«We started a Master of Science in business analytics – that’s the hot topic. We serve the business community around San Francisco so we educate the working professionals and this is where they all want to be,» explained Judy Lee, Associate Professor and Department Chair at Golden Gate University, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at 21st Cloud Expo, held Oct 31 – Nov 2, 2017, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.

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«We started a Master of Science in business analytics – that’s the hot topic. We serve the business community around San Francisco so we educate the working professionals and this is where they all want to be,» explained Judy Lee, Associate Professor and Department Chair at Golden Gate University, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at 21st Cloud Expo, held Oct 31 – Nov 2, 2017, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.

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With its giant, gleaming skyscrapers and seemingly endless wealth, Dubai is often viewed as being one of the world’s most hi-tech cities. When it comes to digital innovation, Dubai, one of seven Emirates in the United Arab Emirates, with a population of 2.5 million, has one of the highest levels of ICT adoption in the region, both by the public and government.

Over the past two decades a number of digital transformation initiatives, with titles such as Dubai Internet City and Dubai e-government, have driven adoption of ICT in all aspects of life. So it may come as some surprise to learn that cloud services in the region are lagging behind.

While many businesses, individuals and even government departments are using cloud-based email servers, in the main internal file servers are still the norm when it comes to storing data; as I found when attending Gitex 2017 last month, the leading computing and technology conference in the Middle East.

Speaking to other delegates about the Middle Eastern market at the five-day event in the Dubai World Trade Centre, a few things became clear.

Dubai is ahead in many ways in the adoption of technology, but when it comes to cloud servers it is about four to five years behind.

The appetite for a move to the cloud is there and adoption is slowly increasing, but there are only a small number of services available.

This is set to change with the recent announcement that Amazon’s cloud computing arm, Amazon Web Services (AWS), is to open its first data centre region in the Middle East by 2019, with offices in Dubai and Bahrain.

Amazon has also revealed plans to open a new CloudFront Edge location in the United Arab Emirates in 2018.

This is sure to pave the way for other major cloud providers to move their operations into the region.

Before the big boys get in, there are still plenty of opportunities for SMEs to make serious inroads into the Middle Eastern cloud market through the UAE.

However, there are many pieces of the puzzle to put together before this can become a reality.

The first consideration is practicality. An SME, particularly a small company, is going to find it almost impossible to enter the market alone, in particular with government, because of the restrictive registration costs involved and various bureaucratic hoops – generally, it costs around $5k to register with the Emirate Government Finance Departments.

In essence, as an SME looking to break into the Middle East, it is essential to work with a channel partner – value-added reseller (VAR) or value-added distributor (VAD) who already have working relationships with government departments and forward-thinking businesses.

The key word is trust. It’s not going to be enough to have an offering that is attractive in terms of cost and technology; businesses and especially government departments in the region will want reassurances about security, cost and even about your personnel.

There will be many questions that will need to be answered, such as where servers are based, who has access to them, and how are they linked – servers based in the region and staff on the ground is a must. A bit different to Europe where most of us subscribe to cloud services on the assumption that it is safe – uploading our data to the cloud without truly knowing where it is.  Perhaps we can learn something here?

But now is certainly the time to strike if our recent experience is anything to go by.

Dubai recently launched its five-year strategy called Smart Dubai 2021, which aims to take its smart city transformation to “a different level”.

Digital transformation is expected to have a “significant and positive impact” on the city, achieving not only financial savings but also improving the happiness of its citizens – commendably, people and happiness are high on the government agenda in Dubai.

If you have a cloud solution that you are certain can help Dubai achieve these aims and the partners you need to help you deliver it, you will find a willing and receptive audience and the route to a potentially lucrative future in the Middle East. They are ready for us, the question is, are we ready and able to serve this growing market?

Read more: Dubai launches IoT strategy and ‘data wealth’ initiative

DevOps promotes continuous improvement through a culture of collaboration. But in real terms, how do you: Integrate activities across diverse teams and services? Make objective decisions with system-wide visibility? Use feedback loops to enable learning and improvement?
With technology insights and real-world examples, in his general session at @DevOpsSummit, at 21st Cloud Expo, Andi Mann, Chief Technology Advocate at Splunk, explored how leading organizations use data-driven DevOps to close their feedback loops to drive continuous improvement.

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In a recent post, titled “10 Surprising Facts About Cloud Computing and What It Really Is”, Zac Johnson highlighted some interesting facts about cloud computing in the SMB marketplace:
Cloud Computing is up to 40 times more cost-effective for an SMB, compared to running its own IT system.
94% of SMBs have experienced security benefits in the cloud that they didn’t have with their on-premises service

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If you’re starting a small business, then you’re probably going to be utilising cloud technologies, for cost saving if nothing else. But without security, your ambitions could be over before they have begun.

