Cloud adoption continues to be hampered by concerns about security and availability. Fast forward to the future where the IT landscape will support thousands of clouds that are protected in a seamless, consistent fashion.
In his General Session at the 11th International Cloud Expo, Sean Doherty, Vice President and CTO for the Enterprise Security Group at Symantec, will discuss how in this future of cloud computing, today’s adoption concerns will be in the past and your clouds will be safer than many data center operations.

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I read a story the other day about “the 10 poorest countries” in the world. The writer examined poverty statistics to determine this list. Some of the countries are known for terrible governments (eg, Zimbabwe), some had high per-person income levels – usually due to abundant mining — but abysmal income disparities (eg, Burundi), while others (eg, Madagascar) were just poor through and through.

But there’s always hope. Madagascar, for example, has landed on our radar screen in the Top 10 “raw” ranking among 22 African nations we’ve surveyed.

What does that mean?

We started our research at the Tau Institute with the struggles of developing countries – “the world’s poorest” – in mind. How could we develop a truly relative ranking, one that shows which countries are doing the best with what they have? We’ve integrated several publicly available sources of information and adjusted them for local cost-of-living levels and income disparity to produce our ranking, known as the Tau Index.

Its purpose is to find the countries that are the most dynamic, ie, which have the most potential for continuous upward economic progress, regardless of where they stand today. It provides a unique view of technology-driven progress, whether you’re looking at developed countries or developing nations across the entire spectrum of relative wealth. (I’ve written extensively on this topic – you can find my most recent articles at http://rogerstrukhoff.sys-con.com )

99 Countries Surveyed
We have an overall ranking of 99 countries at this point, and have broken the overall result into regional and income-tier groupings. We also have a “raw” ranking. The overall ranking integrates income levels, local cost of living, bandwidth measurements, and other publicly available socioeconomic measurements. The raw ranking focuses on the income and technology integration, leaving the socioeconomic factors aside.

Most “developmental” and “competitiveness” rankings and the like simply tell us what we already know, ie, rich countries are at the top, developing countries at the bottom. It’s easy enough to draw a nice, smooth curve as incomes rise from less than $1,000 to more than $50,000 throughout the nations of the world. Measurements of health, infrastructure, technology development, etc. follow this curve faithfully.

But economic progress in this era of globalization and the Worldwide Web is a very odd thing. Ethiopia, for example, has the lowest income (at $374). It does not score well overall, or in our regional or tiered rankings.

Yet the country’s national airline, Ethiopian Airlines, is Africa’s second largest, is the first outside of Japan to buy the new Boeing 787, and is working to establish the nation’s capital, Addis Abbaba, as a major regional hub. Looking at our numbers, we find that Ethiopia does score relatively well in the raw rankings, placing 4th among 22 African countries we’ve surveyed.

Back to Madagascar: it ranks 7th on that particular list, three notches behind Ethiopia but two notches ahead of Egypt. In our overall rankings, Madagascar is a more modest 13th among the 22 African nations, and 82nd overall out of 99 countries surveyed. Compare this to Egypt’s 8th place in Africa and 65th overall.

As I’ve stated, our research is intended to start conversations, not finish them, so please contact me to learn more about what we’re doing.

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Every emerging market goes through a time of confusion where both vendors and analysts try to “define” the solution to a pervasive problem. Meanwhile, companies actually experiencing the problem are left to sort through a cacophony of mixed messages and terminology, all the while struggling to understand how this “category” of products solves their problem. As cloud storage moves closer to the IT mainstream, we see this same story arc playing out, with analysts and vendors coining a new category of products – “Cloud Integrated Storage” (CiS) – that is subtly different from the “cloud storage gateway” term that previously captured the entire category.
According to an ESG report, CiS entails “primary and/or most active data staying onsite (as a tier or cache).” It operates “for less active data … as an easily scalable archive” and offers “powerful remote data protection and business continuity capabilities.” While this description is quite elaborate, in layman’s terms, CiS simply delivers cloud storage in addition to traditional storage to on-premise environments. In fact, it may all sound very familiar to those already using advanced cloud storage gateways and appliances.

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This is a follow-up to a recent post about modernizing data protection and doing more than simply swapping out media or mediums like flat tires on a car as well as part of the Quantum protecting data with certainty event series.
While I was traveling saw this advertisement sign from Datalink (who is a Quantum partner that participated in some of the events) in a few different airports which is a variation of the Datadomain tape sucks attention getter. For those not familiar, that creature on the right is an oversized mosquito with the company logos on the lower left being Datalink, NetApp, Cisco and VMware.

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SYS-CON Events announced today that the Telx, a leading provider of global interconnectivity, cloud enablement services and data center solutions, has been named “Bronze Sponsor” of SYS-CON’s 11th International Cloud Expo, which will take place on November 5–8, 2012, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
Telx is a leading provider of interconnection and data center services in strategic, high-demand North American markets. With 17 premier C3 Cloud Connection Centers by TelxTM, Telx increases speed to market and reduces connectivity costs by providing direct connections to a community of the industry’s highest performance networks and access to 1,000+ customers, including leading telecommunications carriers, ISPs, cloud providers, content providers and enterprises.

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Much has been written here, and in many blogs, about Cloud Adoption. However, most of this has focused on the tangible and critical pieces like technical architecture and operational considerations. This can’t be minimized in the least. However, in my work with both vendors and end customers, I’ve identified what is another critical success factor across all organizations, and that is adopting a Cloud Mindset. And while mindset may seem “softer” than the other issues, if we don’t shift our mindset, we will continue to cling to ideas and assumptions that served us well in the past, but can get in the way of our future success.

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It’s become increasingly clear that Big Data, and the tools for manipulating, visualizing and analyzing it, are transforming the business landscape. McKinsey released a report in 2011 that projects 40 percent growth in global data generated per year. This is all well and good, but more and more companies are finding that their toolbox for dealing with all of this data is antiquated and confusing.
Indeed, 58 percent of enterprise decision makers surveyed in March 2012 by DataXu felt they lacked the skills and technology required for marketing analytics. Marketers should be chomping at the bit to fruitfully employ the data they have. Successful marketing requires proper segmentation of the customer base to create more targeted campaigns. Real-time insight into the performance of existing campaigns and a clear grasp of where to redirect efforts can also turn a campaign that would have failed into a success. These are the promises made by the drivers of the current “data movement.” The unfortunate reality, however, is that the accumulation of data just adds to the costs of an organization as it struggles to merely store the incoming torrent of data, let alone harness it and allow non-technical individuals to explore and understand it.

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