The high barrier to entry prevents many companies from tapping into the full potential of machine learning. But what if you could make it more accessible?
We’re in the midst of a data explosion, with today’s enterprises amassing goldmines of information (25 quintillion bytes of data every day, according to some reports). But what exactly are they doing with this data? Considering the volume of data being collected is quickly becoming unmanageable, now is a good time to shift from manual machine learning to a cognitive approach. This enables businesses to better capitalize on their data and facilitate agile decision-making.
From Science to Art: Making Machine Learning Approachable | @CloudExpo #AI #ML #Cloud
The high barrier to entry prevents many companies from tapping into the full potential of machine learning. But what if you could make it more accessible?
We’re in the midst of a data explosion, with today’s enterprises amassing goldmines of information (25 quintillion bytes of data every day, according to some reports). But what exactly are they doing with this data? Considering the volume of data being collected is quickly becoming unmanageable, now is a good time to shift from manual machine learning to a cognitive approach. This enables businesses to better capitalize on their data and facilitate agile decision-making.
Becoming Bionic – My Experience | @ExpoDX #DX #ML #ArtificialIntelligence
I recently became a bionic man. I have one good ear and one bad ear as a result of flying around while suffering colds and flus over the years, and with only one good it makes it difficult to hear a conversation in a noisy room, so I went looking for a high tech digital solution.
For the last couple of years I have been watching the start-up, Doppler Labs, as they developed their earbuds that were purported to have great sound, but also to enhance hearing. This month after reading about their latest software release, I ordered a pair to try. There were three reasons I wanted to try Doppler Labs’ HearOne Wireless Smart Earbuds. First because their goal was to enhance hearing for a few hundred dollars, rather than for many thousands of dollars that the hearing aid industry charges, secondly, they were building artificial intelligence (AI) into their earbuds, and thirdly, I could listen to premium audio and talk on my phone with them.
Becoming Bionic – My Experience | @ExpoDX #DX #ML #ArtificialIntelligence
I recently became a bionic man. I have one good ear and one bad ear as a result of flying around while suffering colds and flus over the years, and with only one good it makes it difficult to hear a conversation in a noisy room, so I went looking for a high tech digital solution.
For the last couple of years I have been watching the start-up, Doppler Labs, as they developed their earbuds that were purported to have great sound, but also to enhance hearing. This month after reading about their latest software release, I ordered a pair to try. There were three reasons I wanted to try Doppler Labs’ HearOne Wireless Smart Earbuds. First because their goal was to enhance hearing for a few hundred dollars, rather than for many thousands of dollars that the hearing aid industry charges, secondly, they were building artificial intelligence (AI) into their earbuds, and thirdly, I could listen to premium audio and talk on my phone with them.
VMware says it won’t support customers who opt for Microsoft’s Azure Migrate tool
Microsoft’s recent announcement and product update aimed at helping customers migrate from their VMware environments has, unsurprisingly, not gone down very well with the virtualisation giant.
On Monday, as announced in a blog post earlier this week, Microsoft will announce Azure Migrate, a free service, will become broadly available to all Azure customers. The key use case, and one which Corey Sanders, Azure director of compute, described as a frequent request, is moving on-premises VMware workloads to Azure.
“Many of you are looking to move to the cloud to help your business move faster,” wrote Sanders. “At the same time, we understand that it may not be possible to run your entire business in the cloud.
“The reality is, running your VMware virtualisation stack in the cloud does not address your hybrid requirements,” added Sanders. “For this, you need a broad set of hybrid services and solutions that provide not just connectivity and virtualisation, but true consistency across your cloud and on-premises environments.
“Azure is the only true hybrid cloud that enables consistency across application development, management, security, data, and identity.”
VMware responded to this by saying that as the Azure Migrate service has been neither certified or supported by the company, it could not recommend it for customers.
“Our experience has shown public cloud environments require significant joint engineering to run enterprise workloads,” wrote Ajay Patel, senior vice president product development cloud services at VMware. “Hence, we cannot endorse an unsupported and non-engineered solution that isn’t optimised for the VMware stack.
