“delaPlex is a software development company. We do team-based outsourcing development,” explained Mark Rivers, COO and Co-founder of delaPlex Software, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at 18th Cloud Expo, held June 7-9, 2016, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY.

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Security, data privacy, reliability and regulatory compliance are critical factors when evaluating whether to move business applications from in-house client hosted environments to a cloud platform.
In her session at 18th Cloud Expo, Vandana Viswanathan, Associate Director at Cognizant, In this session, will provide an orientation to the five stages required to implement a cloud hosted solution validation strategy.

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Having automated workflows sounds like a sexy thing. And it is. It feels pretty awesome to be able to initiate a process with a button and forget about it while the work gets done.
But that doesn’t mean you have to automate every process in your office. I mean, I think people can take care of replacing the copy paper on their own, right? Right? Come on, people.
Because automation shouldn’t be blatantly applied to every corner of your business, it’s good to start with a very basic question before you begin.
Why?
There are a lot of ways to improve your business – why are you looking to automation? What do you hope to get out of it?
Here are some good and bad reasons companies automate their processes.

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Security, data privacy, reliability and regulatory compliance are critical factors when evaluating whether to move business applications from in-house client hosted environments to a cloud platform.
In her session at 18th Cloud Expo, Vandana Viswanathan, Associate Director at Cognizant, In this session, will provide an orientation to the five stages required to implement a cloud hosted solution validation strategy.

read more

(c)iStock.com/JurgaR

Amazon Web Services (AWS) generated $2.89 billion (£2.19bn) over the last financial quarter, according to financial figures released by the infrastructure giant yesterday.

The figures represent an almost 58% rise from this time last year. For the past two quarters, the figure stands at almost $5.5bn – up 61% from the six months ending June 30 2015.

Considering specific AWS figures were kept out of all its financial releases until last year, instead being bumped in with ‘other business’, it does rather beg the question why it ever took them so long to disclose the figures. Among the highlights Amazon disclosed in the AWS section of its release – there were five bullet points in total – was the launch of a data centre zone in Mumbai, its sixth in the Asia Pacific region, as well as FedRAMP high compliance certification and the customer win of Salesforce.

“It’s been a busy few months for Amazon around the world, and particularly in India,” said Jeff Bezos, Amazon CEO in a statement. “The team in India is inventing at a torrid pace, and we’re very grateful to our Indian customers for their welcoming response.”

Elsewhere Alphabet, parent firm of Google, announced its second quarter financial results, hitting overall revenue of $21.5bn, up 21% year on year, with particular highlights in mobile search, desktop and tablet search, YouTube, and programmatic advertising.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai, in an earnings call, discussed cloud in-depth and emphasised its importance in the context of Google’s machine learning initiatives. As reported by Seeking Alpha, Pichai told analysts: “Many tremendous digital experiences are being built in the cloud today, and businesses are working to take advantage of the cloud as part of their digital transformation.

“We have strong momentum with businesses like [workflow platform] Symphony, who recently announced that its cloud computing business is available on the Google Cloud Platform,” said Pichai, adding that ‘more and more’ Fortune 100 companies are choosing Google for its cloudy operations. “We provide the high reliability and performance needed by Symphony’s customers in the financial services industry.”

Unlike Amazon, Google does not disclose its cloud revenues specifically; however, industry analysts have long been trying to join the dots. As reported by Business Insider, a note from Goldman Sachs argues AWS quadrupled the sales of Microsoft over the past 12 months, and generated 15 times that of Google. The note also reveals that AWS sees 72% year over year growth.

Back in February, Synergy Research put Amazon’s year on year growth from Q415 at 63%, and put AWS at 31% share of the overall market, significantly ahead of Microsoft (9%), IBM (7%) and Google (4%). AWS’ yearly growth according to Synergy is behind Microsoft and Google, although the firm’s lead is such that it is merely a drop in the ocean.

Big Data. Analytics. Internet of Things. Cloud. In the last few years, you cannot have a discussion around technology without those terms entering the conversation. They have been major technology disruptors impacting all aspects of the business. Change seems to occur at breakneck speeds and shows no sign of slowing. Today, it appears the one constant in technology is change. Constant change requires constant innovation which thereby introduces more new technologies. One of the new technologies entering the conversation is machine learning. Gartner identified machine learning as one of the top 10 technology trends for 2016. It is definitely a hot topic.

