While news about the malicious hacking trade and the actions of elusive cyber-criminals continue to grab headlines, the third of our annual Insider Threat reports confirm that the risk posed by those legitimately ‘inside the fence’ continues to top business data security concerns. Of course, there can be no denying that the breadth and depth of private and public sector breaches in the past few years that have resulted from trusted insiders turning rogue or being compromised by perpetrators of APTs and the like indicates that there is a major disconnect when it comes to organisations’ handling of data security – and, crucially, how they manage their privileged users.
Monthly Archives: January 2015
Updating WAS Applications In XL Deploy By @XebiaLabs | @CloudExpo [#Cloud]
Some users of WebSphere Application Server prefer to upgrade their EAR/WAR applications using WAS’s “update-in-place” option instead of uninstalling it and then re-installing.
The latter, of course, is XL Deploy’s default behavior, but it can be changed with a simple tweak to a type definition in an XML file.
Here is a look at how the WAS Admin Console presents these options:
The World of Hadoop and Beyond By @JnanDash | @CloudExpo [#BigData]
Hortonworks went through an IPO last Friday, December 12, 2014. It’s initial price of $16 soared by 60% immediately after. Today the stock price is $24.70 with a market cap of $1.02B. Another billion dollar club member. They compete with Cloudera and MapR in packaging the open source Hadoop platform for customers. How do they make money when the basic Apache Hadoop is free? – by offering added services like training and consulting. They can also add auxiliary products (not open source) that customers must pay for. The interesting fact is that Hortonworks’s CEO had claimed a $100m revenue this year, but looks like he is way short of that – $33m during first nine months. The future is quite uncertain!
Use Case: Spark Performance Monitoring By @MLnick | @BigDataExpo [#BigData]
At Graphflow, our mission is to empower online stores of all sizes to grow their businesses by providing them access to the same machine learning and Big Data tools used by the largest and most sophisticated tech players in the market.
To deliver on this mission, we decided from the very beginning to go ‘all in’ on Spark for our scalable analytics and machine learning applications. When Graphflow started using Spark, it was on version 0.7.0, and it was relatively immature. A lot has changed over the past year and a half: Spark has become a top-level Apache project, version 1.2.0 was released, and Spark has matured significantly in terms of functionality, deployment, stability, and operations.
Selecting a Cloud Vendor By @Connectria | @CloudExpo [#Cloud]
In today’s highly connected world, the benefits and widespread adoption of cloud computing are not just limited to enterprises and government agencies; its transformative impact has prompted changes to a variety of businesses across several verticals – both big and small. In fact, a recent study by Emergent Research, ‘Small Business Success in the Cloud,’ found that the percentage of U.S. small businesses using cloud computing is expected to grow by more than half, from 37 percent to nearly 80 percent, by the year 2020.
Deploy and Release with @SerenaSoftware | @DevOpsSummit [#DevOps]
“DevOps is really about the business. The business is under pressure today, competitively in the marketplace to respond to the expectations of the customer. The business is driving IT and the problem is that IT isn’t responding fast enough,” explained Mark Levy, Senior Product Marketing Manager at Serena Software, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at DevOps Summit, held Nov 4–6, 2014, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
The State of the ‘Internet of Things’ By @MadGreek65 | @ThingsExpo [#IoT]
IoT is still a vague buzzword for many people. In his session at @ThingsExpo, Mike Kavis, Vice President & Principal Cloud Architect at Cloud Technology Partners, discussed the business value of IoT that goes far beyond the general public’s perception that IoT is all about wearables and home consumer services.
He also discussed how IoT is perceived by investors and how venture capitalist access this space.
Other topics discussed were barriers to success, what is new, what is old, and what the future may hold.
Mike Kavis is Vice President & Principal Cloud Architect at Cloud Technology Partners. He has served in numerous technical roles such as CTO, Chief Architect, and VP positions with over 25 years of experience in software development and architecture. A pioneer in cloud computing, Mike led a team that built the world’s first high speed transaction network in Amazon’s public cloud and won the 2010 AWS Global Startup Challenge. An expert in cloud security, he is the author of “Architecting the Cloud: Design Decisions for Cloud Computing Service Models (IaaS, PaaS, SaaS)” from Wiley Publishing.
Customer Lifetime Value Is Key Metric By @AriaSystemsInc | @CloudExpo [#Cloud]
If your business had the choice between one million lifetime customers or two million one-time transaction customers, which would you choose? Selecting the former guarantees a recurring revenue stream for years while the latter only guarantees revenue for that individual transaction. Sounds like a no-brainer, right?
There are many factors that contribute to a successful recurring revenue cycle for your business, from product packaging and pricing to configuring existing systems and operations. There is one particular metric that is especially critical to understanding the success or failure of a recurring revenue program. So important, in fact, that more than 75% of North American senior executives say it is a highly or extremely valuable indicator of success.
Pain Management with @StackIQ | @DevOpsSummit [#DevOps]
“We help people build clusters, in the classical sense of the cluster. We help people put a full stack on top of every single one of those machines. We do the full bare metal install,” explained Greg Bruno, Vice President of Engineering and co-founder of StackIQ, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at 15th Cloud Expo, held Nov 4–6, 2014, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
Application Intelligence From @AppDynamics | @DevOpsSummit [#DevOps]
AppDynamics, the application intelligence leader for software-defined businesses, announced the general availability of the AppDynamics Fall ’14 Release.
Serving the combined needs of IT and business teams across the enterprise, the latest release provides a comprehensive view across all aspects of digital performance in ultra large scale deployments. AppDynamics delivers Application Intelligence by building out advanced capabilities across the key areas of analytics, unified monitoring and DevOps.
The Fall ’14 Release of the AppDynamics Application Intelligence platform introduces: powerful new DevOps collaboration capabilities in the ‘Virtual War Room’; AppDynamics Application Analytics, which capture operational and business events and metrics across entire application environments; support for additional integration platforms; a massively scalable data store; and integration of AppDynamics database monitoring into the main platform.