The open source world is experiencing some watershed developments that are pushing enterprise-level technologies into a new space that CIOs must now take heed of.
Open source, open standards, open data, open platforms and open clouds are now driving our collective technology futures forward at a pace we could not have imagined perhaps even half a decade ago.
Far less could Linus Torvalds have prophesied what he was about to create when he wrote on 25 Aug 1991 at 20:57:08 GMT, “I’m doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won’t be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones.”
Ubuntu for one has now reached 12.04 LTS in its server iteration (and desktop), where LTS stands for Long-Term Support. This means five years of cover for companies requiring official certification and audit compliance as well as enterprise-level security guarantees from Ubuntu’s commercial parent Canonical.
Unleashing the Ever-Growing Value of the Cloud
In this “Cloud Trends” Power Panel at the 10th International Cloud Expo, moderated by Cloud Expo Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan, Karen Padir, EVP of Products & Engineering at EnterpriseDB, and Aaron Hollobaugh, VP of Marketing & Communications at Hostway Corporation, map the hottest areas of cloud computing right now, and share real-world examples of offerings that are generating value.
Cloud Expo 2012 Silicon Valley, November 5–8, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA, will feature technical sessions from a rock star conference faculty and the leading Cloud industry players in the world.
Fonality Enhances Contact Center Features for HUD Mobile
Fonality today announced a new release of the Fonality Heads Up Display (HUD) Mobile application delivering extensive contact center features among other enhancements. The application now offers users 100 percent management and visibility of individual queues over tablets and mobile smartphones. In addition, the solution can now be accessed by Fonality’s 200,000+ end-users across its entire cloud-based and hybrid-hosted product line including: Fonality Connect, Fonality PBXtra and Fonality trixboxPro.
HUD Mobile empowers the mobile workforce with cloud-based Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) communications and contact center capabilities in a single-view, secure, user-friendly interface via Apple or Android platforms. This announcement represents a first step in an ongoing “innovation series” of rollouts over the coming months to help growing businesses save time, communicate more efficiently and reduce costs.
“Mobility is without question a must-have to drive productivity especially for SMBs and we’ve already seen broad adoption of Fonality HUD Mobile,” said Fonality’s Chief Technology Officer Rick Bushell. “By enhancing contact center features and making the app available our entire solution base, all of our customers can work from anywhere, anytime. We are committed to delivering smart, simple and affordable business phone solutions to small businesses. HUD Mobile and the upcoming feature releases were designed to help our customers communicate more efficiently, giving them the competitive edge they need for growth.”
The exclusive Fonality HUD Mobile technology brings the entirety of the contact center environment on-the-go. All activities in the queue, including current and pending calls, can be accessed complemented by real-time performance metrics for quality control. Managers enjoy a 360-degree view of all communications, including color-coded agent status, call types and duration. In addition, they have the ability to record calls on-the-fly or join through barge, monitor or whisper modes. Agents can also log in and out of queues to maintain high levels of customer service.
“As a global wine distributor we are extremely busy and often work remotely,” said Justin Hammer, vice president of B-21. “Because our industry is so competitive, we have to be in touch with our global network of buyers to ensure that we have the most popular wines available as quickly as possible. Fonality HUD Mobile allows us to stay connected around the world so we can make quick purchasing decisions to add the latest wines to our catalog. This flexibility has improved our productivity and profitability, because we can stock wines faster. In fact, we recently secured a new wine, made it available online and sold out within a single day solely because of the efficiencies enabled by Fonality HUD Mobile. It is a real difference maker!”
Fonality HUD Mobile creates the same experience as its award-winning desktop counterpart. The mobile solution connects phones, desktops and critical business applications with access to presence and collaboration capabilities. “Find me/follow me” provides seamless connectivity between desktop and mobile devices, along with unified messaging and Microsoft Outlook integration. For improved productivity, other features include company directory, visual voicemail, virtual conference room access, as well as photo caller ID, ring-back and on-the-fly call recording. To control costs and preserve cell minutes, Wi-Fi connectivity can also be activated.
Cloud Computing: Protecting Sensitive Information in the Cloud
Gartner recently published a report that highlights a trend that we have been experiencing over the past few years, namely, the growing number of enterprises wrestling with cloud data security, cloud compliance, and cloud data residency issues associated with storing and processing sensitive information in SaaS cloud applications. Gartner estimates that by 2016, 25% of enterprises will secure access to cloud-based services using what they term a Cloud Access Security Broker platform and that these platforms will reduce the cost of securing access by 30%. Based on what we have seen from our clients, I think the cost savings are a low estimate.
The report also highlights an important consideration that our enterprise clients have told us is critical to their IT departments. Gartner recommends that companies strongly consider a “unified” Cloud Access Security Broker solution that is capable of providing multiple security policy enforcement capabilities from a single platform in order to avoid separate siloed solutions. It is clear that this capability alone could be the driver for significant savings in the enterprise.
