SYS-CON Events announced today that DevOps.com has been named “Media Sponsor” of SYS-CON’s “DevOps Summit at Cloud Expo,” which will take place on June 10–12, 2014, at the Javits Center in New York City, New York.
DevOps.com is where the world meets DevOps. It is the largest collection of original content relating to DevOps on the web today Featuring up-to-the-minute news, feature stories, blogs, bylined articles and more, DevOps.com is where the thought leaders of the DevOps movement make their ideas known.

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Some people are never satisfied. These fearless agents of change are everywhere. They’re informed, confident and willing to experiment. They seek out the best business technology solution for the job at hand. They act on instinct. Yes, you could say that they’re driven.

However, they’re also at risk of being labeled as «rogue employees» because they ordered a software-as-a-service (SaaS) offering and perhaps expensed it without prior approval. Sometimes they’re the champion of progressive projects that are referred to as Shadow IT — intentionally bypassing their company’s formal evaluation and procurement process. How can this happen?

Is it just because their activities are tolerated, or are they being encouraged? If so, by whom? Why would any business leader applaud a team member that breaks the rules? Maybe, the simple answer is that staying within the confines of the status-quo won’t enable a top-performer to fully apply their talent, achieving their absolute best.

On the other hand, having a defined structure does provide benefits. Clearly, standardised business technology purchase processes are often chosen to create a manageable IT environment. But those guidelines also need to be flexible, to accommodate exceptions to the rules.

Truly, this scenario creates a dichotomy; one that will likely occur at greater frequency — from within the smallest business to the largest enterprise — as more companies encounter rapid shifts in global markets that tend to reward the most agile and responsive competitors.

Ongoing quest for strategic advantage

As a senior executive, you know that business technology will always be a key part of your own forward-looking planning process. It’s assumed that information and communication technology (ICT) will continue to be the business enabler of the 21st Century.

But these platforms are often just the table stakes that enables your business to participate in the Global Networked Economy — they’re not the actual source of a sustainable strategic competitive advantage.

In 2003 Nicholas Carr wrote a provocative article for HBR entitled «IT Doesn’t Matter» — where he suggested that once a technology achieves ubiquity, then the focus must shift to differentiated applications that are very difficult for competitors to replicate. Likewise, in time, cloud will become commonplace. So, when that eventuality comes to pass, what comes next?

That’s when value-adding vendor offers of guidance on how to achieve distinct business outcomes will have the edge in this rapidly evolving marketplace. When evaluating cloud companies, such as Cisco, look for a vendor that offers deep domain contextual guidance at every stage of the cloud evolution cycle, for each of the major industry verticals, and for all the key stakeholders within your diverse leadership team.

This will help you implement a cloud-first strategy that brings together your organization, cloud partners and providers, and other technology vendors to form a portfolio and strategy that is open and secure.

Moving beyond basic cloud readiness

If your organization is an early-adopter of cloud computing, then you’re already ahead of the game. You probably know how cloud services can be applied to help you achieve your desired business outcomes.

But are you seeing the full depth and breadth of the upside potential opportunities? If so, then are you ready to respond — just in time — when your top performers are ready to act on the next wave of cloud-related capabilities?

According the latest findings from the Cisco Global Cloud Index, 2014 will be the first year when the majority of workloads shift to the cloud — it’s estimated that 51 percent of all workloads will be processed in the cloud. By 2017, it will expand to 63 percent of all workloads.

Furthermore, if you’ve been following the key business technology trends, then you know that the evolving cloud services debate now incorporates the advent of mobile internet applications — many of which are inherently cloud-centric. The virtual mobile office will gain momentum in 2014.

Preparing to navigate the Internet of Everything

When the Internet emerged just over two decades ago, at first it wasn’t clear what — if anything — would be significantly impacted. Today, we can point to numerous examples of how it has removed traditional boundaries to market entry, leveled the playing field, or recast a legacy industry landscape. Certainly, the disrupted media and entertainment sectors will come to mind.

