Bigger Margins on Parallels RAS Deals, Free Training and Sales Materials to Accelerate Reseller Sales of Affordable Virtual Desktop and Application Delivery Solution Nov. 2, 2016 – Today, Parallels launched its upgraded Parallels Partner Program and portal for resellers of Parallels Remote Application Server (Parallels RAS), a simple, fast and cost-effective way for IT departments […]
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Right now, we’re in a stage in the IT evolution where we are seeing tectonic shifts throughout the industry as they relate to digital transformation. In this video, Simon Johnson, VP of Client Services at GreenPages, discusses how digital transformation is driving the way we consume and provision services and applications and changing the way IT provides the base infrastructure for these services. From the way we consume applications through smartphones, laptops, and tablets, to the platforms they’re built on, the digital transformation has enormous ramifications from an operational, design, and go-to market perspective.
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To learn more about implementing hybrid cloud solutions, email socialmedia@greenpages.com
By Simon Johnson, VP of Client Services, GreenPages Technology Solutions
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Even though seven out of 10 organisations have at least one application in the cloud today, adoption continues to go up, according to the latest verdict from IDG Enterprise.
The survey, which polled 925 respondents and was conducted among the audiences of six of the company’s brands, including CIO, InfoWorld and ComputerWorld, shows interesting comparisons when put aside the same study from five years ago; back then, just over half (51%) of those polled had at least one app in the cloud.
Increasingly, organisations are using multiple cloud models; private, public, and hybrid were cited by 62%, 60% and 26% of respondents respectively. Almost half (45%) of survey respondents say they use storage as a service models, while a third (33%) are planning to deploy disaster recovery as a service. 27% said they were planning on rolling out storage as a service, with the same number cited for database and mobility as a service.
The study also examined buying patterns within different businesses. Perhaps not surprisingly, the CIO (90% of respondents) dominates the enterprise cloud purchase influence, ahead of IT architects (84%), while for small and medium businesses the CEO (81%) is in charge, ahead of the CIO (79%) and the CFO (71%).
As ever, security remains a challenge. When it comes to cloud migration, sensitivity of data was cited by the most respondents as a critical or very important consideration with 82%, ahead of how important the application is to daily business operations (76%) and the cost of migration (74%).
Overall, however, the consensus is positive. “We are at a time where companies are not asking if cloud should be used, but how,” said Brian Glynn, chief revenue officer at IDG Enterprise. “Enterprises are leading the way on what is possible. Given their human and capital resources they are able to fully test cloud options to help them innovate and provide strong solutions to their customers.”
You can find out more about the IDG 2016 cloud computing survey here.
Cloud applications are becoming an integral part of everyday life, both at the personal and professional level. It’s little wonder that companies are vying with each other to tap into this huge market. The latest company to join this bandwagon of enterprise cloud suite applications is Cisco, with the introduction of ONE Enterprise Cloud Suite.
Introduced at Cisco’s Partner Summit in San Francisco on November 1st, ONE Enterprise Cloud Suite is a hybrid cloud software solution that’ll allow companies to make the most of their cloud environment. In many ways, this is a self-service portal that is customized to meet the needs of end-users, app developers, and IT professionals, so they can have a flexible environment backed by a solid infrastructure. It’ll offer advanced automation tools for managing the infrastructure, cloud, and other related services by providing real-time diagnostics and historical analysis. One of the most important features of ONE Enterprise Cloud Suite is Big Data automation, so as to provide higher levels of consistency and reduced risk.
Besides this cloud enterprise suite, Cisco also announced a new storage server called UCS S3260. Part of its Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS), this is the first offering in UCS S-series of servers. Known for its modular architecture, the first of its kind in the industry, this server offers a high level of scalability and cloud connectivity that is sure to go a long way in helping customers to convert their data into useful business insights. Further, this server can store terabytes of data, that can be quickly scaled to Petabytes if needed, with Cisco’s UCS manager, and unified I/O connectivity.
