When you’re a kid at the beach, you spend a lot of time and effort building a sand castle. It’s cool, a lot of fun, and doomed to destruction. When high tide, or random kids, or hot sun come along, the castle is going to fall apart. It doesn’t matter, kids build them every year by the thousands, probably by the millions across the globe. Each is special and unique, each took time and effort, and each will fall apart.
The thing is, they’re all over the globe, and seasons are different all over the globe, so it is conceivable that there is a sand castle built or being built every minute of every day. Not easily provable, but doesn’t need to be for this discussion. when it is night and middle of winter in the northern reaches of North America, it is summer and daytime in Australia. The opportunity for continuation of sand castles is amazing.
Monthly Archives: November 2012
Help Desk Solution Empowers Employees
BMC Software this week launched MyIT, an enterprise IT help desk solution that empowers employees to take more personal control over their IT services and to get the right type of help they need — anytime, anywhere, from any device.
Frustration with company IT departments is a widely shared experience. Forrester Research reports that just 35 percent of business decision-makers say IT provides “high quality, timely end user support.” What’s more, employees are increasingly circumventing their IT organizations in search of faster IT support and problem resolution.
Moreover, studies show that the friction between users and IT help capabilities saps as much as 20 percent of productivity away from workers. That’s a day a week when things go wrong.
Porticor Locks Down Data in the Cloud
Porticor has fleshed out its security widgetry and figures it can now deliver
the only system anywhere that can secure data in the cloud.
It does it with an algorithm that protects cloud data while it’s stored and in
use.
The two-year-old Tel Aviv company’s next trick will be to protect the data
while it’s in motion.
Cloud Expo Silicon Valley: Delivering Windows Desktops as a Cloud Service
Citrix has announced a bold new project aimed at enabling enterprises and service providers to deliver Windows desktops and apps as a true cloud service: Project Avalon.
Project Avalon promises to revolutionize the delivery of IT services by enabling enterprise customers to build and leverage private, public and hybrid clouds to deliver access to desktops, apps and data anywhere.
In his session at the 11th International Cloud Expo, Thomas DeMeo, Sr. Director Product Management, Desktop Virtualization, at Citrix Systems, will discuss the foundational principles critical for next-generation, IT service delivery and what it means to offer Windows desktops and apps as a true cloud-enabled service.
Cloud Expo Silicon Valley: A Risk-Based Approach to Continuous Monitoring
Organizations have become accustomed to accepting the inherent risk associated with point-in-time security assessments. With the emergence of new compliance regulations and the increasing ability to easily change environments through virtualization, we are shifting to a standardized approach to security assessment, authorization, and continuous monitoring. As we move to embrace a security model that requires us to detect and mitigate real-time persistent vulnerabilities and security incidents, it is important to take a risk-based approach to continuous monitoring.
In his session at the 11th International Cloud Expo, Dan Rojas, Director of Strategic Development at Coalfire, will share case studies that demonstrate how organizations prepare to transition to a continuous monitoring program – a program that allows them to deploy security controls that should remain effective over time, regardless of future changes that may occur on the cyber threat landscape.
Stratogent Corporation to Exhibit at Cloud Expo Silicon Valley
Stratogent Corporation, an IT managed services company, announced it will exhibit again this year at the International Cloud Expo at the Santa Clara Convention Center from November 5-8.
“Stratogent is excited to return to Cloud Expo this year where Big Data and Cloud Computing are together giving Silicon Valley a rare look at these parallel trends.” said Chetan Patwardhan, CEO of Stratogent.
“We are the only service provider that installs and manages systems 24×7 in all 3 layers – in-office, in a private cloud and in the public cloud. Our customers have benefited immensely from this location and method agnostic strategy. With myriad of options to choose from, and coexistence of multiple applications in these 3 layers, companies are sometimes bewildered. And if they do end up making the right choice, managing the 3 layers across locations, time-zones, and applications remains a daunting task. Cloud Expo is a great opportunity for users to gain exposure to a plethora of solutions first hand in just a few hours of investment. At our booth 1034, we look forward to both educating novices and brainstorming with the experts. We are excited about this event and very much look forward to a great turnout!”
Progress Software to Lead Cloud Application Presentations at Cloud Expo
Progress Software Corporation, a global software company that simplifies and enables the development and deployment of business applications, on Friday announced that the company will be giving a keynote speech on cloud applications as well as a general session on data connectivity at this year’s Cloud Expo, held November 5-8, 2012 in Santa Clara, California.
