Come learn real-world examples where cloud and mobile are changing the way business works and the impact they’re having on efficiency and productivity.
In his session at the 10th International Cloud Expo, Rodrigo Coutinho Senior Product Marketing Manager at OutSystems, will look at how mobile and the cloud are interwoven and the wave of change these two 2012 megatrends will bring to your organization. He will also provide a roadmap to assure you can navigate this sea change for business success.
Nuix Launches Legal Hold Solution with Technology Partner Zapproved
Nuix, a worldwide provider of information management technologies, and Zapproved Inc., developers of Legal Hold Pro, today announced a technology partnership to introduce Nuix Legal Hold. Nuix Legal Hold is a cloud-based legal hold notification and compliance tracking system that works with Nuix collection and eDiscovery solutions. Nuix Legal Hold is built on Legal Hold Pro, which has been enthusiastically embraced by Fortune 500 companies and government agencies because it is the fastest and simplest way to manage the legal hold notification and compliance process.
Nuix Legal Hold provides legal teams the ability to manage the electronic discovery process. The system streamlines the overall process of responding to anticipated litigation and satisfies the duty to preserve relevant information in a defensible, repeatable manner. With Nuix Legal Hold, legal teams now have a fully integrated electronic discovery solution that systematically tracks, notifies and analyzes data from custodians subject to litigation holds.
“Zapproved has developed an effective and efficient system for managing litigation holds and the preservation workflow, and we’re very excited to work together to offer Nuix Legal Hold as a valuable service for our customers,” said Nuix CEO, Eddie Sheehy.
“Nuix and Zapproved are both committed to introducing powerful solutions into the legal market that our users find simple and easy to use,” said Monica Enand, CEO and founder of Zapproved. “This partnership integrates two state-of-the-art solutions that empower organizations to take on managing eDiscovery in-house.”
Nuix Legal Hold is available now and will be showcased at LegalTech West Coast May 22–23 at Booth 312. For more information on Nuix Legal Hold visit www.nuix.com/legalhold.
The Zetta Founders’ Story: From Netscape to Cloud Storage
It was at Netscape, in the early days of the internet, when co-founders Lou Montulli and Jeff Whitehead first worked together and began to notice how the amount of their data was constantly growing, but the process for adding storage and protecting that data wasn’t improving over time.
“Zetta is a company that’s trying to revolutionize storage,” is what Lou says at the beginning of the video above – but what does a revolution in storage look like?
Data that’s backed up to Zetta is ready to be restored at a moment’s notice because it’s identical to the data on your company’s network and individual endpoints. Your data is never converted to a proprietary backup format (like with appliance-based solutions) or just dumped into buckets (like with that South American river storage).
Sgrouples.com Launches Public Beta, Targets ‘Facebook Fatigue’
Sgrouples, Inc. (www.sgrouples.com) launched into public beta today offering a private alternative to the social network, and a robust suite of services it hopes will make it an all-in-one tool for weary Web users.
Sgrouples’ free custom dashboard lets users create private personal groups, import and manage their social networks like Facebook and Twitter, and provides personal cloud storage.
“We believe social network fatigue, particularly over privacy, and demand for personal clouds, will be the key driving forces in the social space over the next one to two years,” said Mark Weinstein, founder and CEO of Sgrouples, and an early pioneer of Web 2.0 services. “As the Facebook IPO is this week, we feel that now is the perfect time to launch the all-in-one Sgrouples service, which offers an antidote to large social platforms like Facebook by building true privacy into the user model – no tracking, no profiling and no sharing of personal information.”
Weinstein is a 15-year veteran of social media, before it even existed as an Internet category. He was the founder of SuperGroups, which in 1999 was hailed by CNN, Time, Bloomberg News and Dow Jones, among others, and was a popular precursor to today’s social networks and community sites.
“I’ve followed Sgrouples for nearly a year,” said Colin Sebastian, director, equity research, for RW Baird. “Their leadership and development team have incredible vision and are making terrific progress. Moreover, the company is an early mover in addressing growing consumer concerns about social platform overwhelm and user privacy.”
“Privacy by design” is a key selling point for Sgrouples.com, which offers an unprecedented level of protection in its user bill of rights (https://sgrouples.com/privacy), patent-pending permission tool and transparent privacy policy. As Weinstein points out, Sgrouples.com does not track, monitor or profile its users, and no personal information will ever be gathered or shared with third party companies.