Another unique aspect of this server is that it consumes almost 50 percent less power than similar servers, and takes up to 60 percent less space. This is a big move considering that power consumption is one of the biggest aspects of a server’s maintenance costs, closely followed by the cost of space. By addressing both these aspects, Cisco has lowered the cost of total ownership by almost 50 percent when compared to public cloud, and at the same time, offers the perfect infrastructure to power any kind of workload. This can be particularly important for IoT and other data-driven applications, as this server can be quickly scaled to store the enormous amounts of data that is being generated every minute today. Going forward, the rate of data generation is only going to increase, and servers like UCS S3260 are expected to fill this growing demand for storage.
Through this new cloud platform and storage server, Cisco wants to provide an architecture that’ll make it easy for customers to Analyze, Simplify, Automate, and Protect (ASAP) their data, according to a press release from the company. In addition, both these announcements are sure to make it smooth and easy for businesses to make the most of their hybrid cloud adoption.
With these offerings, Cisco has made a foray into the storage business through its successful domain of server business.
The post Cisco Introduces New Products appeared first on Cloud News Daily.
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You should test your DRP in line with any changes to your business. The plan should be updated and changed when new personnel, tech or operational systems are introduced so that it reflects the current state of your company. Whether this is once a month or once a year, the DRP should be an ever-changing document that takes into account any major business alterations as and when they occur.
One way of ensuring your DRP is regularly reviewed is by including it in your managed recovery program and organising a testing schedule around this. It is advised that businesses make time for at least one full scale test a year.
Preparing for a DRP test is important as it ensures your business can get the most out of the results. One of the key things to remember is that there should be no way that a single person can be a point of failure. This means making sure all procedures can be carried out by at least two people and that the team are not relying on any input from the DRP creators to perform a task. This means that if any member of the team is away when a disaster occurs whether due to sickness, vacation time or that they no longer work at the company, there is always a backup in place.
You should also prepare to fully detail and review the test so that your business has a complete record of any changes that need to be made or problems that need investigating. To do this you will need a copy of the DRP and an observer who has a good understanding of the document to take notes during the procedures and to time how long the test takes to complete. Both strengths and weaknesses should be recorded as well as any unexpected results. If possible, it is also helpful to measure the impact on the business of staff and systems being unavailable, as this can have an effect on how much time you allow for DR.
A full scale test of your DRP can be a huge drain on money and resources so it is understandable that a lot of businesses put off this kind of test to avoid disruption. However, it is possible to maintain an up to date DRP in other ways that are less disruptive to your business.
1. DRP review: In a plan review, DR planners should meet with management to review the existing DRP and identify any changes or updates that need to be made to reflect the current state of business. New procedures should respond to changes in the company and any major adjustments made to the DRP during a review should be flagged up for a tabletop or full scale test to ensure that they work.
2. Tabletop test: In a tabletop test, all team members should be involved and talk through the steps taken to achieve a set objective in a disaster scenario. Each step should be described in detail; with the responsible team members describing what actions they would take to complete each procedure. This is a good chance to identify any gaps in personnel knowledge that require extra training, and to rehearse the DRP in a more realistic setting.
3. Full scale test: A full scale test is the best way to validate your DRP and should be made to be as realistic as possible. Spend some time and money simulating a disaster scenario and lay out objectives for your team to respond to, even keeping the fact that the exercise is a drill secret from them. Implement all recovery and backup systems and fully restart networks if necessary. By creating a realistic disaster zone, you will best be able to see how the team and systems will hold up in the event of a true catastrophe and this is hugely beneficial. Use the information gathered from a full scale test to really identify areas of weakness in your DRP and target your resources towards resolving these issues effectively so that your business is fully prepared if disaster strikes.
Faults and setbacks that come to light during a DR test can be distressing but by testing your DRP you will identify these issues before they become a problem and have the opportunity to fix them.
