The deluge of IoT sensor data collected from connected devices and the powerful AI required to make that data actionable are giving rise to a hybrid ecosystem in which cloud, on-prem and edge processes become interweaved. Attendees will learn how emerging composable infrastructure solutions deliver the adaptive architecture needed to manage this new data reality. Machine learning algorithms can better anticipate data storms and automate resources to support surges, including fully scalable GPU-centric compute for the most data-intensive applications. Hyperconverged systems already in place can be revitalized with vendor-agnostic, PCIe-deployed, disaggregated approach to composable, maximizing the value of previous investments.
Monthly Archives: May 2018
Smart Cities and Machine Learning | @ExpoDX @Site1001 #IoT #IIoT #AI #MachineLearning #SmartCities #DigitalTransformation
Machine learning has taken residence at our cities’ cores and now we can finally have “smart cities.” Cities are a collection of buildings made to provide the structure and safety necessary for people to function, create and survive. Buildings are a pool of ever-changing performance data from large automated systems such as heating and cooling to the people that live and work within them. Through machine learning, buildings can optimize performance, reduce costs, and improve occupant comfort by sharing information within the building and with outside city infrastructure via real time shared cloud capabilities.
UK Cloud Awards 2018 winners revealed
17 May, 2018
Yesterday played host to the fifth annual UK Cloud Awards, brought to you by Cloud Proand the Cloud Industry Forum (CIF), where the creme de la creme of the industry gathered at London’s Counrt Hall to celebrate and recognise collective and individual cloud achievements.
Last night’s ceremony, which was supported by headline sponsor Ingram Micro, rewarded the best cloud providers, products and projects from the past year, as decided by an expert panel of independent judges – led by chief judge Frank Bennett.
Margot James, the Minister for Culture, Communications and Creative Industries, was in attendance at the awards, which received hundreds of submissions, with just 18 walking home with prizes on the night.
“In 2016 the digital sectors contributed £116bn to our economy and we’re very keen to continue the upward trajectory. By working closely with the private sector, we intend to increase this contribution to £200bn by 2025 – and I think that’s a target that we can bust,” James said.
“You, the cloud computing sector, are going from strength to strength. As companies across the country continue to adopt cloud-based services into their businesses at the rate they are doing, I see a great future for you all. Your technology allows SMEs to leverage technology and compete globally. You are providing a leapfrog technology. Your services are not only a catalyst in our country, they can be a catalyst in others, especially developing countries. So, there are great export opportunities for UK cloud service providers the world over. I wish you every success in exploiting those opportunities.”
The winners of the UK Cloud Awards 2018 are as follows:
BEST IN CLASS PRODUCTS
Security Solution of the Year
Verify by Aspect Software
Storage Solution of the Year Rubrik
Collaboration Solution of the Year Freshdesk
Business Continuity Solution of the Year iland Secure DRaaS by iland
Most Innovative Enterprise Product iPortalis Control Portal
Most Innovative SMB Product Advanced Voice Services by Natterbox
Unified Communications Product of the Year Advanced Voice Services by Natterbox
Fintech Solution of the Year Mambu
Cloud Platform Solution of the Year Cloud Protection Manager by N2W Software
BEST DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION PROJECTS
Best Public Sector Project Health and Social Care digital meal planning with Kafoodle Kare
Best Private Sector Project (SMB) Stephen James Group supported by Charterhouse Voice Data
Best Private Sector Project (Enterprise)Most Innovative Emerging Technology
Project Freq by Amido
BEST IN CLASS CLOUD PROVIDERS
Best G-Cloud Public Sector Provider UKCloud Ltd
Best Cloud Service Provider (CSP) Sesui Ltd
Best Cloud Managed Service Provider (MSP) Ensonodiv
ACHIEVEMENT AWARDS
Cloud Visionary of the Year Apay Obang-Oyway, Ingram Micro (awarded Honorary CIF Membership)
Cloud Entrepreneur of the Year Mitchell Feldman, RedPixie
“The UK Cloud Awards have had a fantastic year and it is clear from the quality and number of submissions we received that this is an incredibly exciting time to be in the industry,” said Alex Hilton, CIF CEO.
“The standard of entries we’ve seen this year has been so high that making the shortlist is an achievement in itself and deserves to be recognised. However, there can of course only be one winner in each category so I’d like to offer my congratulations to everyone that took home accolades on the night.”
Paul Franklin, publisher of Cloud Pro and IT Pro, added: “These awards wouldn’t be possible without the support from the industry and I would like to offer a special thanks to our headline sponsor Ingram Micro, as well iland and T-Systems, for helping to make the event a success. We pride ourselves on the impartiality and thoroughness of our judging process, which we believe is one of the reasons the UK Cloud Awards have struck a chord with the industry. We fully expect to repeat the success of this year’s awards next year, so watch this space!”
Microservices, AWS ECS and Fargate | @ExpoDX @IBMDevOps #Agile #AWS #CICD #DataOps #DevSecOps #ChatOps
This is going to be a live demo on a production ready CICD pipeline which automate the deployment of application onto AWS ECS and Fargate.
