SYS-CON Events announced today that ThousandEyes will exhibit at SYS-CON’s 13th International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on November 4–7, 2013, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
ThousandEyes provides detailed visibility into the performance of cloud apps and helps enterprises and cloud app providers collaborate to resolve performance problems quickly. Customers include members of the Fortune 500, 7 of the top SaaS providers and others.
Can We Finally Find the Database Holy Grail?
The world runs on transactional database systems. Every business depends on them, and we each interact with them many times each day. Furthermore the world needs to build thousands more applications of transactional database systems to support the next-generation web. Nothing controversial there, but there is a problem: transactional database systems have stubbornly refused to join the 21st century.
The rest of the world is moving toward data center architectures predicated on thousands of commodity machines, commodity networks, and «scale-out» designs. These data centers will offer on-demand computing services that can instantly increase or decrease capacity to applications as needed. It’s easy to just add more web servers, application servers, or storage servers as required. Unfortunately while that works at every other level in the computing stack it does not work at the database layer. Database systems are scale-up systems, not scale-out systems.
Fusing Cloud SOA & Cloud M2M – Building an On Demand, Real-time Enterprise
Back in 2002 Vinod Khosla, one of the elite of the Silicon Valley entrepreneur community (co-founded Sun Microsystems among others), wrote a white paper called the Real-Time Enterprise
At the same time I also wrote a similar paper entitled Building an On Demand Enterprise, which was based around the same principles. We both described utilizing a ‘loosely coupled’ and federated business model via the SOA (Service Oriented Architecture), to build more agile organizational structures.
These service architectures were achieved by integration technologies and standards like SOAP, which as we zoom forward ten years we can see still persists in terms of the underlying model but has now been replaced by REST, a more web-oriented approach suitable to the new Cloud world.
How to balance cloud security with agility in the healthcare vertical
Back in July, a study released from the Ponemon Institute cited cloud-based storage and mobile applications as the typical sources for cloud security concerns within many healthcare organizations. However, it was not understood if this worry was around just the concept of cloud computing and mobile computing, or if these organizations are dealing with true issues. I suspect it was the former.
“The study, ‘The Risk of Regulated Data on Mobile Devices in the Cloud,’ which surveyed 781 IT and data security practitioners, found that 33 percent of respondents said that they need to access protected health information (PHI) to do their work and yet few understood how to keep data secure. For example, 15 percent of those surveyed knew about HIPAA’s security requirements, but 33 percent of respondents indicated that they work for a HIPAA covered entity.” Figure 1 is a depiction of the outcome of this study …
Requirements for Next-Generation Privileged Identity Management
The importance of privileged identity management as a means of managing risk has long been understood. After all, it’s reported 43% of security breaches involve trusted insiders, according to research group Forrester. And the most recent Verizon Data Breach report revealed some 13% of breaches result from privilege misuse or abuse, and 76% involved weak or stolen credentials (of all types).
However, the widespread adoption of cloud computing has significantly increased the consequences of these risks. As was pointed out recently by Gartner Research Director Nick Nikols, “Administrators of private cloud and IaaS environments gain more concentrated power–and the risk that goes with it–than administrators for more traditional data center deployments.” The reason for this is the highly dynamic and scaleable nature of the cloud. Administrators can do much more, much faster than in traditional environments–and attacks scale up just as quickly.
Cloud Expo: Strategic Transformation to Next-Generation Big Data Platform
In his session at the 13th International Cloud Expo®, Tony Shan will present a methodical approach to effectively transforming a complex heterogeneous IT environment to a Big Data-enabled technology ecosystem. First he introduce a pragmatic methodology that provides a step-by-step process to systematically develop and migrate existing applications and databases to a new paradigm: Discover, Evaluate, Analyze, and Recommend (DEAR). Then he drill down to individual components in this method, such as current state diagnosis, future state formulation, gap analysis, roadmap generation, and incremental implementation.