“VMware does not recommend and will not support customers running on the Azure announced partner offering,” Patel added.
Patel also wrote of the various initiatives VMware already has in place with cloud providers. The most prominent is VMware Cloud on AWS, announced at VMworld back in August. At the time, VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger said the move was “the ultimate hybrid solution.” Other partnerships include OVH and IBM.
One thing to note here: this may well be an interesting byplay to the AWS-heavy narrative at re:Invent next week.
[video] How Serverless Changes Cloud, and Your Job | @CloudExpo @CloudTP #CloudNative #Serverless #DevOps
In a recent survey, Sumo Logic surveyed 1,500 customers who employ cloud services such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform (GCP). According to the survey, a quarter of the respondents have already deployed Docker containers and nearly as many (23 percent) are employing the AWS Lambda serverless computing framework.
It’s clear: serverless is here to stay. The adoption does come with some needed changes, within both application development and operations. That means serverless is also changing the way we leverage public clouds. Truth-be-told, many enterprise IT shops were so happy to get out of the management of physical servers within a data center that many limitations of the existing public IaaS clouds were forgiven. However, now that we’ve lived a few years with public IaaS clouds, developers and CloudOps pros are giving a huge thumbs down to the constant monitoring of servers, provisioned or not, that’s required to support the workloads.
Google to launch new cloud region in Hong Kong in 2018
It was ranked as the most cloud-ready area in the Asia Pacific region – and now one of the largest players in the industry is set to build a region there in 2018.
Google has announced that a new Google Cloud Platform (GCP) region will be opened in Hong Kong next year, making it the sixth GCP region in Asia Pacific alongside Singapore, Sydney, Taiwan, and Tokyo, as well as Mumbai, which went live earlier this month.
Including Hong Kong, the total now stands at 18 global locations and 53 zones either open or planned – the Iowa region has four zones instead of the standard three while Singapore and the planned work in the Netherlands currently stand at two.
“A solid cloud infrastructure is the foundation for building a smart city and helping businesses succeed in the digital economy,” said Nicholas W Yang, secretary for innovation and technology at HKSAR Government in a statement. “We are glad that Google is launching the Hong Kong cloud region, a recognition of Hong Kong’s edge and strengths as a data hub.
“This means businesses in Hong Kong, whether big or small, can leverage the latest, well-established technology infrastructure to expand and succeed in the region and globally.”
Last year, the Asia Cloud Computing Association noted Hong Kong as the most mature Asia Pacific cloud nation, overtaking long-time leader Japan. The report gave the country top marks across the board, with particularly high praise on international connectivity, broadband quality and privacy.
“Under the strong industry leadership of the Office of the Government CIO, Hong Kong is continuing its tradition of robust future planning and a strong tech industry by focusing on ensuring Hong Kong’s infrastructure is primed for fast, reliable and secure cloud offerings targeting the entire region,” the report noted.
You can read more about the GCP Hong Kong region by visiting here.
Six things to keep in mind when shopping for a cloud backup solution
When you’re looking for a cloud backup solution for your business, you’re not just thinking about storing a few files in a remote location. You’re planning your disaster recovery strategy. You want a reliable tool that will store your business data and help you recover it when you need it. The thing is, your data is spread over different types of computers, devices and applications, which makes your strategy more complicated. There are a few things you should keep in mind.
You want a cloud backup solution that can protect local machines
The term ‘local machine’ goes beyond the simple desktop. You’re using computers for all your daily tasks and they’re essential for your business. For example, they host your:
- Services to manage your network at the office (like DHCP, Wi-Fi, router)
- Local domain services (like Active Directory, DNS)
- Print services (sharing multifunctional printers in the company)
- Physical access control system (surveillance cameras, cards or biometrics to enter company buildings)
- System management for food and beverage machines
And the list goes on. Every single downtime on these services can damage your company’s productivity. A cloud backup solution for business that helps you do a full backup of the operating system and your computer applications will ensure that you can always get back on your feet.
