The following post includes two customer stories submitted to our Advocacy program. We are incredibly thankful to Sabra and Joyce for sharing their stories with us and allowing us to share them with you! Read on for their experiences choosing and using Parallels Desktop. We’re so appreciative of the folks that take the time to write us and tell us […]
The post Customer Story: QuickBooks on Mac is a Trend appeared first on Parallels Blog.
(c)iStock.com/micheldenijs
Since the end of the 19th century, humans have been fascinated with the idea of artificial intelligence and self-governing machines – from the early novels by HG Wells to the Hollywood blockbusters 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Terminator and Ex-Machina. And while this fascination will probably never subside, one thing is certain: In the not so distant future, machines will become increasingly useful to us.
One area ripe for this advancement is IT infrastructure management. Machine intelligence will allow infrastructure to regulate, protect and heal itself from external attacks or threats.
In the coming years, there will be a polar shift as autonomics begins to play an increasing role in the delivery of services. The polar shift (or, more accurately, the geomagnetic reversal) happens when magnetic north and magnetic south swap places (about once every 500,000 years). The IT equivalent means humans and machines swapping places. In today’s workplace, humans use systems and processes to fix problems when infrastructure goes wrong. With true autonomics, the machines self-regulate and only occasionally escalate decision making to humans.
Over time autonomics will display ever-more sophisticated cognitive characteristics where machines will interact more effectively with customers, clients and operators. The upside of this transformation is not only economic – it’s about delivering a higher quality of service. With autonomics, it’s about eliminating mistakes – which humans are prone to – and enabling machines to do things faster and more thoroughly. This is my vision of the future.
At its heart, autonomics is partly about the automation of key processes and tasks but it is also about machines being able to make decisions as the environment in which they operate changes.
The on-ramp for these advanced autonomics is cloud computing. The beauty of having a cloud platform that is compatible with the traditional ITIL world, and the highly automated cloud environment, is that this multimodal way of working can become streamlined. The marriage of cloud computing and autonomics means that machine intelligence is no longer restricted to an on-premise architecture, but can be spread across various cloud-based services that run simultaneous instances of autonomics. In other words, businesses running machine learning on the cloud will be able to scale their services to meet demand across a variety of platforms, anywhere in the world.
Because machine learning improves with continued use, widespread use of machine intelligence through the cloud will lead to autonomics, a natural evolution of automation. At that point, autonomic computing can evolve almost naturally, much like human intelligence has over the millennia. There’s one stark difference, though: with cloud computing, the advances will happen at a much faster pace.
Read more: A trillion tiny robots in the cloud: The future of AI in an algorithm world
SYS-CON Events announced today that AppNeta, the leader in performance insight for business-critical web applications, will exhibit and present at SYS-CON’s @DevOpsSummit at Cloud Expo New York, which will take place on June 7-9, 2016, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY.
AppNeta is the only application performance monitoring (APM) company to provide solutions for all applications – applications you develop internally, business-critical SaaS applications you use and the networks that deliver them.
SYS-CON Events announced today that IBM Cloud Data Services has been named “Bronze Sponsor” of SYS-CON’s 18th Cloud Expo, which will take place on June 7-9, 2016, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY.
IBM Cloud Data Services offers a portfolio of integrated, best-of-breed cloud data services for developers focused on mobile computing and analytics use cases.
A BriefingsDirect business innovation thought leadership discussion focuses on the heightened role and impact of procurement as a strategic business force.
We’ll explore how intelligent procurement is rapidly transforming from an emphasis on cost savings to creating new business value and enabling supplier innovations.
As the so-called digital enterprise adapts to a world of increased collaboration, data access, and business networks, procurement leaders can have a much bigger impact, both inside and outside of their companies.
As cloud adoption continues to grow, business innovation, scalability and agility are not only becoming realistic goals for the modern business, but mandatory requirements in order to facilitate growth and keep up with the competition. As many companies already have highly virtualised infrastructure in place, their IT strategy is increasingly focused on cloud adoption as a means of not just driving cost efficiencies but also innovation. Increasingly, businesses are looking at ways to ease the burden of meeting regulatory compliance and security requirements by implementing the relevant cloud adoption strategies.
