Join Impiger for their featured webinar: ‘Cloud Computing: A Roadmap to Modern Software Delivery’ on November 10, 2016, at 12:00 pm CST.
Very few companies have not experienced some impact to their IT delivery due to the evolution of cloud computing. This webinar is not about deciding whether you should entertain moving some or all of your IT to the cloud, but rather, a detailed look under the hood to help IT professionals understand how cloud adoption has evolved and what trends will impact their plan.
Monthly Archives: October 2016
[webinar] @ImpigerTech’s Software Delivery Roadmap | #API #IoT #DataCenter
Join Impiger for their featured webinar: ‘Cloud Computing: A Roadmap to Modern Software Delivery’ on November 10, 2016, at 12:00 pm CST.
Very few companies have not experienced some impact to their IT delivery due to the evolution of cloud computing. This webinar is not about deciding whether you should entertain moving some or all of your IT to the cloud, but rather, a detailed look under the hood to help IT professionals understand how cloud adoption has evolved and what trends will impact their plan.
About #DevOps Collaboration | @DevOpsSummit #APM #CD #ContinuousDelivery
The general concepts of DevOps have played a central role advancing the modern software delivery industry. With the library of DevOps best practices, tips and guides expanding quickly, it can be difficult to track down the best and most accurate resources and information. In order to help the software development community, and to further our own learning, we reached out to leading industry analysts and asked them about an increasingly popular tenet of a DevOps transformation: collaboration.
GE Cloud to Power India’s IIoT
Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) is seen as the next big wave of cloud applications, as more industries around the world are looking to tap into the benefits of IIoT. This trend is seen not just in developed countries, but also in emerging markets like India. To service this sector, GE Cloud, in partnership with EY, is all set to make a foray into the Indian market.
This partnership between EY and GE Cloud was launched globally in May, to collect data from industrial machines with an aim to provide the right analytics for asset performance management (APM) and optimization of business operations. This software, called Predix, is offered as a cloud-based Platform as a Service (PaaS) for industrial applications.
Built on an open source platform called Cloud Foundry, Predix works towards creating a detailed model that encompasses the operations of the entire organization. Based on this information, it provides the right analytics that’ll help to improve the overall efficiency of operations.
GE’s foray into the Indian market augurs well for both the company as well as its Indian consumers. The capital good market in India is estimated to be worth around $42 billion. However, the last few years has seen a lag in this sector, as the total production increased only by 1.1%. This slow growth is not only due to lowered demand from the domestic market, but also because of inefficiencies plaguing the industries. To improve efficiency and reduce the cost of operations, technology is the way forward, and IIoT can play a crucial role to bridge this gap. In this sense, the entry of GE’s Predix maybe the silver lining that the Indian market needs to spruce up its efficiency and improve its production.
For GE too, the Indian market is important simply because it’s too large to be missed. Firstly, manufacturing is still a staple part of the Indian economy, unlike US and other markets that have moved towards a service economy. Secondly, India is known for a young and educated population, and a booming economy – the perfect recipe for an explosive increase in the demand for goods and services. As industries are poised to meet this demand, they need advanced analytics, and this is where GE’s Predix fits in. As the demand for industrial product grows, so will the need for predictive software, and all this means GE is possibly on the verge of stepping into a gold mine.
Despite this optimism and the benefits for both the parties, there are still some roadblocks. First off, much of the Indian market is fragmented, and many industries are dominated by a bunch of small players. Reaching out to these smaller companies maybe a difficult task for GE, as the funds available for technological innovations may be limited for smaller companies. Secondly, technological adaptation and the mindset to break away from traditional manufacturing practices may take some time, and GE should be ready for this waiting period. Thirdly, there is still a substantial amount of rigid bureaucracy and corruption in India, and this can complicate implementation.
Despite these roadblocks, the entry of Predix can augur well for everyone involved, though it may take some time for the benefits to materialize.
The post GE Cloud to Power India’s IIoT appeared first on Cloud News Daily.
Launching @QosmosL7Viewer at @CloudExpo | #SDN #NFV #IoT #Virtualization
Qosmos, the market leader for IP traffic classification and network intelligence technology, has announced that it will launch the Launch L7 Viewer at CloudExpo | @ThingsExpo Silicon Valley, being held November 1 – 3, 2016, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA. The L7 Viewer is a traffic analysis tool that provides complete visibility of all network traffic that crosses a virtualized infrastructure, up to Layer 7. It facilitates and accelerates common IT tasks such as VM migration, application upgrades, cloud migration and root-cause identification for network and application issues.
