Ever since Eric Schmidt, the Chief Executive of Google Inc. mentioned the magical term – “Cloud Computing” – in the year 2006, a gale has been crowding over the Silicon Valley. Companies across the IT industry are competing against each other to associate themselves with the cloud computing technology in one way or the other. Amazon.com Inc., for example, (hurriedly) started selling Elastic Compute Cloud service the same year, for programmers to rent the company’s giant computers.
@CloudExpo | #Cloud Security Myths: Busted
In a Feb 2014 survey, 94 percent of organizations surveyed reported running applications or experimenting with infrastructure-as-a-service[1]. According to research firm Nasumi, there is over one exabyte currently stored in the cloud. An exabyte is over a billion GB[2]. Considering the amount of data in the cloud and the growing rate of adoption for sensitive use cases, it is natural that securing our data in the cloud is a concern. But, cloud security, though rightfully a central concern, should not be a hindrance to aggressively moving workloads and applications to the cloud.
@CloudExpo | National Cybersecurity = #CloudComputing Security
A recent Inc.com article claimed that the percentage of U.S. small businesses using cloud computing is expected to more than double during the next six years, from 37 percent to nearly 80 percent (l). This forecast was gleaned from a just released Emergent Research and Intuit study. This statement is also very scary in that it also highlights the growing importance of the cybersecurity threat to the nation’s economic livelihood.
@ThingsExpo | Traffic & the Internet of Things
Driving the freeways of Greater Los Angeles is often an experience in wave theory. Heavy traffic on one freeway can influence traffic on several others; slowdowns and stoppages ripple throughout much of the system during much of the day; and one can often feel trouble ahead well before seeing it or stopping for it.
With a gross economy size approaching $1 trillion annually, the Southland loses billions upon billions of dollars in wasted transportation costs and lost productivity each year. This area should serve as a model for what the Internet of Things can achieve.
Everyone has their own traffic horror stories, whether coming from elsewhere in the US, Mexico City or Sao Paulo, London or Paris, Tokyo or Beijing, Bangkok, or any of hundreds of other cities in the world. One city working the problem is Singapore, which uses a proto-IoT architecture of several GPS systems, flexible tolls, and traffic reports to traffic relatively uncongested.
Add intelligent, driverless cars to the mix, a much wider use of electrical power, and more New Urbanism—the movement that combines walkable neighborhoods centered around transportation hubs—and solving the world’s traffic problems will start to look less like trying to boil the ocean.
The Great Change
Applied globally, we can see significant reductions in energy use, which is of the essence if the virtual elimination of poverty is a goal. Most of the developing world uses only 3% to 5% of the energy per-person compared to the developed world. There is simply not enough building capacity in the human species to provide a reasonable lifestyle for everyone unless that lifestyle requires much less energy.
I see this as a practical statement, not a political one. Serious reductions in the amount of energy required to grow and process food, build stuff, heat and cool buildings, and move us from place to place are required to get the expected human population peak of 9-10 billion people to live comfortably.
The IoT will be integral to such a Great Change, if it comes to pass. Working on LA traffic is one of the great places to start.
@CloudExpo | Migrating Apps to the #Cloud
Security professionals are constantly negotiating the tension of balancing ease-of-use with data security. Savvy security professionals know that their users will often choose a less secure technology that makes getting things done easier over a more secure technology that makes getting things done more cumbersome. The trick is in aligning the secure choice with the efficient choice – but this comes with much-needed analysis and consideration.
Increasingly, best-in-class applications are being offered in a Software as a Service (SaaS) model; just take a look at the plethora of cloud-based tools available for organizations that need a scalable way to access software across physical locations and a means of enabling their increasingly mobile users.
Building and Scaling a Profitable SaaS Business
The cloud is everywhere and growing, and with it SaaS has become an accepted means for software delivery. SaaS is more than just a technology, it is a thriving business model estimated to be worth around $53 billion dollars by 2015, according to IDC. The question is – how do you build and scale a profitable SaaS business model? In his session at 15th Cloud Expo, Jason Cumberland, Vice President, SaaS Solutions at Dimension Data, will give the audience an understanding of common mistakes businesses make when transitioning to SaaS; how to avoid them; and how to build a profitable and scalable SaaS business.
@CloudExpo | Creating Complete Dev/Test Environments in the #Cloud
You can’t truly accelerate the SDLC without a dependable continuous testing process. Evolving from automated to continuous testing requires on-demand access to a complete, realistic test environment. Yet, such access can be extremely difficult to achieve with today’s increasingly complex and interdependent applications. Consider these recent research findings from voke:
On average, organizations require access to 33 systems for dev/test, but have unrestricted access to only 18
Only 4% of participants report immediate, on-demand access to dev/test lab environments
@ThingsExpo | Zero to a Connected Internet of Things (#IoT) Application
Where historically app development would require developers to manage device functionality, application environment and application logic, today new platforms are emerging that are IoT focused and arm developers with cloud based connectivity and communications, development, monitoring, management and analytics tools. In her session at Internet of @ThingsExpo, Seema Jethani, Director of Product Management at Basho Technologies, will explore how to rapidly prototype using IoT cloud platforms and choose the right platform to match application requirements, security and privacy needs, data management capabilities and development tools.
@Gridstore Named “Exhibitor” of @CloudExpo Silicon Valley [#Cloud]
SYS-CON Events announced today that Gridstore™, the leader in software-defined storage (SDS) purpose-built for Windows Servers and Hyper-V, will exhibit at SYS-CON’s 15th International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on November 4–6, 2014, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
Gridstore™ is the leader in software-defined storage purpose built for virtualization that is designed to accelerate applications in virtualized environments. Using its patented Server-Side Virtual Controller™ Technology (SVCT) to eliminate the I/O blender effect and accelerate applications Gridstore delivers vmOptimized™ Storage that self-optimizes to each application or VM across both virtual and physical environments. Leveraging a grid architecture, Gridstore delivers the first end-to-end storage QoS to ensure the most important App or VM performance is never compromised. The storage grid, that uses Gridstore’s performance optimized nodes or capacity optimized nodes, starts with as few as 3 nodes and then can grow one or more at a time to deliver a cost effective scale-as-you-grow solution. Headquartered in Mountain View, CA. its products and services are available through a global network of value-added resellers.
@Vormetric To Present #BigData and #Cloud At @CloudExpo Silicon Valley
Cloud and Big Data present unique dilemmas: embracing the benefits of these new technologies while maintaining the security of your organization’s assets. When an outside party owns, controls and manages your infrastructure and computational resources, how can you be assured that sensitive data remains private and secure? How do you best protect data in mixed use cloud and big data infrastructure sets? Can you still satisfy the full range of reporting, compliance and regulatory requirements?
In his session at 15th Cloud Expo, Derek Tumulak, Vice President of Product Management at Vormetric, will discuss how to address data security in cloud and Big Data environments so that your organization isn’t next week’s data breach headline.