Category Archives: News & Analysis

Azure, Datacentre, Equinix, Microsoft, Microsoft Office 365, News & Analysis, Software as a service, TelecityGroup

Equinix and Telecity to offer Microsoft Azure ExpressRoute for Office 365

datacentre cloudData centre operators Equinix and TelecityGroup are both now offering Microsoft Azure ExpressRoute for Office 365 as part of their cloud offerings. Microsoft is understood to be announcing as many as five such partnerships with data centre operators.

Co-location specialist TelecityGroup said it is offering the cloud service to three distinct types of customer, these being enterprise customers, co-location partners and a reseller channel. The reseller channel itself is broken down three groups of telcos, managed service providers and systems integrators.

The nature of the market for Office 365 is broadening, according to Adi Ayyagani, the group head of market development for TelecityGroup. “Once interest was restricted to financial services and a couple of other early adopters, but now enterprises from every vertical market are showing an interest.”

TelecityGroup is offering the Office365 service on its software defined networking Cloud-IX platform. Though a number of operators are reportedly making ExpressRoute for Office 365 available, Ayyagani claimed that the Level 3 MPLS network that underpins Cloud-IX will make all the difference. “It means customers can get the service from anywhere, it’s more robust and there’s a greater level of integration available, so that configuration of the service is a lot simpler for service providers,” said Ayyagani.

The managed service providers, telcos and systems integrators reselling the cloud service will be able to use TelecityGroup’s broad footprint to access almost any market in Europe, the Middle East or African, said Ayyagani.

Meanwhile, global data centre operator Equinix has now announced worldwide availability of the cloud version of Microsoft Office for enterprises. The service improves the levels of data privacy since ExpressRoute enables most Office 365 network traffic to avoid the public Internet. Enterprises that use ExpressRoute in an Equinix data centre also get the benefit of being able to run hybrid and multi-cloud services that didn’t previously scale well over the Internet or over typical WAN works, it says.

“Office 365 customers can now benefit from predictable network performance and the ability to better manage network availability,” said Ross Ortega, Microsoft’s Principal Program Manager for Azure Networking.

Cloudera, compliance, Deloitte, Enterprise IT, Financial Services, News & Analysis

Deloitte and Cloudera create compliance service in the cloud

CloudProfessional service company Deloitte and cloud operator Cloudera have launched a jointly created cloud service that helps financial services people meet their compliance obligations more easily. It aims to specifically ease the workload created by the supervisory rules of the capital analysis and review (CCAR) process.

The Deloitte CCAR service aims to help companies cope with the masses of data needed to stress test financial products as regulations constantly change. Annual CCAR supervisory rules regularly specify new scenarios and datasets to be used in credit risk, liquidity risk, market risk, pre-provision net revenue (PPNR) and capital management models.

The cost and time involved in constantly processing these complicated variables, in order to generate the forecasted stress estimates, is escalating as the number of quarterly and yearly models multiples, according to Deloitte.

The Deloitte-designed solution includes accelerators to streamline data selection, data quality, variables conversion, data ingestion and management and to convert or migrate models to the SAS DS2 or Apache Spark or Python programming languages.

Cloudera was approached to use its expertise in Apache Hadoop open source software frameworks in order to create the visualization and dashboard tools promised in the system. The tools are designed to interact with the results of stress tests so they can quickly identify trends and potential sources of risk.

Deloitte built accelerators in Spark that cater for a wide variety of contingencies, which cuts the cost and risk of migrating existing CCAR models into an open source environment at first and into  the SAS DS2 once it is released.

“The current regulatory environment that our clients face is more complex than at any time in history,” said Ashish Verma, director at Deloitte Consulting LLP. “This complexity in regulation has led to complexity in data management, making compliance very costly with little benefit to the business.”

Cloudera has created a ‘cost effective solution’ to the problems faced by clients, said Verma, “storing this data within Cloudera Enterprise means companies can perform additional non-compliance analysis and potentially develop a deeper understanding of their businesses.”

