Look at the “major cloud features” in this SingleHop infographic. Notice how some reference work life, some personal life (I was going to say “private life” but thought better of it) and most serve both halves of the lives we lead today.
Cloud Computing in 2015 By @ODayP | @CloudExpo [#Cloud]
Now that cloud services have become part of IT’s “new normal,” commonly referred to as “hybrid,” it seems obvious that the approaches and tools we use to manage IT would also evolve and mature, though the pace of evolution varies amongst companies, of course. According to a Website Magazine article quoting a Gartner survey, more than 55% of CIOs indicate they would host all critical apps in the cloud by 2020. Cloud services use cases can vary greatly, but often hold common themes around converting traditional applications to SaaS, or adding disaster recovery to your existing datacenter with RaaS.
The IT Guide To PaaS By @NavrupJohal | @DevOpsSummit [#DevOps]
PaaS has been such a great innovation for developers. They can develop and deploy applications from their desktop to the cloud, all in a consistent environment. They can deploy to production themselves, bypassing the IT middleman and speeding up the application delivery process. And they can develop in any language they want, without limitations. Developers have it made! But what about IT?
Does PaaS help them in any way or is it just another system for them to manage? Is this an unnecessary complication or does it help them? Why do they need PaaS?
Lifecycle Management with @ElasticBox | @DevOpsSummit [#DevOps]
«ElasticBox is an enterprise company that makes it very easy for developers and IT ops to collaborate to develop, build and deploy applications on any cloud – private, public or hybrid,» stated Monish Sharma, VP of Customer Success at ElasticBox, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at DevOps Summit, held Nov 4–6, 2014, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
BTMU Selects @VASCODataNews to Secure Online Banking Services [#Cloud]
VASCO Data Security International, Inc., announced on Wednesday that The Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi UFJ, Ltd. (BTMU) has implemented VASCO’s two-factor authentication solutions to protect retail banking customers accessing the bank’s online banking services.
DIGIPASS for Mobile for smartphones will be deployed as a one-time password (OTP) service to secure the bank’s «Tokyo-Mitsubishi UFJ Direct» retail banking service. VASCO’s VACMAN Controller, a large-scale authentication platform, will provide the verification engine for high volume authentication requests. DIGIPASS authenticators are being offered to customers free of charge.
‘Tiered Archive Appliance’ By @QuantumCorp | @CloudExpo [#Cloud]
More and more file-based and machine generated data is being created every day causing exponential data and content growth, and creating a management nightmare for IT managers.
What data centers really need to cope with this growth is a purpose-built tiered archive appliance that enables users to establish a single storage target for all of their applications – an appliance that will intelligently place and move data to and between storage tiers based on user-defined policies.
In her session at 15th Cloud Expo, Janae Lee, Senior Vice President of Strategy at Quantum, will discussed how VM applications can simply send user file data via NAS or HTTP to an intelligent storage target and user content will automatically route content to the appropriate archive tier(s) to deliver the desired mix of resiliency and access – whether it is private or hybrid cloud storage for broad access, or tape for less active long term protection.
She also discussed how this simplified blending of storage to enable protection and timely access to valuable data and content is the future of archive
What Are JavaScript Source Maps? By @Logentries
It’s generally a good practice to minify and combine your assets (JS & CSS) when deploying to production. This process reduces the size of your assets and dramatically improves your website’s load time.
Source maps create a map from these compressed asset files back to the source files.
This map allows you to debug and view the source code of your compressed assets, as if you were actually working with the originals.
Take a look at jQuery minified & combined code that was generated from the original. The code practically unreadable and would be difficult to debug.
But, as we all know, no matter how thoroughly you test, sometimes bugs fall will through the cracks. This is why it’s useful to debug Javascript code in production, and that’s when source maps come in handy.
CTO Focus Interview: Gunnar Berger, Citrix
In the third installment of our CTO Focus Interview series, I got to speak with Gunnar Berger, CTO at Citrix (View Part I and Part II of the series). Gunnar is a well respected thought leader who previously worked as an Analyst at Gartner and joined Citrix last June. Gunnar is on a mission to make VDI easier and cheaper to deploy. I’d highly recommend following Gunnar on Twitter to hear more from him.
Ben: What are your primary responsibilities at Citrix?
Gunnar: A lot of what I do at Citrix is on the back end and not necessarily public facing. In the public view, it’s more of looking at a long term strategy. Most roadmaps are looking ahead 12-18 months. I can be influential in these plans, but I am really looking at the longer term strategy. Where are we going to be in 3-5 years? How do we actually get to that place? How do you take today’s roadmap and drive it towards that 5 year plan? One of the main reasons I took the job at Citrix is because I want to fix VDI. I think it costs too much and is too complex. I think we truly can change VDI at Citrix.
Ben: What are some of the challenges you face as a CTO?