Record any incidents carefully and make time to fully investigate the cause behind each one so that the DR team can suggest a solution that stops it from happening again. Once the issues are resolved you will need to repeat a full scale test to ensure that the solutions work effectively and are compatible with the rest of the DRP. You may need to do this a few times to get the right result so make sure all changes are properly recorded.
By making disaster recovery planning a priority and testing your procedures regularly, your business will be fully prepared for any setbacks. Find out if your company’s DRP will hold up by speaking to IT service providers and consultants before putting them in place.
Bert Loomis was a visionary. This general session will highlight how Bert Loomis and people like him inspire us to build great things with small inventions.
In their general session at 19th Cloud Expo, Harold Hannon, Architect at IBM Bluemix, and Michael O’Neill, Strategic Business Development at Nvidia, will discuss the accelerating pace of AI development and how IBM Cloud and NVIDIA are partnering to bring AI capabilities to “every day,” on-demand. They will also review two “free infrastructure” programs available to startups and innovators.
Picture credit: “MongoDB”, by Andreas Kollegger, used under CC BY 2.0 / Modified from original”
NoSQL database provider MongoDB has announced the launch of its 3.4 product, promising greater analytics capabilities and additional data models.
Among the new features include multi-model functionality, native graph analytics, as well as a new SQL interface. The company hopes the new release will help it be placed ‘at the centre of enterprises’ digital transformation initiatives’, according to the press material, citing the Internet of Things (IoT) and artificial intelligence as use cases which require deeper analytical and operational requirements.
Elsewhere, the launch of 3.4 offers a variety of options to simplify application deployments to multiple data centres, from ‘zones’, claimed as the industry’s first fully elastic database partitioning capability designed for multi-region deployments, as well as faster elastic operations which aim to reduce the time balancing data across distributed clusters.
“Developers want to access and store their data in the simplest way possible,” said Eliot Horowitz, MongoDB CTO and co-founder in a statement. “We are continuing to add new capabilities to our query language – like graph and faceted search operators – so developers can use MongoDB for applications that previously required multiple technologies, thereby consolidating their technology footprint.”
“Leaders of nearly every business are under enormous pressure to disrupt, or be disrupted, by the advent of the digital enterprise,” added Dev Ittycheria, MongoDB president and CEO. “Organisations that know how to leverage next-generation software and data technologies to transform their businesses have an intrinsic competitive advantage.”
As is with the way of these things, MongoDB rolled out a number of customers who have tested the new service. Among them include Chinese search engine Baidu, pollsters YouGov, who say they have been “passionate” users of MongoDB since 2010, and real estate portal Homes.com.
If you’ve done a fair amount of development, you’re sure to have used Nitrou.io at some point of time during your development career. For others, Nitrous.io is a ubiquitous cloud-based Integrated Development Environment (IDE) that made it easy for developers to work on any programming language without having to download any tool, software kit, or editor. In other words, you can open nitrous.io on your browser, login, and start coding in a programming language of your choice. You even had the choice to share it with other developers and teammates for better collaboration.
Well, all this convenience and ease of use is going to end on November 14! An official release by the company says that it will stop taking on new users, and will refund all payments made to its service after October 16. Anyone with an existing project on Nitrous.io will be sent an email link to download their data, and this link will expire within 15 days.
This announcement came as a surprise for its customers, and the cloud IDE community at large, because Nitrous.io is a popular platform for developers. Founded in 2012, this company has offices in San Francisco and Singapore. It attracted more than 500 investors, including some big names like Golden Gate Ventures, Bessemer Venture Partners, and Lion Rock Capital. It even got a funding to the tune of $6.65 million in March 2014. This company is well-known for the huge jump it got within the first year of its operations – 100,000 users even before its first anniversary. With such an impressive background, and a large and satisfied customer base, it’s not clear why the company decided to shut down its operations. Though the team says that it’ll soon release an open-source version of its cloud IDE, it’s not clear when this release would happen. No timelines have been given in this regard.
