Parallels Support team guest author: Dineshraj Yuvaraj You are using Parallels Desktop and planning to upgrade to the latest version? Or do you want to install Parallels Desktop from scratch? Either way, you will need your Parallels Desktop for Mac license key to do that. Let me walk you through some simple steps on how to […]
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The seemingly miraculous hand-held devices we use today are a far cry from the computers of old. Capabilities, speed, affordability and storage have increased dramatically, transforming every aspect of our lives. As a point of reference, the first data centers were rooms that housed huge, individual mainframe computers. These machines cost millions of dollars each, and time on them had to be rented by several organizations because no one except governments and higher educational institutions could afford to build them.
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Even though the majority of respondents in a survey released by Oracle say collaboration between business and IT is key for an enterprise cloud model to succeed, a plethora of barriers remain.
The research, which polled 1,200 technology decision makers in midsize and large companies across three continents, found more than a quarter (27%) of respondents said managing shadow IT is a ‘significant’ barrier to adopting an integrated approach to the cloud, while almost half (43%) say business departments lack understanding when it comes to the need for integrated cloud resources.
Other barriers for adopting an integrated cloud approach, and thus precluding collaboration, were proving return on investment, cited by 36% of respondents, discord between infrastructures (36%), increased cost (31%) and increased security risk (29%).
Naturally, the takeaway from the research is that by using infrastructure as a service – a service which Oracle is more than happy to provide – organisations can collaborate more freely and the divisions between line of business and IT will become more harmonious.
“These issues can be blamed in part on infrastructure that has become too rigid, confused and complex,” said Pascal Giraud, senior director IaaS foundation and cloud platform Oracle EMEA in a statement. “This has led to an unresponsive, disjointed organisation where opportunity and innovation fall down the cracks between lines of business and badly integrated systems.”
Elsewhere, research from Databarracks has found that nearly two thirds (61%) of IT decision makers polled believe their employees regularly sidestep their employer’s security policies. Issues which may go against corporate policy include taking company data off-site, keeping written records of passwords, and fabricating or omitting information on sign-in sheets.
The company added that, despite the rise in ransomware attacks, there remains a “blind ignorance” to enterprise security.
A common criticism of cloud technology is its energy consumption. The many data centers that make cloud storage seamless and convenient, is also a major consumer of power. According to the Natural Resource Defense Council, US data centers consumed a whopping 91 billion kilowatts of electricity in 2013, and this is roughly equal to the output of 34 mega coal power plants. At this rate of consumption, it is estimated that data centers will need 140 billion kilowatts of electricity by 2020.
Sounds unsustainable? You’re absolutely right!
The amount of coal that’ll be needed to power these plants coupled with the high rates of emission is sure to add more damage to climate change and environmental degradation.
To lower pollution levels, many top cloud providers are beginning to look at the possible use of renewable energy to power their data centers. Wind and solar are expected to the biggest sources of renewable power for cloud technology within the next few years.
Recently, Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced that it would build a 189-megawatt wind farm in Hardin County, Ohio. This wind farm alone is expected to generate 530,000 megawatts a year, beginning from the end of December, 2017. In fact, this wind farm will be AWS’ fifth renewable energy farm, with already three being operational, and the fourth one expected to come online in May 2017. The existing three wind farms are located in North Carolina, Virginia, and Indiana respectively. With these farms, already 40 percent of AWS’ operations are powered by renewable energy, and the company plans to increase it to 50 percent by the end of 2017. Eventually, AWS plans to source 100 percent of its energy consumption from renewable energy.
Besides AWS, other top cloud providers are also taking the renewable route, though their plans are not as ambitious as that of the market leader. Microsoft uses wind, solar, and hydro power plants to power its data centers, and estimates show that about 44 percent of its energy consumption comes from these sources. The company aims to reach the half-way mark by 2018, and keep improving from there on. In addition, Microsoft has been carbon neutral since 2012.
Google, another major player in the cloud market, has a different approach to tackling the problem of power consumption. This company believes it’s not practical to build large renewable energy farms in places where its data centers are located, rather it believes these farms should be located in places that are most conducive to it. For example, solar farms should be in sunny states like Arizona and California, and not in Minnesota and Wisconsin, even if this is where the data centers are located.
This company thinks a more pragmatic approach would be to buy renewable energy to power its data centers, instead of harnessing it directly from farms. This way, the company may have more flexibility in terms of the provider.
Regardless of the approach, it’s heartening to see these top companies lead the way in making this planet a more sustainable and livable place for future generations.
