With tough new regulations coming to Europe on data privacy in May 2018, Calligo will explain why in reality the effect is global and transforms how you consider critical data. EU GDPR fundamentally rewrites the rules for cloud, Big Data and IoT.
In his session at 21st Cloud Expo, Adam Ryan, Vice President and General Manager EMEA at Calligo, will examine the regulations and provide insight on how it affects technology, challenges the established rules and will usher in new levels of diligence around personal data.
Monthly Archives: July 2017
American Airlines Adopts Public Cloud Computing | @CloudExpo #AI #Cloud #Analytics
Did you know that the reservations systems of the biggest carriers mostly run on a specialized IBM operating system known as Transaction Processing Facility (TPF). Designed by IBM in the 1960’s it was designed to process a large numbers of transactions quickly. Although IBM is still updating the code, the last major rewrite was about ten years ago. With all the major technologies changes since then, it’s clear that IBM has already accomplished a herculean task by keeping an application viable for over 50 years!
Managing Your Hybrid Cloud | @CloudExpo #AI #ML #Cloud #Cognitive Computing
Runaway cloud computing cost may be causing an information technology industry crisis. Expanding requirements, extended transition schedules and misleading marketplace hype have made “Transformation” a dirty word. Questions about how to manage cost variances and deviations with assets and cost across different suppliers abound. A recent Cloud Tech article explained that while public cloud offers considerable cost savings in comparison to private or on-premises based alternatives, there may also be significant hidden costs. Operational features like auto-scaling can cause costs to soar in line with demand for resources, making predicting costs difficult and budgeting even harder. There is also an acute need for a holistic and heterogeneous system that can track the costs of cloud services from the point of consumption (e.g., an application or business unit) down to the resources involved (e.g., storage or compute service).
Announcing @CalligoCloud Named “Bronze Sponsor” of @CloudExpo Silicon Valley | #Cloud #Security
SYS-CON Events announced today that Calligo has been named “Bronze Sponsor” of SYS-CON’s 21st International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on Oct 31 – Nov 2, 2017, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
Calligo is an innovative cloud service provider offering mid-sized companies the highest levels of data privacy. Calligo offers unparalleled application performance guarantees, commercial flexibility and a personalized support service from its globally located cloud platforms. Through its four pillars of focus, Calligo delivers a platform that businesses can trust to deliver the high level of service and protection they expect and is lacking in many cloud offerings.
Google triples number of $500k cloud deals year over year as latest results announced
Google says it has tripled the number of its big cloud deals year over year as its parent company Alphabet announced revenues of $26 billion (£19.9bn) for the most recent quarter.
In a call with analysts, Google CEO Sundar Pichai – who it was also announced is joining the Alphabet board of directors – discussed the company’s ‘impressive’ cloud assets. “[Google Cloud Platform] continues to experience impressive growth across products, sectors and geographies and increasingly with large enterprise customers in regulated sectors,” he said, as transcribed by Seeking Alpha.
“To be more specific about our momentum with big customers, in Q2 the number of new deals we closed worth more than $0.5 million is three times what it was last year,” Pichai added.
This was about as specific as Pichai got, as Google puts cloud in its ‘other revenue’ bucket, alongside such products as the Google Play app store. Google’s other revenues for Q217 were at $3.1 billion, up 42% from this time last year but seeing a very slight decrease from Q1 this year.
Compared with Amazon, which is now reporting its AWS revenues separately, and Microsoft, which does not give specifics but instead puts revenues for ‘intelligent cloud’, including Azure and server products, it is relatively nebulous.
Yet while a lot of the focus has been on AWS and Azure’s competition in recent weeks – as this publication reported on – analysts have been noting Google’s relative rise. The company still only finds a place in the ‘visionaries’ section for Gartner’s IaaS Magic Quadrant, however its growth remains higher than AWS if not at the same level as Microsoft, according to Canalys.
Google’s overall revenues were at $25.8 billion, with ‘other bets’, such as its autonomous car business, Waymo, at $248 million. Like Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella last week, Pichai focused on the importance of artificial intelligence in the company’s strategy going forward. “Google continues to lead the shift to AI driven computing,” he said. “It’s our focus on infusing our products and platforms with power of machine learning and AI that’s driving our success.”
Among the company’s highlights in the most recent quarter were partnerships with SAP and Nutanix, opening four new cloud regions, with the most recent being in London, as well as the launch of Transfer Appliance, a product aimed at transferring data from local servers into their cloud.
You can digest the full Alphabet results here.
A guide to simplifying private cloud management with SaaS
On-premises cloud infrastructure promises better security, governance, and performance than public cloud, but many enterprises don’t want to deploy it because they must invest in a team of cloud experts. But now, software as a service (SaaS) is being used as the management platform for some on-premises clouds, which greatly simplifies cloud management and reduces the need for cloud-savvy network administrators.
Here, we will see how the use of SaaS simplifies on-premises cloud operations in three areas: provisioning and configuration, monitoring, and management.
Why SaaS for private cloud?
