th Cloud Expo, Amar Kapadia, Senior Director of Open Cloud Strategy at Seagate, will walk through the essential considerations when developing a cloud storage strategy. In this discussion, you will understand the challenges IT is facing, why companies need to move to cloud, and how the right cloud model can help your business economically overcome the data struggle.

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