SYS-CON Events announced today that Conference Guru 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.
A valuable conference experience generates new contacts, sales leads, potential strategic partners and potential investors; helps gather competitive intelligence and even provides inspiration for new products and services. Conference Guru works with conference organizers to pass great deals to great conferences, helping you discover new conferences and increase your return on investment.
[session] SAP in the Public Cloud | @CloudExpo @Ocean9inc #Cloud #Analytics #Security
Managing mission-critical SAP systems and landscapes has never been easy. Add public cloud with its myriad of powerful cloud native services and this may not change any time soon.
Public cloud offers exciting new possibilities for enterprise workloads. But to make use of these possibilities and capabilities, IT teams need to re-think everything they have done before. Otherwise, they will just end up using public cloud as a hosting platform for their workloads, aka known as “lift and shift.”
Ireland’s ‘distinctive’ data centre market makes it top for Europe, says new report
If you’re looking for a place to put your data, then Ireland may be the best port of call, according to a new report from BroadGroup.
The report, issued this morning, argued the Emerald Isle’s status in the EU, as well as its ‘low corporate tax environment’, make it an attractive proposition. Connectivity is also a strong point, with the first direct submarine cable system from Ireland to France – bypassing the UK – expected to be launched in 2019.
“Active government support for inward investment by hyperscales from companies such as Amazon and Microsoft has resulted in the construction of massive facilities around Dublin,” the company notes. “Even now authorities are seeking to identify potential land banks for new large scale data centre facilities in Ireland, which indicates that the supply of more space will continue to enter the market.”
While Amazon and Microsoft have facilities in Dublin, another company looking to move business over to Ireland is Apple. According to Silicon Republic, a court decision on the €850 million Apple data centre looking to be built in Athenry is expected later this week having been postponed due to a shortage of judges.
BroadGroup suggests that Dublin is somewhat overlooked in terms of clout compared with its European neighbours. The city is currently the seventh largest market by third party metres squared space in Europe, but the presence of webscales should account for Dublin to be re-classified as a tier 1 hub, alongside London, Paris, Amsterdam, and Frankfurt.
You can read the full report here (paid).
[video] Enterprise Cloud Solutions with @Tintri | @CloudExpo #IaaS #Cloud #DevOps
«Tintri focuses on the Ops side of the DevOps, which basically is pushing more and more of the accessibility of the infrastructure to the developers and trying to get behind the scenes,» explained Dhiraj Sehgal of Tintri in this SYS-CON.tv interview at 20th Cloud Expo, held June 6-8, 2017, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY.
The Shifting Needs of Cloud-Era End Users
Click here to download our recent webinar:
How the Cloud Is Killing Traditional Help Desk
As we enter the cloud era, most people are focused on what, where, and why when it comes to cloud. They want to know; how do I architect it? How do I migrate to it? And how do I operate it? Once the transition is made, the question is then, how does it affect how I support my users? Also, what is the impact to my Help Desk team? Given a cloud framework, operations people need to be considered differently. Their positions were created to deal with issues IT already knew about. However, cloud changes the game. Since so much of the cloud is hidden, you can’t just refer to a guidebook to get some help, thus you do lose some sense of control. For example, if Office 365 rolls out a new update, when users connect it will look different because it updates automatically, and the users might not know what to do.
The issue is that today the traditional structured tiers of Help Desk aren’t the same. The old model won’t work anymore. In a traditional help desk model, Tier 1 handles the simpler questions while Tier 2 handles the more difficult, escalated challenges. But with the cloud, if the Help Desk cannot solve the issue, then they become the user and must open a ticket with the vendor or cloud provider, thus making coordination more difficult and less efficient.
That is not to say that transitioning to the cloud doesn’t have many perks and can greatly contribute to efficiency. But it’s crucial to plan for the impact that your company’s cloud strategy will have on your Help Desk and end user support. There are a variety of variables that must be considered when moving to the cloud, including more training, re-architecting the way Help Desk is built, and turning it into a Help Hub. Help Desk is changing drastically: it is the hub for communications and you need to be able to provide that conduit to other, additional help avenues and take incident ownership to maximize your users’ productivity. During our recent webinar, How the Cloud Is Killing Traditional Help Desk, we dove deeper into this and provided you with the questions that should be asked and the solutions to common cloud-era Help Desk challenges.
