VASCO Data Security International, Inc., announced on Wednesday that The Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi UFJ, Ltd. (BTMU) has implemented VASCO’s two-factor authentication solutions to protect retail banking customers accessing the bank’s online banking services.
DIGIPASS for Mobile for smartphones will be deployed as a one-time password (OTP) service to secure the bank’s “Tokyo-Mitsubishi UFJ Direct” retail banking service. VASCO’s VACMAN Controller, a large-scale authentication platform, will provide the verification engine for high volume authentication requests. DIGIPASS authenticators are being offered to customers free of charge.
Monthly Archives: December 2014
‘Tiered Archive Appliance’ By @QuantumCorp | @CloudExpo [#Cloud]
More and more file-based and machine generated data is being created every day causing exponential data and content growth, and creating a management nightmare for IT managers.
What data centers really need to cope with this growth is a purpose-built tiered archive appliance that enables users to establish a single storage target for all of their applications – an appliance that will intelligently place and move data to and between storage tiers based on user-defined policies.
In her session at 15th Cloud Expo, Janae Lee, Senior Vice President of Strategy at Quantum, will discussed how VM applications can simply send user file data via NAS or HTTP to an intelligent storage target and user content will automatically route content to the appropriate archive tier(s) to deliver the desired mix of resiliency and access – whether it is private or hybrid cloud storage for broad access, or tape for less active long term protection.
She also discussed how this simplified blending of storage to enable protection and timely access to valuable data and content is the future of archive
What Are JavaScript Source Maps? By @Logentries
It’s generally a good practice to minify and combine your assets (JS & CSS) when deploying to production. This process reduces the size of your assets and dramatically improves your website’s load time.
Source maps create a map from these compressed asset files back to the source files.
This map allows you to debug and view the source code of your compressed assets, as if you were actually working with the originals.
Take a look at jQuery minified & combined code that was generated from the original. The code practically unreadable and would be difficult to debug.
But, as we all know, no matter how thoroughly you test, sometimes bugs fall will through the cracks. This is why it’s useful to debug Javascript code in production, and that’s when source maps come in handy.
CTO Focus Interview: Gunnar Berger, Citrix
In the third installment of our CTO Focus Interview series, I got to speak with Gunnar Berger, CTO at Citrix (View Part I and Part II of the series). Gunnar is a well respected thought leader who previously worked as an Analyst at Gartner and joined Citrix last June. Gunnar is on a mission to make VDI easier and cheaper to deploy. I’d highly recommend following Gunnar on Twitter to hear more from him.
Ben: What are your primary responsibilities at Citrix?
Gunnar: A lot of what I do at Citrix is on the back end and not necessarily public facing. In the public view, it’s more of looking at a long term strategy. Most roadmaps are looking ahead 12-18 months. I can be influential in these plans, but I am really looking at the longer term strategy. Where are we going to be in 3-5 years? How do we actually get to that place? How do you take today’s roadmap and drive it towards that 5 year plan? One of the main reasons I took the job at Citrix is because I want to fix VDI. I think it costs too much and is too complex. I think we truly can change VDI at Citrix.
Ben: What are some of the challenges you face as a CTO?
Gunnar: One of the main challenges when looking at long term strategies is that things can happen in the short term that can impact those long term plans. That’s every CTO’s challenge regardless of industry. In this particular industry, things change every single day. Every couple of months there is a major merger or acquisition. You have to be nimble and quick and be ready to make adjustments on the fly. My background at Gartner is very relevant here. I have to make sure I understand where the customer is now and where they will be 3-5 years from now.
If you look at the history of Citrix, look back 5 years and you see they made an incorrect prediction on VDI. You can create a long term strategy and have it not work out. If you aren’t correct with your long term strategy, it’s important to capture that early on and pivot.
Ben: What goals do you have for 2015?
Gunnar: I have three main goals heading into 2015. The first is doubling down on applications. The second is to review the complexity and costs of VDI. The third is to “bridge to the cloud.”
1. Double down on applications
Citrix over rotated on VDI but now the pendulum is moving back. VDI has a place but so does RDS. We are doubling down so that XenApp is not a second class citizen to XenDesktop. Apps are what users want, XenApp is our tried and true solution for pushing these apps out to users on any device.
