With all the excellent training available on television today, we are all now well prepared to deal with the coming Zombie Apocalypse. Our failure as a society lies, however, in our misunderstanding of the nature of the cybersecurity challenge. This failure threatens us all and our survival will depend on society’s ability to deal with the evolution and maturation of the changing enterprise cybersecurity challenge.

If you’re completely oblivious to the living dead threat, a zombie apocalypse refers to a widespread (usually global) rise of zombies hostile to human life. The zombies will engage in a general assault on civilization where victims may become zombies themselves. This causes the outbreak to become an exponentially growing crisis. The spreading phenomenon swamps normal military and law enforcement organizations, leading to the panicked collapse of civilized society until only isolated pockets of survivors remain, scavenging for food and supplies in a world reduced to a pre-industrial hostile wilderness.

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According to the latest forecast from 451 Research, three in five enterprise workloads will run in the cloud by mid-2018, up from two in five (41%) today.

The analyst firm argues there will be strong growth in particular enterprise workload categories, including data and analytics and business applications. In the same timeframe, almost a quarter (23%) of enterprise workloads will be software as a service (SaaS), compared to 12% for IaaS. 451 argues that IaaS will be the highest growing segment, and despite the ‘hype and attention’ associated with it comprises only 6% of workloads today.

Almost two in five (38%) of the 1,200 global IT professionals surveyed said they have a cloud-first policy, with the most common events leading to increased cloud usage including mergers and acquisitions, as well as software upgrades, hardware refreshes, and data centre capacity expansions.

“The predicted doubling of IaaS usage is the highest growth expectation for any type of cloud and points to significant revenue potential for vendors in this space,” said Andrew Reichman, research director of 451 Research and author of the report. “Because cloud delivers increasing agility and flexibility to better fit ever-changing business needs, IaaS and SaaS allows organisations to focus their efforts on their business, rather than on maintaining costly and complex data centres and infrastructure.

“If used properly, it has the potential to dramatically improve efficiency and results of business technology usage,” Reichman added.

These figures dovetail nicely with a forecast made by Huawei at its Connect event earlier this week, where the Chinese telco argued that by 2025 all enterprise IT would be ‘cloudified’, and that 85% of all enterprise applications would be based in the cloud.

The 451 Research report, ‘Voice of the Enterprise: Cloud Transformation’, can be found here (registration required).

(c)iStock.com/Anil Bolukbas

With an increasingly open IT ecosystem, there are three key principles for all businesses, from SMBs to enterprises, to make the most of their lot: cooperation over competition, benefit sharing, and creating a bigger market rather than fighting for a larger share.

That was the verdict of Guo Ping, rotating CEO of Chinese telco Huawei, at the company’s Huawei Connect event. “Essentially, marketplace advantages will come from within an organisation, as has traditionally been the case, and also externally from the ecosystem in which they operate – forming a combination of both competitive and ecological advantages,” said Guo in the third day’s keynote.

“The ICT ecosystem will be more open, dynamic, and symbiotic. Every enterprise, big or small, can take part in this interdependent, symbiotic, and regenerative community of common interests, as long as it has its own unique value and makes its own unique contribution,” Guo added.

The previous days have seen a plethora of announcements from the Chinese vendor, with Connect being the first time that Huawei had ‘publicly given a comprehensive look at its cloud strategy’. The overall theme of Connect was “shape the cloud”, and Huawei predicts that by 2025 all enterprise IT will be ‘cloudified’, while 85% of enterprise applications will be based in the cloud.

There were plenty of numerical analogies floating around too; cloud 2.0 was used not infrequently to describe the future of IT, while another announcement prognosticated upon bank 3.0 – first noted in a 2012 book by Brett King, and used here to annotate a new financial cloud solution from Huawei and Infosys.

Ken Hu, another of Huawei’s rotating CEOs, argued that the coming 10 years will envisage the era of cloud 2.0. “Cloud is changing everything,” Hu said. “We view change as a process of rebirth. For any business in the cloud 2.0 era, change brings hope. And through action, we can create the future.”

Huawei announced enterprise cloud solutions with partner Accenture, alongside research from Forrester around digital transformation, while the Chinese giant also announced its latest excursions into the world of all-flash storage, unveiling System OceanStor Dorado V3, bolstered with support from Intel, Oracle, and Brocade. 

There is growing need for data-driven applications and the need for digital platforms to build these apps.
In his session at 19th Cloud Expo, Muddu Sudhakar, VP and GM of Security & IoT at Splunk, will cover different PaaS solutions and Big Data platforms that are available to build applications.
In addition, AI and machine learning are creating new requirements that developers need in the building of next-gen apps. The next-generation digital platforms have some of the past platform needs and many new requirements. He will provide reference architectures for next-gen platforms and sample apps that can be built on this platform.

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SYS-CON Events announced today that Hitrons Solutions will exhibit at the 19th International Cloud Expo, which will take place on November 1–3, 2016, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
Hitrons Solutions Inc. is distributor in the North American market for unique products and services of small and medium-size businesses, including cloud services and solutions, SEO marketing platforms, and mobile applications.

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Security certainly feels a lot more like a journey than a destination. This is especially true with APIs becoming a critical piece of any mobile or web application. With so much information being shared through APIs, teams need to ask themselves: how can you effectively secure your API?
While the security demands of developing and maintaining APIs will continue to evolve, there are a few key areas your team should be focused on if you have have responsibility for an Application Programming Interface (API).

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The growing popularity of IoT has spawned the debate on privacy once again. Last year, Samsung stoked controversy by warning customers that their Smart TV Voice Recognition system was capable of “listening” to personal and sensitive information spoken by customers. Not only this, all of this intercepted information is transmitted over a non-encrypted connection to be stored in a third party server.

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It was late 2011 and Steven Donovan was comfortable working at SHI International Corporation, a growing information technology firm, as a personal computer break/fix technician. His company had been growing quickly from a $1 million “software-only” regional re-seller into eventually becoming a $6 billion global provider of information technology products and services.
At that time, cloud computing was just starting to explode onto the information technology scene. Although Amazon Web Services had been offering its Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) since 2006, browser-based enterprise applications from companies like Google had only been around since 2009. Steven wanted to somehow elevate himself professionally so after hearing good things about the National Cloud Technologist Association’s CloudMASTER® certification, which was available at the New Jersey Institute of Technology, he enrolled. After a short, but intense, online curriculum Steven earned NCTA CloudMASTER® Certificate 11002.

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Leading cloud-centric IT organizations are establishing core capabilities to improve productivity, control costs and provide a highly responsive end-user experience. Key steps along this journey include creating an end-user cloud services catalog, automating workflows and provisioning, and implementing IT showback and chargeback.
In his session at 19th Cloud Expo, Mark Jamensky, executive vice president of Products at Embotics, will walk attendees through an in-depth case study of enterprise IT management products provider Serena Software and its journey to enhancing ITaaS and IT cost visibility capabilities. The session will share best practices, lessons learned and key technologies used along the way.

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Leading cloud-centric IT organizations are establishing core capabilities to improve productivity, control costs and provide a highly responsive end-user experience. Key steps along this journey include creating an end-user cloud services catalog, automating workflows and provisioning, and implementing IT showback and chargeback.
In his session at 19th Cloud Expo, Mark Jamensky, executive vice president of Products at Embotics, will walk attendees through an in-depth case study of enterprise IT management products provider Serena Software and its journey to enhancing ITaaS and IT cost visibility capabilities. The session will share best practices, lessons learned and key technologies used along the way.

read more