Monthly Archives: November 2013
Transforming Business Transformation with Cloud and Agile Architecture
All the Cloud players—both service providers as well as the software and hardware vendors—are missing critical elements of the big picture. From the perspective of the enterprise customer, the transformative nature of the Cloud is but one of many disruptions to the organization. There are global marketplace challenges, regulatory issues, organizational and process changes, as well as disruption across the breadth of IT, from the rise of mobile technologies to Cybersecurity to the Cloud. Cloud Computing is an important part of this story to be sure, but it is but one of many concerns facing the C suite.
The Next Cloud Battleground: PaaS
Back in the day – when the Internets were exploding and I was still coding – I worked in enterprise architecture. Enterprise architecture, for the record, is generally not the same as application development. When an organization grows beyond a certain point, it becomes necessary to start designing a common framework upon which applications can be rapidly developed and deployed.
Architects design and implement this framework and application developers then code their applications for deployment on that architecture.
If that sounds a lot like PaaS it should because deep down, it is.
3 ways application development is thankful for MSPs
In honour of the upcoming holiday, we wanted to spend a little time exploring how application development and product management can leverage managed services as well as (or better) other parts of the organization more traditionally associated with such outsourcing partnership.
Smaller organizations have few, if any infrastructure-specific employees, but instead focus hiring product and development roles to improve the development cycle and strength of features for an application. This makes a lot of sense, especially when provisioning cloud-based infrastructure has never been easier.
Yet, even with outsourced infrastructure, the actual responsibility of managing the more traditional parts of IT fall on the development staff. This is obviously not optimal, given the differences in product development within infrastructure management.
Where does that leave an organization with an over-taxed development team and not enough infrastructure management knowledge internally? Managed services, of course!
Utilizing an MSP means more than simply offloading work …
VASCO to Launch DIGIPASS 760, a Visual Transaction Signing Solution
VASCO Data Security International, Inc. has announced the launch of DIGIPASS 760, a visual transaction signing solution. DIGIPASS 760 is the first successful integration of Cronto’s patented solution into VASCO’s DIGIPASS product line.
DIGIPASS 760 is an innovative authentication device targeted towards banks, enabling them to establish a secure optical communication channel with the client. The solution works with the CrontoSign technology whereby a graphical cryptogram consisting of a matrix of colored dots is displayed on the bank’s website.
IBM-Marist College Team Tests Cloud Tech for System Outage Prevention
IBM and Marist College are evaluating a cloud computing technology intended to help keep communications services running during natural calamities.
The new invention will work to migrate voice and data applications to safer data centers within minutes, IBM said Thursday.
Casimer DeCusatis, IBM engineer, said the technology is aimed at helping data center operators reduce the time of moving services to another location outside disaster-hit areas using mobile devices.
The cloud invention being tested at Marist’s lab leverages software-defined networking technology in order to manage data flows within physical and virtual networks.
Information technology personnel can use the SDN-based technology to access and control network resources via wireless devices and open source networks, IBM says.
IBM sponsors Marist’s lab where technologies related to SDN are being studied.
The disaster prevention technology is slated for commercial release in 2014.
IBM-Marist College Team Tests Cloud Tech for System Outage Prevention
IBM and Marist College are evaluating a cloud computing technology intended to help keep communications services running during natural calamities.
The new invention will work to migrate voice and data applications to safer data centers within minutes, IBM said Thursday.
Casimer DeCusatis, IBM engineer, said the technology is aimed at helping data center operators reduce the time of moving services to another location outside disaster-hit areas using mobile devices.
The cloud invention being tested at Marist’s lab leverages software-defined networking technology in order to manage data flows within physical and virtual networks.
Information technology personnel can use the SDN-based technology to access and control network resources via wireless devices and open source networks, IBM says.
IBM sponsors Marist’s lab where technologies related to SDN are being studied.
The disaster prevention technology is slated for commercial release in 2014.
Is Internet of Things Really Internet of Agents? | Part 1
Machine-to-machine (M2M) technology and the resulting Internet of Things are leading us inexorably toward everything-as-a-service (XaaS). As more things get connected, the range of service opportunities expands. And as those services are presented online, they become available for use, re-use and re-purposing.
At first thought, the idea of more connected devices suggests simply that there will be more devices around, and as such, more products for manufacturers to make and sell. That’s true, but as I suggested in an earlier blog, even the manufacturers will realize that there is actually more value in services related to those connected things than in the things themselves.
Let’s Be Frenemies: Playing Nice in the Cloud
I first heard the word “frenemy” a few years ago from my teenage daughter describing one of her classmates. She really liked this girl, but there were things about her she didn’t quite trust – like she couldn’t be counted on as someone who “had her back.” Off to the Urban Dictionary I went, as was the new norm if I wanted to more fully relate to my teenagers. Thanks to my daughter, today I’ve found a great use for this word that can help others come to terms with certain fast-paced technology. For me, the Cloud is like my daughter’s nice, but not-so-trustworthy friend. The cloud is our frenemy.
The cloud is our frenemy because we struggle with the stability of the relationship. Consumers have never felt so powerful since the advent of smartphones and tools that enable them to download, upload and share music, videos, and photos. When this phenomenon first caught on, most consumers didn’t even realize they were using the cloud – or what was behind the technology. They just knew they were more productive and more fulfilled.
New Massively Scalable Monitoring in OpenNebula 4.4
This is the fifth entry in a blog post series explaining how to make the most out of your OpenNebula 4.4 cloud. In previous posts we explained the new multiple datastore system with storage load balancing, the enhanced cloud bursting to Amazon features, the multiple groups functionality and the enhanced Amazon API implementation.
OpenNebula is aimed at extremely large production clouds and it’s continuously evolving to become more and more scalable. We are excited to announce that the upcoming OpenNebula 4.4 release features a brand new monitoring system that delivers more performance and scalability.
The old monitoring system divided the hosts into chunks, and for each monitoring cycle it executed a set of static probes on that chunk of hosts via ssh, collecting the monitoring information (including Virtual Machines running in the hosts). The following monitoring cycle would do the same thing with the next chunk of hosts. As a consequence, when the number of hosts was very large the system took a large amount of time to monitor all the hosts. It was possible to increase the number of monitored hosts per cycle, but beyond a certain amount the system got overloaded with ssh connections.