I just heard an interesting story from Runtastic, who is one of our Mobile Real User Monitoring customers. Runtastic’s main mobile app allows their users to track their sport activities such as running, biking, hiking or skiing. They had a user complaining about too high speed. He didn’t actually complain about the performance of the app but instead complained about his average speed during his workout as calculated by the app. After his one hour biking session, the app showed the he covered a distance of 490 km – that would probably be a world record and give him the yellow shirt in a small French bicycling event.

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Way back in the 20th century we used to regard cyclical trading patterns as the highs and lows of any given business market in the most traditional sense. Driven by changes in demand and supply, seasonal fluctuations and the relative performance of competing products or services, we have always understood that business cycles exist as a natural part of classical economic teaching.
Today we have the opportunity to view the various economic models of the business world slightly differently.

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Dealing with legacy applications in the cloud is not a simple, straight ahead proposition. The bottom line is it can be done, but doing it smartly is a whole other issue.
As Dan Woods asks:
“Can cloud infrastructure support traditional applications that were not built to deliver reliable performance from unreliable components?”
The reasons to move legacy apps to the cloud are manifest: improved performance, ROI, and associated upkeep costs, to name a few. So much money has already gone into creating the tech and utilizing the data center real estate that simply abandoning what you’ve been using would be like burning millions of dollars.
However, the answer to Dan Woods’ question is not a simple yes or no, and many providers who reply in one way or the other are selling short the amount of thinking that has to go into making legacy applications at home in the cloud.

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Corporate Cloud Adoption A couple of weeks back, Solar VPS President and COO Ross Brouse (@RossBrouse), gave a technical keynote presentation at New York City’s Cloud Expo. The presentation covered corporate Cloud adoption – how Cloud adoption begins on the couch and makes it all the way to the boardroom. Well, in this short article, we are going to run with that flag and dive into the topic a bit. So, if you’re a company of any size looking to fully Cloudize (word, not a word? We think it should be), err, make the jump into the Cloud, here are a few tips for successful Cloud computing adoption. Understand the Difference Before even considering a move into the Cloud, companies and non-IT minds need to understand the difference between the public Cloud and the private Cloud. Are you streaming music via Spotify right now? Are you looking at a friend’s Facebook status, tweeting to a person halfway across the world or downloading data from a shared Dropbox account? If so, you are using the public Cloud. The public Cloud, is as the name suggests, for public use. On the other hand, a private Cloud deployment is a Cloud deployed and maintained behind a private, closely guarded, corporate firewall. All the data stored in the private Cloud require corporate access keys and are housed behind a stringent firewall to ensure security. When deploying a corporate Cloud, although some employees might use applications like Dropbox, Box.net and SugarSync to store less vital all information, the most sensitive data is stored, secured and kept behind your corporate firewall, in your corporate private Cloud only accessible using the right access keys. BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) Means Everything When it comes to corporate Cloud adoption, the BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) movement is paramount. Why is that? Well, think about it this way. If you work for a company who issues you a device instead of allowing you to use your own personal device, you now have two devices with different purposes. One device is for your personal life and one device is for your work life. However this creates an issue. It means, subconsciously, that employees can’t check in with their personal lives while at work and while at home, the last thing they want to do is check in with their work lives. This division is not good. A person is more than a simple division. The fix is BYOD. The Bring Your Own Device movement allows consumers to bring their personal devices to work and use their personal devices for work. By synching with the corporate exchange server, corporate apps, corporate WordPress blogs etc. on their personal device, employees no longer need to worry about that work/life division. Instead of only checking personal email accounts, an employee can and now will check both personal and work accounts at the same time. The joining of work and life means a blurring of the work/life balance but it also means – and this … Continue

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IBM’s partnership with Cloud Foundry will certainly go down as one of the bigger announcements in the cloud computing space this year. But what will it mean on a wider scale?

IBM and Pivotal have announced collaboration on the open platform as a service (PaaS) Cloud Foundry, pushing forward to establish open governance in the PaaS community – in other words, allowing companies total freedom to write software applications running in the cloud.

“Cloud Foundry’s potential to transform business is vast, and steps like the one taken today help open the ecosystem for greater client innovation,” Daniel Sabbah, IBM general manager of next generation platforms said in a statement.

This is the latest big bet IBM has taken in mapping out its cloud computing strategy in recent months. And as a result, you can be fairly sure the Cloud Foundry technology is going to integrate tightly with IBM’s …

The after-effects of PRISM means that companies are much less likely to use US-based cloud service providers (CSPs), according to a survey from the Cloud Security Alliance.

56% were less likely to use US-based providers, with one in 10 going as far to say that they’d cancelled a project which used US CSPs as a result. Only 3%, interestingly, said their confidence in US vendors had increased.

It’s noticeable that, from the vendors’ perspective, their confidence had not been diminished. 64% said the incident had not hindered their prospects of conducting business outside the US.

Yet in terms of general security policy, respondents did not feel at ease about governmental transparency and legitimacy. Almost half (47%) of those polled said that their country’s processes in obtaining criminal information were “poor…there is no transparency in the process and I have no idea how often the government accesses …

yes

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When I was asked about innovation, the first thing I did was review my research to get an idea of what my peers in the industry were predicting for our parallel IT futures. Not surprisingly, they all reflected the same sentiment: the cloud is growing, and employees will continue to bring their own devices (BYOD). BYOD is a trend that has remained a hot topic, and point of controversy, throughout the year. Now that we’re entering the second half of 2013, I think we can safely say that those predictions have been realized. Because the cloud is the common theme throughout all innovation and tech conversations, I am going to focus solely on where I believe the cloud is heading. At this time I would like to take this opportunity to look even deeper into the crystal ball and provide some insight into where the cloud conversation is heading for the remainder of 2013 and 2014.

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“The government’s desire to think ‘cloud first’ is critical in reducing federal IT costs and AWS GovCloud should ease the transition, while maintaining the necessary security and compliance requirements demanded by the public sector,” said Anthony Robbins, vice president of Federal at Brocade, on the release of the Brocade Vyatta vRouter, a robust virtual router, firewall and VPN solution for AWS GovCloud.
This new AWS Region is designed to help U.S. government agencies and contractors move more sensitive workloads into the cloud by addressing their specific regulatory and compliance requirements.
With the introduction of the Brocade Vyatta vRouter for AWS GovCloud, federal agencies and approved affiliates can build secure, elaborate n-tier networks to better handle sensitive workloads within the cloud. Robbins noted, “The Brocade Vyatta vRouter provides the ability for network architects to replicate current data center infrastructures in the cloud, as well as simplify the provisioning of hybrid cloud environments.”

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