SYS-CON Events announced today that N3N will exhibit at SYS-CON’s @ThingsExpo, which will take place on Oct 31 – Nov 2, 2017, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
N3N’s solutions increase the effectiveness of operations and control centers, increase the value of IoT investments, and facilitate real-time operational decision making. N3N enables operations teams with a four dimensional digital “big board” that consolidates real-time live video feeds alongside IoT sensor data and analytics insights onto a single, holistic, display, focusing attention on what matters, when it matters.

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Today companies are looking to achieve cloud-first digital agility to reduce time-to-market, optimize utilization of resources, and rapidly deliver disruptive business solutions. However, leveraging the benefits of cloud deployments can be complicated for companies with extensive legacy computing environments.
In his session at 21st Cloud Expo, Craig Sproule, founder and CEO of Metavine, will outline the challenges enterprises face in migrating legacy solutions to the cloud. He will also present an approach to address those challenges, accelerate the process, and minimize the risk of the migration.

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Another day, another research study which reveals the benefits of the public cloud tinged with security concerns.

This time, a report from Barracuda Networks has shown that while respondents – 300 IT decision makers from companies across the US – expect the percentage of their infrastructure in the public cloud to almost double in five years, three quarters (74%) say security concerns restrict their organisations’ migration.

Yet perhaps the most worrying aspect of the research was around confusion with regard to the shared responsibility model of cloud computing. More than three quarters (77%) of those polled say public cloud providers are responsible for securing customer data in the cloud, while 68% believed vendors are responsible for securing customer applications as well.

This is not the first time this publication – or indeed, Barracuda – has noted the disparity. Back in July, a report from the company found similar misgivings. It’s worth repeating again what Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft, the two leading companies in the space, have to say on it.

AWS describes the relationship between vendor and customer as being responsible for security ‘of’ the cloud – compute, storage, networking, and so forth – and ‘in’ the cloud, such as customer data, applications, and identity and access management, respectively. For Microsoft, it’s a question of differentiating between software, infrastructure, and platform as a service. SaaS has more responsibility for the provider, going down through PaaS, IaaS and eventually on-prem which is of course entirely the customer’s responsibility – but with data classification always the responsibility of the user.

Here, the issues do not appear to have changed, with Barracuda making a series of recommendations to organisations. First, partner with third-party security vendors who support a wide range of ecosystems for a multi-cloud scenario – a situation Skytap, who this publication recently featured, affirmed – as well as look for vendors that provide a common management scheme. Naturally, Barracuda is adept at each of these scenarios.

“This survey confirms what we are hearing from customers and partners – security remains a key concern for organisations evaluating public cloud, and there’s confusion over where their part of the shared responsibility model begins and ends,” said Tim Jefferson, Barracuda vice president public cloud in a statement.

“Many organisations realise that cloud deployments can be inherently more secure than on-premises deployments because cloud providers are collectively investing more into security controls than they could on their own,” added Jefferson. “However, the organisations benefiting most from public cloud are those that understand that their public cloud provider is not responsible for securing data or applications and are augmenting security with support from third-party vendors.”

Two in three UK IT decision makers polled in a new study say their organisation is losing out on revenue as they lack specific cloud expertise.

The report, put together by Rackspace and the London School of Economics, polled 950 IT decision makers and 950 IT pros and found 67% of the latter believed they could bring greater innovation to their organisation with the ‘right cloud insight’. 85% said greater expertise within their organisation would help them recoup the return on their cloud investment.

Almost half (46%) of IT decision makers say they find it hard to recruit the best talent to manage their organisation’s clouds, with migration project management, native cloud app development, and cloud security among the skills companies are struggling with to hire. Similarly, competition for talent, an inability to offer competitive salaries, and difficulties in providing sufficient career progression and training were also cited as barriers to recruitment.

With this in mind, almost three quarters (72%) of respondents said they were looking to increase their firm’s cloud usage in the coming five years. The research evidently denotes a friction point; 84% of IT decision makers said it took ‘a number of weeks or more’ to train new hires, with 37% opting for ‘months’.

Will Venters, assistant professor of information systems at LSE, said cloud technology had been a ‘victim of its own success’. “As the technology has become ubiquitous among large organisations – and helped them to wrestle back control of sprawling physical IT estates – it has also opened up a huge number of development and innovation opportunities.

“However, to fully realise these opportunities, organisations need to not only have the right expertise in place now, but also have a cloud skills development strategy to ensure they are constantly evolving their IT workforce and training procedures in parallel with the constantly evolving demands of cloud.

