“Dice has been around for the last 20 years. We have been helping tech professionals find new jobs and career opportunities,” explained Manish Dixit, VP of Product and Engineering at Dice, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at 19th Cloud Expo, held November 1-3, 2016, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.

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The IoT continued its toddler-like growth and stumbles in 2016. Here are five trends to look for in 2017 as the IoT enters its adolescence and how to benefit from them.
1. Ecosystems begin to determine winners and losers
Previously these were nice in-the-future concerns; now they will really count. Filling out a whole product value proposition through partnerships has repeatedly proven its importance across B2B and enterprise software sectors. In the IoT, they will be even more critical.

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The 20th International Cloud Expo has announced that its Call for Papers is open. Cloud Expo, to be held June 6-8, 2017, at the Javits Center in New York City, brings together Cloud Computing, Big Data, Internet of Things, DevOps, Containers, Microservices and WebRTC to one location.
With cloud computing driving a higher percentage of enterprise IT budgets every year, it becomes increasingly important to plant your flag in this fast-expanding business opportunity. Submit your speaking proposal today!

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(c)iStock.com/urbancow

Say hello to UpCloud. The Finland-based cloud provider has secured €4 million (£3.4m) in a series A funding round, and is looking to expand its team with the proceeds.

The startup, which was founded in 2011, currently has four data centres in Chicago, Frankfurt, Helsinki, and London, and was recently named by Deloitte as one of the top three fastest growing technology firms in Finland.

UpCloud aims squarely at the ‘cost-effective, high performance’ space, and is naturally bullish about its funding and future opportunities. “Our goal is to offer developers the most high performance cloud infrastructure resources and the best tools to control and manage them on a global scale,” a blog post from Antti Vilpponen, CEO, and Joel Pihlajamaa, CTO and founder, read. “With the funding, we are able to accelerate many things towards this goal; opening of new data centres and offices, but also hire great people to our team.”

Regular readers of this publication may recognise the name. The company was ranked highly in a benchmark report from Cloud Spectator back in March, scoring 95 out of 100 and coming second only to 1&1. In comparison, Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and IBM SoftLayer scored 76 between them with scores of 27, 27, and 22 respectively.

How was this so? By focusing on performance as well as price, measuring vCPU, memory, and block storage capabilities, Cloud Spectator came to the conclusion that the smaller players provided better value for money. “When it comes to price performance, we see many smaller players find an advantage by offering high-performance infrastructure at a very competitive price,” Kenny Li, CEO of Cloud Spectator, told this reporter at the time, adding that he expected to see further consolidation, as the likes of Verizon, HP, and Dell, exited the cloud infrastructure space.

All good news for UpCloud then, whose aim is to become the ‘de facto global European alternative in the high performance cloud space’, according to the company.

The funding round was led by Inventure, a Nordic venture capital firm.

The volume of transactions running through websites and mobile apps make customer-facing applications crucial to online businesses. If these applications perform well for their users, they generate revenue for the business. If they don’t, they affect the credibility of the business, which in turn affects the overall revenue. It is therefore imperative that businesses understand how well their revenue-critical applications are behaving for their end users.

From an IT team’s point of view, understanding the user experience of their applications is becoming challenging as technology evolves. Newer and more complex applications are being written using an assortment of languages. These applications are being deployed on a wide variety of infrastructure components. To add to that, today’s users access these modern applications on a variety of devices such as the Web, smartphones, tablets and smart watches.

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Cyberattacks are relentless. The pace of attacks shows no sign of slowing, and organizations understand that 100 percent prevention of attacks is not possible. Traditional prevention and detection techniques are falling short, and security professionals are scrambling for new paradigms that can more effectively detect attacks and mitigate the growing levels of damage.
In this climate of confusion, deception-based solutions offer a viable and proven way to stop attackers in their tracks. Why? Because instead of sitting back and waiting to be the victim, detection technologies let organizations be proactive and take the attack to the attacker. We’ve compiled a list of top five reasons why more security teams are opting for deception.

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There’s a funny thing about digital transformation: we are simultaneously over-hyping it and understating it. On the one hand, every tech company in the world is talking about it. It doesn’t matter how mundane the technology; every company is somehow relating their products to digital transformation.

On the other, many people are failing to grasp the import and impact of what digital transformation really means. In far too many cases, business and IT leaders are dismissing it as nothing more than a marketing ploy. The unfortunate result is that the over-hypedness of digital transformation is obscuring its real meaning.

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Almost three years ago, VMware introduced the world to its virtual SAN. This new solution enabled customers to use storage within ESXi servers without the need for external storage – an exciting promise for organizations that wanted to quickly scale their virtual storage. Now, it’s time to check in on this technology and see if it’s living up to its promise.
VMware became a player in the storage array and software market when it launched vSAN. Server admins were looking forward to using vSAN because it gave them a symmetrical architecture that did not require external storage, thus being able to use storage within existing servers. It also doesn’t require specialized storage skills. However, no one solution can be all things to all enterprises, and as enterprises began to deploy vSAN across their environments, they noticed something big was missing.

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