For large enterprise organizations, it can be next-to-impossible to identify attacks and act to mitigate them in good time. That’s one of the reasons executives often discover security breaches when an external researcher — or worse, a journalist — gets in touch to ask why hundreds of millions of logins for their company’s services are freely available on hacker forums.
The huge volume of incoming connections, the heterogeneity of services, and the desire to avoid false positives leave enterprise security teams in a difficult spot. Finding potential security breaches is like finding a tiny needle in a very large haystack — monitoring millions of connections over thousands of servers is not something that can be managed by a team of humans.
Monthly Archives: November 2016
AWS launches refreshed T2, R4, C5 and I3 instances, snags Workday as new customer
(c)iStock.com/Prykhodov
Amazon Web Services (AWS) has announced the launch of a new series of instances for its cloud infrastructure, both expanding current instance families and creating new categories.
At Re:Invent in Las Vegas today, Andy Jassy, AWS chief executive, announced XL and 2XL segments for its T2 series of instances, which are aimed more at the simpler workload, as well as I3, the next generation of its high I/O instances, C5 for more compute intensive workloads, and R4 for memory intensive workloads.
Two new services at opposite ends of the spectrum were also introduced; Amazon Lightsail, which caters to customers who want to spin up a virtual private server with the minimum of fuss, as well as F1 instances which cater to field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) and more sophisticated hardware acceleration. Additionally, Elastic GPUs, which allow GPUs to be attached to all instances, were also unveiled.
Picture credit: Screenshot
“If you look at these instances, nobody else has even half of these,” said Jassy, moments before announcing a bunch of new instances. “Having this number really matters for customers. We’re constantly reinventing our instance families.”
The keynote presentation focused on the notion that, to quote one of the slides, ‘with AWS, it can feel like you have been given superpowers.’ Tempting as it may be to scoff, the stats and citations kept flooding in: more than 1000 launches in 2016, compared to 159 in 2012 and 24 in 2008; acknowledgement of the Gartner IaaS Magic Quadrant ranking and particular the analyst firm’s view that AWS had ‘several’ times the size of the next 14 providers combined; the thousands of systems integrators and ISVs on board, as well as companies “born or reborn in the cloud.”
So what were these superpowers? One was ‘supersonic speed’, which relates to the greater breadth and depth of AWS’ services, while another focused on ‘immortality’; how businesses can survive and thrive long term by keeping pace with emerging technologies.
Perhaps the most interesting of the lot was the second supposed superpower, ‘x-ray vision’. Here we saw practically the only instance of competitor-bashing. When Jassy described the importance of “the ability to see through the handwaving and bombast”, a picture of Oracle’s Larry Ellison briefly appeared.
“In the old days, because it was so hard and so expensive to test and experiment, you would get these old guard leaders who stand up and make wild claims…and you had no ability to find out what was real,” said Jassy. “In the cloud that’s not the case. That ship has sailed – kind of like an America’s Cup ship.”
Talk about converting your own touchdown. But this led onto an interesting piece around analytics. AWS has also launched Amazon Athena, an interactive query service which aims to make data analysis in Amazon S3 simpler. Athena is designed for more ad-hoc analytics, and Jassy noted the new release complements Redshift and EMR, the firm’s other products in the space.
From analytics begat a discussion on machine learning, with AWS announcing a variety of new tools aimed at developers. Amazon Rekognition, as the name may suggest, focuses on image recognition, while Amazon Polly looks at text to speech capabilities and Lex is the natural language processing which powers Amazon Alexa, now available as a general service.
As is the way of such events, customers were ferried on and off the stage, from energy provider ENEL, who is aiming to move to ‘cloud only’ through AWS as well as using its IoT service, and Workday, who has confirmed it is using AWS as its preferred public cloud supplier. The latter follows the announcement yesterday that shipping carrier Matson has gone all-in, shutting down its four on-premises data centres in the process.
