[slides] Staying Secure & Organized in the Cloud | @CloudExpo @SearchYourCloud #Cloud #Security #Compliance

As companies adopt the cloud-to-streamline workflow, deployment hasn’t been very seamless because of IT concerns surrounding security risks. The cloud offers many benefits, but protecting and securing information can be tricky across multiple cloud providers and remains IT’s overall responsibility.
In his session at 19th Cloud Expo, Simon Bain, CEO of SearchYourCloud, addressed security compliance issues associated with cloud applications and how document-level encryption is critical for supplementing existing enterprise security solutions. He drew from case studies, outlined best practices for businesses and demoed how data can be transported and stored to and from the cloud already encrypted and securely accessed no matter where it’s stored.

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How to Use Microsoft Ink on a Mac

Parallels Desktop 12 Update 1 was released a few weeks ago. You can read about all the changes in this update here. In this blog post, I will discuss in some detail only one of the Update 1 features: even greater support for Microsoft Ink. As I wrote about in an earlier blog post, Ink […]

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Oracle’s Cloud Transition Path

Oracle is the perfect poster boy for the growing might of cloud computing. This tech stalwart is steadily moving its operations to the cloud, and is slowly moving away from selling its traditional on-premise licensed software.  This transition is expected to reflect in its earnings too. In fact, many analysts are looking forward to the quarterly results that will be announced on December 15.

The street consensus is an earnings of $9.14 billion in revenue, that would lead to an earnings per share (EPS) of $0.60. They also expect Oracle to announce a positive outlook for the next quarter, and expect it to generate around $9.24 billion in revenue, amounting to an earnings per share of $0.64.

While it’s not a surprise to see tech companies growing and expanding their offerings, what’s special about Oracle is it’s move to the cloud. In many ways, this also reflects the growing might of the cloud industry at large.

NetSuite

A defining moment in Oracle’s cloud transition path came on November 7th of this year when it acquired a cloud based provider called NetSuite for a sum of $9.3 billion. NetSuite is a provider of customer relationship management and enterprise resource planning software, and with this acquisition, Oracle took a big step forward into the world of cloud services. It’s worthy to note that Oracle’s co-founder and Chairman Larry Ellison owned almost 40 percent in NetSuite.

Textura

Before NetSuite, Oracle acquired other companies in the cloud space as well. In May of 2016, it purchased Textura for a sum of $663 million. Textura is a cloud-based construction management company that handled around $3.4 billion in payments at the time of its acquisition. This company provided services to more than 6,000 companies in the construction sector by helping them manage projects within specified time and budget constraints, and also, by reducing risk for developers.

Opower

Oracle acquired Opower on May 2nd, 2016 for a sum of $532 million. Opower is a prominent player in the utilities market, with its offering of customer engagement and energy efficiency cloud services for utility providers. This company has more than 100 clients, including some prominent names such as PG&E, Exelon, and National Grid. The big data platform of Opower is believed to store and analyze more than 600 billion meter readings from around 60 million end customers. The analysis from this data helps its clients to proactively meet regulations, and offer a digital experience for its end customers.

With these acquisitions, oracle expanded its reach across different sectors. In addition, many of Oracle’s services are moved to the cloud, so it was able to make a larger foray into cloud-based services. Some reports even show that the company is vying to become the first cloud provider to hit the $10 billion revenue mark in the Saas/ PaaS segment.

This ambition could become a reality soon, as the tech giant has overcome the initial bottlenecks that come with the acquisition of new companies. In this sense, the worst of cloud transition is behind Oracle now, and it can look forward to an exciting future in the cloud world!

The post Oracle’s Cloud Transition Path appeared first on Cloud News Daily.

Microsoft’s Azure-powered IoT solutions transforming Indian manufacturing industry

(c)iStock/photogearch

Microsoft recently presented three most significant IoT solutions that are said to be transforming the Indian manufacturing industry. These cloud-based solutions offered by Precimetrix, Teramatrix and Covacsis are powered by Azure – the Microsoft Cloud – that helps create digital, intelligent and predictive factories.

The solutions are already deployed across India’s leading organisations like Hero Moto Corp, Samudra LED, KEC, VE Commercial Vehicles, Godrej, TAFE, Bajaj, among others. By leveraging Azure, Microsoft partners are able to address challenges like rapidly changing customer preferences, hardware evolutions and managing hyper business growth in the manufacturing space.

This is how the solutions help the manufacturing sector create digital factories:

Customer engagement is the backbone of digital transformation which allows building tailored customer experiences by harnessing data and drawing actionable insights to achieve a segment of one.

Covacsis offers a platform that provides a 360 visibility of the manufacturing floor in real-time. Real-time visibility is helping the KEC team analyse run time, cycle time, availability and OEE of the machines in real time, allowing them to optimise the productivity output and minimise operational costs.

Another key pillar for digital transformation is the ability to empower employees, providing tools and processes for greater collaboration, mobility and insight. Microsoft works with a lot of its partners to offer solutions that help organisations achieve more by designing a workplace that is intelligent, flexible, and secure. Some of these offerings are provided by partners like ZingHR, Vymo, Qustn, Knolskape, Symphony Summitt, among others.

