The term Big Data is going to become a key part of the forward-looking business technology debate among informed, proactive and ICT savvy executives. But what’s really driving the growing demand for meaningful solutions?

While most companies are collecting, storing and analysing data, they continue to struggle with both the business and IT challenges of Big Data — more data is not necessarily better.

Enormous amounts of data are being generated daily by smartphones, sensors, video cameras, smart meters, and other connected devices, adding to the huge store of information from traditional sources.

This “data avalanche” represents a potential gold mine of insights, but a new study commissioned by Cisco reveals that IT professionals and businesses are challenged to extract strategic value from their data.

The Cisco Connected World Technology Report (CCWTR) surveyed IT professionals across 18 countries to examine the IT readiness, challenges, technology gaps, and strategic value of …

Communications provider CommScope has released a report, entitled the 2013 Global Enterprise Survey, to assess which aspects of IT were changing the paradigm for organisations around the world – and found that cloud computing and enterprise mobility were the biggest tickets on the list.

The research, which is taken every three years and gathered over 1100 responses from 63 countries in five continents, found the top five disruptive IT forces as enterprise mobility, cloud services, 40Gb and 100Gb Ethernet, infrastructure intelligence and green power.

Of course, many of these overlap, with cloud and mobility often going hand-in-hand for corporate IT policy. Respondents also stated that server virtualisation and cloud were the key components of a green, energy-saving strategy.

44% of respondents said that cloud services were a game-changer, with the same number citing enterprise mobility as a key trend. The research found other contextual statistics:

• Just under three quarters (74%) of …

Planning scalable environments isn’t terribly difficult, but it does require a change of perspective. During this session we’ll broaden our views to think on an Internet Scale by dissecting a video publishing application built with The SoftLayer Platform, Message Queuing, Object Storage, and Drupal. By examining a scalable modular application build that can handle unpredictable traffic, you’ll be able to grow your development arsenal and pick up a few strategies to apply to your own projects.

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These days, it seems that every cloud provider claims that cloud is safer than your traditional datacenter. Is it though?
In his general session at the 12th International Cloud Expo, Rishi Bhargava, VP of Product Management for Datacenter and Server Security group at McAfee, will help you explore and address the security challenges and considerations for public cloud (IaaS, PaaS and SaaS).
Rishi Bhargava is Vice President of Product Management for Datacenter and Server Security group at McAfee, Inc. He is responsible for Product management and strategy for datacenter solution. A visionary and technology enthusiast, he is also driving all Embedded Security Products Initiatives at McAfee. With over 12 years of diverse experience in product development and product management, he has a reputation for turning small ideas into successful market leading products.

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Private clouds are a great way to provide real-time service delivery of IT resources with a single-tenant, customized, secure environment. However, the challenge of scaling and managing physical resources still exists. The solution may be to leverage an Infrastructure-as-a-Service provider to build an off-premise Private Cloud to add scalability to your current private cloud.
In his general session at the 12th International Cloud Expo, Duke Skarda, CTO of SoftLayer, will discuss:
How to achieve scalability at Internet speed
Why it makes technical and business sense to host the cloud off-premises
What hosting options are available

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MuleSoft and its integration platform Wednesday got a $37 million investment led by NEA, bringing the company’s total financing to $81 million.
Other investors include Salesforce.com, as well as existing backers Hummer Winblad Venture Partners, Morgenthaler Ventures, Lightspeed Venture Partners, SAP Ventures and Bay Partners.
The funds are meant to pay for MuleSoft’s aggressive growth plans across its SaaS and enterprise customer segments, further global expansion, and “category-defining” technology innovations for connecting what it calls the “New Enterprise.”
Together with announcing the funding the company launched its Anypoint Platform, described as the first and only complete integration platform to enable connectivity to any application, data service or API across the entire cloud and on-premise continuum.

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Organizations want extraordinary results from their IT units. Today’s mantra is faster delivery, better quality, cheaper solutions, and safer environments. Many CIOs are implementing cloud computing enterprise architectures to address these challenges with results varying greatly. Why are some organizations seeing only limited results from cloud computing implementations while others are increasing market share, decreasing costs, generating value, and innovating faster?

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Roy Illsley, Principal Analyst, Ovum Software

IBM recently made three significant announcements about its vision for how cloud computing will be adopted by enterprise customers.

First, IBM believes that open standards are needed to drive increased customer demand for workload portability in a hybrid cloud environment. Second, IBM has segmented the adoption of cloud computing as two different strategies serving two different reasons to adopt cloud computing, namely a cloud-enabled approach and a cloud-centric approach. A third element that IBM introduced to the cloud debate was role-converged infrastructure solutions, and how these will enable both of the cloud adoption strategies.

Ovum considers that the concept of an open standard-based approach to cloud computing represents one such way a technology can gain wider adoption, but cautions that it will need wide cross-vendor support to make an impact on the market.

IBM backs OpenStack as the way to wider cloud adoption

At …

By Luca Smuraglia, General Manager, Enterprise Business, Easynet

I’m a numbers man. I like to look at all the data available and make a decision based on fact, not just instinct. And I’m not alone: whether at work or at home, we all like to arm ourselves with information before we make a decision.

It’s empowering and reassuring. E-Consultancy’s recent Multichannel Retail Survey found that 90% of consumers research online before buying in-store. We amass vast quantities of data as businesses and as consumers, and we’re constantly hearing about explosions of information, tsunamis of data. According to Ofcom’s International Communications Market Report, the average UK mobile connection consumed over 424MB of data – higher even than Japan (392MB) in second place and the United States (319MB).  

Information as an asset to a business is more important than ever, but the term ‘big data’ is misleading …