By Eoin Jennings, general manager hosting services, Easynet Global Services

A little learning is a dangerous thing, scribed poet Alexander Pope in 1711, possibly to distract his wife from improving her bible studies knowledge or honing her counterpoint skills.

Three hundred years later and whilst most of us no longer frown upon a lady flashing her ankles nor rush to join a harpsichord recital, never could the statement be truer.

Smartphones and tablets have brought about the collision of the worlds of IT and telecoms, and are responsible for us all knowing a little bit about IT. 

If we can find ‘Settings’ on our iPhones, we can find ‘Control Panel’ in windows or ‘Internet Options’ in Explorer, delve in and make the changes we want, removing the need for the IT helpdesk – blissfully unaware that we’re putting our organisation at risk. In businesses across the globe, CIOs are breaking …

Consumers need to be made more aware of what they’re purchasing in a cloud solution, according to the latest research paper.

The team of researchers, including IBM and Google, published their findings in a paper entitled ‘Verifying Cloud Services: Present and Future’, and aimed for this to be an education for cloud customers – punters need to examine “in breadth, rather in depth”, how a CSP performs.

The researchers put this down to a series of issues which need answering: is the service running the right software? Is the service doing what it is supposed to? How efficient is the service? Does it comply with security policies, if any?

Of course, this comes down to the niggling matter of SLAs. A CSP puts down an SLA, intending to give the client an idea of availability and performance. Yet the researchers say this isn’t always the case.

The paper argues …

SYS-CON Events announced today that BMC Software, the global leader in enterprise cloud management, will exhibit at SYS-CON’s 13th International Cloud Expo, which will take place on November 4–7, 2013, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
For more than 30 years, BMC has helped thousands of companies around the world master tough IT problems. From mainframe to mobile, from the back room to the boardroom, BMC delivers the automation, integration, and sophistication that enable the business and IT to perform like never before.

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In case you haven’t heard, Microsoft has announced that the end of life (EOL) for Windows Server 2003 is July 14, 2015. If you’re wondering what this means for you, it comes down to this – there will be no patches or security updates, putting your applications and business at risk. New threats won’t be addressed and your WS2003 systems will become a security risk and compliance nightmare. In a recent blog post, Microsoft warns us to “watch out for performance bottlenecks,” but that’s the least of the worry. Do you have a plan in place to protect yourself (i.e., your job?)

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The Industrial Internet refers to the world of connected sensors on people, equipment, machines, parts, assets, vehicles, inventory, etc. These items are connected by embedded wireless chips that monitor sensors and wirelessly send data to a server somewhere in the world. Here is an example of how one of the largest companies in the world is utilizing the industrial Internet.
Every major part of a GE jet engine, locomotive or turbine is equipped with wireless sensors that continuously measure and wirelessly send every aspect of performance to a central server that is often in the cloud. As the data is received by the server, it is analyzed by big data analytical solutions and the results are used to improve everything from the flight path to energy efficiency.

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TokBox, a Telefónica Digital company, released the results of global survey of 1,161 participants regarding developer community attitudes towards WebRTC. The report, which found rapidly emerging interest from larger organizations (1,000+ employees), also found rapid WebRTC adoption amongst smaller companies (fewer than 500 employees) where more than one in four (27.1%) developers say WebRTC is already critical to their work.

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According to Gartner, the winning cloud architectures and standards of the coming years will be determined by the evolution of PaaS (Platform as a Service). This session will give an overview of the main concepts of a PaaS and will focus on Cloud Foundry, an Open Source PaaS which is mostly developed in Ruby, from key architectural definitions and up to its main components.
In his session at the Cloud Foundry® Fundamentals Summit at 13th International Cloud Expo®, Manuel Garcia, Director of Operations at Altoros’s office in Santa Fe, will walk attendees through the practical case of getting a private PaaS up and running with Cloud Foundry, will reveal the challenges one can encounter and possible solutions.

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SYS-CON Events announced today that Portal Architects, creators of SkySync will exhibit at SYS-CON’s 13th International Cloud Expo, which will take place on November 4–7, 2013, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
SkySync enables businesses to easily Sync, Copy, or Migrate Files across any on-site or cloud-based storage platform. With SkySync’s new file virtualization capabilities, organizations can perform federated searches across any number of connected systems at once. The search results are automatically aggregated into a single folder which can then be synced, copied or moved to any defined storage destination.

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Mobility is a significant driver of technology today. Whether it’s mobility of applications between data center and cloud, web and mobile device platform or users from corporate to home to publicly available networks, mobility is a significant factor impacting all aspects of application delivery but in particular, security.

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