Afterwards, a real-world business scenario in an industry vertical will be presented, where he will apply this comprehensive method to execute a holistic transformation. We dive deep into the key barriers, limitations, and issues in specific use cases, which help derive the core technical requirements for the new platform in this case study. Multiple options in the technology components are short-listed and assessed via qualitative and quantitative evaluations. Prototypes are further developed to conduct trial runs on the final candidates with specific test cases and justification criteria. Best practices and lessons learned about Big Data, advanced analytics and public cloud services will also be discussed.
Verizon Challenges Amazon with Verizon Cloud
Verizon is calling on the expertise of one of its recent acquisitions to offer a cloud computing service to its customers.
Verizon has announced details about a new cloud computing service for business, Verizon Cloud, an IaaS offering the company claims will offer better end-user control over performance than any other cloud solution.
Currently in limited beta, Verizon Cloud features an IaaS elastic computing system, Verizon Cloud Compute, and an object storage system, Verizon Cloud Storage. But where Verizon Cloud differs, according to Verizon, is that it delivers the performance you specify, not just the performance you end up with, according to an article on InfoWorld.com.
Cloud Expo Silicon Valley: The Agnostic Cloud
In their session at the 13th International Cloud Expo®, Luke Malpass, Software Architect & Co-founder of Fasetto, and Coy Christmas, CTO & Co-Founder of Fasetto, will discuss their PDQ Offline application, which is an application that allows sharing of files, pictures, videos and any other information instantly between any device, without internet, Wi-Fi or cell data, at no cost. Next they will discuss a new concept – “Cloud Life” – and how they are going about it – bringing all aspects of your life together in a single, accessible-anywhere platform, where all your information on the cloud can access one another, opening up opportunities never thought of before.
Moving Email to the Cloud Part 2
By Chris Chesley, Solutions Architect
My last blog post was part 1 of moving your Email to the Cloud with Office 365. Here’s the next installment in the series in which I will be covering the 3 methods of authenticating your users for Office 365. This is a very important consideration and will have a large impact on your end users and their day to day activities.
The first method of authenticating your users into Office 365 is to do so directly. This has no ties to your Active Directory. The benefits here are that your users get mail, messages and SharePoint access regardless of your site’s online status. The downside is that your users may have a different password than they use to get into their desktop/laptops and this can get very messy if you have a large number of users.
The second way of authenticating your users is full Active Directory integration. I will refer to this as the “Single Sign On” method. In this method, your Active Directory is the authoritative source of authentication for your users. Users log into their desktop/laptop and can access all of the Office 365 applications without typing their password again, which is convenient. You DO need a few servers running locally to make this happen. You need an Active Directory Federation Server (ADFS) and an Azure Active Directory Sync Sever. Both of these services are needed to sync your AD and user information to Office 365. The con of this method is that you need a redundant AD setup because if it’s down your users are not going to be able to access mail or anything else in the cloud. You can do this by hosting a Domain Controller, and the other 2 systems I mentioned, in a cloud or at one of your other locations, if you have one.
The third option is what I will refer to as “Single Password.” In this setup, you install an Azure Active Directory Sync server in your environment but do not need an ADFS server. The Sync tool will hash your user’s passwords and send them to Office 365. When a user tries to access any of the Office 365 services, they are asked to type in their password. The password is then hashed and compared to the stored hash and they are let in if they match. This does require the users to type their password again, but it allows them to use their existing Active Directory password and anytime this password changes, it is synced to the cloud.
The choice of which method you use has a big impact on your users as well as how you manage them. Knowing these choices and choosing one that meets your business goals will set you on the path of successfully moving your services to the cloud.
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Why Salesforce is winning the cloud platform war
The future of any enterprise software vendor is being decided today in their developer community.
Alex William’s insightful thoughts on Salesforce Is A Platform Company. Period. underscores how rapidly Salesforce is maturing as a cloud platform. And the best measure of that progress can be seen in their developer community.
(To be clear, Salesforce and the other companies mentioned in this post are not clients and never have been. I track this area out of personal interest.)
The last four years I’ve made a point at every Salesforce Dreamforce event to spend the majority of my time in the developer area. Watching mini hacks going on in the DevZone, mini workshops, the Salesforce Platform and Developer keynotes over the last few years has been a great learning experience. An added plus: developers are often skeptical and want to see new enhancements help streamline their code, extend its functionality …