At last, the moment has arrived: the thirteenth and final installment of ZapThink’s annual retrospective and predictions written by one of ZapThink’s original members. ZapThink will live on as a division of Dovel Technologies, and I will continue my thought leadership at an as yet unselected opportunity, so in a year’s time, you may see the fourteenth installment of this annual tradition. But for today, let’s score ourselves one last time on last year’s predictions and make three new ones for 2014.
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Delivering Security ‘as a Service’
SecuritySolutionsWatch.com: Thank you for joining us today, Bryan. If you wouldn’t mind, please tell us a little bit about your background and your role at HP.
Bryan Coapstick: As the Director of Mobile Innovation, I am responsible for ensuring that HP’s mobility initiatives successfully help enterprises improve communications and interactions with customers, employees, constituents and partners to ensure they have the data they need, when they need it, and in a format that is easy to interact with and consume. Additionally, I serve as the industry chair for the Advanced Mobility Working group for the American Council for Technology/Industry Advisory Council (ACT/IAC), whose mission is to “foster collaboration and communication on issues regarding mobile computing in the Federal Government, including citizen services, remote connectivity, employee services, workforce productivity, digital publishing, and enterprise mobility.”
Prior to joining HP, I spent nearly two decades in both the public and private sectors, focused on emerging technologies and the critical intersections between business strategy and technology. I’ve worked with several Fortune 200 companies to increase their market presence and effectively leverage their mobile and digital channels. Additionally, I have built interactive teams, worked to guide digital mobile strategies, and led an Innovation Lab focused on accelerating digital interaction models, the convergence of big data analytics with context aware applications, and emerging mobile payments and transaction capabilities.
Five Hot Healthcare Innovations in 2013 and a Few to Look Out for in 2014
The ability to provide fast and accurate healthcare has always depended on having the latest technology and educating the relevant staff on how to best employ these new devices and applications. Throughout 2013, a number of innovations appeared in the industry, changing the way healthcare we administer and receive care.
New technologies have the potential to disrupt the traditional, slow, and ineffective processes that are often ingrained in the healthcare system. They have the potential to offer more security to meet stringent compliance requirements, streamline distribution, and get more consistency throughout a range of services. This year has seen some new technologies and trends that are having a real impact on the industry.
Cloud Shifts the Burden of Security to Development
Explores three ways to help development teams bear the burden of security: use pen test results to harden the application, leverage service virtualization for security scenarios, & adopt policy-driven development to help engineers understand and satisfy management’s security expectations.
The move to the cloud brings a number of new security challenges, but the application remains your last line of defense. Engineers are extremely well poised to perform tasks critical for securing the application-provided that certain key obstacles are overcome.
Three Ways to Sell Desktop-as-a-Service
Cloud service providers are up against several key challenges when it comes to selling desktop virtualization technology. An understanding of the benefits of desktop-as-a-service (DaaS) rarely exists, and licensing concerns – and their rising costs – are not going away any time soon. Knowing the do’s and don’t of selling desktop-as-a-service before diving in can solve problems on the front end while ensuring adoption of DaaS occurs in companies of all shapes and sizes.
1. Turn IT administrators into allies, not opponents.
Among the myriad reasons enterprises cite for turning to desktop-as-a-service (DaaS) technology, a few prove instrumental in driving its adoption. When evaluating the decision drivers behind DaaS, it is important to consider what the actual motivators behind a switch away from traditional desktop computing may be, and who it is that must be properly motivated. While some of the most progressive executives of small and mid-sized businesses may themselves be the driving force behind such a switch, it is worth noting that these are not typically the individuals interacting with DaaS providers. On the other hand, those who head the IT department of a company have many potential motivators for spearheading a switch from traditional compute to virtualized hosted Windows desktops. The time, energy and frustration DaaS can spare those who actually administer end-user compute for organizations with dozens – or hundreds – of desktops can be significant. If these individuals are sufficiently aware of the benefits they stand to accrue through a switch to more efficient DaaS technology, it follows intuitively that such heads of IT organizations would be among the strongest advocates for such a shift.
Your Cloud Availability: 98%, 99.99% or 99.9999%?
We discussed my belief that the nines (99.99…%) are more marketing than the real deal today – What do you think? The market and tools used to measure your uptime immature or do not really exist. The concept of availability in the cloud is determined by the level of responsibility and liability that the vendors have for their customers. These notions include the ability to monitor, proactively fix and maintain continuous communication with users, giving them clear and genuine visibility into what exactly is going on and when the system is expected to return to normal. It is also necessary, here, to define the concept of downtime. At a very basic level, it is when the system is not available. However, the more precise answer depends on the criticality of specific features and components of an application or service.
On that note, we are interested in hearing your point of view. First and foremost, it is essential to ask, what do you consider “downtime”? How do you approach the matter of downtime with your customers? How do you compensate, if at all? Maybe even before discussing compensation, let us ask how or if you measure downtime? If so, are you able to calculate your own availability over the past week, month, or year? With your help, we can gain even greater insights on the topic.
The Changing Face of Disaster Recovery in the Age of Cloud Computing
Disaster Recovery (DR) has typically only been used by organizations for applications deemed to be mission critical. This was because organizations didn’t want to incur the expense associated with DR for less important applications. Today, because of cloud computing, many organizations are considering the use of DR for as many applications as is essential for the business.
DR in the cloud is relatively a new concept still and, like many technology trends we’ve seen so far, there’s a lot of hype and misinterpretation out there. Multiple schools of thought exist on whether or not to implement DR in the cloud.
CloudTimes Named “Media Sponsor” of Cloud Expo 2014 NY and Silicon Valley
SYS-CON Events announced today that CloudTimes 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.
CloudTimes is the premier source for thought leadership and the latest news on Cloud Computing. We are an international group of Cloud Computing experts and write on topics covering SaaS, PaaS, IaaS, Cloud Security, Virtualization, Enterprise 2.0 Applications, Cloud Services, Cloud Marketing, Social Cloud, Mobile Cloud and everything related.
Log Management 101: Where Do Logs Come From?
We’ve had a lot of people asking for the Log Management Primer for a while now. And, surprisingly, many of these folks have a strong technical background, including developers. Some want it for themselves, and some want it to pass on to a colleague, manager, etc. I’m going to explain what logs are, where they come from and how you can get your logs.
If you’re a developer, this post probably isn’t for you as we don’t dig into the code level nitty gritty, but it will give you a high level overview of logs, where they come from and how they get sent to a third party service.
Business Implications for Cloud Information Protection
For some organizations, cloud computing can be a hard sell, even before you come to the question of how to handle cloud-computing security. Public cloud, private cloud, hybrid cloud, encryption, tokenization, data residency, privacy regulations – all are factors involved and the perceived effort can sometimes seem to overshadow the benefits. But just as cloud computing comes with a slew of demonstrated business benefits, so does effective cloud computing security. Included below are three specific benefits to implementing a cloud computing security system.
1. Regulatory compliance prevents costly fines.
One of the most common reasons enterprises have for investing in cloud computing security is, of course, regulatory compliance. Heavily regulated industries like finance and health care – industries that handle the most sensitive personal information – must remain in compliance with relevant regional, national, and international laws, as well as with industry-specific standards. Failure to do so can come with a high price. In fact, banks that fail to comply with the PCI DSS requirements, for example, may face fines of anywhere from $5,000 to $100,000 per month, costs that tend to get passed downstream, resulting in higher costs for all, according to the PCI Compliance Guide’s FAQ.