Although corporate giants realized the danger of cyber attacks and cyber crime in general, especially after attacks on Sony and Zappos, as well as the very sensitive data breach that struck Ashley Madison website, small businesses still don’t do much for making their networks more secure.
Statistics say that more than half of all small businesses in the US don’t provide security training for their employees, only one quarter conduct outside party security tests, and more than 40% don’t produce backup copies of their most important business files, in case something goes wrong.
Shadow IT is here to stay. IT departments need to appreciate that it is so culturally inbuilt that shutting it down is now impossible; in fact, policies punishing the use of third-party apps would more likely push rogue users deeper into the darkness. The battle that can be won is to better educate staff and make Shadow IT an integral part of the company’s wider security awareness program. Some staff are aware of the problems, and will ignore them, but many just simply won’t understand why what they are doing could affect the whole business.
I have traveled extensively over the final quarter of 2015, meeting with customers, prospects and partners. There is something about being on the road that gives clarity to business and as a result, it is clear in my mind that Information Technology is witnessing its greatest period of change. The Internet of Things, Cloud and Big Data are driving the massive growth of new applications and data. Rapid rates of application and data growth are forcing organizations to move away from legacy scale-up approaches to ones that provide seamless scale-out. Siloed and monolithic approaches to delivering storage, compute and network resources must be replaced by integrated and elastic infrastructure and services consumption models.
The Microservices architectural pattern promises increased DevOps agility and can help enable continuous delivery of software. This session is for developers who are transforming existing applications to cloud-native applications, or creating new microservices style applications.
In his session at 17th Cloud Expo, Jim Bugwadia, CEO of Nirmata, introduced best practices, patterns, challenges, and solutions for the development and operations of microservices style applications. He discussed how application container solutions can be used to efficiently deploy and operate these applications in a highly scalable and flexible manner. He also included a live demonstration of how microservices applications, packaged in Docker containers, can be deployed and managed across public and private clouds in a fully automated manner.
The Internet of Things is in the early stages of mainstream deployment but it promises to unlock value and rapidly transform how organizations manage, operationalize, and monetize their assets. IoT is a complex structure of hardware, sensors, applications, analytics and devices that need to be able to communicate geographically and across all functions. Once the data is collected from numerous endpoints, the challenge then becomes converting it into actionable insight.
As we inch our way closer to the New Year, we would like to take a moment and appreciate some of the technological advancements of 2015, as well as a few bold IIoT predictions for our connected-world enthusiasts. This medley of top news gives credit to our inventiveness, while highlighting a future forecast for IIoT.
No matter your place in the world, drones have captured our attention. Precision Ag has changed the way farmers care for crops and animals. So naturally, more and more farmers would be jumping on the drone plan of action. Recently, the FAA has been putting a major kink in the farmer’s right to use drones in farming. The ruling states that if a farmer uses a drone for farm operations in any way, they must file with the FAA for a commercial exemption to use that technology legally. New permanent rules for drone usage could be in place next year from the FAA. So time will tell how the FAA’s ruling will impact the farmers and other commercial drone users in this country.
Cloud adoption across enterprises is accelerating and this momentum will continue to be a core focus for many organizations in 2016. Realizing we are still in the early stages of the cloud migration tsunami is both exciting and scary at the same time.
When it comes to the cloud, unprecedented opportunities lie ahead that can be capitalized upon. There is also a serious threat of being left behind if not well prepared. Cloud enabled IT will percolate throughout all parts of the enterprise in some form or another. Every single aspect of IT – including server infrastructure, networks, storage, application development, packaged apps, and applications management – will all be touched and transformed by the cloud in short order.
Our shopping experiences continue to change. Today, we use smartphones, tablets and laptops to shop, purchase and track shipments online, from anywhere at any time. We bring mobile devices into retail stores to compare prices and learn more about products on the shelf. We search for available inventories, the nearest store locations, and for new, used, shared and auctioned products and services. These digital transformations are profoundly altering the nature of retailing, and their velocity will only accelerate.
Developing software for the Internet of Things (IoT) comes with its own set of challenges. Security, privacy, and unified standards are a few key issues. In addition, each IoT product is comprised of (at least) three separate application components: the software embedded in the device, the backend service, and the mobile application for the end user’s controls. Each component is developed by a different team, using different technologies and practices, and deployed to a different stack/target – this makes the integration of these separate pipelines and the coordination of software updates for IoT more problematic. How do you coordinate the diverse moving parts that must come together when developing your IoT product or updating each of its components?
The Internet of Things has the potential to disrupt all industries, not just consumer, as businesses leverage the new insights and capabilities enabled by new devices / things, automation, integration and analytics, etc., to transform how they do business.
One industry ripe for disruption is higher education. Colleges and universities are being challenged with serving more students and at the same time ensuring successful student outcomes.
In his session at @ThingsExpo, Chris Witeck, Principal Technology Strategist at Citrix, looked at the potential of IoT in providing the platform for the next generation classroom, helping schools to easily offer a blended learning environment for students inside and outside of the classroom.