“Failure to do so will severely impede the future aspirations of businesses in an increasingly competitive digital market.”

According to Firebrand Training, an IT training and project management course provider, the top five cloud skills organisations – and employees – need to get on board for this year include database and big data, application security, and containers.

The Rackspace research polled executives from the UK, US, Germany, Benelux, Switzerland, Mexico, Singapore, Australia and Hong Kong.

SYS-CON Events announced today that NetApp has been named “Bronze Sponsor” of SYS-CON’s 21st International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on Oct 31 – Nov 2, 2017, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
NetApp is the data authority for hybrid cloud. NetApp provides a full range of hybrid cloud data services that simplify management of applications and data across cloud and on-premises environments to accelerate digital transformation. Together with their partners, NetApp empowers global organizations to unleash the full potential of their data to expand customer touchpoints, foster greater innovation and optimize their operations.

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SYS-CON Events announced today that B2Cloud will exhibit at SYS-CON’s 21st International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on Oct 31 – Nov 2, 2017, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
B2Cloud specializes in IoT devices for preventive and predictive maintenance in any kind of equipment retrieving data like Energy consumption, working time, temperature, humidity, pressure, etc.

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SYS-CON Events announced today that Suzuki Inc. will exhibit at the Japan External Trade Organization (JETRO) Pavilion at SYS-CON’s 21st International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on Oct 31 – Nov 2, 2017, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
Suzuki Inc. is a semiconductor-related business, including sales of consuming parts, parts repair, and maintenance for semiconductor manufacturing machines, etc. It is also a health care business providing experimental research for dementia, etc. For more information, visit http://www.e-suzuki.co.jp/en/.

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Oracle OpenWorld may still be a couple of weeks away, but Larry Ellison gave a glimpse of what to expect in San Francisco with the announcement of new licensing and pricing structures – promising to beat Amazon by at least 50% on cost.

Ellison, Oracle’s CTO, took to the stage to not only discuss the new structures, but reaffirm the company’s strategy, as well as its next generation, fully autonomous database, to be fully unveiled at OpenWorld.

One of the new models is ‘universal credits’ (below), which provides Oracle customers “the industry’s most flexible buying and consumption model for cloud services”, as the company itself puts it. In other words, you give Oracle what you want to spend without having to explicitly say where it’s going, whether it’s the infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), or which data centre you will be using. “You don’t have to in advance figure out what you’re going to buy,” Ellison told attendees. “The contract is incredibly simple.”

Also announced was a ‘bring your own license’ (BYOL) model which enables Oracle customers to reuse their existing software licenses for Oracle’s PaaS. Customers who have existing on-premises licenses can leverage their investment to move to Oracle’s cloud options at ‘a fraction of the old PaaS price’, the company added.

All this is put alongside the much-vaunted database to shape Oracle’s cloud strategy. The database was previously referenced during the company’s most recent financial results last week, whereby Ellison told analysts the new Oracle will be a “totally automated self-driving system that does not require a human being either to manage the database or tune the database.”

The elimination of human labour – and the mistakes human make – was a theme the Oracle CTO kept returning to. “Human error can have devastating consequences,” he explained, referencing the Equifax data breach as a recent example. Another theme was around explaining what Amazon Web Services (AWS) couldn’t do; whence during the financial results announcement only occasional sideswipes were made at AWS, this time around pretty much the entire half hour presentation was built upon it.

Ellison said it will be ‘guaranteed’ in Oracle’s SLAs going forward that, firstly, the price will be half that of Amazon’s, and, secondly, the uptime on the new autonomous database will be 99.995%, or only 30 minutes of – planned – downtime.

“There’s nothing close in the cloud industry,” said Ellison. “There’s nothing remotely close. Our approach to the cloud business is to lower your costs and lower your risks by fully automating all sorts of platform services completely, with completely autonomous software that runs itself, eliminates the cost of human error, and eliminates the opportunity for human error.

“This is very different to what Amazon is trying to do,” he added. “They’re not even working on this.”

You can view the full presentation here.

Picture credits: Oracle

SYS-CON Events announced today that SIGMA Corporation will exhibit at the Japan External Trade Organization (JETRO) Pavilion at SYS-CON’s 21st International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on Oct 31 – Nov 2, 2017, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
uLaser flow inspection device from the Japanese top share to Global Standard! Then, make the best use of data to flip to next page. For more information, visit http://www.sigma-k.co.jp/en/.

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