ZenApp, or did you mean Citrix XenApp? XenApp (not ZenApp, we know, it’s confusing!) is a virtual application delivery tool offered by Citrix. Gone are the days when employees have to stick to their desktops. With the advent of virtualization technology, employees are now able to access applications and resources from any device, anywhere and […]
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Many of you are very familiar with iRules, our Tool Command Language (Tcl) based scripter. It’s a powerful application delivery tool to have a programmable proxy that allows you to manipulate – in real time – any network traffic passing through the BIG-IP. Many BIG-IP fans have used it to address their specific needs and some iRules have even been productized as features. For example, the cool ASM Data Mask feature that blocks sensitive info like SSN or credit card numbers from leaking out was once an iRule. Aw, our baby made it to the BIGs.
A common question we get is “How Do I Get To The Windows Taskbar In Coherence?”. (We’ll answer that, we swear!) Accessibility is a major factor that brought the term “ease of use” to modern technology. The Mac Dock and Windows Taskbar were even remarkably named “Access Hubs.” As you may already know, Coherence view mode in Parallels Desktop […]
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We have seen enterprise cloud evolve a lot in recent years, going from specific workloads running in the cloud to businesses looking at a cloud-first approach for many applications and processes. This rise was also reflected in the Verizon State of the Market: Enterprise Cloud 2016 report, which found that 84% of enterprises have seen their use of cloud increase in the past year, with 87% of these now using cloud for at least one mission-critical workload. Furthermore, 69% of businesses say that cloud has enabled them to significantly reengineer one or more business processes, giving a clear sign of the fundamental impact that cloud is having on the way we do business.
These findings give a clear sign that whilst companies will continue to leverage the cloud for niche applications, enterprises are now looking to put more business-centric applications in the cloud. This approach requires designing cloud-based applications that specifically fit each workload — taking into account geography, security, networking, service management expectations and the ability to quickly deploy the solution to meet rapidly changing business requirements. As a result, a core focus for 2016 will be the creation of individual cloud spaces that correspond to the individual needs of a given workload.
The key to cloud is collaboration
This focused alignment has led to the role of enterprise IT evolving to that of a cloud broker that must collaborate with lines of business to ensure overall success of the organisation. By using an actionable, scorecard approach for aligning cloud solutions with the needs of each workload, enterprises can make more informed assessments on how best to support applications in the cloud.
Three practical steps are as follows:
In addition to assessing the technical requirements, IT professionals must evaluate the applications’ risk profile. Using data discovery tools to look at the data flow is instrumental to detecting breaches and mitigating any impact.
Cloud is empowering IT professionals to gain a greater role in effectively impacting business results. Working in the right cloud environment allows for operational efficiency, increased performance, stringent security measures and robust network connectivity.
What’s on the horizon for cloud?
In the coming months and years, we will see an increased focus on the fundamental technology elements that enable the Internet of Things – cloud network and security. Networking and cloud computing are at the heart of IoT, comprising half of the key ingredients that make IoT possible. (Security and infrastructure are the other two.) This is not surprising considering IoT needs reliable, flexible network connections (both wireless and wireline) to move all the collected data and information from devices back to a central processing hub, without the need for human intervention. Similarly, cloud computing provides the flexibility, scale and security to host applications and store data.
Going forward, success will not be measured by merely moving to the cloud. Success will be measured by combining favourable financials and user impact with enhanced collaboration and information sharing across a business’ entire ecosystem. Those IT departments that embrace the cloud through the creation and implementation of a comprehensive strategy — that includes strong and measurable metrics and a strong focus on managing business outcomes — will be the ones we talk about as pioneers in the years to come.
Written by Gavan Egan, Managing Director of Cloud Services at Verizon Enterprise Solutions
We now work in a world in which data flows to and from the cloud across platforms, geographies and applications.