2. Review complexity and cost of VDI
My overall goal is to make VDI easier to deploy and cheaper to deploy. This plays into a long term strategy. Let’s face it, VDI deployments take a lot of time and money. I can’t remember where it was that I heard this stat, but for every dollar of a VDI sale I need to sell $12 in everything else. For a customer to buy one thing they need to buy $12 of something else…not an ideal situation for the customer.
We need to solve that issue to make it less costly. I’m unapologetically a fan of VDI. I think it’s an extremely powerful technology that has a lot of great benefits, but it is currentlycostly and complex. Luckily, in my position I get to work with a lot of really smart people that can solve this so I’m confident that Citrix will make VDI what I have always wanted it to be.
3. Bridge to the cloud
This is where Citrix Workspace Services comes into play. You will start seeing more and more of this from Citrix over the next several months. Essentially this is the unification of all of our different products (i.e. XenDesktop, XenApp, XenMobile, NetScaler, etc.). We will be “SaaS-ifying” our entire stack, which is a massive undertaking. We really want to improve the admin experience by creating a single administrative interface for users of all different product suites.
The goal is provide the same benefits to an enterprise that an end user receives from products like the ChromeBook – automatically get the latest version so you never have to update manually. We want to get to the point that no matter what, customers are always operating on the most recent versions. This obviously benefits the customer as they are getting the latest things instantly.
Citrix isn’t going to try to become a cloud provider. To do that you need billions of dollars. We’re building a bridge to enable users to move seamlessly from on-prem to off-prem. You want to be on Azure or Amazon? We can do that.
The idea is that this becomes the middle ground between you and those cloud providers. What I like about being the intermediary is being able to dial up and back between clouds seamlessly to allow customers to stand things up and test them in minutes instead of days.
Ben: Citrix has made heavy investments in mobility. Where do you see mobility in the next 3-5 years?
Gunnar: Honestly, I want to stop talking about mobility like it’s something special. Everything we are doing these days is mobile. Mobile Device Management? Mobile Application Management? We need to drop the mobile from this story. It’s device management. It’s applications management. As far as where mobility fits in with Citrix – it’s inherent to the big picture much like the necessity to breath. I say this to paint a picture because it’s in our DNA. This is what Citrix has done for the last 25 years. In today’s world with smartphones and tablets, we take apps and make them run elsewhere just like we have always done.
Ben: Throughout your career, what concept or technology would you say has had the most drastic impact on IT?
Gunnar: Hands down virtualization. Virtualization is the root of where cloud started. Cloud is the most disruptive technology moving forward, and it all started with the hypervisor.
Are you a CIO/CTO interested in participating in our Focus Interview series? Email me at bstephenson@greenpages.com
By Ben Stephenson, Emerging Media Specialist
Ten Tips for Facilitating a #DevOps Culture By @Rex_Morrow | @DevOpsSummit
“Culture” is nebulous and seemingly ephemeral, as it consists of a lot of touchy-feely sentiments which tend to be at odds with how engineers have trained themselves to think – rationally and logically.
DevOps is generally recognized as a means of driving better business outcomes via improvements in process, tools, and culture within the IT organization. Process is immediately recognizable – it’s the way you’re doing business today, and everyone involved can probably identify at least a couple of tweaks they believe would improve the process overall. Tooling is a bit more difficult, as to do it right you need to invest in tools which support your workflows, and if your process is broken or less than ideal today then selecting the right tool becomes much more complicated – the conventional wisdom is to first optimize your process and workflows, and then to select the right tool for the job. The third aspect, however, is much harder to nail down. “Culture” is nebulous and seemingly ephemeral, as it consists of a lot of touchy-feely sentiments which tend to be at odds with how engineers have trained themselves to think – rationally and logically.
Announcing @AppZero_Inc and @DellServices Deliver WS 2003 Migrations
AppZero, the fastest, most flexible way to move enterprise applications to the cloud, announced an alliance with Dell Services to help customers migrate off Windows Server 2003 before it reaches end of extended support on July 14, 2015. With extended support ending, many organizations are still either unaware of the coming end, or are struggling with legacy applications that still require the old architecture.
Why APIs matter in the world of virtualisation
The All Things API series is tailored to capture thought-provoking ideas and commentary from today’s visionaries, tech leaders, geeks, evangelists and the like. Day-in and -out, we have the pleasure of meeting with subject-matter experts within the community, ranging from developers at Fortune 100 companies to API & developer evangelists writing their own path.
