SYS-CON Events announced today that Adobe has been named “Bronze Sponsor” of SYS-CON’s 18th Cloud Expo, which will take place on June 7-9, 2016, at the Javits Center in New York, New York.
Adobe is changing the world though digital experiences. Adobe helps customers develop and deliver high-impact experiences that differentiate brands, build loyalty, and drive revenue across every screen, including smartphones, computers, tablets and TVs. Adobe content solutions are used daily by millions of companies worldwide-from publishers and broadcasters, to enterprises, marketing agencies and household-name brands. Building on its established design leadership, Adobe enables customers not only to make great content, but to manage, measure and monetize it for maximum impact.
Monthly Archives: May 2016
What is the role of SDN in data centre security?
Software Defined Networking (SDN) is a breakthrough which is seemingly in everyone’s technology roadmap, but not ‘sexy’ enough to command column inches in recent months. At Telco Cloud, Juniper Cloud Automation Architect Scott Alexander argued the use case for security.
Companies who are striving towards 100% secure are likely to be disappointed as most within the industry now accept this is not achievable. Irrelevant of how many advances are made to secure the data centre, there will always be a collection of individuals who dedicate time to find new weaknesses. The new objective for the majority is to remain as secure as possible, consistently, reacting as quickly as possible to new threats which may emerge.
One of the main challenges for the data centre is the traditional defence. A number of data centres have one large firewall around the perimeter, which can be effective at keeping out threats, but on the occasion one breaches defences, traditional data centres are very linear, allowing the threat to roam freely. Larger segments of the data centre will be ring fenced, however the same principle applies here; once you crack that defence you are once again free to roam.
Alexander highlighted once you write various SDN policies, you can define which applications can ‘talk’ to each other. Until this is defined through an effective SDN policy, an application can talk to any other application, create the free roaming problem. Once a threat is in the data centre damage control becomes very difficult.
If every application is a room with several doors, Alexander said though implementing SDN you can keep relevant doors open and close doors to areas a given applications has no need to have access to. Spinning up various applications allows you to retain internal perimeters and create a policy of damage control.
Virtualizing a company’s assets can be a painful process, as it has to be done application by application. This however can be an advantage as Alexander highlighted to understand what doors are open and closed, you have to analyse the applications individually; there isn’t currently a method to do a blanket risk assessment of your applications. As you are migrating the applications individually any case during the virtualization efforts, it shouldn’t be too much of a task to understand what doors are open.
For the most part, the concept of 100% secure has seemingly been irradiated from the industry; most have accepted it is almost impossible. However, segmented security can aid a team in driving towards the objective of remaining secure as possible, consistently.
[session] Network-Aware Orchestration By @GlueNetworks | @CloudExpo #Cloud
Enterprise networks are complex. Moreover, they were designed and deployed to meet a specific set of business requirements at a specific point in time. But, the adoption of cloud services, new business applications and intensifying security policies, among other factors, require IT organizations to continuously deploy configuration changes. Therefore, enterprises are looking for better ways to automate the management of their networks while still leveraging existing capabilities, optimizing performance and reducing operational risk through standardization and best-practice architectures.
[session] Secure Solutions for Storing and Moving Sensitive Data | @CloudExpo #Cloud
As cloud and storage projections continue to rise, the number of organizations moving to the cloud is escalating and it is clear cloud storage is here to stay. However, is it secure?
Data is the lifeblood for government entities, countries, cloud service providers and enterprises alike and losing or exposing that data can have disastrous results.
There are new concepts for data storage on the horizon that will deliver secure solutions for storing and moving sensitive data around the world.
In his session at 18th Cloud Expo, Scott Sobhani, CEO and cofounder of Cloud Constellation Corporation and the SpaceBelt, Information Ultra-Highway, attendees will learn about new best practices to bypass the Internet.
What happens to EU General Data Protection Regulation if the UK votes for a Brexit?
Businesses warned not to give up on data reforms just because UK could quit Europe
As the UK prepares to vote on whether to leave the European Union, businesses are being warned not to give up on data reforms inspired by the forthcoming EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
Businesses across the country have been studying implications of the new Regulation, due to be in force in May 2018, which aims to create a ‘one-stop shop’ for data protection across the European Union.
Some of the key aspects of the bill include huge fines for data breaches, new rules around the collection of personal data and new rights for European citizens to ask for data be deleted or edited. Many businesses will also be required to appoint a Data Protection Officer.
However, the Brexit vote opens up the possibility that the UK could be out of the EU by the time it comes into force.
