When it comes to protecting an IT investment, a natural choice today is to leverage a cloud technology.
In his session at 14th Cloud Expo, Rick Vanover, Product Strategy Specialist at Veeam Software, will discuss how you can start to engage one or more cloud technologies for your data protection strategy. Whether you are looking for straightforward object-based storage to clouds such as Glacier or S3, implementing gateway appliances to storage such as Azure, leveraging cloud computing or want to develop a line of business around cloud services; there are options for protection today leveraging cloud solutions.
Cloud Expo Power Panel | What Have We Learned About Cloud Adoption?
IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS (infrastructure, platform and software as a service) all have their place in enterprises today and are no strangers to utilizing them. But with the multitude of technologies out in the market, how to make a decision on which to use and when? What is most efficient and effective?
This Power Panel at 14th Cloud Expo will focus on the three and best use cases for each and how IT can be an enabler of all three.
IBM Unleashes New Tools to Accelerate Data-Driven Cities
IBM on Monday announced that the cities of Minneapolis, Minnesota, and Montpellier, France, are working with IBM to make data-driven decisions to rapidly transform the way they provide water, transportation and emergency management.
These and other cities around the world are increasingly using data to make better decisions and allocate resources to sense and respond to challenges in city infrastructure. From improving traffic management, responding rapidly to incidents, using effective communication channels with citizens and ensuring sustainable natural resources, data and analytics are providing new insight to create more effective cities. As a result of helping create thousands of Smarter Cities, IBM has isolated the most pressing challenges and is bringing together a new way to help municipalities use Big Data and analytics via the cloud to improve economics and address the strategic issues that are critical to their future.
Top Five Best Practices for Your Application PaaS Audience
The benefits of using a Cloud Platform-as-a-Service are clear – higher elasticity, lower cost and risk, and support for new business models. But what are some of the pitfalls? What type of workloads should you start with? And what will make your deployment successful? Based on data from a recent survey of 300 IT organizations, many businesses are in the process of developing a PaaS architecture and infrastructure requirements for their cloud-based application PaaS.
In her session at 14th Cloud Expo, Ayalla Goldschmidt, Senior Director of Product Marketing for Oracle Fusion Middleware and Java Platform, will share results from this survey including successful Application PaaS use cases. Find out how your peers are planning for this new computing model and what the top five best practices are.
How the insurance industry is set to fully embrace cloud
The consumer insurance industry may be one of the more reluctant industries to jump head-first into the cloud. Think about the current process of getting a home, renters, auto or life insurance policy through a traditional vendor. You might shop for quotes online, visit an agent in person, or have companies compete over your business.
Think about all the back-end computing that goes into running an insurance operation. Agents are always in the field assessing damages, administrative personnel is fielding customer inquiries while claims can be placed 24 hours a day.
Traditional IT systems become inefficient when expanded to this scale which is why the cloud model is starting to make more sense for insurance agencies that are looking to reduce costs and increase IT efficiency.
Tony Jacob, Managing Director of Worldwide Insurance at Microsoft says, “The reality today is that many insurers are held back by their legacy IT …
NASCAR & Unified Communications: Get the Most Out of Your Investment
By Bill Kane, Practice Manager
I’m a big NASCAR fan. NASCAR stands for National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing. Back in the day, good old boys would take stock cars, add seatbelts and roll cages and go racing. In the early days they even drove convertibles. Today they only look like stock cars from the outside with a bunch of advertisements on them. Everything about these cars is anything but stock. My wife would tell you that it’s a huge waste of time watching 40 guys go in a circle for 500 miles. What she doesn’t see is that there is more to racing than just being the best driver.
The drivers have years of experience, the cars are highly specialized and contain none of the stock parts with engines that have 900 horse power. They are highly tuned, with specialized suspensions and tires. Even the pit crew are athletes that can change a full set of tires and fill the gas tank in seconds. Until you have sat in the driver’s seat and have gone over 100 miles an hour, it’s hard to appreciate the sport. I fulfilled one of my bucket list items by attending Richard Petty’s driving school. Yes, I got to drive one of those 900 horsepower beasts, and yes I got to go over 100 miles per hour. My favorite races start in the afternoon and end after the sun goes down. I like these the best because the way a car performs when the sun is up, when the track is hot and the tires are slick, is completely different than at night when the track cools. To watch these teams make little changes throughout the race and go from back of the pack to first is truly amazing. No one can make it through a full race without making changes. They call it putting in a turn of wedge here or adjusting the air pressure in a tire by as little as a pound can make all the difference. The guy that started the race on the pole (first row inside), isn’t necessarily the one that will cross the finish line in first place.
Cisco unified communications is a lot like NASCAR racing. Sure the guys that installed your system did a great job but, are you getting the most out of your investment so that you can win the race? What you need is a skilled pit crew. You need to check in and make sure you’re running the optimum version. In addition, you need to ensure your settings are correct so that your users are getting the full benefit of what’s available. Are you taking advantage of features such as Singlewire, Mobility & Meet-Me? Do you have the proper licensing in place to be able to able to install them? My point here is that you made a serious investment so you need to ensure that you are getting all that you can out of that investment.
