With worldwide spending on cloud services and infrastructure growing by 23% in 2015 to $118B, it is clear that cloud services are here to stay. Yet, the rate of cloud adoption varies by companies and markets around the world. With thousands of outages and hijacks across the Internet every day, one reason for hesitation is the faith in quality Internet performance.
In his session at 16th Cloud Expo, Michael Kane, Senior Manager at Dyn, explored how Internet performance affects your end-user’s experience and how you can make variations in the Internet work to your competitive advantage.

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The majority of an organization’s revenues are dependent on suppliers, distributors and other third parties. But as Benjamin M. Lawsky, New York State’s Superintendent of Financial Services, points out: “Unfortunately, those third-party firms can provide a back-door entrance to hackers who are seeking to steal sensitive bank customer data.”
By now most everyone is well aware of the major data breaches afflicting Target and Home Depot – both triggered through a third party – that affected more than 100 million consumers. But the problem persists. A recent report from the New York State Department of Financial Services (NYDFS) revealed that nearly a third of 40 banks surveyed don’t require their third-party vendors to notify them in the event of an information security or other cyber security breach.

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User expectations and rethinking of business productivity are having a profound impact on how business applications are used, designed, and leveraged to help buyers, sellers, and employees do their jobs better.

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The cyber security, resiliency and accountability of IT systems at financial services organizations is rarely out of national headlines. Firms that operate in the financial space hold extremely sensitive data, so therefore attackers usually consider the effort and risk of attacking them worth the potential reward.
Fortunately, financial services organizations are making increasing investments in order to make the effort (and financial outlay) required to attack them so high as to make them an impractical target. This recent article in the Financial Times mentions some of the interesting steps that organizations are taking in order to drive up the operational costs of would-be attackers, as well as some of the figures involved in the investment in cyber security by banks and other financial sector businesses.

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SYS-CON Events announced today that MobiDev, a software development company, will exhibit at the 17th International Cloud Expo®, which will take place November 3–5, 2015, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
MobiDev is a software development company with representative offices in Atlanta (US), Sheffield (UK) and Würzburg (Germany); and development centers in Ukraine. Since 2009 it has grown from a small group of passionate engineers and business managers to a full-scale mobile software company with over 150 developers, designers, quality assurance engineers, project managers in house, specializing in the world-class mobile and web development.

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The Federal Government’s “Cloud First” policy mandates that agencies take full advantage of cloud computing benefits to maximize capacity utilization, improve IT flexibility and responsiveness, and minimize cost. The Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP) is a mandatory government-wide program that provides a standardized approach to security assessment, authorization, and continuous monitoring for cloud products and services. Advantages for business include being able to market to many federal agencies after a single FedRAMP review following the government’s “approve once, and use often” approach.

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F5 President & CEO, Manny Rivelo, shares his vision of Innovate, Expand, Deliver at #F5Agility15. Always insightful, Manny discusses his new role as CEO, what hybrid application services means to organizations, how F5 has evolved from just a load balancing company, how organizations use F5 solutions across hybrid environments and how F5 is all about the software. He also shares some perspective on the new BIG-IP v12 and his favorite part of F5 Agility. Applications without constraints. Thanks Manny!

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It seems like every time I write a blog, a new breach has occurred (for an up-to-date look at local, state and federal breaches I suggest you periodically review the Identity Theft Resource Center’s running list). Since I last penned a post, we’ve seen breaches of the Mayo Clinic, Citizen’s Bank, CVS and Arkansas BlueCross/BlueShield. To the average person, most breaches probably bleed together. If you’ve seen one breach, you’ve seen them all, right? If we’re going off of that logic, then one might assume all industries can take the same data security approach.

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Early in my DevOps Journey, I was introduced to a book of great significance circulating within the Web Operations industry titled The Phoenix Project.
(You can read our review of Gene’s book, if interested.)
Written as a novel and loosely based on many of the same principles explored in The Goal, this book has been read and referenced by many who have adopted DevOps into their continuous improvement and software delivery processes around the world.
As I began planning my travel schedule last summer, I learned of a workshop taking place in Nashville by Gene Kim, co-author of The Phoenix Project. I jumped at the chance to not only meet and speak with Gene, but absorb as much as possible from his workshop.

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Cloud computing is emerging to solve numerous enterprise IT problems at organizations of all sizes, and Cloud Foundry has emerged as a leading Platform-­as-­a-­Service (PaaS) to develop and launch applications in their private enterprise clouds.

