There are 182 billion emails sent every day, generating a lot of data about how recipients and ISPs respond. Many marketers take a more-is-better approach to stats, preferring to have the ability to slice and dice their email lists based numerous arbitrary stats. However, fundamentally what really matters is whether or not sending an email to a particular recipient will generate value. Data Scientists can design high-level insights such as engagement prediction models and content clusters that allow marketers to cut through the noise and design their campaigns around strong, predictive signals, rather than arbitrary statistics.
Monthly Archives: December 2014
Monetize the Cloud with @Solgenia_Corp | @CloudExpo [#Cloud]
“In our world there’s a lot of cloud. Our focus is to help companies, who are bogged down by the enormousness of the cloud and infrastructure, to really go out there and monetize the cloud,” explained Ian Khan, Global Strategic Positioning & Brand Manager at Solgenia, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at Cloud Expo, held Nov 4–6, 2014, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
Cloud Security Stats & Facts Affecting IT Directors By @GiladPN [#Cloud]
Cloud computing is your future operational platform, (virtual) data center, and application platform – all rolled into one concept from multiple vendors. The following are 25 recent statistics about the current and future state of the cloud that will help you understand the breadth of the cloud and the benefits it can bring to your organization and your career.
Seventy-five percent of IT decision makers, cloud vendors, and business users used the cloud in some way in 2013, compared to 67% the previous year, according to the Future of Cloud Computing Survey.
‘Enterprise Cloud Migration’ By @Verizon | @CloudExpo [#Cloud] @VZCloud
Once the decision has been made to move part or all of a workload to the cloud, a methodology for selecting that workload needs to be established. How do you move to the cloud?
What does the discovery, assessment and planning look like? What workloads make sense?
Which cloud model makes sense for each workload? What are the considerations for how to select the right cloud model? And how does that fit in with the overall IT transformation?
IBM announces deal with WPP, taps into greater big data and analytics
Picture credit: iStockPhoto
IBM has announced that communications services group WPP has extended its partnership with the tech giant, providing a service delivery and technology platform to run WPP’s operations in the cloud for $1.25bn (£797m).
The current agreement will last for seven years, with WPP able to expand the use of big data and analytics and deploy new products and services through Big Blue.
“As the world’s largest communications group, we are seeking to exploit IBM’s cloud computing expertise to allow us to innovate and add value to both the service and the product we deliver to clients across 111 countries,” said WPP Group CIO Robin Dargue.
This isn’t the only deal coming from Armonk towers in recent months, with multi-billion dollar deals agreed between IBM and ABN Amro, a Dutch bank, as well as German airline firm Lufthansa. And according to reports, this won’t be the last announcement either.
IBM’s push towards becoming the leader in cloud computing has been aggressive for the past 12 months, having shoved $1bn (£638m) of investments into that space to rebrand as a cloud-first company back in March. A lot of big legacy tech firms have been moving this way as well – SAP, Oracle, Microsoft – with similar results in struggling financials and job cuts.
The firm’s Q3 numbers showed revenue down 4%, operating net income down 18%, yet cloud revenue was up more than 50%. They’re numbers which make analysts and investors worry, but it’s to be expected when moving your revenues to cloud-based ones rather than legacy software.
Globalfoundries recently picked up IBM’s chipmaking division, at a cost of $1.5bn to Big Blue, as a clear sign of where IBM CEO Ginni Rometty wants to move the company. As she explained on the analyst call: “The strategy’s correct, and now it’s our speed of execution that needs to continue to improve.”
IBM has also made strides to partner up with its perceived competition in recent months, announcing an agreement with SAP to help run its HANA Enterprise Cloud. The two companies, even though they’re enemies in the cloud vendor war, have partnered for more than 40 years. It’s certainly a trend – take Microsoft’s recent buddying up with Dropbox, even though Redmond has its own storage product in OneDrive.
Fun Facts about Microsoft Azure
Looking for some helpful facts about Microsoft Azure? For those out there that may be confused about the Microsoft Azure solutions offered to date, here is the first in a series of posts about the cool new features of the Microsoft premium cloud offering, Azure.
Azure Backup, ok… wait, what? I need to do backup in the cloud? No one told me that!
Facts about Microsoft Azure
Yes Virginia, you need to have a backup solution in the cloud. To keep this high level below I attempted to outline what the Azure backup offering really is. There are several protections built into the Azure platform that help customers protect their data as well as options to recover from a failure.