In his session at 18th Cloud Expo, Jeff Greenwald, Senior Director of Market Development at HGST, will discuss the millennial approach to managing how data is stored, protected, accessed, shared, and governed. Attendees will learn that employing the right infrastructure will set your business free, even within the most demanding use cases – from business continuity to backup and archive.
SolarWinds has completed the acquisition of LogicNow, which it plans to merge with the N-able business unit to create SolarWinds MSP. The new company will now serve 18,000 managed service providers worldwide, managing more than five million end-points and one million mailboxes.
For LogicNow’s General Manager Alistair Forbes combining his company’s expertise with capabilities of SolarWinds was an opportunity to take the business to the next level.
“This acquisition is the culmination of a journey which we’ve been on for the last 12 years,” said Forbes. “We saw the opportunity to combine with SolarWinds and the N-able division, and really shift gears into the next phase of our business. Since N-able was acquired by SolarWinds we’ve really seen them become a much more prominent player in the market.
“If you have a look at opportunity SolarWinds gave N-able, we see this as the best way we can accelerate the growth of the LogicNow business and take it to the next level.”
What is worth noting is that the growth of LogicNow has not hit a glass ceiling, Forbes highlighted the business has grown 40% over the last twelve months, however the association with SolarWinds can open up new doors for the team. While LogicNow is in itself a respected brand in the industry, SolarWinds has made its name as a specialist for enterprise scale organizations. By leaning on the SolarWinds brand, Forbes believes opportunities will be created which would have been significantly harder by taking the organic route.
The SolarWinds MSP business will now focus on a number of areas including remote monitoring and management, security including anti-malware, multi-vendor patch management and web access control, backup and disaster recovery, data analytics and risk and vulnerability assessment, amongst other areas.
First and foremost, the new brand will focus on understanding the technology, expertise and assets which are now available, to both business units. “The immediate focus of the business will be to take the combined assets and see what we can create,” said Forbes. “There will be some areas of overlap and also a few redundancies, but nothing massive. This acquisition is all about putting two and two together to make something bigger.”
For the moment, the LogicNow and SolarWinds N-able brands will continue, though this will be phased out over time. Internally, both units are working to shift the culture from the separate businesses to the SolarWinds MSP mentality, though it is thought the restructuring and integration process will be a relatively simple one. For the most part, there is little overlap, and although certain functions will require redundancies, there are only a couple of offices which would be deemed to clash. Boulder, Colorado is one of those offices, and there will be a requirement to merge into one physical location, though the headcount reduction will be minimized overall, Forbes claims.
(c)iStock.com/pablographix
Moving to a DevOps approach in your organisation has long been advocated as being a good idea – but what benefits does it provide? A new piece of research from managed cloud services provider Claranet argues better quality of applications is the key reason to move over.
The study, which surveyed 900 IT decision makers across Europe, argues the classic reason for moving to DevOps, greater business agility, is not a catch-all. Indeed agility (55%) was only the third most popular benefit, behind greater apps (60%) and a better understanding between employees (56%). Increased profitability (55%), better customer satisfaction (52%), and greater operational efficiency (50%) were also highly cited. Not one person surveyed said there were no benefits of a DevOps approach in their organisation.
Almost a third (32%) of firms polled said they are implementing DevOps practices, up from 26% the year before, yet almost all (92%) said they had experienced some difficult in the implementation process. Lack of time to automate tasks was the most frequently cited bugbear, with almost half of respondents (47%) arguing for it; conflict with historic ITIL (44%), skills shortages (43%) and a lack of understanding in how to implement DevOps strategically (40%) also cited.
“We are at a position in the software industry where cloud, or dynamic and changeable infrastructure, has given us the opportunity to change how we design, deliver and operate our software systems – which is where DevOps comes in,” said Neil Thomas, Claranet product director, adding: “But businesses need to have the right infrastructure and management processes in place for it to work effectively.”
