The following post is a customer story submitted to our Advocacy program by Alexandria Land from Lake Forest Park, Washington. We are incredibly thankful to Alexandria for sharing her experience with us and allowing us to share it with you. Read on for Alexandria’s experience choosing and using Parallels Desktop. Alexandria graduated in 2010 from the Savannah College of Art […]
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With Citrix announcing that the release of XenApp 7.6 and XenDesktop 7.6 are scheduled for September 2015, businesses are now in a dilemma as to whether they should immediately migrate to the new version, wait for some time or opt for a new tool. In this context, it is important to understand Citrix products, components, […]
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The Internet of Things Maturity Model (IoTMM) is a qualitative method to gauge the growth and increasing impact of IoT capabilities in an IT environment from both a business and technology perspective.
In his session at @ThingsExpo, Tony Shan will first scan the IoT landscape and investigate the major challenges and barriers. The key areas of consideration are identified to get started with IoT journey. He will then pinpoint the need of a tool for effective IoT adoption and implementation, which leads to IoTMM in which five maturity levels are defined: Advanced, Dynamic, Optimized, Primitive, and Tentative (ADOPT).
Subsequently he will characterize the IoT maturity continuum at each individual level, followed by a description of key enablers. He will then walk through the technical architecture and components for the selected enablers to illustrate the building blocks to construct IoT solutions. Further he will articulate how to leverage IoTMM in the real world. Best practices and lessons learned are discussed during the session.
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Research released by WinMagic reveals two thirds of employees do not know their company policy on cloud storage – and its usage is putting business data at risk.
The survey, which quizzed 1,000 office workers at companies with 50 or more employees, found a marked difference in employees’ usage of cloud storage; 41% of respondents said they used cloud services at least once a week, while 42% never touch them.
5% of those who said they use cloud storage once a week do so at the behest of their employer, while just over a third (35%) said they used a company-sanctioned cloud storage solution.
Worryingly, one in 10 employees who use cloud storage services at least once a week admit they have ‘no confidence’ in the security of their data accessed from the cloud. 50% of respondents use personal devices to access work information at least once a week, while a similar number (47%) use company-issued equipment at home every seven days.
The consensus points to a garbled mess, putting data breaches further in the spotlight and giving IT teams permanent headaches. Darin Welfare, EMEA VP at WinMagic, notes the challenges businesses currently face. “One of the key steps that any organisation can take to mitigate the risk from widespread use of unsanctioned cloud services is to ensure that all company data is encrypted before employees have the opportunity to upload to the cloud.
“In the eventuality that the cloud vendor does not adequately put in place control mechanisms and procedures to ensure security across their infrastructure, sensitive and valuable corporate data is still encrypted and cannot be accessed and understood beyond those who have the right to,” added Welfare. “This approach provides the company with the assurance that the IT team is in control of the key and management of all company data before any employees turn to cloud storage services.”
Recent research has shed light on the dissatisfaction customers have with their cloud providers. Earlier this month, a survey from ElasticHosts of UK-based CIOs found more than four in five believe their vendor could do more to reduce the burden on in-house IT staff.
Oracle, a global computer technology corporation, recently announced two additions to its cloud platform for integration: Oracle SOA Cloud Service and Oracle API Manager Cloud Service, a suite of tools that allow users to integrate on-premises and cloud-based applications. These two new services join Oracle’s iPaaS services.
These new additions were built on Oracle’s SOA suite, which is based on service-oriented architecture, and Oracle’s SOA Cloud Service offers easy provisioning, management, automatic upgrades and easy scale up. The result of this is that programmers are able to quickly develop, deploy and scale their API and integration projects.
Additionally, hybrid integration is supported via its deployment portability feature, enabling users to move their platforms from the cloud to on-premises as business demands change. This feature is ideal for organizations that wish to move their integration workloads to the cloud while deploying production on-premises.
A recent Ovum survey reported that almost 90 percent of respondents showed an inclination towards adopting cloud-based integration platform for appropriate use. Low cost agility and digitalization are what is driving the need for hybrid integration solutions, with SOA and iPaaS being some of the preferred options. Organizations need to distribute these integration processes in a manner that maximizes efficient utilization of both on-premises and cloud-based infrastructure and operational spend.
