Monthly Archives: June 2012

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Cloud-based solutions best defence against cyber “DDoS” attacks?

A recent paper on distributed denial of services (DDoS) attacks by Neustar concludes that only cloud-based DDoS solutions offer a comprehensive defence against increasing attacks that are expected to surge by as much as 40% in 2012.

“Cloud solutions provide the bandwidth (as measured in Gbps) to absorb today’s massive network layer attacks, plus the technology diversity and processing power to handle application-layer and high packets-per-second strikes,” said Neustar.

Neustar agrees that all on-premise hardware, even at best, has limits.  At some point the sheer volume of traffic will clog network connections – before on-premise perimeter equipment even gets involved!

“Network-bandwidth attacks of 10Gbps or more were still 15% of all DDoS incidents Neustar mitigated. More than one out of 10 attacks came with hurricane strength, enough to overwhelm bandwidth and quickly cause an outage.”

Additionally, high packets-per-second (PPS) attacks grew in popularity.

“Instead of exhausting bandwidth, these drain processing …

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What IT departments need to do to prepare for cloud adoption

Cloud computing continues to gain acceptance amongst enterprises and as a result, software vendors are working hard to meet the need.

Specifically, enterprise IT has had to address the challenges concerning security, integration with internal applications, performance, and reliability of the cloud.

With the combination of maturing platforms, generational and cultural shifts, and compelling economics, cloud-based solutions are fast becoming the undeniable choice for nearly all future non-core technology purchases. Once adopted, the cloud is inherently scalable and can be up and running within hours, designed specifically for an organisation’s needs. 

From our own research and insights into Axway customers, we predict that by 2014 the cloud will be the primary operating model for enterprise IT organisations, bringing unprecedented change to IT and a competitive advantage to early adopters. Put simply, by 2014, cloud computing will ultimately redefine the role of enterprise IT itself.

So, with cloud adoption taking …

Identity Governance Framework, Identity management, SailPoint AccessIQ, Single sign-on

SailPoint Announces Integrated Cloud Identity Management Solution for the Enterprise

Image representing Sailpoint Technologies as d...

Recognizing that cloud adoption is making identity management more complex and difficult for the world’s largest companies, SailPoint today announced SailPoint AccessIQ, which integrates cloud access management with rich identity governance and automated provisioning. AccessIQ provides convenient, easy-to-use services such as single sign-on (SSO) and self-service access request, while ensuring that cloud applications are managed within the same identity governance framework used for on-premises applications. Delivered as a cloud service, AccessIQ deploys quickly and allows enterprises to immediately take advantage of convenient cloud access services coupled with improved visibility and oversight over their usage.

“The consumerization of IT has changed business user expectations. They want fast, simple and convenient access to cloud services without being slowed down by IT processes and controls,” said Jackie Gilbert, VP and GM of SailPoint’s Cloud Business Unit. “And, we see a growing trend of ‘bring your own application,’ where workers self-provision cloud applications. Both scenarios make it more difficult to monitor and control when and where users are placing sensitive data in the cloud, which brings a host of security and compliance concerns. IT can’t manage compliance and risk if it doesn’t have visibility into the cloud applications used throughout the enterprise.”

Designed for empowered business users looking for a more flexible and agile way to address business challenges, AccessIQ provides an intuitive, tablet-like interface to deliver services that improve productivity and user satisfaction. AccessIQ includes an intuitive App Launchpad for one-click, single sign-on to cloud applications from any device, step-up authentication options for added security, as well as simple self-service application request capabilities, via an easy-to-use App Store. This empowers business users to safely use cloud applications for business or mixed-use purposes, with approvals and provisioning handled automatically based on organizational roles and security policies.

SailPoint AccessIQ, together with SailPoint IdentityIQTM, offers the richest set of end-to-end controls over cloud applications available today. AccessIQ’s integration with IdentityIQ provides an enterprise-grade governance platform for managing identities and applications in the cloud, with policy, role, and risk models unified with on-premises application identity management. To extend governance to applications outside the control of IT, AccessIQ provides:

  • Full visibility of user sign-on activity and account usage, enabling
    business unit procured applications and SaaS applications procured by
    individuals to be managed as part of an enterprise-wide identity
    governance strategy.
  • A flexible, risk-based approach to cloud application identities so IT
    organizations can tailor how they manage and control those
    applications without locking down the environment and getting in the
    way of the business.
  • Full audit reporting on application usage and “who has access to what”
    to demonstrate compliance and control monthly subscription expenses by
    promptly deprovisioning unused or unauthorized cloud application
    accounts.

