DataDirect, Enterprise Service Bus, Progress, Tools

Progress Software Offers DataDirect Cloud Connectivity Management Service

Progress Software Corporation today announced it’s offering a beta program of the DataDirect® Cloud service. The new SaaS-based connection management service is a key step in the company’s mission to help organizations create, run and connect to the world’s best business applications. The cloud connectivity service enables simplified SQL access to a broad spectrum of cloud-based data sources through a single standards-based interface.

Cloud is reshaping the way organizations build and deploy software and enabling the next generation of ISVs and applications to be built in less time, at less cost, all the while increasing application scalability and resilience. With the acknowledged value of cloud, there’s been an explosion of new data sources in the cloud such as SaaS CRM, Social Network Feeds, and SaaS ERP. Organizations seeking to unlock the data in these sources need an easy way to connect to them. Point-to-point connectivity might be available through a proprietary web service, but creating unique access calls that conform to multiple APIs is unwieldy and complex. The multitude of different API’s as well as their various versions is making applications too complex to maintain.

Connectivity-as-a-Service provides standards-based SQL access to cloud data without requiring customized interfaces or new libraries to learn. It executes the SQL query against the appropriate cloud data source, managing all of the complexity, API’s, and versioning itself so that the application does not have to.

The DataDirect Cloud offering provides:

  • A single ODBC and JDBC driver based on the DataDirect premium driver
    technology that plugs into almost any 3rd party application
    suite (i.e., Business Intelligence, Enterprise Service Bus, Business
    Process Management Suites, Data Integration ETL, Java EE)
  • Real-time SQL access to a broad spectrum of data sources through a
    connectivity management service that resides in the cloud
  • Web based query development tools that allow interaction with SaaS
    data without any on-premise software required
  • Elastic scalability suitable for the most demanding data access needs
  • Specifically for ISVs, the ability to distribute the DataDirect Cloud
    OEM driver “in the box” and support a broad array of data sources that
    will be updated and expanded regularly without having to redeploy to
    on premise installations.


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Challenges of data privacy in the era of cloud computing

More than eight in ten companies are now using some form of cloud computing solution; proof that the benefits of the cloud are becoming more widely accepted amongst enterprises.

Moreover, positive steps are being made toward further boosting cloud services in the EU.

In September, Neelie Kroes, Europe’s Commissioner for the Digital Agenda, released the paper, «Unleashing the Potential of Cloud Computing in Europe.» This outlines a number of recommendations designed to drive European businesses and the public sector into the cloud. The goal is to create 2.5 million new European jobs and boost GDP in the Single Market to EUR 160 billion by 2020.

Data security in the cloud

However, whilst European organisations are being won over by the benefits, confusion still surrounds the issue of data security and privacy in the cloud.

Data is having an increasingly hard time crossing boundaries for this reason. Countries are …

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Cloud Expo Silicon Valley: Holland Takes the Cloud By Storm

To showcase what Holland and the Dutch Cloud Computing Industry have to offer, the Dutch government invited 10 selected companies with international experience and ambition to present their software and services at the Holland Pavilion during Cloud Expo Silicon Valley in Santa Clara, November 5-8. The ten exhibiting companies at the Holland Pavilion are: IS Channels, Interxion, Cameramanager.com , Servoy, Stealth Software, Workvoices, Pangaea, 2020 Vision, Silver Solutions and TBlox.

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JETRO Jets Into Cloud Expo

Arrived at Cloud Expo for its opening in Santa Clara, and pleasantly surprised to see JETRO on the exhibitor’s program. This is the Japan External Trade Organization, a group that held a lot of sway in the 70s and 80s, when Americans thought Japan was going to take over the US economy.

Despite two economic “lost decades,” Japan remains the world’s third largest economy, and a far wealther nation than China, which superseded its overall economy a few years ago.

Japan has scored well in the research we’ve conducted at our Tau Institute over the past several months.Even though our algorithms tend to highlight developing nations rather than the highly developed places such as Japan, the country nonetheless ranks in the Top 20 among the 102 countries we’ve studied. It does perform in the middle of the pack amongst its closest peers, as its Internet speed and broadband access could be higher, and its very high cost of living works against it.