A new whitepaper from the Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) aims to help software as a service startups build solid security foundations early into the product development cycle and gain customer trust in the process.

The key for startups, according to the paper, is to plan their security posture according to the progress they make in funding and product development. In the inception phase – when money is tight – startups need to focus on laying building blocks for potential security need. When the first paying customers arrive, the strategy should accelerate, and then when the company has a solid presence, a more mature security posture needs to come through.

There are various tips throughout the paper. For a start, the CSA recommends organisations be transparent about their security. “Offering your clients some useful security insights regarding the best ways to integrate your service into the client’s environment may position you as a trusted advisor,” the report notes. “This proactive approach may help you earn your client’s appreciation when they go to evaluate your company’s security risks.”

Another key is for organisations to understand the shared responsibility model – a bugbear this publication has frequently noted – as well as considering deploying to more than one region in its cloud provider platform to increase resilience to region-level failures.

“In today’s risk environment, young startups find themselves challenged on how to best align security with current and future business growth,” said John Yeoh, research director at CSA in a statement. “In creating this paper, we hope that startups, regardless of industry or geography, will find it a valuable tool in understanding, addressing and applying trusted and best practices for creating a secure computing environment.”

You can find out more about the report here (registration required).

There is a huge demand for responsive, real-time mobile and web experiences, but current architectural patterns do not easily accommodate applications that respond to events in real time. Common solutions using message queues or HTTP long-polling quickly lead to resiliency, scalability and development velocity challenges. In his session at 21st Cloud Expo, Ryland Degnan, a Senior Software Engineer on the Netflix Edge Platform team, will discuss how by leveraging a reactive stream-based protocol, we have been able to solve many of these problems at the communication layer. This makes it possible to create rich application experiences and support use-cases such as mobile-to-mobile communication and large file transfers that would be difficult or cost-prohibitive with traditional networking.

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«I focus on what we are calling CAST Highlight, which is our SaaS application portfolio analysis tool. It is an extremely lightweight tool that can integrate with pretty much any build process right now,» explained Andrew Siegmund, Application Migration Specialist for CAST, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at 21st Cloud Expo, held Oct 31 – Nov 2, 2017, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.

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Want to know a secret? Amazon Web Services (AWS) is beefing up its government capability by announcing the AWS Secret Region, which can operate workloads up to the highest level of security classification.

The move, claims AWS, makes it the only commercial cloud provider to offer regions serving workloads across the full range of data classifications, from ‘unclassified’, to ‘sensitive’, to ‘secret’, and then finally to ‘top secret’.

John Edwards, Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) CIO, said that the Secret region is a ‘key component of the Intel Community’s multi-fabric cloud strategy’, while Teresa Carlson, vice president for AWS worldwide public sector, added it was an ‘important milestone’.

“The U.S. Intelligence Community can now execute their missions with a common set of tools, a constant flow of the latest technology and the flexibility to rapidly scale with the mission,” said Carlson.

The region will complement the work Amazon already does with the CIA. Regular readers of this publication will remember the protracted legal action between AWS and IBM in 2013 with the final decision going to AWS in October of that year. Speaking at an industry event in early 2015 Doug Wolfe, the then-CIO at the CIA, confirmed AWS’ cloud had attained “final operational capability”, and praised the company for getting the project up and running in less than 18 months.

“Ultimately, this capability allows more agency collaboration, helps get critical information to decision makers faster, and enables an increase in our nation’s security,” added Carlson.

Last month, Microsoft announced the launch of new Azure government capabilities for classified mission-critical workloads, called Azure Government Secret. “Azure Government is the mission-critical cloud, providing more than 7,000 federal, state, and local customers the exclusivity, highest compliance and security, hybrid flexibility, and commercial-grade innovation they need to better meet citizen expectations,” wrote Tom Keane, Microsoft Azure head of global infrastructure.

As many know, the first generation of Cloud Management Platform (CMP) solutions were designed for managing virtual infrastructure (IaaS) and traditional applications. But that’s no longer enough to satisfy evolving and complex business requirements.
In his session at 21st Cloud Expo, Scott Davis, Embotics CTO, explored how next-generation CMPs ensure organizations can manage cloud-native and microservice-based application architectures, while also facilitating agile DevOps methodology. He explained how automation, orchestration and governance are fundamental to managing today’s hybrid cloud environments and are critical for digital businesses to deliver services faster, with better user experience and higher quality, all while saving money.

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