Monthly Archives: June 2015

Amazon AWS, Cloud Services, News

Amazon Web Services Will Expand to India

Amazon Web Services has decided to enter India after having localized services in China. The decision to move into India was influenced by the fact that India is expected to see a lot of growth and has seen the emergence of a multitude of startups, including Flipkart, Snapdeal, payment services such as Paytm, which is backed by Alibaba and Uber’s main rival called Ola. Gartner research vice president Ed Anderson has said “Organizations in India seeking IT outsourcing services are increasingly turning to public cloud services as an alternative to traditional ITO offerings. In fact, cloud services are not only being used for low-value or transient workloads but also increasingly for production workloads, including some mission-critical initiatives.”

More traditional businesses are also a part of Amazon Web Services. These businesses, like automobile giant Tata Motors, media firm NDTV, and national flower retail chain Ferns N Petals, will be some of the initial launch partners.

While Amazon Web Services is already available in India, its expansion of its cloud computing platform will improve service for existing customers while potentially drawing in new ones.

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Andy Jassy, senior vice president for Amazon Web Services,  said in a statement: “Tens of thousands of customers in India are using AWS from one of AWS’s eleven global infrastructure regions outside of India. Several of these customers, along with many prospective new customers, have asked us to locate infrastructure in India so they can enjoy even lower latency to their end users in India and satisfy any data sovereignty requirements they may have.”

The post Amazon Web Services Will Expand to India appeared first on Cloud News Daily.

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Tune into the Cloud – Something Got Me Started By @GregorPetri | @CloudExpo #Cloud

By now it is widely acknowledged that cloud enables a fast (agile) start. But more important than a fast start is getting results quickly. We are talking then about high productivity platforms, a category of PaaS. Funnily enough, several cloud providers – such as Microsoft and Google – launched a PaaS platform first and only later – when they saw how quickly the virtual machine based IaaS services from Amazon were becoming popular – technically did a step back to launch a lower level IaaS service.

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‘The Evolving Cloud’ Power Panel at @CloudExpo | #Cloud #Microservices

Discussions about cloud computing are evolving into discussions about enterprise IT in general. As enterprises increasingly migrate toward their own unique clouds, new issues such as the use of containers and microservices emerge to keep things interesting.
In this Power Panel at 16th Cloud Expo, moderated by Conference Chair Roger Strukhoff, panelists addressed the state of cloud computing today, and what enterprise IT professionals need to know about how the latest topics and trends affect their organization.

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55% of enterprises predict cloud computing will enable new business models in three years

(c)iStock.com/4774344sean

In late 2014, Oxford Economics and SAP collaborated on a survey of 200 senior business and IT executives globally regarding the adoption and use of cloud technology:

  • 69% of enterprises expect to make moderate-to-heavy cloud investments over the next three years as they migrate core business functions to the cloud.
  • 44% of enterprises are relying on cloud computing to launch new business models today, predicting this will increase to 55% in three years.
  • 32% are using cloud computing to streamline their supply chains today. Senior executives predict this figure will increase to 56% in three years, a 24% increase.
  • 59% say they use cloud-based applications and platforms to better manage and analyze data today, reflecting the increasing importance of analytics and big data enterprise-wide.

These and other insights are from The Cloud Grows Up. You can find the study here (no opt-in).  Oxford Economics’ analysts compared the latest survey with one completed in 2012 looking for leading indicators of cloud adoption in enterprises. They found many C- and VP-level executives are taking a more pragmatic, realistic view of what cloud technologies can contribute. Enterprises are moving beyond the hype of cloud computing, putting in the hard work of launching new business models while driving top-line revenue growth.

Oxford Economics has made two interactive infographics available from the study here. The first details cloud adoption, and the second, on how enterprises see cloud computing changing their business models over the next three years.  As cloud platforms and applications become a scalable, secure and for the most part reliable, once-elusive enterprise goals and new business models become attainable.

Key takeaways from the study include the following:

  • Top–line growth (58%), collaboration among employees (58%), and supply chain (56%) are the three areas enterprises expect cloud computing to impact most in three years. The greatest gains will be in the areas of supply chain (a 24% jump), collaboration among employees (20%) and increased agility and responsiveness to customers (17%). The following graphic compares where enterprises are seeing cloud computing’s impact today and a prediction of each areas’ impact in three years.