John Culkin, Director of Information Management at Crown Records Management, said: “It would be tempting for businesses to think that if the UK leaves the EU this regulation would not apply. In fact, that isn’t the case. Although an independent Britain would not be a signatory of the Regulation, in reality it would still be impossible to avoid its implications.
“The Regulation governs the personal data of all European citizens, providing them with greater control and more rights over information held about them. So any company holding identifiable information of an EU citizen, no matter where it is based, needs to be aware. With millions of EU citizens living in the UK, too, it’s hard to imagine that many businesses here would be unaffected.
“The same applies to data breaches involving the personal data of European citizens. So it will still be vital to have a watertight information management system in place which allows businesses to know what information they have, where it is, how it can be edited and who is responsible for it.”
Even if the UK votes to leave the EU, data in Great Britain & Northern Ireland will continue to be regulated by the current Data Protection Act, which was passed in 1998.
A spokesperson for the Information Commissioners’ Office (ICO), an independent body set up to uphold information rights, said: “Although derived from an EU Directive, the Data Protection Act was passed by the UK Parliament and will remain in place after any exit, until Parliament decides to introduce a new law or amend it.
“The UK has a history of providing legal protection to consumers around their personal data. Our data protection laws precede EU legislation by more than a decade, and go beyond the current requirements set out by the EU, for instance with the power given to the ICO to issue fines.
“Having clear laws with safeguards in place is more important than ever given the growing digital economy, and is also central to the sharing of data that international trade relies on. The UK will continue to need clear and effective data protection laws, whether or not the country remains part of the EU.”
Culkin believes there is a real danger that UK businesses will defer crucial reforms of their information management systems – just in case the Brexit vote in June changes the agenda. But he warns it is a big risk.
He said: “Businesses should be thinking about the benefits of good information governance rather than hesitating because of what could happen in the future.
“There is no point putting in place systems that ignore privacy by design, for instance, when that is good procedure – no matter what happens in Europe in June. The same is true of measures to protect a business from data breaches, which have reputational as well as financial implications – no matter who imposes the fine.
“As for personal data, citizens, in the UK are only going to be more demanding about how their data is collected, stored and edited in future – the genie is out of the bottle and it’s not sensible to think that leaving the EU will change it. Preparing for a modern data world is not only about the GDPR.”
This a view shared by the ICO which will continue to ensure organisations meet their information rights obligations no matter how the UK votes.
A spokesperson said: “Ultimately, this is a decision for organisations based on their own particular circumstances. Revisiting and reassessing your data protection practices will serve you well whatever the outcome of the referendum. Investing in GDPR compliance will ensure an organisation has a high standard of data protection compliance that will enable the building of consumer trust.”
How to Leverage IIoT | @ThingsExpo #IoT #IIoT #M2M #InternetOfThings
The Internet of Things (IoT) is creeping into every aspect of our lives. With the advent of smart cities, smart manufacturing, precision agriculture, drones and digital energy, businesses and individuals alike have seen the influx of IoT technology. For example, a recent report from Gartner, “suggests that more than 26 billion devices will be connected to the internet by 2020, with 250,000 of them being vehicles.” So, with the billions of connected things, its only natural this week’s top news roundup would highlight how IoT is maturing and what experts see for the future ahead.
Tibco announces stream of new updates
Tibco has announced four new updates for its Spotfire, LiveView, community support and IoT offerings.
The company’s current focus is on leveraging analytics for augmented intelligence to discover new insights then productively share those insights across the enterprise in the shortest amount of time possible.
“Some in the industry would lead you to believe that computers are going to replace people. We think that’s dead wrong,” said Mark Palmer, SVP at Tibco. “Computers should serve to augment human experience and intellect. At Tibco, we focus our industry-leading visual, advanced, embedded and, streaming analytics solutions on delivering a pragmatic approach to cognitive computing, which we achieve by combining enhanced intelligence features with algorithmic automation capabilities.
“This combination encapsulates the essence of our Fast Data analytics platform – it balances human insight with intelligent technologies for superior productivity and a competitive advantage in end users’ respective markets.”
The Spotfire offering now includes self-service data preparation, management, and utilisation functionality to extend the platform’s analytics capabilities. The team highlighted the product requires no third-party coordination for data preparation, as the inline datawrangling functionality in Spotfire is built-in.
The company has also launched open source, BSD-licensed Accelerator package for Apache Spark and the IoT. The offering includes five subsystems; Connector, for edge connection to IoT and enterprise data; Digester, a stream data preparation layer; Finder, predictive model discovery template; Automator, a streaming analytics-based automation engine for Apache Spark; and Tracker, to monitor predictive models and automatically invoke model retraining.
LiveView now includes a code-free HTML5 operational-intelligence dashboard development platform for use with the Live Datamart. Finally, the team have introduced a new developer community space for sharing end-user-driven technical expertise, insights, and Wiki articles.
