For the last 10 years, the best and most comprehensive option to run Windows® on Mac® has been Parallels Desktop for Mac. Our competitors all have one thing in common: They use cost as a driving reason as to why you should not use Parallels Desktop. However, our competitors often fail to mention the vast […]
The post 5 Reasons Parallels Desktop 12 for Mac Is Better than VMWare Fusion 8.5 appeared first on Parallels Blog.
This is the burning question these days for the great minds of the enterprise regardless of industry! The digital revolution changes the way we do business and enables a world of new possibilities. But it also places unprecedented demands on businesses, on IT departments… and on legacy environments that were never designed to meet these challenges. Even today, 96% of enterprises involve mainframes in their new business initiatives. Forrester recently worked with Compuware to do some analysis and conduct a survey on How to Improve Application Development and Delivery with DevOps.
Cloud Expo, Inc. has announced today that Andi Mann and Aruna Ravichandran have been named Co-Chairs of @DevOpsSummit at Cloud Expo 2017. The @DevOpsSummit at Cloud Expo New York will take place on June 6-8, 2017, at the Javits Center in New York City, New York, and @DevOpsSummit at Cloud Expo Silicon Valley will take place Oct. 31-Nov. 2, 2017, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
Were you busy this week? Here’s a tech news recap of articles you may have missed for the week of 02/13/2017!
Azure’s Managed Disks are a huge win for cloud deployment and it gives more flexibility to support changing workloads. CIOs, Priorities, and the Life Sciences Industry. Safeguarding your cloud resources with Azure security services. VMware DaaS goes hybrid with Horizon Cloud. Cisco and Pure Storage announce data storage solution, and more tops news this week you may have missed!
Remember, to stay up-to-date on the latest tech news throughout the week, follow @GreenPagesIT on Twitter.
Join us for our upcoming webinar: “Harnessing Lightning: DevOps + ITOM for Secure & Compliant Hybrid Cloud Ops.” Click here to register
By Jake Cryan, Digital Marketing Specialist
Wooed by the promise of faster innovation, lower TCO, and greater agility, businesses of every shape and size have embraced the cloud at every layer of the IT stack – from apps to file sharing to infrastructure. The typical organization currently uses more than a dozen sanctioned cloud apps and will shift more than half of all workloads to the cloud by 2018. Such cloud investments have delivered measurable benefits. But they’ve also resulted in some unintended side-effects: complexity and risk. End users now struggle to navigate multiple environments with varying degrees of performance. Companies are unclear on the security of their data and network access. And IT squads are overwhelmed trying to monitor and manage it all.
We asked 50 futurists, professionals employed to review trends and develop strategy, to identify and rank the top five ways they believe digital transformation will drive value generation between now and 2020.
These top five value generators offer significant business advantages; but if your organization can achieve them faster than your competitors, there is a bonus advantage. We call it the Ax2 phenomenon (advantages have advantages). Not only do digital leaders realize competitive advantages before others, but they also have the advantage of insights from new data, which leads to new actions and new insights not yet understood or possible for laggards.
Just over a week ago I received a long and loud sustained applause for a presentation I delivered at this year’s Cloud Expo in Santa Clara. I was extremely pleased with the turnout and had some very good conversations with many of the attendees. Over the next few days I had many more meaningful conversations and was not only happy with the results but also learned a few new things. Here is everything I learned in those three days distilled into three short points.
YotaScale announced another round of funding today worth $3.6 million from Engineering Capital, Pelion Ventures, and angel investors such as Jocelyn Goldfein, Timothy Chou and Robert Dykes. This is the third round of funding for Yotascale. In January 2016, it got a funding of $1.2 million from Engineering Capital and in September of the same year, it got $2.4 million from a company called NewDo Venture. In all, the company has raised a total funding of $7.2 million.
YotaScale is an infrastructure performance management platform for cloud computing. Founded in 2015, this company is headquartered in Menlo Park in California. It was founded by Asim Razzaq, a former Senior Engineering Director at eBay and PayPal. During his stint at eBay, Razzaq realized that there was no dedicated service for monitoring the performance of cloud infrastructure, so he set out to fill this gap with his own company. Abbas Yousafzai is the current CTO, and Razzaq is the CEO of this company.
YotaScale collects and analyzes data collected from billions of data points on a platform. It uses machine learning algorithms to monitor factors such as load balance, performance, cost and availability of any platform. The aim of this system is to ensure that a company’s infrastructure is optimized to meet the changing business priorities of its clients. In fact, using such performance-based information, enterprises can customize platforms to align with their own priorities, so they can make the most of the underlying hardware and software of any cloud platform. In addition, it gives them unique insights about the platform, using which they can create new products and applications, and at the same time, reduce their operating costs.
Performance management for cloud computing is a hot and growing space, and there is much competition in this niche. CloudHealth technologies and Cloudability are two other notable companies involved in performance management, and together, both these companies have raised about $80 million through investments. In comparison, this funding of $7.2 million pales. However, Razzaq is confident that his product will bring in more investors as the company expands.
