Monthly Archives: July 2015

Big Data, Camden Council, Enterprise IT, IBM, News & Analysis

Camden Council uses big data to help reduce fraud, save money

Camden Council is using big data to tackle fraud and save cash as its budgets slim

Camden Council is using big data to tackle fraud and save cash as its budgets slim

Camden Council is using a big data platform to create a ‘Residents Index’ to help tackle debt collection, illegal subletting and fraud.

The service, based on IBM’s InfoSphere platform, centrally stores and manages citizen data collected from 16 different systems across London – including data from Electoral Services, Housing and Council Tax Services – to help give a single view of local residents.

Authorised users can access the platform to search relevant data and highlight discrepancies in the information given to the Council by residents to help reduce fraud and save money on over-procurement of public services.

It’s also using the Index to improve the accuracy of its electoral register. Using the platform, it said it was able to fast track the registration of more than 80 per cent of its residents and identify new residents who need to vote.

“Big data is revolutionising the way we work across the borough, reducing crime and saving money just when public services are facing huge funding cuts,” said Camden councillor Theo Blackwell.

“Take School admission fraud; parents complain about people gaming the system by pretending to reside in the borough to get their kids into the most sought-after schools. Now with the Residents Index in place, Council staff can carry out detailed checks and identify previously hidden discrepancies in the information supplied to the Council to prove residency. We have already withdrawn five school places from fraudulent applicants making sure that school places fairly go to those who are entitled to them.”

“The Resident Index has proven its worth, helping the Council to become more efficient, and now contains over one million relevant records. This is just one example and we have other plans to use the benefits of data technology to improve public services and balance the books.”

Early last year Camden Borough laid out its 3 year plan to use more digital services in a bid to save money and improve the services it offers to local residents, which includes using cloud services to save on infrastructure cost and big data platforms to inform decision making at the Council.

Cisco, Dell, HP, IDC, Kuba Stolarski, News & Analysis

Cloud infrastructure revenues grow 25% in Q1 2015

IDC Q1 2015 cloud revenuesRevenue from cloud infrastructure including servers, storage and switches grew 25.1 per cent year on year in the first quarter of this year – the highest rate in over a year according to analyst house IDC and the second highest level of total spending in the past nine quarters.

Cloud IT infrastructure spending climbed to 30 per cent or nearly a third of overall IT infrastructure spending in the first quarter of this year, up from 26.4 per cent last year. Private cloud revenues grew nearly 25 per cent year on year, which was slightly outpaced by public cloud growth at close to 26 per cent.

Kuba Stolarski, research manager, server, virtualization and workload research at IDC said the shift to cloud seems to be the main driver of growth in the IT infrastructure market at the moment.

“Cloud IT infrastructure growth continues to outpace the growth of the overall IT infrastructure market, driven by the transition of workloads onto cloud-based platforms,” Stolarski said.

“Both private and public cloud infrastructures have been growing at a similar pace, suggesting that customers are open to a broad array of hybrid deployment scenarios as they modernize their IT for the 3rd Platform, begin to deploy next-gen software solutions, and embrace modern management processes that enable agile, flexible, and extensible cloud platforms.”

HP, Dell and Cisco landed in the top three spots in IT infrastructure market share with 15.7, 11.9 and 9.3 per cent respectively. Lenovo’s four per cent year on year growth seems down largely to its acquisition of IBM’s x86 server business.

It hasn’t been the best quarter for storage on the other hand. Year on year quarterly growth rates declined slightly for both EMC and NetApp, and interestingly ODM direct sales also declined, suggesting both enterprises and the scale-out market still find big box vendors a competitive option when compared to lower cost Chinese and Taiwanese manufacturers.

