The world of cloud and application development is not just for the hardened developer these days.
In their session at 14th Cloud Expo, Phil Jackson, Development Community Advocate for SoftLayer, and Harold Hannon, Sr. Software Architect at SoftLayer, will pull back the curtain of the architecture of a fun demo application purpose-built for the cloud. They will focus on demonstrating how they leveraged compute, storage, messaging, and other cloud elements hosted at SoftLayer to lower the effort and difficulty of putting together a useful application. This will be an active demonstration and review of simple command-line tools and resources, so don’t be afraid if you are not a seasoned developer.
Healthcare cloud security: Now and into the future
By David Linthicum
Healthcare providers and payers that utilize cloud platforms to store and access personnel records (and like data) are probably storing protected health information (“PHI”), which is protected by the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (“HIPAA”). Rules now in place govern the use of cloud computing to store health-related data, including personnel-related data. The consequences for failure to comply can be severe to a company’s bottom line, including some heavy fines and PR nightmares.
In March of last year, the Department of Health and Human Services (“HHS”) finalized the HIPAA Omnibus Rule, which made the regulation more cloud friendly. This rule expanded HIPAA’s applicability beyond covered entities (health care providers and/or payer) to business associates. By definition, a “business associate” is a person or entity that creates, receives, maintains, or transmits PHI in the course of fulfilling certain functions or activities for …
Game of Thrones: 5 takeaways for IT
By Ben Stephenson, Journey to the Cloud
After a long wait, Game of Thrones Season 4 has officially started (no spoilers for the first episode of season 4 – I wouldn’t wish that on my worst enemy).
Amidst the action and excitement, there are some lessons IT can take away from seasons 1-3 of the show. Here are five of them:
1) The war lies to the North
After Robert Baratheon dies, there is all out war for rule of the Iron Throne and control of the Seven Kingdoms. Joffrey Lannister usurps power after the passing of the king and executes the Lord of Winterfell, Ned Stark. This sparks Ned’s son Robb to march on King’s Landing to attempt to overthrow Joffrey. Meanwhile Robert Baratheon’s younger brother Renly, his older brother Stannis, and Daenerys Targaryen are also all raising armies to try and defeat Joffrey. By the …
Storms in the Cloud
There are things we tend to take for granted in our everyday lives. We have certain expectations that don’t even have to be spoken, they’re just a given. If you walk into a room and turn on the light switch, the lights will go on, it’s assumed. If you turn the water faucet on, water will come out; if you pick up the telephone, there will be a dial tone. The concept of any of those things not happening does not enter the conversation. These are services we have that are ubiquitous; we don’t even think about them – they are just there.
In recent years people have seen the impact Mother Nature has had on those core services such as electricity, water and phone, Storms, hurricanes, floods and blizzards have taken our expectations of these services and turned them on their head.
SherWeb to Exhibit at Cloud Expo New York
SYS-CON Events announced today that SherWeb, a long-time leading provider of cloud services and Microsoft’s 2013 World Hosting Partner of the Year, will exhibit at SYS-CON’s 14th International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on June 10–12, 2014, at the Javits Center in New York City, New York.
A worldwide hosted services leader ranking in the prestigious North American Deloitte Technology Fast 500TM, and Microsoft’s 2013 World Hosting Partner of the Year, SherWeb provides competitive cloud solutions to businesses and partners around the world. Founded in 1998, SherWeb is a privately owned company headquartered in Quebec, Canada. Its service portfolio includes Microsoft Exchange, SharePoint, Lync, Dynamics CRM and more.
Sync Your Timeouts: When Load Balancers Cause Database Deadlocks
Have you seen this error message before “java.sql.Exception: ORA-00060: deadlock detected while waiting for resource”?
This is caused when parallel updates require locks on either rows or tables in your database. I recently ran into this exception on an instance of an IBM eCommerce Server. The first thought was that there are simply too many people hitting the same functionality that updates Sales Tax Summary information – which was showing up in the call stack of the exception:
The logical conclusion would be to blame this on too many folks accessing this functionality or outdated table statistics causing update statements to run too long causing others to run into that lock. It turned out to be caused by something that wasn’t that obvious and wouldn’t have shown up in any Exception stack traces or log files. A misconfigured timeout setting on the load balancer caused a re-execute of the original incoming web request. While the first app server was still updating the table and holding the lock – as it had a longer timeout specified as the load balancer – the second app server tried to do the same thing causing that exception.
The User Interface Revolution Will Be Televised
We all want usability, that’s a given right? We exist in an enterprise world, but we want to behave as naturally as possible with all of the technologies and devices that we come into contact with every day.
The co-called ‘consumerization of information technology’ suggests that we as users have adopted powerful devices for our home and personal use. These devices will in many respects out-perform those devices that we might be using or have used in the workplace.
