After reading Sean Michael Kerner’s article in Enterprise Networking Planet earlier this month, I thought I’d add a few thoughts of my own to what he wrote. He discusses SDN and IPv6. Here’s my take on Software Defined Networking (SDN) in 2015:

Given the ongoing hype and the range of benefits its proponents extol, I expect to see a continued increase in interest and evaluation of SDN. However with the ongoing battle between the major SDN vendors (OpenFlow, Cisco ACI, VMware NSX, Contrail, etc.) and the fear of ‘backing the wrong horse’, the lack of proven, mature enterprise deployments and the management and monitoring difficulties associated with SDN (most NMS do not yet adequately support SDN) it is unlikely that wide-scale enterprise deployments of SDN will occur in 2015. Whilst the perceived benefit of easing the management and implementation of distributed security policies, access-control and QoS by deploying SDN is undeniably appealing, lack of maturity will hold back wide-scale deployment for some time to come.

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We recently changed over the entire phone system in our London office. After four years, the equipment failed, and it was time to update. As we did so, we also changed vendors. Why?
It occurred to us that, for four years, we had put up with horrible support – we were the victims of fraud at one point, and the vendor did nothing to support us with the main telecom provider. The phone system could go down for a day before they came out to repair it. No big deal, right? What high tech software company needs to communicate to the outside world?
So it was time to put in a new phone system. Though our original vendor offered lower terms than a competitor (though, note that they submitted their bid 48 hours later than they had promised, and while our phone system was STILL down!), we decided to pay a bit more with a vendor who seemed more eager and supportive for our business.

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The speed of product development has increased massively in the past 10 years. At the same time our formal secure development and SDL methodologies have fallen behind. This forces product developers to choose between rapid release times and security.
In his session at DevOps Summit, Michael Murray, Director of Cyber Security Consulting and Assessment at GE Healthcare, examined the problems and presented some solutions for moving security into the DevOps lifecycle to ensure that we get fast AND secure.

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Last week I was able to catch up with Chris Tranter, Technical Lead at Hallmark UK.
Hallmark’s engineering team runs on tight deadlines, and like all popular websites, places a huge importance on customer experience. As you can imagine, their site has abnormal and inconsistent load times, especially through the holiday season. Ensuring a smooth, seamless experience without stalls, outages, or crashes is extremely important.
It was great to see how AppDynamics APM can become a necessary solution on a developer’s toolkit.

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SYS-CON Media announced that Cisco, a worldwide leader in IT that helps companies seize the opportunities of tomorrow, has launched a new ad campaign in Cloud Computing Journal.
The ad campaign, a webcast titled ‘Is Your Data Center Ready for the Application Economy?’, focuses on the latest data center networking technologies, including SDN or ACI, and how customers are using SDN and ACI in their organizations to achieve business agility. The Cisco webcast is available on-demand.

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(c)iStock.com/ngkaki

“IPOs are one of the great, mysterious Wall Street spectacles,” Shawn Tully wrote in Forbes earlier this week. “The praise is overwhelming, the definition of ‘success’ is baffling, and anyone who questions the system is taken for a dullard.”

This might explain why everyone and their dog has attempted to shed light on one of tech’s most eagerly anticipated public offerings. So let’s start off with the facts. Box secured a $1.7 billion valuation in its IPO, raising about $175 million on its first day. Shares soared to a high of $24.73, significantly higher than its initial $14 price.

This is despite in its updated filing Box noted profitability at -137% and sales and marketing at 137% compared to revenue. Tomasz Tunguz, Redpoint venture capitalist, noted that in today’s market, which “values revenue growth and seemingly ignores profitability”, Box is actually in a better position to capitalise than many believe.

Indeed, CEO Aaron Levie was on the warpath as he described how many pundits misunderstood Box’s business model. He told CNBC: “The thing that’s largely misunderstood about our business is we’re not in the consumer space. Box helps manage corporate data and corporate information for the world’s largest companies.”

He added: “We’re participating in a once in a lifetime transition from on premise computing to cloud computing. When people think, when the cost of storage goes down over time as an example, that doesn’t actually relate to our business because we give unlimited storage, and as the price of storage goes down that actually benefits our infrastructure costs.

“That’s one of the misunderstood dynamics of the business.”

Not everyone is in agreement, however. David Lavenda ,VP of product strategy at harmon.ie, described the IPO as “the end of Box.”

