15th Cloud Expo, which took place Nov. 4-6, 2014, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA, expanded the conference content of @ThingsExpo, Big Data Expo, and DevOps Summit to include two developer events.
IBM held a Bluemix Developer Playground on November 5 and ElasticBox held a Hackathon on November 6. Both events took place on the expo floor.
The Bluemix Developer Playground, for developers of all levels, highlighted the ease of use of Bluemix, its services and functionality and provide short-term introductory projects that developers can complete between sessions.

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The move in recent years to cloud computing services and architectures has added significant pace to the application development and deployment environment. When enterprise IT can spin up large computing instances in just minutes, developers can also design and deploy in small time frames that were unimaginable a few years ago. The consequent move toward lean, agile, and fast development leads to the need for the development and operations sides to work very closely together. Thus, DevOps becomes essential for any ambitious enterprise today.

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Our last post defined customer lifetime value (CLV) as the metric critical in measuring the success or failure of a recurring revenue program. In order for your company to routinely return significant revenue, maximizing CLV needs to be at the top of your priority list. A CLV-supported strategy boosts many aspects of your business, from sales to customer service. When it comes to increasing customer retention and customer satisfaction, the two keys to driving long-term results, this same strategy works to increase both at every available opportunity.

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Having been ranked as one of the top cloud providers for uptime, new figures show Amazon Web Services (AWS) having a 41% reduction in performance issues quarter to quarter during 2014.

The figures, from CloudEndure, see AWS with 127 errors during Q114, a greater number than the following three quarters combined, with 43 in Q2, 37 in Q3, and 26 in Q4.

AWS EC2 was the most frequent faller in 2014, with 46 errors, compared to scalable DNS provider Route 53 (24), network monitoring service CloudWatch (20) and content delivery network CloudFront (20).

These numbers tie in nicely with CloudHarmony’s one year metrics released earlier in January. These numbers just recorded outages instead of errors, and found CloudFront and Route 53 with a clean bill of health, while EC2 had 12 outages over nine regions at an SLA of 99.9973%.

Picture credit: CloudEndure

By region, AWS’ data centres in North Virginia were hit hardest, with 64 errors in 2014, compared with 28 in Oregon and Sao Paolo, and 20 in Ireland. With new data centre regions springing up everywhere – most notably Frankfurt in October last year – 2015’s figures will certainly be interesting.

Ofir Ehrlich, co-founder at CloudEndure, notes the majority of these errors shouldn’t be a problem if your applications are architected correctly – such as running apps simultaneously in multiple regions, so if one does fall over then there is no impact.

In January the company looked at Microsoft’s 2014 figures and found significantly more Azure service interruptions in the final three quarters, with 28 in Q2. Survey data from Synergy in October saw Microsoft overtake the competition for second place in cloud infrastructure services. AWS, meanwhile, remains the standout performer in the cloud infrastructure space, while research from Skyhigh Networks showed how Amazon remains the most popular enterprise cloud service.

Read the full blog here.

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Let’s be clear: you need to store all that data somewhere. Hard drives were your only resort a few decades ago. Today, cloud is the new frontier on the data storage land, brimming with features.

So you’ve got data stored somewhere on cloud servers – your photos on Facebook, conversations in Skype, and projects in Asana – but what happens if one of these services take a knock and your data gets wiped?

Here’s the kicker: the cloud has many benefits (affordable prices, access to massive storage, remote accessibility), but it’s not 100% foolproof. Even if you trust the most reliable cloud services with your data, things can go awry at any point and a crash/failure may permanently destroy some data.

Why is data not safe in the cloud?

Cloud data storage has worked well for long, so it’s natural to assume that everything is safe, particularly because the transfer and backup process is transparent and automatic. However, cloud data is vulnerable to the same threats as the internet as a whole. Here’s a run-down of some of those threats:

Cyber-attacks: At any time you store information in the cloud, you are at a risk for a data breach. This storage format is of particular interest to cyber criminals as large volumes of data is stored by companies and consumers on cloud servers. An attack like distributed-denial-of-service can disrupt the composition of all this data. Codespaces had to close down its business due to data loss, which was a result of the DDoS attack on its cloud storage server.

Password hacks: Mat Honan, a tech writer, lost one single password to a hack, but because his accounts were kept under the same cloud storage service (referred to as daisy-chained), the hacker was able to get into his email account using remote access and wipe all the data on his MacBook, iPhone and iPad. Everything from important documents to family photos was gone forever. The takeaway? Besides software and hardware failure, even user error with the cloud can contribute to data loss.

Server crash/failure/outage: Amazon’s EC2 cloud services crash destroyed some data on a permanent basis. While the data loss was small compared to the total data stored, it was catastrophic for some companies. Chartbeat, one of Amazon’s customers, had to inform its clients that 11 hours of historical data was deleted permanently.

Can you do something to prevent cloud data loss?

