Monthly Archives: October 2015

Adobe, Content & Applications, Document Management, DropBox, News & Analysis, Storage, Storage as a Service

Adobe tweaks Document Cloud to unblock Dropbox and make e-signing easier

AdobeAdobe has announced two improvements to document management in the cloud, by making PDF files more manageable in Dropbox and solving one of the snags in electronic document signing.

One billion users of Adobe Acrobat DC and Adobe Acrobat Reader will now be able to edit PDFs as they sit in Dropbox folders, the vendor has announced, as it has worked with Dropbox to simplify the way that PDF files can be edited with Adobe apps.

According to Adobe, the billion mobile devices and desktop computers in the world that have Adobe Acrobat software contain 18 billion PDF files whose functions are limited by Dropbox. The blockage that stopped users from editing those files has now been removed as part of a drive to make Adobe Document Cloud more efficient, the vendor claims.

The improvement was achieved after the two companies integrated their applications and services on mobile devices, desktops and the web, according to Kevin M. Lynch, general manager of Adobe Document Cloud.

Users can now view and edit PDF files stored in their Dropbox Basic, Pro and Dropbox for Business accounts with any changes automatically saved back to Dropbox. Collaboration has also been simplified, Abode claims, as Acrobat DC users can now execute the full range of tasks promised by the application. Editing text on PDF files, organising pages and converting documents to their original format will no longer be hindered by Dropbox environment. Meanwhile, the synchronisation of documents will no longer be restricted by glitches between Adobe and Dropbox operating software.

Adobe has had to adjust as customers have constantly evolved, said Lynch. “Today, mobile has become the rule and people expect to complete work quickly and simply wherever and whenever they need. Our work with Dropbox will help Document Cloud customers be more productive,” said Lynch.

Adobe has also created new options for e-signing in Document Cloud in a bid to make electronic document management easier. New functions include a visual drag-and-drop Workflow Designer, digital signatures (a more advanced secure form of e-signatures) and Enterprise Mobility Management and Signature Capture.

Adobe said it has worked with Workday, Salesforce and Ariba to add e-signing options to their respective HR, sales, procurement and legal systems.

Bryan Lamkin, Adobe digital media’s general manager, promised, “a new level of efficiency”.

Desktop virtualization, Parallels Business Solutions, Parallels Desktop, Parallels Desktop for Mac, the future of work, thought leadership

Why Desktop Virtualization Matters Today

This blog post has been reprinted with permission from Jeff Steiner, Parallels Sr. Director of Product Marketing, from his LinkedIn blog. The original piece can be found here. I have a pretty strange background. I was a developer for over a decade and then made the switch to the business side (and Product Marketing no […]

The post Why Desktop Virtualization Matters Today appeared first on Parallels Blog.

News

Azure Cloud Security Enhancement

One of the most anticipated user management and security features for Microsoft Azure has officially been launched. According to Alex Simons, director of program management at Microsoft’s Identity Division, the Azure Roles-Based Access Control, or RBAC, is now generally available. RBAC has been requested by customers that have evaluated Azure as the foundation of their own enterprise cloud sectors. Azure Roles-Based Access Control permits administrators to selectively grant access to both cloud services and production workloads,  adding a level of security.

As Dushyant Gill, a Microsoft Azure Active Directory program manager explained, “Until now, to give people the ability to manage Azure you had to give them full control of an entire Azure subscription. Now, using RBAC, you can grant people only the amount of access that they need to perform their jobs.” RBAC interfaces with Azure Active Directory (AD), Microsoft’s cloud-based identity management platform, to show users their assigned Azure resources. Once you extend your Active Directory to the cloud, using Azure AD—your employees can purchase and manage Azure subscriptions using their existing work identity. These Azure subscriptions automatically connect to your Azure AD for single sign-on and access management.”

Azure

If an Active Directory account becomes disabled, access to all Azure subscriptions is cut off, enhancing the security of the azure program. Roles-Based Access Control may also provide departments a certain level of independence whilst still being compliant with the organizations IT policies. Gill described, “Using Azure RBAC, you can enable self-service management of cloud resources for your project teams while retaining central control over security sensitive infrastructure. For example, a common setup is to allow project teams to create and manage their own virtual machines and storage accounts, but only allow them to connect to networks managed by a central team.”

