Parallels to sponsor Mac Admin & Developer Conference (MacADUK 2017) in London this year and we look forward to seeing you at our stand. Our Senior System Engineer, Robert Rengstl will also give a speech on 8th of February: When? 7th – 8th February 2017 Where? The O2 London, United Kingdom – Foyer Speaker Slot? Senior System Engineer Robert Rengstl – Day 2, […]
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Parallels Desktop 12 Update 1 adds even greater support for Microsoft Ink. (You can read an overview of Ink on the Mac here.) In earlier blog posts, I have focused on the use of Ink in the Office for Windows 2016 applications (Word, Excel, etc.). In this blog post, I will specifically discuss the uses […]
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Both SaaS vendors and SaaS buyers are going “all-in” to hyperscale IaaS platforms such as AWS, which is disrupting the SaaS value proposition. Why should the enterprise SaaS consumer pay for the SaaS service if their data is resident in adjacent AWS S3 buckets? If both SaaS sellers and buyers are using the same cloud tools, automation and pay-per-transaction model offered by IaaS platforms, then why not host the “shrink-wrapped” software in the customers’ cloud? Further, serverless computing, cloud marketplaces and DevOps are changing the economics of hosting and delivering software.
In 2016, cloud computing started to dominate many IT market segments. As a business, Synergy Research Group reported that industry revenue for the four quarters ended Sept. 30 grew 25%. Operator and vendor revenue for six segments of cloud computing reached $148 billion during that period, with spending on private clouds accounting for over half the total but spending on the public cloud growing much more rapidly. As more and more companies are taking advantage of the benefits of moving to cloud services, there is a significant need for IT professionals to gain the skills needed to successfully use and implement a wide range of cloud services, making typical vendor-focused training solutions less valuable.
In his session at 20th Cloud Expo, Scott Davis, CTO of Embotics, will discuss how automation can provide the dynamic management required to cost-effectively deliver microservices and container solutions at scale. He will discuss how flexible automation is the key to effectively bridging and seamlessly coordinating both IT and developer needs for component orchestration across disparate clouds – an increasingly important requirement at today’s multi-cloud enterprise.
Digital transformation requires participants to have a vision for and understanding of what they are trying to achieve and why. In fact, the lack of a clear digital strategy is the second biggest mistake companies make in digital transformation, right behind moving too slowly, according to the middle managers we surveyed. Digital strategies, however, should evolve out of a documented, enterprise-focused digital transformation “doctrine.”
SYS-CON Events announced today that Data Center Dynamics has been named “Media Sponsor” of SYS-CON’s 20th International Cloud Expo, which will take place on June 6–8, 2017, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY.
DCD is a global B2B events and media company, delivering unmatched insight and networking, to help the professionals driving the data center scale IT infrastructure sector to make better strategic and operational decisions.
Dropbox and Slack, two well-known and widely used cloud-based products, have rolled out new features to attract more customers.
The common theme among the new changes is scaling the existing products to work for the entire company instead of just a small team or group. Currently, both these services have a common weakness, which is their tendency to create fragmentation and reinforce silos because only a small group of workers can adopt them for their own use. Typically, it’s only for a team or an informal group of workers who have to collaborate together.
Though the existing features make it convenient for small groups of people to use them, it creates problems for IT departments as the existing features do not support a company-wide collaboration and use. That has changed with these new enhancements.
Dropbox’s new feature called “Dropbox Smart Sync” allows users to view all the files stored in the cloud, in their local machine as well. This way, the storage space needed in local machines can remain the same, and yet users can browse through unlimited data, and even download just what they want. An example released by the company shows that users working with just 128 GB of hard drive space can browse through terabytes of data to find what they want. Once they identify the file they want, they can simply download it to their local machine. Earlier, users needed a web browser to log in and view files, but those additional steps are not needed now.
Another new feature from Dropbox is called “Paper”, that is expected to provide a flexible platform for employees of different departments to collaborate with each other for creating, reviewing, and editing documents within an organization. Both these features encourage a company-wide access, rather than just small groups.
Like Dropbox, Slack has also expanded its features. The Slack Enterprise Grid allows companies to create an unlimited number of workspaces, so different groups can work together, and at the same time can collaborate across different groups. Currently, only a single workspace exists for the entire organization. While this may work for an organization with about 500 employees, it can get too overwhelming for an organization with say 20,000 employees. To overcome this restriction, Slack’s new features make it convenient to create many small workspaces, so it can be scaled for the entire organization as well.
This feature comes with an administrative layer to help wrap everything together and to manage all the different workspaces and communications. All this means, as an employee, you can find employees who are in other departments and workspaces and collaborate with them if you have to. But, you won’t have to read through all the messages that transpire in the other groups.