Gunnar: One of the main challenges when looking at long term strategies is that things can happen in the short term that can impact those long term plans. That’s every CTO’s challenge regardless of industry. In this particular industry, things change every single day. Every couple of months there is a major merger or acquisition. You have to be nimble and quick and be ready to make adjustments on the fly. My background at Gartner is very relevant here. I have to make sure I understand where the customer is now and where they will be 3-5 years from now.
If you look at the history of Citrix, look back 5 years and you see they made an incorrect prediction on VDI. You can create a long term strategy and have it not work out. If you aren’t correct with your long term strategy, it’s important to capture that early on and pivot.
Ben: What goals do you have for 2015?
Gunnar: I have three main goals heading into 2015. The first is doubling down on applications. The second is to review the complexity and costs of VDI. The third is to “bridge to the cloud.”
1. Double down on applications
Citrix over rotated on VDI but now the pendulum is moving back. VDI has a place but so does RDS. We are doubling down so that XenApp is not a second class citizen to XenDesktop. Apps are what users want, XenApp is our tried and true solution for pushing these apps out to users on any device.
2. Review complexity and cost of VDI
My overall goal is to make VDI easier to deploy and cheaper to deploy. This plays into a long term strategy. Let’s face it, VDI deployments take a lot of time and money. I can’t remember where it was that I heard this stat, but for every dollar of a VDI sale I need to sell $12 in everything else. For a customer to buy one thing they need to buy $12 of something else…not an ideal situation for the customer.
We need to solve that issue to make it less costly. I’m unapologetically a fan of VDI. I think it’s an extremely powerful technology that has a lot of great benefits, but it is currentlycostly and complex. Luckily, in my position I get to work with a lot of really smart people that can solve this so I’m confident that Citrix will make VDI what I have always wanted it to be.
3. Bridge to the cloud
This is where Citrix Workspace Services comes into play. You will start seeing more and more of this from Citrix over the next several months. Essentially this is the unification of all of our different products (i.e. XenDesktop, XenApp, XenMobile, NetScaler, etc.). We will be “SaaS-ifying” our entire stack, which is a massive undertaking. We really want to improve the admin experience by creating a single administrative interface for users of all different product suites.
The goal is provide the same benefits to an enterprise that an end user receives from products like the ChromeBook – automatically get the latest version so you never have to update manually. We want to get to the point that no matter what, customers are always operating on the most recent versions. This obviously benefits the customer as they are getting the latest things instantly.
Citrix isn’t going to try to become a cloud provider. To do that you need billions of dollars. We’re building a bridge to enable users to move seamlessly from on-prem to off-prem. You want to be on Azure or Amazon? We can do that.
The idea is that this becomes the middle ground between you and those cloud providers. What I like about being the intermediary is being able to dial up and back between clouds seamlessly to allow customers to stand things up and test them in minutes instead of days.
Ben: Citrix has made heavy investments in mobility. Where do you see mobility in the next 3-5 years?
Gunnar: Honestly, I want to stop talking about mobility like it’s something special. Everything we are doing these days is mobile. Mobile Device Management? Mobile Application Management? We need to drop the mobile from this story. It’s device management. It’s applications management. As far as where mobility fits in with Citrix – it’s inherent to the big picture much like the necessity to breath. I say this to paint a picture because it’s in our DNA. This is what Citrix has done for the last 25 years. In today’s world with smartphones and tablets, we take apps and make them run elsewhere just like we have always done.
Ben: Throughout your career, what concept or technology would you say has had the most drastic impact on IT?
Gunnar: Hands down virtualization. Virtualization is the root of where cloud started. Cloud is the most disruptive technology moving forward, and it all started with the hypervisor.
Are you a CIO/CTO interested in participating in our Focus Interview series? Email me at bstephenson@greenpages.com
By Ben Stephenson, Emerging Media Specialist
Ten Tips for Facilitating a #DevOps Culture By @Rex_Morrow | @DevOpsSummit
“Culture” is nebulous and seemingly ephemeral, as it consists of a lot of touchy-feely sentiments which tend to be at odds with how engineers have trained themselves to think – rationally and logically.
DevOps is generally recognized as a means of driving better business outcomes via improvements in process, tools, and culture within the IT organization. Process is immediately recognizable – it’s the way you’re doing business today, and everyone involved can probably identify at least a couple of tweaks they believe would improve the process overall. Tooling is a bit more difficult, as to do it right you need to invest in tools which support your workflows, and if your process is broken or less than ideal today then selecting the right tool becomes much more complicated – the conventional wisdom is to first optimize your process and workflows, and then to select the right tool for the job. The third aspect, however, is much harder to nail down. “Culture” is nebulous and seemingly ephemeral, as it consists of a lot of touchy-feely sentiments which tend to be at odds with how engineers have trained themselves to think – rationally and logically.
Announcing @AppZero_Inc and @DellServices Deliver WS 2003 Migrations
AppZero, the fastest, most flexible way to move enterprise applications to the cloud, announced an alliance with Dell Services to help customers migrate off Windows Server 2003 before it reaches end of extended support on July 14, 2015. With extended support ending, many organizations are still either unaware of the coming end, or are struggling with legacy applications that still require the old architecture.