Five Questions Every CEO Should Ask Their CIO / CISO

We’ve distilled lessons learned from Snowden scandal and created 5 questions every CEO should be asking their CIO / CISO in order to avoid a catastrophic rogue insider event in the private sector both in using cloud as a vector of exfiltration as well as protecting their data stored in the cloud.
Today is the one-year anniversary of the historic Snowden disclosure. In the year since the first stories about Edward Snowden appeared, one of the lasting affects of the scandal is a heightened awareness of the risk posed by rogue insiders. This increased focus on rogue insiders has spread beyond the government to the private sector, and from security circles to corporate executives.

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Using Tools to Create Mobile Apps Quickly

Perfecto Mobile is using a variety of cloud-based testing tools to help its developers rapidly create the best mobile apps for both enterprises and commercial deployment.
We have surely entered a golden age of mobile apps development, not just for app stores wares, but across all kinds of enterprise and productivity applications. The notion of mobile-first has altered the development landscape so much that the very notion of software development writ large will never be the same.

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CodeFutures’ Cory Isaacson to Preview His Newest Book at Cloud Expo

Isaacson will give a brief preview of his upcoming book and answer questions regarding why we have been looking at databases all wrong.
Cory Isaacson is the CEO and CTO of CodeFutures, a provider of agile Big Data technologies. He has been actively involved in leading information technologies for more than 20 years. He has focused on efficiently addressing development and deployment challenges of emerging technologies such as SOA, virtualization and commoditization of resources to support real-world business applications. Cory’s expertise with high performance transactional applications has helped leading IT organizations respond to business needs for higher volumes while still managing cost pressures. Most recently, Cory has been an active evangelist on the need for using concurrent processing and scalable database techniques in order to improve application performance on multi-core architectures. Cory is responsible for the corporate strategy at CodeFutures.

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Getting Started with OpenStack

OpenStack continues to grow exponentially as the de facto standard for open source cloud platforms. But how can someone quickly get started with learning this exciting new technology?
In his session at 14th Cloud Expo, Kenneth Hui, a Technology Evangelist with Rackspace, will walk participants through an overview of the OpenStack components and offer practical suggestions and resources for learning OpenStack.
Kenneth Hui is a Technology Evangelist with Rackspace. Prior to Rackspace, Ken was a vArchitect at VCE, focused on virtualized converged infrastructure. His passion is to help IT deliver value to their customers through collaboration, automation, and cloud computing. Ken’s responsibilities at Rackspace include helping to drive the adoption of OpenStack and the hybrid cloud.

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OpenStack and the Industry Shift with Open Cloud

As open technologies continue to make a bigger splash in the industry, the growth with OpenStack is showing the shift toward a new way to manage and consume IT resources. In the public and private cloud ecosystems, OpenStack has an opportunity to bring existing organizations into a standardized platform, plus many new customers are making moves to embrace OpenStack and open platforms in their IT portfolio. What does OpenStack mean to today’s companies, systems integrators, and to administrators?
In his session at 14th Cloud Expo, Eric Wright, Systems Architect at Pluralsight, to discuss how making the move toward OpenStack and increasing knowledge and feature usage in OpenStack is going to be a key factor in the success in adopting this exciting platform.

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Unlocking Business Value with Cloud Hosted Desktops

As businesses look to unlock greater value out of their existing IT investments, they are increasingly re-evaluating their overall desktop strategy. A greater mobile workforce shifting usage models like BYOD and legacy infrastructure refresh cycles are all acting as catalysts in fueling a shift to a hosted, cloud-based model across the entire IT infrastructure, including the end-user computing side. Increasingly, IT leaders everywhere are seeking high performing, secure, and cost-effective alternatives to traditional desktops – one that minimizes large capital investments and allows them to shift scarce resources into supporting the needs of the business.
The groundswell of Windows 7 migration plans, expanding virtual workforce, growing popularity of mobile devices, and tighter IT budgets all point to the need to reevaluate desktop strategies. By moving virtual desktops to the cloud, instead of an internally deployed and managed data center, companies can realize all the promised benefits of virtual desktops – centralized management, improved data security and simplified deployment – without the exorbitant cost, limitations or hassles of VDI.

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Why You Need to Enable Transparent Security in the Cloud

The promise of easy, rapid, and low-cost deployment is luring increasing numbers to the cloud. Is security the only remaining obstacle to total domination by the cloud?
In his session at 14th Cloud Expo, John Gunn, VP of Corporate Communications for VASCO Data Security, will examine how the evolving threat landscape will present new security challenges for the cloud. You will also learn how to use transparent authentication to find the right balance between keeping the promise of user convenience while still maintaining essential security practices.

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85% of CRMs will be SaaS by 2025, research shows

If you are using a CRM, your CRM is most likely hosted in the cloud. If you aren’t using a CRM, you are light years behind your competition in regards to the amount of knowledge you have on your customers and your interactions with them.

Cloud CRM presents distinct advantages versus the traditional model of setting the system up in an onsite data centre. Technology research firm Gartner predicts that 50% of CRM tools will most likely be delivered by cloud in 2015 and by 2025, 85% of CRM offerings will be hosted in the cloud.

Angus McFayden, a technology law expert affiliated with Out-law.com says, “The move towards cloud based solutions is predominantly being driven by cost effectiveness and the flexibility of those solutions.”

McFayden goes on to say, “As a result, businesses are able to deliver on their strategies a lot quicker than if they had …

Why DevOps Needs a Friend

Application Performance Management (APM) has been bred with all the right elements to give us the insights we need to see the health of our applications. Similar to your most trusted watch dog, it alerts us to anomalies when events occur, providing awareness to the environment that only they can observe.
As enterprises embrace the DevOps philosophy, and the coalescence of the Development and Operations continues, I foresee the conditions ripening to foster innovative methods of making application performance better and code deployments smoother. To me, the argument that system monitoring is just a “nice to have” and not really a core requirement for operational readiness dissipates quickly when a critical application goes down with no warning.

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GoodData Launches Enterprise Partnership Enablement Program

GoodData has announced the launch of its Enterprise Partnership Enablement Program. This program provides implementation and reseller partners with the training and tools necessary to support GoodData’s end-to-end Open Analytics Platform. This initiative supports GoodData’s commitment to delivering an enterprise-ready and scalable BI solution.
“With the launch of this partnership program, GoodData will increasingly support a wider variety of customers,” said Senior Vice President of Global Services at GoodData, Ran Van Riper. “Implementation partners work with the GoodData team to provide the highest quality of service to enable every customer.”

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