SaaS has become a hit in the market because people want to consume computing resources, but they don’t want to build the infrastructure themselves. SaaS frees IT departments from having to manage a big infrastructure. According to Gartner, the cloud system infrastructure (SaaS) market will grow from $34.6 million in 2017 to $71.5 million in 2020.
Prior to the evolution of SaaS, the private cloud concept failed because many enterprises became disenchanted with the effort and cost involved in building a cloud from scratch using OpenStack, VMware, or other do-it-yourself cloud components. In contrast, SaaS enables remote management of private cloud and allows companies to consume private cloud resources and while the development and management is taken care of by a SaaS vendor.
The move to SaaS-managed cloud follows a growing trend in the industry toward cloud-managed infrastructure, a trend that began with Wi-Fi vendors like Meraki and expanded to include security, SD-WAN, and finally cloud vendors. There are two components to a SaaS-managed cloud: an on-premises cloud operating system and infrastructure (typically a hyper-converged platform) and a SaaS portal. The SaaS portal is the point of entry for management, but it can also deliver commands that automatically monitor and manage the on-premises infrastructure to further reduce enterprise overhead. Let’s look at some examples of how SaaS improves key aspects of on-premises cloud management.
Provisioning and configuration
Simply installing a cloud can be a complex process. One must assemble the necessary servers, storage and networking resources, and then implement an operating system and cloud software. Wouldn’t it be nice if there was no need for integration?
Some cloud vendors are starting to implement cloud software that is pre-installed into the operating system image, so that once a server is deployed and powered on, the cloud should come up automatically without IT administrators having to know anything about various services and their persistent stores. The image software should pool together servers, storage and networking resources to create a highly resilient cloud. Ideally, the user should be able to install a cloud and have it up and running in less than 30 minutes. Rather than sending a technician to provision the cloud, the SaaS portal can automatically discover the cloud hardware and register it automatically.
Monitoring
Rather than having an IT administrator continually monitor the cloud’s health (to see when VMs are under-provisioned, for example), the SaaS portal can do it and alert the IT staff when an issue needs to be resolved.
To reveal the state of applications and what actions other users have performed, the SaaS-managed cloud can monitor events, statistics, and dashboards in real time. It can get logs and audit the actions of all users. For example, if a service was down since 10pm last night, it is good to know if a user or script mistakenly shut down a VM that provides that service.
Management
Any system as complex as a cloud needs to monitor critical services and help monitor workloads. Companies can spend a lot of manpower resources to perform this function manually, but a SaaS-managed cloud can monitor and heal itself.
For example, if any hardware component or software service fails, the system should detect and fix the situation. Then, it can alert the administrator about which component failed, so the administrator could take corrective action to restore the capacity of the system. And beyond simply monitoring the cloud’s health, intelligent SaaS portals can respond to monitoring inputs by dynamically adjusting the storage and CPU allocations dynamically. Such a “cloud brain” could also watch for and shut down rogue VMs, push out required software patches and new software versions, for example, allowing IT administrators to focus on other, more important tasks.
SaaS-based private cloud management eliminates the most painful part of infrastructure management. IT administrators are perfectly willing to give up patching, maintenance releases and the need for new configurations and turn them over to a “cloud brain.” Essentially, a SaaS-managed cloud builds the foundation for a self-driving cloud, making deploying, running, and managing an on-premises cloud as “hands off: as using a public cloud. It eliminates over-provisioning and saves money by cutting the IT resources needed to run a private cloud while delivering the security, control, and performance that private cloud brings.
With a SaaS-managed cloud, IT departments can actively manage the capacity being used for on-premises cloud to optimise infrastructure spending on both manpower and hardware.
DXWorldEXPO Announces Agenda | @ExpoDX #AI #DX #DigitalTransformation
“DX encompasses the continuing technology revolution, and is addressing society’s most important issues throughout the entire $78 trillion 21st-century global economy,” said Roger Strukhoff, Conference Chair. “DX World Expo has organized these issues along 10 tracks with more than 150 of the world’s top speakers coming to Istanbul to help change the world.”
[slides] IoT Network Data #Analytics | @ThingsExpo #BigData #IoT #AI #DX
While the focus and objectives of IoT initiatives are many and diverse, they all share a few common attributes, and one of those is the network. Commonly, that network includes the Internet, over which there isn’t any real control for performance and availability. Or is there? The current state of the art for Big Data analytics, as applied to network telemetry, offers new opportunities for improving and assuring operational integrity.
In his session at @ThingsExpo, Jim Frey, Vice President of Strategic Alliances at Kentik, discussed tactics and tools to bridge the gap between IoT project teams and the network planning and operations functions that play a significant role in project success.
Cisco Live 2017: Kinetic Launch, ACI Updates, & More!
GreenPages Solutions Architect, Kevin Dresser, recently attended Cisco Live 2017 in Las Vegas. Here are his hightlights and thoughts from the conference:
I arrived a day early to Cisco Live to attend a technical seminar on Cisco’s Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) which is their software-defined-networking solution for the Nexus Data Center platform. ACI has been out for over two years, however, this year’s conference had a great deal of emphasis on the fundamentals of ACI and taking these beyond just the data center. The theme this year was “The Network. Intuitive.” and just a week prior to CiscoLive was a major announcement of intent-based networking solutions under the Cisco Digital Network Architecture (DNA) portfolio.
