Where is your data right now? The explosion of cloud computing and consumer IT means that your data, as well as data about you, can be virtually anywhere.
Having your data and the data about you virtually everywhere is, in fact, key to the cloud computing business model. This means that traditional security concepts that focus in depth on infrastructure defense no longer apply. No one knows and understands this more than Dell’s Brett Hansen, Executive Director, Dell Data Security Solutions.
Monthly Archives: September 2015
Fujitsu aims to help CIOs master hybrid IT through new functionality
(c)iStock.com/ricochet64
Japanese IT giant Fujitsu has announced new functionality which the company claims will help CIOs to deliver hybrid IT environments without compromising compliance and data security.
The company is announcing Fujitsu Cloud Services Management, which builds on the previous Fujitsu Cloud Integration Platform and aims to enable unified management of various cloud environments, across different departments within an organisation.
Fujitsu is also announcing an extension of its range of standardised managed services, and says it continues to invest in cloud platforms. As this publication reported, last year the IT giant ploughed over £1 billion into strengthening its infrastructure as a service (IaaS), software as a service (SaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS) base. According to Fujitsu, the company grew its global year on year IaaS revenues by 49% last year ,with 91% growth in its virtual cloud IaaS business.
“Hybrid IT is the new reality across many organisations’ IT estates as cloud services become an increasingly important element of overall IT services,” said Joel O’Halloran, Fujitsu SVP head of managed infrastructure services and digital business platform. “CIOs of course recognise the enormous potential that cloud-based services have to offer – but to fully recognise the benefits, they need to be properly integrated and managed as part of the wider IT services.
“Therefore Fujitsu supports its customers by integrating and orchestrating these services with traditional IT so that they can gain sustainable competitive advantage.”
Many pundits in the industry are advocating a move towards hybrid architecture for greater business agility and data security. Ian Finlay, chief operating officer of Abiquo, wrote in this publication earlier this month: “As enterprise IT evaluates the best technical approach for hybrid IT management, it’s vitally important that the speed, flexibility and agility drawing end users to public cloud in the first place be preserved in the hybrid model.”
Splunk Accelerates Momentum in the Internet of Things | @ThingsExpo @Splunk #IoT
“The Internet of Things transforms the way organizations leverage machine data and gain insights from it,” noted Splunk’s CTO Snehal Antani, as Splunk announced accelerated momentum in Industrial Data and the IoT. The trend is driven by Splunk’s continued investment in its products and partner ecosystem as well as the creativity of customers and the flexibility to deploy Splunk IoT solutions as software, cloud services or in a hybrid environment. Customers are using Splunk® solutions to collect and correlate data from control systems, sensors, mobile devices and IT systems for a variety of Industrial Data and IoT use cases. These use cases include operational efficiency, predictive maintenance, industrial cybersecurity and asset analytics.
Join @HarbingerSys at @CloudExpo Silicon Valley | #API #Cloud #BigData #Microservices
SYS-CON Events announced today that Harbinger Systems will exhibit at SYS-CON’s 17th International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on November 3–5, 2015, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA. Harbinger Systems is a global company providing software technology services. Since 1990, Harbinger has developed a strong customer base worldwide. Its customers include software product companies ranging from hi-tech start-ups in Silicon Valley to leading product companies in the US and large in-house IT organizations.
Join Secure Infrastructure & Services at @CloudExpo Silicon Valley | #API #Cloud #BigData
SYS-CON Events announced today that Secure Infrastructure & Services will exhibit at SYS-CON’s 17th International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on November 3–5, 2015, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
Secure Infrastructure & Services (SIAS) is a managed services provider of cloud computing solutions for the IBM Power Systems market. The company helps mid-market firms built on IBM hardware platforms to deploy new levels of reliable and cost-effective computing and high availability solutions, leveraging the cloud and the benefits of Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS).
Join @MangoSpring at @CloudExpo Silicon Valley | #API #APM #Cloud #BigData #Microservices
SYS-CON Events announced today that MangoApps will exhibit at SYS-CON’s 17th International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on November 3–5, 2015, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
MangoApps provides private all-in-one social intranets allowing workers to securely collaborate from anywhere in the world and from any device. Social, mobile, and easy to use. MangoApps has been named a “Market Leader” by Ovum Research and a “Cool Vendor” by Gartner. 20,000+ business customers worldwide.
