At this year’s Cisco Partner Summit in Montreal, Canada, CANCOM was awarded “Security Partner of the Year” for the Central Europe and Germany regions. Cisco recognized CANCOM’s successes in the development, implementation, and marketing of IT security solutions based on Cisco technologies.
CANCOM is one of the first partners to integrate all of Cisco’s security solutions into its own vertical business solutions. Among the sectors that enjoy the advantages of being in CANCOM’s comprehensive security portfolio are the automobile and manufacturing industries.

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Funny thing about the never-ending discussions of cloud, virtualization, and containers out here in pundit-land… Most writers blithely ignore the one truth that all of us need to be reminded of on occasion.

Your cloud is built on hardware.

Yes indeed, I did say that out loud. Talk about fifteen layers of server/network virtualization all you like, SDX your way into the 22nd century, but never forget that someone somewhere is racking and stacking to make it happen.

Why does that matter? Well for a lot of reasons, though they can be broken into the usual categories – public and private. On-premises and off.
Virtualization, cloud, and containers share one simple premise – make it easier for folks to get machines that do what they need, when they need it. Which is cool, but easier (and/or cheaper) always results in more. And more means that underlying hardware has to grow. It also means the complexity of the infrastructure grows.

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The key is to develop a Cloud strategy, start planning, allocate resources and look at alternatives well in advance to allocate appropriate time for performing testing activities such as simulation and performance testing. The outcome at Wimbledon is: Mobile Cloud and Analytics – winner
In recent sporting events the focus has been on providing real time updates on mobile devices such as tablets, phones and leveraging the Cloud. Cloud is supporting this year’s Wimbledon tennis tournament in a big way. The infrastructure is hosted on IBMs Cloud that provides a scalable and on-demand environment that can be dynamically provisioned quickly, and then it can be taken down after the event. Peaks in usage are handled by the Cloud and there is real time information for fans that is available on fingertips for matches on 19 courts. During the tournament millions of users access information about favorite tennis players, matches and results. However during the rest of the year demand is lower. Since the Cloud is being leveraged, there is no need to spend time and money to provision and manage new infrastructure and to reduce capacity based on lower usage. In addition thousands of cyber security incidents are processed every day by the IBM Cloud security framework.

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How do you securely enable access to your applications in AWS without exposing any attack surfaces? The answer is usually very complicated because application environments morph over time in response to growing requirements from your employee base, your partners and your customers.
In his session at @DevOpsSummit, Haseeb Budhani, CEO and Co-founder of Soha, shared five common approaches that DevOps teams follow to secure access to applications deployed in AWS, Azure, etc., and the friction and risks they impose on the business.

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In 2014 I started publishing my series of “Tune into the Cloud” columns on the Gartner Blog Network, below some of the highlights so far.
On how time to market – enabled by ever more productive cloud platforms – is ruling the battle for cloud dominance, and how virtual servers are increasingly becoming table stakes when it comes to cloud competition.

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At DevOps Summit NY there’s been a whole lot of talk about not just DevOps, but containers, IoT, and microservices. Sessions focused not just on the cultural shift needed to grow at scale with a DevOps approach, but also made sure to include the network ”plumbing” needed to ensure success as applications decompose into the microservice architectures enabling rapid growth and support for the Internet of (Every)Things.

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«We got started as search consultants. On the services side of the business we have help organizations save time and save money when they hit issues that everyone more or less hits when their data grows,» noted Otis Gospodnetić, Founder of Sematext, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at @DevOpsSummit, held June 9-11, 2015, at the Javits Center in New York City.

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We’ve been researching national IT dynamics for the past few years at the Tau Institute, covering more than 100 nations. We believe that aggressive adoption of IT on a national basis is the key to sustained economic and societal growth.

We also realize that larger forces can derail the most aggressive commitments and best intentions. The largest force is violence, whether local and endemic, terroristic, or a function of war. A second major force is overarching economic strategy, which is not explicitly violent but can continue to cause great disruption and distress.

Making Your Bed
Thus, we arrive at the Euro crisis, Greece, and the Procrustean Bed. The fundamental challenge within the Eurozone, known from the start, is that of yoking several unlike nations into a single economic sled.

The Euro was largely driven by German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, who saw a common currency between his nation and France as a way to eliminate the possibility of future wars between the two, and thereby achieve a long-term peace that Europe had not seen previously. The Maastricht Treaty of 1992 shortly followed the unification of Germany in 1990, both occurring during Kohl’s time as Germany’s leader.

But the common currency didn’t end with the two largest (and similar) economies of Europe as members. The Maastricht Treaty allowed many other nations to become part of the Eurozone, if they promised to adhere to certain criteria.