Salesforce reveals secret recipe for digital transformation
Speaking at the London edition of Salesforce’s world tour, EVP of Customer Success & Growth Simon Short outlined the case for digital transformation, and also the factors which underpin a successful transformation project itself.
Short’s view on digital transformation is there are very few companies who achieve the goal of becoming digitally orientated. This is done to three reasons. Firstly, the aggressive expansion of technology is so vast some organizations are drowning in information overload. Another is the cultural side of digital transformation, there simply aren’t enough companies embracing the necessity of cultural change. And finally, despite implementing various technologies and advanced platforms, some companies still operate in silos. Until these digital silos are connected on one overarching platform, the digital transformation journey is not complete.
The invention of chess is a good anecdote to demonstrate the progression of technology. The inventor, Ibn Khallikan, approached the Indian king with the game and his reward was to be rice, more specifically one grain for the first square on the chess board, two for the second, four for the third, and doubling there on until the end of the 64 squares. Although at first it would not appear to be a great amount, the geometric progression of the amount of rice far exceeded the king’s resources. Short believes the same theory can be applied to the growth of technology in the business world.
“If you apply the same doubling theory and Moore’s law to the growth and importance of technology, we get have way through the chess board in 2002,” said Short. “Since then we’ve seen an explosion of technology within the business world. As we continue to move forward, it’s a real challenge for those with existing technology to make the change and get ahead of the trend. No one really knows what the power of technology is and where it will go. This is the conundrum for businesses throughout the world.”
One of the main challenges here is focused around legacy technologies, businesses cannot rid themselves of the cumbersome platforms quickly enough to capitalize on the potential on emerging technologies. But at the same time, Short highlighted the companies who focus on technology implementation and do not embrace the cultural change required will not be successful in the digital transformation journey.
According to Short, digital transformation is so much more than simply implementing technology. Ensuring you employees embrace the digital change, as well as connecting the individual silos (for example the eCommerce platform to the customer call centre and also the logistics/delivery team), are more important aspects of the project than the technology itself. Without the digital culture and the connected model, the customer simply sees a business which is broken even if the technology is revolutionary. “Silos and culture are the two things which can kill any transformation project,” said Short.
But what is the secret to a successful digital transformation project? And what have the successful ‘Digital Masters’ done which other companies haven’t?
For Short, the project has to be led by the CEO and has to be phased in. The various different components of the project (business change, strategy, technology implementation, employee digital engagement etc.) have to be implemented hand-in-hand. If one area progresses faster than the rest, the project will stutter. And most importantly, there has to be a governance and accountability role, an area which most companies overlook, to ensure all components of the project are heading in the same direction and progressing at the same speed. In general, there are six lessons from Short’s and Salesforce’s perspective:
- Change has to be led from the CEO and not delegated down. The business unit and IT cannot get into a shouting match, pointed fingers at each other, the CEO needs to take control and pull the business along with him
- Physical and digital experience needs to be co-ordinated. The customer experiences the brand in the physical world as well as the digital despite the growth of the internet and technology; the physical and digital experience for the customer needs to be co-ordinated to be successful
- Outside-in thinking. Many companies make the mistake of telling their customers about how they are changing the brand, as opposed to understanding what the customer journey is and adapting the digital experience to enhance this.
- Understanding it’s okay to fail. This is one of the more challenging facets according to Short, as accountable businesses don’t like to fail. But the belief every PoC will be an extraordinary success is somewhat wishful thinking. Short highlighted being okay with failure is the only way to move on and achieve success.
- Data driven insights. The amount of data available to businesses is unprecedented and growing faster every day. Decisions should be based on the data available which has been derived directly from the customer. It removes uncertainty (as much as possible in any case) and provides justification.
- A single platform to connect the business units. Without a single platform to connect all business units, digital transformation cannot be achieved, as digital transformation should focus on the connected journey. The aim should be the seamlessly interact with the customer on all their touchpoints.
Digital transformation is a key objective for the majority of businesses around the world, and rightly so. According to MIT research which Short quoted on stage, digitally transformed businesses are 26% more profitable than what would be perceived as the norm, but too many companies are focusing on the technology as opposed to the customer. Until the ideas of culture, technology and silo connections are addressed on a level playing field, digital transformation cannot be achieved.
How to enable the ISV community with cloud computing
(c)iStock.com/roberthyrons
Access to computing resources has been democratised through access to low cost cloud platforms. Network access is now high-speed, low-cost and almost ubiquitous. Together, this means that cloud provides a perfect platform for the development and scalable delivery of applications. And the ISV community has a significant opportunity to take advantage.