Looking back, things have been quiet with Nitrous.io since the beginning of this year. The only change was the company’s pricing that was announced in April of this year. Also, this company hired Alex Malinovich, a GitHub alum, as its CEO in July. This strategic change was done with the aim to reach out to more professional developers, along with novices and students. Besides this announcement, there has been no major feature releases for the whole of this year.
Such a long silence followed by this sudden announcement has opened much speculation about what could have gone wrong with the company. Some contend that its strategy to bring in more professional developers did not work out, and the company eventually ran out of money, thereby forcing it to stop operations. A few others believe that it is likely to be acquired by a major player, just like how another cloud IDE, Cloud9 was acquired by Amazon Web Services. None of these speculations have been confirmed by the company yet.
This means, the more than 200,000 developers on this site are going to feel disappointed, as of now. Let’s hope Nitrous.io comes up with its new open-source version soon!
The post Nitrous.io – We’ll miss you! appeared first on Cloud News Daily.
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Nitrous.io, a Singapore and San Francisco-based cloud integrated development environment (IDE) provider, has announced it is to shut down its development platform and cloud IDE on November 14, with customers given until that date before their data is deleted.
The company has stopped new signups, and said that payments made after October 16 will be refunded in full, as well as promising that subscriptions to any Nitrous email list will expire at the end of this month.
While two weeks is a less than ideal timeframe to sort out new data, the company said in a blog post confirming the shutdown that customers who have an active workstation will be able to easily download a backup of their data through an email link.
The company added that a self-hosted and open source version of the Nitrous IDE, called Nitrous Solo – which will allow users to host their own instances on other cloud providers – will be rolled out “in the coming weeks.”
According to Crunchbase, Nitrous.io, previously known at Action.io, received a total of $7.65 million in funding across two rounds; one of $1m in seed funding in April 2013, alongside $6.65m of series A in March 2014 led by Bessemer Venture Partners. The company launched a professional version of its development platform in April last year, claiming at the time that more than 200,000 people had registered and built apps using the original free version of Nitrous.
You can read the full blog post here.
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The vast majority of companies who are moving to cloud applications also have a significant current investment in on-premise operational applications and on-premise capabilities around data warehousing, business intelligence and analytics. This means that most of them will be working with a hybrid cloud/on-premise data management environment for the foreseeable future.
Moving at ‘cloud speed’, and setting up a new application in a matter of hours, is a big advantage in terms of business agility, but one cost is that managing data becomes more complicated.
It seems that more often than not, a hybrid architecture isn’t planned – it just happens. The ‘typical’ use-case pattern starts with organisations integrating a cloud application, perhaps for CRM or HR, then, they add cloud database before finally adding a cloud data warehouse and/or analytics capability.
A lot of the time it’s the business that drives this pattern in an effort to solve a particular problem. Most frequently, IT is hugely involved in the effort, but the cloud analytics decision is made by the business side. As a result, IT inherits significant new data management complexity.
It can be difficult to retrofit governance into existing systems. Often, the focus is on the initial data migration to the new operational application or analytics, where a simple bulk data loader is employed in the interest of speed and agility. This has several downsides:
Once the new applications have gone live, focus shifts to ensuring data consistency. Moving between cloud and on-premise systems and cloud-to-cloud brings new challenges, and leave fewer resources dedicated to overall data management.
If you don’t want to slow down the business initiatives that are driving the new applications, but still want to prevent that data complexity or chaos, it will pay to have a data management architecture and best practices in place before-hand.
Data management in a large organisation is challenging. But this gets even more complex when it’s hybrid. The key is to plan ahead so that you’re not a roadblock to the business. Key considerations for a successful programme should question:
At the end of the day, the business challenge is to deliver value faster than the competition. The IT challenge comes with meeting the speed and quality requirements of the business while enabling them to accelerate their business agility. It can be done, but it takes careful planning and a good, forward-looking data management architecture.