The security devil is always in the details of the attack: the ones you’ve endured, the ones you prepare yourself to fend off, and the ones that, you fear, will catch you completely unaware and defenseless. The Internet of Things (IoT) is nothing if not an endless proliferation of details. It’s the vision of a world in which continuous Internet connectivity and addressability is embedded into a growing range of human artifacts, into the natural world, and even into our smartphones, appliances, and physical persons.
In the IoT vision, every new «thing» – sensor, actuator, data source, data consumer, routing intermediary, etc., is a new security-relevant detail that stirs up a wide range of collateral security issues. In other words, every new networked IoT endpoint is a new potential attack vector or launching point that the baddies can exploit. Potentially, every time you plug in a new IoT-networked device that is infected with malware or simply open to unauthorized third-party exploitation, the vulnerabilities start. Someone somewhere might exploit the new access point to gain illicit access to sensitive secrets (business, consumer, government, etc.), to damage software and data, and to wage distributed denial of service attacks.
.@CloudTest and NTT Resonant Announce Distribution Agreement | @CloudExpo
SOASTA and NTT Resonant on Tuesday announced a global distribution agreement expanding the mobile device access of Remote TestKit for use with SOASTA TouchTest. The new partnership will provide a complete mobile testing solution that improves the quality, reliability and overall user experience of mobile apps for NTT Resonant and SOASTA customers worldwide. The combined solution includes cloud-based device access for manual testing, automated continuous integration and performance analysis.
Starting at $99 USD per month, the integrated solution allows customers to create manual and automated tests for mobile apps and run them on demand against hundreds of real devices in the cloud.
The Consumption Cloud with @Solgenia_Corp | @CloudExpo [#Cloud]
In this demo at 15th Cloud Expo, Ermanno Bonifazi, CEO & Founder of Solgenia, introduces Solgenia Powua, a platform that allows developers and cloud providers to do business with the cloud, to monetize the cloud.
Bringing Shadow IT into the Light By @BCFerryCoder | @CloudExpo [#Cloud]
Shadow IT, aka Rogue IT, has a bad rep. And it probably should. It can compromise security, increase IT costs, result in dangerous leakage of data and IP, and get people fired. It also generates friction and thus expands the already too wide rift between developers and IT.
In a nutshell, Shadow IT is practicing IT without IT’s permission. I’ll focus on Shadow IT as practiced by developers here. A common example is bypassing the internal resource request process and spinning up VMs on AWS for application development. Or using a DBaaS like MongoHQ or Google Cloud Datastore for instant access to a fast, redundant, reliable, always-available datastore. Other examples include using DropBox to store corporate files, using Evernote to store notes, github to store source code, collaboration software too like yammer, and LastPass for password management.
‘The Story Behind Big Decisions’ Presentation | @CloudExpo [#BigData]
Are your Big Data initiatives resulting in Big Impact or Big Mess?
In her session at Big Data Expo, Penelope Everall Gordon, Emerging Technology Strategist at 1Plug Corporation, shared her successes in improving Big Decision outcomes by building stories compelling to the target audience – and her failures when she lost sight of the plotline, distracted by the glitter of technology and the lure of buried insights. The cast of characters includes the agency head [city official? elected official??] perpetually waiting for the report from the latest exploratory committee and the division executive relying on gut instinct; and the epilogue offers guidelines that you can use to more effectively influence decisions and improve strategic decision outcomes.
Tune into the Cloud: #Cloud Service Brokerage By @GregorPetri | @CloudExpo
Despite valiant efforts of the Dutch ICT association, the local ministry of economic affairs and tireless encouragement from (now former) EU Commissioner Neelie Kroes, my home country, the Netherlands, has been struggling to gain cloud momentum. Not an uncommon characteristics in Europe but a sharp contrast to the US, but also to Dutch progress in the music scene.
The music industry – especially the dance segment – is in fact increasingly being dominated by Dutch names. After Tiesto, Armin van Buren and Ferry Korsten now tracks from Afrojack, Dash Berlin, Nicky Romero, Fedde le Grand, Martin Garrix and Hardwell are storming the global charts. (Come to think of it, these names are not nearly as Dutch as the DJs themselves, but that makes their success not any less remarkable.)
