Just wanted to get a quick note to all of our Cloud Expo friends that Cloud Expo and Cloud Expo Europe are registered trademarks of our parent company, SYS-CON Media, Inc. I am CEO of SYS-CON and value all the friends we’ve made in the industry these past years, as we continue to provide you with the best events in the business.
So I want to make it clear that we ARE NOT affiliated with an event in London that’s using our Cloud Expo Europe name. This is NOT our company, NOT our show, and we ARE NOT affiliated with that company. We urge our friends to continue to support the true Cloud Expo events that we’ve been producing for many years!
With that, I wish all of our friends Season’s Greetings, Happy Holidays, Merry Christmas, and a Happy New Year!
Knowing what to test is half the battle. Knowing how it was tested the other. Knowing what that means is the third. That’s some testing, real clear numbers.
In most countries, top speed is no longer the thing that auto manufacturers want to talk about. Top speed is great if you need it, but for the vast bulk of us, we’ll never need it. Since the flow of traffic dictates that too much speed is hazardous on the vast bulk of roads, automobile manufacturers have correctly moved the conversation to other things – cup holders (did you know there is a magic number of them for female purchasers? Did you know people actually debate not the existence of such a number, but what it is?), USB/bluetooth connectivity, backup cameras, etc. Safety and convenience features have supplanted top speed as the things to discuss.
Evolving regulatory compliance requirements can be a major headache for the IT teams responsible for identity and access management (IAM). Sarbanes Oxley, the wide range of privacy regulations and other federal requirements, have transformed IAM from a problem that keeps the chief information security officer up at night into a true business concern shared by all company executives. Knowing who has access to what information within your organization – and whether they should have that access – is a deceptively complex issue that has the potential to drive a wedge between even the healthiest of relationships across the business.
On the surface, it may seem as though the nuts and bolts of IAM should reside in a company’s IT department. This is because there are many islands of information stored in databases across the business that are managed and administered by the IT team. In addition, employee access to particular areas of the network is usually enabled and revoked by IT.
Using the Holiday season as a way to educate about the cloud.
Happy holidays to all of you and may the season keep your perimeters protected, your assets secure and your networks free of nasty little elves!
Twas the night before Christmas
and all through the net
No access was stirring;
No hackers as yet.
Murphy in sales was showing his app
Tweeting and downloading with only a tap
I grumble and moan ‘cause I know it to be.
That his iPhone and iPad was BYOD
Then out on the site there arose such a clatter,
I sprang from the help desk to see what was the matter.
Without my UniSec dashboard, I would not know
If the network alert meant friend or meant foe.
Cor’lating data from SIEM, Log and ID
Who’s accessing what assets was now clear to me
I knew it in real time where the problem arose
An old password, an account that we froze.
I saw the address was from Kuala Lumpur
Trying to suck data through an open back door
I plugged up the breach, no data would leak
No access tonight—not even a peek.
Red Hat has bought itself a Christmas present – privately held ManageIQ.
It’s paying $104 million in folding money for the pleasure of what appears to be a made-to-measure glove. The two seem to be a perfect fit. The deal might close by the end of the year.
Red Hat approached the six-year-old UK-based start-up around September when ManageIQ, already a Red Hat partner, was starting to look around for more money to finance a deeper plunge into the channel.
ManageIO says it’s “channel-ready” now and eager to get out there and mix it up.
It brings Red Hat the real-time cloud management and automation it lacks. It’s in the center of Red Hat’s three hot buttons: Red Hat’s KVM Enterprise Virtualization, CloudForms, Red Hat’s hybrid IaaS solution, and OpenStack. It’s got a hybrid cloud bias, which should suit Red Hat to a “T,” since it’s bet the farm on hybrid. And it says it can set up its tent in an enterprise and help coax the user off Red Hat’s hereditary enemy VMware and on to Red Hat’s cheaper alternative.
“It’s all about Stackato, our enterprise private PaaS solution. It’s all about making it really easy for enterprises to deploy and manage their own Platform as a Service,” explained Bart Copeland, CEO of ActiveState, in this SYS-CON.tv interview with Cloud Expo Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan at the 11th International Cloud Expo, held November 5-8, 2012, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
Cloud Expo 2013 New York, June 10–13, at the Javits Center in New York City, New York, will feature technical sessions from a rock star conference faculty and the leading Cloud industry players in the world.
Is Big Data a buzzword with no clear definition? Wikipedia defines Big Data as…
…a collection of data sets so large and complex that it becomes difficult to process using on-hand database management tools or traditional data processing applications…
Here is a collection of 13 (unlucky?) other definitions of “Big Data” – from analyst firms, from government organizations, from technology publication and from technology vendors.
NJVC®, an information technology solutions provider headquartered in northern Virginia and supplier of Cloudcuity™ AppDeployer, and Virtual Global, a provider of cloud-enabled enterprise IT solutions based in northern Virginia, have teamed up to offer the top 10 transformational impacts of the cloud in 2013—all of which will transform business and government in the biggest disruption IT has experienced in 25 years.
«The disruptive impact of cloud is uprooting old industries and making way for new ,” said Cary Landis, NJVC senior architect, Cloudcuity AppDeployer and Virtual Global CEO. Whereas change is not new, the rate of change may be accelerating faster than many imagined. “In the coming year, the cloud’s impact on business and government strategies will continue to accelerate, and it will be the biggest driver behind major IT decisions. This, in turn, will cause the biggest disruption to the IT industry in the past 25 years.”
One of the things I look forward to most at Christmastime is the seemingly endless parade of predictions and year-in-review columns. You see them everywhere:
The Ten Best movies of 2012
2012: The Year in Bacon
Ten Brilliant, Surefire, Can’t-Miss Business Predictions for 2013
A Crystal Ball on the Cloud
Heck, we just issued a predictions release earlier this week. The bottom line is when I see a list, there’s a good chance I’m going to read it and tweet it, regardless of what it’s about.
Speaking of which, IDC and EMC just released a cool report called “The Digital Universe in 2020, that looks at the state of Big Data eight years from now. See below for a list of interesting insights. My only nit is that a report that looks forward to 2020 should at least contain one section about flying cars and our benevolent robot overlords.
The best thing about public cloud is it’s cheaper to fail than belabor conversations about whether to try it or not. If you physically touched it, estimated your peak demand before buying, and/or don’t have a re-occurring OpEx fee… IT’S NOT CLOUD.
If you’re an IT manager calling your internal VMware or other virtualization farm a «Private Cloud» in an attempt to prove to your leadership that «public cloud is insecure» or «I built the same thing as Amazon Web Services (AWS)», you need to get ready for a dose of reality in the coming year.
Server-huggers beware, you might have been able to get away with it until now, but 2013 will mark a turning point in which the term Private Cloud will be permanently exposed for what it is… a capital intensive, server stacking, virtualization game.
Just because you might have flexibility to decide how much RAM you can assign to a VM, doesn’t give you the right to «cloud-wash» your internal IT operation and call it something that it’s not… because although it may be Private (can someone tell me again why it’s important to be able to touch your servers?), it’s certainly not Cloud.
Not that there’s anything wrong with that…