On November 7th, I sat down and chatted with an interesting expert in the realm of APIs: John Kirby, ViaWest API expert and Director of Software Architecture. Kirby has been in the software development field for over 25 years, and when he’s not on the slopes skiing beautiful Colorado or riding his bike, he helps his team focus on the big picture of how the enterprise’s next generation of virtualization can become more agile and responsive to customer needs.
Q: In your own words, how would you describe ViaWest?
ViaWest provides colocation, managed services and cloud computing solutions across North America. We’re a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), and cloud provider across API enabled platforms. We are seeing IaaS become more software driven and virtualized, including the network component. The glue that pulls everything together is the API. This requires your environments to act like their “heads-are-on-swivel” in the sense that as you’re building an eco-system, you need a way manage and have components communicate through all layers and directions of the platform. For example, a data center has all sorts of different colocation and cloud platforms. It is the APIs that allow those technologies to communicate and exchange data with each other.
When expanding our solutions, we always take a close look at what we need to build, what we need to buy and who to partner with for services and infrastructure. We’re definitely cognizant of how cooperative and flexible the vendor’s solutions are. For example, if the vendor isn’t built on APIs and only has command line solution, it’s very difficult to integrate into the ecosystem.
What we’re developing with Cloud Elements, is what we’re considering to be our core API set. This core API set will enable our solutions to integrate with other vendor platforms. We can use the Lego as an analogy – you take the Legos and stack them all together to come up with something new and interesting. APIs are the backbone and the glue that brings infrastructure, platform, and cross-platform systems together.
Q: How would you describe your product development strategy?
Part of what we have to move towards in terms of product development is following a DevOps model, taking into consideration developer best practices (e.g. agile) and bring it onto the operational side. It’s no longer just a practice of building and making a product, and then tossing it over the wall to ops to maintain and install.
When you look at rolling out something to the software development side, it has to be an integrated and coordinated approach with operations. Our product strategy is to be well architected, designed and constructed, and to not differentiate between software development and ops. Everything we build/buy and maintain is API driven and software driven.
That also means that our team’s skill set is evolving – people are thinking like developers, and how they write applications, even if they’re not in development. We had that abstraction [differentiation between development and ops] in the hardware space. No longer are we building to the command-line; how we develop and how we operationalize is becoming increasingly programmatic.
Q: What advice would you offer to those just getting started?
You have developers that have been stereotyped into how they operate, and there can be some cultural differences between where you’re leading your company and where you’ve come from. Consider that there are somewhat orthodoxical views to operations, such as ops is responsible for keeping the lights on, writing script, etc. The challenge is to harmonize these skill sets.
Also, recognize that there are different personalities, different skill-sets, and that you can provide training to get your operational people the skill-sets they need. So when you’re ready to automate, instead of using Perl script with embedded complicated business logic, you’re calling an API.
My advice: simplify and do more. Find the parodies between how your development software code is written and tested, and how to now include managed and operational workflow. Be cognizant of both sides. You’ll be asking people to act more like a developer, with the discipline of operations. It will take training, socializing, and putting together the right architecture and tools to foster that. And if you’re still operating at a command-line, with not much of a reason to change, my advice is to change to a DevOps approach.
Q: How would you describe the value you delivering to your customers?
ViaWest has a really good relationship with our customers. We’re responsive, collaborative, and easily distinguished from other service providers. We work with customers to troubleshoot problems and get to real solutions.
Sometimes customer support takes up a lot of clock time, that doesn’t scale well as a business, especially if you have a ton of manual steps. Our product strategy moving forward is to get the best of breed tools so that our team can quickly troubleshoot and easily configure the changes that are required. If something does go wrong, there are better ways to solve issues. We’re aiming to have better metrics to monitor and better practices to mediate.
Point being, if you can automate or anticipate problems, you can be more proactive and have the ability to quickly scale and offer more products.
Q: Where is Cloud Elements involved in your product development strategy?
Cloud Elements is working with us on a hybrid portal project. We’re building a framework for leveraging APIs, creating reusable components for future products. Collaboratively, we’re focused on better velocity, better consistency, and better automation.
We have a limited staff for homegrown solutions, and look to companies like Cloud Elements for help and input to strategic solutions. If our partners’ products and solutions have a good API, then likely it’s a good fit. On the other hand, if you partner with a company that has a great solution but provides a black box, then you don’t know what you’re getting into.
