South Sudan is the world’s newest nation, created after a violent struggle, and one that now appears primed for more violence. Once again, the baser instincts of us human beings may trump our nobler nature.

More than 2 milliion people died in South Sudan’s fight for independence, an astonishing number. Imagine half a million people murdered in New York Ciry or London and you get the idea of the scale of this slaughter.

Yet the area is far from hopeless when it comes to ICT. We have not yet been able to break out specific figures for South Sudan, but we were able to include Sudan in our research with relevant figures before the nation broke into its present two pieces.

Our research encompasses 102 nations, and strives to determine relative progress with ICT infrastructure. We integrate several socio-economic and technology measures into our unique algorithms. Our approach gives developing nations of the world a chance to be compared on a “pound-for-pound” basis with developed nations, and can uncover diamonds in the rough in developing regions.

Sudan and South Sudan may be among those diamonds in the rough. Although Sudan finihsed 95th out of the 102 nations we survey with the information we were able to use, it showed a lot more promise when we focused more heavily on technology measures and less on socio-economic measures.

In fact, Sudan cracked our Global Top 20 in terms of potential, mostly due to having broader Internet access than expected – higher than better-known emerging starts Ghana and Senegal, for example.

We understand the danger of minimizing the socio-economic factors. After all, if a nation is simply too dangerous to visit, let alone consider as a place to invest, why even mention it?

Our approach has a heavy measure of caveat emptor – we assume that serious people have a good grasp of the risks involved in traveling to and doing businesss in any nation – and we don’t try to predict short-term economic performance. We do believe that over the long term, those countries with the most dynamic relative ICT infrastructures will be successful, as will those who invest in them.

Sudan and South Sudan have a combined population of about 48 million people, and sit in proximity to emerging East Africa, to Egypt, and to the Gulf states. If only political leaders there could lift their heads, stop focusing on the perceived enemies at hand, and take a longer view, they could truly improve the lives of their people. Our research says this, I say this, and I can hope for the day when it’s safe for me to visit Joba and environs.

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South Sudan is the world’s newest nation, created after a violent struggle, and one that now appears primed for more violence. Once again, the baser instincts of us human beings may trump our nobler nature.

More than 2 milliion people died in South Sudan’s fight for independence, an astonishing number. Imagine half a million people murdered in New York Ciry or London and you get the idea of the scale of this slaughter.

Yet the area is far from hopeless when it comes to ICT. We have not yet been able to break out specific figures for South Sudan, but we were able to include Sudan in our research with relevant figures before the nation broke into its present two pieces.

Our research encompasses 102 nations, and strives to determine relative progress with ICT infrastructure. We integrate several socio-economic and technology measures into our unique algorithms. Our approach gives developing nations of the world a chance to be compared on a “pound-for-pound” basis with developed nations, and can uncover diamonds in the rough in developing regions.

Sudan and South Sudan may be among those diamonds in the rough. Although Sudan finihsed 95th out of the 102 nations we survey with the information we were able to use, it showed a lot more promise when we focused more heavily on technology measures and less on socio-economic measures.

In fact, Sudan cracked our Global Top 20 in terms of potential, mostly due to having broader Internet access than expected – higher than better-known emerging starts Ghana and Senegal, for example.

We understand the danger of minimizing the socio-economic factors. After all, if a nation is simply too dangerous to visit, let alone consider as a place to invest, why even mention it?

Our approach has a heavy measure of caveat emptor – we assume that serious people have a good grasp of the risks involved in traveling to and doing businesss in any nation – and we don’t try to predict short-term economic performance. We do believe that over the long term, those countries with the most dynamic relative ICT infrastructures will be successful, as will those who invest in them.

Sudan and South Sudan have a combined population of about 48 million people, and sit in proximity to emerging East Africa, to Egypt, and to the Gulf states. If only political leaders there could lift their heads, stop focusing on the perceived enemies at hand, and take a longer view, they could truly improve the lives of their people. Our research says this, I say this, and I can hope for the day when it’s safe for me to visit Joba and environs.