Delivering value for customers
The SaaS model creates new opportunities for both ISVs and their customers. Consumption-based charging models enable both low cost-of-entry and low cost-of-software, so clients can experiment with applications that optimise business processes, drive higher efficiency, productivity and growth.
Such cloud-based models allow ISVs to focus on their core goals of developing and delivering applications; and improving their customer experience. Tasks like capacity management, infrastructure budget management and platform availability can all be offloaded to a cloud partner; and importantly, the costs of such operations can be married to usage and revenue for the ISV.
Other tasks can potentially be offloaded, too – ISVs working with a Managed Service Provider can also offload tasks such as patching, replication, redundancy and security. With the right partner, an ISV can deliver agility to the DevOps cycle and then rely on the service provider to implement change control, security or compliance enhancements, business continuity and to deliver a robust availability and performance SLA for the production applications.
Enabling customisation
ISVs can take a pragmatic approach in a move to SaaS, establishing whether it’s a good fit for their client base, their financial model and their software offering. However, they might have use cases that are better suited to a partner that can deliver hybrid solutions.
Applications delivered to end-users in heavily regulated industries may not be suited to multi-tenanted platforms, but may still sit well on discrete, dedicated infrastructure with appropriate security and compliance controls. Those cloud platforms where resources are rented by the hour may not necessarily offer the best value to applications with predictable workloads; or those where the end-user signs fixed-term contracts.
The combination of opportunities presented by IaaS and SaaS models has expanded the options available to ISVs for software development and delivery; and in turn provided a greater number of options and better-value solutions for end-users.
The cloud is reducing barriers to entry for new software businesses and allowing existing ISVs to be more agile, responsive to customers and innovative. Both the customers of these solutions and the ISVs themselves stand to gain considerable benefits by taking advantage of cloud infrastructure and managed services as long as due diligence is undertaken in this transition.
Choosing a cloud provider
Developers are now leveraging Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) and other cloud platforms to spin up cloud instances and to tear them down when they’re done, without any manual intervention, and all from one portal. However, there are a variety of service providers that offer an equal variety of cloud services. Software businesses need to consider their specific needs carefully when selecting a provider.
Key considerations should include:
- Uptime commitment from the service provider, particularly how this relates to the critical needs of the relevant application
- Whether a transparent billing mechanism is built in with the cloud offering
- API functionality to allow your software to drive the infrastructure
- Tools or native platform capabilities that allow rapid cloning and deployment of whole environments, enabling faster and more reliable DevOps cycles
- Whether that partner can deliver a robust, managed service wrap that enhances the user experience and delivers security to client data
The challenges ahead
Despite the opportunities it offers, the cloud is not a panacea for ISVs and challenges still remain in the delivery of secure, reliable software solutions to end-users. However, by partnering with a Managed Service Provider that can offer agile development platforms and robust delivery services, many software developers will be able to reap the benefits of increased focus on core business areas, improved user experience and faster, more agile DevOps cycles.
Amazon Web Services launches X1 instances on EC2 for SAP users
(c)iStock.com/Prykhodov
Amazon Web Services (AWS) has officially launched X1 instances for its EC2 cloud, which claim to have the most memory available in any SAP-certified cloud instance available today.
The instances have 2 terabytes of memory each and are, according to Amazon, a good fit for programmes such as the SAP HANA in-memory database, big data processing engines such as Apache Spark and Presto, as well as other high performance computing workloads. The memory available in X1 is eight times more than in any other instance on EC2.
“Amazon EC2 provides the most comprehensive selection of instances, offering customers, by far, the deepest compute functionality to support any workload,” said Matt Garman, Amazon EC2 VP in a statement. “XI instances change the game for SAP workloads in the cloud. Now, for the first time, customers can run their most memory-intensive applications at scale with the elasticity, flexibility, and reliability of the AWS Cloud, rather than having to battle the complexity, cost, and lack of agility of colo or on-premises solutions.”
This is not the first time AWS has waxed lyrical over SAP this week; earlier the cloud giant issued a release which noted a significant increase of customers running SAP applications on the AWS cloud. No specifics on numbers were given, but customers include GE Oil & Gas, Kellogg’s, and Zappos.com.
AWS as we know it turned 10 years old back in March, and still continues to be seen as the darling of the industry with a significant – almost unsurpassable – lead in infrastructure as a service and, in the words of Ian Moyse, Cloud Industry Forum and Eurocloud board member, taken companies such as Microsoft with it more quickly than expected.
X1 instances are available upon request to AWS customers in selected US, EU, and Asia Pacific regions, with the service being rolled out to more regions in the coming months.