The market transition from education and evaluation to remediation is marching along as the End of Support (EOS) nears for Windows Server 2003. The market has moved from being unaware of the challenge that EOS would pose for most IT organizations at the beginning of 2014 to POCs, trials, and evaluating how to get help with these projects by the end of 2014. You can get a sense of how the market has moved by reading the 2014 Windows Server 2003 End of Support Survey Results.

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SYS-CON Events announced today that Open Data Centers (ODC), a carrier-neutral colocation provider, will exhibit at SYS-CON’s 16th International Cloud Expo®, which will take place June 9-11, 2015, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY.
Open Data Centers is a carrier-neutral data center operator in New Jersey and New York City offering alternative connectivity options for carriers, service providers and enterprise customers.

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These are some the Key Release Management Metrics our clients use to continually tune their release management process.

1. Number of Changes pending future system releases (Backlog)

2. Number of Successful Changes within a Release

3. Number of Failed Changes in a Release (Percentage of Failed Changes)

4. Number of Outages Caused by a Release

5. Number of Incidents Caused by a Release

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Even as cloud and managed services grow increasingly central to business strategy and performance, challenges remain. The biggest sticking point for companies seeking to capitalize on the cloud is data security. Keeping data safe is an issue in any computing environment, and it has been a focus since the earliest days of the cloud revolution. Understandably so: a lot can go wrong when you allow valuable information to live outside the firewall. Recent revelations about government snooping, along with a steady stream of well-publicized data breaches, only add to the uncertainty

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Data-intensive companies that strive to gain insights from data using Big Data analytics tools can gain tremendous competitive advantage by deploying data-centric storage. Organizations generate large volumes of data, the vast majority of which is unstructured. As the volume and velocity of this unstructured data increases, the costs, risks and usability challenges associated with managing the unstructured data (regardless of file type, size or device) increases simultaneously, including end-to-end data risk protection, search, discovery and access.
In his session at Big Data Expo, Shahbaz Ali, President, CEO and Co-founder of Tarmin, will introduce new data-centric strategies that focus on the value of information as a strategic business enabler.

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One important differentiator between what passed for digital back in the dot-com days and today’s notion of digital is the role mobile plays. Yes, this company had a mobile site, and they had what the AVP claimed was a “mobile first” plan for their web content, but as yet they had yet to roll out any responsive design. In the final analysis, their digital effort up to this point boiled down to little more than better brochureware, a la 1990s web redesigns.

But more significantly, what was entirely missing from their digital achievements (although the AVP did indicate that it was a roadmap item) was pulling together their real-time platform or any of their other software-based products and combining them with the marketing effort that to date is the sum total of their digital effort.

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Network visibility and access to real-time data surrounding your infrastructure is pretty important, don’t you think? With Boundary, users can identify problems quickly, and ensure their applications and supporting infrastructure are running smoothly and at peak efficiency.

We are happy to announce that our integration with Boundary, providers of IT monitoring for DevOps teams, is now available. Getting the Boundary integration up and running is as easy as copying and pasting an API key, which can be found in your VictorOps admin interface. Just click on the Integrations tab and choose ‘Boundary’. You will then see an API token to provide to the Boundary UI. Piece of cake.

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We explore how retailer Columbia Sportswear has made great strides in improving their business results through modernized IT, and where they expect to go next with their software-defined strategy.
To learn more about the new wave of IT, we sat down with Suzan Pickett, Manager of Global Infrastructure Services at Columbia Sportswear in Portland, Oregon; Tim Melvin, Director of Global Technology Infrastructure at Columbia, and Carlos Tronco, Lead Systems Engineer at Columbia Sportswear. The discussion is moderated by me, Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions.

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A friend of mine’s son recently returned from an extended absence which basically removed him from nearly all aspects of technology, including the Internet, for a bit longer than 5 years. Upon return, observing him restore his awareness of technologies and absorb all things new developed over the past 5 years was both exciting and moving.

To be fair, the guy grew up in an Internet world, with access to online resources including Facebook, Twitter, and other social applications.
The interesting part of his re-introduction to the “wired” world was watching the comprehension flashes he went through when absorbing the much higher levels of application and data integration, and speed of network access.

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