That said, YotaScale, or for that matter, other companies in this space too, face many hurdles. Different types of cloud infrastructure data are generated at different times because not all hardware or software components run at the same time. Some information is generated hourly, while others daily, and so on. With such disparate data, it becomes difficult to combine them together to get the picture of the platform’s performance at any given time.
For example, let’s say three components run and based on it, the performance is optimal at 1:00 AM, but when data about a hardware component arrives in at 5:00 AM, it changes to sub-optimal. This way, it’s hard to know if the performance was optimal at all at 1:00AM because the data that is needed to get a complete picture hasn’t come in until 5:00 AM.
Another problem is to define what is normal because it is highly contextual. So, what is normal for one situation may not be normal for another one.
Addressing these hurdles will be a crucial aspect for YotaScale in the near future.
The post YotaScale Gets Another Round of Funding appeared first on Cloud News Daily.
(c)iStock.com/roberthyrons
When it comes to digital transformation within the legal sector there are understandably many questions about how to handle sensitive information without compromising client confidentiality. This is also true when dealing with the internet as a whole, but particularly when it comes to cloud computing.
In a survey by the Cloud Industry Forum it was revealed that 70% of IT decision makers regarded data security as one of their biggest concerns when deciding whether to move to cloud-based services, up from 61% the year before. Law firms are notoriously cautious about moving to the cloud and whilst many of them are planning to invest in new technology over the next two years, many are concerned about the risks involved with this decision.
The transactional nature of legal services means that IT availability is paramount, and the IT team must protect the business against threats like power outages, ransomware and other malicious attacks. Updating the IT infrastructure that legal firms use to do this, for example by migrating to the cloud, is now becoming key to enhancing operational efficiency, increasing IT security and ensuring the overall future success of individual legal firms.
Increasingly, law firms are beginning to migrate to the cloud. Recently, New York law firm Graubard Miller and Thames Valley based solicitor B P Collins, migrated to the iland cloud for both Disaster-Recovery-as-a-Service and cloud hosting services. This reflects the overall market need for reliable, secure and cost-efficient IT resilience, particularly in the face of growing business threats.
With the backup and disaster recovery services that are available, migrating to the cloud provides a much safer, secure and compliant option for businesses within the legal sector. Whilst there is still a bit of a misconception that the cloud presents a risk for legal firms, storing confidential data and client information in the cloud is actually a viable security measure protecting against both human and natural disasters.
Graubard Miller, for example, leverages on-demand testing functionality in the cloud to ensure everything will run smoothly should they need to fail over, as well as employing a hybrid cloud solution which seamlessly protects both physical and virtual machines. In addition, features such as role-based access control, two-factor authentication, turnkey security and compliance reports greatly simplify auditing processes and these measures provide an effective, efficient and easy alternative to traditional onsite IT systems.
As with any business, cloud computing offers law firms an effective means for storing large amounts of data in an easily accessible, cost-effective manner. When properly implemented, the cloud enables lawyers to work from anywhere, resulting in increased productivity and an enhanced work-life balance. More cloud providers also now offer cloud management via mobile apps, providing the user with even more freedom to access data. In addition to this, as data can be accessed and shared securely anytime from anywhere, collaboration among lawyers can be significantly improved.
Furthermore, the cloud offers potential cost savings for legal firms. This is largely due to the fact that the cloud reduces the need for in-house servers, therefore cutting down on the high cost of investing in and managing IT hardware. B P Collins, as an SMB who leverages the iland cloud through Managed Service Provider, Wavex, has benefited from opting for pay-as-you-go pricing in the cloud, making a significant saving on their IT infrastructure. Organisations are also often able to outsource cloud and data management to their cloud provider, saving costs and easing the load on their IT teams.
Migrating to the cloud is not a decision that should be taken lightly, and legal firms must be aware of the options available to them to ensure their journey to cloud is the most secure and compliant it can be.
Law firms should always consider the security measures of a cloud provider when choosing the best option for them. Confidentiality is vital to the lawyer-client relationship, therefore cloud providers must meet international best practices when it comes to complying with rigorous enterprise security and control standards such as data encryption, intrusion detection and vulnerability scanning.
Firms also need to consider data sovereignty and privacy regulations and the implications of the legal domains in which cloud content is stored. Many countries do not allow certain types of data to be stored outside of the country; therefore the firm needs to know where the cloud provider is physically located and whether it provides mitigation strategies to properly safeguard stored data.
In order for law firms to remain competitive they must update their technology to ensure their services continue to evolve. As with B P Collins, operating within the cloud enables legal firms to work with individuals and organisations to provide a range of services, from securing international acquisitions to supporting individual needs and safeguarding clients’ interests.