You want a cloud backup solution that can protect your servers
Your servers can be hardware servers or virtual machines (VMware, Hyper-V, etc.). They can run any Linux distribution or Windows, as the operating system. The most important thing is the service they are hosting:
- Public web site
- eCommerce application
- Accounting platform
- Email system
- Customer relationship management
Your servers could be on-premises or in the cloud, it doesn’t matter. When you’re looking for a cloud backup solution for business, you want to recover quickly if something goes wrong, like a user error or a ransomware attack.
You want a cloud backup solution that can protect your databases and applications
A modern IT application will be made up of different functionalities. It’s often a 3-tier design with a:
- Presentation interface (the client software or web page with interactive windows)
- Business logic (a server that receives and processes requests, and pulls the right data)
- Database and programming (the data and its management system)
For example, with your Outlook client software, you write emails that the SMTP email server will send, and those emails will be stored in a mailbox database so you can read them later or forward them to someone else.
Your cloud backup solution for business should be able to handle this complexity as well as its constraints. For example, it should know how to handle files that are ‘open,’ meaning being read or written by the system. It should allow you to back up all the tiers and restore them in the right sequence, so they can run together again after an incident.
You want a cloud backup solution that can protect all the diversity of end-user devices
Gone are the days when employees were only using desktops or laptops at the office.
- Today’s users are also accessing and processing business data from smartphones and tablets
- They’re working from public or home networks
- They’re using their personal devices for work
- Business data is cohabiting with personal files
Every IT administrator wants to make sure the data on these devices is protected. Your cloud backup solution for business needs to back up as much data as possible from mobile devices.
You want a cloud backup solution that offers centralised management and cloud-to-cloud capabilities
IT administrators are sometimes forced to switch from one product to another to do their backup tasks. This is because some vendors will only offer backup for specific scenarios. However, a few vendors will cover them all, so you can orchestrate your backup strategy from a single console.
A cloud backup that offers a centralized management tool will help businesses:
- Organize the backups based on the type of device or application
- Prepare different schedules to run the backup tasks
- Delegate backup management activities to other people
- Manage backups for different domains
- Restore data remotely on a device or computer
Being able to back up local machines, virtual machines, cloud servers, applications, databases and mobile devices from a single interface is the IT person’s dream.
You don’t want a file sync and share solution
Many vendors will present their file sync and share solution as a cloud backup solution for business. We both know that it’s not.
A file sync and share solution will only help you:
- Share files between different users
- Have multiple users edit the same version of a file in real time
- Get the latest edited version of a file synced on multiple devices
A file sync and share solution works well for documents, spreadsheets, slide decks and multimedia. It won’t work for backing up servers, workstations, databases and emails.
In other words, you can’t just use DropBox, Google Drive, OneDrive or similar platforms as a cloud backup solution for your business.
Conclusion
We’ve told you what to keep in mind when you’re shopping for your cloud backup solution for business. Remember, the success of your disaster recovery strategy depends on the solution you choose.
Want to know more about our cloud backup solution for business? Click here.
The post 6 Things to Keep in Mind When Shopping for a Cloud Backup Solution for Business appeared first on SherWeb.
A GDPR Compliance Journey | @DevOpsSummit #BigData #DevOps #FinTech #AI #ML #DX
In preparation for General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) compliance, a global 100 financial services organization embarked on a journey to assess its core information processing environments with the objective of identifying opportunities to strengthen its data privacy protection programs. This article focuses on the technology challenges, approach, and lessons learned for the centralized testing environment.
[slides] Modernize Your Applications | @CloudExpo @InteractorTeam #DX #AI #IoT #SDN
Most technology leaders, contemporary and from the hardware era, are reshaping their businesses to do software. They hope to capture value from emerging technologies such as IoT, SDN, and AI. Ultimately, irrespective of the vertical, it is about deriving value from independent software applications participating in an ecosystem as one comprehensive solution. In his session at @ThingsExpo, Kausik Sridhar, founder and CTO of Pulzze Systems, discussed how given the magnitude of today’s application ecosystem, tweaking existing software to stitch various components together leads to sub-optimal solutions. This definitely deserves a re-think, and paves the way for a new breed of lightweight application servers that are micro-services and DevOps ready!