When I talk to CIOs, they usually complain that the trend of Bring Your Own Device, or BYOD, is undermining their ability to keep their organization’s infrastructures and data secure. Every employee who comes to work with his or her smartphone or tablet and pulls up sales reports, help tickets and other corporate data creates a small hole in the IT armor companies have spent billions to build. Over time, the argument goes, the holes become a dangerous sieve.
My response to those worries: BYOD is a force of nature, so you better not get in its way. And it’s just raising the curtain on another, even bigger trend that follows right behind it. Let’s call it BYOS, short for “bring your own services.”
Gauging the Cloud Computing Confidence Level Among Businesses
It’s rather difficult to get a good read on public opinion, especially about things that half of them don’t know about. Cloud computing is one of those things.
How does one get a really good view on the overall public perception of particular things? Sure, you’ve got your own personal opinions, but they may be years ahead or behind the bulk of the public, depending on what exactly the subject is. We’re speaking very generally right now and philosophically at that, but this is a general topic that is extremely relevant. How can we really gauge things, and not just model them and pretend as if we’re doing something real.
Political polls claim to be judges of public opinion. They are somewhat accurate, but you’re taking thousands of people and claiming that they are representative of millions. Something seems fundamentally wrong. Thus, to claim that we know anything except very limited knowledge based on polling would be a lie.
Study shows differences between cloud users and non-users
A cornerstone study into cloud computing in the UK has revealed the key difference in opinion between cloud users and non-cloud users.
The study, from Raconteur Media and written by Mike O’Driscoll entitled ‘Navigating the Cloud’, had a relatively small survey base – just under 250 completed at least part of the survey – but of that number, there was a lot of clout – 84% saw themselves as the key IT decision maker.
Again, software as a service (SaaS) proved itself to be the most mature cloud market. 81% of respondents currently use SaaS, compared to 45% for information as a service (IaaS) and 38% for platform as a service (38%). Crucially, only 5% of respondents had no plans to use SaaS in their company.
This correlates with research from Symform which showed that SaaS “continued to be the entryway” for cloud platforms.
The survey showed less of a grasp for …
Why Averages Are Inadequate, and Percentiles Are Great
Anyone who ever monitored or analyzed an application uses or has used averages. They are simple to understand and calculate. We tend to ignore just how wrong the picture is that averages paint of the world. To emphasis the point let me give you a real-world example outside of the performance space that I read recently in a newspaper.
The article was explaining that the average salary in a certain region in Europe was 1900 Euro’s (to be clear this would be quite good in that region!). However when looking closer they found out that the majority, namely 9 out of 10 people, only earned around 1000 Euros and one would earn 10.000 (I over simplified this of course, but you get the idea). If you do the math you will see that the average of this is indeed 1900, but we can all agree that this does not represent the “average” salary as we would use the word in day to day live. So now let’s apply this thinking to application performance.
SOA Software Offers Free API Management and Developer Community Platform
The new SOA Software Open™ platform brings API providers and App developers together, offering easy access to powerful API Management capabilities combined with a social community in which developers collaborate to build dynamic, engaging apps with scalable APIs. The free SOA Software Open service allows users to manage up to 10 million API transactions per month, far higher than other solutions, and offers a powerful developer community platform unlike anything else in the industry. Developers can easily upgrade to SOA Software’s Enterprise API Platform either on-premise or as-a-Service if they want additional capacity, their own brand for their APIs, or a guaranteed SLA.
Ten Steps to Building Private Cloud Services
IT organizations that want to build private cloud services face tremendous challenges. The technologies are immature, but they are the easiest hurdle. Processes and funding models must change. Organizational cultures need to be rewritten, even though politics stand in the way. Service orientation requires tight alignment with the business. Measuring success means measuring business results.
How should leadership drive cultural, political and organizational change in IT to deliver private cloud services?
How should operational processes change to support a private cloud service?
How should IT use technologies to build a private cloud service?
Cloud and big data – a fusion of two innovative IT trends
As market awareness and adoption increases, so customer confidence and clarity is growing and companies are better able to evaluate the benefits and challenges that big data presents their individual organisations.
It’s not surprising to see that big data is the top IT spending priority in Gartner’s recent global forecast. These figures correlate with Cisco’s recent CloudWatch survey, which found that Big Data will be an important aspect of IT strategy and is set to increase in importance over the next 12 months.
Big data priorities
Two priorities emerge ahead of others – accessing data in real time and accessing data from multiple devices. It is no exaggeration to say that organisations of all shapes and sizes are experiencing a data explosion and that the IT department is in the eye of this data storm. Real time access to data is not only seen as a critical success …
Cloud Computing: GreenButton Uses Multiple Clouds for Big Compute
The inspiration for GreenButton was the devilishly complicated battle scene in the 2003 movie “The Lord of the Rings” that its founder Scott Houston pulled together in two weeks for director Peter Jackson against all odds. It was accomplished in record time with thousands of servers and little sleep.
Fade to today. The GreenButton start-up claims its newfangled Cloud Fabric is the first server solution to let users – both the enterprise and service providers – deploy, manage and run compute-intensive applications in either private or public clouds or, for that matter, in multiple multi-tenant clouds.
It’s talking about what it calls “Big Compute,” basically deploying as much supplementary processing power as the cloud can provide. Thousands of cores spun up in 20-30 minutes at a fraction of the usual cost.
Cloud Computing: GreenButton Uses Multiple Clouds for Big Compute
The inspiration for GreenButton was the devilishly complicated battle scene in the 2003 movie “The Lord of the Rings” that its founder Scott Houston pulled together in two weeks for director Peter Jackson against all odds. It was accomplished in record time with thousands of servers and little sleep.
Fade to today. The GreenButton start-up claims its newfangled Cloud Fabric is the first server solution to let users – both the enterprise and service providers – deploy, manage and run compute-intensive applications in either private or public clouds or, for that matter, in multiple multi-tenant clouds.
It’s talking about what it calls “Big Compute,” basically deploying as much supplementary processing power as the cloud can provide. Thousands of cores spun up in 20-30 minutes at a fraction of the usual cost.
Get Past the Confusion Surrounding Hybrid Cloud Computing
In the already overhyped cloud computing market, hybrid cloud computing is emerging as the next big thing. To get past the hype, IT leaders should assess how hybrid cloud computing fits into their road maps, and determine which of its many forms makes sense (and which don’t) for their enterprises.