Carrenza, gov.uk, Government, IaaS, Infrastructure as a Service, News & Analysis, Public Sector

Carrenza claims it’s now top cloud host for UK government digital service

gov.ukUK cloud service provider Carrenza has announced it is now providing the majority of hosting for the government digital service (GDS) as it made the production and staging environments for the Gov.UK site live on its cloud infrastructure.

Gov.uk has now rationalised hundreds of individual web sites for government departments and public bodies and concentrated the traffic for 24 ministerial departments and 28 other organisations according to Carrenza.

Infrastructure as a service (IaaS) provider Carrenza was initially asked to provide the infrastructure for Gov.UK’s preview operation in 2013 but, it claims, once it opened a second UK data centre its role was expanded. Carrenza rents capacity in Slough and London from data centre operators Equinix and Level 3.

Carrenza runs its IaaS and platform as a service (PaaS) offerings on a VMware-based cloud built on HP servers and HP 3PAR SAN storage which, it says, supports a range of operating systems, application and database technologies that includes “pretty much anything that runs on X86 architecture”. After Carrenza achieved official security accreditation the GDS moved the majority of Gov.Uk’s staging and production systems to the Carrenza Cloud, which has now received 2 billion visits, it says.

GDS originally found Carrenza through the G-Cloud III framework and a competitive tendering process. A major consideration for any cloud service provider, when pitching for contracts with the GDS, is a commitment to open source technology, according to Carrenza CEO Dan Sutherland.

Carrenza was chosen for Gov.UK because its custom software was developed in-house at GDS which needed to source cloud hosting and support for its flagship website.

“The launch of Gov.uk was a significant milestone,” said Sutherland. Open source has underpinned open dialogue and is helping to change and improve the way government communicates with its citizens, according to Sutherland.

Any cloud service provider wanting to win government contracts needs to concentrate on communicating with them, according to Andrew Mellish, Carrenza’s Head of Public Sector Services. “Our team understands what GDS is trying to achieve and how best to deliver the technologies they are using,” said Mellish, “when someone from GDS calls one of our engineers, they know they are speaking to someone who gets it and will work with them as efficiently as possible.”

Dublin, Interop, News & Analysis, Taqua, Telco Cloud

Interop opens European telco cloud hub in Dublin

wireless area networking cloudVirtual infrastructure specialist Interop Technologies has opened a European HQ and network operations centre in Dublin to support the launch of Europe’s first end-to-end cloud-based IP multimedia subsystem (IMS) core and IP services suite, reports Telecoms.com.

The CorePlusXSM suite aims to give operators a platform to run Internet protocol (IP) services and exploit the opportunities of LTE networks, according to Interop. It’s needed because launching these IP services in traditional turnkey configuration is too problematic and expensive for operators. Interop said it will make offering new services, such as Wi-Fi calling, VoLTE and rich communication services (RCS), a lot easier. Interop partnered with voice-over-Wi-Fi specialist Taqua to develop the suite.

“We developed CorePlusXSM to solve real market problems for operators burdened by the extraordinary cost, complexity and expertise requirements associated with IMS and advanced IP services,” said Interop Technologies CEO John Dwyer.

“VoWiFi is an important service offering that operators can utilize to solve real-world coverage issues immediately,” said Eric Pratt, Taqua’s CEO. “We’re working with Interop to reduce the barrier of entry to advanced IP voice and messaging services for European service providers with a robust WiFi calling solution they can deploy now.”

GSMA figures show that European mobile operators invested €155 billion between 2007 and 2014, according to Dwyer, and it estimates that another €170 billion of investment is needed for the following six years. This level of network investment is the catalyst for the IP Revolution and the European telecom market is preparing the path for the all-IP network explosion, said Dwyer.

Interop Technologies’ plan is to virtualise the IP Revolution so operators of all types and sizes can participate, he said. Interop is in the deployment phase with ‘several’ customers and plans to announce the roll-out of a major project later this year, it said.