The move to DevOps, much like enterprise mobility, often comes with a question of ‘is it right for my organisation?’. For Robert Reeves, CTO of Datical, speaking to this publication in January, the answer was in black and white – DevOps is right for every organisation because the alternative is silos, which is wrong for every organisation.
Claranet argues similarly, although adds that culture can be a major stumbling block. “At a very simplistic level, developers look to change things while operations teams look to preserve them,” said Thomas. “They need to welcome the changes involved in this shift in approach, be ready to adapt to changing circumstances and be more flexible about job functions.”
SAP and Yandex Data Factory have announced a new strategic partnership to develop cloud-based predictive analytics services for the retail, e-commerce, banking and telecommunications sectors.
Using the machine learning & data analytics capabilities of Yandex Data Factory, the team will offer services such as personalised offers of goods and services, churn prediction and recommendations for the retention of customers, which will be based on the SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud platform.
While the offering could seemingly be extended to other verticals, the team are focusing on more consumer orientated areas due to the volume of data these companies have already collected. There does not seem to be any reason why it could not be extended beyond the industries mentioned, though there would have to be a suitable amount of information collected to realize the full potential of the offering.
“While the advantages of big data analysis are well-understood, many in the retail, e-commerce, banking and telecommunications sectors will have concerns over integrating data analysis technology with their existing systems,” said Alexander Khaytin, chief operating officer at Yandex Data Factory. “We wanted to remove this obstacle and therefore deliberately partnered with SAP – one of the leading providers of data and business automation tools in these sectors – so that we can offer our clients advanced predictive and prescriptive analytics, without additional integration costs.”
The Yandex big data algorithms are based on matching a customer’s profile with another customer who has demonstrated the same purchasing tendencies. In theory, should two customers have a similar profile, predictions on what one will do can be based on the actions of the second. Yandex claims it can reduce the costs of acquiring new and retaining current customers by up to 10%.
(c)iStock.com/wavebreakmedia
Enterprise file sync and share (EFSS) firm Egnyte has announced the launch of Egnyte Protect, a product which aims to give IT and line of business greater control and visibility of their content both in the cloud and on-premise.
The move positions Egynte away from the traditional EFSS buckets and moves the firm towards data and information governance, a space Egnyte claims to be worth eight times more than their current opportunity. Isabelle Guis, chief marketing and strategy officer at Egnyte, argues Protect should be thought of as ‘another layer of security’ for organisations.
“You can ensure that the right person has access to the right content at the right time,” Guis tells CloudTech. “What’s happening today is someone gets granted access to the marketing folder and [it’s] on SharePoint – this person can access without even knowing it the finance and marketing folder, but on Egynte the marketing folder only. We will raise a flag and tell IT there is an anomaly here.”
The design of Protect is intended to be open, and features partnerships with Box, SharePoint, and others. In terms of how the idea came about, after the company tried out pure cloud EFSS there was a clear reaction from customers; we love the cloud, but we cannot migrate everything over. Most of this is down to regulation and compliance. As a CloudTech article from earlier this week examined, if data is HIPAA regulated, or if it is military-based, or if a customer requests it, then they just cannot move it.
Hence a lightbulb moment; gaining visibility over content throughout the entire lifecycle. As Egnyte argues, apps are in the cloud, but the content is still on-premise. The various analytics gleaned from years of pushing the EFSS solution – Egnyte claims to have more than 14,000 customers worldwide – helped get the right information out there.
Regarding branding – a subject Guis acknowledges is important given her job role – it is a clear change. “We see ourselves as a content intelligence platform,” explains Guis. “EFSS has great benefits to be a service used by the line of business, but also be of interest to IT – we understand the line of business and we understand IT and it allows us because of our architecture to collect loads of analytics.
“We decided that the highest demand for now was content governance,” she adds. “That’s what our customers were asking for, and that compliments very well our enterprise file sync and share. There are synergies where you want to enable productivity and business agility, but at the same time you want to keep your IP secure.”