Figure 2

  • Developing new products & services (61%), new lines of business (51%) and entering new markets (40%) are three key areas cloud computing is transforming enterprises.  With a 35% increase, developing new products and services is the most dominant strategy enterprises are relying on to grow their businesses. See the comparison below for further details.       

developed new services using cloud computing 2

  • 58% of enterprises predict their use of cloud computing will increase top-line revenue growth in three years. 67% see the cloud changing skill sets and transforming the role of HR. The following graphic illustrates the first of two interactive infographics Oxford Economics and SAP are providing with the report. You can access the infographic here.

clouds enduring promise

  • 74% of enterprises say innovation and R&D is somewhat or mostly cloud-based. 61% say they will have developed new products and services in three years as a result of adopting cloud technologies.  The following graphic illustrates the second of two interactive infographics Oxford Economics and SAP are providing with the report. You can access the infographic here.

infographic the cloud grows up

  • Enterprise cloud security strategies are maturing rapidly. From 2012 to 2014, strategies for ensuring the security of API and interfaces increased 24%, from 20% to 44%. Additional concerns that increased include virus attacks (up 19%), and identity theft (up 16%).  The following figure compares the top concerns enterprises have in the area of cloud security.

cloud security

  • 31% of respondents say the cloud computing has had a transformative impact on their business.  48%, nearly half, state that cloud computing has had a moderate impact on business performance. The majority believe cloud computing will have a significant impact on top-line revenue growth in three years.

Figure 31

  • 67% of enterprises say that marketing, purchasing, and supply chain are somewhat and mostly cloud-based as of today. Cloud-based adoption has reached an inflection point in enterprises, with functional areas having the largest percentage of workloads running on cloud-based apps. Enterprise senior executives see the potential to improve innovation, R&D, and time-to-market via greater collaboration using cloud technologies.
AT&T, China Mobile, China Telecom, Comcast, Deutsche Telekom, Lithium, Networks, News & Analysis, OpenDaylight, OpenFlow, Orange, Sarwar Raza, SDN, T-Mobile, Telefónica I+D, Virtualisation

OpenDaylight launches third open source SDN platform, announces advisory group

OpenDaylight has released the latest version of its open source SDN platform and cobbled together an advisory group to improve the feedback loop between deployment and feature evolution

OpenDaylight has released the latest version of its open source SDN platform and cobbled together an advisory group to improve the feedback loop between deployment and feature evolution

The OpenDaylight project has released the third version of its open source software-defined networking (SDN) platform, Lithium, as the organisation launches an advisory tasked with feeding technical insights learned through deployment back into the developer community.

The OpenDaylight Project is an open source collaboration between many of the industry’s major networking incumbents on the core architectures enabling software defined networking (SDN) and network function virtualisation (NFV).

The community is developing an open source SDN architecture and software, the latest release of which has been dubbed Lithium, that supports a wide range of protocols including OpenFlow, the southbound protocol around which most vendors have consolidated.

“End users have already deployed OpenDaylight for a wide variety of use cases from NFV, network on demand, flow programming using OpenFlow and even Internet of Things,” said Neela Jacques, executive director, OpenDaylight.

“Lithium was built to meet the requirements of the wide range of end users embedding OpenDaylight into the heart of their products, services and infrastructures. I expect new and improved capabilities such as service chaining and network virtualization to be quickly picked up by our user base,” Jacques said.

The organisation said Lithium boats a number of improvements over the previous release of its platform, Helium, like increased scalability, native support for OpenStack Neutron, new security, monitoring and automation features, support for more APIs and protocols including Source Group Tag eXchange (SXP), Link Aggregation Control Protocol (LACP), IoT Data Management (IoTDM), SMNP Plugin, Open Policy Framework (OpFlex) and Control and Provisioning of Wireless Access Points (CAPWAP).

“We see OpenDaylight as a powerful platform for carrier-grade SDN solutions, which is getting more feature-rich with every release,” said Sarwar Raza, vice president, NFV Product Management, HP and OpenDaylight Project board member. “ConteXtream, now an HP Company, has been active in the OpenDaylight community since its inception and has made significant contributions to Service Function Chaining, an important capability for NFV. We look forward to our continued involvement in the OpenDaylight project to help enable widespread adoption of SDN and create a solid foundation for NFV.”

The move comes the same week the project announced the formation of the OpenDaylight Advisory Group (AG), a group composed mostly of telcos tasked with providing technical input to the OpenDaylight developer community based on deployment experience.

