“Blue Box has been around for 10-11 years, and last year we launched Blue Box Cloud. We like the term ‘Private Cloud as a Service’ because we think that embodies what we are launching as a product – it’s a managed hosted private cloud,” explained Giles Frith, Vice President of Customer Operations at Blue Box, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at DevOps Summit, held Nov 4–6, 2014, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
Monthly Archives: May 2015
‘DevOps Skills Are in High Demand’ @PuppetLabs | @DevOpsSummit [#DevOps]
Puppet Labs on Wednesday released the DevOps Salary Report, based on salary data gathered from Puppet Labs’ industry-recognized State of DevOps Report. The data confirms that market demand for DevOps skills is growing, and that DevOps engineers are among the highest paid IT practitioners today. That’s because IT organizations today are grappling with how to be more agile and responsive to the business, while maintaining the stability of their infrastructure. DevOps practices, such as continuous delivery and strong cross-team collaboration, are proven to increase both agility and reliability: High-performing IT organizations are deploying code 30 times more frequently with 50 percent fewer failures. These results are driving accelerated adoption of DevOps practices and aggressive hiring of people with DevOps expertise.
Hybrid IT – What/Where/Why/How? By @CenturyLink | @CloudExpo [#Cloud]
Hybrid IT is an approach to delivering IT services that matches business requirements and application needs with different IT deployment modalities.
In their session at 16th Cloud Expo, Jeff Katzen, Director of the Cloud Practice at CenturyLink, and Gary Sloper, Area Vice President, Sales Engineering and Operations, at CenturyLink, will go into more depth around those different modalities and how customers have made decisions to choose between them.
They will talk to some of the challenges that organizations might face in leveraging a Hybrid IT environment, specifically with regard to cloud services and discuss different ways to solve those challenges. All the concepts introduced will be backed by real world customer implementation examples.
Taking Back Cloud Control By @tShawnMills | @CloudExpo [#Cloud]
With SaaS use rampant across organizations, how can IT departments track company data and maintain security? More and more departments are commissioning their own solutions and bypassing IT. A cloud environment is amorphous and powerful, allowing you to set up solutions for all of your user needs: document sharing and collaboration, mobile access, e-mail, even industry-specific applications.
In his session at 16th Cloud Expo, Shawn Mills, President and a founder of Green House Data, will discuss how to get users to stay in compliance with corporate guidelines and actually use the tools provided for them rather than turning to outside, unsanctioned resources and potentially putting security at risk.
When Will Google Move to Iceland? By @WayneLam888 | @CloudExpo [#Cloud]
As the Internet continues its rapid expansion, is it high time to move the world’s data centers to Iceland? A place that can offer 100% renewable energy at a fixed, long-term power cost.
At first glance it may seem an unusual proposition and difficult to imagine a Silicon Valley icon like Google moving/consolidating all their data centers to such a remote area. But it’s a move that may make the most strategic sense. In many ways, Iceland makes for an ideal location for the data centers of the future.
The first compelling argument is Iceland’s year-round cooler climate, which easily accommodates and dissipates the extreme heat generated by thousands of running servers. No need to run air-cooling systems at full blast during summer.
When Will Google Move to Iceland? By @WayneLam888 | @CloudExpo [#Cloud]
As the Internet continues its rapid expansion, is it high time to move the world’s data centers to Iceland? A place that can offer 100% renewable energy at a fixed, long-term power cost.
At first glance it may seem an unusual proposition and difficult to imagine a Silicon Valley icon like Google moving/consolidating all their data centers to such a remote area. But it’s a move that may make the most strategic sense. In many ways, Iceland makes for an ideal location for the data centers of the future.
The first compelling argument is Iceland’s year-round cooler climate, which easily accommodates and dissipates the extreme heat generated by thousands of running servers. No need to run air-cooling systems at full blast during summer.