Data Analytics For Rebranding By @Sisense | @CloudExpo [#BigData]
Any CEO will tell you that marketing is an essential part of running a successful business. After all, without demand and lead generation there will be no sales; if the product isn’t selling, all the brilliant innovative technology in the world won’t make even the slightest difference and the company will eventually go under.
However, it won’t be too much of a stretch to say that marketers are generally an underappreciated, often misunderstood species within technological organizations. I will claim that current analytics tools might allow marketers to «rebrand» themselves, and prove their true value to the organization in a clear and undisputable way.
DevOps for Non-Engineers By @PagerDuty | @DevOpsSummit [#DevOps]
If you’ve used the term “DevOps” as a job title, you may have been making a big mistake. It sounds innocuous: After all, isn’t DevOps something that you do? If you’re a marketer, hiring manager or non-engineer at your company, it might seem like it.
But nothing could be further from the truth. It’s actually a philosophy and set of practices that guides how your engineering and IT teams work. And using the term improperly doesn’t always sit well with tech teams, even if they have “DevOps Engineer” on their LinkedIn profile.
Using the term improperly can cause many problems. It may create additional silos in your organization, or may negatively impact how teams collaborate and get things done—limiting the effectiveness and accountability of DevOps work.
To counteract misinterpretations of what DevOps is and what it means, it helps to know why it matters and where the idea came from.
AWS, Google, SoftLayer score highly in ranking of most reliable cloud providers
(c)iStock.com/sanfel
Cloud benchmarking provider CloudHarmony has updated its metrics, and found AWS, Google and SoftLayer to be among the most reliable public cloud providers in 2014.
The figures, which can be found on its service status page here, saw Amazon’s S3 register 23 outages across nine regions resulting in a 2.69 hour downtime across the year, while Amazon EC2 clocked up 12 outages resulting in a just over two hour outage time.
Google’s Cloud DNS had a 100% record, while Cloud Storage suffered eight outages at an SLA of 99.9996%, App Engine suffered just one outage and Compute Engine had 66 outages for a 99.982% SLA.
The most downtime of all the cloud providers analysed fell to Aruba Cloud, whose Cloud Storage facility clocked up a whopping 407 outages across five regions, and a total of 67.85 hours down. Microsoft’s Azure Virtual Machines suffered a total of 103 outages, and 42.94 hours out, with a 365 day availability of 99.937%, while ElasticHosts and Internap AgileCLOUD also clocked up more than 30 hours down over the course of the year.
IBM’s SoftLayer had a clean bill of health, scoring 100% across Object Storage, CDN and DNS, while Rackspace nearly achieved the same, suffering 26 outages on Cloud Servers.
Whether it’s an unexpected outage, such as Microsoft’s – or planned downtime, as Verizon attempted this weekend – there is no getting away from the cold hard facts of an SLA. Yet according to a senior executive at cloud services provider Claranet, SLAs don’t give quite enough insight.
“The vast majority of SLAs don’t really get to the heart of what’s important to customers – or, at the very least, fall short of guaranteeing what customers really need and expect, beyond uptime and availability,” explained Paul Marland, director of account management.
“The industry tends to measure against technical metrics, but it’s important to remember that it’s the end user’s actual experience that counts.”
As CloudHarmony CEO Jason Read acknowledges, not every outage could be recorded. Yet while this gives a good idea of the state of play, cloud solutions require far more due diligence, from price, to how it will fit into your business.
Technology and the Evolving Workforce | @CloudExpo [#Cloud]
According to a Greer Institute Workforce and Talent study, the 2020 workforce is both «the most educated and culturally diverse of any generation» and «notorious job-hoppers who dislike bureaucracy and distrust traditional hierarchies.» Given this, it is crucial for leaders to understand how best to motivate and engage this 2020 workforce and win the war for top talent.
To prepare for the globally distributed, highly collaborative, always on-the-go 2020 workforce, leaders need to start building the kind of workplace that can harness all this new technology. One of the most impactful places to start changing the way your company plans for, hires, and engages its talent is by understanding what is already possible with today’s cloud, mobile, and social technologies. The new workforce has a relentless consumer-grade expectation for mobile, social, and globally accessible tools with ubiquitous access to work. These expectations are challenging HR and IT leaders to deploy technology solutions to attract, retain, and manage their workforce while creating a collaborative, engaging employee experience.