Cloud computing is being deployed in its financial sector, telcos, and increasingly in its transportation and manufacturing sectors, according to reports from colleagues. I’ll see what I can find out from the JETRO reps. Ironically, it seems the United States would likely favor a stronger Japan these days; certainly the purchase of lots of US cloud technology and services could be a new bright spot for the industry.

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What Businesses are looking for in Their Website (and Hosting Provider)


According to Frost & Sullivan’s September 2012 report “Australian Infrastructure as a Service Market (IaaS)”, many organizations see beyond the initial cost savings of cloud-based solutions and are attracted by the promised increased agility and scalability that adoption offers.

However despite the benefits of cloud, many IT departments are still reluctant to move with common barriers including perceived loss of control, data sovereignty and security concerns when they move their workload and infrastructure to cloud. This explains why for those with concerns, hosting of non-critical systems is the common testing ground in the search for the right cloud computing strategy.

Cloud hosting services offers full remote access to the virtual machine (VM) in much the same way as the physical server. Some cloud hosting services also allow on the fly configuration of resources, such as RAM and CPU resources, to match variations in the activity of the website or VM. Just to be clear, this may require a couple of minutes of reboot time of the VM for the new configuration to kick in. Businesses that run business-critical systems like online retailing would do well to bear this in mind.

Many companies that have pre-existing systems they want to move into a cloud based hosting environment wish it were possible to convert their hardware-based server into a virtual machine and host this VM out in the cloud. The hope is to be able to keep all essential fancy configurations and permission settings as the VM gets migrated into the cloud. In reality this doesn’t always happen for a number of reasons, security settings being one of them.  

For businesses using a content management system (CMS) for their websites, migration to cloud-based hosting is relatively simple. Hosting providers have ready-made packages of the most common CMSs and it’s just a matter of choosing from one of these. After importing a backup from the current system, including the database, the SMB will have a copy of the website up and running within hours of the migration. After making a final backup of the old database and restoring it to the new CMS, all that needs to be done is to make changes to the DNS so that the domain now points to the new website. The final step is to put a simple redirect on the old website to catch visitors whose DNS records may be cached and still have the old site settings.

It can sound very technical and complicated. In reality, website administrators and web hosters use a control panel to automate a lot of these processes. In web hosting a control panel is a web-based user interface provided by the hosting company that allows users to manage their various hosted services in a single place.

One such control panel is Parallels Plesk Panel which allows a server administrator to set up new websites, reseller accounts, e-mail accounts, and DNS entries through a web-based interface. The administrator can create client and site templates, which predetermine resource-allocation parameters for the domains and clients.

The recently released Parallels Plesk Panel 11 features 80 improvements that give users more control over their sites. With Parallels Web Presence Builder add-on, Plesk directly addresses SMB needs for social media integration with faster website performance, in dedicated or virtualized environments.

The 2012 Web Server Survey by Netcraft found NGINX to be the third most widely used web server across all domains (11.53% of surveyed sites) and the second most widely used web server for all «active» sites (12.31% of surveyed sites).

With the combination of NGINX and Parallels Plesk Panel 11, users can automatically install and configure an NGINX web proxy in front of a standard Apache web server. This configuration will speed up delivery of clients’ website contents and result in faster and more predictable performance by offloading concurrency and latency processing from Apache to NGINX.

For website owners, whether SMBs and large enterprise, the benefits of fast and predictable performance can translate to higher customer satisfaction and the much sought after stickiness.

Cloud is rapidly becoming the delivery model of choice for many companies. With significant upfront savings and low or zero maintenance costs, the commercial case for any business to adopt cloud is strong. Cloud computing gives every business, particularly SMBs, access to computing resources, including applications and services, previously only available to large enterprises.

With Parallels Plesk control panel the administration of any website has never been easier, more affordable and manageable. At the end of the day, this is what all business owners want of their website. 


Anthony Banek
CEO for OzHosting.com

 

Android, Mobile

Basware Launches Enhanced Mobile App for Purchase-to-Pay

Basware, a provider of e-invoicing and purchase-to-pay solutions, has today announced the availability of Basware Mobile 1.2, bringing the processing of purchase requisitions into its native apps for iOS and Android powered smartphones and tablets.