In a normal, on premise scenario, host based hardware and networking failures are protected at the hypervisor level. In Azure you do not see this because control of the hypervisor has been removed. Azure, however, is designed to be highly available meeting and exceeding the posted SLAs associated with the service
Hardware failures of storage are also protected against within Azure. At the lowest end you have Local Redundant storage where they maintain 3 copies of your data within a region. The more common and industry preferred method is Geo-Redundant storage which keeps 3 copies in you’re region and 3 additional copies in another datacenter, somewhere geographically dispersed based on a complex algorithm. The above protections help to insure survivability of your workloads.
Important to note: The copies in the second datacenter are crash consistent copies so it should not be considered a backup of the data but more of a recovery mechanism for a disaster.
Did I hear you just ask about Recovery Services in Azure? Why yes, we have two to talk about today.
- Azure Backup
- Azure Site Recovery
Azure Site Recovery – This scenario both orchestrates site recovery as well as provides a destination for virtual machines. Microsoft currently supports Hyper-V to Azure, Hyper-V to Hyper-V or VMware to VMware recovery scenarios with this method.
Azure Backup is a destination for your backups. Microsoft offers traditional agents for Windows Backup and the preferred platform, Microsoft System Center 2012 – Data Protection Manager. Keeping the data in the cloud, Azure holds up to 120 copies of the data and can be restored as needed. At this time the Azure Windows backup version only protects files. It will not do Full System or Bare Metal backups of Azure VMs.
As of this blog post to get a traditional full system backup there is a recommend two-step process where you use Windows Backup which can capture a System State backup and the enable Azure Backup to capture this into your Azure Backup Vault.
There are 2 other methods that exist but currently the jury is out on the validity of these offerings. They are VM Capture and Blob Snapshot.
- VM capture – which is equivalent to a VM snapshot
- Blob Snapshot – This is equivalent to a LUN snapshot
As I said these are options but considered by many too immature at this time and respectfully not widely adopted. Hopefully, this provides some clarity around Azure and as with all things Microsoft Cloud related, Microsoft issues new features almost daily now. Check back again for more updates on what Azure can do for your organization!
By David Barter, Practice Manager, Microsoft Technologies
Deploy Private Cloud in 15 Minutes Or Less By @Appcore & @Citrix | @CloudExpo [#Cloud]
What are the benefits of using an enterprise-grade orchestration platform?
In their session at 15th Cloud Expo, Nate Gordon, Director of Technology at Appcore, and Kedar Poduri, Senior Director of Product Management at Citrix Systems, took a closer look at the architectural design factors needed to support diverse workloads and how to run these workloads efficiently as a service provider. They also discussed how to deploy private cloud environments in 15 minutes or less.
Announcing @VictorOps Releases Inaugural State of On-Call Report [#DevOps]
According to research from VictorOps, DevOps is a growing trend from enterprise IT to SaaS solution providers. Additionally, the primary research shows that collaboration is essential as IT teams work toward faster time to resolution. Systems have grown too complex to continue limiting problem solving to just a few people in the IT organization, and collaboration using both mobile and desktop technology is a key component of success.
In the inaugural VictorOps State of On-Call Report released today, VictorOps surveyed 500 IT professionals to look at the challenges and general state of what it means to be on-call. The report examines everything from what teams are doing to decrease mean time to resolution (MTTR) to the prevalence of alert fatigue and the use of monitoring, automation and incident lifecycle management tools.
Why You Need a BYOD Plan, Now! | @CloudExpo [#Cloud]
Though the problems seem daunting, the trend toward BYOD adoption doesn’t appear to be slowing. Many organizations see the drawbacks of BYOD but determine that the benefits are worth the extra risks. As long as companies practice common sense security policies such as app restrictions, data encryption on devices, and enforcement of BYOD rules, any damage caused by security incidents should be minimal. At all times, companies need to be vigilant and prepared for whatever may happen, while still enjoying the advantages from BYOD.
Product Review: Cyberoam CR10iNG By @GretenDave [#Cloud]
Data security has long been thought the exclusive domain of large enterprises. Why would cyber-criminals bother with small and midsized companies when the big prizes are to be found hacking into large organizations?
Unfortunately an increasing number of smaller companies find themselves at risk of infiltration, antivirus corruption, and data theft. Hackers are catching on that smaller offices are a softer target. Security in these organizations is generally looser as they often lack the financial resources for a comprehensive security system.