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IT organizations face a growing demand for faster innovation and new applications to support emerging opportunities in social, mobile, growth markets, Big Data analytics, mergers and acquisitions, strategic partnerships, and more. This is great news because it shows that IT continues to be a key stakeholder in delivering business service innovation. However, it also means that IT must deliver new innovation despite flat budgets, while maintaining existing services that grow more complex every day.
This is where cloud computing can help to deliver business outcomes, especially if you look beyond just one or two cloud providers, to the almost limitless variety of interconnected and intermediated cloud services – what I call the ‘cloud of clouds’. This is true especially for foundational capabilities – like compute infrastructure, data storage, content delivery, or financial management; and cloud-native services like social media, mobile interfaces, or Big Data analytics. Indeed, it makes little sense today to waste time and resources to rewrite existing code every time you need one of these foundational or cloud-native services. By leveraging the cloud of clouds, developers can instead focus on writing new and unique application code that delivers the competitive advantage the business needs.

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«In a nutshell we provide a cloud software delivery and management platform. When you look at Infrastructure as a Service you can boil it down to two things: self-service and automation,» explained James Weir, CTO and co-founder of UShareSoft, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at the 13th International Cloud Expo®, held Nov 4–7, 2013, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
Cloud Expo® 2014 New York, June 10-12, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY, will feature technical sessions from a rock star conference faculty and the leading Cloud industry players in the world.

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Like millions of other Americans, I learned the other night about the massive data breach at Target. The Washington Post is reporting that sensitive details on over 40 million credit and debit cards were exposed. While the information associated with the crime is still coming out, the implications of this breach could be enormous.
Forrester’s John Kindervag was quoted in the Washington Post article I read saying that “whatever money Target thought they were going to see the holiday season just got flushed down the data breach toilet.” The costs they potentially face include everything from fines, reimbursement to the major card schemes (Visa, MasterCard, American Express), legal fees, system and infrastructure costs to bolster security (once they determine what went wrong) and, perhaps most significantly, brand and reputation damage that could very well impact their top line.

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SYS-CON Events announced today that TMCnet has been named “Media Sponsor” of SYS-CON’s 14th International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on June 10–12, 2014, at the Javits Center in New York City, New York, and the 15th International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on November 4–6, 2014, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
Technology Marketing Corporation (TMC) is the world’s leading business to business and integrated marketing media company, servicing niche markets within the communications and technology industries.

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Throughout 2013 most senior executives have been exposed to the key emerging business technology trends. During 2014, you’re going to see and hear a lot more about the Internet of Things (IoT) — and the impact will reach just about every industry and all the major markets within the Global Networked Economy.
Let’s consider the forward-looking outlook, from a leading industry analyst. International Data Corporation (IDC) recently offered their predictions for the coming year.
«The 3rd Platform’s impact was felt throughout the ICT industry in 2013 as a high-profile CEO lost his job, a major IT player went private, numerous vendors endured cash cow stagnation, and billion-dollar bets were placed on new technologies,» said Frank Gens, Senior Vice President and Chief Analyst at IDC.

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One key element that is often missing in the avid discussions on what’s keeping more enterprises out of the cloud is a common recognition that storage in the cloud is simply not what it should be. It may surprise you, but to a large degree the solution to some of the cloud’s biggest concerns – such as security, compliance, control and complexity – has to do with storage.
So what’s wrong with storage in the cloud?
Unlike compute or networking in the cloud, storage in the cloud is very different from the storage enterprises use in their own data centers. If we look at cloud compute, the VMs are exactly the same as those you would provision in your own data center; networking is very similar: Internet Protocol (IP) and Virtual LANs let you connect machines to each other with reasonable performance and low latency. But storage in the cloud is not the same as that in an on-premise data center.

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With the end of the year buzz around predictions, it’s hard not to join in the conversation. Our CenturyLink Cloud leadership team came together for a few predictions for the year head – and to show we are keepin’ it real, we scored last year’s predictions as well.
1. Enterprise-buyer demand fuels cloud consolidation. Well past the «dipping their toes in» stage with cloud-native apps, enterprises are now accelerating the migration of business-critical applications to the cloud. They will demand more complete, mature cloud solutions from the IT providers they already know and trust. This, in turn, will result in more cloud M&A activity as incumbent vendors solidify their cloud strategy and enhance offerings.

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My general prediction is that Cloudera and Hortonworks are both aggressively moving to fulfilling a vision which looks a lot like Gartner’s “Logical Data Warehouse”….namely, “the next-generation data warehouse that improves agility, enables innovation and responds more efficiently to changing business requirements.”
In 2012, Infochimps (now CSC) leveraged its early use of stream processing, NoSQLs, and Hadoop to create a design pattern which combined real-time, ad-hoc, and batch analytics. This concept of combining the best-in-breed Big Data technologies will continue to advance across the industry until the entire legacy (and proprietary) data infrastructure stack will be replaced with a new (and open) one.

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