I had dinner with a friend a couple of months ago who was not getting the most out of his investment. I asked him how he liked his Cisco VoIP phone system. He said that it was ok, and, when I dug a little deeper, I found out that they weren’t using all the functionality. When it was initially installed they made the decision to forgo some of the functionality for a speedy install. He was amazed when I stared to explain things like Mobility. We were able to spend a few hours on his system and, once complete, he couldn’t believe the difference.
Is there a connection between NASCAR racing and unified communications? I would say yes. You bought the best, now you need to ensure its performing up to your expectations. GreenPages can be that pit crew to ensure that you are maximizing your unified communications investment and taking full advantage of the business benefits that are available today. Reach out to socialmedia@greenpages.com if you’d like to talk about unified communications strategies and trends in more detail.
iomart posts more profits, vows to concentrate on bespoke private and hybrid cloud
UK-based cloud service provider iomart Group has announced pre-tax profits of £14.6m for the end of the financial year – and vows to continue towards bespoke private and hybrid cloud as opposed to mass public cloud.
Revenue stood at £55.6m compared to £43.1m in 2013, representing a 29% increase, whilst revenues from iomart’s hosting segment were up by 40% to £44.7m – higher than the company’s overall revenue last year.
This represents a solid year for iomart, and represents a further base on which to build following successive profit-making years. The company bought Backup Technology and Redstation in September 2013 to bolster its attack in terms of data protection, cloud backup and dedicated hosting, as well as upped its data centre count to eight and adding an extension to its centre in Maidenhead.
Phil Worms, marketing director at iomart, told CloudTech the results were ‘solid’ and …
What Business Must Learn from the eBay Breach
Until this week the biggest anxiety when dealing with eBay has likely been fretting over a negative rating, concerns about slow shipping or a delayed refund. Then suddenly yesterday the media jumped all over the story that eBay had been hacked and users need to change their passwords. By the way, I can tell you from experience the password change process is not as easy or straightforward as you would expect.
EBay is now in damage control mode and trying to calm fears after revealing that hackers attacked its network three months ago. It is believed over 145 million user records were accessed, forcing eBay to issue a security warning. Three states are conducting a joint investigation which will focus on eBay’s measures for securing personal data, the circumstances that led to the breach, how many users were affected, and the company’s response to the breach, said a spokeswoman for Connecticut Attorney General George Jepsen.[i] The breach could possibly be the second-biggest in US history, based on the number of records accessed by the hackers. Massive data breaches seem to be occurring much more frequently with Heartland Payments, Target, Neiman Marcus, Living Social, Zappos, AOL and now eBay all reporting damages in the news recently.
The New Battleground in Analytics | Part 1
As a relative newcomer to the world of Application Performance Management (APM) and the larger category of Application Intelligence, I knew I had a lot to learn. I came into this market having spent the last 15 years in the Analytics space. The idea of taking large volumes of disparate data and turning it into actionable insight is something I’ve always found compelling. Though people generally think of a flashy dashboard, Analytics is so much more. At Business Objects I got to be part of the evolution from standardized reporting through ad hoc analysis, data exploration, and predictive analysis. There was still a significant barrier though to making it work in the real-world where data volume, variety and velocity were too much to handle at the application level. Data had to be extracted and transformed before being made available in a data warehouse or mart where it became available to an end user. That’s an expensive and time consuming process that only offered the insight you’re looking for hours, days or even weeks later. However, at SAP our customers were finally able to realize the promise of these new capabilities with the introduction of SAP HANA (High-performance Analytic Appliance). That in-memory platform delivered amazing computing power capable of simplifying the infrastructure of application environments while giving the business real-time insight.
Cloud as Delivery Vehicle – The Next Wave of the Internet
“While cost has traditionally been a foundational benefit of the cloud, we believe that other factors can play a more important part in defining the cloud of tomorrow,” said Todd Gleason, Vice President of Technology at FireHost, in this exclusive Q&A with Cloud Expo conference chairs Larry Carvalho and Vanessa Alvarez. “We believe that the generalist cloud provider – those low-cost commodity clouds that created price competition and insecure clouds – are going to either be gobbled up or beaten up as the industry evolves from this generalist mentality to focus on specialist clouds that have a particular focus.”
Cloud Computing Journal: How are cloud standards playing a role in expanding adoption among users? Are standards helping new business models for service providers?
Todd Gleason: Standardization is important, but we’re concerned because security desperately needs to be part of this effort. It is not addressed enough, if at all. Much of the open standards work in cloud and other IT technologies traditionally is not security-conscious, making adoption riskier than many want to admit or truly understand. So, while standards are a good thing, we believe security should be baked in at their inception. We advocate for innovation, but it’s important that the innovative spirit is not blind to the need to protect vendors and customers.