Fact: storage performance problems have only gotten more complicated, as applications not only have become largely virtualized, but also have moved to cloud-based infrastructures. Storage performance in virtualized environments isn’t just about IOPS anymore. Instead, you need to guarantee performance for individual VMs, helping applications maintain performance as the number of VMs continues to go up in real time.
In his session at Cloud Expo, Dhiraj Sehgal, Product and Marketing at Tintri, will share success stories from a few folks who have already started using VM-aware storage. By managing storage operations at the VM-level, they’ve been able to solve their most vexing storage problems, and create infrastructures that scale to meet the needs of their applications. Best of all, they’ve got predictable, manageable storage performance – at a level conventional storage can’t match.

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Despite the clear advantages of cloud, enterprises can be skittish about getting “trapped” in a public cloud vendor. But unfortunately, this may prevent them from achieving success in the cloud, a new survey finds.

According to a Logicworks survey by Wakefield Research, 78% of IT decision makers believe that concerns about vendor lock-in prevent their organisation from maximising the benefits of cloud resources. This means that the majority of IT leaders consciously choose not to fully invest in cloud because they value long-term vendor flexibility over long-term cloud success.

The cost of avoiding lock-in

The study confirms reports by Gartner, Fortune and others that cite IT executives who believe the overwhelming market dominance of public cloud players like Amazon is a negative; to combat this, these companies use core services like Amazon EC2 and S3 but stay away from “higher level” managed services like databases and orchestration tools. The perception is that if you use AWS’ basic services and build your own management tools, you can pick up and leave Amazon more easily.

The trouble is that there is a cost to this choice. The benefit of the public cloud is not just outsourced compute and storage. It is that public cloud providers like AWS have spent the last 10 years building advanced, scalable infrastructure services—and they release hundreds of updates to these services every year. You do not have to build your own version of these services, you never have to upgrade your cloud to get these new features, you do not have to patch them or version them. They just show up.

Also, if you build your own queuing, notification, networking tools, etc. that you can get from AWS, you spend the same amount of time — if not more — upfront building or re-architecting your own tools. Then you have to manage those tools, update them, and improve them over time.

The other option is to run “multicloud” — use two or more public cloud vendors and/or PaaS providers, so that you can leave one or the other at any time. While only a small number of enterprises currently take this approach, it seems to berising in popularity. The problem with this approach is that cloud vendors have no incentive to make the seamless transition of data between clouds possible, and many thought leaders claim the “interoperable cloud” is a dream. In reality, multicloud can be complicated, messy, and result in applications built to the lowest common (cloud) denominator.

Alternative paths to cloud success

Is there a way to balance vendor lock-in fears with manageability? To avoid vendor-lock in while still reducing the complexity of IT management? The answer is not about keeping one foot out of the cloud, but about fully embracing a new way of managing IT. The real challenge in migrating to any IaaS platform is not the technology itself but the governance models, cost control measures and the processes your systems and development teams use to work together. The hard part is evolving the role of central IT as not just purchaser and governance body, but an engine of continuous development and change.

The cloud gives IT teams an opportunity to work with infrastructure as code, which means that infrastructure can be versioned, tested, repeatable, and centrally managed. Central IT can develop an infrastructure system, create a template from it, and establish guardrails for the evolution of that template by multiple business units. Usually this takes the form of a security playbook or service catalog, where users can launch resources from pre-formulated templates in which security best practices are embedded. This follows the service-oriented IT model where central IT becomes the service provider or PaaS platform through which IaaS is ingested.

When you implement templatization (AWS CloudFormation, Terraform) andconfiguration management, you build a set of management standards that will serve you in every IaaS platform. You just have a JSON file that controls virtual resources and could theoretically be configured to build any cloud resource with any vendor. Any work you do on this front will make it easier to manage or migrate in or out of your cloud.

Why is central IT the key player in preventing vendor lock-in? It is all about defining standards that transcend the boundaries of platforms or cloud vendors. Getting the platform wrong can cost you three months of work. Getting the standards right will serve you for years to come. If you ever need to migrate out of your primary cloud provider, you will have a central entity that knows where workloads live and can intelligently recreate practices on a second platform.

The future of vendor lock-in

Vendor lock-in will never be absent from IT. IT management is too complex; it will always be easier/more cost-effective on some level for organisation to use a vendor’s tools or resources than to build their own. Vendors are vendors — they want you to stick around. The key is not to defend your organisation by avoiding cloud, but by rethinking the way you manage IT all together.

In the end, intelligent cloud management allows you to maximise the benefits of the cloud without getting stuck in one vendor. When you get the people and process right, changing the technology is not so daunting.

The post Vendor Lock-In is Big Roadblock to Cloud Success, Survey Finds appeared first on Logicworks Gathering Clouds.

