As a CIO, are your direct reports IT managers or are they IT leaders? The hard truth is that many IT managers have risen through the ranks based on their technical skills, not their leadership ability. Many are unable to effectively engage and inspire, creating forward momentum in the direction of desired change. Renowned for its approach to leadership and emphasis on their people, organizations increasingly look to our military for insight into these challenges.
11 Things You Can Do With Parallels Desktop 11 (Infographic)
You’ve heard of Parallels Desktop 11 for Mac, but do you know everything it can do? We’re not even talking about increased speed, better battery life or improved functionality—we’re talking chatting up Cortana, toggling in and out of Coherence Mode in a single click, and tons more. Running Windows (or practically any other OS, for […]
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Cloud News Daily 2015-10-09 04:54:43
In response to an increasing demand, AliCloud, Alibaba Group’s cloud computing sector, announced that it has launched another data center. This new data center, located in Silicon Valley, California, addresses the need for both affordable and secure cloud computing while still establishing an infrastructure that provides high availability and disaster recovery. Customers may begin to apply for the new centers services on October 12th. This new center is the fourth announced in 2015 and the ninth worldwide. The first United States data center was announced I in March of 2015. A center in Singapore was announced in August in addition to an environmentally-friendly lake water-cooled data center at Qiandao Lake, China in early September. These data centers join ones located in Beijing, Hangzhou, Hong Kong, Shenzhen, and Shanghai in China. AliCloud plans to expand into areas such as the Middle East, Asia, and Europe.
The newest Silicon Valley data center has been designed to handle the cloud and big data analytics requirements of customers along the West Coast of the United States for the three to five years. It will have the same service level agreements as the first center in the United States, but will also contain a portfolio incorporating all AliCloud services currently available in international markets. This portfolio will ten cloud services that are designed to assist customers focused on innovation, including start-ups looking to reduce the cost of cloud-based service delivery and big data analytics, as well as established businesses in industries such as the gaming, multimedia and mobile Internet.
Cloud services available from Silicon Valley that aim to aid enterprises in achieving optimum performance and availability include Cloud Monitor System (CMS), an open platform for real-time monitoring of sites and servers; Open Cache Service (OCS), an online caching service for rapid access of hotspot data; Open Storage Service (OSS), a massive, secure and highly-reliable cloud storage service; and irtual Private Cloud (VPC), an isolated and customized network environment including other AliCloud services.
Ethan Sicheng Yu, Vice President of AliCloud, has commented, “Our data centers are typically located in key innovation and commerce hubs around the world, where we expect growing demand for cost-efficient cloud computing and big data analytics services. Our second U.S. data center is situated in Silicon Valley which is the epicenter for technology innovation world-wide. AliCloud is focused on building a comprehensive and holistic global ecosystem that offers world-class cloud computing and a nuanced understanding of local requirements. We expect to welcome more partners and customers onto the AliCloud platform as we extend our global reach and continue to deliver outstanding value for our cloud computing infrastructure services”
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CIOs continue to bemoan IT complexity, report shows
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Cloud computing has been cited by CIOs as one of the biggest contributors to IT complexity, according to a report released this week by Trustmarque.
Two thirds (66%) of survey respondents claim cloud is a primary reason for IT complexity, ahead of legacy technology (51%) and software licensing (51%). Almost three quarters (71%) said it was increasingly difficult to understand the right technology to use, while 61% agreed that finding the right solution to their business need was becoming more complicated.
Not surprisingly, 79% of those polled said that simplifying IT was a priority for their organisation. Breaking those numbers down, 36% said the biggest priority was ‘simplifying the management of shadow IT and business-led IT spend’, while 34% argued it was ‘simplifying the user experience through deploying new digital technologies’. Equally unsurprisingly, 87% of CIOs noted keeping ahead of security threats was a challenge.
An even higher number of CIOs (89%) argued that simplifying legacy IT whilst driving innovation remains a challenge. The topic of keeping on top of the competition while transforming enterprise IT was covered in depth at the IP EXPO event earlier this week. Antonio Piraino, CTO at ScienceLogic, put part of the blame at the CIO for hybrid IT issues; problems included the CIO being hesitant, a shift in complexity, and not identifying cloud appropriate workloads.
One of the key tenets of Piraino’s talk – that transforming to cloud is as significant a change as moving from the mainframe to client/server – was emphasised by James Butler, Trustmarque CTO. “The challenge of transforming traditional IT estates and organisations to this new platform is as significant as from mainframes to PCs, or the adoption of the Internet,” he said.
“This transition from the internet-enabled business to the digital one is a huge increase in complexity for IT departments designed for business as usual technical operations, while traditional models of integration, licensing and management that were not designed for cloud are exacerbating the problem,” Butler added.
The issue of software licensing and restrictive models is being taken up by the Campaign for Clear Licensing (CCL), which has examined the practices of Oracle, SAP, and IBM thus far.
The Multi-Cloud Era | @CloudExpo @HarbingerSys #Cloud
“All our customers are looking at the cloud ecosystem as an important part of their overall product strategy. Some see it evolve as a multi-cloud / hybrid cloud strategy, while others are embracing all forms of cloud offerings like PaaS, IaaS and SaaS in their solutions,” noted Suhas Joshi, Vice President – Technology, at Harbinger Group, in this exclusive Q&A with Cloud Expo Conference Chair Roger Strukhoff.
