Thanks to the plethora of communication and messaging apps available to the average user, unified communications (UC) is becoming more important than ever before. UC is a set of products and services designed to give employees a uniform communications experience, integrating different apps and channels to a singular point of interaction. For example, UC might allow a transcript of a voicemail to be delivered to a recipient’s email, enabling a central communication location that comprises multiple mediums at once.
[session] The Future of Data Centers in a Serverless World | @CloudExpo @Evernote #Cloud #DataCenter #Serverless
While some developers care passionately about how data centers and clouds are architected, for most, it is only the end result that matters. To the majority of companies, technology exists to solve a business problem, and only delivers value when it is solving that problem. 2017 brings the mainstream adoption of containers for production workloads.
In his session at 21st Cloud Expo, Ben McCormack, VP of Operations at Evernote, will discuss how data centers of the future will be managed, how the public cloud best suits your organization, and what the future holds for operations and infrastructure engineers in a post-container world. Is a serverless world inevitable?
Announcing @SourceForge “Media Sponsor” of @CloudExpo | #Serverless #DevOps #AI #DX
SYS-CON Events announced today that SourceForge has been named “Media Sponsor” of SYS-CON’s 21st International Cloud Expo, which will take place on Oct 31 – Nov 2, 2017, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA. SourceForge is the largest, most trusted destination for Open Source Software development, collaboration, discovery and download on the web serving over 32 million viewers, 150 million downloads and over 460,000 active development projects each and every month.
[session] #BigData App Development in a #DevOps World | @CloudExpo #DX
Today traditional IT approaches leverage well-architected compute/networking domains to control what applications can access what data, and how. DevOps includes rapid application development/deployment leveraging concepts like containerization, third-party sourced applications and databases. Such applications need access to production data for its test and iteration cycles. Data Security? That sounds like a roadblock to DevOps vs. protecting the crown jewels to those in IT.
[session] Continuous Deployment for #Docker | @DevOpsSummit #DevOps #DX
Today most companies are adopting or evaluating container technology – Docker in particular – to speed up application deployment, drive down cost, ease management and make application delivery more flexible overall.
As with most new architectures, this dream takes significant work to become a reality. Even when you do get your application componentized enough and packaged properly, there are still challenges for DevOps teams to making the shift to continuous delivery and achieving that reduction in cost and increase in speed. Sometimes in order to reduce complexity teams compromise features or change requirements
Why Is the Healthcare Industry Abuzz About Blockchain? | @CloudExpo #Cloud #FinTech #Blockchain
Blockchain. A day doesn’t seem to go by without seeing articles and discussions about the technology. According to PwC executive Seamus Cushley, approximately $1.4B has been invested in blockchain just last year. In Gartner’s recent hype cycle for emerging technologies, blockchain is approaching the peak. It is considered by Gartner as one of the ‘Key platform-enabling technologies to track.’ While there is a lot of ‘hype vs reality’ discussions going on, there is no arguing that blockchain is being taken very seriously across industries and cannot be ignored.
[session] APIs and Financial Services Innovation | @CloudExpo @IBMcloud #AI #API #FinTech
IBM helps FinTechs and financial services companies build and monetize cognitive-enabled financial services apps quickly and at scale. Hosted on IBM Bluemix, IBM’s platform builds in customer insights, regulatory compliance analytics and security to help reduce development time and testing.
In his session at 21st Cloud Expo, Lennart Frantzell, a Developer Advocate with IBM, will discuss how these tools simplify the time-consuming tasks of selection, mapping and data integration, allowing developers to use IBM services or combine them with their own data.
Tech News Recap for the Week of 09/22/17
If you had a busy week and need to catch up, here’s a tech news recap of articles you may have missed for the week of 09/22/2017!
Microsoft is adding a potent security feature to Windows 10. HP announces 360 Secure Fabric analytics security solution. The 6 phases of adopting cloud security practices. Locky variant ransomware attack continues to grow and more top news this week you may have missed! Remember, to stay up-to-date on the latest tech news throughout the week, follow @GreenPagesIT on Twitter.
Tech News Recap
Featured
- VMworld 2017: NSX Cloud, AppDefense + VMware’s New Direction
IT Operations
- How the NHL is boosting fan engagement with advanced analytics
- 5 software licensing challenges in the next generation network
- US Air Force plots IT overhaul, aims for cloud
[Interested in learning more about SD-WAN? Download, What to Look For When Considering an SD-WAN Solution.]
Microsoft
- Microsoft shows VMware and Oracle how to get real about open source
- Microsoft is adding a potent security feature to Windows 10
- Office 365 phishing attacks create a sustained insider nightmare for IT
Cisco
- Cisco’s Intersight platform brings datacenter management to the cloud
HPE
- HP’s Aruba announces 360 Secure Fabric analytics security solution
Cloud
- One way to start the cloud journey: Unified communications
- The 6 phases of adopting cloud security practices
- Only 29% of IT leaders have the skills needed to fully embrace the cloud
Security
- Android malware bypassed Google Play store security, could have infected 4.2 million devices
- Is universal end-to-end encrypted email possible (or even desirable)?