The same pipeline will automate deployment into various environment such as Test, UAT, and Prod. The pipeline will go through various stages such as source, build, test, approval, UAT stage, Prod stage.
The demo will utilize only AWS services including AWS CodeCommit, Codebuild, code pipeline, Elastic container service (ECS), ECR, and Fargate.
Verizon moves to AWS as preferred public cloud provider
Verizon is moving to Amazon Web Services (AWS) as its preferred public cloud provider – migrating more than 1,000 business critical applications and backend systems in the process.
The announcement, made by AWS, notes that Verizon first started working with the cloud infrastructure behemoth in 2015, with the latest wave of migrations ‘part of a corporate-wide initiative at Verizon to increase agility and reduce costs through the use of cloud computing.’ Among the migrations are a series of production databases to Amazon Aurora.
“We are making the public cloud a core part of our digital transformation, upgrading our database management approach to replace our proprietary solutions with Amazon Aurora,” said Mahmoud El-Assir, Verizon senior vice president of global technology services in a statement. “The agility we’ve gained by moving to the world’s leading public cloud has helped us better serve our customers.
“Working with AWS complements our focus on efficiency, speed, and innovation within our engineering culture, and has enabled us to quickly deliver the best, most efficient customer experiences,” El-Assir added.
The move to AWS is an interesting one – and it’s worth noting here the distinction between having a ‘preferred’ provider and going all-in, as in the recent case with Ryanair. At Google Next last year, Alin D’Silva, VP and CTO of Verizon’s digital workplace initiative, explained to attendees how the company was rolling out G Suite to more than 150,000 employees.
Verizon’s history in the space is also worth mentioning. The telco acquired Terremark back in 2011, with a press release at the time noting the move would ‘clear the way for Verizon to lead the rapidly evolving global managed IT infrastructure and cloud services market.’
Alas, history did not quite turn out that way. Verizon’s cloud service was launched at the back of 2013, with Terremark’s technology at the forefront, and despite making a fair amount of noise and putting partnerships in place – one with Oracle for database software and middleware stands out – the ship had long since sailed. In February 2016, Verizon shut down part of its public cloud service, and a year later it sold up to IBM.
The companies described the move as a ‘unique cooperation between two tech leaders’ – a description which raised a few eyebrows. Speaking to this publication back in 2016, John Dinsdale, a chief analyst at Synergy Research, summed it all up. “Early on in the growth of the cloud market it had seemed like telcos might have a leading part to play – but the speed of cloud market development and the aggressiveness of the leading cloud providers has largely left them behind,” he said.
Kaspersky to relocate infrastructure to Switzerland for transparency
16 May, 2018
Kaspersky will relocate some of its infrastructure in Moscow to Switzerland and open a Swiss data centre to address concerns that its software is being used by the Kremlin to gather intelligence.
The Moscow-based anti-virus company announced it is moving its data storage and processing facilities for users in Europe, North America, Singapore, Australia, Japan and South Korea to Zurich towards the end of 2019.
The cyber security company is also opening a transparency centre to enable international regulators to review products and an independent third-party organisation will be established to also review its new processes.
The move is a direct response to growing concerns from Western nations over mass hostile cyber activity being carried out by Kremlin-backed Russian hackers and that Kaspersky could be linked to them.
Kaspersky has denied that Russian intelligence services have any access to its user’s data, but the company is concerned with the potential loss of trust posed by the allegations.
“The world is changing and changing really fast. The world in which we worked two or three years ago is different,” said Anton Shingarev, vice president of public affairs at Kaspersky Lab.
“The company needs to address that. The allegations we faced are wrong and there is no evidence. Still the allegations are there. We need to show customers we are taking them seriously and address them.”
At the end of 2017 the US government signed into law a government-wide ban on Kaspersky Lab software after months of suspicion the Russian-based cybersecurity company could spy on other countries through its products.
Twitter also banned Kaspersky from advertising on its platform based on US government’s allegations.
On Monday the Dutch government also moved to phase out Kaspersky anti-virus software for precautionary measures.
In a letter to parliament, Justice Minister Ferdinand Grapperhaus said the decision was made because the Russian Government had an “offensive cyber programme that targets among others the Netherlands and Dutch interests”.
Image credit: Shutterstock
Kaspersky to relocate infrastructure to Switzerland for transparency
16 May, 2018
Kaspersky will relocate some of its infrastructure in Moscow to Switzerland and open a Swiss data centre to address concerns that its software is being used by the Kremlin to gather intelligence.
The Moscow-based anti-virus company announced it is moving its data storage and processing facilities for users in Europe, North America, Singapore, Australia, Japan and South Korea to Zurich towards the end of 2019.
The cyber security company is also opening a transparency centre to enable international regulators to review products and an independent third-party organisation will be established to also review its new processes.
The move is a direct response to growing concerns from Western nations over mass hostile cyber activity being carried out by Kremlin-backed Russian hackers and that Kaspersky could be linked to them.