Oracle’s cloud platform has been seeing exponential growth, and they are behind some of the world’s most distinguishable organizations. They have more than 2,500 customers using their Cloud Platform, which includes services such as Application Development, Business Analytics, Content and Collaboration, Data Management, Integration, and Mobile.
Oracle cloud supports more than 70 million users and handles over 33 billion transactions per day. It stores more than 700 petabytes of storage in its 19 data centers around the world to support the over 54,000 mobile devices it runs on.
The post Oracle’s New Cloud Platform For Integration appeared first on Cloud News Daily.
Ever wondered if your marketing efforts for an in-store sale or event are impacting, or even reaching, your customers? Foot traffic is a great indicator of marketing effectiveness. By comparing foot traffic before, during and after sale promotions you’re able to identify if any increases (or decreases) have occurred, giving you a better understanding of how a marketing campaign worked or why it didn’t work.
Virtual infrastructure specialist Interop Technologies has opened a European HQ and network operations centre in Dublin to support the launch of Europe’s first end-to-end cloud-based IP multimedia subsystem (IMS) core and IP services suite, reports Telecoms.com.
The CorePlusXSM suite aims to give operators a platform to run Internet protocol (IP) services and exploit the opportunities of LTE networks, according to Interop. It’s needed because launching these IP services in traditional turnkey configuration is too problematic and expensive for operators. Interop said it will make offering new services, such as Wi-Fi calling, VoLTE and rich communication services (RCS), a lot easier. Interop partnered with voice-over-Wi-Fi specialist Taqua to develop the suite.
“We developed CorePlusXSM to solve real market problems for operators burdened by the extraordinary cost, complexity and expertise requirements associated with IMS and advanced IP services,” said Interop Technologies CEO John Dwyer.
“VoWiFi is an important service offering that operators can utilize to solve real-world coverage issues immediately,” said Eric Pratt, Taqua’s CEO. “We’re working with Interop to reduce the barrier of entry to advanced IP voice and messaging services for European service providers with a robust WiFi calling solution they can deploy now.”
GSMA figures show that European mobile operators invested €155 billion between 2007 and 2014, according to Dwyer, and it estimates that another €170 billion of investment is needed for the following six years. This level of network investment is the catalyst for the IP Revolution and the European telecom market is preparing the path for the all-IP network explosion, said Dwyer.
Interop Technologies’ plan is to virtualise the IP Revolution so operators of all types and sizes can participate, he said. Interop is in the deployment phase with ‘several’ customers and plans to announce the roll-out of a major project later this year, it said.
As CorePlusXSM is a complete end-to-end virtualised solution, operators can quickly and cheaply launch IP services on 2G and 3G networks, while laying the path for future advanced service evolution, according to Interop. The reduction in cost, complexity and labour intensity gives companies a quick start, without limiting their options for adding new services as the network, business and subscriber demand evolves, according to Interop.
Rackspace has announced new managed security and compliance assistance services to protect businesses and mitigate the risk of cyber threats. These services will give Rackspace clients ‘holistic’ coverage across cover complex, multi-cloud environments, it claims.
The service will provide consultation and tailored security using Rackspace’s inhouse expertise. It can both improve security while cutting the cost of vigilance, Rackspace claimed.
The Rackspace Managed Security offering is to be backed by round the clock support from the Customer Security Operations Center (CSOC) at Rackspace headquarters and will open in October. The service comprises four elements: host and network protection, vulnerability management, threat intelligence and compliance assistance.
Host and Network Protection will protect against zero-day and non-malware attacks as well as traditional compromise tactics. Security Analytics uses a security information and event management (SIEM) system paired with big data analytics to collect and analyse security data from the customer’s environment. As part of its Vulnerability Management service Rackspace will scan its clients’ environments and tailor its responses to estimated threats. Meanwhile, its Threat Intelligence will use fuse information from 20 feeds with Rackspace’s own internal data to constantly redraw the changing threat landscape.