Bare Metal and Containers | @CloudExpo #DevOps #BigData #Containers #Microservices
Clearly the way forward is to move to cloud be it bare metal, VMs or containers. One aspect of the current public clouds that is slowing this cloud migration is cloud lock-in. Every cloud vendor is trying to make it very difficult to move out once a customer has chosen their cloud.
In his session at 17th Cloud Expo, Naveen Nimmu, CEO of Clouber, Inc., will advocate that making the inter-cloud migration as simple as changing airlines would help the entire industry to quickly adopt the cloud without worrying about any lock-in fears. In fact by having standard APIs for IaaS would help PaaS explode much faster as there is no need to support plethora of clouds by every PaaS vendor.
Monetizing IoT: Show Me the Money! | @ThingsExpo #IoT #InternetOfThings
The Internet of Things (IoT) is growing rapidly by extending current technologies, products and networks. By 2020, Cisco estimates there will be 50 billion connected devices. Gartner has forecast revenues of over $300 billion, just to IoT suppliers. Now is the time to figure out how you’ll make money – not just create innovative products.
With hundreds of new products and companies jumping into the IoT fray every month, there’s no shortage of innovation. Despite this, McKinsey/VisionMobile data shows “less than 10 percent of IoT developers are making enough to support a reasonably sized team.”
Amazon Web Services makes aggressive customer acquisition play
At its Amazon re:Invent event Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced a number of products and initiatives designed to make it easier for potential customers to move their business to the AWS Cloud.
AWS Snowball is a portable storage appliance designed to be an alternative to trying to upload data over networks, claiming to be able to move 100 TB of data to AWS in less than a week. Amazon is betting that companies are neither willing to prioritise their existing bandwidth, nor devote the time to do this over the network. In addition the company launched Amazon Kinesis Firehose, which is designed to make it easier to upload wireless streaming data to the AWS cloud.
“It has never been easier or more cost-effective for companies to collect, store, analyze, and share data than it is today with the AWS Cloud,” said Bill Vass, VP of AWS Storage Services. “As customers have realized that their data contains key insights that can lead to competitive advantage, they’re looking to get as much data into AWS as quickly as possible. AWS Snowball and Amazon Kinesis Firehose give customers two more important tools to get their data into AWS.”
On top of these new products Amazon announced two new database services – AWS Database Migration Service and Amazon RDS for MariaDB – designed to make it easier for enterprises to bring their production databases to AWS, which seems to take aim at Oracle customers especially.
“With more than a hundred thousand active customers, and six database engines from which to choose, Amazon RDS has become the new normal for running relational databases in the cloud,” said Hal Berenson, VP of Relational Database Services, AWS. “With the AWS Database Migration Service, and its associated Schema Conversion Tool, customers can choose either to move the same database engine from on-premises to AWS, or change from one of the proprietary engines they’re running on-premises to one of the several open source engines available in Amazon RDS.”
Continuing the theme of taking on the big enterprise IT incumbents Amazon launched QuickSight, a cloud business intelligence service that would appear to compete directly with the likes of IBM, while aiming to undercut them with a low-price as-a-service model.
“After several years of development, we’re excited to bring Amazon QuickSight to our customers – a fast and easy-to-use BI service that addresses these needs at an affordable price,” said Raju Gulabani, VP of Database Services at AWS. “At the heart of Amazon QuickSight is the brand new SPICE in-memory calculation engine, which uses the power of the AWS Cloud to make queries run lightning fast on large datasets. We’re looking forward to our customers and partners being able to SPICE up their analytics.”
Lastly Amazon announced a new business group in partnership with Accenture that is also designed to make it easier for companies to move their business to the cloud. The Accenture AWS Business Group is a joint effort between the two and is another example of Accenture putting the cloud at the centre of its strategy.
“Accenture is already a market leader in cloud and the formation of the Accenture AWS Business Group is a key part of our Accenture Cloud First agenda,” said Omar Abbosh, Chief Strategy Officer of Accenture. “Cloud is increasingly becoming a starting point with our clients for their enterprise solutions. Whether our clients need to innovate faster, create new services, or maximize value from their investments, the Accenture AWS Business Group will help them get there faster, with lower risk and with solutions optimized for AWS.”
The Dark Art of Container Monitoring | @DevOpsSummit @Sysdig #DevOps #Microservices
Containers are revolutionizing the way we deploy and maintain our infrastructures, but monitoring and troubleshooting in a containerized environment can still be painful and impractical. Understanding even basic resource usage is difficult – let alone tracking network connections or malicious activity.
In his session at DevOps Summit, Gianluca Borello, Sr. Software Engineer at Sysdig, will cover the current state of the art for container monitoring and visibility, including pros / cons and live demonstrations of each method. Special emphasis will be put on sysdig, an open source troubleshooting tool. Sysdig offers unprecedented container visibility without the need to break the “sanctity” of the container.
Cloud Computing: A Data-Centric Business Model By @Kevin_Jackson | @CloudExpo #Cloud
“Cloud computing is a model for enabling ubiquitous, convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management.”
While this definition is broadly accepted and has, in fact, been my adopted standard for years, it only describes technical aspects of cloud computing.
The amalgamation of technologies used to deliver cloud services is not even half the story. Above all else, the successful employment requires a tight linkage to the economic and business models of the enterprise.