These new features from both Dropbox and Slack augur well for users, and more importantly, it shows a growing and maturing cloud market. The rolling out of such features means these companies are eyeing for a larger market share and want to stay on top of competition. Such developments are sure to increase cloud adoption, that in turn, can make collaboration and working much easier, simpler and more convenient than before.
The post Dropbox and Slack Roll out New Features appeared first on Cloud News Daily.
(c)iStock.com/mediaphotos
The forecast for the digital era is cloudy all over. According to a recent IDC FutureScape on cloud market predictions, 50% of IT spending and 60% of IT infrastructure spending will be cloud based by 2018. Between 60% and 70% of all software, services and technology spending will be on the cloud by 2020.
IDC also forecast that 65% of organisations’ IT assets will be offsite, in co-located, hosting and cloud data centers by 2018. One-third of IT staff will be working at third-party service providers.
All of this leads to an industrywide shortage of cloud skills. Global Knowledge in 2015 found that one out of five decision-makers was having difficulty finding talent with the skills for cloud initiatives, while cloud computing jobs were one of the highest paying, with a mean salary of $102,000.
In its 2016 IT industry outlook, CompTIA noted the IDC prediction that the cloud would create 7 million jobs between 2013 and 2015. The trade group noted that many of these jobs most likely already existed but were reengineered with a greater cloud focus.
In short, there is a real opportunity for career advancement and success for network and data centre professionals with the right training and certifications. For those weighing a career in IT, cloud skills are in high demand and worth pursuing.
There are public clouds, private clouds, and hybrid clouds; and there is also no agreement on which type of cloud is best. That depends entirely on each organisation along with the type of data it generates and uses.
Organisations using the public cloud rely on the resources of third-party service providers for cloud storage or online accounting software. The biggest argument in its favour is cost. Organisations can rent public cloud services for monthly or annual fees and it’s up to the provider to keep them running, accessible and updated.
This is known as software as a service (SaaS). Some providers are going further to offer platform as a service (PaaS) and infrastructure as a service (IaaS). PaaS enables an application to run one different infrastructures. IaaS makes an entire infrastructure available as a rentable service.
The public cloud has issues, however. One of them is security and another is accessibility. Data on the public cloud may not be as secure as it should be, especially if it is sensitive financial or health information that is regulated. Also, if the internet is down, then the data and the application may not be available when the organisation needs them.
For these reasons, many organisations are setting up and maintaining their own private clouds. Organisations use private clouds to make their data more secure and to arrange them the way they prefer. They are not interested in selling SaaS but want the benefits of the cloud. The downside is the expense, which can be very big, and the need to hire scarce IT professionals with cloud expertise.
The hybrid cloud blends both approaches. Organisations keep sensitive data more secure on an internally managed private cloud. They then use the public cloud when needed, like in peak demand periods, when individual applications can be sent to the public cloud. Hybrids are also helpful during rough weather, scheduled maintenance or rolling brownouts or blackouts. IDC predicts that 80% of enterprise IT organisations will commit to the hybrid cloud by 2017.
No matter what type of cloud organisations ultimately choose, they will need IT professionals with certain cloud skills. Some of the fundamental skills are cloud migration and cloud security.
Cloud skills training and certification courses should combine learning conceptual knowledge with developing hands-on skills. Among the topics covered should be:
Although many companies have already moved to the cloud, many more are not there yet. They need IT professionals who have a solid grounding in the varying models for clouds. They also need to know how to map the organisation’s current IT infrastructure, including its applications and workloads on existing servers, and how to send all of what they have mapped to a cloud equivalent. The larger the organisation, the more complicated this becomes.
Cloud security is another major skill for IT professionals. Almost every day brings news of yet more data breaches. How to keep data secure, how to build and maintain secure platforms, and securing cloud infrastructure are all high-demand skills.
Additional top cloud skills cover SaaS, PaaS and IaaS. Organizations need IT professionals with knowhow to develop and work with cloud applications. The same applies to cloud platforms and infrastructures. This means they should be fluent cloud programming languages like Python, Perl and Ruby along with traditional languages like .NET, Java and PHP. Linux skills are also in high demand.
So is cloud database expertise. The hyper-connected Internet of Things generates quintillions of bytes of data daily. Organisations want most to uncover insights and new markets from this tsunami of data, and they need IT professionals with cloud database querying skills. SQL along with open source languages like MySQL, Hadoop or Mongo DB are worth learning.
