Search-Enabled Applications are a new breed of applications that utilize a search index as their backbone for data retrieval. These applications can easily adapt to new data sets and provide access to both structured and unstructured data. They also provide faster data retrieval, are context-aware and enable access to all different types of data, which result in an extremely productive end-user experience.
In his session at 16th Cloud Expo, Sushil Prabhu is the CEO of OpenCrowd, will discuss a wide variety of use cases ranging from database offloading to enterprise search, to business applications like compliance and how 360-degree view customer dashboards can be implemented using this new architecture.
Monthly Archives: May 2015
Cyber Threats Are Still Flourishing | @CloudExpo [#Cloud]
Our new assessment offering stems from our direct client experience and from critical data points garnered from our upcoming 2015 Global Threat Intelligence Report, which will be available next month (May 2015). The report, which was commissioned by our parent company NTT, found that the state of security systems at a wide range of large enterprise organizations still have relatively low levels of maturity – many of which have spent millions of dollars on security technologies. The report analyzed millions of logs, including six billion attacks across 18,000 global clients. This really gave us a comprehensive view of the current state of security within enterprises and also gave us the insights needed to provide clients with the right path forward. To give a little context, some of the statistics in the report showed that 76 percent of the vulnerabilities identified in client systems in 2014 were more than two years old, and almost 9 percent of those were more than 10 years old! Think about just those few points and it is not surprising that cyber threats are still flourishing.
Storage for Docker Containers By @ABrongersma | @CloudExpo [#Cloud]
Learn how to solve the problem of keeping files in sync between multiple Docker containers.
In his session at 16th Cloud Expo, Aaron Brongersma, Senior Infrastructure Engineer at Modulus, will discuss using rsync, GlusterFS, EBS and Bit Torrent Sync. He’ll break down the tools that are needed to help create a seamless user experience.
In the end, can we have an environment where we can easily move Docker containers, servers, and volumes without impacting our applications? He will share his results. You can decide for yourself.
Managing hybrid clouds: What team do IT leaders need?
(c)iStock.com/Erik Khalitov
As most enterprise IT leaders know, transitioning IT staff to a cloud-based service delivery model is often more challenging than transitioning the infrastructure itself.
A collaborative, vertically-oriented IT organisational structure is crucial to the success of any cloud infrastructure, and yet the advice enterprises receive—usually some variation of “break down silos”—is not especially useful in an organisation with hundreds or even thousands of IT employees. A highly functional IT structure is even more difficult to achieve when the enterprise has a mix of public, private, and on-premises environments.
The vast majority of enterprises now manage hybrid clouds, and 74% of enterprises will deploy 10% to 60% of their business applications on a public IaaS platform in three years. In order for IT leaders to gain visibility across all environments and monitor, optimise, and audit all tiers of hundreds of applications, hybrid cloud environment must be managed by high-performing cross-functional teams, monitoring dashboards, and clearly defined roles and responsibilities.
Unfortunately, 59% of enterprises believe they lack the operational workflows to manage security in a cloud environment, and 79% believe they need better visibility across on-premises and cloud-based environments, according to a recent study. The question is, how? What team can adequately manage a hybrid cloud, with which processes?
A greater breadth of experience and flexibility is required of each IT employee than ever before, yet the progress of implementing the latest deployment and integration best practices is often slow. It is also challenging to find staff that understands the challenges of both traditional IT and cloud computing and can implement and monitor security and deployment strategy across both. This is why enterprises usually hire a managed service provider (MSP).
Unfortunately, enterprises all too often make the mistake of hiring a provider that specialises only in public cloud deployments, also called a “born in the cloud” provider. Because the enterprise has in-house expertise in on-premises or private cloud infrastructure, they are attracted to companies who promise exclusive expertise in the public cloud.
This type of MSP is usually best equipped to deal with new applications and greenfield deployments, and as a result will frequently stay far away from an enterprise’s legacy applications and traditional IT staff. They will often perform a cursory audit of the application, and may deploy the application in a public cloud without understanding the application’s weaknesses, which tiers/features cannot be replaced by cloud platform’s resources, and the roles of the engineers that maintain that application.