While most of the threats to cloud computing are unpredictable (and some are unpreventable), users can take steps to mitigate the loss. Here are some measures you can take when signing up for a cloud storage service:    

1.  Create unique passwords for accounts

Check the passwords you use for your accounts. Are you using the same password for different services? If you answered yes, you may be setting yourself up for data loss. Instead, use a password manager and set up different passwords for different accounts.  Password management services like LastPass and RoboForm can help you generate hard-to-guess passwords and save them on devices you frequently use to access cloud storage services. However, you will need to protect your devices as physical theft may lead to password compromise.

2.   Activate two-factor authentication

Two-factor authentication may not be foolproof, but it’s an important step in securing the data stored in your accounts from threats like cyber attacks. So make sure you’ll be notified if a cyber criminal tries to manipulate your password, and if there were security questions involved in setting up a password, make sure to select obscure questions. Services like Twitter, Facebook, Google, Rackspace, WordPress (plugin required) and Amazon offer two-factor authentication to their customers.

3.  Review connected accounts

Review connected accounts with access to your cloud data. In Box and Microsoft services, for example, you can review your connected accounts under the settings menu. If there are connected accounts that you discontinued, remove them. You don’t want an account that you no longer use become the gateway for hackers to access your active account. Keep lists clean on cloud storage services and social media networks.

4.  Use an encrypted service provider

In case of highly sensitive information, it’s important to encrypt the data with a program like Boxcryptor before storing it in the cloud. Another thing you can do is select a cloud service provider that offers local decryption and encryption of your data in addition to backup and storage. It removes the need of using a data encryption program and reduces the possibility that server administrators or service providers will have access to your data (also referred to as zero-knowledge privacy).

5.  Backup to other sources

Don’t store everything in the cloud if you want to give yourself a good chance to restore data when failures and outages occur. Back up your mission critical information to a local server; while this may sound cumbersome to do, there are many applications with data export settings to make the process seamless. You can also create a few copies on external hard drives to avoid permanent data loss.

6.  Review the terms of service agreements

While terms of service agreements may appear as a burden to go through, they often include important considerations pertaining to privacy and security policies. If anything gives you a pause, ask the service provider or the customer support department what a given clause implies, or use a search engine to read opinions of others. If your cloud provider is known to update its terms and policies frequently, ask the company to notify you of the change.

These steps will minimise the chances of cloud data loss. Additionally, if there’s anything you’d hate to part with, or anything you’re worried an overzealous service provider may snoop your account over, take it off the cloud and store it on your local server.

For consumers and businesses using or considering migrating data to cloud storage, all you can do is be prepared at your best. Apart from following the tips mentioned above, get to know service providers as much as you can.

Enterprise Initiatives Episode: Our guest on the podcast this week is John Willis, Founder and VP of Customer Enablement at SocketPlane. We discuss the effort needed to implement a grassroots DevOps initiative.

Listen in to find out how to gain the essential support of leaders for your project. (Make sure you have both headphones in to hear the full audio of this episode.)

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I’ve spent the past few years looking at clouds on the ground and in the air. On the ground, I’m immersed in OpenStack’s global innovation and momentum. Doing so involves lots of time in the air, looking at literal clouds as I fly around the world talking with OpenStack developers, community members and users.
Yet most of my conversations don’t reside in the clouds. They reside squarely in reality, as users want clear answers on how OpenStack-based solutions can help with their everyday challenges. I’m fortunate to spend my time talking about the critical issues that matter, which often differs from the political, technical and governance issues we read about more frequently.

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The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation recently identified four keys areas in which to focus for the next 15 years: Health, Farming, Banking, and Education. Bill himself holds forth on a regular basis about the challenges facing many billions of people in the world, particularly in Africa, as well as the opportunities to save lives and change lives.

He does not seem naïve about the enormity of the challenges, and does not offer technology as a simple panacea to what ails the world. He also seems committed to respecting national sovereignty in implementing programs, difficult as that may be sometimes. And he seems to understand very clearly that even the vast wealth of his and his wife’s foundation and its allies cannot hope to achieve signficant results on its own.

I would add Energy, Transportation, and Government to Bill’s and Melinda’s list–aware that the Foundation supports these areas and many others as well. In our efforts at the Tau Institute, we then focus on how the Internet of Things will play a role in these areas as well as societal improvement and transformation overall. We’ve also chosen a 25-year timeframe, an thus use the term IoT 2040 to describe our activities.

Our program includes research, events, consulting, and technical education. We have four overriding goals:

1. To spur beneficial economic development in all corners of the world
2. To reduce poverty & disease
3. To curtail violence as a way of settling disputes
4. To produce political and societal leaders who will maintain progress

We think a good way to measure progress is through the research we’ve been conducting for the past few years, which creates relative,”pound-for-pound” rankings that show how well nations are doing with respect to their available resources.

Our rankings reflect a lot of time spent, by me and by our associates and advisors, living in the various corners of the world. We integrate several technology and social factors into our algorithms — on the one hand including average bandwidth, access to broadband, number of dataservers, on the other hand including income disparity, perception of corruption, human development, and the local cost of living.

The most dynamic countries should correlate well over time with those most quickly growing their economies in an equitable way.

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