“Solr or Elasticsearch?”…well, at least that is the common question I hear from Sematext’s consulting services clients and prospects. Which one is better, Solr or Elasticsearch? Which one is faster? Which one scales better? Which one can do X, and Y, and Z? Which one is easier to manage? Which one should we use? Which one do you recommend? etc., etc.

These are all great questions, though not always with clear and definite, universally applicable answers. So which one do we recommend you use? How do you choose in the end? Well, let me share how I see Solr and Elasticsearch past, present, and future, let’s do a bit of comparing and contrasting, and hopefully help you make the right choice for your particular needs.

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Our guest on the podcast this week is Erik Sebesta, Co-Founder and CATO of Cloud Technology Partners. We discuss recent Internet of Things projects, including those of two healthcare intelligence companies, and explore exactly what it takes to delivery real-time data, safely and efficiently to end consumers. Listen in to learn how we’re building the next generation of IoT platforms and helping companies leverage this emerging technology.

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We all like to complain about services going down when bad weather strikes. The ‘wrong kind of snow’ can wreak havoc with trains and the road network can get snarled up fast, while power lines can come down in more remote areas. Where are the backup and recovery plans, we ask – but could our own customers or internal sponsors and colleagues be saying the same about us if we fail to deliver as we should?

The uncomfortable truth is many smaller businesses are unprepared for business continuity in the event of a disaster. The Federation of Small Businesses (FSB) has recently found that three out of five (59%) of the small businesses they questioned did not have a plan in place to deal with extreme weather conditions such as floods and snowstorms.

That’s just one of many stats that doesn’t seem to have improved much over the past few years. Another survey, by telecoms provider Daisy Group, has suggested that despite the boom in mobile technologies, “adverse weather conditions prevent an estimated three million UK workers from completing their normal work responsibilities each year”, and that a third of UK businesses were affected by transport problems, power cuts or broadband and phone line failures caused by inclement weather over the past two years.

So the word ‘disaster’ is relative – your head office could be intact, but failure to get vital collateral to a sales meeting or a rep on the road could mean the loss of a much prized contract. A field service engineer could have no means of ordering a key spare part. Many organisations will simply be unprepared for a sudden demand on bandwidth from people working remotely, with all that entails in secure access to company networks. And any downtime on core IT systems and lack of network access from anywhere can rapidly unravel workflows and damage reputations, as the productivity and morale of staff often depends on having reliable tools for their jobs. How many times are you told by other organisations that ‘Our systems are down’?

Secure offsite backup is a must, enabled with cloud storage

Apart from staff, of course, IT is the lifeblood of most modern organisations, no matter what sector they are in. IT and communications are likely to be the underpinning infrastructure that keeps an organisation in business. But while it may be impossible to have a plan that keeps you operating fully during a major disaster, too many organisations do not also have a day-to-day set of procedures that will help cope with less demanding events such as a prolonged spell of bad weather.

Business continuity plans cover factors such as mapping your locations, assets and operations, and identifying the critical processes you need to operate and what minimum resources are needed. Staff need to be covered for emergencies – for example, do your salespeople or other mobile professionals have an emergency kit in their cars?

There are key considerations for IT and communications:

• Secure offsite backup is a must, enabled, say, with cloud storage.
• Managed servers and cloud computing can help ensure your organisation’s network and applications are available independently if your office isn’t open.
• Network access from a range of devices, including people’s own smartphones and tablets, could be useful. The so-called ‘bring your own device’ movement means that you can be more flexible in remote working.
• Virtual secure networking from home and other remote computers, say in serviced offices, is certainly advisable for core systems such as accounts.
• Audio, video and web conferencing systems allow you to set up virtual meetings – a dial-in system for telephone calls could be top of the list.
• There are many in-car and portable gadgets, such as those that set up an instant Wi-Fi hotspot for a group using a mobile phone network.
• A sensible option is dual Internet provision. Having an alternative cable, DSL or mobile Internet service in the office to call on could be vital if the primary service is down.

You can really go to town on business continuity planning and risk management. There are several international and British standards and guidelines, many training courses, and one piece of guidance produced by the Cabinet Office – ‘Business Continuity for Dummies’. That sounds rather insulting, but it may be what you need to help put a practical plan in place to suit your organisation.

If you think you already have a good plan, there’s one thing you should do now: test it before it’s needed. This year’s Business Continuity Awareness Week, 16-20 March, has ‘testing and exercising’ as its theme, as here’s another stat to make you sit up: less than a third of organisations have tested their plans in the last year, notes the Business Continuity Institute. And what about all those without plans at all?

(c)iStock.com/scyther5

Amazon Web Services (AWS) remains the most popular enterprise cloud service, according to the latest quarterly report from Skyhigh Networks, while the number of cloud services used by firms continues to rise.

According to the report the average employee uses 27 apps at work, while the average number of cloud services in use per company was 897 in Q414, which compares favourably against 831 in Q3 and 626 in Q413. The biggest rise in app type was development, which saw a 97% spike in usage year on year. Collaboration went up 53%, file sharing 20%, business intelligence 18% and social media 17%.

As this publication reported back in October, Amazon continues to assert its dominance in enterprise cloud services. For Q414 figures, AWS finished top ahead of Microsoft Office 365, Salesforce, Cisco WebEx, and ServiceNow. Yammer, Box and Zendesk also made the top 10 while Workday was in the top 20, leading Skyhigh to comment: “Representing a new generation of enterprise software players, four companies in the list went public in the last 36 months.”