Again, the sheer amount of choice to prospective customers was emphasised, from infrastructure, to enterprise apps, to hybrid. Perhaps the last word should be given to William Fellows, vice president of 451 Research. He argues in the analyst firm’s latest note that 2017 will see the emergence of ‘AWS+1’ as an operating principle. This ‘blended cloud’ model would ensure the CIO and CFO can demonstrate “value, choice, and flexibility”, the company added.
Turning IT Departments into Superheroes | @CloudExpo #ITaaS #Cloud #Virtualization
Nerdio is an IT-as-a-service platform with virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) technology at its core. It is designed for IT departments that need a way to easily manage their ever-increasing workloads. Nerdio allows users to efficiently manage their complete IT environments by giving them full visibility and control of users’ desktops. In addition to virtual desktops, the platform includes unlimited virtual servers, Microsoft Office 365 security, and disaster recovery and 24/7/365 support.
[video] Bert Loomis and AI in the Cloud By @IBMCloud | @CloudExpo #AI #Cloud #DigitalTransformation
Bert Loomis was a visionary. This general session will highlight how Bert Loomis and people like him inspire us to build great things with small inventions.
In their general session at 19th Cloud Expo, Harold Hannon, Architect at IBM Bluemix, and Michael O’Neill, Strategic Business Development at Nvidia, discussed the accelerating pace of AI development and how IBM Cloud and NVIDIA are partnering to bring AI capabilities to “every day,” on-demand. They also reviewed two “free infrastructure” programs available to startups and innovators.
Can Cloud Computing Aid NASA in its Search for Life?
NASA is constantly looking for ideas and technologies that will help in its quest for extraterrestrial life, and cloud can be one technology that has the capability to aid this search.
In fact, NASA understands the potential of cloud, and this is why its chief technology and innovation officer, Tom Soderstrom, visited the re:Invent conference hosted by Amazon Web Services. Already the two organizations have started working together on a number of projects, and their partnership is likely to extend to more projects in the future too.
Here’s a look at how cloud technologies play a crucial role in some of NASA’s projects.
Surface Water ocean Topography (SWOT)
The mission of this program is to make the first global survey of Earth’s water from space, to get a better understanding of oceans and Earth’s terrestrial water levels. This project involves both US and French oceanographers, and could provide much-needed answers to meet the water needs of an ever-growing population. This project generates about 100 TB of data a day, or about 100GB a second. It’s impossible for data centers to handle such large amounts of information, so NASA is taking the help of cloud providers to store and analyze this data.
NASA-ISRO SAR Mission (INSAR)
Like SWOT, this program also plans to record the impact of climate change, and even predict the occurrence of natural hazards with greater precision. INSAR is a joint program between NASA and India’s Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO). This project is already operational, and is expected to send large streams of data within the next few years. These data will also be stored and analyzed through cloud, as it’s too much for any single data center to handle.
Asteroid Redirect Mission
This is NASA’s first robotic mission to visit a large asteroid located near the Earth, collect a multi-ton boulder from its surface, and redirect it into an orbit closer to the moon. This massive project is expected to be completed in 2020s, and is expected to provide data for a human mission to Mars in 2030s.
This project hasn’t started yet because NASA is looking for the perfect asteroid that is close to Earth, and one whose orbit can be redirected towards the moon. To identify this asteroid, NASA has to sift through tons of data and make complex calculations, and this is where cloud computing can help.
Europa lander
Europa is one of the moons on Jupiter that is completely covered with ice. NASA wants to explore the possibility of water below its frozen surface, and also even look for the presence of life here. The first step towards that goal is to select the right landing spot for a lander, so it can sample the surface and even possibly bring back some ice. Again, identifying this landing spot requires enormous calculations considering that Europa is the sixth-largest moon in our solar system.
In short, cloud can provide the storage and computing power that NASA needs to press ahead with its different programs.
The post Can Cloud Computing Aid NASA in its Search for Life? appeared first on Cloud News Daily.