As CorePlusXSM is a complete end-to-end virtualised solution, operators can quickly and cheaply launch IP services on 2G and 3G networks, while laying the path for future advanced service evolution, according to Interop. The reduction in cost, complexity and labour intensity gives companies a quick start, without limiting their options for adding new services as the network, business and subscriber demand evolves, according to Interop.

compliance, managed security, News & Analysis, Rackspace

Rackspace launches managed security and compliance service for enterprise cloud clients

Security concept with padlock icon on digital screenRackspace has announced new managed security and compliance assistance services to protect businesses and mitigate the risk of cyber threats. These services will give Rackspace clients ‘holistic’ coverage across cover complex, multi-cloud environments, it claims.

The service will provide consultation and tailored security using Rackspace’s inhouse expertise. It can both improve security while cutting the cost of vigilance, Rackspace claimed.

The Rackspace Managed Security offering is to be backed by round the clock support from the Customer Security Operations Center (CSOC) at Rackspace headquarters and will open in October. The service comprises four elements: host and network protection, vulnerability management, threat intelligence and compliance assistance.

Host and Network Protection will protect against zero-day and non-malware attacks as well as traditional compromise tactics. Security Analytics uses a security information and event management (SIEM) system paired with big data analytics to collect and analyse security data from the customer’s environment. As part of its Vulnerability Management service Rackspace will scan its clients’ environments and tailor its responses to estimated threats. Meanwhile, its Threat Intelligence will use fuse information from 20 feeds with Rackspace’s own internal data to constantly redraw the changing threat landscape.

All this information will help clients meet their governance objectives, as part of Rackspace’s Compliance Assistance service, which offers detailed proof of configuration hardening and monitoring, patch monitoring and user observance, the service provider said.

This information, in tandem with detail about file integrity, will help cloud service managers and CIOs to keep on top of their mounting compliance challenge, claimed Brian Kelly, chief security officer at Rackspace.

“Cyber-attacks are the new normal for companies,” said Kelly. It will be a lot cheaper and quicker to use Rackspace to manage cloud services, said Kelly. “We have 16 years of first-hand knowledge managing IT infrastructure and direct experience with today’s complex threats.”

administrators, Database, developers, Internet of Things, IoT, JSON, MapR, News & Analysis

MapR claims JSON IoT development breakthrough

Cloud databaseEnterprise software vendor MapR has unveiled plans to slash the workload of IoT developers and administrators by cutting the complexity of managing its NoSQL databases.

The key to this simplification, it says, is in more creative use of the JavaScript Object Notification (JSON) format, which it claims has the potential to make significant improvements in both database scalability and the analysis of the information they contain.

“We’re seeing big changes in the way applications are developed and how data is consumed,” said MapR’s chief marketing officer Jack Norris, “the underlying data format is the key to making information sharing easier.”

Bringing out the advantages of JSON makes administration easier, according to Norris, because users can make changes easily in a database built on documents. This in turn helps developers when they are planning applications, because it is easier to create a user friendly system. Tweaking JSON will benefit system builders in their own work too, Norris argued, since a document database can now be given enterprise grade scalability, reliability and integrated analytics.

The organisational improvements include the ability to personalise and deliver better online shopping experiences, reduce risk and prevent fraud in real-time, improve manufacturing efficiencies and cut costs. Savings will come from preventing cluster sprawl, eliminating data silos and lowering the cost of ownership of data management, claims MapR. Meanwhile it has promised a productivity dividend from continuous analytics of real-time data.

The MapR-DB supports the Open JSON Application Interface (OJAITM), which is designed to be a general purpose JSON access layer across databases, file systems and message streams, enabling a flexible and unified interface to work with big data, claims MapR.

The addition of a document database capacity extends the NoSQL MapR-DB to cover more types of unstructured business data, said one analyst. This could make it faster and easier to build big data applications, without the burden of shuffling data around first.

