Today’s modern day industrial revolution is being shaped by ubiquitous connectivity, machine to machine (M2M) communications, the Internet of Things (IoT), open APIs leading to a surge in new applications and services, partnerships and eventual marketplaces. IoT has the potential to transform industry and society much like advances in steam technology, transportation, mass production and communications ushered in the industrial revolution in the 18th and 19th centuries.

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SYS-CON Events announced today that Vitria will exhibit, conduct a demo theater presentation, and CTO Dale Skeen will deliver a technical session at @ThingsExpo, which will take place on November 3–5, 2015, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
Vitria is a leading provider of advanced analytics platforms that enable businesses to transform their operations and boost revenue growth through Faster Analytics, Smarter Actions, and Better Outcomes Faster.

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Service providers expect a significant growth in the desktop as a service (DaaS) market, according to the latest research from Citrix.

The 2015 Global DaaS Market Survey, which polled more than 500 Citrix service providers in 40 countries, shows service provider partners predict a 71% growth in DaaS, while the adoption of public cloud is set to account for half of cloud adoption for DaaS in 2016. Naturally, adoption of desktop as a service through hosted or co-located data centres will be at the same level, but down from 79% today.

The sector is maturing with providers expanding into different solutions, the research notes. While almost half (49%) of providers offer complete workspaces as part of the desktop as a service model, other offerings are on the table, including mobile device management (34%), file share and sync (29%), and cloud VDI (22%). Despite that, vertical focus is predominantly driving business growth, with finance, manufacturing, and healthcare cited.

John Carey, senior director of worldwide channel programs strategy at Citrix, noted in a blog post: “The 2015 survey showed growth in service providers offering this complete desktops as a service approach, but also new trends in hosted mobile device management, file share and sync, plus hosted networking. This is exciting for Citrix and our partners as we continue to develop and enhance the secure mobile workspace technologies that benefit people, wherever they choose to work.”

The evolution of desktop as a service, as well as virtual desktop infrastructure, has been an interesting one in recent months and years. Many industry players argue DaaS could succeed where VDI has failed; not least in terms of reduced cost, essentially renting equipment from the cloud provider rather than putting together a costly on-prem VDI deployment.

At the back end of 2014, NaviSite’s group vice president and general manager Sumeet Sabharwal explained in a company blog post how maturation of technology, expansion of the provider landscape, and expansion of endpoint devices has helped create a perfect storm for desktop as a service going into 2015.

Speaking to this reporter in March, Sabharwal explained how aiming the technology at specific workloads has improved the situation; however issues such as image management, desktop engineering and Active Directory integration means the service is “not child’s play.”

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Security is trumpeted as a top concern for organisations, especially with increased investment in new technologies like mobile, cloud, and the Internet of Things. As new technologies are introduced and adversaries become more sophisticated, the threat landscape and the attack surface within organisations continues to grow. This means that not only do organisations need protection from threats, they need to protect their data and they also need to protect their reputation and brand. However, not all companies are taking the threat as seriously as perhaps they should.

Just last week, two new industry reports on this subject caught my attention. The first report indicates that UK companies are still failing to protect their sensitive information against cyber-attacks. According to PwC, there has been a 38% increase in detected information security incidents this year, with these incidents now costing an average of £1.7m. PwC’s report found that businesses are failing to take cyber security seriously, despite noting a 24% rise in security budgets this year.

Corero Network Security also recently launched its mid-year report on the current state of DDoS attacks based on the experience of its global customers. In the report Corero stated that attackers are leveraging sub-saturating DDoS attacks with growing frequency and the attackers are using shorter attack durations to evade defences. DDoS scrubbing solutions can cause disruption in a network and are often used to distract victims while other malware penetrates networks and steals customer information and company data.

With DDoS attacks on the up (the report by Corero showed that customers experienced about 4.5 DDoS attacks per day in Q2 2015, a 32 percent increase on Q1) and malware continuing to increase (it has doubled in the first half of 2015), now more than ever companies need a safe and secure place to store sensitive data.  This also means that as companies continue to try and combat the increasing onslaught of cyber-attacks, including DDoS, so they are turning more and more to their service providers to help them achieve this.