The Keynote session, “Cloud Applications: Some Assembly Required,” will be given by Dr. John Bates, CTO of Progress Software, on Wednesday November 7. The general session, “The Impact of Big Data and Cloud on Data Connectivity,” will be given by Jaime Meritt, director, product management, Progress Software, and Jesse Davis, director, DataDirect research and development, Progress Software, on November 6.
Actuate, VMware to Deliver Faster Insights from Big Data in the Cloud
Actuate Corporation is partnering with VMware to provide a cost-effective way for companies to gain insight from any source of Big Data in hybrid cloud environments, by deploying seamless, dynamic and accessible business information solutions.
ActuateOne is designed to support private, public and SaaS (software as a service) cloud deployments by eliminating the need for hard-coded configuration, thereby enabling fast and easy deployment with VMware solutions. VMware solutions provide multiple benefits to IT administrators and users. VMware virtualization creates a layer of abstraction between the resources required by an application and operating system, and the underlying hardware that provides those resources.
Customers can extend the reliability and agility offered by the new VMware vFabric™ Data Director™ to their virtualized ActuateOne cluster, by provisioning and managing the data sources visualized in an Actuate dashboard as well as the vFabric Postgres database that manages the Encyclopedia Volumes of that ActuateOne deployment. This multi-layered coupling of ActuateOne upon VMware simplifies IT management tasks, while ensuring the highest levels of mission-critical availability, security and scalability for any Actuate / VMware deployment.
“We are pleased to be working with Actuate to provide our customers with a solution for analyzing and visualizing large data sets that reside in hybrid cloud environments,” said Fausto Ibarra, Senior Director, Product Management, VMware. “With VMware vFabric™ Data Director, VMware vFabric Postgres and ActuateOne, organizations can securely and efficiently extract actionable insights from their data to make informative business decisions.”
“Actuate’s technology scales linearly across any number of virtual instances, interfacing well with VMware solutions, and further delivering on the Actuate promise of better insights for better decision making by more people in the organization,” said Wenfeng Li, Vice President of Product Development at Actuate. “ActuateOne sources multiple instances of Big Data, merging it with traditional relational data via our data integration features, and then presents this blended content as interactive, customizable visualizations to large numbers of simultaneous users.”
ActuateOne – Actuate’s BI platform and suite of interactive applications built on open source BIRT – has already earned VMware Ready™ status. The VMware Ready designation signifies that ActuateOne has gone through VMware’s advanced testing and evaluation process to certify product compatibility. As part of the partnership, Actuate and VMware demonstrated linear scalability of ActuateOne in conjunction with VMware vSphere®, vFabric™ Data Director™, and VMware vFabric Postgres.
Together, the solution delivers three unique capabilities:
- An efficient and secure approach to using shared infrastructure for
servicing highly frequent requests - A standardized, portable, and extensible approach to enable workloads
to be deployed across multiple clouds without manual configuration - Agile access to shared infrastructure for provisioning workloads in
demand
Cbeyond VP Chris Ortbals to Speak on Cloud Security at Cloud Expo
Cbeyond Inc. the technology ally to small and mid-sized businesses, will address secure cloud and network integration strategies during Cloud Expo 2012 Silicon Valley, November 5-8, 2012, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, California.
Chris Ortbals, Cbeyond’s vice president of cloud services, will lead a breakout session under the Cloud Architecture, Security & Performance track from 08:15-9:00 a.m. on Tuesday, November 6, 2012.
Entitled “Having Data Security Nightmares? Fight the Monsters under your IT Bed with Secure Cloud and Network Unification”, Ortbals’ presentation will look behind the intersection of network and cloud technologies. It will also include tips to help businesses ensure their mission-critical data is protected all the way from the premise to the private or public cloud.
SOA Software CTO Stresses API Management in the Cloud
Alistair Farquharson, CTO of SOA Software, a provider of Enterprise API Management and SOA Governance solutions, will be delivering a presentation on Best Practices of API Management at the 11th Cloud Expo at the Santa Clara Convention Center [Nov 5-8]. Farquharson’s session will focus on ways that IT departments can support business objectives through APIs that open access to core information systems to external developers.
Application Programmer Interfaces (APIs) expose enterprise systems to developers, including distributed, unknown third parties that create apps such as those that work on mobile devices. The goal of enterprise API management is to enable the business to realize success from APIs without inadvertently creating security and system management problems or running up unsustainable costs.