[video] Getting Public Cloud Benefits | @CloudExpo @Cloudistics #AI #Cloud #DataCenter
You know you need the cloud, but you’re hesitant to simply dump everything at Amazon since you know that not all workloads are suitable for cloud. You know that you want the kind of ease of use and scalability that you get with public cloud, but your applications are architected in a way that makes the public cloud a non-starter. You’re looking at private cloud solutions based on hyperconverged infrastructure, but you’re concerned with the limits inherent in those technologies.
Crisis Response Using Cloud Computing | @CloudExpo #ML #IoT #M2M #Cloud #FedRAMP
Cloud computing is more than servers and storage. In a crisis situation it can actually be a lifesaver. BlackBerry, in fact, has just become the first cloud-based crisis communication service to receive a Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP) authorization from the United States Government for its AtHoc Alert and AtHoc Connect services. If you’re not familiar with FedRAMP, it is a US government-wide program that provides a standardized approach to security assessment, authorization, and continuous monitoring for cloud products and services. The Blackberry certification was sponsored by the US Federal Aviation Administration.
[video] Composable Infrastructure with @HTBase | @CloudExpo #IaaS #Cloud
«We focus on composable infrastructure. Composable infrastructure has been named by companies like Gartner as the evolution of the IT infrastructure where everything is now driven by software,» explained Bruno Andrade, CEO and Founder of HTBase, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at 20th Cloud Expo, held June 6-8, 2017, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY.
[video] The Age of Digital Transformation | @CloudExpo @Catchpoint #WebPerf #AI #DX #DevOps
The current age of digital transformation means that IT organizations must adapt their toolset to cover all digital experiences, beyond just the end users’. Today’s businesses can no longer focus solely on the digital interactions they manage with employees or customers; they must now contend with non-traditional factors. Whether it’s the power of brand to make or break a company, the need to monitor across all locations 24/7, or the ability to proactively resolve issues, companies must adapt to the new world.
Do you have the data agility your business needs?
Data is the new battleground. For companies, the situation is clear – their future depends on how quickly and efficiently they can turn data into accurate insights. This challenge has put immense pressure on CIOs to not only manage ever-growing data volumes, sources, and types, but to also support more and more data users as well as new and increasingly complex use cases.
Fortunately, CIOs can look for support in their plight from unprecedented levels of technological innovation. New cloud platforms, new databases like Apache Hadoop, and real-time data processing are just some of the modern data capabilities at their disposal. However, innovation is occurring so quickly and changes are so profound that it is impossible for most companies to keep pace, let alone leverage those factors for a competitive advantage.
The challenge CIOs face today is acute, with rapidly advancing platforms and technology, and more sources to connect and users to support than ever before
It’s clear that data infrastructures today can’t be static if they are to keep pace with the data requirements of the business. Today’s competitive environment requires adaptive and scalable infrastructures able to solve today’s challenges and address tomorrow’s needs. After all, the speed with which you process and analyse data may be the difference between winning and losing the next customer. This is significantly more important today than 10 or 15 years ago, since companies used to make a strategic database choice once and keep running it for a decade or two. Now we see companies updating their data platform choices far more frequently to keep up.
If companies are to thrive in a data-driven economy, they can’t afford to be handcuffed to ‘old’ technologies; they need the flexibility and agility to move at a moment’s notice to the latest market innovations. However, it’s not enough for companies to simply be technology agnostic; they also need to be in a position to re-use data projects, transformations, and routines as they move between platforms and technologies.
How can your company meet the agility imperative? To start, let’s consider the cloud question.
Many clouds and constituencies
In a data-driven enterprise, the needs of everyone – from developers and data analysts to non-technical business users – must be considered when selecting IaaS solutions. For example, application developers who use tools such as Microsoft Visual Studio and .NET will likely have a preference for the integration efficiencies of Microsoft Azure.
Data scientists may want to leverage the Google Cloud Platform for the advanced machine learning capability it supports, while other team members may have a preference for the breadth of the AWS offering. In a decentralised world where it’s easy to spin up solutions in the cloud, different groups will often make independent decisions that make sense for them. The IT team is then saddled with the task of managing problems in the multi-cloud world they inherited – problems that often grow larger than the initial teams expected.