This is a crucial function for enterprises. Some enterprises supplement their managed cloud service provider with a consultant, but with hundreds or thousands of legacy applications, hiring consultants to perform this work on a near-constant basis is cost-prohibitive. Overall, trusting legacy applications to a cloud-only team may result in higher costs for hosting that is not even as secure or highly available as on-premises hosting, not through the fault of the cloud platform itself but due to mismanagement.
At a time when the vast majority of enterprises will implement a combination of on-premises, private, and public cloud environments, they need a partner that understands all three. They need an MSP who can deploy greenfield public cloud environments in a relatively short span of time, but also has experience in traditional enterprise hosting in order to understand legacy applications and communicate in the same language with their not-yet-cloud-ready internal teams. Enterprises no longer need to manage both traditional hosting partners and cloud partners, but can maintain a single MSP for both private and public deployments.
This allows enterprises to maintain a single relationship, a single contract, SOW and SLA, and a single “throat to choke”. This level of organisational simplicity makes it possible to move applications between public/private clouds with the same vendor. This dramatically reduces organisational friction by reusing a team that has already integrated with the internal team. As an added benefit, traditional IT staff and cloud engineering staff both connect with a single external team of DevOps experts, enabling the further spread of a single set of best practices throughout the organisation.
A cloud MSP with traditional IT knowledge can often communicate more effectively with your internal IT teams in “translating” cloud resources, which makes it possible for the MSP to integrate with, coach, and educate the internal team about cloud best practices. They will often recommend and document the enterprise’s deployment processes and use tools like Jenkins and Puppet to allow developers and cloud engineers to work together more seamlessly. In this way, they function as DevOps implementers and internal change-makers, not mere consultants who usually must be hired multiple times because internal divisions, heavyweight processes, and poor deployment strategies are gradually reinstated after they leave. Unlike consultants, managed service providers are incentivised to educate and change internal IT staff’s processes – because it makes their lives easier.
In addition, not every application tier is immediately suitable for the public cloud. There are many legacy systems – like Oracle RAC, for example – that have no replacement in a cloud platform like AWS. There may also be business reasons why it is not advisable to move all tiers of an application, such as when significant capital has been invested in custom database or virtualisation systems. An MSP that understands both traditional IT and cloud infrastructure will not only be able to better audit and advise enterprises on this score, but may even be able to transport that physical hardware to their own data centre so that the enterprise can get all the benefits of outsourced management while maintaining colocation between their database tier and other tiers hosted on the public cloud. The cost savings and agility benefits of such a configuration can be significant.
From a technical perspective, this scenario also enables enterprises to employ a single monitoring interface that spans both environments. Often third party security and monitoring tools like EM7 or Alert Logic are employed, each of which provide tools for both private and public cloud deployments. This monitoring interface is a crucial component of any true DevOps team, and often acts as a single source of truth when something does not go as planned. Dashboards help reduce finger-pointing when the “blame” is clear, and both the internal IT team and the MSP can focus instead on implementing a solution. This will also allow internal teams to see what is beneath the covers.
While it may be attractive in the short-term for large enterprises to hire cloud consultants or cloud-only MSPs, these are often stop-gap solutions. They fix current issues and support new lines of business, but require additional time and expense to manage legacy applications, educate internal IT teams, and monitor across both environment. Hybrid deployments require teams that understand where an enterprise is right now – on its way to a more agile, customer-driven model, but needing some help to get there.
The post Managing Hybrid Clouds: What Team Do IT Leaders Need? appeared first on Gathering Clouds.
The channel must embrace cloud to build for the future
The channel needs to embrace cloud services in order to succeed in IT today
With cloud acceptance growing, more and more businesses are dipping their toes in the water and trying out cloud based services and applications in a bid to work smarter and lower IT expenditure. But with recent research suggesting that four in ten ICT decision-makers feel their deployment fails to live up to the hype – more needs to be done to ensure cloud migration is a success.
This is where the channel has a vital role to play and can bridge the knowledge gap and help end-users reap the benefits that cloud technology can provide.
With the cloud becoming a mainstream solution for businesses and an integral part of an organisation’s IT strategy, the channel is presented with a huge opportunity. Offering cloud services to the market has the potential to yield high revenues, so it’s vital that the channel takes a realistic approach to adopting cloud within its portfolio, and becomes a trusted advisor to the end user.
