Microsoft® Office for Windows® is the gold standard for a productivity suite, and the spreadsheet in that suite, Excel, is the gold standard of spreadsheet applications. So, it is not surprising that many Parallels Desktop users turn to Excel® for their spreadsheet needs, and getting the best performance out of Excel is important to them. […]
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As cloud adoption continues to transform business, today’s global enterprises are challenged with managing a growing amount of information living outside of the data center. The rapid adoption of IoT and increasingly mobile workforce are exacerbating the problem. Ensuring secure data sharing and efficient backup poses capacity and bandwidth considerations as well as policy and regulatory compliance issues.
SYS-CON Events announced today that Super Micro Computer, Inc., a global leader in compute, storage and networking technologies, will exhibit at SYS-CON’s 20th International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on June 6-8, 2017, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY.
Supermicro (NASDAQ: SMCI), the leading innovator in high-performance, high-efficiency server technology, is a premier provider of advanced server Building Block Solutions® for Data Center, Cloud Computing, Enterprise IT, Hadoop/Big Data, HPC and Embedded Systems worldwide. Supermicro is committed to protecting the environment through its “We Keep IT Green®” initiative and provides customers with the most energy-efficient, environmentally friendly solutions available on the market.
While some vendors scramble to create and sell you a fancy solution for monitoring your spanking new Amazon Lambdas, hear how you can do it on the cheap using just built-in Java APIs yourself. By exploiting a little-known fact that Lambdas aren’t exactly single threaded, you can effectively identify hot spots in your serverless code.
In his session at 20th Cloud Expo, David Martin, Principal Product Owner at CA Technologies, will give a live demonstration and code walkthrough, showing how to overcome the challenges of monitoring S3 and RDS. This presentation will provide an overview of necessary Amazon Lambda concepts and discuss how to integrate the monitoring data with other tools.
DevOps is often described as a combination of technology and culture. Without both, DevOps isn’t complete. However, applying the culture to outdated technology is a recipe for disaster; as response times grow and connections between teams are delayed by technology, the culture will die. A Nutanix Enterprise Cloud has many benefits that provide the needed base for a true DevOps paradigm.
SYS-CON Events announced today that IBM has been named “Diamond Sponsor” of SYS-CON’s 20th Cloud Expo, which will take place on June 6-8, 2017 at the Javits Center in New York, New York and and October 31-November 2 in Silicon Valley.
SYS-CON Events announced today that T-Mobile will exhibit at SYS-CON’s 20th International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on June 6-8, 2017, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY. As America’s Un-carrier, T-Mobile US, Inc., is redefining the way consumers and businesses buy wireless services through leading product and service innovation. The Company’s advanced nationwide 4G LTE network delivers outstanding wireless experiences to 67.4 million customers who are unwilling to compromise on quality and value.
SYS-CON Events announced today that CA Technologies has been named “Platinum Sponsor” of SYS-CON’s 20th International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on June 6-8, 2017, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY, and the 21st International Cloud Expo®, which will take place October 31-November 2, 2017, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA. CA Technologies helps customers succeed in a future where every business – from apparel to energy – is being rewritten by software. From planning to development to management to security, CA creates software that fuels transformation for companies in the application economy.
In his keynote at 19th Cloud Expo, Sheng Liang, co-founder and CEO of Rancher Labs, discussed the technological advances and new business opportunities created by the rapid adoption of containers. With the success of Amazon Web Services (AWS) and various open source technologies used to build private clouds, cloud computing has become an essential component of IT strategy. However, users continue to face challenges in implementing clouds, as older technologies evolve and newer ones like Docker containers gain prominence. He explored these challenges and how to address them, while considering how containers will influence the direction of cloud computing.
