“Avere Systems is a hybrid cloud solution provider. We have customers that want to use cloud storage and we have customers that want to take advantage of cloud compute,” explained Rebecca Thompson, VP of Marketing at Avere Systems, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at 18th Cloud Expo, held June 7-9, 2016, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY.
How cloud assurance is at the heart of digital transformation
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Cloud computing is transforming modern business. Through the cloud, new digital-centric businesses are emerging that are more agile and innovative than anything seen before. Whether a new, ‘upstart’ business like Uber, with its compelling approach to city transport; or an established company breaking into new markets, like General Motors with its investment into Lyft, businesses are pioneering new customer services and business models that are disrupting entire industries and changing the way we work and play.
This digital transformation (DX) will affect all businesses. According to IDC, one third of the top 20 companies in every industry will have been disrupted by such digitally transformed companies by 2018. The message to businesses is clear: disrupt or be disrupted.
Enterprises are now on an accelerated modernisation path, trying to maintain, and even extend, their lead as other digital and data driven organisations challenge their status. For established enterprises, this is a particular challenge: they are not start ups that can live exclusively in the clouds. They have legacy systems and applications that cannot be virtualised and migrated to the cloud and customers who rely upon the flawless and ceaseless delivery of their digital services. Furthermore, due to governance, compliance, and regulatory (GRC) requirements some of the digital assets have to stay on premise. Therefore, the road ahead is more complicated than simply migrating infrastructure and applications to the cloud.
Head in the cloud
The cloud provides enterprises with the agility to increase the infrastructure capacity with no capital expenses and quickly deploy new services as mandated by the business needs. However in the process the enterprises may lose visibility and control over the data and the quality of service delivery. It is the role of the CIO to ensure that a business maintains control of its digital assets to ensure continuity of service for its customers.
Cloud-based assets should be treated like any other IT resource; they will be deployed to support enterprise functions and mission critical systems so they need to be closely monitored. If an organisation becomes dependent on the cloud to support key aspects of the business then the CIO needs to have complete visibility across all cloud-based systems. CIOs can implement dashboards that provide real-time analysis of the operational impact of cloud services and applications.
Apart from changes to core infrastructure, lines of business (LOBs) will independently utilise third party cloud based services; regularly introducing new applications to drive new workflows and efficiencies. The CIO should also have the power to veto initiatives that do not comply with the overall corporate IT quality assurance strategy.
Successful cloud-based disruption is not only about delivering transformational customer and business services; it is about delivering them well. The reliable delivery of business services is directly tied to customer experience, satisfaction, loyalty and ultimately corporate performance. In the connected world, assuring the quality of the enterprise service delivery infrastructure – supporting as it does the services that enable DX – becomes a mission-critical business activity.
However, this entails assuring these services end-to-end across edge, core and cloud both physical, virtual, and hybrid environments. The challenge is how to monitor activity continuously across the entire infrastructure in real-time, in particular to identify and diagnose service issues. There is increased pressure on IT to reap the benefits of external cloud services, but there is rarely a plan to assure performance and secure the data stored in the cloud, beyond relying on the cloud providers. While such providers advertise that they have integrated control, management, and security of respective cloud offerings, businesses should be reluctant to depend nothing more than trusting this is the case. It is far better for the CIO to be able to verify that data is safe and to do this, they need visibility of the entire system.
Dark skies ahead
The challenge facing businesses has become more acute because now, companies rely on a mix of public cloud services providers, private cloud and on-premises legacy technology. With more and more systems relying on the performance of external services, it’s a challenge to pin down the root cause of a service interruption when it occurs, as it relies on the consistent performance of multiple elements both on and off of your premises.
Despite the benefits of this hybrid environment the reality is that it can cause an enterprise to lose sight of service vulnerabilities. What is needed is a holistic end-to-end view of the entire service delivery infrastructure. Without this visibility, service failure and even criminal activities, such as hacking and Denial of Service (DoS) attacks, can go unnoticed. With so much of modern business activity reliant on the effective operation of the network, it is vital to be able to identify and address issues quickly and effectively.
Every cloud has a silver lining
The right approach to service assurance overcomes this challenge by providing a holistic visibility across the entire service delivery infrastructure from the wireless Edge to the Core and in the Cloud. This is achieved by continuous end-to-end monitoring and analysis of the traffic data flowing over hybrid cloud networks. This enables enterprises to spot and isolate any anomalies that may present a hindrance to business performance. Translating real-time smart data into actionable insights is of huge strategic value to the enterprise both in terms of productivity and revenue.
Cloud will play a central role in the DX transformation of the large majority – if not all – enterprises over the next decade. The CIO needs to be able to confidently manage the quality of each new cloud service and application that is adopted across the business. Every new system must be accounted for and be aligned with the overall DX cloud initiative and enterprise-wide DX strategy. Digital transformation can be a perilous journey for a business, however, with the right tools and approach, a business can emerge able to compete in an increasingly connected world.
Autotask partners with Microsoft CSP programme to maximise Azure opportunity
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IT management software provider Autotask has announced a partnership with Microsoft’s Cloud Solution Provider (CSP) programme and MessageOps to launch CSP Boss.
The product is aimed at Autotask customers looking to “maximise the cloud services opportunity”. Service providers can automate management, billing and support of Microsoft’s cloud portfolio, including Office 365, Azure, and SharePoint, while value added services can also be provided in the form of an integrated help desk and knowledge base. According to the dedicated page for CSP Boss, 20% gross profit margins are promised for resellers.