“MapR continues to build on the innovative data platform at the core of its Hadoop distribution,” said Nik Rouda, senior analyst at the Enterprise Strategy Group.

Analytics, HDS, Internet of Things, News & Analysis

Hitachi Data Systems unveils new automated IoT policing system

A new IoT system can predict crime by reading social media and analysing the public’s movements, claims Hitachi data Systems (HDS).

Hybrid cloud systems designed by HDS are to offer new automated policing systems, including predictive crime analytics and video management systems. The new public safety technologies were unveiled yesterday by HDS at the ASIS International Annual Seminar and Exhibits in Anaheim, California.

The new Hitachi Visualization Suite (HVS) (version 4.5) now includes Predictive Crime Analytics (PCA) and version 2.0 of the Video Management Platform (VMP).

The PCA predicts crime by analysing live social media and Internet data feeds to gather intelligent insights which enable the users of the system to make ‘highly accurate crime predictions’, claims HDS. Both social media and video camera data will be analysed for both historical crime and to predict potential incidents.

The HVS is a hybrid cloud-based platform that integrates disparate data and video assets from public safety systems, such as computer-aided emergency services dispatch, number plate readers and gunshot sensors. The real time info is then presented geospatially to monitors at law enforcement agencies in order to improve intelligence, support their investigations and make policing more efficient, says HDS. The geospatial visualizations will also provide better historical crime data, by presenting information on crime in several forms, including heat maps.

Blending real-time event data from public safety systems with historical and contextual crime data allows agencies to conduct more thorough analysis, using spatial and temporal prediction algorithms, that could help solve many hitherto unsolvable crimes. It could also provide underlying risk factors that generate or mitigate crime, says HDS.

The system uses natural language processing for topic intensity modelling using social media networks which, HDS claims, will deliver highly accurate crime predictions.

The systems will ultimately create faster police response times when situations develop, according to Mark Jules, HDS’s VP of Public Safety and Data Visualization. “Today, we are empowering them with the ability to take a proactive approach to crime and terrorism,” said Jules, “Public safety is a fundamental pillar of our vision for smart cities and societies.”

Cloudera, Hadoop, News & Analysis, Open Source

Cloudera announces tighter security measures for Hadoop

Cloud securityCloudera has announced a new open source project that aims to use real-time analytical applications in Hadoop and an open source security layer for unified access control enforcement.

Kudu, an in-memory store for Hadoop, aims to give developers more choice and stop them from having their options limited. Currently developers must choose between fast analytics with HDFS or updating data with HBase. Combining the two, according to Cloudera, can be potentially fatal for any developers that try, since the systems are both highly complex.

Cloudera says Kudu eliminates the complexities involved in processes like time series analysis, machine data analytics and online reporting. It does this by supporting high-performance sequential and random reads and writes, enabling fast analytics on changing data.

Cloudera co-authored Kudu with Intel, which helped it make better use of in-memory hardware and Intel’s 3D XPoint technology. Other contributors included Xiaomi, AtScale, Splice Machine and Zoomdata.

“Our infrastructure team has been working with Cloudera to develop Kudu, taking advantage of its unique ability to support columnar scans and fast inserts and updates to continue to expand our Hadoop ecosystem footprint,” Baoqiu Cui, chief architect at smartphone developer Xiaomi, told CIO magazine. “Using Kudu, alongside interactive SQL tools like Impala, has allowed us to build a next-generation data analytics platform for real-time analytics and online reporting.”

Meanwhile a new core security for Hadoop has been launched. RecordService aims to provide unified access control enforcement for Hadoop by enforcing role based access controls. It acts as a new layer that sits between Hadoop’s storage and computing engines and aims to consistently enforce the role-based access controls defined by Sentry. RecordService also provides dynamic data masking across Hadoop, protecting sensitive data as it is accessed.