SYS-CON Events announced today that Numerex Corp, a leading provider of managed enterprise solutions enabling the Internet of Things (IoT), will exhibit at the 19th International Cloud Expo | @ThingsExpo, which will take place on November 1–3, 2016, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
Numerex Corp. (NASDAQ:NMRX) is a leading provider of managed enterprise solutions enabling the Internet of Things (IoT). The Company’s solutions produce new revenue streams or create operating efficiencies for its customers. Numerex provides its technology and services through its integrated platforms, which are generally sold on a subscription basis.

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We are always online. We access our data, our finances, work, and various services on the Internet. But we live in a congested world of information in which the roads were built two decades ago. The quest for better, faster Internet routing has been around for a decade, but nobody solved this problem.
We’ve seen band aid approaches like CDNs that attack a niche’s slice of static content part of the Internet, but that’s it. It does not address the dynamic services-based Internet of today. It does not address real-time apps, video, conferencing and collaboration, which is the Internet. In his session at 19th Cloud Expo, Elad Rave, CEO and co-founder of Teridion, will discuss why.

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(c)iStock.com/KIVILCIM PINAR

Cloud storage provider Dropbox has said the password reset measures the company put in place has prevented any hacking of user data, following revelations made in stories which argued that millions of account details had been accessed.

Certain Dropbox users received an email from the cloud storage provider earlier this week advising that if their account password was the same as before mid-2012, they will be prompted to change it the next time they sign in.

A blog post at the time from Patrick Heim, Dropbox head of trust and security, said it was done “purely as a preventative measure”. Yet according to a Motherboard story citing an anonymous Dropbox employee, as well as being vetted by other publications, the number of credentials taken from 2012 total more than 68 million.

Troy Hunt, a security expert who curates the ‘Have I been pwned?’ service, also obtained a copy of the data, and trawled through it finding not only his details – although his password had been changed well after the purported breach – but his wife’s.

Given her password had not been changed since April 2012, and that she uses a password manager, Hunt put two and two together. “There is no doubt whatsoever that the data breach contains legitimate Dropbox passwords – you simply can’t fabricate this sort of thing,” Hunt wrote.

Heim said in a statement today: “This is not a new security incident, and there is no indication that Dropbox user accounts have been improperly accessed. Our analysis confirms that the credentials are user email addresses with hashed and salted passwords that were obtained prior to mid-2012.

“We can confirm that the scope of the password reset we completed last week did protect all impacted users,” Heim added. “Even if these passwords are cracked, the password reset means they can’t be used to access Dropbox accounts. The reset only affects users who signed up for Dropbox prior to mid-2012 and hadn’t changed their password since.”

So what does this mean for users? David Emm is principal security researcher at Kaspersky Lab. He argues the importance of the ‘positive impact’ the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) could bring to the situation, but sounds a note of caution.

“Organisations should prepare on the basis that hackers will get in,” Emm said. “It’s therefore positive that we’re starting to see a shift from organisations using defensive strategies towards being better prepared.

“Dropbox hashed and salted passwords, and immediately gave advice to consumers, recommending that they change their passwords as a precaution. We know that many people use the same password across multiple online accounts, so it’s important that those affected take steps to change their password for other online accounts where they have used the same password”, added Emm.

“While Dropbox accounts are protected, affected users who may have reused their password on other sites should take steps to protect themselves on those sites,” said Heim. “The best way to do this is by updating these passwords, making them strong and unique, and enabling two-step verification.

“Individuals who received a notification from Dropbox should also be alert to spam or phishing,” he added.

(c)iStock.com/Vershinin-M

The world as we know it is ending! Well, in a less dramatic sense, things are evolving. Legacy-name companies serving as Fortune 500 poster children have fallen and are being quickly replaced by new faces. (FYI: 86% of Fortune 500 companies from 1955 have failed.) These new faces have the legacies trembling with fear because of their secret weapon––innovation. Paving the way for the little guys with big ideas, the future is here.

Disrupting the peace

There’s a term given to the little guys who upset the larger firms: disruptors. Coined by Marc Andreessen nearly five years ago in his article, Software is Eating the World, disruptors are really good at taking a bunch of different ideas and packaging them in a way that alters the way people do things. They are astute at incorporating successful, universal aspects of already existing technologies.

But how is it possible that the business structure has shifted seemingly overnight? It’s because of Digital Transformation Strategy (DTS). A seemingly generic term, DTS began with Andreessen’s head in the cloud – the cloud. Developing a platform based off of the timeliness of cloud technology, iPhone and App Store disrupting began to take form.

