You want to move your enterprise applications to the cloud, but fear (security, uptime, responsiveness) and loathing (exaggerated claims, undisclosed complexity, etc.) seem to keep getting in the way. It feels like this fear & loathing in the enterprise cloud is resulting in organizations realizing only a small percentage of the potential benefits that can be gained through cloud adoption.
In his general session at the 13th International Cloud Expo®, Gary Ballabio, Product Line Director at Akamai Technologies, will examine a variety of strategies you can employ to make your cloud architecture better performing, more secure and available. Through a variety of best practices learn how to escape fear & loathing and achieve the optimal reliability for applications running in the cloud.

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A day doesn’t go by when we don’t hear about sensitive information being exposed or stolen. The culprits could be the government, professional hackers, careless employees with data on mobile devices, or internal employees with unauthorized access to data or unintentional release of data. It seems the wave of data breaches has gained momentum as data has moved from internal servers to the cloud; and access has gone mobile. Though the fact remains that there will be gaps in security, the goal of companies and IT departments should be to make those gaps as small and as difficult to take advantage of as possible.
Encryption has always been viewed as one of the strongest security measures, and its price-performance has become very attractive with the advent of cloud computing. This is because encryption is by far the best way to replace physical walls in the cloud.

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SoftLayer, an IBM Company, has announced that SilverSky, a provider of cloud-based information security and messaging solutions, has chosen SoftLayer to help power its cloud-based email and Email Protection Suite offerings. SilverSky’s comprehensive security services, running on SoftLayer’s cloud platform and distributed through IBM’s global sales channel, will enable businesses around the world to quickly move email workloads and critical information into the cloud in a secure and cost-effective way.
As a provider of cloud-based information security, secure messaging and collaboration services, SilverSky protects $525 billion in customer assets and handles more than 500 million security events each day. SilverSky’s growing customer base includes 6,700 organizations around the globe in the financial services, retail, healthcare, energy, critical infrastructure and manufacturing sectors.

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According to IDC, we spent over $34 billion on business analytics in 2012. To put that in perspective, that’s more than the GDP of 100 of the world’s countries. And Gartner’s 2013 survey of over 2000 CIOs worldwide puts business intelligence at the top of their technology priorities. Given this spend and focus, it’s shocking to realize that according to the BI Scorecard only 24% of today’s information workers actually have access to BI tools, and that number has stagnated even with the advent of new technologies like data visualization. What gives? The reality is that most information workers don’t spend their day working with a BI tool, nor do they want to. They already have their preferred applications. So, what can be done?
In his session at the 13th International Cloud Expo®, Karl Van den Bergh, VP, Product and Alliances at Jaspersoft, will discuss how cloud application developers hold the key to making analytics more pervasive within the enterprise. He’ll analyze emerging business models and technologies that are enabling developers to easily and affordably inject intelligence inside the applications they build, bringing information TO knowledge workers rather than expecting them to go find it. He will also look at how some of the world’s leading companies are already doing this and the benefits they’re seeing from this approach.

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When Windows Azure was first released a few years ago, it was Microsoft’s PaaS offering in the public cloud space. This has matured and Microsoft recently released a preview of their IaaS offering in Windows Azure. This new offering allows an organization to host a virtual machine with various operating systems (including Linux) and different applications such as Active Directory Domain Controllers or SharePoint Server as an example. These VMs in Azure can also be connected with PaaS instances in Azure or on-premises infrastructure.
In his general session at the 13th International Cloud Expo®, Matt Hester, Senior Information Technology Professional Evangelist for Microsoft, will provide an overview of this new capability and how to get started.

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For the past few months Solar VPS has been conducting an open lab beta test accessible for all Solar VPS clients. The test, known as Cosmo’s Lab, featured a product line called SolarSystem Cloud Apps on Demand, or One Click A.I.
The idea behind the laboratory test was very simple: like Google’s Beta Lab’s, we wanted to release and test a product line which we believe will have a great impact on the Cloud hosting and general marketplace. The product line is Cloud Apps on Demand. In short, SolarSystem Cloud Apps on Demand featured 260 + Cloud Applications which our clients could install with the single click of a button. Just as Softaculous acts as an auto-script installer, we built SolarSystem Cloud Apps on Demand to install the most popular and useful Cloud applications with one click. We wanted to build a solution which was dead simple to use, highly useful and extremely valuable to the marketplace.

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Small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) comprise the ‘engine room’ of the UK’s business economy. 

Recent figures from the Department of Business Skills and Innovation underline their importance and reveal  that SMBs make up 99% of all businesses and account for 59% of all private sector employment and 49% of all private sector turnover, so there’s nothing ‘small’ about their role in contributing to the economic recovery.

It’s also encouraging to see that the number of UK SMBs has grown hugely in the past decade, rising from 3.5 million in the UK in 2000 to 4.5 million in 2011, according to the Federation of Small Businesses.

But despite renewed optimism and growth, SMB organisations have endured tough times through the recession and must continue to maintain a tight rein on operational costs and overheads. Budgets for key areas such HR and IT remain closely guarded and …

This infographic highlights some interesting findings from Parasoft’s research on API Integrity…
With the advent of the API economy, the integrity of the APIs you produce and consume is now more important than ever. As applications grow increasingly interdependent, the security, functionality, and performance of the composite «mashup» is only as strong as its weakest link. The success of an end-to-end transaction depends upon all the parts working flawlessly-all the time.
To better understand the scope and impact of API issues, Parasoft, leading provider of API Testing solutions, recently conducted study on API Integrity. The following infographic highlights some interesting findings…

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Over the past decade, social media has disrupted the traditional methods of providing customer support. In the new era, digital tools like Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Pinterest are transforming organizations into social enterprises.
For companies of any size, a strong social media strategy is a growing necessity in the world of branding. What savvy businesses are doing is taking advantage of collaborative online platforms to shorten the distance between support specialists and consumers. The bottom line is that social media is a strategic tool that can be used to manage a company’s online reputation, control the spread of misinformation and enhance the overall customer experience.
In his session at the 13th International Cloud Expo®, Robert Collazo, Manager of Social Media and Senior Systems Engineer at Rackspace, will explain how you can leverage social and mobile technologies to drive real business outcomes. Attendees will learn how to optimize their company’s online presence in order to build customer engagement and extract value from social networks like Facebook, micro-blogs like Twitter and multimedia platforms like YouTube.

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