There’s been plenty written and predicted about the future of cloud and Software-as-a-Service, and it’s hard to argue with its benefits – for both organizations and users. If our cloud-based future is to come true though, we must pay closer attention to the service levels users are getting from Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications.
Obvious? Maybe not.
As many organizations make their first big move to the cloud with services like Office 365, a few common misconceptions – grounded in the general belief that once we move to the cloud, IT no longer owns direct responsibility for service levels – threaten to put them on a path to protracted outages and frustrated users.
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The Seven-Year Itch! Startups, It’s Time to Graduate from Amazon
For about seven years, the IT industry and its pundits have been infatuated with the “cloud” – specifically Amazon Web Services (AWS). Tech startups and their investors have flocked to AWS with inflated expectations on the notion that cloud economics were better than hosting applications themselves. After all, start-up resources are tight, agility is required, and any time not wasted on infrastructure management can be put toward business and product differentiation. It all makes sense, but start-ups and investors alike are now finding that much of AWS’s promise is not being met. After as much as seven years of doing this “cloud” thing, many are having second thoughts about a cloud only solution. AWS was expected to deliver reliability, cost savings, flexibility, and good support, but these benefits have not been realized and it’s the customer that suffers.
Frederick’s of Hollywood: Making a Holistic Move to the Cloud
A trendsetter in intimate women’s apparel, Frederick’s of Hollywood, needed a cloud strategy that merged stability, security and PCI compliance needs with the ability to scale up during retail busy season.
In her session at 14th Cloud Expo, Malorie Lanthier, VP of Information Technology at Frederick’s of Hollywood, will discuss how migrating to the cloud enhanced the scalability, resiliency and flexibility of Frederick’s of Hollywood’s IT infrastructure while elevating the ability to address company-wide business objectives. She’ll also share her cloud evaluation process, successful practices used to make the wholesale move to the cloud and advice for organizations looking to develop and execute a holistic cloud plan quickly and effectively.
Sakura Internet Cloud Datacenter Deploys Amplidata Object Store
Amplidata has announced that Sakura Internet* has deployed an initial 1.3 petabyte object store using AmpliStor® storage software based on a reference architecture from Intel, Amplidata, and Quanta QCT*.
As the adoption of cloud computing soars in Japan, Osaka-based Internet service provider Sakura Internet is delivering a growing range of cloud services aimed primarily at small-to-medium size businesses (SMBs) and software developers. Sakura’s customers increasingly require cloud storage services that support archiving, and content delivery for large amounts of unstructured data.
ObserveIT Selected as IBM Beacon Award Finalist
ObserveIT has been selected as one of two IBM Beacon Award finalists in the “outstanding ready for IBM security intelligence solution” category.
The IBM Beacon Awards recognize IBM Business Partners who have delivered exceptional solutions using IBM products and services. By delivering innovative solutions proven to drive business value, Beacon Award winners help transform the way their clients, their industries and the world do business.
ObserveIT’s behavior monitoring software solution is already in use in more than 800 corporations in 70 countries, where it is used for auditing, tracking and recording third–party and internal privileged user behavior with real-time, context-aware video monitoring within any server environment. ObserveIT augments the traditional access management and logging systems by adding video playback of user activities, helping IT management clearly and easily understand who did what and when.
Compuware Deepens Investment in APM for SAP Solutions
Compuware Corporation on Tuesday announced that effective February 1, 2014, it has opened a new Center of Excellence for SAP solutions in the Partner Port, located near SAP headquarters, where more than 100 SAP partners and other companies with close relationships with SAP have office space in Walldorf, Germany. Compuware has also increased its investment in R&D and expertise to support the fast-growing base of companies using SAP® solutions.
Compuware APM for SAP Solutions is a non-invasive solution that comes out-of-the-box, with zero configuration. The solution discovers processes and user transactions performed with SAP software and captures important performance parameters of non-SAP components in heterogeneous ERP landscapes. All transactions are monitored 24/7, without placing additional load on the servers or network. Additionally, this solution can be extended to monitor cloud, big data, Citrix and mobile environments as well.
Managing Consumer Identities in the Cloud
Cloud environments have created situations that allow users, customers, consumers, and employees to access Public, Intranet, and Extranet applications from different locations, devices, and as different personas. The focus of all the Internet and enterprise front-end applications today is to enhance the user experience. In addition, with advances in mobility and BYOD, the line between public and private becomes a deep shade of gray.
At the same time, organizations are leveraging SaaS applications, such as Google Apps and DropBox, for their internal business communication and collaboration. This opens up challenges in providing a universal identity for the user, while at the same time retaining the flexibility to segregate access depending on the scenario. While cloud computing environments may offer different levels of abstraction to its users, federated identity management does not leverage these abstractions; each user must set up her identity management solution. This situation is further aggravated by the fact that no identity federation solution is able to integrate all abstraction layers (i.e., IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS). The overwhelming challenge is to manage the user’s identity effectively and in a compliant manner while retaining the richness of the user experience.
Why Intelligent VM Routing Is Critical to Your Private Cloud’s Success
Virtualized and private cloud infrastructures are all about sharing resources – compute, storage and network. Optimizing these environments comes down to the ability to properly balance capacity supply and application demand. In practical terms, this means allocating the right amount of resources and putting workloads in the right places. These decisions are critical to ensuring performance, compliance and cost control.
Yet most organizations are using antiquated methods such as home-grown spreadsheets and best guesses to determine which infrastructure to host workloads on and how much capacity to allocate. Not only do these approaches hinder operational agility, but as hosting decisions become more and more complex, they are downright dangerous. The typical strategy employed to stave off risk is to over-provision infrastructure, and the thinking behind this is that having an excess of capacity on hand will ensure that enough resource is available to avoid any performance problems. This is not only expensive, but it actually doesn’t prevent key operational issues and many of the performance and compliance issues that are caused by incorrectly combining workloads.
Bloated Web Pages Can Make or Break the Day
In a previous post, we discussed why GoDaddy could sustain the peak load after its Super Bowl Ad campaign aired and why others like Kia wasted a lot of marketing money because its site availability dropped under the load. In this post, we will look at the technical details behind the impact of oversized pages, and how that may have been averted by kia.com.
Previously, I noted availability issues occurred for Kia during game time. The Kia team broke an important performance rule – large number of bytes transferred.
First, let’s look at the anatomy of an American football fumble– play in motion, ball fumbled, pile-up ensues until possession is determined, then play is recovered or turned over.
Compuware APM Introduces Smart Network Packet Capture and Analysis
Compuware Corporation has announced a major new release of its Data Center Real User Monitoring solution (DC RUM). Enhanced analytics and new network packet capture and analysis capabilities simplify identification and triage of performance issues across applications, infrastructure and network. Now application operators can monitor and understand the network impact on application performance down to the transaction and user level at packet-level depth. The new availability analytics span all layers of a business transaction, from the network TCP session all the way up to the application logic.