Nearly half of Brits find wearables in the enterprise intrusive – study
How will wearables impact privacy in the enterprise?
A recently published study by UK mobile app developer Apadmi suggests UKers are deeply concerned about the privacy implications of wearable IP-connected technology in the workplace.
The study, which surveyed 500 adults living and working in the UK, found that 42 per cent of people in the UK thought that wearable technology posed a risk to their privacy, with only 18 per cent of respondents saying they didn’t feel it was a danger.
But there seemed to be a significant portion of respondents (40 per cent) that did not know whether wearable tech would pose a threat to their privacy.
“It’s obvious from our investigations that privacy is a very real issue for the wearable technology industry, although it’s by no means insurmountable,” said Nick Black, co-founder and director at Apadmi
“A lot of commentators are flagging up the potential privacy implications of devices that can record and relay so much data about an individual. And consumers appear to be taking note, with quite a few admitting that these concerns weigh on their mind when considering whether or not to buy wearable technology.”
Wearables have started to gain favour with some larger enterprises in the US and UK, particularly when it comes to tracking health and fitness. Some private health insurers for instance monitor fitness data as a way to incentivise fitness activity, which reduces the risk of health issues and can lead to lower premiums.
But opinion on the privacy implications of mandating wearables in the workplace seems to be quite strong. When asked how they would feel if their employer required them to use wearable technology as part of their role 25 per cent of respondents said they would consider changing jobs, and a further 24 per cent replied they would be happy to do this.
“We also need to draw attention to the fact that a huge number of people still don’t have a firm grasp of how wearable technology might impact upon privacy in the first place, as demonstrated by the significant number of ‘don’t know’ respondents in our survey. People are naturally apprehensive about what they don’t understand. But it’s interesting that those who go on to purchase a device are overwhelmingly happy with their decision and the benefits it has brought to their lives,” Black explained.
“With this in mind, wearable tech businesses and app developers need to educate prospective customers around privacy concerns to alleviate these fears. Many people still don’t fully understand the privacy issues around wearable technology or appreciate its potential to dramatically improve lives in areas such as health and social care.”
Despite the potential privacy implications many believe use of wearables in the enterprise will rapidly increase over the next few years. Salesforce for instance claims use of wearables in the enterprise will more than triple in the next two years, with smartwatches emerging as a popular candidate to deliver sales and customer service improvements.
The company’s own survey of over 1,400 working adults shows 79 per cent of adopters agree wearables will be strategic to their company’s future success; 76 per cent report improvements in business performance since deploying wearables in the enterprise; and 86 per cent of adopters’ organisations plan to increase their wearables spend over the next 12 months.
Cloud adoption nudges past 80 per cent in the UK – survey
Cloud adoption is on the rise in the UK
A recent survey of over 250 UK-based senior IT decision makers shows around 84 per cent are using cloud services, with at least 70 per cent of those organisations already using cloud expecting their adoption to increase over the next 12 months.
The survey, commissioned by UK cloud trade body the Cloud Industry Forum (CIF), suggests cloud services have grown substantially in popularity over the past couple of years, with adoption growing 8 per cent over the past year and 75 per cent since 2010.
“Cloud computing has come a long way in just a few short years. When we commissioned our first major research project into the UK Cloud market in 2010, just 48 per cent of organisations had consciously adopted a cloud service,” said Alex Hilton, chief executive officer of the CIF.
“During this time, cloud has moved from the edge of the IT estate to its centre, and it is now largely regarded as just another way that we do IT. Importantly, it is, by and large, delivering the benefits the industry promised it would deliver,” he said.
The organisation believes the impending conclusion of official support for Windows Server 2003 will accelerate cloud adoption over the next year. But Hilton says that many are still a long way off from adopting all-cloud strategies, in part because of legacy.
“Although more organisations than ever are committing to a 100 per cent cloud environment, the vast majority are a long way from migrating their entire IT estates; just 15 per cent consider their primary IT model to now be cloud, and around half of businesses cannot foresee a time when they will move all of their IT to the cloud – instead managing a blend of IT delivery models.”