SailPoint AccessIQ is a fully hosted, multi-tenant solution that seamlessly and securely integrates with SailPoint IdentityIQ. It will be generally available in Q3 2012 with per-user subscription-based pricing. For more information, visit: www.sailpoint.com/cloud.


Collaboration, Project-Manager, semYOU Cloud Office, Task-Manager, Virtual office

New semYOU Cloud Office Offers 15 Enterprise Apps for Business Productivity, Collaboration

With its new version of the semYOU Cloud Office (www.semyou.com), scheduled to be launched in late May, app computing system semYOU is taking users beyond the hype by offering businesses a comprehensive, flexible cloud-based enterprise office system based on software-as-a-service.

Now businesses that need software for human resources, project, task, scheduling management and more can gain access to required applications by simply pointing and clicking. The new semYOU Cloud Office is a complete software infrastructure for small or large companies that want to be flexible, are working globally and collaborate with different partners worldwide.

“In less than three minutes, a business can make the whole software infrastructure of semYou available for individual users, teams, projects or the whole company, complete with an administration suite for managing users, groups, rights and licenses, security as well as customization,” said Volker Jahns, CEO of semYOU LLC.

The system provides users with 15 enterprise apps such as Task-Manager, Project-Manager, Project-Timer-Recording and more that all users in the Cloud Office may use. The array of applications makes it possible for IT departments to deploy a full software suite for ongoing projects via the cloud without having to change software infrastructure or increase costs.

“The big advantage of implementing a virtual office via semYOU Cloud Office is that you have the ability to be flexible and scalable for each new situation in your business,” said Jahns. “Instead of your being stuck with a rigid system architecture that’s dedicated to specific applications, the new enterprise app idea from semYOU is to enable you to use professional apps for each business case, just when you need them.”

An additional benefit is that users do not have to deal with software installations, downloads or any other changes to their computers.

The semYou enterprise app system is designed as a low-cost model, and businesses can create virtual offices for their teams starting at $15 user/month for a minimum duration of one month. That means if 10 individuals use the system’s applications, the business pays $150 for that month, and users are not restricted to the same app.

“With semYOU, the cloud finally gets a face,” stated Jahns. “We’re demonstrating how the Internet will look tomorrow for business.”


Business Intelligence, Business Processes, Foreclosure, Multiple listing service, Partnerships, Real estate, Real estate broker, Real estate owned

Green River Capital Partners with Realty Pilot To Add Cloud Asset Management

Green River Capital (GRC), a provider of customized REO asset management and loss mitigation services for mortgage servicers, investment firms, credit unions and banking institutions, announced today that it has entered into an agreement with Phoenix-based Realty Pilot, a provider of cloud-based real estate solutions.

GRC will integrate Realty Pilot’s technology to enhance the platform used by GRC’s valuation unit, Infinity Valuation Services (IVS). Agents now have access to multiple listing service (MLS) data directly through IVS’s online platform, which automatically populates data input fields with information regarding comparable properties selected by the user.

“This integration significantly improves our agents’ productivity by dramatically reducing data entry when performing valuations,” said Lorenz Schwarz, COO of GRC. “Adopting Realty Pilot’s technology will advance the functionality of our existing systems, providing greater reporting capabilities and improved process transparency. Furthermore, this development allows IVS to streamline operations and expand its valuation product offerings to address the changing needs of our clients and the industry as a whole.”

Realty Pilot provides a broad suite of automated solutions to the real estate market, including integrated nationwide MLS data. IVS provides BPOs and appraisals to the Mortgage and REO industries, tailoring the products to meet each client’s needs.For more information, visit www.greenrivercap.com.


Cloud Storage, Featured, Storage, Storage and Information Management

Top Takeaways From EMC World 2012

A little over a week has gone by since the end of EMC World, and all the product announcements have gotten out of the bag. So, why another article about EMC World, if there are no “big reveals” left? Because I want to make sense of all of the hype, product announcements, and strategic discussions. What do the over 40 new products mean to GreenPages’ customers—both present and future? How many of those products were just cosmetic makeovers and how many are actual game changers? Why should you, our friends and extended business family, care, and what should you care about?

I will start by saying that this EMC World really did reveal some technology-leading thoughts and products, and proved that EMC has taken the lead in major storage technology strategy. EMC has always been the 800-pound gorilla of the storage industry, but for many years was far from the front of the pack. This has changed, and in a big way. Innovation still takes place mostly in the small companies on the bleeding edge of storage (SSD, virtualization across platforms, innovative file systems), but EMC has become the leading investor in storage R&D, and it shows. While they may not be inventing the coolest and most striking new storage and hardware, their pace of development and integration of that cool stuff has exponentially increased. Time to market and product refresh cycles are picking up pace. Relationships with the people who get the products in front of you (resellers, integrators and distributors) are vastly improved and much friendlier to the commercial world we all live in (as opposed to the rarified heights of the largest enterprises). The relevance of EMC products to the virtualized datacenter is clear, and the storage engineers who ran the technical sessions and laid out all the new storage, DR, and virtualization roadmaps proved that EMC is the leading storage technology firm in the world.