Cloud Services, News

Cloud News Daily 2015-07-03 06:15:55

iiNet will begin to provide cloud services on a consumption based infrastructure-as-a-service model to the South Australian Departments of Premier and Cabinet; Planning, Transport, and Infrastructure; and Communities and Social Inclusion.

iiNet general manager for Business and Government ,Daryl Knight, said “This infrastructure will be there for government to use. We’re very confident there will be significant workloads that will be put onto this platform, and we’re confident it will be there for some time, provided we deliver a good service and deliver value for money for the state. Its spread across two data centers iiNet owns in Adelaide, and there is a natural advantage there that appeals to the state, because the infrastructure is located in the state it resides, and we’ve got connectivity straight into the state’s internal data network.” In addition, iiNet will also offer the Australian government back up services.

blog-businesscloud

The South Australian government is taking advantage of this opportunity to promote its cloud credentials.  Public Sector Minister Susan Close said in a statement “In line with the government’s SA Connected ICT strategy, it allows agencies to invest in services rather than buying hardware and software. This solution improves agility for state government agencies with no upfront costs and provides the ability to spin up or shut down servers as required in minutes instead of months. Consumption-based pricing requires no minimum spend. With the rapidly maturing cloud market, we are now at the point where government agencies can benefit from quicker deployment speeds, greater flexibility, and improved value for money by using this model through iiNet.”
The cloud will be hosted in iiNet’s two Adelaide-based data centers and the private cloud will consume hardware reserved for the state government.

 

The post appeared first on Cloud News Daily.

Uncategorized

It’s Time for a Connector-Less Approach By @HeritageLaura | @CloudExpo #API #Cloud

The basic integration architecture, as defined by ESBs, hasn’t changed for more than a decade. Most cloud integration providers still rely on an ESB architecture and their proprietary connectors. As a result, enterprise integration projects suffer from constraints of availability and reliability of these connectors that are not re-usable across other integration vendors. However, the rapid adoption of APIs and almost ubiquitous availability of APIs amongst most SaaS and Cloud applications are rapidly redefining traditional integration approaches and their reliance on proprietary connectors.
In her session at 16th Cloud Expo, Laura Heritage, Director of API Strategy at Akana, discussed how enterprises can adopt an API-based integration and connector-less architecture to achieve lightweight, quick, and configurable drag-and-drop integration that is fit for the new digital enterprise.

read more

Uncategorized

Webinar: The Cloud Just Killed Your LAN and WAN | @CloudExpo #Cloud

Live Webinar with 451 Research Analyst Peter Christy. Join us on Wednesday July 22, 2015, at 10 am PT / 1 pm ET
In a world where users are on the Internet and the applications are in the cloud, how do you maintain your historic SLA with your users?
Peter Christy, Research Director, Networks at 451 Research, will discuss this new network paradigm, one in which there is no LAN and no WAN, and discuss what users and network administrators gain and give up when migrating to the agile world of cloud.
Soha Senior Director of Product Marketing Robert Berlin will also share insights on today’s cloud application and security landscape, and discuss how Soha’s solution enables highly secure application delivery networks.

read more

Datacentre, Dave Turek, France, IBM, News & Analysis, Nvidia

IBM, Nvidia, Mellanox launch OpenPower design centre to target big data apps

IBM has set up another OpenPower design centre in Europe to target big data and HPC

IBM has set up another OpenPower design centre in Europe to target big data and HPC

IBM, Nvidia and Mellanox are setting up another OpenPower design centre in Europe to target development of high performance computing (HPC) apps based on the open source Power architecture.

The move will see technical experts from IBM, Nvidia and Mellanox jointly develop applications on OpenPower architecture which take advantage of the companies’ respective technologies – specifically IBM Power CPUs, Nvidia’s Tesla Accelerated Computing Platform and Mellanox InfiniBand networking solution.

The companies said the move will both advance development of HPC software and create new opportunities for software developers to acquire HPC-related skills and experience.

“Our launch of this new centre reinforces IBM’s commitment to open-source collaboration and is a next step in expanding the software and solution ecosystem around OpenPower,” said Dave Turek, IBM’s vice president of HPC Market Engagement.

“Teaming with Nvidia and Mellanox, the centre will allow us to leverage the strengths of each of our companies to extend innovation and bring higher value to our customers around the world,” Turek said.