Cloud Computing: TwinStrata Releases New In-Cloud Storage Gateways
TwinStrata on Tuesday announced that TwinStrata CloudArray is now available as an in-cloud gateway to support progressive organizations with cloud-based infrastructures. By enabling CloudArray to run on a growing number of cloud compute environments – IBM SmartCloud Enterprise, Rackspace, Amazon EC2 and Google (availability late Q3) – TwinStrata delivers a solution ideal for both enhancing storage infrastructures already deployed in the cloud, as well as sophisticated disaster recovery efforts.
Nicos Vekiarides, chief executive officer at TwinStrata, stated: “Whether you want to avoid the impact of cloud outages or local outages, easily and flexibly grow capacity without limits, or benefit from a centralized SAN in the cloud, CloudArray delivers trademark simplicity and enterprise-class data protection.”
All Your Packets Belong to … You?
No one argues that networks have not exploded in terms of speeds and feeds in the past decade. What with more consumers (and cows), more companies going “online”, and more content it’d be hard to argue that there’s less traffic out there today than there was even a mere four or five years ago. The increasing pressure put on the network is often mentioned almost in passing, as though merely moving from 10Gbps to 40Gbps to 100Gbps will solve the problem. Move along now, nothing to see here but a higher flow of packets.
But that higher density of packets along with greater diversity of content coupled with distribution through cloud computing that’s creating other issues for network services whose purpose it is to collect, analyze, and act upon those packets.
Cloud Security – Implementing a Secure Cloud Backup Case Study
Secure cloud backup is a scenario which increasingly gains traction. It allows organizations to implement an off-site backup while maintaining costs at a minimum. In this blog post I would like to focus on a specific use case of secure cloud backup. The system we describe is comprised of an on-premise replication server, Porticor Cloud Security, and Amazon S3 as the final backup destination, all integrated by one of our fine cloud integrators.
In this use case, an enterprise organization was struggling with an inefficient and costly offsite backup infrastructure that was meant to manage an incrementally expanding database. An offsite server farm was costly to operate and maintain and the tape backup and recovery methods used were time consuming. Furthermore, the company failed to meet regulatory requirements with regard to data availability. T
Enabling Security and Compliance in Big Data
An interesting subplot of this burgeoning, “capture everything” big data culture, is whether a single, byte size piece of information really matters anymore. Big data, after all is really about big picture thinking. At a high level, it’s about how we assemble – on a massive scale– unrelated bits of information to better inform our worldview.
Five tips for CIOs moving to the cloud
CIOs making strategic moves to the cloud that involve core infrastructure such as productivity tools, enterprise applications or collaboration capabilities need to be prepared for a new way of thinking and operating.
Moving to the cloud isn’t – and shouldn’t be – business as usual. It’s a switch that demands fresh attitudes to procurement, accounting, project management and, more than anything, ways of working.
This is the biggest shift in computing architecture since client/server and inevitably there will be surprises along the way but best practices and case studies are emerging. Based on over a decade of operating with companies moving to the cloud, these can be usefully stilled down to the following:
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Communicate. Any change in IT can lead to confusion. You need to have a strong business case for the Board to get buy-in at the highest levels and this support will help mute any broader …
Dropbox, The Woz, & Public Cloud
Public cloud computing is in the news in a bad way, with Dropbox’s latest security breach and The Woz’s new fears about giving up local control of one’s data.
The Woz seemed to be thinking more out loud than making a prediction; he’s allowed to say whatever he wants in any case. As a Founding Father of the personal-computing revolution, he’s no doubt horrified at the idea of handing over one’s personal stuff to some faceless corporation who promises to store said stuff somewhere, somehow. What if they lose it?
I don’t know whether Woz is also worried about government snooping of all this stuff. I know I certainly am, and I am thoroughly disheartened to see the Obama Administration continue to act as if 1984 has finally, and truly, arrived in this great nation of ours.
Meanwhile, Dropbox seems to be the latest public-cloud company to be victimized by its customers. People with bad intentions allegedly stole passwords from somewhere in cyberspace, and found that some of them also worked at Dropbox. The company has promised tighter security, including required two-stage authentication.
Really, it’s like leaving your laptop in your unlocked car or apartment. But Dropbox has hardly been pro-active in heading these problems off at the pass. eCommerce sites with similarly flimsy security at least have the good stuff – credit card info – encrypted or outsourced and doubly encrypted.
With Dropxbox, the good stuff is rather larger in size than credit-card info, and my clear 20/20 hindsight says the company should have been more serious about securing it, dumb customers or no.
I don’t think these headlines are going to impede public cloud adoption by large enterprises. Any enterprise IT department that wishes, or has been directed to wish, for public cloud in its strategy will have a detailed checklist to head off amateur-hour mistakes.
I also don’t think these headlines will impede the growth of Apple’s iCloud. Myrmidons will continue to follow their departed leader’s vision for several more years, it seems.
I do think these headlines represent a grave threat to all who sell public-cloud ideas to small and medium-sized businesses. Public cloud security lapses look like the inevitable result of hare-brained scchemes to these folks. Since a super-majority of them run their companies on Windows, it seems that Microsoft has a large opportunity here to jump in more aggressively with cloud, integrate ironclad security with Windows 8, and save the day.
The hard reality that our modern era of viruses and malware was largely spawned by Microsoft’s sloppiness in integrating Internet Explorer as an ostensibly key part of Windows gives me little faith this will happen.