We have identified three key reasons why resellers shy away from broadening their offering to encompass cloud for new and existing customers. A common barrier is a simple lack of understanding of the cloud and its benefits. However, if a business is keen to adopt this technology, it is vital that its reseller is able to offer advice and guidance to prevent them looking elsewhere.
Research by Opal back in 2010 found that 40 per cent of resellers admit a sense of ‘fear and confusion’ around cloud computing, with the apprehension to embrace the technology also extending to end users, with 57 per cent reporting uncertainty among their customer bases. This lack of education means they are missing out on huge opportunities for their business. A collaborative approach between the reseller and cloud vendor will help to ensure a seamless knowledge transfer followed by successful partnership and delivery.
The sheer upheaval caused by offering the cloud will see some resellers needing to re-evaluate their own business models and strategies to fulfil the need. Those that are unaccustomed to a service-oriented business model may find that becoming a cloud reseller presents strategic challenges as they rely on out-dated business plans and models that don’t enable this new technology. However, failing to evolve business models could leave resellers behind in the adoption curve, whilst their competitors are getting ahead. Working with an already established partner will help resellers re-evaluate their existing business plans to ensure they can offer cloud solutions to their customers.
Resellers are finding it challenging to provide their customers with quick, scalable cloud solutions due to the fact that moving existing technology services into cloud services can be time consuming, and staff will be focused on working to integrate these within the enterprise. However, this issue can easily be resolved by choosing a trusted cloud provider, and in turn building a successful partnership.
Although resellers will come across barriers when looking at providing their customers with cloud services, these shouldn’t get in the way of progression. In order to enter a successful partnership with a cloud provider, there are some important factors resellers should consider before taking the plunge.
Scalability
Before choosing a prospective partner, resellers need to ensure it has the scalability and technology innovation to provide a simple integration of current IT services into the cloud. Recent research has proved that deploying cloud services from three or more suppliers can damage a company’s business agility. UK businesses state a preference for procuring cloud services from a single supplier for ease of management. It’s important to make sure the chosen provider has the ability to provide one fully encompassed cloud service that can offer everything their customers require.
Brand reputation
Choosing a partner that offers not only a best-of breed private, public and hybrid cloud solution, but also has the ability to provide the reseller with a branded platform will give an extra layer of credibility to the business for not only existing customers, but future ones as well. Resellers are more likely to choose a cloud provider that gives them control over the appearance, as well as support and access to infrastructure of the cloud platform.
Industry experience
It’s vital to ensure the cloud provider has extensive industry experience and knowledge with a proven track record in order to meet the required criteria of scalability and performance. The partner must have the knowledge in order to educate and offer advice to the reseller. If they are able to do so, the reseller can therefore pass this knowledge on to their own customers.
By not offering the cloud, resellers will miss out on vast opportunities and in turn, lose potential revenue as well as new and existing customers. The channel must now embrace the cloud and take advantage of the partnerships available in order to succeed.
Written by Matthew Munson, chief technology officer, Cube52
Google adds Crate to SQL services on GCE
Google has been on a big data push
Google has added open source distributed SQL data store Crate to the Google Compute Engine arsenal, the latest in a series of moves aimed at bolstering the company’s data services.
Crate is a distributed open source data store built on a high availability “shared-nothing” architecture that automatically shards and distributes data across all of nodes (and maintains several replicas for fault tolerance).
It uses SQL syntax but packs some NoSQL goodies as well (Elasticsearch, Presto, Lucene are among the components it implements).
“This means when a new node is added, the cluster automatically rebalances and can self-heal when a node is removed. All data is indexed, optimized, and compressed on ingest and is accessible using familiar SQL syntax through a RESTful API,” explained Tyler Randles, evangelist at Crate.
“Crate was built so developers won’t need to “glue” several technologies together to store documents or BLOBs, or support real-time search. It also helps dev-ops by eliminating the need for manual tuning, sharding, replication, and other operations required to keep a large data store in good health.”
The move is yet another attempt by Google to bolster its data services. Earlier this week the company revealed Bigtable, a fully managed NoSQL database service the company said combines its own internal database technology with open source Apache HBase APIs.