- Hackers backdoored CCleaner for a month: Over 2 million infected with malware
- Equifax suffered another data breach in March
- New Locky variant ransomware attack hits 20M attacks in one day
- CCleaner hackers attacked Microsoft, Intel, Cisco, and other tech giants
- Security alert: 1.4M new phishing sites created each month
- When public cloud security concerns persist, companies look to encryption
[Interested in learning more about SD-WAN? Download, What to Look For When Considering an SD-WAN Solution.]
By Jake Cryan, Digital Marketing Specialist
MongoDB sets up to go public, reveals $101m yearly revenues in filing
Database provider MongoDB has filed to go public, confirming reports from a month previously and potentially becoming the third major cloud IPO of 2017 after Okta and Cloudera.
The SEC filing, available to view here, shows MongoDB made $101.4 million in total revenues in the year ending January 31 2017, up 55% from the previous year’s $65.3m, which was up 37% from 2014-15’s $40.8m. Despite total gross profit of $71.4m, total operating expenses of $157.4m puts an overall net loss at $86.7m.
The company’s level of funding sits at more than $300m over six funding rounds – not including two undisclosed ventures – with its valuation sitting at $1.2 billion in 2013.
Continued losses are of course nothing new in this space, yet citing IDC figures of $61.3bn for the global database market, MongoDB cites a ‘highly differentiated business model that combines the developer mindshare and adoption benefits of open source with the economic benefits of a proprietary software subscription business model’ as a primary reason to take the market.
The company’s freemium product, Community Server, has been downloaded more than 30 million times in eight years with a third of that coming in the past 12 months, while 90% of MongoDB’s total revenue comes through subscriptions.
MongoDB cites legacy relationship database software providers – IBM, Microsoft, Oracle ‘and other similar companies’ are in the document – as competitors, as well as non-relational database providers and cloud providers, with Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and Microsoft Azure cited.
No non-relational database providers were named in the SEC; however it appears MongoDB has beaten Couchbase to the punch for going public for now. In March last year, the Mountain View firm secured a $30 million series F funding round, with CEO Bob Wiederhold telling this reporter it would give the company a ‘runway we need to have what we think will be a very successful IPO in the not too distant future.’
Fast forward 15 months, however, and Wiederhold has stepped aside from the CEO chair – although remaining executive chairman – to be replaced by former Veritas president Matt Cain, with no word of a public offering forthcoming.
Okta and Cloudera, who filed within weeks of each other earlier this year, set out solid financial results in their first quarter as public companies. Okta saw total revenues of $61m in the quarter, an increase of 62.9% year on year, while Cloudera hit $89.8m, up 39% from the year before.
What are the challenges of a hybrid cloud strategy?
When cloud first emerged as a potent technology, the reaction from organizations was mixed. Some of them jumped into the bandwagon right away while others waited until their concerns were answered, especially pertaining to security. Within a few years, AWS and Microsoft emerged as the leaders of the cloud market and their rise also shaped the industry and helped it to mature.
Today, organizations that want to embrace cloud prefer to have a hybrid cloud strategy, where they use the services of multiple vendors and also, have their own data centers. The obvious advantage of this strategy is that they can tap into the benefits of different cloud providers and leverage the power of data centers.
In fact, a research by Gartner shows that by 2020, 90 percent of organizations will adopt a hybrid cloud strategy because of the flexibility and cost-saving that comes with it.
That said, implementing a hybrid cloud strategy is anything but easy because of the huge complexities that come with it. For example, let’s say you have application A that runs on Azure, application B that runs on AWS and application C that is in your own data center. How will you control access to all these three applications? Will you use a single sign-on for easy user identity management or will you go in for a complex user management system?
The above scenario should give you a glimpse into the challenges that go with a hybrid cloud strategy. Let’s look at a few more now.
On-premise or cloud
One major challenge in hybrid cloud implementation is to decide which services should be managed on-premises and which on the cloud. This complication arises from the growing sophistication and falling prices of computing, or the CPU and RAM that power systems. Vendors like Dell and HP are providing increased capabilities, thereby giving greater value for money.
Such a scenario makes it difficult to determine if you should deploy workloads on your on-premise infrastructure or on an off-premise system that comes with a continuous consolidation of server environments.
Security concerns
Despite all the advancements made in cloud security, concerns still abound. There is a lot of skepticism about whether critical data will be safe in the cloud. Such fears lead to prohibitive costs, in many cases, especially if you have a large and complex IT infrastructure.
Planning
You could be losing thousands of dollars every month and ineffective IT systems, if you don’t plan well. You need to stay on top of the developments both in the cloud industry as well as hardware advancements in the data center industry to help you maximize the benefits of both.
Overall, a hybrid cloud strategy is being preferred over other forms of cloud implementations and rightly so because it offers many benefits. At the same time, there are also challenges that come with it. So, make sure you address and plan these challenges to truly leverage the power of hybrid systems.
The post What are the challenges of a hybrid cloud strategy? appeared first on Cloud News Daily.