Next-Gen Cloud. Whatever you call it, there’s a higher calling for cloud computing that requires providers to change their spots and move from a commodity mindset to a premium one. Businesses can no longer maintain the status quo that today’s service providers offer. Yes, the continuity, speed, mobility, data access and connectivity are staples of the cloud and always will be. But cloud providers that plan to not only exist tomorrow – but to lead – know that security must be the top priority for the cloud and are delivering it now.
In his session at 14th Cloud Expo, Kurt Hagerman, Chief Information Security Officer at FireHost, will detail why and how you can have both infrastructure performance and enterprise-grade security – and what tomorrow’s cloud provider will look like.
Monthly Archives: April 2014
Social Cloud: Revolutionizing Sharing, Starting from the Infrastructure
The social media expansion has shown just how people are eager to share their experiences with the rest of the world. Cloud technology is the perfect platform to satisfy this need given its great flexibility and readiness. At Cynny, we aim to revolutionize how people share and organize their digital life through a brand new cloud service, starting from infrastructure to the users’ interface.
A revolution that began from inventing and designing our very own infrastructure: we have created the first server network powered solely by ARM CPU. The microservers have “organism-like” features, differentiating them from any of the current technologies. Benefits include low consumption of energy, making Cynny the ecologically friendly alternative for storage as well as cheaper infrastructure, lower running costs, etc.
Ten Answers Regarding Mobile App Testing
This white paper digs deep into the reasons testing mobile apps is fundamentally harder than traditional web or desktop applications. Experts Tina Zhuo and Dennis Schultz from IBM along with Yoram Mizrachi from Perfecto Mobile and John Montgomery from uTest collaborate to explore the complexities of mobile test environments, the value of the mobile device cloud, the unique role crowd sourcing can play, and how teams can leverage automation to help deliver quality apps.
Healthcare IT a HIT in Philippines
The upcoming HIT-PH Conference in Metro Manila on May 22-23 focuses on the rapid advance of Information Technology in this sector.
“The Philippine healthcare industry is entering the digital age,” according to the conference organizers, Exist Healthcare IT and Goldcrest Communications. “The use of IT systems in hospitals holds great potential to improve operational efficiencies, promote better clinical outcomes and enhance patient engagement.”
Mobility will be a key topic at this event, covering the use of mobile devices at bedside, barcode technology employed to minimize data-entry errors, and scanning technology to improve record retrieval. Other topics include the use of portals to engage patients online, and the use of cloud computing to scale health IT infrastructures.
In the ongoing research we do at the Tau institute for Global ICT Studies, the Philippines ranks as an emerging regional leader.
Continued improvements in the area of bandwidth are needed, something that’s recently been highlighted by problems with some of the submarine cables serving the country. In contrast, a local investment of US$65 million in a new cable – the “SJC” – addresses this ongoing issue.
The healthcare sector will no doubt benefit as things improve, although our research does show the country as presenting a significant challenge to its government and industry to achieve the improvement it needs. The HIT-PH Conference should provide a unique opportunity for these issues to be addressed and discussed.
The Facts About Cloud High Availability and Disaster Recovery
Enterprises are moving more and more applications to the cloud. Gartner predicts that the bulk of new IT spending by 2016 will be for cloud computing platforms and applications and that nearly half of large enterprises will have cloud deployments by the end of 2017.1
The far-reaching impact of cloud computing is summarized in a recent McKinsey report on disruptive technologies: “Cloud technology has the potential to improve productivity across $3 trillion in global enterprise IT spending, as well as enabling the creation of new online products and services for billions of consumers and millions of businesses alike.”2
For many organizations, moving applications that can tolerate brief periods of downtime to the cloud is a straightforward decision with clear benefits. However, concerns about how to provide high availability and disaster protection in the cloud may make this decision more difficult for business-critical applications such as SQL, SAP, and Exchange. Understanding the facts about HA and DR in the cloud can help you make informed decisions about moving applications to the cloud, while ensuring the important business operations that depend on them are protected from downtime and data loss.
Security, Compliance, Performance: We Are Talking About Web Conferencing
Web conferencing in a public cloud has the same risks as any other cloud service. If you have ever had concerns over the types of data being shared in your employees’ web conferences, such as IP, financials or customer data, then it’s time to look at web conferencing in a private cloud.
In her session at 14th Cloud Expo, Courtney Behrens, Senior Marketing Manager at Brother International, will discuss how issues that had previously been out of your control, like performance, advanced administration and compliance, can now be put back behind your firewall.
Two Giant Economies Provide Experiment to “Free and Unfettered” Internet
In my previous blog I contrasted the latest net neutrality developments in the EU with the situation in the U.S. Neither decision will settle the argument and the two camps will continue to debate the topic for the foreseeable future. On both sides of the argument and the ocean, believers state with conviction that their way is the right way, leading to a healthier Internet industry and benefits for all.