As cloud computing is maturing at a rapid pace with many “as-a-service” type offerings such as infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), platform-as-a-service (PaaS), desktop-as-a-service (DaaS), disaster recovery-as-a-service (DRaaS), software-as-a-service (SaaS), such developments have paved the way for the anything-as-a-service (XaaS) model. This can be seen as the founding pedestal for next version of the cloud development: the “vertical cloud”. The vertical cloud is designed to deliver core applications, tools and the corresponding biota of a specific vertical that allow organisations to customise cloud services themselves to their specific needs and tastes.
The vertical cloud allows enterprises to pick and choose what to operate in the cloud and on customer’s premises, based on security and compliance requirements that govern their businesses. In industries such as banking and finance or insurance, for example, regulatory compliance is the prime driver while choosing the relevant architecture for their IT Infrastructure. With major regulations on banking and finance in progress, including Basel III and EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), regulatory compliance will remain a major area of investment throughout 2016.
However, using the vertical cloud shifts the onus of compliance to the cloud provider on account of their proven and re-usable governance and security frameworks. Vertical cloud offerings can come pre-packaged with the required regulatory obligations and thus offer organisations a relief from the encumbrance of ensuring compliance themselves.
Continued growth in cloud and IT infrastructure spending
Analysts foresee that a significant acceleration in global cloud-related spending will continue. During 2016, global spending on IT services is forecast to reach $3.54 trillion, as companies continue to adopt cloud services, according to Gartner. This trend is no different in the United Kingdom, where adoption continues to grow. For example, the banking and finance sector is predicted to increase spending on IT in 2016, a big part of which is dedicated to cloud services. Recent guidance issued by the Financial Conduct Authority is likely to perpetuate this trend, by advocating the implementation of the cloud by financial services organisations, paving the way for firms in this sector to take advantage of cloud services and the innovation that it can foster.
The main factors driving cloud adoption are industry competition and pace of change brought on by digitisation. However, businesses need to be more nimble and use the cloud to absorb planned and unscheduled changes swiftly and seamlessly. In order to enable companies to deal with market trends and deviations, the cloud value chain takes a holistic approach to the current business in the context of a changing market. Here is a snapshot of a few such phases which, in rapid evolutionary terms, lead to the adoption of the vertical cloud, a concept that encompasses them all.
The cloud service economy is here. The current trend in cloud adoption is to look beyond asset management and traditional methods used to accomplish business outcome (e.g. developing, testing and repairing). Instead, various flexible ‘as-a-Service’ models offered by cloud firms allow businesses to employ technology solutions themselves, freeing IT teams to focus instead on architectural and advisory services. From the perspective of an IT Infrastructure, the expectation in the cloud service economy is to have ‘value’ delivered directly by the investment made instead of traditional and laborious ways of realising it.
Anything-as-a-Service as a prelude to vertical cloud. Cloud thinking is spurring some organisations to explore running their entire IT operations on the Anything-as-a-Service (XaaS) model with cost vs service consumption variability. Ultimately, however, it is the digital disruption across industries that added to the increasing complexity of continuing traditional in-house handling. As such, businesses are faced with the need to handle next generation requirements such as big data analytics, cognitive computing, mobility and smart solutions, Internet of Things (IoT) and other examples of digitisation.
Security and regulatory compliance are complex and exhaustive, requiring IT infrastructure and applications to be constantly ready for ever-evolving demands. Hence, pursuing the vertical cloud strategy can help business not only to advance and accelerate business growth and gain competitive advantage, but also to mitigate security and regulatory compliance.
Written by Nachiket Deshpande, Vice President of Infrastructure Services, Cognizant.
SYS-CON Events announced today that Alert Logic, Inc., the leading provider of Security-as-a-Service solutions for the cloud, will exhibit at SYS-CON’s 18th International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on June 7-9, 2016, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY.
Alert Logic, Inc., provides Security-as-a-Service for on-premises, cloud, and hybrid infrastructures, delivering deep security insight and continuous protection for customers at a lower cost than traditional security solutions. Fully managed by a team of experts, the Alert Logic Security-as-a-Service solution provides network, system and web application protection immediately, wherever your IT infrastructure resides.