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The CompTIA Cloud+certification validates the skills and expertise of IT practitioners in implementing and maintaining cloud technologies. This is exactly what it takes to become a good cloud technician. In the past few years, however, the National Cloud Technologists Association (NCTA) has recognized that evolving market demands have changed cloud computing technology in at least 13 ways.
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Regulatory and security burdens are no longer the barriers to cloud adoption that they used to be for the financial sector – and vertical software as a service (SaaS) is now making the leap a true no-brainer.
The digital economy has created so many opportunities. So much has changed in such a short period of time; just five years ago, the notion of cloud services being used in business would have been an utterly alien concept. Now, it’s well on the way to gaining acceptance across even the traditionally slowest adopting sectors, but much work still has to be done.
For too long, banks have lagged behind in terms of SaaS adoption. While the SaaS model has been widely used for horizontal consumer applications, it has not had the same uptake across financial services – understandably in many instances.
Several factors have served to hinder uptake of SaaS in the banking space, least of all the relative scarcity of banking-specific SaaS on offer. Vendors have had to meet a complex array of requirements from banks, including the effective control, management, audit, and securing of all information flows, while ensuring compliance with a complex array of regulatory requirements – no mean feat. That’s where on-premises applications have appeared more attractive in the short-term as financial institutions have been more comfortable having application providers defined within their firewall.
Yet, by failing to maximise the benefits of the cloud, institutions really are now missing out on a lot. SaaS is evolving in the cloud, and is increasingly closing the gap on how to meet those unique requirements through automation and data consolidation.
Indeed, the scalability of SaaS is massive, having been designed with adaptability inherently in mind. It is also highly resilient , evolving constantly, and providing immediately realised value. Indeed, the cost of ownership is usually significantly lower than other delivery models.
However, the real game-changer has now arrived, heralding the dawn of the cloud service economy in earnest.
‘Vertical SaaS’ offers the same level of control, integration, transparency, and security as that offered by Application Service Providers and, most importantly, can live within an institution’s firewall. Vertical SaaS is fundamentally able to combine the security benefits of the ASP delivery model with the cost benefits of the SaaS model for a true win-win situation.
Vertical SaaS is thus providing a highly viable model and addressing financial sector concerns in new ways – and financial institutions can still take a lead.
Primarily, the vendor solution is able to integrate well with the operating and control environment of the bank, while providing fast and accurate financial reporting which, in turn, allows for better, more informed decision-making.
Vertical SaaS is also offsetting concerns by better understanding data governance procedures and actively meeting requirements by including compliance capabilities, thus ensuring transparency and agility for ever-evolving demands. This further means that operating procedures and infrastructure are audited by an independent third party, providing further peace-of-mind.
With the introduction of, and marked on-going investment in, the more robust model that is vertical SaaS, the reasons for financial institutions to avoid making the adoption leap are becoming fewer and fewer. The hard work has already been done. It’s now quicker, more secure, more agile, and ultimately better – so there really is no barrier left to stop banks from adopting and realising the huge benefits.
Among the largest transformations brought about by cloud and virtualization technologies is the location-agnostic and device-agnostic applications that are proliferating across corporate networks. With cloud technology, businesses are now able to centrally host resources such as applications, data, and VDI desktops in a datacenter and publish them to any remote device, allowing them to proactively […]
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Picture credit: Golem
Say hello to Golem. The goal of the Golem project is to allow users to rent unused computing power – think Airbnb for computers – and to create, not entirely modestly, ‘the new way the Internet will work’. But how is it going about this mission?
The answer: by utilising blockchain and paying users in cryptocurrency. In theory, the Golem network will be a decentralised ecosystem where dedicated software and the combined power of users’ machines will be able to complete any computing task.
Julian Zawistowski is CEO of imapp, the company which develops Golem. Describing the Golem project as ‘Uber for computers’ – or in the future, describing Uber as ‘Golem for cars’ – he explains how the idea came about when working on a ‘cool computing chemistry’ project. “We realised we had scaling up problems,” he tells CloudTech, “because at that point you never have enough computing power when it peaks, but then all of a sudden you need nothing… [it’s] very volatile.”
Enter Ethereum, a public blockchain platform which enables the ability for ‘smart contracts’ – protocols that can verify or enhance the performance of a contract. This enables the backbone for Golem; having an Ethereum-based transaction system can clear payments between providers, requestors, and software developers, while it also compares favourably for developing applications on the platform as opposed to other blockchains, such as Bitcoin.