Research from a recent Gartner study predicts that by 2019, “more than 30 percent of the 100 largest vendors’ new software investments will have shifted from cloud-first to cloud-only”. The study considers the idea that “cloud-first, and even cloud-only is replacing the no-cloud attitude” that has dominated corporations in recent years. With there being no preference between public or private cloud, it indicates that organisations are moving in the direction of a hybrid cloud future.
This is in line with conversations we have every day with organisations in the UK, as most indicate that their three-year roadmap includes building a hybrid environment. While “on-premises” environments will not go away completely, there is significant agility and cost savings associated with introducing a hybrid approach in delivering IT resources to key applications and development services.
Everyone throws around the term hybrid cloud, but what does it really mean?
Hybrid cloud is a combination of on-premises and off-premises (or cloud based) IT infrastructure platforms. Enabling an organisation to run applications on multiple platforms increases efficiency and choice, as no one platform is right for everything. A hybrid approach allows an organisation to choose the right platform for the right workload, for the right price. This agility speeds up ‘time to market’ for many organisations, and improves the capabilities to service employees and customers.
This shift is, in some ways, a no brainer in the medium term, however it is not without challenges and risks. It’s difficult for organisations used to ‘on premises’ single vendor or single platform architectures to build, manage and protect hybrid cloud environments. While introducing multiple platforms drives efficiency and choice, it also drives complexity and risk for organisations ill prepared to address this shift in strategy correctly. Given these concerns, if you are considering a move towards a hybrid cloud environment, what should you consider and how do you get there?
There are advantages to choosing a hybrid cloud environment from an efficiency standpoint. Lower costs, pay as you go models, and access to a wide breadth of services summarise some of the broad positive outcomes. These outcomes enable businesses to run tests, build new systems, and adapt faster. Best of all, organisations can be quicker to market.
However, it’s important to consider that the changes required to enable a hybrid cloud can be risky and time consuming, so you may need a different group of tools to protect the environments that are created. To address and avoid risk, protection and immediate recovery is key.
Traditional migration and disaster recovery methods that are based on individual pieces of hardware can be disruptive to the production systems they protect and are no longer adequate in the hybrid cloud or multi-platform world. These traditional replication, migration and recovery tools are by design incapable of protecting applications and environments that may span multiple ‘on-premises’ and cloud platforms.
It’s no surprise that traditional ways of protecting applications in “on-premises-only” environments won’t suffice in the hybrid cloud world. Thus, we believe there are important things to consider when planning the shift towards a hybrid cloud environment that will reduce the risk and prevent environmental exposure and complexity.
Creating a successful hybrid cloud environment in three steps:
Planning: Planning is significantly easier if your environment has a protection, mobility, and testing suite or platform that is agnostic to the infrastructure you’re running your IT on. By design, you can make changes to which platforms you use (on-premises and/or cloud based) with no protection dependencies tied to that individual on-premises or cloud platform. Furthermore, an agnostic platform allows you to avoid introducing organisational risk when making changes, thus providing the agility desired when deciding to move to a hybrid cloud IT environment in the first place.
Testing: Any changes to your environment, whether internal on-premises changes or more complex shifts to cloud based resources, will carry organisational risk. Thus, testing whether changes will be executed smoothly and successfully is the bedrock of any serious hybrid-cloud strategy. Downtime, data loss, and the costs associated with infrastructure changes can be significant risks an organisation moving to hybrid cloud needs to consider. A successful hybrid cloud environment can be enabled by, and will continue to allow for testing capabilities that can assess whether the applications absorbing infrastructure or platform change will remain available through and after those changes occur.
Future proofing: When introducing new platforms into your IT environment, future proofing your decisions is critical. Questions such as ‘can we protect our applications once they are moved to a new private/hybrid/public cloud platform?’ and ‘if this new platform doesn’t meet our expectations, can we move again easily?’ are very important considerations to think through before any changes are actually made.
There are numerous advantages to having a hybrid cloud. If you do your due diligence and take the right steps to get there, you’ll find the rewards can be significant from both a cost as well as efficiency standpoint.