What are the highlights for GreenPages’ world?

Product Announcements:

Probably the biggest technology in terms of impact, IMHO, is Isilon. This is the fastest, most scalable, easy-to-manage NAS systems ever. It can grow to the petabyte range, and there is no downtime or forklift upgrades. It is “scale-out” storage, meaning you add nodes that contain processing (CPU), RAM for Cache and additional bandwidth, along with capacity in three flavors (SSD, 15K and 7.2K).  This is the system of choice for any healthcare PACs application or Life Sciences data storage. It is a fantastic general-purpose NAS system as well. Isilon is the system of choice for anyone managing Big Data (large amounts of unstructured data). The entry point for this system is around 10 TB, so you don’t have to be a large company to find the value here. Isilon also has the advantage of being a true scale-out system. Some technical nuggets around Isilon OneFS Upgrade: 90% greater throughput, or 740 GB/sec; roles-based admin – SEC 17a-4 compliance; better caching (50% reduction in latency of IO intensive apps; VMware Integration: VAAI (vStorage APIs for Array Integration) and VASA (vStorage APIs for Storage Awareness).

If you are going to jump up into the big time storage array arena, the new VMAX line is arguably the one to get, for power, performance and integration with the virtualized datacenter. It has expanded to the VMAX 10, 20 (current), and 40. The top of the line sports 8 controllers, scales up to 4 PB, has up to 32 2.8 GHz Xeon 6-core processors, 1 TB usable RAM, 2.5” drives,  and uses MLC SSD drives (bringing that cost of the flash drive down into the lower atmosphere). The latest development of the auto-tiering software FAST allows IBM and HDS storage to be a “tier” of storage for the VMAX. Other arrays will be added soon.

VNXe 3150 storage system offers up to 50% more performance and capacity in an entry level system. This system includes 10 GbE connectivity, Solid State Storage and the first production storage system (that I have heard of) that uses the latest Intel CPU, Sandy Bridge. Who says EMC product lifecycles are slow and behind the times??

VPLEX Metro/VPLEX Geo solutions have some significant upgrades, including integration with RecoverPoint and SRM, more performance and scalability; and Oracle RAC up to 100 KM apart. If you want to federate your datacenters, introduce “stretch clusters” and have both an HA and DR strategy, this is the industry leader now.

The VNX Series  has  more than a few improvements: lower price SSDs, RAID types that can be mixed in FAST; 256 snaps per LUN; connector for vCOPs; EMC Storage Analytics Suite based on vCOPs; AppSync to replace/improve Replication Manager.

The new VSPEX Proven Infrastructure includes EMC’s VNX and VNXe hybrid storage arrays, along with Avamar software and Data Domain backup appliances. The cloud platform also includes processors from Intel, switches from Brocade, servers from Cisco, and software from Citrix, Microsoft HyperV and VMware.  Avamar and Data Domain products will offer data deduplication to users, while EMC’s Fully Automated Storage Tiering (FAST), will offer data migration between varying disk storage arrays based on data use patterns. There are initially 14 VSPEX configurations, which EMC said represent the most popular use cases for companies moving to cloud computing.

Data Domain & Avamar upgrades include the DD990 with an Intel Sandy Bridge CPU, doubling the performance of the DD890 – 28 PB, 16 TB/hr throughput; tight integration of Avamar with VMware, including Hyper-V, SAP, Sybase, SQL2012 – recovery is 30 times faster than NBU/V-Ray.

Vfcache PCIe NAND Flash Card is a server side I/O enhancement that pushes Flash Cache to the server, but integrates Cache management with the VNX array FAST Cache. This will prove to be a huge deal for mission critical applications running on VMware, since I/O will no longer be a bottleneck even for the most demanding applications. Combine this with Sandy Bridge CPUs and the UCS system with the latest M3 servers and you will have the world’s most powerful server virtualization platform!

DataBridge is a “mash-up” of nearly any storage or system management tool into a common pane of glass, not intended to be a discovery or management tool but, rather, to be a place where all of the discovery tools can deliver their data to one place. This combines EMC infrastructure data sources along with non-EMC data sources with business logic from customer organizations. Stay tuned for more on this.

