Proxies are one of the more interesting (in my no-doubt biased opinion) “devices” in the network. They’re the basis for caching, load balancing, app security, and even app acceleration services. They’re also a bridge between dev and ops and the network, being commonplace to all three groups and environments in most data center architectures.
But not all proxies are built on the same architectural principles, which means not all proxies are created equal. A large number of proxies are half-proxies while others are full-proxies, and the differences between them are what mean the difference between what you can and cannot do with them. In fact, there are three very important things you can do with a full-proxy that you can’t do with a regular old proxy.

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“Open source is a very powerful thing and lies at the heart of most modern technology. It’s useful to a lot of people and a lot of companies invest in it,” stated Alex Gorbachev, President of Intelligent Systems Services Inc., in this SYS-CON.tv interview at 17th Cloud Expo, held November 3-5, 2015, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.

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For the last 15 years, companies operating in the United States and Europe have benefited from Safe Harbor – a streamlined process that allowed U.S. companies to transfer and store European citizens’ data in the U.S. provided a level of privacy protections were adhered to according to outlined European standards. Recently, however, an Irish court has ruled, in a case brought by an Austrian citizen concerned about how Facebook was handling his private data, that the Safe Harbor agreement is inconsistent with European privacy law, as it did not require all organizations entitled to work with EU privacy-related data to comply with it. The court’s decision means Ireland’s Data Privacy Commissioner must review the merits of the case and make a final determination about whether Facebook is allowed to transfer private data from its European users to the United States. In the mean time, companies that had relied on the Safe Harbor process can no longer do so. In today’s data-centric business world, the ruling comes as a blow to thousands of companies operating at the global scale that are now faced with navigating new, complicated individual standards – across multiple regions.

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“eFolder does a lot of different things but we protect data and we are focused on protecting data no matter where it resides,” explained Carlo Tapia, Product Marketing Manager at eFolder, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at Cloud Expo, held November 3-5, 2015, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.

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Actifio is powering new application development and testing services from Net3 Technologies (N3T), a managed cloud services provider. N3T’s new Symmetry DevOps™ service builds on its existing Palmetto Virtual Data Center (PvDC) Cloud services for data backup and disaster recovery (DR) based on the Actifio Copy Data Virtualization platform.

Previously, N3T’s data protection and DR services were challenged by overlapping and inefficient legacy hardware and software platforms from multiple vendors, which meant higher costs in licensing and management overhead, and difficulty in responding rapidly to client needs. It was also time consuming for N3T staff needing to perform manual operations across all of these point tools. Shifting these services to Actifio’s platform replaced the inefficiency of multiple backup and replication tools with one simple, manageable access point. For N3T, this enabled it to free up staff time, improve customer satisfaction with a new self-service portal that integrates with the Actifio Foresight™ API, and allow for increased revenues from expanded service offerings.

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Certain CIOs for incomprehensible reasons keep off their cloud transformation projects several key IT disciplines including Enterprise Architecture (EA), IT Service Management (ITSM) and most importantly Project Management. Do they consider them obsolete? useless? irrelevant? ITaaS Strategist Philippe Abdoulaye provides 7 keys that will boost PMOs and make them pivotal to any ITaaS (or cloud-related) transformation projects.

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As competitive organizations move away from quarterly software releases to faster releases, they are being forced to face the inevitable adoption of DevOps processes and efficiencies.
Businesses today want to deliver software improvements at weekly and even daily intervals, especially in SaaS environments, for mobile apps, and for cloud-based workloads. Yet those kinds of delivery speeds are inconceivable with any kind of manual software development processes.

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Cloud computing is unquestionably one of the driving forces of DevOps, as the automation of operations transforms enterprise software development. DevOps, however, is more than a technology trend, as it represents a move toward silo-busting, self-organizing horizontal teams that drive business velocity.
At the same time, enterprise Digital Transformation represents an upheaval across the enterprise, as customer preferences and behavior drive enterprise technology decisions. This transformation extends well beyond technology, however, as companies must rethink their organizational structure, moving toward silo-busting, self-organizing horizontal teams… sound familiar?

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Software Measurement is a tricky business. When we all agree on what the thing we are trying to count is, like pieces of candy in a jar, it is simple. Sadly, software isn’t candy in a jar.
We try to count things like bugs, or lines of code, of number of stories completed in a sprint but never agree on what any of those things are in the first place. I have been in trouble more than once in my role as a tester from having my performance judged based on number of bugs I reported in a sprint, or the number of test cases written for a release.
Metrics can be dangerous, but we can also use them to build a more complete story about our software.
Let’s take a look at how metrics and APIs can go together.

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