But what we’re about to see will make that transition pale in comparison. The Internet of Everything will change all kinds of industries that may have seemed unscathed by the prior disruptions. For the adventurous among us, that means a vast array of new opportunities.

And yet, many of the same core business-related challenges will likely remain constant. New venture capital investment will still be in short supply. Top-performing employee talent might be difficult to hire and retain.

Meanwhile, cloud services will be abundant. You’ll have a plethora of choices — including public, private and hybrid cloud offerings. But so will every one of your competitors. Therefore, you’ll need something extra special, something that truly differentiates you in the marketplace.

If you want to win big, then you’ll need to apply the best and brightest minds — to uncover that special ingredient. Be prepared to seek help and ask for guidance from those who have «been there, and done that» type of forward-thinking ICT project before.

Value-adding vendors have savvy business consulting and technical services staff, plus a multifaceted ecosystem of integration partners that you can depend on to meet your primary goals and satisfy the demands of your top-performers. Be wise, choose carefully. Don’t settle for anything less than what you really need to succeed in the coming year.

Some people are never satisfied. These fearless agents of change are everywhere. They’re informed, confident and willing to experiment. They seek out the best business technology solution for the job at hand. They act on instinct. Yes, you could say that they’re driven.
However, they’re also at risk of being labeled as «rogue employees» because they ordered a software-as-a-service (SaaS) offering and perhaps expensed it without prior approval. Sometimes they’re the champion of progressive projects that are referred to as Shadow IT — intentionally bypassing their company’s formal evaluation and procurement process. How can this happen?
Is it just because their activities are tolerated, or are they being encouraged? If so, by whom? Why would any business leader applaud a team member that breaks the rules? Maybe, the simple answer is that staying within the confines of the status-quo won’t enable a top-performer to fully apply their talent, achieving their absolute best.

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The GovCloud Media Network features agency specific video playlist for registered members. Please enjoy this feature on the Army IT. Please visit the new GovCloud Network Media Library for more video content. For membership information please send request to info@govcloudnetwork.com.

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There are 182 billion emails sent every day, generating a lot of data about how recipients and ISPs respond. Many marketers take a more-is-better approach to stats, preferring to have the ability to slice and dice their email lists based numerous arbitrary stats. However, fundamentally what really matters is whether or not sending an email to a particular recipient will generate value. Data Scientists can design high-level insights such as engagement prediction models and content clusters that allow marketers to cut through the noise and design their campaigns around strong, predictive signals, rather than arbitrary statistics.
SendGrid sends up to half a billion emails a day for customers such as Pinterest and GitHub. All this email adds up to more text than produced in the entire twitterverse. We track events like clicks, opens and deliveries to help improve deliverability for our customers – adding up to over 50 billion useful events every month. While SendGrid data covers only about 2% of all non-spam email activity in the world, it gives SendGrid a unique snapshot of email activity spanning from the senders to the recipients and inbox providers like gmail and yahoo. To cope with data of this scale SendGrid has designed and implemented custom data structures to store 10s of billions of items in memory on a single commodity machine.

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The introduction of the Cloud has enabled the fast and agile data recovery process which is effectively more efficient than restoring data from physical drives as was the former practice. How does this impact Backup & Recovery, Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity initiatives?
Cloud backup is the new approach to data storage and backup which allows the users to store a copy of the data on an offsite server – accessible via the network. The network that hosts the server may be private or a public one, and is often managed by some third-party service provider. Therefore, the provision of cloud solution for the data recovery services is a flourishing business market whereby the service provider charges the users in exchange for server access, storage space and bandwidth, etc.

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SYS-CON Events announced today that the Web Host Industry Review has been named “Media Sponsor” of SYS-CON’s 15th International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on November 4–6, 2014, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
Since 2000, The Web Host Industry Review has made a name for itself as the foremost authority of the Web hosting industry providing reliable, insightful and comprehensive news, reviews and resources to the hosting community. TheWHIR Blogs provides a community of expert industry perspectives. The Web Host Industry Review Magazine also offers a business-minded, issue-driven perspective of interest to executives and decision-makers. WHIR TV offers on demand web hosting video interviews and web hosting video features of the key persons and events of the web hosting industry. WHIR Events brings together like-minded hosting industry professionals and decision-makers in local communities. TheWHIR is an iNET Interactive property.