There are lots of other deep technical messages that were talked about in the sessions that ran for three solid days, not counting the unbelievable Lab sessions. Those Lab sessions are now available for demo purposes. You can see any EMC technology from implementation to configuration just by contacting GreenPages and asking for your Friendly Neighborhood Storage Guy!!

One final thought I would like to stress: efficiency. EMC is sending a smart business message of efficiency, using VNX as example. Storage is far outstripping storage advances and IT budgets. All is not hopeless, however. You can improve efficiency with dedupe/compression, auto tiering; Flash allows storage to keep up with Moore’s Law; you can consolidate file servers with virtual file servers (we have done this with many GreenPages customers when consolidating servers in VMware). Files are the main culprit. How will you manage it, quotas or content management? What will you chose? How will you manage your data without the money or work force you think you might need?

Contact GreenPages if you need help answering these questions! Meanwhile, watch for more storage technology breakthroughs to come from EMC in the coming months.

Actuate, Actuate Corporation, Apache Hadoop, Big Data, BIRT Project, Data Mining, Partnerships, Pervasive

Actuate and Pervasive Software Team to Provide Interactive Visualization of Big Data Analytics

 

Image representing Actuate as depicted in Crun...

Image representing Pervasive Software as depic...

Actuate Corporation today announced an alliance with Pervasive Software Inc. that will enable business data analysts to rapidly review, prepare and analyze big data, and display intuitive data visualizations to support users’ ability to make efficient business decisions.

By speeding Big Data-based decision making, powering predictive analytics and decreasing capital and operating costs, ActuateOne and Pervasive RushAnalyzer “will make Big Data analytics and powerful visualizations available to business users in any industry and to the BIRT developer community.”

“Pervasive RushAnalyzer, the first predictive analytics product to run natively on Hadoop, enables users to rapidly transform and analyze terabytes of data on commodity hardware, and ActuateOne provides the advanced visualization capabilities to support insights and more productive conclusions,” said Mike Hoskins, CTO and general manager of Pervasive, Big Data Products and Solutions. “Pervasive’s seamless integration with Actuate, via BIRT, puts advanced Big Data analytic insights and actionable intelligence into the hands of multiple roles within an organization.”

“Big Data analytics has been traditionally been the realm of data scientists,” said Nobby Akiha, Senior Vice President of Marketing for Actuate. “By teaming with Pervasive, we are changing the game to ensure business users are in the driver’s seat to analyze Big Data sources so that they can operationalize and deliver insights to everyday users.”

ActuateOne – an integrated suite of standard and cloud software built around BIRT – enables easy visualization of data trends through customizable BIRT-based dashboards and Google-standard plug-and-play gadgets. Pervasive RushAnalyzer lets data analysts build and deploy predictive analytics solutions on multiple platforms, including Hadoop clusters and high-performance servers, to rapidly discover data patterns, build operational analytics and deliver predictive analytics. The drag-and-drop graphical interface speeds data preparation with direct access to multiple databases and file formats, as well as a prebuilt library of data mining and analytic operators, leading to simpler data manipulation, mining and visualization.


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The State of Cloud Computing: Cloud Expo "Power Panel" on SYS-CON.tv

“The State of Cloud Computing June 2012” was the topic under discussion in the traditional SYS-CON.tv Power Panel recorded in our Times Square studio yesterday – the Sunday before today’s Cloud Expo New York opening, kicking off 4 days of Keynotes, General Sessions technical and strategy breakout sessions, discussion panels, interviews…and of course the huge Cloud Expo show floor with booths from every layer of the Cloud Computing ecosystem. This week also sees the introduction for the first time of our Big Data Pavilion, and of no fewer than two separate Big Data tracks all four days at the event.

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Discussion of Big Data in the Geospatial Intelligence Domain

The US Geospatial Intelligence Foundation (USGIF) held a Geoint Community Week June 4-8 2012 which included a technology day. The afternoon of 07 June was dedicated to fast-paced “ignite” style presentations from some of the key community thought leaders on geospatial data. At the end of these presentations Bob Gourley was asked to summarize and […]

This post by was first published at CTOvision.com.

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Embrace Storage Hogs with Cloud Storage

Do you know who your storage hogs are? Every organization has them, whether it’s folks who save everything or applications that just need more capacity every year. And let’s face it: The need for increased storage capacity isn’t just a result of your company pack rats – it’s often a necessity due to growing data sets, data retention policies and regulatory compliance requirements.
On average, organizations expand their need for storage by 20-60% on an annual basis, outgrowing capacity of existing storage regularly. Can cloud storage help contain the costs of this spiraling growth?

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