Egnyte’s history has been an interesting one, if not having the highs and lows of other players in the storage industry. The company’s CEO, Vineet Jain, repeatedly eschewed the huge funding rounds that became de rigour in the space – Egynte’s total funding across five rounds is less than half of Box’s series E – and by combining a laser focus on enterprise from day one as well as not going overboard with the venture capital means a slow and steady business philosophy, only launching in Europe two years ago.
The firm anticipates it will become cash-flow positive by Q3 this year, and Guis notes that this is without the help of Protect. “From a timing perspective, enterprises are becoming more mature, they realise that fighting shadow IT is a gigantic task – every day with new applications coming it’s almost a lost battle,” she says. “They need to find another way to scale, and to keep control without preventing the business productivity.”
The company has also rebranded its traditional file sync and share product to Egnyte Connect. You can find out more about Protect here.
Update: A previous version of this article stated that Egynte had 40,000 global customers instead of 14,000. This has since been corrected.
(c)iStock.com/wavebreakmedia
Enterprise file sync and share (EFSS) firm Egnyte has announced the launch of Egnyte Protect, a product which aims to give IT and line of business greater control and visibility of their content both in the cloud and on-premise.
The move positions Egynte away from the traditional EFSS buckets and moves the firm towards data and information governance, a space Egnyte claims to be worth eight times more than their current opportunity. Isabelle Guis, chief marketing and strategy officer at Egnyte, argues Protect should be thought of as ‘another layer of security’ for organisations.
“You can ensure that the right person has access to the right content at the right time,” Guis tells CloudTech. “What’s happening today is someone gets granted access to the marketing folder and [it’s] on SharePoint – this person can access without even knowing it the finance and marketing folder, but on Egynte the marketing folder only. We will raise a flag and tell IT there is an anomaly here.”
The design of Protect is intended to be open, and features partnerships with Box, SharePoint, and others. In terms of how the idea came about, after the company tried out pure cloud EFSS there was a clear reaction from customers; we love the cloud, but we cannot migrate everything over. Most of this is down to regulation and compliance. As a CloudTech article from earlier this week examined, if data is HIPAA regulated, or if it is military-based, or if a customer requests it, then they just cannot move it.
Hence a lightbulb moment; gaining visibility over content throughout the entire lifecycle. As Egnyte argues, apps are in the cloud, but the content is still on-premise. The various analytics gleaned from years of pushing the EFSS solution – Egnyte claims to have more than 40,000 customers worldwide – helped get the right information out there.
Regarding branding – a subject Guis acknowledges is important given her job role – it is a clear change. “We see ourselves as a content intelligence platform,” explains Guis. “EFSS has great benefits to be a service used by the line of business, but also be of interest to IT – we understand the line of business and we understand IT and it allows us because of our architecture to collect loads of analytics.
“We decided that the highest demand for now was content governance,” she adds. “That’s what our customers were asking for, and that compliments very well our enterprise file sync and share. There are synergies where you want to enable productivity and business agility, but at the same time you want to keep your IP secure.”
Egnyte’s history has been an interesting one, if not having the highs and lows of other players in the storage industry. The company’s CEO, Vineet Jain, repeatedly eschewed the huge funding rounds that became de rigour in the space – Egynte’s total funding across five rounds is less than half of Box’s series E – and by combining a laser focus on enterprise from day one as well as not going overboard with the venture capital means a slow and steady business philosophy, only launching in Europe two years ago.
The firm anticipates it will become cash-flow positive by Q3 this year, and Guis notes that this is without the help of Protect. “From a timing perspective, enterprises are becoming more mature, they realise that fighting shadow IT is a gigantic task – every day with new applications coming it’s almost a lost battle,” she says. “They need to find another way to scale, and to keep control without preventing the business productivity.”
The company has also rebranded its traditional file sync and share product to Egnyte Connect. You can find out more about Protect here.