[video] Leveraging Tech Skills with @Dicedotcom | @CloudExpo #Cloud #BigData #DataCenter
“Dice has been around for the last 20 years. We have been helping tech professionals find new jobs and career opportunities,” explained Manish Dixit, VP of Product and Engineering at Dice, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at 19th Cloud Expo, held November 1-3, 2016, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
IoT’s Adolescence: Five Predictions for 2017 | @ThingsExpo #AI #IoT #M2M #ML
The IoT continued its toddler-like growth and stumbles in 2016. Here are five trends to look for in 2017 as the IoT enters its adolescence and how to benefit from them.
1. Ecosystems begin to determine winners and losers
Previously these were nice in-the-future concerns; now they will really count. Filling out a whole product value proposition through partnerships has repeatedly proven its importance across B2B and enterprise software sectors. In the IoT, they will be even more critical.
Call for Papers @CloudExpo | #BigData #IoT #AI #DevOps #FinTech #Blockchain
The 20th International Cloud Expo has announced that its Call for Papers is open. Cloud Expo, to be held June 6-8, 2017, at the Javits Center in New York City, brings together Cloud Computing, Big Data, Internet of Things, DevOps, Containers, Microservices and WebRTC to one location.
With cloud computing driving a higher percentage of enterprise IT budgets every year, it becomes increasingly important to plant your flag in this fast-expanding business opportunity. Submit your speaking proposal today!
UpCloud raises £3.4m in series A for competitive high performance cloud
(c)iStock.com/urbancow
Say hello to UpCloud. The Finland-based cloud provider has secured €4 million (£3.4m) in a series A funding round, and is looking to expand its team with the proceeds.
The startup, which was founded in 2011, currently has four data centres in Chicago, Frankfurt, Helsinki, and London, and was recently named by Deloitte as one of the top three fastest growing technology firms in Finland.
UpCloud aims squarely at the ‘cost-effective, high performance’ space, and is naturally bullish about its funding and future opportunities. “Our goal is to offer developers the most high performance cloud infrastructure resources and the best tools to control and manage them on a global scale,” a blog post from Antti Vilpponen, CEO, and Joel Pihlajamaa, CTO and founder, read. “With the funding, we are able to accelerate many things towards this goal; opening of new data centres and offices, but also hire great people to our team.”
Regular readers of this publication may recognise the name. The company was ranked highly in a benchmark report from Cloud Spectator back in March, scoring 95 out of 100 and coming second only to 1&1. In comparison, Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and IBM SoftLayer scored 76 between them with scores of 27, 27, and 22 respectively.
How was this so? By focusing on performance as well as price, measuring vCPU, memory, and block storage capabilities, Cloud Spectator came to the conclusion that the smaller players provided better value for money. “When it comes to price performance, we see many smaller players find an advantage by offering high-performance infrastructure at a very competitive price,” Kenny Li, CEO of Cloud Spectator, told this reporter at the time, adding that he expected to see further consolidation, as the likes of Verizon, HP, and Dell, exited the cloud infrastructure space.
All good news for UpCloud then, whose aim is to become the ‘de facto global European alternative in the high performance cloud space’, according to the company.
The funding round was led by Inventure, a Nordic venture capital firm.
End-User Experience #Monitoring | @DevOpsSummit #DevOps #APM #IoT
The volume of transactions running through websites and mobile apps make customer-facing applications crucial to online businesses. If these applications perform well for their users, they generate revenue for the business. If they don’t, they affect the credibility of the business, which in turn affects the overall revenue. It is therefore imperative that businesses understand how well their revenue-critical applications are behaving for their end users.
From an IT team’s point of view, understanding the user experience of their applications is becoming challenging as technology evolves. Newer and more complex applications are being written using an assortment of languages. These applications are being deployed on a wide variety of infrastructure components. To add to that, today’s users access these modern applications on a variety of devices such as the Web, smartphones, tablets and smart watches.