Personally, I like the “gray box”. I know what we’re getting, but there’s opportunity to iterate, evolve and build a solution on top of it with their technology. Of course our partners need to have an API, otherwise it’s very difficult to integrate. We also look for a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) approach in order to scale. Doesn’t help if someone is building something that’s vertically based and doesn’t scale. I prefer the “horizontal” which helps our development support our 27+ data center wide configurations.
Q: When considering “All Things API”, what resonates with you?
An API is a great way of exposing functionality and consuming data in an abstract way. How I use an API should be really simple. I should just know the API contract to send it a request and the data that’s coming back is easy to understand and well formed. When I hear “All Things API” I first consider what does the API allow me to do? Then what is the underlying API response data structure (how will I use the data?), and finally how do I get access to the data via the API? With that said I also want to know that security and scalability will be provided not at the expense of making the API too complicated to use.
Q: What’s the long term product strategy for ViaWest?
We’re taking a hybrid approach, bringing together colocation, cloud and a client’s on-premise environment. Customers can, and might want to be in all three. The idea is to make sure they can move all (or parts) of their enterprise between the colocated, cloud and on-premise environments. For example, a customer may have mainframes onprem, the website is in the cloud, and their back office systems are colocated. And it doesn’t end there. ViaWest will help provide automated management and provisioning through tool APIs, allowing for a holistic and seamless experience for the customer.
Do you agree with John Kirby’s comments about APIs? Let us know in the comments.
‘Internet of Things Moves into the Mainstream’ By @Autodesk | @ThingsExpo [#IoT]
The Internet of Things (IoT) is rapidly in the process of breaking from its heretofore relatively obscure enterprise applications (such as plant floor control and supply chain management) and going mainstream into the consumer space. More and more creative folks are interconnecting everyday products such as household items, mobile devices, appliances and cars, and unleashing new and imaginative scenarios. We are seeing a lot of excitement around applications in home automation, personal fitness, and in-car entertainment and this excitement will bleed into other areas. On the commercial side, more manufacturers will embed sensors in their products and connect them to the Internet to monitor their performance and offer pro-active maintenance services. As a result, engineers who know how to incorporate software and networking into their mechanical designs will become more in demand.
Cloud-Based Healthcare By @HarbingerSys | @CloudExpo [#Cloud]
Over the last few years the healthcare ecosystem has revolved around innovations in Electronic Health Record (HER) based systems. This evolution has helped us achieve much desired interoperability. Now the focus is shifting to other equally important aspects – scalability and performance. While applying cloud computing environments to the EHR systems, a special consideration needs to be given to the cloud enablement of Veterans Health Information Systems and Technology Architecture (VistA), i.e., the largest single medical system in the United States.
VistA is a collection of over 168 application packages/modules and is based on the client-server communication model operating on RPC broker. Moving VistA to a cloud platform is still in its infancy.
Tech News Recap for the Week of 12/1/2014
Were you busy last week? Here’s a quick tech news recap of articles you may have missed from the week of 12/1/2014.
Tech News Recap
Microsoft bough Acompli for $200M. The FBI warned US businesses of destructive malware. HP will provide Microsoft O365 business services and support. Bank of America’s Cathy Bessant won IT Chief of the Year. Bebe Stores confirmed a payment card security breach. Hawaii’s state government is prioritizing a cloud first strategy for any new IT project. Gartner’s Data Center Conference wrapped up, and there was a lot of good information that came out of it around cloud, open-source, and software-defined technologies.
- Gartner Data Center Conference Review: Success in the Cloud & Software Defined Technologies
- Microsoft Buys Email App Acompli for $200M, Will Still Support Gmail And Other Competitors
- FBI warns US businesses of ‘destructive’ malware
- HP to provide Microsoft Office 365 business services, support
- IT Chief of the Year: Bank Of America’s Cathy Bessant
- Fun Facts about Microsoft Azure
- BYOD is saving serious money for IT
- The Internet of Things to bring a new economic boom
- Amazon’s New Cloud Prices Show That Google Is Now a Threat
- Bebe Stores confirms payment card security breach
- Around the World With BYOD
- Hawaii’s state government prioritizes ‘cloud first’ for new IT projects
Looking for tips around moving a data center? Check out this new whitepaper from GreenPages’ CTO. By Ben Stephenson, Emerging Media Specialist