SYS-CON Events announced today that Progress, a global leader in application development, has been named “Bronze Sponsor” of SYS-CON’s 20th International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on June 6-8, 2017, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY.
Enterprises today are rapidly adopting the cloud, while continuing to retain business-critical/sensitive data inside the firewall. This is creating two separate data silos – one inside the firewall and the other outside the firewall. Cloud ISVs often get requests to connect these silos using technologies such as VPN; however, these tend to be difficult to manage and are not engineered for accessing business data from the cloud.
Monthly Archives: May 2017
Seven Essentials for a Top-Performing IT Help Desk | @CloudExpo #Cloud #DataCenter
The help desk forms the backbone of IT operations for many federal, state and local government agencies. In fact, the cross-functional nature of its operation means the help desk directly impacts productivity and is an essential part of what enables an agency to meet its stakeholder needs.
However, owing to increasingly complex IT environments, managers struggle to ensure that their help desks are operating at optimum efficiency. This seven-point guide will help IT managers ensure their help desks deliver exceptional service while maximizing productivity.
The Simple Checklist for Solving Ghost Issues at Remote Offices | @CloudExpo #Cloud #APM #Monitoring
IT leaders have always had their hands full with ghost issues on-premises. But for businesses that rely on remote and branch offices, monitoring a sprawling network of on-premises equipment introduces even more challenges.
That’s why we move to the cloud, right? To help us eliminate truck rolls, improve cost efficiency and centralize management of applications across all locations.
When you’ve migrated to the cloud (even if it’s just for something like office applications like Office 365 or G Suite), you’ve already considered compliance, licensing, budget concerns. But what happens when your remote users start experiencing classic ghost issues?
SaaS Adoption: Before You Sign on the Dotted Line | @CloudExpo #API #SaaS #Cloud
The purpose of this article is draw attention to key SaaS services that are commonly overlooked during contact signing that are essential to ensuring they meet the expectations and requirements of the organization and provide guidance and recommendations for process and controls necessary for achieving quality SaaS contractual agreements.
[session] #Serverless Applications | @CloudExpo @IBMcloud #AI #OpenWhisk
Apache OpenWhisk on IBM Bluemix provides a powerful and flexible environment for deploying cloud-native applications driven by data, message, and API call events. In his session at 20th Cloud Expo, Daniel Krook, Software Architect, IBM Watson and Cloud Platform, and Distinguished IT Specialist, will discuss why serverless architectures are attractive for many emerging cloud workloads and when you should consider OpenWhisk for your next project. Then get started on Bluemix with three sample applications covering how the OpenWhisk programming model enables you both to implement REST APIs and process non-HTTP events at scale.
Is Middle East Moving to the Cloud?
When we think of cloud, we often think of advanced countries like the U.S, Canada, Australia, Germany, and Scandinavian countries. Or we think of emerging economies like India and China. We rarely associated cloud technology with the Middle East and that’s probably what needs to change.
A report by Gartner shows that companies in the Middle East are all set to spend more than two billion dollars over the next three years as they want to move their data and applications to the cloud. This represents a 22 percent growth as the revenue figures stood at $956 million in 2016.
So, what’s driving the cloud here?
The report further states that platform as a service (PaaS) is recording the highest growth rate at 28.8 percent closely followed by software as a service (SaaS) at 28.5 percent. Growth in both these areas indicate that companies are looking to migrate their applications and workloads from an on-premises data center to the cloud.
As with the rest of the world, companies operating in the Middle East also understand the benefits that come from cloud, and they want to make the most of it. Contrary to popular opinion, Middle East is no longer about oil. Falling oil prices and the growing demand for alternate sources of energy has forced oil-producing countries like Saudi Arabia to look at development of other industries.
Already Dubai and Abu Dhabi are leading the way as one of the best cities in the world for travel and living. There are many companies that have a presence in these two cities, thanks to their advanced infrastructure and friendly corporate policies. Other cities too such as Cairo are looking to follow suit, and it won’t be long before these countries become attractive destinations for companies of all sizes and sectors.
With such a trend, it’s no surprise that cloud will boom here too, as many companies will depend on the cloud one way or the other. In fact, keeping this trend in mind, companies like Alibaba have already started setting up cloud data centers in this part of the world.