Game of Thrones: Five Takeaways for IT
By Ben Stephenson, Journey to the Cloud
After a long wait, Game of Thrones Season 4 has officially started (no spoilers for the first episode of season 4 – I wouldn’t wish that on my worst enemy). Amidst the action and excitement, there are some lessons IT can take away from seasons 1-3 of the show. Here are five of them:
The War Lies to the North
After Robert Baratheon dies, there is all out war for rule of the Iron Throne and control of the Seven Kingdoms. Joffrey Lannister usurps power after the passing of the king and executes the Lord of Winterfell, Ned Stark. This sparks Ned’s son Robb to march on King’s Landing to attempt to overthrow Joffrey. Meanwhile Robert Baratheon’s younger brother Renly, his older brother Stannis, and Daenerys Targaryen are also all raising armies to try and defeat Joffrey. By the end of season 3 however, it becomes known that the deadly “White Walkers” are back after thousands of years. Some people realize that the war everyone is fighting right now is insignificant because the real war lies to the north.
The lesson for IT: There is often a good amount of unrest between the IT Department and other business units. Maybe Accounting gets frustrated and places the blame for a systems failure on IT, but IT claims it was the Accounting Department’s fault for not following proper protocols. Maybe there is unrest between Marketing and IT around budget allocation for new tradeshow equipment. The lesson here is that IT needs to partner with the business and work together in order to achieve the overall goals that will determine the success of the company.
Liberate Your Users
Daenerys Targaryen, or Khaleesi, is looking to take back the throne that used to belong to her family. Without an army, she purchases a large number of slave soldiers. Instead of treating them poorly and forcing them to fight for her, she frees them all and says it’s their decision if they would like to stay and fight by her side. She then goes from city to city freeing slaves. The result? An extremely loyal and passionate army.
The lesson for IT: People will respond better if you give them choices as opposed to dictating how everything is going to work. Employees are going to bring their own devices to the workplace whether you allow it or not, so empower them to do so by implementing a BYOD program. Shadow IT is going to happen. Employees are going to bypass IT and use AWS. Provide them with a way to do so while you control costs, security, and governance.
Innovation Is Key
When Stannis Baratheon launches a full scale attack on King’s Landing with a large fleet of ships, things look pretty dim for the Lannister family. Stannis has more man power and weapons and has the advantage of being able to cut off supply lines to the capital. Tywin Lannister, King Joffrey’s uncle, is forced to think outside the box to try and defend his city. He ends up catapulting barrels of deadly wild fire onto the attacking ships, successfully fending off Stannis’ forces.
The lesson for IT: Continue to innovate and look for creative ways to solve problems. It can be difficult to get to the strategic initiatives when your team is bogged down by day-to-day mundane tasks. IT leaders need to make innovation a top priority in order to keep pace with the needs of the business and the rapidly evolving technology landscape.
The Wall of Security
Security is critical to the survival of any organization. Winterfell and the North always relied on “The Wall” to keep out marauding Wildlings. The Wall is hundreds of feet high, made of sheer ice, and guarded by the Men of the Night’s Watch. Getting a large group of people past The Wall is extremely difficult. However, when an assembly of the Night’s Watch has to abandon their posts to head out beyond the wall, a group of Wildlings is able to scale it and cross to the other side.
The lesson for IT: It’s obviously important to have the proper security measures in place in your organization. The lesson from the Wall though is that no matter what security you have in place, there are always ways to infiltrate your environment no matter how secure it may appear. This is why you need to proactively monitor and manage your environment.
Choose Your Partners Wisely
As the war with the Lannisters drags on, Robb Stark is in desperate need of more soldiers. Robb strikes a deal with Walder Frey to have one of his uncles marry one of Frey’s daughters to unite the families. Robb chose the wrong partner and things don’t go according to plan (and by not “going according to plan” I mean Robb, his wife, his mother, and his countrymen are brutally murdered during the wedding ceremony…).
The lesson for IT: There are a lot of factors to take into consideration when you’re deciding who to align yourself with. Choosing the right vendor for your organization depends on many factors including the specific project you’re working on, your existing environment, your budget, your goals, your future plans, etc. You don’t want to make a hasty decision on a specific vendor or product without thinking it through very carefully. This is where a company such as GreenPages can act as a trusted advisor to help guide you down the right path.
Any other lessons you can think of?
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Safely Expanding Access to Applications
The industry often talks about how the data center perimeter is expanding,necessarily, due to technological shifts such as cloud and mobility and BYOD. But that isn’t really the case. If you look closely, you’ll see that the perimeter is actually shrinking, getting tighter and tighter around the data center. With just about everything web-enabled these days, the need for access to network to enable access to applications is, well, nearly gone. I can as easily share a file via a web-enabled application today as I could by copying it onto a network share using a VPN last year. With mobile devices inside the corporate walls as well as out, it’s no longer effective to just implicitly trust what’s on the local network.
Accenture partners with Orange to deliver Euro-cloud services
Ian Brown, Senior Analyst, IT Services
Accenture and Orange Business Services (OBS) have formed an alliance to support large enterprises with their cloud strategies. Accenture will provide expertise and skills in the planning, implementation, and management of cloud services with an industry solutions focus. OBS will provide its end-to-end infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) and associated managed services.
This isn’t the first example of Accenture partnering on cloud services: it already has agreements with Dell and Microsoft. The significance of this alliance is that OBS is European and has cloud data centers in France. It is mutually beneficial in that it provides Accenture with a pragmatic means to allay European customers’ current sensitivity to data privacy issues, while OBS benefits from partnering with a leading SI that has the industry solutions skills it lacks.
Initially, the alliance will have most relevance to enterprises headquartered in France. OBS stands to gain most in …