RBAC is currently available with a multitude of preset roles; however, “if none of the built-in RBAC roles addresses your specific access need, you will be able to create a custom RBAC role composing the exact operations to which you wish to grant access” (Gill).

The post Azure Cloud Security Enhancement appeared first on Cloud News Daily.

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Rancher Labs to Present at @DevOpsSummit | @Rancher_Labs #DevOps #Containers #Microservices

Containers are all the rage among developers and web companies, but they also represent two very substantial benefits to larger organizations. First, they have the potential to dramatically accelerate the application lifecycle from software builds and testing to deployment and upgrades. Second they represent the first truly hybrid-approach to consuming infrastructure, allowing organizations to run the same workloads on any cloud, virtual machine or physical server. Together, they represent a very real opportunity for DevOps teams to drive faster development and cheaper operations, without many of the limitations of existing PaaS platforms.

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Why the culture shift is the most important factor in your cloud strategy

(c)iStock.com/-MG-

In a recent study which spoke with 300 companies on cloud adoption, 82% of the enterprises stated they had a hybrid cloud strategy, up from 74% in 2014. The continual growth of cloud adoption, in particular for enterprises, is becoming increasingly tricky to ignore.

Before you make this big step, however, there are a number of factors you must take into consideration. What vendor will you select? How will you implement the most effective cloud strategy? And, most importantly of all, how will this impact the company culture and the workforce as a whole?

It’s a factor that can often slip a company’s mind, but the culture shift that can occur from enterprise cloud adoption could have damaging ramifications if not handled correctly. Implement it the right way, however, and you enable your workforce and company to hit the ground running, embracing the many positives that come with such a change. It’s up to you. 

Implementing a culture shift

You’ve chosen your cloud provider. You’ve implemented an effective enterprise-wide strategy. The next, and arguably most important step, is to make the culture shift as applicable and seamless as possible. Many within your workforce may be used to working a certain way for some time now. They’ve relied on emails and documents for communication and have yet to fully experience this form of cloud collaboration. It may be a shock to their working day system. It’s therefore your responsibility to prepare your workforce for this adjustment, highlighting the benefits, and educating them on a new way of collaborating. 

A survey of several hundred companies by CMSWire found that social, interactive communications, and collaboration technologies resulted in significant benefits, including a 15% increase in productivity across the average enterprise, 2%-4% increase in overall revenue, 21% reduction in email, and 16% decrease in meetings. The benefits of cloud collaboration are there to be seen. You must now highlight this to your workforce, guiding them accordingly. 

The why

A company’s employees are its most important commodity. If they aren’t motivated, engaged or in line with a new cloud adoption, the odds of it succeeding plummets substantially. Unhappy or unengaged employees equals lower productivity, which costs American businesses alone over $300 billion a year. On the other hand, companies with happy employees outperform competition by 20%, are 2.1% above industry benchmarks, and earn 1.2%-1.7% more than peer firms. Quite simply, you can’t afford to have your workforce displeased or uneducated on your cloud adoption and the benefits that come with it. 

If there’s one keyword that belongs alongside an enterprise cloud platform, it’s collaboration. Cloud adoption provides tools for co-workers to communicate with ease, encouraging a collaborative work culture. That collaborative culture, however, can’t come to fruition if the workforce isn’t on board with the changes, or isn’t trained appropriately. 

The how

Implementing a culture shift for an entire organisation can’t be achieved overnight. It requires time, patience, knowledge sharing, training, and strong leadership. Firstly, don’t spring this change on your workforce without warning. Inform everyone of the cloud adoption plans before implementing them, and start a back and forth discussion. Does everyone understand the changes? Do people have concerns? Are people fully aware of the benefits aligned with this platform? If you can resolve these issues and queries beforehand, you’ll be able to provide a far more effective and unified culture shift.

The proof is in the cloud-filled pudding. By 2018, more than 60% of enterprises will have at least half of their infrastructure on cloud-based platforms. It’s a platform that is assisting companies worldwide, and the benefits are clear to see. It’s on you, however, to make these benefits clear to the rest of your workforce, along with having them fully prepared before the new platform is implemented. Doing so will enable everyone within the organisation to embrace their new cloud adoption with great energy, involvement, and competence.