“It’s our belief that users are growing tired of large platforms like Facebook, and are ready to migrate towards smaller, more exclusive communities that can offer real privacy and trust in the social experience,” said Weinstein. “We want to re-engineer the social experience by allowing users to connect in a closer way with people they know, in a private platform they trust. Our goal is to create one private place, with a robust suite of services, where people can come to organize all of their real life communities.”
Sgrouples.com is a free all-in-one suite of services that combines many popular features on the Web in one easy-to-use place. From a single user-friendly dashboard, members can start their own private groups; manage their Facebook, Twitter and other social media accounts; and enjoy a personal cloud to save and share photos, documents and important files.
Key features of the site include:
- Privacy bill of rights – no tracking, no profiling, no sharing of
personal information - Patent-pending permission tool (GroupAuthTM) lets users
control their privacy settings
- Private custom user groups
- Cloud storage with My CloudTM (4GB free at sign-up, up to
10GB free with sharing) - Social network aggregator in one easy-to-use dashboard
- Organize and share favorite links with Check It OutTM
- Event calendars users can create and share with others
- Upcoming features: photo printing, apps and games, and Sgrouples Mobile
Soonr Lets Enterprise IT Control Tablets, Mobile Devices
Responding to the growing trend of data being created, consumed and stored on mobile devices that are not controlled by IT, Soonr, a leader in secure business cloud services that transforms tablets like the iPad into business productivity tools, today announced Soonr Enterprise to help solve the mobile enterprise challenges large organizations are facing.
“Soonr is helping our global sales organization fully exploit the power of its smart devices – transforming its tablets and smartphones into reliable alternatives to carrying a laptop,” said Al Lounsbury, director of Digital Tools, Corporate Marketing at Ciena. “They can access core content to do business – whether they are documents, presentations or videos – and work on them seamlessly and securely within the cloud infrastructure.”
Soonr Enterprise builds upon its existing enterprise grade infrastructure and services that have been in continuous operation since 2005, now serving over 120,000 businesses globally.
Business units and Teams want easy access to content across mobile devices, while their IT counterparts want to ensure that access to sensitive information is secured and controlled according to corporate policies. IT professionals have genuine concerns about the extreme security risks of unmanaged cloud services and are issuing legitimate warnings about a lack of controls, capabilities, reporting and integration. Even so, business units are being rapidly drawn to what tablets and mobile devices can give them – agility, ubiquity and simplicity.
“IT needs to provide corporately endorsed solutions that are easy for individuals to use, but provide IT with security, control and accountability,” said Terri McClure, senior analyst with Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG). “With the Consumerization and mobilization trends, IT has some real interesting challenges with data and compliance issues on end-user mobile devices. IT needs vendors like Soonr to help address these data access and collaboration challenges in the enterprise because they are not going away.”
Soonr understands the complexity of security and compliance issues facing today’s IT departments and their requirements for managing cloud services. Soonr’s services run over a purpose-built, enterprise-grade infrastructure that relies on geo-redundant data centers in major regions that delivers better than 99.9 percent uptime with industry-leading response and service restoral time guarantees. Security of customer information is assured with 256-bit AES encryption of data in transit and storage with dynamic key rotation, virus scanning, and firewalls against hacking attacks. Role-based access controls, password protection and expiration timers for share links, and inactivity session timers deliver best-in-class user security. Finally, encryption of all local session information and non-persistent use of login credentials provide critical protection against lost or stolen devices.
“It’s an issue that every large organization has to come to grips with – and it is not an easy one,” said Martin Frid-Nielsen, co-founder and CEO of Soonr. “But we’ve come up with a solution that helps CIOs and their IT departments to navigate the divide between security and ingenuity. The last thing you want to do is hold your company back from effective sale approaches – and the modern ways of doing business – because of fear.”
The new capabilities being announced today are designed to expand the level of control enterprise IT is able to exert over users, devices and the documents that are part of the cloud collaboration environment under IT management. These include the ability to create and manage Groups from global team lists with custom share permissions, which reflects how Projects are actually managed in large companies. Both users and Groups may now be imported from enterprise Active Directory databases so that adding individuals to Projects with the right permissions is fully automated, saving time and reducing mistakes when multiple systems have to be configured.