With cloud skills and the certifications, IT professionals can demonstrate that they can help an IT department drive cloud deployments in a consistent and centralised manner. They become more valuable to any organisations because they know how to help to bring about desired business outcomes, such as greater business agility and lower IT architecture spending.
Read more: The top five in-demand cloud skills for 2016 and beyond
(c)iStock.com/mediaphotos
The forecast for the digital era is cloudy all over. According to a recent IDC FutureScape on cloud market predictions, 50% of IT spending and 60% of IT infrastructure spending will be cloud based by 2018. Between 60% and 70% of all software, services and technology spending will be on the cloud by 2020.
IDC also forecast that 65% of organisations’ IT assets will be offsite, in co-located, hosting and cloud data centers by 2018. One-third of IT staff will be working at third-party service providers.
All of this leads to an industrywide shortage of cloud skills. Global Knowledge in 2015 found that one out of five decision-makers was having difficulty finding talent with the skills for cloud initiatives, while cloud computing jobs were one of the highest paying, with a mean salary of $102,000.
In its 2016 IT industry outlook, CompTIA noted the IDC prediction that the cloud would create 7 million jobs between 2013 and 2015. The trade group noted that many of these jobs most likely already existed but were reengineered with a greater cloud focus.
In short, there is a real opportunity for career advancement and success for network and data centre professionals with the right training and certifications. For those weighing a career in IT, cloud skills are in high demand and worth pursuing.
There are public clouds, private clouds, and hybrid clouds; and there is also no agreement on which type of cloud is best. That depends entirely on each organisation along with the type of data it generates and uses.
Organisations using the public cloud rely on the resources of third-party service providers for cloud storage or online accounting software. The biggest argument in its favour is cost. Organisations can rent public cloud services for monthly or annual fees and it’s up to the provider to keep them running, accessible and updated.
This is known as software as a service (SaaS). Some providers are going further to offer platform as a service (PaaS) and infrastructure as a service (IaaS). PaaS enables an application to run one different infrastructures. IaaS makes an entire infrastructure available as a rentable service.
The public cloud has issues, however. One of them is security and another is accessibility. Data on the public cloud may not be as secure as it should be, especially if it is sensitive financial or health information that is regulated. Also, if the internet is down, then the data and the application may not be available when the organisation needs them.
For these reasons, many organisations are setting up and maintaining their own private clouds. Organisations use private clouds to make their data more secure and to arrange them the way they prefer. They are not interested in selling SaaS but want the benefits of the cloud. The downside is the expense, which can be very big, and the need to hire scarce IT professionals with cloud expertise.
The hybrid cloud blends both approaches. Organisations keep sensitive data more secure on an internally managed private cloud. They then use the public cloud when needed, like in peak demand periods, when individual applications can be sent to the public cloud. Hybrids are also helpful during rough weather, scheduled maintenance or rolling brownouts or blackouts. IDC predicts that 80% of enterprise IT organisations will commit to the hybrid cloud by 2017.
No matter what type of cloud organisations ultimately choose, they will need IT professionals with certain cloud skills. Some of the fundamental skills are cloud migration and cloud security.
Cloud skills training and certification courses should combine learning conceptual knowledge with developing hands-on skills. Among the topics covered should be:
Although many companies have already moved to the cloud, many more are not there yet. They need IT professionals who have a solid grounding in the varying models for clouds. They also need to know how to map the organisation’s current IT infrastructure, including its applications and workloads on existing servers, and how to send all of what they have mapped to a cloud equivalent. The larger the organisation, the more complicated this becomes.
Cloud security is another major skill for IT professionals. Almost every day brings news of yet more data breaches. How to keep data secure, how to build and maintain secure platforms, and securing cloud infrastructure are all high-demand skills.
Additional top cloud skills cover SaaS, PaaS and IaaS. Organizations need IT professionals with knowhow to develop and work with cloud applications. The same applies to cloud platforms and infrastructures. This means they should be fluent cloud programming languages like Python, Perl and Ruby along with traditional languages like .NET, Java and PHP. Linux skills are also in high demand.
So is cloud database expertise. The hyper-connected Internet of Things generates quintillions of bytes of data daily. Organisations want most to uncover insights and new markets from this tsunami of data, and they need IT professionals with cloud database querying skills. SQL along with open source languages like MySQL, Hadoop or Mongo DB are worth learning.
With cloud skills and the certifications, IT professionals can demonstrate that they can help an IT department drive cloud deployments in a consistent and centralised manner. They become more valuable to any organisations because they know how to help to bring about desired business outcomes, such as greater business agility and lower IT architecture spending.
Read more: The top five in-demand cloud skills for 2016 and beyond