All this information will help clients meet their governance objectives, as part of Rackspace’s Compliance Assistance service, which offers detailed proof of configuration hardening and monitoring, patch monitoring and user observance, the service provider said.
This information, in tandem with detail about file integrity, will help cloud service managers and CIOs to keep on top of their mounting compliance challenge, claimed Brian Kelly, chief security officer at Rackspace.
“Cyber-attacks are the new normal for companies,” said Kelly. It will be a lot cheaper and quicker to use Rackspace to manage cloud services, said Kelly. “We have 16 years of first-hand knowledge managing IT infrastructure and direct experience with today’s complex threats.”
Enterprise software vendor MapR has unveiled plans to slash the workload of IoT developers and administrators by cutting the complexity of managing its NoSQL databases.
The key to this simplification, it says, is in more creative use of the JavaScript Object Notification (JSON) format, which it claims has the potential to make significant improvements in both database scalability and the analysis of the information they contain.
“We’re seeing big changes in the way applications are developed and how data is consumed,” said MapR’s chief marketing officer Jack Norris, “the underlying data format is the key to making information sharing easier.”
Bringing out the advantages of JSON makes administration easier, according to Norris, because users can make changes easily in a database built on documents. This in turn helps developers when they are planning applications, because it is easier to create a user friendly system. Tweaking JSON will benefit system builders in their own work too, Norris argued, since a document database can now be given enterprise grade scalability, reliability and integrated analytics.
The organisational improvements include the ability to personalise and deliver better online shopping experiences, reduce risk and prevent fraud in real-time, improve manufacturing efficiencies and cut costs. Savings will come from preventing cluster sprawl, eliminating data silos and lowering the cost of ownership of data management, claims MapR. Meanwhile it has promised a productivity dividend from continuous analytics of real-time data.
The MapR-DB supports the Open JSON Application Interface (OJAITM), which is designed to be a general purpose JSON access layer across databases, file systems and message streams, enabling a flexible and unified interface to work with big data, claims MapR.
The addition of a document database capacity extends the NoSQL MapR-DB to cover more types of unstructured business data, said one analyst. This could make it faster and easier to build big data applications, without the burden of shuffling data around first.
“MapR continues to build on the innovative data platform at the core of its Hadoop distribution,” said Nik Rouda, senior analyst at the Enterprise Strategy Group.
A new IoT system can predict crime by reading social media and analysing the public’s movements, claims Hitachi data Systems (HDS).
Hybrid cloud systems designed by HDS are to offer new automated policing systems, including predictive crime analytics and video management systems. The new public safety technologies were unveiled yesterday by HDS at the ASIS International Annual Seminar and Exhibits in Anaheim, California.
The new Hitachi Visualization Suite (HVS) (version 4.5) now includes Predictive Crime Analytics (PCA) and version 2.0 of the Video Management Platform (VMP).
The PCA predicts crime by analysing live social media and Internet data feeds to gather intelligent insights which enable the users of the system to make ‘highly accurate crime predictions’, claims HDS. Both social media and video camera data will be analysed for both historical crime and to predict potential incidents.
The HVS is a hybrid cloud-based platform that integrates disparate data and video assets from public safety systems, such as computer-aided emergency services dispatch, number plate readers and gunshot sensors. The real time info is then presented geospatially to monitors at law enforcement agencies in order to improve intelligence, support their investigations and make policing more efficient, says HDS. The geospatial visualizations will also provide better historical crime data, by presenting information on crime in several forms, including heat maps.
Blending real-time event data from public safety systems with historical and contextual crime data allows agencies to conduct more thorough analysis, using spatial and temporal prediction algorithms, that could help solve many hitherto unsolvable crimes. It could also provide underlying risk factors that generate or mitigate crime, says HDS.
The system uses natural language processing for topic intensity modelling using social media networks which, HDS claims, will deliver highly accurate crime predictions.
The systems will ultimately create faster police response times when situations develop, according to Mark Jules, HDS’s VP of Public Safety and Data Visualization. “Today, we are empowering them with the ability to take a proactive approach to crime and terrorism,” said Jules, “Public safety is a fundamental pillar of our vision for smart cities and societies.”