Thus came a number of smaller and poorer nations with economies that were quite dissimilar to those of giants Germany and France. The yoke had been placed; the Bed (which in ancient Greek history is one in which hapless travelers are brutalized by the evil Procrustes until they fit into it) had been made.

Discrepancy
Per-person incomes in the Eurozone range from about $15,000 to $50,000 for the most part, unemployment rates vary widely, income parity varies widely, and our Tau Institute rankings of national IT environments vary widely as well.

It can be pointed out that there are also significant income and unemployment disparities across the United States, another single-currency zone. But the US has a very free flow of labor—if you can’t find a job locally you can move to a different state or region relatively easily—and a common (if unofficial) national language.

It is much, much easier, for an unemployed worker in high-unemployment South Carolina to seek work in high-employment Nebraska, for example, than for an unemployed worker in Greece to do the same in Germany. The US Federal Reserve Bank also has the ability to print money and have it flow through the states with a relatively politics-free flexibility that the European Central Bank simply does not.

As I write these words, it appears as if the crisis of Greece staying in the Euro will be resolved. Helmut Kohl himself has been sharply critical of positions within the current German government that are rigid in interpreting the letter of the law but fail to appreciate the notion of a united Europe within the united currency.

Tilting at Windmills
That said, it seems that a unified currency is a quixotic quest. As an example, below is a chart of where the currencies of four quite similar Southeast Asian nations (Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia, and Thailand) have traveled over the past five years. The lines moving upward the most quickly represent the weaker currencies.
Had these four similar nations been yoked to a common currency, the pressures on Indonesia (the blue line) to maintain budget discipline would be considerable when compared to the Philippines and Thailand (at the bottom). Malaysia (green line in the middle) would face considerable pressure not only to conform to an overall agreement, but would also be affected by economic stress from its neighbors below and above it.

There is rudimentary talk of creating a single Southeast Asian currency some day—this chart illustrates the difficulty of doing so.

Tying it Together
All of this discussion ties back into our ongoing research at the Tau Institute, and the work I do as Conference Chair of Cloud Expo | @ThingsExpo.

At the Tau Institute, we seek to measure the relative dynamics of national IT environments, as well as their real-time momentum. By viewing the chart above, it should be no surprise that Indonesia lags within its region, whereas the Philippines is a leader. Malaysia actually follows the Philippines closely, with Thailand a bit further behind, for reasons other than currency fluctuation.

But the overall correlation is strong throughout Asia and other regions of the world. Back in Europe, for example, Greece trails every country but Italy and Russia (another under-performer with a serious currency dilemma).

Another significant point about Europe is that several non-Eurozone nations emerge among the leaders, including Denmark, Hungary, the UK, Sweden, Poland, and Bulgaria, all of whom outrank Germany.

That said, the Eurozone nations Estonia, the Netherlands, Finland, Latvia, and Lithuania also score better than Germany. (It’s worth remembering that our rankings adjust for income and cost of living to provide a relative, not absolute picture of IT infrastructure development.)

Closer economic cooperation and even a united currency can bring great regional benefits if said region is viewed more like the US than completely independent nations. Giving up even small bits of sovereignty is an incendiary issue everywhere, so such thinking must be advanced very cautiously.

But my question is, if Greece is able to remain in the Eurozone, how will it be able to increase its commitment to IT development? From where will the money come? How can investors, governmental and private, be confident in an economic environment that looks to be one of continued austerity?

Meanwhile, the world continues to turn. My work with Cloud Expo | @ThngsExpo means bringing together 150 or so speakers twice a year to discuss the latest use cases, developments, and great thoughts about cloud computing and all that it entails.

These are the products, services, and solutions that are being adopted worldwide with the aim of improving economies and societies. It starts with these people, as I continue to wish for the day when violence and ham-handed government policy does less for those in power and more for everyone else.

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Today air travel is a minefield of delays, hassles and customer disappointment. Airlines struggle to revitalize the experience. GE and M2Mi will demonstrate practical examples of how IoT solutions are helping airlines bring back personalization, reduce trip time and improve reliability.
In their session at @ThingsExpo, Shyam Varan Nath, Principal Architect with GE, and Dr. Sarah Cooper, M2Mi’s VP Business Development and Engineering, will explore the IoT cloud-based platform technologies driving this change including privacy controls, data transparency and integration of real time context with predictive analytics.
They will conclude with a look forward to tomorrow’s Smart Airports where airlines use connected baggage to predict plane fuel levels, security is ubiquitous and your seat remembers you.

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SQL injections are unique compared to other cyberattacks. These threats are very common and have been around for a while. One would think that this would mean businesses should have an idea of how to stop these incidents from happening, right? Unfortunately, SQL security remains a thorn in the side of many companies today.

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