The twelve founding members of the advisory group include researchers and specialists from China Telecom, Deutsche Telekom, T-Mobile, China Mobile, Telefónica I+D, AT&T, Orange, and Comcast.

The organisation said the advisory group was set up to help provide technical and strategic guidance to the steering committee and developer community – in other words, to keep the open source platform from straying from the requirements of those deploying it.

Interestingly, apart from NASDAQ, enterprises seem relatively under-represented on the committee, which could see future iterations of OpenDaylight focus more heavily on those use cases – possibly over others more common in the enterprise.

Featured, Miscellaneous IT, Tech New Recap

Tech News Recap for the Week of 6/22/2015

Were you busy last week? Here’s a quick tech news recap of articles you may have missed from the week of 6/22/2015.

Tech News RecapWorking to make its public cloud more competitive, VMware has partnered with Bitnami to make using open source apps and development environments on vCloud Air easy. VMware also previewed a Docker runtime that works with vSphere dubbed Project Bonneville. Microsoft has improved visibility into Azure cloud costs and has also tightened up its partnership with Docker.

Tech News Recap

Microsoft Windows Server 2003 End-of-Life is right around the corner. Make sure you are properly prepared.

 

By Ben Stephenson, Emerging Media Specialist

Amit Walia, data privacy, Data security, Informatica, News & Analysis, Ponemon Institute

Close to 60 per cent of confidential cloud data can’t have risk levels assessed – research

UK IT professionals claim to be struggling with accurately assessing the risk of storing their confidential data in the cloud

UK IT professionals claim to be struggling with accurately assessing the risk of storing their confidential data in the cloud

Data from a recent Ponemon Institute survey commissioned by Informatica suggests UK enterprises are struggling to assess the risk associated with placing confidential data in the cloud, with respondents claiming they can’t determine the risk to 58 per cent of the confidential data they store in the cloud.

The problem seems particularly acute when it comes to cloud-based data specifically – enterprises said they faced the same challenge with 28 per cent of the sensitive information held on-premise.

The survey results, which include responses from 118 UK IT and IT security professionals with responsibility for data protection, hint at differences in the level of data management tool deployments for on-premise and cloud-based systems, which does seem to skew the results in terms of confidence in data risk allocation. About 46 per cent are using such tools for data on premise and 34 per cent for data in the cloud.

Still, less than half of respondents claimed to have common processes in place for discovering and classifying the sensitive or confidential data on-premise, and just a quarter said they have a process in place for data stored in the cloud.

About 54 per cent of respondents said they are not confident in their ability to proactively respond to a new threat in the cloud, and 30 per cent of the sensitive or confidential data located in the cloud is believed to be at risk according to respondents.

“The survey highlights that whilst organisations continue to fear cyberattacks, what really keeps them up at night is the unknown. Namely not knowing where data is and the associated risk to it,” said Larry Ponemon, chairman and founder, Ponemon Institute.

“Whilst businesses are more confident about having data on premise, the shift towards cloud computing is continuing to accelerate and organisations can’t afford to be held back by data security concerns. Instead, security practitioners need to get a handle on the classification of data so that they can feel more confident about the information that they are moving to the cloud. Regardless of whether information is held on premise or in the cloud, data governance protocols should be the same,” Ponemon said.

Informatica senior vice president and general manager, data integration and security Amit Walia said the results demonstrate the majority of organisations do not have a handle on their sensitive data, regardless of whether it exists on-premise or in the cloud.

He explained that as data volumes grow enterprises are leaning more on customised software and automated processes rather than manual processes to classify data risk and apply rules and policies, which is creating somewhat of a false perception when it comes to risk.

“Because businesses have less confidence in their understanding of sensitive data then they perceive more risk. To reduce threat exposure and improve breach resiliency, organisations need to invest in data centric security technologies, which enable businesses to enact the need-to-know data access policies that help limit the exposure of sensitive data,” Walia said.

IBM, Internet of Things, IoT, Lake George, News & Analysis, Rick Relyea, The Jefferson Project

IoT, big data used to make Lake George a model for water body preservation

IBM and the Jefferson Project have teamed up to use IoT and big data to monitor and analyse Lake George's health

IBM and the Jefferson Project have teamed up to use IoT and big data to monitor and analyse Lake George’s health

The Jefferson Project at Lake George, New York, a collaborative project between Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, IBM Research and The FUND for Lake George is using Internet of Things sensors and big data analytics to create a model that can be used to help preserve a wide range of water sources.