Some believe cloud adoption is largely being driven outside the IT department. According to Tim Jennings, chief IT analyst at Ovum, cloud often makes its entrance into organisations behind the back of IT.
“It’s less about cost savings and cloud enabling IT at the centre, and more about cloud enabling business processes,” said Jennings, who was speaking at the Ovum Industry Congress in London this week. “This change is firmly in place, and nowhere is this more prevalent than line of business uptake of software-as-a-service.”
“For IT then, the challenge comes back to the ‘Shadow IT’ dilemma – or how to offer a consolidated, continuous, secure set of services,” he added.
IBM bolsters Bluemix with added services, Cloud Foundry Dojos
IBM is bolstering its Bluemix and Cloud Foundry initiatives
IBM has signed up a number of partners for its Bluemix platform that will see the company bolster the platform-as-a-service with and its Cloud Foundry efforts by establishing developer meeting spaces.
The company announced a public beta of a .NET runtime, which will enable Cloud Foundry developers to use Microsoft’s development technologies and develop .NET apps.
ThinkData Works’ data catalogue Namara.io, application KPI service Cupenya Insights, event processing service flowthings.io and push service Reappt were also added to Bluemix catalogue, as well as some new internally developed mobile and API management capabilities.
IBM also said it is supporting the expansion of Cloud Foundry Dojos, physical developer spaces designed to host developers looking to leverage the open source platform-as-a-service. The company said it will establish its first of a number of independent Cloud Foundry Dojos in Raleigh, North Carolina, in a bid to boost the number of – and mentor –Bluemix developers.
Having poured billions of dollars into cloud and PaaS, it’s clear IBM has high hopes for Bluemix. The company is putting Bluemix at the core of its Internet of Things strategy – it recently announced plans to carve out a section in Bluemix for specialist IoT services (IoT Zone) and a number of new IoT-focused cloud services available on the platform.
IBM claims Bluemix is the largest deployment of Cloud Foundry in the market today, though it hasn’t really clarified what “largest” means in this context; it’s equally unclear how Bluemix deployments compare with Pivotal CF and HP Helion among other commercial Cloud Foundry distributions.
Meeras, Alibaba form JV to target big data, cloud
Meeras and Alibaba are setting up an IT joint venture in Dubai
Dubai-based investment company Meeras and Alibaba’s cloud computing plant to set up a joint venture firm specialising in systems integration with a focus on big data and cloud-based services.
The yet-to-be named joint venture, headquartered in Dubai, will focus on providing applications development services to private and public sector clients, which includes advising on service oriented architecture strategy and big data analytics application.
Meeras group chairman Abdulla Al Habbai said the move will complement other initiatives aimed at transforming Dubai into a smart city and ICT hub.
“We strongly believe that the new company will alter the information technology landscape of the region,” Al Habbai said. “Alibaba, our chosen partner has an excellent global track record of offering world-class services to clients. Together, we aim to raise industry standards and provide state-of-the-art technology solutions that contribute to translating the objectives of our visionary leadership.”
The joint venture will also see the construction of a local Tier III cloud datacentre to power some of the services the two companies create, as well as at a later point commercial and retail space in the vicinity, in a bid to attract startups and other firms to the region.
Jack Ma, founder and executive chairman of Alibaba Group said: “As the world evolves, I believe the information technology era is moving towards the data technology era. Dubai’s advanced infrastructure and economic strength is a good match for our technology edge, and with Meraas we will be able to provide local entrepreneurs with the vital infrastructure that will ignite innovation and help them to succeed.”
Alibaba said the move will also help the company capitalise on growth in local IT spending, with the company citing a recent IDC study that suggests regional IT spend reaching $270bn in 2015 and growing at around nine per cent annually, the second-fastest globally.