“What happened so far is no surprise,” he said. “The investors would have lined up folks before they pulled the trigger. It’s what happens down the road that counts.

“Continuing to invest in sales for a commodity offering doesn’t make sense,” Lavenda added. “If Box doesn’t buy companies or develop new products with these funds, it won’t maintain its valuation.”

Vineet Jain is the CEO of enterprise file share and sync provider Egnyte, considered more of a competitor to Box than its traditional rival, Dropbox. When the firm launched in Europe back in April, when initial rumours about Box’s IPO were rife, Jain told this publication that cloud valuations were “completely out of whack”, and “basic financial sense has to creep back in.”

He said: “Box will succeed on the low end of the market. Egnyte is positioned to succeed as the high end of the market, and of course Dropbox is poised to take on the consumer market.”

The enterprise focus, with big seat customers, is of course an evident one for Box. The company is far greater than a mere cloud storage player; content management and collaboration for mobile, as evinced in Box Notes, is significant.

Shares last closed at $22.60. Do you agree with these comments?

(c)iStock.com/filadendron

A new report from government IT network MeriTalk has assessed how federal agencies are keen on the concept of cloud computing, but are reticent to migrate their full IT estate over for the moment.

This is not to say federal firms aren’t completely against the idea, however. Nearly one in five (19%) of the 150 respondents say they deliver more than a quarter of their agency’s IT services through the cloud. The most popular choice to move was email (50%), followed by web hosting (45%) and servers and storage (43%).

Perhaps not surprisingly, finance and accounting applications (33%) were the least likely to be moved over, alongside custom business apps (32%) and disaster recovery tools (31%).

It’s not just a case of wanting to move data over, however. About a third (32%) of agency data cannot be moved to the cloud due to security or data sovereignty issues, according to survey respondents. More than half of respondents (53%) say they are afraid to commit to a long term contract in case it holds their agency back from cloud adoption. The average federal cloud contract is 3.6 years.

What’s more interesting is more than one in five (23%) say they don’t want to give sensitive federal data over to even FedRAMP-certified cloud providers. If they’re unwilling to give data over to officially secure vendors, then who can they give it to?

The most damning statistic, however, is in overall satisfaction. Only 53% of agencies using cloud rate their experience as successful, leaving a lot to be desired.

Yet there’s hope. 67% of those polled who are open to using open source platforms believe data is safer in the cloud than in legacy systems, compared to 43% who aren’t using open source.

“Open source is not only driving much of the technology innovation in cloud, it is also enabling government agencies to answer their questions about cloud portability and integration,” said Mike Byrd, senior director of government channel sales at Red Hat in a statement.

“In this way, it is not surprising to me that the survey respondents who have embraced open source reported greater cloud success,” he added.

Some federal organisations have moved to the cloud with success in recent months, most notably the state of California, after IBM, AT&T and KPMG won the contrast. George Cruser, GM infrastructure for IBM Global Technology Services, told this publication one of the key tenets was for California to have full understanding, rather than just pure outsourcing.

You can read the full report, underwritten by Red Hat and Cisco, here.

SYS-CON Events announced today that CodeFutures, a leading supplier of database performance tools, has been named a “Sponsor” of SYS-CON’s 16th International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on June 9–11, 2015, at the Javits Center in New York, NY.
CodeFutures is an independent software vendor focused on providing tools that deliver database performance tools that increase productivity during database development and increase database performance and scalability during production.

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Vormetric on Wednesday announced the results of its 2015 Insider Threat Report (ITR), conducted online on their behalf by Harris Poll and in conjunction with analyst firm Ovum in fall 2014 among 818 IT decision makers in various countries, including 408 in the United States. The report details striking findings around how U.S. and international enterprises perceive security threats, the types of employees considered most dangerous, environments at the greatest risk for data loss and the steps organizations are taking to secure data.

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Storage administrators find themselves walking a line between meeting employees’ demands to use public cloud storage services, and their organizations’ need to store information on-premises for security, performance, cost and compliance reasons. However, as file sharing protocols like CIFS and NFS continue to lose their relevance, simply relying only on a NAS-based environment creates inefficiencies that hurt productivity and the bottom line. IT wants to implement cloud storage it can purchase and own like NAS (NTAP) but that works like traditional public cloud storage services like Dropbox, Box and Google Drive.

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