“The idea of building Golem occurred to us only when we learned more about Ethereum and smart contracts,” says Zawistowski. “Then we realised you could use this blockchain layer with the logic that smart contracts give you to build a system like Golem.”
Golem recently announced the launch of a crowdfunding project, beginning on November 11, using its own Golem Network Token (GNT). Zawistowski explains the GNT is important to give the project flexibility and control, compared to other blockchain tokens, adding that the plan is to be able to deliver Golem as a standalone independent product in six months’ time.
The link between blockchain and cloud technologies – aside from the hype around blockchain being similar to the hype around cloud the better part of a decade ago, as Chirag Mehta recently put it – is an interesting one. If we take the concept of a distributed network of computers as being similar, and the concept of ‘blockchain as a service’ (BaaS), spearheaded by major cloud providers, such as AWS, Google, IBM, and Microsoft, then there is a link.
Zawistowski argues these are where the similarities end, however; not least with regard to redundancy. Redundancy in cloud, creating backup copies, is naturally important – but for blockchain, it’s on a much bigger scale to base the platform’s security. “The biggest advantage of blockchain technology is the biggest disadvantage at the same time,” he explains. “That may not be true for every technology, in details, but basically every node in the network does the same, and scaling up the network does in fact not add to its usability.
“Of course you want some redundancy on cloud for security, but there’s like a backup, a single, or two or three copies of what you’re doing – not 60,000 of them!”
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In a field as competitive as the storage market is, knowing what’s going to happen before it actually happens can be extremely valuable. And right now, the storage market is going through some big transitions, some of which are upending the industry.
This is kind of to be expected when dealing with a business that incorporates the latest technological advances, but even with that in mind, the rapid evolution underway at the moment is impressive to watch. The storage market as we know it today will look quite different in a decade. But let’s not get too far ahead of ourselves; we’ll keep our projections focused and take a brief but insightful look into the not-too-distant future as we see what the experts are saying about the storage market for 2017.
If one thing is consistent across the range of predictions being made, it’s that the role of cloud storage will be integral. More businesses are turning to the cloud for a wide variety of services with storage being one of the primary choices.
In a study released earlier this year, 451 Research found that the cloud storage market was expected to double by next year. That’s only the start of what could be some enormous growth for cloud storage. Research conducted by MarketsandMarkets similarly found huge rates of growth for the market, only their study went further. The organisation predicts that after doing nearly $19 billion in 2015, the cloud storage market would grow to more than $65 billion by 2020. These findings indicate that businesses are quickly moving many of their storage needs to the cloud.
That’s not the only transition many enterprises are making regarding their storage options. For many years, companies relied on hard disk drives for their storage needs, but starting several years ago, they began to move into the realm of solid state drives (SSDs). SSDs are largely better for performance, much faster than hard disk drives, and better able to handle the workloads businesses have these days. The one downside was the price — SSDs were simply the more expensive option. But that’s not necessarily the case anymore. The price of solid state drives is declining, and many experts are predicting they’ll reach the same price range as hard disk drives in 2017. That means not only will SSDs become more popular among enterprises, they’ll soon be used as a replacement for hard disk drives. The hard disk option may still be used for archived data that needs to be kept around in the long term, but the vast majority of storage usage will likely be solid state drives.
While many companies head over to cloud storage, we can also expect more intense competition. The usual companies will be out in full force, like Google, Microsoft Azure, and definitely AWS, but that won’t be the only place the competition will come from. According to Mark Lewis, CEO of Formation (and the former CTO and GM of EMC), the legacy players will find new rivals in regional cloud service providers. These providers will be businesses fulfilling niche company needs, providing specialised services that can bring more value to their customers.
This marks a big change from the much larger cloud service providers that usually offer features meant to cover a wide range of clients. Whether a company is trying to set up a modular data centre or working to analyse years of sales data, a specialised provider will have a specific service designed to help them.
Lewis also predicts that there will be an increase in adoption for software defined storage. Instead of being used for smaller projects, software defined storage will become a major factor in big data initiatives, an especially important role considering how vital big data is becoming for enterprises. Part of the reason businesses will move to software defined storage is how easy it has become to move legacy applications to there, turning its advantages into key strengths every business can use.
Staying on top of these changes in the storage market can help a business be prepared for the future. It’s all about keeping technology up to date and using the latest advances for the benefits they provide. While these predictions are still more educated guesses, they can provide a helpful guide for a company’s plans for the future.