One of the biggest benefits of Parallels Desktop is the ability to run multiple OSes, including those that are a few years old. If you’re wondering why you’d even want to run an out of date operating system, here are just a few reasons: 1. You’re a developer or power user and need to test […]
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With worldwide spending on cloud services and infrastructure growing by 23% in 2015 to $118B, it is clear that cloud services are here to stay. Yet, the rate of cloud adoption varies by companies and markets around the world. With thousands of outages and hijacks across the Internet every day, one reason for hesitation is the faith in quality Internet performance.
In his session at 16th Cloud Expo, Michael Kane, Senior Manager at Dyn, explored how Internet performance affects your end-user’s experience and how you can make variations in the Internet work to your competitive advantage.
GE has recently announced the expansion of its Predix Internet of Things platform to provide Infrastructure as a Service, a market currently dominated by cloud giant Amazon Web Services, followed by Microsoft, Google, and IBM. However, GE hopes to stand out amongst the competition by offering these infrastructure services specifically to meet the needs of its industrial customers.
GE currently manufactures large machinery such as jet engines, turbines, and locomotives, all loaded with sensors. These sensors generate massive amounts of information.
Predix was originally a Platform as a Service that allowed customers as well as third party developers to utilize the data from the sensors to build applications. With the expansion, the company will be providing infrastructure services to run those applications made.
While this greatly resembles the IBM cloud strategy, Harel Kodesh, CTO of GE Software has noted that there is a more focused set of services dedicated to the Internet of Things. He went on to explain that one of the main selling points was that the new infrastructure offering couples nicely with its software development platform. Also, the security layer has been designed specifically to meet the needs of companies running highly sensitive industrial equipment.
Another thing that sets GE apart from competitors like Amazon Web Services is that GE is able to understand how these large pieces of machinery work because it has built them. So, Predix will be able to process the amount of data the devices generate and also better predict the impact a given set of data will have on equipment based on factors such as temperature and workload.
The post GE Adds Infrastructure As A Service To Internet of Things appeared first on Cloud News Daily.
The majority of an organization’s revenues are dependent on suppliers, distributors and other third parties. But as Benjamin M. Lawsky, New York State’s Superintendent of Financial Services, points out: “Unfortunately, those third-party firms can provide a back-door entrance to hackers who are seeking to steal sensitive bank customer data.”
By now most everyone is well aware of the major data breaches afflicting Target and Home Depot – both triggered through a third party – that affected more than 100 million consumers. But the problem persists. A recent report from the New York State Department of Financial Services (NYDFS) revealed that nearly a third of 40 banks surveyed don’t require their third-party vendors to notify them in the event of an information security or other cyber security breach.
User expectations and rethinking of business productivity are having a profound impact on how business applications are used, designed, and leveraged to help buyers, sellers, and employees do their jobs better.
The cyber security, resiliency and accountability of IT systems at financial services organizations is rarely out of national headlines. Firms that operate in the financial space hold extremely sensitive data, so therefore attackers usually consider the effort and risk of attacking them worth the potential reward.
Fortunately, financial services organizations are making increasing investments in order to make the effort (and financial outlay) required to attack them so high as to make them an impractical target. This recent article in the Financial Times mentions some of the interesting steps that organizations are taking in order to drive up the operational costs of would-be attackers, as well as some of the figures involved in the investment in cyber security by banks and other financial sector businesses.
SYS-CON Events announced today that MobiDev, a software development company, will exhibit at the 17th International Cloud Expo®, which will take place November 3–5, 2015, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
MobiDev is a software development company with representative offices in Atlanta (US), Sheffield (UK) and Würzburg (Germany); and development centers in Ukraine. Since 2009 it has grown from a small group of passionate engineers and business managers to a full-scale mobile software company with over 150 developers, designers, quality assurance engineers, project managers in house, specializing in the world-class mobile and web development.
Tintri secured $125m in series F funding this week
Storage specialist Tintri has secured $125m in a funding round the company said would go towards accelerating development of its virtualised storage solution.
The latest funding round, led by Silver Lake Kraftwerk with participation from Insight Venture Partners, Lightspeed Ventures, Menlo Ventures and NEA brings the total investment secured by Tintri since its founding in 2008 to $260m.
Tintri specialises in storage hardware optimised to serve up data for individual virtual machines. The company’s storage servers blend both HDD and SSD tech in order to optimise hot and cold storage and access, making storage more performant by making it smarter.
“The storage industry is going through a dramatic transformation. Virtualization and cloud are forces for change—and conventional DAS, NAS and SAN storage is struggling to keep pace. That’s why our message of VM-aware storage (VAS) is winning in the marketplace,” said Ken Klein, chairman and chief executive for Tintri.
“This funding fuels our mission—we’ll be growing our global footprint and raising visibility of the business benefits of storage built specifically for virtualized enterprises.”
The company’s virtualisation-aware storage wares have enjoyed some solid traction among some of the world’s largest companies and service providers including Chevron, GE, the EIB, NTT, SK Telecom and Rogers Communications.
(Image Credit: iStockPhoto/pixdeluxe)
While cloud adoption among SMBs continues to rise, there are still plenty of SMB customers I speak with who are reluctant to take advantage of what the cloud has to offer. Below are four examples of how cloud adoption can help SMBs excel:
The cloud gives SMBs access to enterprise class features that many couldn’t normally take advantage of. Geo-location and load balancing are both great examples. If an SMB puts its website up on Microsoft Azure, a click of a button can put 3 copies locally and also put 3 copies in 3 different geographical locations automatically.
This way, if something happened at one of the locations, all of the data is already at another data centre ready to spin up. Doing this without utilising the cloud would be extremely costly and quite unrealistic for the budgets of most SMB organisations.
DRaaS is a cost effective insurance policy for SMBs. Instead of having to buy and maintain separate servers, SAN, storage, network, firewall, rack space, etc. I can take my backups and load them up to the cloud (Azure, vCloud Air, Cirrity, etc). This gives me a way to have infrastructure fail over in the event of a disaster.
SMBs that go this route can pay less per month to have this available than it would be buy on-prem equipment. Buying the equipment may mean that you aren’t using all of it as well.
Another way SMBs can use the cloud is to host desktops. Doing this means you don’t have to buy or maintain desktops and allows for greater scalability. There are plenty of companies where users change a lot so internal IT is tasked with adding or removing users on a fairly regular basis. This means they have desktops that they need to build out manually.
By hosting your desktops in the cloud, you can automatically spin up or down when needed. This not only provides cost savings, but will also save your IT department a significant amount of time.
If you are running, say, Microsoft Azure, you can set Azure to utilisation between 25-75% of CPU. When utilisation gets above 75%, Azure is going to automatically turn up more servers and load balance them. If utilisation dips below 25%, it will decommission servers. This allows for automatic scaling based on user activity. Doing this traditionally is much more expensive and in many cases not possible for SMBs.
The bottom line is SMBs should take a closer look at cloud options that can increase efficiencies and drive down costs. The corporate IT department is evolving. Has yours kept pace?
Can you think of further key ways for SMBs to take advantage of the cloud? Let us know in the comments.
The Federal Government’s “Cloud First” policy mandates that agencies take full advantage of cloud computing benefits to maximize capacity utilization, improve IT flexibility and responsiveness, and minimize cost. The Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP) is a mandatory government-wide program that provides a standardized approach to security assessment, authorization, and continuous monitoring for cloud products and services. Advantages for business include being able to market to many federal agencies after a single FedRAMP review following the government’s “approve once, and use often” approach.