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By Victor M. Larios

Today half of the world’s population is living in urban areas, and cities are growing their infrastructures and services to keep up. Traditionally city governments have different departments to oversee the metropolitan services for citizens; however, departments are not fully communicating their plans and actions, utilizing their services as independent entities. As a city grows, duplicated efforts and waste of resources emerge. In developing a smart city infrastructure, it is necessary to think of cities as complex systems with departments as subsystems sharing all resources and assets.

For example, a typical department of transportation models traffic patterns in order to plan new roads or arrange streets for efficient mobility. In a systemic approach streets in the city are a shared resource – the education department adds traffic at peak times according to school schedules; the sanitation department influences traffic with low speed vehicles collecting garbage; and the environmental department estimates degrees of pollution via the density of traffic identified by the transportation department. Also, the health department could use such information, as well as weather conditions, to increase its pharmaceutical stock in relation to pollution numbers or anticipated storms or natural disasters.

In this scope, it’s fundamental for cities in a smartification process to consolidate their infrastructure according to the basic principles of services design such as modularity, exportability, interoperability, extensibility, and scalability.

Cloud computing technologies offer a good solution for cities to consolidate their physical infrastructure. Cloud technologies provide different levels of services such as IaaS (infrastructure as a service), PaaS (platform as a service) and SaaS (software as a service) for efficiency, quality of service on demand and green infrastructure.

In 2013 the IEEE launched a new and ambitious educational program for the development of Smart Cities with the goal of identifying and sharing best practices to support cities in their smartification process. Guadalajara, Mexico was the first city selected for this IEEE initiative due in part to the city government’s decision to renew the downtown and build a Digital Creative City (Guadalajara Ciudad Creativa Digital or GCCD).  The master plan, designed by Prof. Carlo Ratti and Prof. Dennis Frenchman from MIT and several consultancy groups, proposed a master plan to transform the city without loosing its traditions, identity, and architecture.

During the kickoff workshop in Guadalajara in October 2013 local IEEE volunteers defined a strategy for six working groups to tackle different layers of the Smart City: 1) Physical Infrastructure, 2) Internet of Things, 3) Open Data Framework, 4) Analytics and Visualization, 5) Metrics for Smart Cities, and 6) Education for Smart Cities.

According to the GCCD original master plan, the city environment would have a device sensor network and a set of cloud services.  Infrastructure requirements include an optical fiber backbone network and data center facilities for urban informatics. In order to innovate interactions of citizens with information and services, the urban informatics are based on private cloud services supported by the concept of the Urban Operating System (UOS). The UOS is a complex event system manager based on data analytics from the sensor network that optimizes and forecasts the use of city resources and services by the citizens.

Cloud computing technologies offer a good solution for cities to consolidate their physical infrastructure

One of the first proposals is private cloud architecture for the city of Guadalajara. A roadmap in cloud technologies development envisioned for two years includes a local talent program to develop skills in cloud computing to encourage innovative solutions for the coming challenges.

One of the projects in progress at GCCD is the construction of the digital creative accelerator complex as a smart building to host small/medium business for creative industries, and an innovation center with living labs for IoT, smart cities, and other areas of research interest for the municipality. Besides this new smart building complex, a renewal smart building project called the “Ingenium Campus” will be the vector of knowledge within the city.

It comprises an incubator to support local start-ups in the digital creative and smart cities fields, a media arts magnet middle school and the Ingenium Institute as a joint effort between the educational universities of Guadalajara and the GCCD companies for talent engagement, education and entrepreneurship development.

Hence, the first services in the private cloud will be related to environmental, social and economic aspects of the city.