John Lennon and #DevOps | @DevOpsSummit @CAinc #API #Docker #BigData
“Life,” according to a saying often attributed to John Lennon, “is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.”
Nowhere is this truer than in IT – especially in the world of ops. Operations staffs spend much of their time firefighting infrastructure emergencies. These unplanned activities drive up costs and keep IT from focusing on the support of new projects that have strategic value to the business.
And, according to numbers from IDC and others, things are getting worse – not better. IT’s server firefighting costs have multiplied by 8-10x over the past 20 years, while spending on servers themselves has remained flat. So IT leaders have to more aggressively confront the issue of unplanned activities if they’re going to survive the coming application onslaught.
DataStax Enterprise delivered with Microsoft Azure to run on any cloud
Open source distributed database developer Datastax has worked with partner Microsoft to fine tune the delivery of its new cloud based system over the latter’s Azure service.
The new service, DataStax Enterprise (DSE) running on Microsoft’s Azure cloud service, was unveiled at the Cassandra Summit in California.
Databases no longer have to be centralised to have integrity according to Microsoft and Datastax, who claim to have created a distributed database that runs smoothly across all the varieties of the cloud. Datastax claims its DSE makes it easy to move Apache Cassandra and DSE workloads between data centres, service providers and Azure. DataStax claims customers can now build hybrid applications that can make full use of all three resources.
The new system aims to bring a stable version of a database to the cloud, overcoming the challenge of maintain one version of each record when elements of the database are stored on different computers at different locations. Datastax claims it can overcome the technical difficulties involved in both integrity and scalability so that users can enjoy the advantage of cloud computing, like flexibility of scale and cost controls, without surrendering the traditional strengths of a monolithic system.
The fine-tuning of the DSE with Azure ensures that the enterprises can have a development and production-ready ‘bring your own license’ clusters, claimed DataStax CEO Billy Bosworth. These can be launched in minutes on the Azure Marketplace platform using Azure resource management (ARM) templates, he told delegates at the summit.
Increasingly DataStax Enterprise customers use the database in hybrid cloud environments. Its alignment with Microsoft helps any company needing to build high-performance IoT, mobile and web apps quickly, said Bosworth.
“DataStax is a natural partner as it can build systems that scale across thousands of servers, which is ideal for a hyper-scale cloud environment,” said Scott Guthrie, Microsoft VP for Cloud and Enterprise.
The Forrester Wave Report: Enterprise Public Cloud Platforms | @CloudExpo #API #Cloud
According to Forrester, public cloud platforms are evolving, blurring the lines between Software as a Service (SaaS), Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), and Platform as a Service (PaaS) in order to satisfy the needs of enterprises and widen their appeal to developers.
In The Forrester Wave™: Enterprise Public Cloud Platforms, Q4 2014, Forrester evaluates the 16 most significant Enterprise Public Cloud Platforms and details how each vendor fulfills the 19 evaluation criteria points.
Backblaze launches cheap cloud storage service
Backup service provider Backblaze has made a cloud storage service available for beta testing. When launched it could provide businesses with a cheap alternative to the Amazon S3 and the storage services bundled with Microsoft Azure and Google’s Cloud.
According to sources, Backblaze B2 will offer a free tier of service of up to 10GB storage, with 1GB/ per day of outbound traffic and unlimited inbound bandwidth. Developers will be able to access it through an API and command-line interface, but the service will also offer a web interface for less technical users.
Launched in 2007 Backblaze stores 150 petabytes of backup data and over 10 billion files on its servers, having built its own storage pods and software as a policy. Now, it intends to use this infrastructure building knowledge to offer a competitive cloud storage service, according to CEO Gleb Budman.
“We spent 90 per cent of our time and energy on building out the cloud storage and only 10 per cent on the front end,” Glebman told Tech Crunch. The stability of its backup service technology persuaded many users to extend the service into data storage. In response to customer demand,
Backblaze’s engineers spent a year working on the software to make this possible. Now the company is preparing to launch a business to business service that, it says, can compete with the cloud storage market’s incumbents on price and availability.
Backblaze’s service, when launched, will be half the price of Amazon Glacier, and ‘about a fourth’ of Amazon’s S3 service, according to sources. “Storage is still expensive,” Glebman said.
Though the primary use for Backblaze B2 will be to store images, videos and other documents, Budman said he expects some users to use it to store large research data sets.