Last month the company announced the beta launch of Google Cloud Dataflow, a Java-based service that lets users build, deploy and run data processing pipelines for other applications like ETL, analytics, real-time computation, and process orchestration, while abstracting away all the other infrastructure bits like cluster management.
BYOD threat larger than anticipated – survey
BYOD isn’t being managed effectively by many IT departments
Over half of UK workers over the age of 18 are using mobile devices and tablets in the workplace that are entirely unmanaged by their organisation’s IT department according to a recently published survey.
A survey of just over 1,000 UK workers commissioned by IT and managed services provider Phoenix shows the while over half (51 per cent) primarily use their own device in the workplace, close to 60 per cent of those workers do not involved their organisation’s IT support in setting up or managing their devices.
Phoenix managing director of partner business Alistair Blaxill said the results demonstrate UK organisations are much more exposed to cyberthreats than most appreciate.
“Mobility is one of the most significant driving forces for the IT sector and an increasing number of people want to be fully connected to work all of the time. However, the emergence of BYOD in the workplace is creating a real challenge for IT departments, with workers using their own unmanaged devices to access corporate networks and sensitive data,” Blaxill said.
“The findings of our survey underline this trend in the UK and it reinforces the need for businesses to stay on top of how employees access IT and ensure that they are appropriately protected.”
Blaxill said the best way to ensure IT can adequately protect these devices is by changing the way they interact with employees – and to speed up delivery of support services to incentivise bringing IT into the fold.
“Employees’ attitudes to IT support are changing and they want instant, real-time solutions to their device issues. Our survey tells us that just 23 per cent and 32 per cent of workers received their IT support either primarily face-to-face or a mix of face-to-face and remotely respectively. Savvy employers are now looking to provide workers with an IT support service that mirrors the personal experience they receive outside of work when resolving issues with their own personal devices.”
Microservices and #Containers | @CloudExpo [#DevOps #Microservices]
The concept and subsequent adoption of ‘Containerization” is growing at a rapid speed with the support of almost every other major player in the industry. This concept is much more efficient than the Virtualization which has been a major option for Infrastructure optimization in the past decade.
The following factors distinguish a Container from a Virtual Machine.
Containers contain Only the Application Specific libraries and binaries. They do not include a guest operating system. Rather all the operating system requirements are derived from the host computer in which the container is placed. This makes the container a really light weight super process within the host operating system. This makes the portability of containers across environments much more easier.
Airbus, Cisco team up on SDN, IoT, cloud security
Airbus and Cisco are partnering to develop IT solutions for the defence sectors
Airbus Defence and Space announced a partnership with Cisco this week that will see the two firms jointly develop solutions making use of a range of technologies for the security and defence sector.
The companies said they plan to combine their strengths in defence, security and satellite communications, software-defined networking, cybersecurity, mobility, cloud, data intelligence and Internet of Things to develop, market and sell IT solutions for the security and defence sector.
Eric Souleres, head of engineering, operations and quality of the communications, intelligence and security (CIS) unit at Airbus Defence and Space said: “This relationship is a significant step forward for both companies. By utilising both companies’ technology and expertise we will be able to develop and offer superior and ground-breaking products and solutions to our customers, and strengthen our respective strategies as system integrator and IT leader.”
As part of the agreement, Cisco will provide Airbus Defence and Space with its networking, design and engineering expertise as well as networking equipment and infrastructure. Airbus Defence and Space global sales and engineering teams will also receive training from Cisco solution architects and sales experts.
“Cisco and Airbus Defence and Space strongly believe that the network is key in driving innovation and delivering business outcomes to our customers,” said Wendy Mars, vice president, enterprise business group, Cisco EMEAR.
“The diversity of our talent and technology will help enable both companies to better address existing opportunities and create transformational solutions that will deliver competitive advantage in the defence, cyber security and the satellite communication industries,” Mars said.
Give Your Mom the Gift of Freedom this Mother’s Day
Moms can be hard to shop for—particularly if they’re tech-savvy. When she’s the master of 1-click ordering on Amazon, she often already has everything she could ever want (or need). But there is this one thing she may not have—Parallels Access! If your mom has an iPhone, Android phone, iPad, or other mobile device, Parallels Access may be […]
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