This is a smart move considering that data center traffic will reach 366 exabytes per year, up from 68 exabytes in 2013. Such an explosive growth needs a ton of facilities and this is exactly what major cloud companies are vying to setup.
In addition to data center traffic, consumer adoption of cloud storage is also expected to grow astronomically. It is expected to represent 61 percent of total cloud transactions in 2018, up from 26 percent in 2013, according to a report by Cisco. To top it, Cisco predicts that this region will rank second in the world, just behind the Asia Pacific region when it comes to growth.
All these numbers and trends point yet again to the growing might of cloud and its overarching reach to almost every part of the world. Let’s hope that soon African and Asian countries also join the bandwagon, so every individual in every part of the world can leverage the benefits of cloud technology.
The post Is Middle East Moving to the Cloud? appeared first on Cloud News Daily.
Enterprise-owned data centres still ‘essential’ despite cloud growth, research notes
Enterprises may be starting to move workloads to the cloud, but enterprise-owned data centres remain the ‘primary compute venue’ with workloads staying consistent over the past three years, according to new research from the Uptime Institute.
The study, which polled more than 1,000 data centre and IT professionals globally, argues that enterprises continue to see the data centre as ‘essential’ to their digital-centric strategies with the majority of budgets increasing or staying consistent through 2017.
Respondents reported that nearly two thirds of their IT assets were currently deployed in their own data centres. 22% were deployed in colocation or multi-tenant data centre providers, with only 13% deployed in the cloud.
Despite this, more than two thirds (68%) of companies polled say they rely on IT-based resiliency, relying on live application failover in case of an outage due to multiple, geographically distributed data centres. An overwhelming majority (90%) said their company’s management was more concerned around outages compared to this time last year.
“The survey findings reflect several key trends that are acting together as a powerful catalyst for change within the industry,” said Matt Stansberry, senior director of content and publications at Uptime Institute. “Increased performance at the processor level, further expansion of server virtualisation, and the adoption of cloud computing have all created an IT foundation that differs greatly from those seen just five years ago. Through this change, enterprise-owned data centres have remained a central component.
“We urge data centre and IT professionals to focus on the business aspects of running their IT foundation, creating sets of repeatable processes to make it work efficiently and adopting new technologies and solutions when the business demands it,” added Stansberry.
You can find out more about the results here.
A&I Named “Bronze Sponsor” of @CloudExpo | @AISolutions_Inc #DevOps #API #DX
SYS-CON Events announced today that A&I Solutions named “Bronze Sponsor” of SYS-CON’s 20th International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on June 6-8, 2017, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY. Founded over 15 years ago in 1999, A&I Solutions continues to provide companies with premier integrated enterprise solutions. By partnering with the trusted and proven solutions of leading technology companies, our customers are assured high performance levels across all IT environments including: physical, distributed, cloud, virtual and heterogeneous platforms. Our expertise in enterprise applications, service assurance, security and infrastructure monitoring allows our customers to transform their companies by driving consistency and maximizing efficiency.
Mastering Your SaaS Provider Relationship | @CloudExpo #SaaS #Cloud
In this modern world of IT, you’ve probably got some new colleagues in your life-namely, the cloud and SaaS providers who now hold your infrastructure in their hands.
These business relationships-yes, they’re technology-based, but cloud and SaaS are business models-will become as important to your IT team and your company as the hardware and software you used to install. Once you’ve adopted SaaS, or inherited SaaS, it’s on you to avoid price hikes, licensing issues and app or provider sprawl. Budgeting for these apps, which means understanding their pricing models, is also likely in IT’s hands.
Choose Your Cloud Services Wisely to Build Trust with Business Leaders | @CloudExpo #SaaS #Cloud
The first step to solving a problem is recognizing that it actually exists. And whether you’ve realized it or not, cloud services are a problem for your IT department.
Even if you feel like you have a solid grasp of cloud technology and the nuances of making a cloud purchase, business leaders don’t share the same confidence. Nearly 80% feel that IT lacks the skills necessary to help with cloud purchases-and they’re looking to cloud brokers for help instead.
It’s time to admit we have a cloud services problem and start adapting to modern business technology. Part of that is understanding which services to outsource to the cloud so you can start proving your cloud knowledge to business leaders.