“Security is a critical part of Hadoop, but for it to evolve the security needs to become universal across the platform. With RecordService, the Hadoop community fulfils the vision of unified fine-grained access controls for every Hadoop access path,” said Mike Olson, co-founder and chief strategy officer at Cloudera.

Apache, Azure, Database, Microsoft, News & Analysis, Ubuntu

Microsoft selects Ubuntu for first Linux-based Azure offering

AzureMicrosoft has announced plans to simplify Big Data and widen its use through Azure.

In a blog post, T K Rengarajan, Microsoft’s corporate VP for Data Platforms, described how the expanded Microsoft Azure Data Lake Store, available in preview later this year, will provide a single repository that captures data of any size, type and speed without forcing changes to applications as data scales. In the store, data can be securely shared for collaboration and is accessible for processing and analytics from HDFS applications and tools.

Another new addition is Azure Data Lake Analytics, a service built on Apache YARN that dynamically scales, which Microsoft says will stop people being side tracked from work by needing to know about distributed architecture. This service, available in preview later this year, will include U-SQL, a language that unifies the benefits of SQL with the expressive power of user code. U-SQL’s scalable distributed querying is intended to help users analyse data in the store and across SQL Servers in Azure, Azure SQL Database and Azure SQL Data Warehouse.

Meanwhile, Microsoft has selected Ubuntu for its first Linux-based Azure offering. The Hadoop-based big data service offering, HDInsight, will run on Canonical’s open source browser Ubuntu.

Azure HDInsight uses a range of open source analytics engines including Hive, Spark, HBase and Storm. Microsoft says it is now on general release with a 99.9 per cent uptime service level agreement.

Meanwhile Azure Data Lake Tools for Visual Studio will provide an integrated development environment that aims to ‘dramatically’ simplify authoring, debugging and optimization for processing and analytics at any scale, according to Rengarajan. “Leading Hadoop applications that span security, governance, data preparation and analytics can be easily deployed from the Azure Marketplace on top of Azure Data Lake,” said Rengarajan.

Azure Data Lake removes the complexities of ingesting and storing all of your data while making it faster to get up and running with batch, streaming, and interactive analytics, said Rengarajan.

China Unicom, Datacentre, News & Analysis, Telco Cloud, Telefonica

China Unicom and Telefónica in global data centre sharing agreement

Reflections are seen on a logo of Spain's telecommunications giant Telefonica in MadridTelefónica and China Unicom have agreed to share their international data centre capacity for multinational clients across Europe, The Americas and Asia.

The initial agreement covers three major data centres from each operator but, the companies say, this could be the first step towards larger scale cloud cooperation.

The pooling of resources means China Unicom can support customers seeking to expand into Europe and The Americas while Telefónica can strengthen its proposition across Asia.The cloud computing aspect of the agreement includes IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) with virtual servers and multi-cloud solutions.

China Unicom’s customers can now benefit from Telefónica’s data centre presence in Sao Paolo in Brazil, Miami in the US and Alcalá de Henares in Madrid, Spain. The extent of the partnership will expand as Telefónica commits additional investment towards new infrastructure, facilities and multi-cloud solutions, it says. Conversely, Telefónica can use the cloud capacity of China Unicom’s data centres located across China in Langfang, Shanghai and Chongqing. This, it says, means it can offer end-to-end service delivery for its multinational customers.

China Unicom’s data centre provides international connectivity services including virtual private networks, multi protocol label switching (MPLS) and Global LAN. Internet access for customers’ servers can be offered as an option to the standard service. Every China Unicom Point of Presence comes with ‘meet me’ room services. The mutual colocation service also offers local support for customer equipment.

Telefónica has a presence in 21 countries and a customer base of 329 million accesses around the world, with its major markets being in Spain, Europe and Latin America. Telecom operator China Unicom offers mobile broadband (WCDMA, LTE FDD, TD-LTE), fixed-line broadband, GSM, fixed-line local access, ICT, data communications and related services. It has a total of 439 million subscribers.