Just a couple of weeks ago we released our latest Enterprise Cloud Services – Advanced Security Solution (EC-AS) combining our existing VMware vCloud platform and our management console with advanced security features including vulnerability scanning, whole disk encryption, event and log analysis, antivirus and malware and intrusion detection. We did this because both our customers – and the market – were telling us they needed more sophisticated security solutions to help them achieve cloud security and compliance. The Corero report substantiates the need for more sophisticated security solutions and in particular highlights customer demand for higher levels of security from service providers.

We find that today cloud initiatives are increasingly stalling or getting cancelled altogether because the security risks are deemed to be too high. This results in an uncomfortable situation for IT leaders as lines of business in their organisations are still demanding the agility, scalability and cost savings that cloud computing can deliver. IT leaders know they can’t abandon cloud altogether, the benefits are too high – and yet they also know whose head will be on the line if an outage, data loss or hacking incident was traced to a cloud workload.  So what can they do?

One ECS-AS feature that our customers are particularly excited about is on-demand security reporting. At the click of a button, our customers can get a report showing the security of their cloud resources, data and applications across all of their security parameters. This report can be used to show executives the security status of the organisation’s cloud workloads (thereby quelling any residual fears they have about cloud security) as well as show compliance to auditors as required.

To provide further assistance to the mid-market we have also released a compliance services offering which helps companies meet compliance requirements for industry regulations such as SOC2 and PCI-DSS. Additionally our certified compliance team helps customers interpret reports, provide supporting documentation, answer auditors’ questions, align to ITIL frameworks and so on. Achieving compliance can be a game changer for customers in the mid-market and pave the way for growth acceleration. As a result, this is opening up a whole new level of cloud usage to the mid-market – especially in industries that require stringent security and compliance like Healthcare, Insurance and Finance.

That said, the threat landscape and attack surface is only set to get worse and unfortunately, despite the scale of threats, many businesses are still not doing enough to protect themselves from what could be a financially crippling attack. My advice is make sure that you are working with a cloud service provider that can help you address security and protect your cloud workload, otherwise you could  be setting your cloud projects up for failure.

With the exponential growth of network traffic slowing down data transmission, companies are looking for solutions. Recently, a solution has emerged that can help improve your data speed with data centers on the edge. These micro data center solutions can simplify the lives of many data center owners and operators because they are self-contained, secure computing environments, assembled in a factory and shipped in one enclosure which includes all the necessary power, cooling, security, and management tools. Their flexibility opens up a wave of new applications, made possible through reduced latency, increased security and cost efficiency.

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WebRTC sits at the intersection between VoIP and the Web. As such, it poses some interesting challenges for those developing services on top of it, but also for those who need to test and monitor these services.
In his session at WebRTC Summit, Tsahi Levent-Levi, co-founder of testRTC, will review the various challenges posed by WebRTC when it comes to testing and monitoring and on ways to overcome them.

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In a VentureBeat article the author describes ‘the future of enterprise tech‘, describing how pioneering organizations like Netflix are entirely embracing a Cloud paradigm for their business, moving away from the traditional approach of owning and operating your own data centre populated by EMC, Oracle and VMware.

Instead they are moving to ‘web scale IT’ via on demand rental of containers, commodity hardware and NoSQL databases, but critically it’s not just about swapping out the infrastructure components.

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Discussions of cloud computing have evolved in recent years from a focus on specific types of cloud, to a world of hybrid cloud, and to a world dominated by the APIs that make today’s multi-cloud environments and hybrid clouds possible.
In this Power Panel at 17th Cloud Expo, moderated by Conference Chair Roger Strukhoff, panelists will address the importance of customers being able to use the specific technologies they need, through environments and ecosystems that expose their APIs to make true change and transformation possible.

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If the calibration engineer does the calibration incorrectly – or a malefactor intentionally introduces a miscalibration – then the end result would be off. Every time. Even though there was nothing wrong with the sensor data, no security breach between the sensor and emissions device, and furthermore, every line of code in the device was completely correct.

In fact, the only way to detect a calibration attack is by running an independent analog test. In other words, someone would have to get their own exhaust particulate measuring device and run tests on real vehicles to see if the emissions device was properly calibrated.

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