One way to meet a variety of stakeholders’ needs and embrace the latest technology is to plan a multi-cloud environment by design, creating a modern data architecture that is capable of serving the broadest possible range of users. This approach can safeguard you from vendor lock-in, and far more importantly, ensure you won’t get locked out of leveraging the unique strengths and future innovations of each cloud provider as they continue to evolve at a breakneck pace in the years to come.
Integration approaches for data agility
Once perhaps considered a tactical tool, today the right integration solution is an essential and strategic component of a modern data architecture, helping to streamline and maximise data use throughout the business.
Your data integration software choice should not only support data processing “anywhere” (on multi-cloud, on-premise, and hybrid deployments) but also enable you to embrace the latest technology innovations, and the growing range of data use cases and users you need to serve.
Hand coding
I said “data integration software” as I simply don’t believe that a modern data architecture can be supported by hand-coded integration alone. While custom code may make sense for targeted, simple projects that don’t require a lot of maintenance, it’s not sustainable for an entire modern data architecture strategy.
Hand coding is simply too time-consuming and expensive, requiring high-paid specialists and high ongoing maintenance costs. Moreover, hand-coded projects are tied to the specific platform they were coded to, and often even a particular version of that platform, which then locks the solution to that vendor and technology snapshot. In a continually accelerating technology environment, that’s a disastrous strategic choice. Also, hand coding requires developers to make every change, which limits the organisation’s ability to solve the varied and evolving needs of a widely-distributed group of data consumers. And finally, it can’t leverage metadata to address security, compliance, and re-use.
Traditional ETL tools
Traditional ETL tools are an improvement over hand-coding, giving you the ability to be platform agnostic, use lower skilled resources and reduce maintenance costs. However, the major drawback with traditional ETL tools is that they require proprietary runtime engines that limit users to the performance, scale, and feature set the engines were initially designed to address.
Almost invariably, they can’t process real-time streaming data, and they can’t leverage the full native processing power and scale of next-generation data platforms, which have enormous amounts of industry-wide investment continually improving their capabilities. After all, it’s not simply about having the flexibility to connect to a range of platforms and technologies – the key is to leverage the best each has to offer. Moreover, proprietary run-time technologies typically require software to be deployed on every node, which dramatically increases deployment and ongoing management complexity.
Importantly, this proprietary software requirement also makes it impossible to take advantage of the spin up and spin down abilities of the cloud, which is critical to realising the cloud’s potential elasticity, agility and cost savings benefits. Traditional ETL tools simply can’t keep up with the pace of business or market innovation and therefore prevent, rather than enable digital business success.
Agile data fabric
What’s required for the digital era is scalable integration software built for modern data environments, users, styles, and workflow – from batch and bulk to IoT data streams and real-time capabilities – in other words, an agile data fabric.
The software should be able to integrate data from the cloud and execute both in the cloud and on-premises. To serve the increasing business need for greater data agility and adaptability, integration software should be optimised to work natively on all platforms and offer a unified and cohesive set of integration capabilities (i.e. data and application integration, metadata management, governance and data quality).
In a data-driven enterprise, the needs of everyone – from developers and data analysts to non-technical users – must be considered when selecting IaaS solutions
This will allow organisations to remain platform agnostic, yet be in a position to take full advantage of each platforms’ native capabilities (cloud or otherwise) and data technology. All the work executed for one technology should be easily transferable to the next, providing the organisation with economies of skills and scale.
The other critical capability you should look for in an Agile Data Fabric is self-service data management. Moving from a top-down, centrally controlled data management model to one that is fully distributed is the only way to accelerate and scale organisation-wide trustworthy insight. If data is to inform decisions for your entire organisation, then IT, data analysts and line of business users all have to be active, tightly coordinated participants in data integration, preparation, analytics, and stewardship. Of course, the move to self-service can result in chaos if not accompanied by appropriate controls, so these capabilities need to be tightly coupled with data governance functions that provide controls for empowering decision makers without putting data at risk and undermining compliance.
The challenge CIOs face today is acute – with rapidly advancing platforms and technology, and more sources to connect and users to support than ever before. Meeting these new and ever-evolving data demands requires that companies create a data infrastructure that is agile enough to keep pace with the market and the needs of the organisation.
Read more: How IaaS cuts time for app deployment and maintenance costs while improving innovation