[session] You Don’t Have to Be Smarter Than the Hacker By @SSLGURUcom | @CloudExpo #Cloud #Security
In the 21st century, security on the Internet has become one of the most important issues. We hear more and more about cyber-attacks on the websites of large corporations, banks and even small businesses. When online we’re concerned not only for our own safety but also our privacy. We have to know that hackers usually start their preparation by investigating the private information of admins – the habits, interests, visited websites and so on. On the other hand, our own security is in danger because privacy online must go hand-in-hand with safety. With so many different SSL certificates and vendors available we are concerned about the level of security and reliability.
Why it’s time to take new strategies for beating ransomware
(c)iStock.com/Leonardo Patrizi
The sad facts of ransomware are that no-one is immune and attacks are impacting hospitals, schools, government, law enforcement agencies and businesses of all sizes. The increased frequency – and scale – of attacks has organisations thinking differently about their approach to ransomware. According to the FBI, ransomware attacks have increased 35-fold in 2016, resulting in an estimated $209 million paid out every quarter.
In addition, there has recently been a string of very public web services hacking events that have created question marks about the threat of storing data in the public cloud. More worryingly, we only know the publicly reported instances of such hacks.
In 2012, Dropbox was compromised by an internal phishing attack targeted at a Dropbox administrator. The event took four years to come to light, as the entire dataset – with hashed and salted passwords – appeared for sale on the dark web in 2016. The company put through a password reset prompt for users whose password had not changed before mid-2012, saying afterwards that the move had protected all impacted users.
In 2014, Yahoo! was breached by state-sponsored hackers who managed to get access to 500 million user credentials. In this case, two years passed before the breach became public knowledge only after the credentials were offered for sale to the public in 2016.
These events underscore the value of target-rich environments that attract the efforts of the world’s cyber-criminal and state-sponsored espionage community. User credentials are sold by the fraction of a penny, so commercial hackers must focus their energies on the world’s largest websites and cloud storage repositories in order to be successful. What’s worse, the increasing occurrences of these hacks is evolving the conversation around SaaS security from if to when.
The proportions have reached pandemic scale but of further concern are the delays between first breach and public notification. The delays beg the question: how long will it take to find out about the hacks that are happening right now?
What we do know is that all of the major cloud storage SaaS companies share some aspect of the data management and security management with their customers. Not one of them can claim to allow their customers to enjoy exclusive ownership of their data, their metadata, their encryption keys and their access credentials. For a certain class of security-conscious enterprises, this is fundamentally unacceptable. Gartner agrees, where in the 2016 IT Market Clock for the Digital Workplace it said: “Organisations with strong requirements for data protection, or those with strict regulations about data location and residency or complex data manipulation requirements, should focus on private cloud or on-premises EFSS deployments.”
How to safeguard your organisation
There are several countermeasures organisations can implement to fight back against crypto-malware:
Step one: Secure the perimeter to minimise the chance of breach: Patch your operating systems and keep your operating systems up to date. This is imperative. Then educate employees about the threat of ransomware and the role they can play in protecting the organisation’s data, disable macro scripts from office files transmitted over email, and limit access to critical and rapidly-changing datasets to only need-to-know users.
Step two: Backup all files and systems to avoid paying ransom to recover from crypto events. Then backup your endpoint and backup your file servers, and implement lightweight, optimised data protection tools that minimise recovery points.
Using very granular file sync and backup procedures, affected organisations with innovative safeguards in place have minimised their recovery points to as little as five minutes – versus 24 hours or more with alternate measures. With the right data protection tools, organisations can successfully save themselves from paying hundreds of thousands of dollars in ransom and minimise the period of business outage, while protecting their corporate reputations.
For the last 20 years, the market has been conditioned for daily backups. Whether we’re talking server or endpoint backup, in both cases file storage systems have been built for relatively lax backup intervals because backups have been expensive, requiring lots of CPU, lots of storage and too much time, and organisations haven’t had to deal with an explosion of file-locking malware attacks.