Let’s get digital

What does it take for Digital Transformation Strategy to take shape? Andreessen summed it up to timing. We’re living in an ideal “future-state” that has created a climate for disruptors. Jeetu Patel, author of Software is Still Eating the World adds: “What Uber and Airbnb — like Andreessen — understood about ‘software eating the world’ was that incredible innovations often emerge at just these moments when it looks like everything has been changed and we’ve reached the new normal.”

Patel takes into context the mindset of businesses coming to terms with how their core may be shaken due to inevitable technological changes.

Beyond timing, the second important factor is focus. Patel examines Uber by claiming that Uber’s focus is on their own assets. Uber’s most important asset? Experience. The “experience factor” focuses Uber’s mission on creating user experience rather than ownership of transportation vehicles. Summing up Uber’s success in focusing on their core, Patel explains: “At the practical level, when you look at the technology components of Uber’s world-renowned app, they decided to rely on other core platforms and technologies to power many of the key elements.”

Tech blogs and writers have written ad nauseam about Uber’s platform approach. We get it. The platform is/was/continues-to-be revolutionary. However, it’s easy to lose sight of the fact that it took a lot of connecting, of a lot of dots, to create the platform. (Of course there are other variables that go into the success of a product. Having a solid technology platform helps, but it doesn’t guarantee success.)

So ask yourself: What dots are you looking at?

As mentioned in the article, it doesn’t make sense for every company to strive to be a software business or disruptor. There would be no place for this function in every business. However, there exists an additional role for businesses and that’s where our team at Myriad Mobile comes in. Our role in this disrupting world is to act as a catalyst. This role is important for the growth of disruptors as a way to provide both the timeliness and focus needed. Having the the disruptor-assistance mindset, we at Team Myriad take into consideration these questions developed by Patel:

• Will the non-core service provide your application an innovation tailwind?
• Can the service be substituted by another supplier?
• Will the service provide a neutral to incremental experience improvement for your customers?

Asking these questions keep catalytic companies on the same page with the disruptors they aid.  

This is the beginning

Perhaps the most important takeaway from Patel’s article is this concept: “The central question, therefore, is not whether every company will have to embark on some sort of digital transformation journey depending on their business, but rather how they will go about making it happen.”

Technology changes the business realm because it is constantly evolving and never finished. Andreesson’s Digital Transformation Strategy reiterates that point — and he wrote about it five years ago! (That’s a lifetime in the technology realm.) If your company is not looking at a digital transformation strategy in your industry, we have one question: Why not? There has never been a better time for innovation through solidly-built, already existing technology platforms.

Disruptors take note and find your catalyst, the future is here.

The post Erupting Disruptors: Software is Still Eating the World appeared first on Myriad Mobile.

Why do your mobile transformations need to happen today? Mobile is the strategy that enterprise transformation centers on to drive customer engagement.
In his general session at @ThingsExpo, Roger Woods, Director, Mobile Product & Strategy – Adobe Marketing Cloud, covered key IoT and mobile trends that are forcing mobile transformation, key components of a solid mobile strategy and explored how brands are effectively driving mobile change throughout the enterprise.

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Why do your mobile transformations need to happen today? Mobile is the strategy that enterprise transformation centers on to drive customer engagement.
In his general session at @ThingsExpo, Roger Woods, Director, Mobile Product & Strategy – Adobe Marketing Cloud, covered key IoT and mobile trends that are forcing mobile transformation, key components of a solid mobile strategy and explored how brands are effectively driving mobile change throughout the enterprise.

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(c)iStock.com/Peter Chernaev

Almost three quarters of survey respondents in a study conducted by Unisys believe that it is ‘critical’ or ‘very important’ for organisations to modify IT processes and resources to support a digital business model.

The survey, which polled 175 IT and business executives in the US and Europe, examined the effect of social, cloud, mobility, data analytics, the Internet of Things, and security on driving new business models. 88% of respondents say data security in the cloud is a top priority for competing in the digital world, while more than half (55%) of organisations’ applications are already deployed in a cloud environment.

The overall sense of the report was that organisations were seeing positive results from their cloud and digital initiatives. As data security is a priority, one of the more interesting aspects is with regards to improvements over the past 12 months; 56% said data security had gone up, compared to greater user experience with applications and services (44%), IT efficiency (42%) and infrastructure performance (41%).

Similarly, organisations need to be more agile to better compete, the research argues. Only 15% of companies polled say they have the ‘extremely flexible’ and ‘nimble’ attributes required to take full advantages of the opportunities of digital.

“Digital business is all about finding innovative ways to empower workers and customers,” said Steve Nunn, vice president of cloud and infrastructure services at Unisys. “The organisations that will prosper in the new order are those that most quickly become focused, proficient and flexible in integrating and securing the cloud, IoT, and other key digital technologies to drive new levels of service.

“This research points the way for organisations to become more nimble and successful in capitalising on present and future business challenges,” Nunn added.