The top file sharing service, as it has been for the past year, was Dropbox, with Google Drive, OneDrive, and Box behind. Office 365 continues to be the most popular collaboration service, ahead of Gmail, Yammer, Yahoo Mail and Cisco WebEx.

Yet the report had an interesting undercurrent, and proposed the concept of the “enterprisation of consumer IT”. Never mind the consumerisation of the enterprise, Skyhigh argues: Facebook, Dropbox, Google Drive and Gmail, frequently used by consumers, now offer enterprise versions which provide greater controls for businesses. The top consumer cloud services, according to the report, are Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn and Pinterest.

There’s a problem however; four of these top five consumer apps also appeared in the list of top apps which don’t encrypt data at rest. 37% of users in Q414 uploaded at least one file containing sensitive or confidential data to a cloud service, while 22% of files uploaded overall contained private data.

The Q3 report briefly touched upon this, arguing how companies are struggling to block consumer products. Yet there’s been a shift in thinking. Whereas shadow IT – employees bypassing IT admin controls to use their own cloud services for greater productivity – was once a disaster, CIOs are now beginning to see the positive side, as sister publication Enterprise AppsTech has explored in depth.

The Skyhigh research also examined the fastest growing cloud services, with Loggly, Todoist and ToutApp in the top three – the latter two appearing on the fastest growing list for two consecutive quarters.

 “From the perspective of the end-user, there is an unprecedented amount of choice, and people are inclined to use things that help them while discontinuing their use of things that either don’t help them or are inferior to other solutions,” the report notes.

“It is this idea that led us to think that, by measuring usage patterns across thousands of cloud services, we could help identify the up-and-coming solutions that are on the path to mainstream adoption based on their growth rates.”

You can find the full report here.

There’s no denying we’re in the midst of a cloud craze – but, behind all the hype, is cloud adoption really imperative? How much of the cloud buzz is fabrications of possible benefits, and how much of it is reality? To decipher what’s true and what’s false, I’ve put together a list of five reasons why cloud adoption is important, based on the facts.
Freedom from responsibility and costs. Yes, when you move services to a cloud provider, you immediately relinquish some control. However, you instantly free yourself from the cost of hardware and server management, and gain back the time (or manpower) that it would ordinarily take to run IT systems.

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Cloud Foundry open Platform as a Service makes it easy to operate, scale and deploy application for your dedicated cloud environments. It enables developers and operators to be significantly more agile, writing great applications and deliver them in days instead of months. Cloud Foundry takes care of all the infrastructure and network plumbing that you need to build, run and operate your applications and can do this while patching and updating systems and services without any downtime.

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The Enov8 SolutionEcosystem allows enterprises to inject a level of transparency and discipline into DevOps and / or environment management operations. Ecosystem provides you with a foundation where you can systematically improve overall governance through out-of-the-box best practices and prioritize automation efforts based on the current work effort.
“Cigniti’s focus to offer end-to-end software testing services solutions gets further strengthened through this partnership. Test environment management and test data management solutions are very important for enterprises across the verticals. With increasing need for DevOps and Agile testing this partnership also positions us to serve ISVs in helping accelerate their market readiness with quality software,” said Srikanth Chakkilam, Executive Director at Cigniti Technologies.

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Kafka 0.8.2 has a pile of new metrics for all three main Kafka components: Producers, Brokers, and Consumers. Not only does it have a lot of new metrics, the whole metrics part of Kafka has been redone — we worked closely with Kafka developers for several weeks to bring order and structure to all Kafka metrics and make them easy to collect, parse and interpret.

We could list all the Kafka metrics you can get via SPM, but in short — SPM monitors all Kafka metrics and, as with all things SPM monitors, all these metrics are nicely graphed and are filterable by server name, topic, partition, and everything else that makes sense in Kafka deployments.

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According to survey figures released by Gartner, 95% of attendees at the analyst house’s Datacentre Conference in Las Vegas are unhappy with their private cloud deployments.

The 140 respondents were given six potential options to explain what was going wrong with their private cloud, alongside a ‘nothing is going wrong’ option. 31% cited a failure to change the operational model, 19% said it was simply doing too little, and 13% cited a failure to change the funding model.

Picture credit: Gartner

Bittman admitted he was “a little surprised” at the results, although some commentators below the line argued the question was leading in focusing too much on the negative side of public cloud.

Regardless, the increasing prevalence of hybrid cloud models – as Matt Asay wrote for Tech Republic, “no wonder private cloud vendors have started calling themselves ‘hybrid’ clouds” –  has meant the private cloud as we know it is facing a tipping point.

In a report last October, Verizon argued the long-held public v private cloud discussion was “inadequate to describe the massive variety of cloud services available today.” The report noted how more companies were taking a planned, lifecycle approach to adopting cloud, and that each application warranted a different approach on its own merits.

Some companies are trying to blur the lines. CenturyLink’s newest private cloud, released in August, has private cloud instance plugged in to public cloud nodes thus running off the same platform. It’s certainly hybrid IT, but the company was insistent it was still a private cloud. David Linthicum, writing in the same month, argued private clouds had a new role of being points of control, or interfaces, into public clouds.

Yet a report from Piper Jaffray in January found CIOs were still concerned over public cloud solutions. 35% of respondents said the security of public cloud was the primary reason for keeping data on premise.

What do you make of the survey results?