The use of legacy backup software in an organisation becomes a major issue for organisations where knowledge workers are continuously storing data on PCs and file shares. For example, an organisation that has 1,000 knowledge worker employees with file access by power users and IT teams has all of its files shares vulnerable. Daily backup using legacy tools leaves 24 hours of work unprotected which equates to 2.73 many years of cumulative lost productivity.
That demonstrates how legacy backup tools can have real costs for organisations that are routinely faced with crypto-ransomware. Modern backup solutions, including CTERA’s, can enable organisations to achieve a finer degree of backup interval granularity through the use of global, source-based deduplication, incremental-ever versioning and the ability to track file changes without doing full system scans. That said – default settings for even the most efficient tools are anywhere from four to eight hours, which is nearly a full business day. Therefore, the same problem essentially persists.
The only way we can put an end to this ransomware pandemic is by building the right safeguards that eliminate enterprise vulnerability and end the need to pay cyber-criminals to access our data and our systems. Whether you choose CTERA tools or any number of other approaches to safeguarding your organisation, do take steps now so you’re prepared because it is now a case of when, not if, an attack will happen.
How to bridge the data analytics gap between vendors and customers
(c)iStock.com/George Clerk
A new whitepaper from the Asia Cloud Computing Association (ACCA) argues there is a gap between data analytics services offered by vendors and the requirements of Asia Pacific organisations looking to engage them.
The findings, which appear in the paper ‘Data Analytics to Bridge Knowledge Gaps’, finds that 62% of companies surveyed use data analytics to some extent, yet less than half use analytics for making financial decisions and only 5% use it for human resources purposes.
The paper points out that cloud computing is an “obvious technological enabler” of analytics, and companies who continue to be sluggish in their cloud deployments – such as those who perceive industry regulation as a barrier to adopting cloud – are already at a disadvantage.
ACCA offers five recommendations across various stakeholders to ‘unlock’ data analytics on cloud. Analytics providers need to simplify their tools and develop more capacity building services to generate greater demand; as the report notes, training and consulting for clients is “perhaps the area where providers to date are the most successful.” Regulators need to promote privacy regulations that “reflect the reality of big data and analytics,” while ecosystem players – such as investors, accelerators and third party consultants – need to show how business sectors can be disrupted through analytics. Innovators, the report noted, need to keep going as they are.
“The impact that efficient use of data analytics could create to APAC businesses is profound and imminent. However, to drive greater adoption and value, the entire ecosystem needs to play their part,” said Arun Sundar, chief strategy officer at TrustSphere and chairman of the ACCA Emerging Cloud Services Working Group. “The role of governments and trade bodies is critical at this juncture to bring the demand and supply side in alignment with industry best practices and frameworks.
“This will help to allay concerns about issues such as privacy and cross-border data transfer policies which will encourage business leaders in APAC to leverage analytics for improved business outcomes for both enterprises and consumers alike,” Sundar added.
Previous ACCA reports have focused on the ‘cloud readiness’ of Asia Pacific nations. In April this year, the latest analysis found Hong Kong to have overtaken previous leader Japan to secure the #1 spot.
You can read the full whitepaper here (PDF).
Not only Windows on Mac – Free systems in Parallels Desktop
You all know that you can run Windows on your Mac with Parallels Desktop. Today, we want to show you that there is so much more to Parallels Desktop than running Windows on Mac. A large number of existing OSes can be installed in a virtual machine on the Mac with Parallels Desktop. Mac is […]
The post Not only Windows on Mac – Free systems in Parallels Desktop appeared first on Parallels Blog.
When Things Attack! | @ThingsExpo #IoT #M2M #API #Security
As I started writing this blog, I happened to be watching an episode from the new season of Black Mirror on Netflix. Black Mirror is a Sci-Fi anthology series, ala the Twilight Zone, although with a much darker perspective on both humanity and technology. I found the episode, ‘Most Hated in the Nation’ somewhat apropos to my topic. The episode follows a police detective investigating the apparent murder of a columnist. This individual has been deluged with social media hate diatribes that would seem familiar to many. As the investigation continues, more mysterious deaths occur, with the victims all being targets of similar social media anger. Meanwhile, in the background, there are various news stories and visual cuts to ADIs (Autonomic Drone Insects). These tiny bee-like drones are being deployed throughout the country to replace the dying bee population, allowing for the continued pollinating of crops.