The graphic below shows the core ACI fundamentals that tie together the analysis services, the defining of network functions and the provisioning and configuration of devices.
The opening keynote highlighted three core challenges that Cisco’s vision is now focused on: Scale, Complexity, and Security. Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins stated that “in 2020, as many as 1 million new connections will be added to the internet every hour”. The reality of this type of continuous growth of connected devices is where reducing complexity becomes a necessity. And as that network footprint grows, so does the threat surface. The emphasis on security was paramount and needs to be built into everything. The messaging from Cisco around this new era of networking is that their intuitive network, “powered by intent and informed by context”, will provide a secure, intelligent and adaptable platform. At the core of this intuitive network is the vast amount of data points that are available from these network connected devices. Last year’s Tetration and AppDynamics acquisitions are now integrated into the network to bring analytics to the DNA portfolio and leverage the huge amounts of data points that are available from these network connected devices. One example of how this will work is “Encrypted Traffic Analytics” which will look at network traffic and perform packet analytics that can accurately detect threats in encrypted traffic with more than 99 percent accuracy. ETA will accomplish this by looking at packet meta data and flow dynamics without needing to decrypt the data which has always been a resource intensive bottleneck. Another major benefit of network data analytics is in the information learned about the network to help significantly reduce the time administrators spend on problem identification, troubleshooting, and resolution.
One last item to mention regarding the keynote was the announcement of the Cisco Security Connector for iOS. Apple CEO Tim Cook joined the stage with Chuck Robbins to discuss the Cisco/Apple partnership and how they are committed to enterprise network security. The Security Connector for iOS app will deliver visibility, control, and privacy to enterprise owned iOS devices and use existing solutions like Umbrella to prevent access to malicious sites whether on the corporate network, public wifi or cellular data connections.
Here’s a summary of some of the new products and solutions:
The DNA Center is a management dashboard and command center for all network functions. This is where Scale and Complexity are addressed by eliminating the need to configure individual devices through the traditional CLI. Auto provisioning and policy definitions are all centrally managed through the DNA Center.
Data Analytics and Assurance –
The analytics and assurance platform continuously collects data from NetFlow, SNMP and Syslog sources to monitor device, user and application performance. The analytics and correlation of data help reduce troubleshooting time determining root cause and remediation of issues. Network traffic patterns and trends are also identified to help proactively plan changes before performance issues impact users.
The new Catalyst 9300, 9400 and 9500 switches come with custom built ASICs that are programmable, enabling software developers to leverage network resources to optimize their applications. The Catalyst 9000 is the ACI solution to the Enterprise as the Nexus 9000 is to the Data Center.
SD-Access will bring SDN to the Enterprise access layer. Segmentation policies for users, devices, and applications will provide greater security to the access network devices. Identity Services Engine will ensure user and device security policies are enforced as they move between wired and wireless connections. The DNA Center will provide auto-provisioning and management through the centralized UI and will tap into the network analytics platform for performance monitoring, management, and troubleshooting.
The following hardware platforms are supported for SD-Access:
Switches: Catalyst 9300, 9400, 9500, 3650, 3850, 4500E, 6500, 6800 and Nexus 7000
Routers: 4000 ISR and 1000 ASR
Wireless: 3800, 2800, 1850, 1830 and 1815 APs; 8540, 5520 and 3504 Controllers
Although not available until Fall 2017, Encrypted Traffic Analytics can accurately detect threats in encrypted traffic without needing to decrypt the data. The technology uses NetFlow and Stealthwatch to feed packet flow dynamics and meta data flow analysis to pick out threats with 99.9% accuracy.
Threat Intelligence Director on Firepower –
The Threat Intelligence Director will be available on the FMC in Fall 2017 to enable 3rd party threat intelligence feeds beyond the current Talos services.
The Jasper service provides real-time control and visibility of IoT deployments using cellular data connections. New features include improved reporting, integration with other Cisco products such as Spark and Umbrella as well as an analytics package.
Kinetic is another IoT tool that compliments Jasper by working with wifi and wired endpoints and runs on the new Catalyst 9000 switches.
My takeaway from this year’s Cisco Live conference is that Cisco has really turned a corner on their movement towards providing software solutions for the network. Most significant is how they are integrating the analytics, automation and security solutions across many different network platforms. Changes are coming in the way we design, implement and support networks.
By Kevin Dresser, Solutions Architect
Announcing @Massive1Network to Exhibit at @CloudExpo Silicon Valley | #Cloud #DataCenter
SYS-CON Events announced today that Massive Networks will exhibit at SYS-CON’s 21st International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on Oct 31 – Nov 2, 2017, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
Massive Networks mission is simple. To help your business operate seamlessly with fast, reliable, and secure internet and network solutions. Improve your customer’s experience with outstanding connections to your cloud.