Cloud Foundry is open­-source software, and available in “plain vanilla” code from the Cloud Foundry Foundation. It is also available in proprietary versions from a few vendors.

However, it’s important to understand that Cloud Foundry is not owned by a single, proprietary provider, and its availability is not limited to the small number of proprietary vendors.
[section label=»Common themes»]

Common themes

A few common themes have emerged from organizations who are working with Cloud Foundry as part of their overall cloud computing strategy:

Governance, risk and compliance management
Information privacy and security
Flexibility, speed, and the ability to scale quickly
Short deployment time
Balancing agility, cost and control
With those goals in mind, Cloud Foundry is being used across many industries. Brief summaries are provided below, and a series of use cases across industries can be found in this section of CF Live.

Do you have a compelling use case to add to the mix? If so, please let us know!

[section label=»Logistics and supply chains»]

Logistics & supply chains

Logistics and supply chains represent an intense competitive space today. One Cloud Foundry user describes it as “a race” to develop supply chains in the cloud. This pace makes it impractical to deploy and manage new and updated applications in local data centers. There is a need for an enterprise-ready platform such as Cloud Foundry that allows for a quick expansion to meet new customer demand.

A fully integrated cloud platform and infrastructure also allows Cloud Foundry clients to address major tasks such as database management and performance tuning, monitoring, security testing, patching and updating, reconfiguring servers, and testing updated environments.

[section label=»Real estate reality»]

Real estate reality

The highly competitive real estate sector is another that has benefited from the use of Cloud Foundry in an overall cloud environment. Virtual tours, work progress photos and community websites for home builders are examples of solutions that have been created.

One image database, for example, has more than 10 million files, accessed by millions of visitors. Real­ estate firms have found that it’s better for them to focus on their core competencies rather than maintaining and deploying the software and hardware requirements of their customer­-facing portals.

One application in this sector encompasses 25 separate servers that serve more than 50,000 agents, with increasing annual visitor traffic and new features being rolled out continuously. The development and deployment team manages source code, addresses the various hardware compatibility issues, with the ability to spin up environments as needed. The company can thus conduct constant development in an agile, flexible environment.

[section label=»Big manufacturing»]

Big manufacturing

Sometimes it’s the technology manufacturers themselves who face the most daunting problems. One of them employing Cloud Foundry in it cloud strategy faces what it describes as a “sprawling collection of (almost 200) ad hoc, independently managed systems.”

In this case, the company’s IT department was required to offer a secure solution to internal clients, building in control, bringing about cost reductions, but without curbing agility and innovation. Before Cloud Foundry and the cloud, provisioning requests sent to IT could take two to three weeks to complete.

Department managers started to circumvent the IT department, building in significant shadow IT and complicating the situation enormously. The resultant lack of visibility and control gave IT management little idea of what was really going on, often with limited knowledge of what data was being hosted offsite and where certain business assets were specifically located. Security risks therefore abounded, with no guarantees that security patches were being implemented, and significant financial waste was occurring.

The development of a new IaaS initiative that integrated Cloud Foundry at the PaaS level got everything back into the corral, and now enables the company’s IT department to offer internal clients a self­-service environment for new resource provisioning in the cloud. This on-­demand, automated suite of services supports the company’s app lifecycle and also makes fabric services universally available. APIs enable access and deployment across the company’s range of services.

[section label=»MSBs benefit, too»]

MSBs benefit, too

Mid­size businesses (MSBs) have been benefited from affordable, multi-­tenant cloud, letting them be free of single-­tenant legacy solutions. Through the use of Cloud Foundry in overall cloud environments, they are able to spin resources up quickly, scale easily, and avoid the previous approach of simply buying more servers or renting more hosted services.

Particular examples include companies in the legal services business as well as logistics firms that need Warehouse Management Systems (WMSs) deployed to the cloud.

[section label=»Financial services’ golden challenge»]

Financial services’ golden challenge

Nothing moves and evolves more quickly than the global financial services industry. Within that context, there is a focus on mitigating operational risks and the costs associated with increasingly complex corporate actions processing. Developing a proven, automated solution continues to be a top priority and a much sought-­after goal among financial institutions worldwide.

One firm that was hosting its entire IT infrastructure in­-house required a renewed commitment to availability, flexibility and scale. The company must be able to adjust to changes in its markets and client demands in a rapid and agile fashion, and be able to do so through mobile devices as well. The ability to provision and deploy in minutes in a virtual environment is golden.

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