One camp takes the view that Internet openness and neutrality means that telecom service providers should not be restricted from managing Internet traffic and, if they feel it is appropriate, to charge more to third-party ISPs and content providers for premium service. Only in this way, it is argued, will bit-carriers be able to earn the revenues they need to invest in network growth and quality improvements that will benefit us all.
The Impact of the IaaS Price Wars
In my latest post at The Virtualization Practice I discuss the impacts of the price wars and how I think it effects the long term play of both IaaS and PaaS.
Public cloud IaaS providers are competing heavily on price. Watching Google, AWS, and Microsoft play the falling prices game is like watching a ping-pong match. It is just a matter of time before IBM’s SoftLayer matches the prices as well. In my latest post at The Virtualization Practice I discuss the impacts of the price wars and how I think it effects the long term play of both IaaS and PaaS.
ownCloud Owns “Little Big Data”
Among the things I wasn’t able to do this week was attend the Red Hat Summit in San Francisco. Bummer. But I was able to conduct a lot of interviews from my office in Illinois.
I cover the emergent Big Three – Cloud Computing, Big Data, Internet of Things – all of which are part of our unified view of IT today. As I prepare for the upcoming @cloudexpo @bigdataexpo @thingsexpo industry celebration in New York June 10-12, I’ll talk to a lot of people about their visions plans, and viewpoints.
There’s a lot of Open Source percolating within this universe as well, of course, and Red Hat is one of the prime examples of leveraging an open-source product into a real business, and one which lends itself nicely to the Big Three as well.
ownCloud Progresses
My first interview was with Frank Karlitschek (pictured), who is CTO, Community Leader, and CTO of ownCloud. I first met Frank at a Linux event in San Diego a couple of years ago. I saw Linus Torvalds wandering around this event, although for some reason he didn’t seem to recognize me.
However, my conversation with Frank was one of the highlights of my day. ownCloud was just barely starting out then, and Frank was very frank with me about the company’s intended focus and the big challenges it faced.
Now the company seems to have some strong legs and a nice focus on developing cloud-storage solutions from within enterprise IT’s datacenters. As some have put it, in an age of the NSA and Edward Snowden’s revelations, enterprises need to feel much more secure about their storage than ever before.
All that said, let’s hear what Frank has to say…
Roger: How have things played out for the company recently? What sort of customers are you attracting?
Frank: Lots of changes actually. We recently released ownCloud Enterprise 6, and closed our A round of funding. Starting with ownCloud 6 Community Edition we’ve seen a maturity of product and a corresponding rise of interest by customers – including some of the world’s top universities, financial institutions and even CERN. In fact, Q4 2013 sales were higher than the total of company sales since the beginning!
Roger: I have a theory that all the world is hybrid cloud, or will be soon. How strongly do you agree/disagree with this?
Frank: Could not agree more strongly. In fact, that is exactly the secret sauce to our success. There is no one of note who can offer a fully private cloud for sync and share. The cloud providers sell storage, so the private cloud part does them no good – not to mention, their technology isn’t built to deliver it.
We, on the other hand, are built for flexibility. We install directly on company servers, integrate into existing infrastructure and extend via open APIs to be able to do things we haven’t even thought of yet. Use your own storage, or use cloud storage of your choice – or both.
Roger: How key is the role of Big Data in developing your solutions? How important is the term Big Data to you?
Frank: If Big Data means collecting massive amounts of structured data and using it for complex analysis, then ownCloud is less Big Data then centralized cloud services. The reason is the ownCloud is about distributed and self-hosted cloud servers so the data is less “big” then Box, Dropbox or Google.
On the other hand, by centralizing a company’s unstructured data, the analysis of this data and connections between the data in the enterprise could be a bit easier, because the enterprise has full access to all the data and can do optimized analysis for the questions they really care about. So maybe we are Little Big Data – or Big Little Data!
Roger: Little Big Data – starring Dustin Hoffman and Brent Spiner, and coming to a screen or torrent near you.
Dell & Red Hat Deliver Enterprise-Grade, OpenStack Private Cloud Solution
Dell and Red Hat Inc. have announced the availability of co-engineered, enterprise-grade, private cloud solutions based on OpenStack, the Dell Red Hat Cloud Solution, powered by Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform. The companies also have extended their collaboration to enable the compatibility, portability and reliability for Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offerings that enterprise customers need as they build public, private and hybrid cloud environments.
Through the new private cloud solutions and extended alliance, Dell and Red Hat aim to provide enterprise customers at various stages of OpenStack evaluation and use with an enterprise-grade software life cycle experience, and greater stability, predictability and rigor to the community-published OpenStack updates.