As workers become increasingly mobile and accustomed to social collaboration, employees expect to be able to access and interact with core business processes and data on the move in order to maximize productivity. Basware Mobile 1.2 delivers a comprehensive purchase-to-pay mobile application to enable users to review, approve and reject invoices and purchase requisitions while on the move. Basware helps businesses further speed up the review and approval cycles of invoice and requisition processing, through the full automation of procurement and accounts payable processes, coupled with the delivery of anywhere, anytime access to processes and data through browser, tablet and smartphone apps.

On 29th February 2012, Basware launched Alusta, a cloud-based platform for business-to-business transaction collaboration. Basware Mobile 1.2 is an enhancement to the mobility function of Alusta, adding purchase requisitions to invoices already supported within in the mobile app. Basware Mobile is fully optimized for all smartphone and tablet devices including mobile web, Android and iOS platforms. It is also designed to allow social collaboration in an enterprise solution.


Backup, Code 42 Software, CrashPlan, Disaster Recovery/Business Continuity

Code 42 Software Expands Endpoint Backup Solutions Ease-of-Use

Code 42 Software Inc., developers of cloud-based endpoint backup solutions for consumers, businesses and the enterprise, today announced at Cloud Expo West 2012 expanded capabilities for its entire family of CrashPlan endpoint backup solutions. This new version of CrashPlan expands the company’s recognized dedication to ease-of-use by both end users and data backup administrators, and provides powerful new enterprise functionality for managing private clouds.

“Code 42 is committed to giving enterprise administrators the private cloud management capabilities they demand,” said Matthew Dornquast, chief executive officer, Code 42 Software. “Our new functionalities make our solution unique and give admins what we believe is the best private cloud management solution on the market today. In addition, a key differentiator of all our CrashPlan offerings is our ability to support a variety of platforms – Mac or Windows, Linux or Solaris. We give users the powerful, trusted backup solutions they need, on the platforms they want to use; and Windows 8 upgraders will be happy to know that CrashPlan is already fully compatible.”

Available today are a variety of additional capabilities for Code 42’s enterprise solution CrashPlan PROe which extend the solution’s ease-of-use for administrators, such as:

  • Single-point upgrades of private clouds – With this new version
    comes automatic upgrade functionality for storage servers, which makes
    managing private clouds easier and less time-consuming. Once all
    servers are individually upgraded to the current version,
    administrators can upgrade their entire private cloud with a
    single-point upgrade for future releases.
  • Support for Security Assertion Markup Language 2.0 (SAML 2.0) –
    This version of the SAML
    OASIS
    standard for exchanging authentication
    and authorization
    data between security
    domains enables web-based authentication and authorization
    scenarios including single
    sign-on (SSO). Organizations utilizing SAML 2.0-based SSO
    technologies (such as Shibboleth) can now integrate CrashPlan PROe
    with those systems, which simplifies the authentication process by
    delegating all authorization to the organization’s identity provider.

CrashPlan PROe is lauded by global organizations such as Google, Adobe, Netflix, LinkedIn and Salesforce.com for its reliability, performance and invisible nature. In addition to its new capabilities, PROe gives the enterprise:

  • Continuous, silent backup – Works quietly, continuously in the
    background to unobtrusively protect data according to admin or user
    settings.
  • Self-service restore – When a restore is required, users can
    initiate it themselves – with only a few clicks – and without needing
    IT intervention.
  • End-to-end security – Encrypts data on the device and again
    during transit, and keeps it encrypted during data storage.
  • Flexible data storage options – Offers both public and private
    cloud data storage across multiple physical locations via a hybrid
    architecture.
  • Superb performance – Innovative compression and multi-threading
    technologies provide superior performance; a byte-level differential
    only transmits and stores new information.
  • Dynamic data balancing – Provides optimum use of available
    storage and bandwidth within and between servers and data centers.
  • Easy monitoring and administration – Gives admins a real-time
    view of the entire system and an easy way to control every aspect of
    the backups – whether for 200 users or two million – via an
    intuitive admin dashboard and console.
  • Easy, trusted access to data while on-the-go – Gives users
    secure access to all their data from anywhere via mobile apps for
    Apple iOS, Android or Windows Phone; apps feature one-touch update and
    the same industry-leading security as the PROe desktop applications.
  • Customizable backup sets – Provides an easy way to back up
    different groups of files and folders on different schedules and/or to
    different destinations.