“Microsoft is excited to see the strategic partnership between Autotask and MessageOps,” said Brent Combest, Microsoft director of partner profitability and compete in a statement. “This combined offering furthers our vision to provide a platform through CSP from which members of the Microsoft channel can create operational efficiencies and ultimately increase profitability via the sale of our online services.”
Elsewhere, Microsoft announced a series of new cloudy and machine learning features to its Office 365 apps. Outlook will be offering @mentions, while Word will incorporate new editing and researching features. “As a cloud-based service, Editor will get better with time,” wrote Kirk Koenigsbauer, Office corporate vice president. “It will expand upon Word’s current spelling and grammar tools to inform you why words or phrases may not be accurate – teaching at the same time it is correcting.”
Earlier this month, Microsoft announced its latest financial results, with Azure revenue growing 102%, and compute usage more than doubling year on year.
You can find out more about CSP Boss here.
Customer Story: Taekwon-Do Competition Uses Parallels Desktop for Mac
Meet Sam Wood. Sam is a real power-user of Parallels Desktop for Mac; it is an essential part of his workflow as an organizer of a Taekwon-Do competition and as a software developer. Today, he would like to share its virtues and benefits with you. Sam is one of the organizers of a famous Taekwon-Do competition […]
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Roadmap for Hybrid IT | @CloudExpo #IoT #M2M #API #DataCenter #BigData
With 15% of enterprises adopting a hybrid IT strategy, you need to set a plan to integrate hybrid cloud throughout your infrastructure.
In his session at 18th Cloud Expo, Steven Dreher, Director of Solutions Architecture at Green House Data, discussed how to plan for shifting resource requirements, overcome challenges, and implement hybrid IT alongside your existing data center assets. Highlights included anticipating workload, cost and resource calculations, integrating services on both sides of the firewall, self-service, monitoring, and workload prioritization.
Analytics Strategies | @CloudExpo #BigData #Analytics #IoT #M2M
As the Big Data marketplace moves closer to a point of mass-maturity, business leaders have begun to take new approaches to implementation and utilization. Advanced analytics solutions have made their way into a range of industries and regions, and companies that successfully align these investments with core goals and requirements will enjoy more progressive improvements to operational sustainability, intelligence and general performance.
However, there is some housekeeping that must be addressed as organizations embark on Big Data and analytics initiatives. Data preparation, information governance and security are three fundamental elements of effective analytics strategies, yet, ironically, each has been largely ignored by many organizations in the rush to realize the promise of Big Data.
DDoS Mitigation | @CloudExpo @WebairInc #BigData #InfoSec #DataCenter
In his session at 18th Cloud Expo, Sagi Brody, Chief Technology Officer at Webair Internet Development Inc., and Logan Best, Infrastructure & Network Engineer at Webair, focused on real world deployments of DDoS mitigation strategies in every layer of the network. He gave an overview of methods to prevent these attacks and best practices on how to provide protection in complex cloud platforms. He also outlined what we have found in our experience managing and running thousands of Linux and Unix managed service platforms and what specifically can be done to offer protection at every layer. He offered insight and examples from both a business and technical perspective.
Lance Crosby’s StackPath
Lance Crosby has recently announced his new venture StackPath, a Security-as-a-Service company, at HostingCon Global. Initially, StackPath will include content delivery, DDoS protection, and Virtual Private Network (VPN) services. Eventually, the company will grow to include other services such as secure compute and storage. These services will be offered as both individual products and a suite of services, operating on private and public clouds. StackPath’s global threat intelligence engine will be available across 35 points-of-presence.
Crosby was inspired to found StackPath in 2013 after he left IBM. He witnessed a plethora of flaws within the cloud security industry and became cognizant of the need for better security, with more than 400 million identified malware attacks in the past year alone.
Though relatively young, the company shows much promise. StackPath has raised $150 million in Series A funding alone from private equity firm ARBY Partners, one of the largest single financing rounds for a private security firm. In addition, StackPath has also acquired many companies: Cloak, a VPN firm that provides secure WiFI connections for iOS devices; MaxCDN, a content delivery network company; and Fireblade, a firewall company.
About Lance Crosby:
A 20 year industry veteran, Crosby founded SoftLayer Technologies, which was acquired by IBM for $2 billion in 2013. He also spent a short while at IBM. He later left to found StackPath with his own money.
Comments:
Lance Crosby, Stackpath CEO and chairman: “That’s where the concept came from. I saw companies like Netflix, big banks, and firms that were spinning up literally tens of thousands of virtual machines a day and there were no real security products that would follow that level of automation and scale.
“The Internet is where the world does business. It may be the single most important utility supporting businesses today, yet we continue to overtax the aging infrastructure and struggle to make it secure.”
The post Lance Crosby’s StackPath appeared first on Cloud News Daily.
Microservices and HTTP/2 | @DevOpsSummit #DevOps #Microservices
There’s a lot of things we do to improve the performance of web and mobile applications. We use caching. We use compression. We offload security (SSL and TLS) to a proxy with greater compute capacity.
We apply image optimization and minification to content.
We do all that because performance is king. Failure to perform can be, for many businesses, equivalent to an outage with increased abandonment rates and angry customers taking to the Internet to express their extreme displeasure.
Procurement Takes Leading Role in Business Strategies | @CloudExpo #API #Cloud #BusinessIntelligence
Companies are exploiting technology advances in procurement and finance services to produce new types of productivity benefits.
We’ll now hear from a procurement expert on how companies can better manage their finances and have tighter control over procurement processes and their supply chain networks. This business process innovation exchange comes to you in conjunction with the Tradeshift Innovation Day held in New York on June 22, 2016.