Forefront of adoption

By 2017, cloud adoption is expected to hit $250 billion, with the worldwide software as a service (SaaS) market growing at a rate of 20.2% every year. Enterprise cloud adoption shows no signs of slowing down. Stay one step ahead of your competitors by preparing your workforce for the impending changes, and putting them at the forefront of the adoption.

Enterprise cloud platforms concentrate heavily on collaboration. Surely you can’t expect your cloud platform to truly succeed if your workforce doesn’t have a collaborate culture? If you can implement this culture shift, then the often trickiest, and most vital part of the workplace transformation is already complete. 

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DevOps gaining ground in businesses, but data security fears linger

(c)iStock.com/AzmanL

The DevOps movement is gaining ground in the UK with spending topping £1 million for one in three UK organisations, according to latest research published by Delphix.

More than three quarters (77%) of organisations surveyed said they had introduced dedicated budgets and support teams for DevOps. Companies have on average introduced seven DevOps initiatives over the past 24 months, with this figure expected to rise to nine in the next two years.

The influences for DevOps are evident. Two thirds (66%) of teams say they need to deliver software faster, while almost half (49%) say the volume of applications that businesses support is increasing and code is being released more frequently.

Almost three in five (59%) of those polled say DevOps is somewhat to strongly defined – yet the responsibility of who controls DevOps initiatives is still up in the air, with 28% opting for the development side, 22% the operations side and the remaining 50% saying both combined.

The first part of the report’s results, released back in August, showed similar disparity. The most popular definition for DevOps was “developers and system administrators collaborating to ease the transition between development and production” (84%), compared to 69% opting for “using infrastructure automation to facilitate self-service provisioning of infrastructure by development teams.”

Even if the definition is not quite there, organisations are increasingly turning to DevOps to identify defects before they get into production. More than half (56%) of businesses identify issues either once the application has been deployed to production, or during QA and validation, which takes on average five days to resolve.

Yet 46% of teams admit they experience delays waiting for testing and development data environments. The result is that teams are often working against data security constraints, with four in 10 respondents admitting developers and QA personnel are given unaudited access to production data.

“The pace at which companies need to securely deliver and update applications has increased drastically over the last few years,” said Iain Chidgey, VP international sales at Delphix. “Traditionally, IT could update applications once or twice a year, but today expectations are much higher, with releases being pushed out weekly, daily or even hourly.”

You can find more about the 2015 State of DevOps report here.

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Announcing @Supermicro_SMCI to Exhibit at @CloudExpo Silicon Valley | #Cloud

SYS-CON Events announced today that Super Micro Computer, Inc., a global leader in high-performance, high-efficiency server, storage technology and green computing, will exhibit at the 17th International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on November 3–5, 2015, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
Supermicro (NASDAQ: SMCI), the leading innovator in high-performance, high-efficiency server technology is a premier provider of advanced server Building Block Solutions® for Data Center, Cloud Computing, Enterprise IT, Hadoop/Big Data, HPC and Embedded Systems worldwide. Supermicro is committed to protecting the environment through its “We Keep IT Green®” initiative and provides customers with the most energy-efficient, environmentally-friendly solutions available on the market.

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News & Analysis, RadiSys, Sanctum, SDN, Virtualisation

Radisys and Sanctum create SDN solution to lost revenue

Network Function VirtualisationService accelerator Radisys is working with software defined networking (SDN) specialist Sanctum Networks to create a carrier-class cloud service that can support communication service providers (CSPs) worldwide.

The SDN cloud was built by combining Sanctum’s Jupiter SDN Controller with Radisys’ FlowEngine Intelligent Traffic Distribution System. Together they aim to create a software defined infrastructure powerful enough to identify, provide and support instant network service offerings with complete visibility.

Using this foundation, the partners say, CSPs will have a much better chance of redefining and improving the subscriber experience and guaranteeing a better of level of service. Software defined networking will also create more options for new over the top services for mobile telcos looking for new revenue streams, the collaborators claim.