Researchers have been monitoring the chemistry of algae in Lake George for the past 35 years to demonstrate how the lake is being affected by a range of inputs including pollution, tourism, and weather activity.

But the project has recently started a new phase which has seen IBM and Jefferson Project researchers put sophisticated underwater sonar-based sensors (powered by solar energy) to measure a range of data.

Those sensors are linked up to custom software deployed on IBM Blue Gene/ Q supercomputer and IBM Smarter Planet software deployed in a datacentre on the Rensselaer campus.

Rick Relyea, director of the Jefferson Project at Lake George said the IoT sensors have greatly improved data accuracy, which has allowed researchers to improve the models they generate from the patterns being observed.

“The Jefferson Project provides the unique opportunity for biologists and environmental scientists to work closely with engineers, physicists, computer scientists and meteorologists to understand large lakes at a level of detail and intensity that is simply unprecedented,” Relyea said.

“Together, we will make tremendous inroads into understanding how lakes naturally behave and how human activities alter biodiversity, the functioning of freshwater ecosystems, and overall water quality.”

The project researchers have already used the preliminary data generated by the sensors to create a range of models that can help predict the impact of weather events, salt run-off, and heavy tourism on water circulation and the water body’s chemistry, which Rylea said could be applied to many other bodies of water in a bid to improve their health.

“The major threats to Lake George are many of the same threats to lakes around the world. Too many nutrients coming in from either fertiliser or sewage. We have contaminants coming in, those may be pesticides, it may be road salts. We have development coming in changing the habitat around the lakes, changing how much water run-off there is. And we have invasive species coming in.”

Apple, iOS, iOS updates, iPhone, Parallels Access, Remote access, Remote Desktop

Things You Can Do While Waiting for iOS Updates to Install

It always inevitably comes at the worst time possible—the dreaded notification to end all notifications: Say hello to the only thing more never-ending than Windows updates: a software update for your iOS device. Find a comfy place to sit back and relax (preferably with a power outlet nearby)—you’re going to be idle for a while. […]

The post Things You Can Do While Waiting for iOS Updates to Install appeared first on Parallels Blog.

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The CXO view: We’re still unconvinced on cloud storage security

(c)iStock.com/4774344sean

Less than one in three delegates polled at the Infosec 2015 event in London believe the cloud is a safe storage solution for corporate data.

The survey from digital encryption and USB specialist iStorage, which questioned more than 270 respondents including heads of IT, CIOs and CTOs, saw almost half (48%) say they do use cloud technology to store confidential information. 54% of those polled say they still use USB devices to store information.

Over three quarters (78%) said they were currently aware of policies within their organisations covering data protection matters, while a similar number (75%) affirmed they knew who specifically was responsible for data protection within their firm. Yet the imminent EU data protection regulations – which this publication has recently covered – caused more of a pain point. Only 50% of respondents said they understood what the regulations would mean for them individually and their organisations.

John Michael, iStorage CEO, said: “Cloud technology may make life easier for mobile workers but it’s certainly not without its risks; it really should only be used to store encrypted, non-sensitive information.” He added: “Ultimately, the cloud concept refers to a physical data centre and as such users are very much reliant on trusting cloud providers to protect any information that they store in this way.”

This is not a view that everyone agrees with, however. Kelly Stirman, VP strategy at MongoDB, spoke at the recent Cloud World Forum event on five tips for making success a reality in the cloud. Subtitled “escaping cloud cuckoo land”, Stirman blasted a few myths out of the water; one of which being the security of the cloud.

“Cloud is not secure – [it’s] just not true,” he told CloudTech. “Most of these guys are vastly more secure than any of us can design in our own systems.” He added: “People tend to object to cloud, their operation [team’s] obligation…because it’s not secure. No, this thing is incredibly secure, but your ops teams need to know how to configure to be secure where you need to be secure.”

iStorage also argues that, for those who still like to use a USB to transport company information, robust encryption capabilities need to be fitted. By remarkable coincidence, the company is also hawking a new USB 3.0 drive, the datAshur SSD, with auto-lock features, self-destructing PIN and brute force protection.

Regardless, despite cloud storage providers beefing up their business credentials – Box’s customer wins with the US Department of Justice, Dropbox’s adoption of the ISO 27018 standard – there still remains a fair amount of scepticism over the validity of cloud among the C-suite.