The centre will be located in IBM’s client centre in Montpellier, France and complement the Jülich Supercomputing Center launched in November last year.

IBM has been working with a broad range of stakeholders spanning the technology, research and government sectors on Power-based supercomputers in order to satisfy its big Power architecture ambitions. The company hopes Power will command roughly a third of the scale-out market over the next few years.

Database, EnterpriseDB, KT, News & Analysis, postgres

KT, EnterpriseDB to offer OpenStack-based DBaaS

EnterpriseDB and KT are co-developing a postgres-based DBaaS

EnterpriseDB and KT are co-developing a postgres-based DBaaS

Postgres database specialist EnterpriseDB announced a partnership with the technology services subsidiary of incumbent Korean telco KT Corporation, KT DS, that will see the two jointly develop and offer a database-as-a-service offering deployed on OpenStack.

The offering will feature EDB’s database tech which is based on postgres, an open source object-relational database management system, and will be delivered via KT’s uCloud service.

KT, a longtime user of EDB’s postgres tech – the same database tech used by eBay and Facebook – said its engineers already contribute heavily to the open source project.

“Our long and successful partnership with EnterpriseDB with on-premises deployments in our own infrastructure made EDB’s Postgres Plus the obvious choice when we selected a cloud partner for our uCloud,” said Seunghye Sohn, senior vice president of KT DS.

Ed Boyajian, chief executive officer of EnterpriseDB said: “KT was a proving ground in Korea for Postgres Plus to power mission-critical, high-volume workloads. They are now leading enterprise and government users to the future with their uCloud and together we’re building on our years of partnership to play a role as cloud computing expands across Korea.”

KT is looking to bolster its cloud computing business among local incumbents looking to get a piece of the growing market, particularly the public sector segment. Earlier this year the Korean government passed the Act on Promotion of Cloud Computing and User Protection (colloquially known as the “Cloud Act”) designed to encourage public sector uptake of cloud services.

5G, Europe, Inria, Networks, News & Analysis, NFV, Orange, Virtualisation

Orange creates NFV, cloud testing lab for 5G advances

Orange and Inria are partnering on an NFV, cloud testing lab for 5G

Orange and Inria are partnering on an NFV, cloud testing lab for 5G

Orange has unveiled its new lab dedicated to network virtualization and cloud computing, called I/O Lab. It’s targeting an open and accessible environment for collaboration with the wider industry.

In a particularly buzzwordy announcement, the telco has claimed the new testing environment for NFV and cloud tech will enable advances in the development of 5G, IoT and Big Data; while also referencing “fog” computing – a form distributed cloud computing where near-user network edge devices are utilised for storage – and Mobile Edge Computing.

“The networks… will undergo a radical transformation in the next decade as a result of the progress of virtualization techniques,” Orange said in a statement. “General purpose servers will be able to use software to incorporate more and more network functions, all while meeting the networks’ growing needs for capacity and reliability. At the same time, cloud computing techniques will contribute to the development of flexible storage and processing capacities in data centres and even within networks and their peripheries, including connected devices and objects.” This trend could be strengthened by the increased momentum of the Internet of Things and Big Data processing”

“The I/O Lab’s vision is to develop a coherent, flexible and reliable management structure for the networks of the future, seen as distributed communication, storage and processing infrastructures. This will be achieved by virtue of the dual distributed network and software culture of its partners and a large contribution of the worldwide Open Source communities.”

The lab has been developed in partnership with Inria, the French Institute for Research in Computer Science and Automation, and the two companies say the test-bed will be dedicated to contributing heavily to relevant Open Source communities.

Orange also claims the lab will promote and develop a broad scale network OS, called “Global OS”, which will be designed to support a variety of app development for the infrastructure, including security, performance, availability, cost and energy efficiency management. It has also targeted 2020 for tangible outputs from the lab in terms of network infrastructure ready for 5G-compatible deployment.