The cloud is built on Sanctum’s intelligent SDN orchestrator and FlowEngine’s programmable data plane processor. The system can optimise service delivery in real-time as demands change and also unifies data across many silos, claims Joseph Sulistyo, director of product management and strategy, Radisys. Success hinges on how enthusiastically the network administrators take to the system and get the full use out of it, according to Sulistyo. “Sanctum Networks has developed a well-designed user interface and dynamic network programming model,” said Sulistyo.

Mobile telcos need somebody to remove the complexity of cloud service delivery in real-world deployments, explained Nazneen Shaikh, vice president of product management at Sanctum Networks. “CSPs can improve service visibility into their network, while ensuring carrier-grade reliability, scale and performance,” said Shaikh.

The billing, network and application data at many mobile operators is all over the place, according to Ravi Palepu, senior director of global telco solutions at revenue management specialist Virtusa. “As a consequence many telcos are either losing revenue by under billing, or losing customers by over billing,” said Palepu, “anything that unifies the data could help telcos identify where they are losing money.”

acquisition, colocation, Datacentre, Digital Reality, M&A, News & Analysis, Telx

Digital Realty completes acquisition of colocation rival Telx for $1.9 billion

datacentreGlobal data centre operator Digital Realty has completed the acquisition of colocation provider Telx in a deal valued at $1.886 billion. Telx will now operate as Digital Realty’s colocation and connectivity line of business.

Funding the acquisition doubles Digital Realty’s footprint in the colocation business and gives it a new interconnection platform, explained William Stein, Digital Realty’s Chief Executive Officer. Digital Realty raised gross proceeds of approximately $1.9 billion of debt and equity capital to fund the Telx acquisition, after settling its forward equity sale transactions with each of its forward counterparties to issue 10.5 million shares and receive $714 million.

Further funding was provided when subsidiary Digital Delta Holdings issued $500 million of 3.400 per cent Notes and $450 million of 4.750 per cent Notes. In August it raised $250 million by closing its underwritten public offering of 10 million shares of 6.350 per cent series I Cumulative Redeemable Preferred Stock.

Stein said the vendor is looking to blend its technical real estate expertise with a more expansive global reach as customers demand new products and services.

“The combination of Digital Realty’s and Telx’s portfolios of data centres and capacity gives customers the platform they need to grow and compete in a data-driven world.  Our focus will give them the ability to scale on a global basis,” said Stein. The company is now so big that nobody can compete with it, he argued. “This acquisition creates unrivalled choice and value, when and where our customers need it,” said Stein.

cloud security, Internet of Things, IoT, KDDI, Kii, News & Analysis

Kii and KDDI say their joint platform will make IoT safe on cloud

Secure cloudJapanese telco KDDI is working with Internet of Things (IoT) cloud platform provider Kii to create a risk averse system in which enterprises can develop mobile apps.

The KDDI cloud platform service (KCPS) is described as a mobile back end as a service (mBaaS) offering that uses Kii’s software to create mobile and IoT apps on a private network. The two companies have worked together on ways to apply cloud disciplines for efficient sharing of resources, contained within the confines on an Intranet environment. The object of the collaboration is to allow companies to develop machine to machine systems, without exposing them to the public cloud while they are in development.

According to KDDI, the KCPS uses the telco’s Wide Area Virtual Switch to integrate a number of different virtual network layers with Kii’s software. Together they create a new level of fast connections across the Intranet. KCPS also provides a service environment for intranet-conscious customers who need high standards of security and enterprise functions without resorting to the public Internet, according to the vendor.

KDDI claims this is the first instance in which both Intranet and Internet services can work seamlessly with any mobile application developed on the KCPS platform.

KDDI’s application development support will allow developers to build better quality, lower priced applications in a short period of time, it claims. The platform is designed to help developers manage application development, devices and data, while providing essential features like push notifications and geo-location information. KCPS should be compatible with mobile apps on Android and iOS, according to KDDI.

“As the IoT gains mass acceptance, we see tremendous value helping mobile app developers get more IoT devices into the hands of consumers,” said Kii CEO Masanari Arai, “our collaboration will use the cloud to build the backend support of these apps in Japan.”