Precimetrix offers IoT and analytics to enable real-time process management and actionable analytics to improve productivity, efficiency and compliance. Samudra’s central monitoring system, powered by Precimetrix, provides smart street lighting system for JPC which has enabled the following benefits:

  • Overall minimum committed annual energy savings of 77.13% in comparison to baseline
  • Zero Investment project even for new lights for first seven years.
  • 77.13% savings in energy costs at an expense of only 22.87%.
  • 30.06% is JMC’s share in energy savings
  • Reduction in maintenance cost by ~61.18%

Teramatrix offers an IoT software platform that enables companies to connect with their fixed or mobile infrastructure and analyse the massive data streams emanating from them. The deployment of their solution at Hero Moto Corp resulted in 20% expected increase in direct and indirect manpower productivity by enabling 24×7 continuity of testing operations and remote management of testing equipment.

Holistic View of #SDLC and #DevOps | @DevOpsSummit @CollabNet #CD #Scrum

If you haven’t heard yet, CollabNet just put out some very big news for managing and gaining value from DevOps.
We introduced CollabNet DevOps Lifecycle Manager (DLM) — a platform designed exclusively for providing a single pane of glass, dashboard, and traceability views across your DevOps toolchain and processes from planning to operations and that can be traced back to planning and development.

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Sixa Gets Funding for a PC-free World

The tech startup scene sure looks promising, as more companies are coming up with innovative ideas, that are in turn, backed by some of the best venture capitalists of our times. Another such company that has obtained funding for its innovative product is Sixa. This company has got $3.5 million in funding from a group of investors led by Tandem Capital.

So what is so different about Sixa’s product and how is it going to impact the tech market?

Currently, cloud is a big technology, and more companies are moving their operations to it because of the many benefits that it offers. That said, many individual customers still prefer to keep their PC’s close to them, which means, most PCs are located on site and not on the cloud. While this has worked for so many years, individual customers are obviously missing out on the advantages of moving to the cloud.

To enable these customers also to make the most of cloud, Sixa aims to help them move to the cloud with their low-latency virtual machines. Launched about three months ago, this product is aimed mainly at developers now, though it can widen to other individual users in the future.

For many developers, this is the technology they were waiting for, so it’s little wonder that there is a waiting list in the thousands. To meet these demands, more than 15,000 employees were brought on board, and this helped the company to release its beta version last week. The additional funding is expected to further boost the presence of the company and help it to cater to a global demand.

Sixa’s product brings a ton of benefits for developers. The first and foremost benefit is they are PC-free, which means, they can work from any device and from any location of their choice. They are no longer confined to an office or home environment, and this flexibility can greatly boost the productivity of employees. Secondly, they don’t have to worry about upgrading hardware or software, as those aspects are taken care of by the cloud administrators. The same holds good for security patches and updates too. As a result, developers are free to focus on their task, without worrying about the overheads, and this makes them more productive than before. Higher levels of productivity is a good enough incentive for companies to subscribe to this service too.

There are already many platforms like Nitrous.io that provided this flexibility for users, so what’s new here? The answer is latency. Many services had latency problems with their virtual machines. This means, when a developer moves the mouse, he or she will see the cursor move only half a second later. This is frustrating to say the least, and can impact the effectiveness and productivity of employees. This product from Sixa overcomes this drawback by reducing the latency to 11 milliseconds on its end. Still the speed of your Internet Service Provider and your distance from the data center will continue to impact your access speed, but it is sure to be faster than before.

This service is available for $49/ a month or $0.49/ an hour.

The post Sixa Gets Funding for a PC-free World appeared first on Cloud News Daily.

[slides] Analyzing #IoT Data | @ThingsExpo @OnProcess #BigData #Analytics

An IoT product’s log files speak volumes about what’s happening with your products in the field, pinpointing current and potential issues, and enabling you to predict failures and save millions of dollars in inventory. But until recently, no one knew how to listen. In his session at @ThingsExpo, Dan Gettens, Chief Research Officer at OnProcess, discussed recent research by Massachusetts Institute of Technology and OnProcess Technology, where MIT created a new, breakthrough analytics model for spare parts forecasting and inventory planning using connected-product failure predictability. He showed how, by analyzing IoT data, you can slash both costly inventory stock and stock-outs, and meet heightened customer expectations for repairs and uptime.

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[session] The Governance of #IoT Data | @ThingsExpo #M2M #AI #BigData

IoT solutions exploit operational data generated by Internet-connected smart “things” for the purpose of gaining operational insight and producing “better outcomes” (for example, create new business models, eliminate unscheduled maintenance, etc.). The explosive proliferation of IoT solutions will result in an exponential growth in the volume of IoT data, precipitating significant Information Governance issues: who owns the IoT data, what are the rights/duties of IoT solutions adopters towards this data, how to deal with Data Residency and Data Privacy issues, how to manage the lifecycle of IoT data, etc.?

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[slides] Choosing the Right AWS Services | @CloudExpo @BMCSoftware #Cloud #Storage #APM #Monitoring

Without a clear strategy for cost control and an architecture designed with cloud services in mind, costs and operational performance can quickly get out of control. To avoid multiple architectural redesigns requires extensive thought and planning. Boundary (now part of BMC) launched a new public-facing multi-tenant high resolution monitoring service on Amazon AWS two years ago, facing challenges and learning best practices in the early days of the new service.
In his session at 19th Cloud Expo, Michael Moran, a Senior Architect, TrueSight R&D, at BMC Software, shared those lessons learned and how to balance cost control with the many choices of service, storage, and compute paradigms.

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