In this ever more mobile age, lawyers are frequently required to access trial-critical documents on the move, rather than just from the office. This is why its important law firms embrace cloud computing securely to ensure their workforce is working as smartly as possible and their IT systems are highly available. If lawyers are spending a large proportion of their time every week out of the office, the ability to access data becomes a necessity.
Making the decision to adopt a cloud first strategy not only ensures high availability, data protection and increased IT security for legal firms, but also results in considerable IT cost reductions and enhanced lawyer-client collaboration. If technology is utilised well, migration to the cloud can only have a positive impact on the overall operational efficiency and ultimately the success of the firm.
(c)iStock.com/roberthyrons
When it comes to digital transformation within the legal sector there are understandably many questions about how to handle sensitive information without compromising client confidentiality. This is also true when dealing with the internet as a whole, but particularly when it comes to cloud computing.
In a survey by the Cloud Industry Forum it was revealed that 70% of IT decision makers regarded data security as one of their biggest concerns when deciding whether to move to cloud-based services, up from 61% the year before. Law firms are notoriously cautious about moving to the cloud and whilst many of them are planning to invest in new technology over the next two years, many are concerned about the risks involved with this decision.
The transactional nature of legal services means that IT availability is paramount, and the IT team must protect the business against threats like power outages, ransomware and other malicious attacks. Updating the IT infrastructure that legal firms use to do this, for example by migrating to the cloud, is now becoming key to enhancing operational efficiency, increasing IT security and ensuring the overall future success of individual legal firms.
Increasingly, law firms are beginning to migrate to the cloud. Recently, New York law firm Graubard Miller and Thames Valley based solicitor B P Collins, migrated to the iland cloud for both Disaster-Recovery-as-a-Service and cloud hosting services. This reflects the overall market need for reliable, secure and cost-efficient IT resilience, particularly in the face of growing business threats.
With the backup and disaster recovery services that are available, migrating to the cloud provides a much safer, secure and compliant option for businesses within the legal sector. Whilst there is still a bit of a misconception that the cloud presents a risk for legal firms, storing confidential data and client information in the cloud is actually a viable security measure protecting against both human and natural disasters.
Graubard Miller, for example, leverages on-demand testing functionality in the cloud to ensure everything will run smoothly should they need to fail over, as well as employing a hybrid cloud solution which seamlessly protects both physical and virtual machines. In addition, features such as role-based access control, two-factor authentication, turnkey security and compliance reports greatly simplify auditing processes and these measures provide an effective, efficient and easy alternative to traditional onsite IT systems.
As with any business, cloud computing offers law firms an effective means for storing large amounts of data in an easily accessible, cost-effective manner. When properly implemented, the cloud enables lawyers to work from anywhere, resulting in increased productivity and an enhanced work-life balance. More cloud providers also now offer cloud management via mobile apps, providing the user with even more freedom to access data. In addition to this, as data can be accessed and shared securely anytime from anywhere, collaboration among lawyers can be significantly improved.
Furthermore, the cloud offers potential cost savings for legal firms. This is largely due to the fact that the cloud reduces the need for in-house servers, therefore cutting down on the high cost of investing in and managing IT hardware. B P Collins, as an SMB who leverages the iland cloud through Managed Service Provider, Wavex, has benefited from opting for pay-as-you-go pricing in the cloud, making a significant saving on their IT infrastructure. Organisations are also often able to outsource cloud and data management to their cloud provider, saving costs and easing the load on their IT teams.
Migrating to the cloud is not a decision that should be taken lightly, and legal firms must be aware of the options available to them to ensure their journey to cloud is the most secure and compliant it can be.
Law firms should always consider the security measures of a cloud provider when choosing the best option for them. Confidentiality is vital to the lawyer-client relationship, therefore cloud providers must meet international best practices when it comes to complying with rigorous enterprise security and control standards such as data encryption, intrusion detection and vulnerability scanning.
Firms also need to consider data sovereignty and privacy regulations and the implications of the legal domains in which cloud content is stored. Many countries do not allow certain types of data to be stored outside of the country; therefore the firm needs to know where the cloud provider is physically located and whether it provides mitigation strategies to properly safeguard stored data.
In order for law firms to remain competitive they must update their technology to ensure their services continue to evolve. As with B P Collins, operating within the cloud enables legal firms to work with individuals and organisations to provide a range of services, from securing international acquisitions to supporting individual needs and safeguarding clients’ interests.
In this ever more mobile age, lawyers are frequently required to access trial-critical documents on the move, rather than just from the office. This is why its important law firms embrace cloud computing securely to ensure their workforce is working as smartly as possible and their IT systems are highly available. If lawyers are spending a large proportion of their time every week out of the office, the ability to access data becomes a necessity.
Making the decision to adopt a cloud first strategy not only ensures high availability, data protection and increased IT security for legal firms, but also results in considerable IT cost reductions and enhanced lawyer-client collaboration. If technology is utilised well, migration to the cloud can only have a positive impact on the overall operational efficiency and ultimately the success of the firm.