New Policy Management capabilities allow the enterprise IT Admin to access all Projects users may have created with the ability to view, search, edit and delete Projects, as well as to control how Projects are shared with other employees or external parties. These new controls enable businesses to be in compliance with industry regulations or lawful access requirements.
Advanced reports and audit trails about user, group, device, and Project-related activities provide a rich set of tools that can be used for business analytics, such as determining how Projects and documents are being used, or for diagnostic, compliance, or security purposes.
Cloud Leadership to the Next Level
Some Cloud leaders have declared victory by leveraging the Cloud for infrastructure or software services and using the utility based, on demand capabilities. However, leaders can explore and realize higher levels of reuse and sharing by identifying specific processes that can be transitioned to the Cloud. Moving entire processes into the Cloud is a higher level of abstraction and will have a tremendous impact on the management and utilization of technology services. Planning and execution for the Cloud should assess and transition such processes to realize the benefits of rapid provisioning and deployment.
Dynamic shared processes for the Cloud have to be designed at a higher level by the vendors and they have to be customizable so that multiple consumers can leverage them. Such processes in the cloud are a conglomeration of building blocks that consist of specific services that can be sequenced. The consumer does not have to provision systems or servers and hence the ability to deploy full processes; not just software, infrastructure or platforms can lead to significant cost savings and reduce long term total cost of ownership. Specialized processes that need to be transitioned to the Cloud are good candidates for this transition, examples are back end processes, reporting, authentication etc. Due to the utility based aspect of the Cloud, these processes can be adjusted as needed based on on-going monitoring and can support rapid deployments.
Mule ION iPaaS Connects Cloud to On-Premise Apps
New tools and services for swift software-as-a-service integration in the cloud lowers the barrier to SaaS adoption for SaaS providers and developers.
MuleSoft this week launched Mule iON SaaS Edition, providing a broad set of new tools and services for swift software-as-a-Service (SaaS) integration in the cloud, and lowering the barrier to SaaS adoption for SaaS providers and developers.
In recent commentary, Ross Mason, founder and CTO of Mulesoft, said, “The world today is moving at lightning speed to SaaS and cloud applications, and the idea of gaining competitive advantage through legacy enterprise applications is no longer relevant.”
IBM’s Patterns and Its Impact on IT Services Purchasing
Cloud computing is fundamentally changing the IT ecosystem in many ways, forcing related changes in business models. Other than customers (who are always “king” and make buying decisions), the IT ecosystem players being affected by cloud includes technology providers, independent software vendors (ISVs) and systems integrators (SIs). One of the battles being fought right now by technology providers is to develop end-to-end cloud platform stacks attractive to ISVs. IBM announced additions to their recently launched PureSystems family at Impact 2012 with more than 125 ISVs supporting this family with patterns. Although the primary focus of this cloud platform stack is on ISVs, there is also a need for SIs to adapt to these changes, especially as it relates to custom software development and maintenance capabilities.
Cloud API Standardization – It’s Time to Get Serious
Okay – this is easy… or is it?
Lots of people continue to perpetuate the idea that the AWS APIs are a de facto standard, so we should just all move on about it. At the same time, everybody seems to acknowledge the fact that Amazon has never ever indicated that they want to be a true standard. Are we reallyIn fact, they have played quite the coy game and kept silent luring potential competitors into a false sense of complacency.
Amazon has licensed their APIs to Eucalyptus under what I and others broadly assume to be a a hard and fast restriction to the enterprise private cloud market. I would not be surprised to learn that the restrictions went further – perhaps prohibiting Eucalyptus from offering any other API or claiming compatibility with other clouds.
Cloud Encryption for Cloud Providers
As part of our cloud strategy, we’ve recently released a VMware version of our cloud security offering. It allows cloud providers using VMware, as well as the cloud users themselves, to create an encrypted environment within minutes, while eliminating the complexity around encryption key management in the cloud without compromising trust and confidentiality.
During this process we’ve engaged in many conversations with the cloud providers’ community to better understand their requirements, and equally important – their customers’ requirements. We’ve identified some interesting patterns with regards to cloud data security, which I thought would be beneficial to share.