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(c)iStock.com/binabina

Last week, iland took part in techUK’s “How to Build Trust in the Security of Cloud Computing” panel debate in London.  The event ran in two parts; the first panel looked at the key concerns associated with cloud security and then a second panel examined what needs to be done to help businesses address these concerns.

The UK is incredibly successful both on the supply side with the expertise we have developed delivering products and services, as well as the adoption and exploitation side of cloud. That said, it was evident in techUK’s Cloud 20/20 vision paper that there are still concerns around security and the resilience of cloud, especially as the market continues to mature. The paper cited that nine out of 10 security professionals worry about cloud security and 80% of budgets will be spent on cloud security, yet one third of data loss is put down to inadequate cloud security. So in effect, companies are still losing data.

To me, one of the clearest issues that came out of the conversation is that the broad scope of ‘the cloud’ continues to be a great source of confusion. Companies cannot adequately combat security threats if they do not dig into the details of the specific types of services they plan to use cloud for, whether that be software as a service, infrastructure as a service, disaster recovery as a service, backup as a service, as examples.

Against this backdrop here are the top five concerns raised by the panel about cloud in general:

• Cloud computing is about commodity compute and a one size fits all approach.  However, whether you are a large or small corporation seeking the benefits of cloud, you want to partner with providers that offer a tailored service that addresses your specific security and compliance requirements.
• Location matters. Organisations are less concerned about multi-tenancy but more concerned about where the data centre is located, where their data resides, who has access to it and the free flow of that data. 
• Unauthorised access, especially by service provider themselves. Cybercrime will target cloud and data centres and there is concern not only about unauthorised access but law enforcement access to cloud data.  For example, under what circumstances will your cloud provider disclose data to a law enforcement company?
• Transparency, audits, the sheer volume of data. Keeping an auditable track of that data was high on the list. 
• Lock-in, data portability and the smooth and easy movement of data. In other words, how easy it is to exit those outsourcing arrangements. 

Other points that came up were the unclear segregation of duties and where the responsibility lies. Whose duty and responsibility is it to secure the platform? Are the skills, experience and resources available to undertake these tasks? And finally, if you if don’t lock down your data, are you raising the risk profile for the organisation and creating opportunities for more vulnerabilities? In terms of the key takeaways here are my top five:

Where cloud service providers are concerned, having a technology platform is not enough

It is more about how that platform is managed, the resilience of the platform, the level of cloud security combined with your people, expertise and providing customers with full transparency. At iland, for instance, not only do we have an advanced security platform that supports all of our cloud services, but we are a curator of security solutions. We bring best of breed technologies and embed these into our platform. Therefore not only do we deliver the expertise but we work hand-in-hand to help customers on their cloud security initiatives.

New technologies will be added into the mix all the time

Organisations therefore need to think about their workloads and whether cloud is suitable. Will they be able to adapt to new security requirements and what level of support will they need to do so?

Accessibility against security

Organisations must consider accessibility versus security and understand the details of various cloud platforms and services to mitigate risks. Don’t overlook location, technology, support, access and transparency. 

Education from your cloud service provider around the risks that are prevalent is absolutely vital

Cloud providers need to give visibility and up-to-date information on these risks. For example, at iland we scan for known vulnerabilities and take that information and associated best practices to our customers.

Know how to recover

It happens more frequently than you think, therefore thinking about how you will recover from an attack is vital.  For example, do you have the ability to recover quickly and can you recover to a point in time that minimises business impact?

I believe that more education is key to cloud. What type of cloud services are you using or thinking about using, and what are the associated security risks and solutions? Cloud providers need to talk in more specific terms about the solution rather than talk generally about ‘the cloud,’ as this is where there is a lot of misunderstanding and misinterpretations.

Finally, as cloud providers help combat security risks, they must also enable customers to easily consume relevant information about their environments, take action and satisfy compliance. Most organisations find there is so much raw data coming out of their cloud provider, they struggle to consolidate this on a daily, or even weekly basis, in order to prioritise the real and most severe risks.  Whether customers are leveraging public cloud, private cloud, disaster recovery or backup services, ensuring and proving cloud security and compliance will only become more important and customers and cloud service providers must work together to achieve it. 

In his session at Cloud Expo, Robert Cohen, an economist and senior fellow at the Economic Strategy Institute, will provide economic scenarios that describe how the rapid adoption of software-defined everything including cloud services, SDDC and open networking will change GDP, industry growth, productivity and jobs.
This session will also include a drill down for several industries such as finance, social media, cloud service providers and pharmaceuticals.

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