The challenges foreseen for the IEEE Guadalajara pilot and cloud initiative include finding a cost effective strategy to support the private cloud, and ensuring security for cloud users, which is paramount given the mixed environment of government, citizens and companies who will be sharing the private cloud. Additionally, the city must adapt public policies to enhance the benefits of a consolidated infrastructure with the proposed private cloud and concepts such as the UOS. With Guadalajara as its first Smart City, the IEEE Smart Cities Initiative is working to build a consortium of cities to share their experience and best practices.

About the author

Victor M. Larios has received his PhD and a DEA in Computer Science at the Technological University of Compiègne, France and a BA in Electronics Engineering at the ITESO University in Guadalajara, Mexico. He works at the University of Guadalajara (UDG) holding a Full Professor-Researcher position at the Department of Information Systems and he is the director of the Smart Cities Innovation Center at CUCEA UDG Campus. Besides, Dr. Victor M. Larios is the founder of the UDG PhD in Information Technologies in 2007, and has been leading projects in Guadalajara between academy, government and high tech industry as IBM, Intel and HP focusing his research to distributed systems, parallel computing, data analytics and visualization, serious games and smart cities.

This month saw the publication of the business plan for the GDS which lays out the focus of its work up until this time next year.

The scope of its work pipeline is impressive in its ambition and potential impact.

In digitising the top 25 most important government services by its 2015 deadline the GDS estimates it will save £979m each year.

Meanwhile, from its G-Cloud programme, it estimates that if the current rate of spend continues it will realise annual savings of around £200m by March 2015.

After being subsumed into the GDS last year it is good to see that G-Cloud has not only retained focus around driving the cloud agenda in government but the extent to which, as a relatively small part of the GDS, it is able to show that there is a compelling commercial reason for government to continue to put cloud at the heart of what it does.

But of course, there is always more that can be done. As we head out of the first year of Cloud First, this year is a critical one in driving the cloud agenda in the public sector. With that in mind here are four areas I think Tony Singleton and his team should focus on:

1)  Continue to provide vocal leadership around the role of G-Cloud –  G-Cloud is maturing in terms of supplier numbers and spend but what is still missing are the higher value transactions which are vital if it is to be seen as the definitive framework for cloud services.

As larger value contracts come up for procurement in the year ahead it is vital that G-Cloud team acts as vocal cheerleaders from within government to ensure departments are aware of and use the framework. This will be particularly important as CloudStore gets incorporated into the Digital Marketplace later this year.

2)  A better balanced set of arguments around the benefits of cloud – cost cutting has been top of the Coalition’s agenda and, as such, has ended up being positioned at the heart of the rational for cloud adoption. The focus on costs is important but risks creating a one dimensional perception of a solution whose real benefit is in its ability to transform and simplify the way the public sector operates and delivers services. 

What is needed then, is a more balanced set of arguments around the case for cloud adoption so buyers have a better understanding of business benefits beyond simple cost savings.

3)  Reducing barriers to buying  – if cheerleading and knowledge building are important, so too is the job of identifying and addressing the issues which are stopping public sector buyers engaging with cloud computing. Chief of these is how G-Cloud fits an organisation’s approach to procurement.

Building awareness of G-Cloud outside of central government, and in local government specifically, is also important. I know the G-Cloud team is starting to take action on all of these areas but it is vital that they benefit from their long term attention.

4)  Encourage government departments to talk about their success – Here at Eduserv we have delivered some great work in many parts of the public sector – from central to local government and other agencies. We’re proud of our success but it can be incredibly hard to get clients to talk publicly about what they have achieved. 

Case studies play a critical role in educating the sector, reducing perceptions of risk and providing a reference point for organisations to plan their own projects. We’d love to see more encouragement and support for government departments to talk about what they have done well and to perhaps make success stories available on CloudStore.

This, of course, is just a starting point and provides some top line areas for action. But if we make an impact on these areas I am confident that in twelve months’ time we will be able to look back on a year when CloudFirst has really made an impact on the public sector.