Kaspersky has denied that Russian intelligence services have any access to its user’s data, but the company is concerned with the potential loss of trust posed by the allegations.
“The world is changing and changing really fast. The world in which we worked two or three years ago is different,” said Anton Shingarev, vice president of public affairs at Kaspersky Lab.
“The company needs to address that. The allegations we faced are wrong and there is no evidence. Still the allegations are there. We need to show customers we are taking them seriously and address them.”
At the end of 2017 the US government signed into law a government-wide ban on Kaspersky Lab software after months of suspicion the Russian-based cybersecurity company could spy on other countries through its products.
Twitter also banned Kaspersky from advertising on its platform based on US government’s allegations.
On Monday the Dutch government also moved to phase out Kaspersky anti-virus software for precautionary measures.
In a letter to parliament, Justice Minister Ferdinand Grapperhaus said the decision was made because the Russian Government had an “offensive cyber programme that targets among others the Netherlands and Dutch interests”.
Image credit: Shutterstock
Secrets, Keys & Crypto | @ExpoDX @Fortanix #AI #IoT #SDN #HybridCloud #CloudSecurity #DigitalTransformation
Transformation Abstract Encryption and privacy in the cloud is a daunting yet essential task for both security practitioners and application developers, especially as applications continue moving to the cloud at an exponential rate. What are some best practices and processes for enterprises to follow that balance both security and ease of use requirements? What technologies are available to empower enterprises with code, data and key protection from cloud providers, system administrators, insiders, government compulsion, and network hackers? Join Ambuj Kumar (CEO, Fortanix) to discuss best practices and technologies for enterprises to securely transition to a multi-cloud hybrid world.
Citrix quietly ditches Xen and NetScaler brands days after Synergy 2018
16 May, 2018
Citrix has ditched its Xen and NetScaler product names in a major rebrand only days following the end of its annual Synergy conference.
The cloud-centric company, specialising in workplace digitisation, is rebranding products such as XenApps, XenDesktops and XenMobile to Citrix Virtual Apps, Citrix Virtual Desktops and Citrix Endpoint Management respectively.
Also part of the rebrand, ShareFile will be named Citrix Content Collaboration, and XenServer will be Citrix Hypervisor.
These new products, which comprise a unified Workspace line, also includes Citrix’s February acquisition Cedexis, which – after aligning to the “unification plan” – will be named Citrix Intelligent Traffic Management.
Citrix’s new Networking line, meanwhile, will see its NetScaler brand phased out entirely with existing products largely retaining their previous identities under a ‘Citrix’ handle; for example, NetScaler ADC will be known as Citrix ADC.
Only days after wrapping up its annual Synergy conference, this year hosted in Anaheim, California, Citrix quietly rolled out this major rebrand in a new product guide and name unification chart for partners.
“Throughout 2018, you will see exciting changes as we unify our product portfolio,” its new guidance said. “As we make it easier to use Citrix products, we’re also making it easier to understand the value of our solutions with new names.”
“Unifying the experience allows us to simplify our offerings, which requires name changes. Once we’ve transitioned to the new solutions and names, this effort will make it easier for you to understand the benefits of Citrix as a business and technology partner.”
Citrix added that changes to its website, support documentation and user interface will be introduced over the next year as part of a transition process, with businesses and partners given support to make any appropriate changes.
The rebrand emerges days after Citrix unveiled a host of new products at Citrix Synergy 2018, including Citrix Analytics, a machine learning-powered security tool, and the new Workspace App.
CEO David Henshall introduced the Workspace App as “one way to organise, access and open all of your files, regardless of whether they’re on your hard drive, on your network drive, on cloud or anywhere in between”.
The company were keen to push a unified message and product line, shifting its focus more towards building a better user experience than predominantly focusing on infrastructure, with this rebrand feeding into Citrix’s desire to provide a more holistic and unified approach toward transforming the digital workspace.
Speaking at a press Q&A following the keynote address, chief product officer PJ Hough went into more detail around building a better user experience for Citrix customers.
“Having spent a lot of time working on productivity software before I joined Citrix, I understand the value of reducing clicks, of reducing confusion for users, and really having people have a consistent and seamless experience across all their devices and platforms,” he said.
Although references to its Xen and NetScaler brands were kept to a minimum during the company’s opening keynote address, products such as XenDesktop and XenApps were often featured in breakaway sessions on the conference floor. But there was no indiciation that Citrix was planning to remove these brands from its line.
Cloud Pro approached Citrix for comment but its US representatives were not available at the time of writing.
Graph Databases and Machine Learning | @ExpoDX @TigerGraphDB #AI #GIS #MachineLearning #GraphDatabases #DigitalTransformation
Machine learning provides predictive models which a business can apply in countless ways to better understand its customers and operations. Since machine learning was first developed with flat, tabular data in mind, it is still not widely understood: when does it make sense to use graph databases and machine learning in combination? This talk tackles the question from two ends: classifying predictive analytics methods and assessing graph database attributes. It also examines the ongoing lifecycle for machine learning in production. From this analysis it builds a framework for seeing where machine learning on a graph can be advantageous.’