A cloud industry protest group has called on the US government to fix its FedRAMP process for certifying government cloud service providers. The inefficiencies of the system are neutralising any benefits the cloud can bring to the US taxpayer, it claims.
A collective of disgruntled agents, that ranges from top tier cloud operators such as AWS, IBM and HPE to support agencies and corporate lawyers, has appealed for a review of the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program, a certification process that has been dubbed FedRAMP.
Though FedRAMP was designed to simplify the use of cloud services by government agencies, the system has been described by a cloud industry advocate group as ‘fundamentally broken’. An aggrieved group of cloud players calling itself FedRAMP Fast Forward claims that a simple system, for helping US civil servants to select between FedRAMP-certified providers, has become too complicated and unwieldy. The pressure group has proposed a six point plan to address the system’s lack of clarity, high costs and lack of accountability.
The promised ‘certify once, use many times’ framework has not been delivered, claims the pressure group. Instead, the system has become expensive and time-consuming to use. As a result, the planned government savings from using cloud services are unlikely to materialise, says the group.
One of the reported problems is that the system does not provide the level of monitoring and management that cloud service providers would expect from any service. Potential suppliers to a government tender cannot gauge their status in the approval process or get feedback on the how to improve things or move the process to its next stage, according to a group statement. Agencies have also complained that they can’t see where the listed authorised cloud services might operate.
The Cloud Computing Caucus, a cross party group of US Congress Members, claims that the certification process is now nearly three times as lengthy as it first was. Worse, it can be 20 times more expensive. The group’s latest annual report says certification time has gone from nine months to two years, on average, while the typical cost expanded from $250,000 to up to $5 million.
The pressure group has now posted a six point reform plan calling for a single route to authorisation, more transparency over the approval process, harmonised security standards, cheaper monitoring, the option to upgrade without dropping out and a simpler road map for compliance.
FedRAMP Fast Forward members include AWS, HPE, IBM, CGI, General Dynamics and CenturyLink.
SYS-CON Events announced today that Commvault, a global leader in enterprise data protection and information management, has been named “Bronze Sponsor” of SYS-CON’s 18th International Cloud Expo, which will take place on June 7–9, 2016, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY, and the 19th International Cloud Expo, which will take place on November 1–3, 2016, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
Commvault is a leading provider of data protection and information management solutions, helping companies worldwide activate their data to drive more value and business insight and to transform modern data environments. With solutions and services delivered directly and through a worldwide network of partners and service providers, Commvault solutions comprise one of the industry’s leading portfolios in data protection and recovery, cloud, virtualization, archive, file sync and share.
BT has launched a new managed comms service that uses software defined networking techniques to automatically optimise network traffic, reports Telecoms.com.
The BT Connect Intelligence IWAN service will, it claims, cut networking costs, boost app performance and tighten security for clients. It unveiled the Walgreens Boots Alliance as a reference customer, which runs in the UK and 20 other countries. Clients can use IWAN as a bridging stage in its transition to full network function virtualisation and software definition in the cloud, it claims.
BT’s IWAN was created by integrating Cisco’s Intelligent WAN (IWAN) service within the BT Connect portfolio of network services. The new offering is a hybrid of public and private cloud and uses Software Defined Wide Area Network (SD-WAN) technology to create virtualised functions such as application performance management and security.
Among the new options offered in this first version of Connect Intelligence IWAN will be a Virtual Private Network (VPN), fast track application routing, higher rates of app performance and better intelligence on how the network is operating.
The VPNs will be created using MPLS technology and will secure interconnections across hybrids of private and public cloud, as well as fixed line and mobile networks. Meanwhile, despite the powerful levels of encryption set up by the VPNs, information from applications will be fast tracked across the network by the quickest possible route, thanks to intelligence based on real-time network performance. The faster performance of applications will improve productivity and user experience, claims BT. Meanwhile SDN will allow the service provider to gives customers deep insight into their application and network performance, BT claims. The telco claims customers can self-manage their networks through BT’s My Account portal.
The use of NFV and SDN paves the way for a new generation of services that are quicker and easier to set up and change, according to Keith Langridge, VP of network services at BT Global Services. “Customers all over the world can now deal much more effectively with their increasing bandwidth and traffic optimisation demands,” said Langridge.