The Parallels team will present an exclusive showcase of Parallels Mac Management for Microsoft SCCM at the Midwest Management Summit (MMS) 2017. This highly engaging technology summit will take place in Minneapolis, MN, from May 15–18. Purposely capped at just 750 attendees, the event was created to help foster the community that is lost in […]
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Microsoft recently shipped the Creators Update with dozens of exciting new features and capabilities! To ensure users get the best experience, Microsoft has announced its commitment to scheduled feature releases for Windows 10, Office 365 ProPlus, and System Center Configuration Manager. The next major release will be available for users as early as this upcoming […]
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This month in our Microsoft update, Practice Director, David Barter discusses the new Citrix and Microsoft service, Citrix XenApp Essentials. This service helps Azure RemoteApp customers simplify management and app provisioning, improve monitoring, and strengthen security. Another major Microsoft announcement this April is Microsoft Teams, a chat-based workspace in Office 365 that helps users stay on task and efficiently collaborate. Available in 181 countries and in 18 languages, this tool is sure to become a serious competitor to Slack.
NHK, Japan Broadcasting, will feature the upcoming @ThingsExpo Silicon Valley in a special ‘Internet of Things’ and smart technology documentary that will be filmed on the expo floor between November 3 to 5, 2015, in Santa Clara. NHK is the sole public TV network in Japan equivalent to the BBC in the UK and the largest in Asia with many award-winning science and technology programs. Japanese TV is producing a documentary about IoT and Smart technology and will be covering @ThingsExpo Silicon Valley. The program, to be aired during the peak viewership season of the year, will have a major impact on the industry in Japan. The film’s director is writing a scenario to fit in the story in the next few days will be turned in to the network.
All organizations that did not originate this moment have a pre-existing culture as well as legacy technology and processes that can be more or less amenable to DevOps implementation. That organizational culture is influenced by the personalities and management styles of Executive Management, the wider culture in which the organization is situated, and the personalities of key team members at all levels of the organization. This culture and entrenched interests usually throw a wrench in the works because of misaligned incentives.
Skyhigh Networks has announced that it has entered into an agreement with CIS Cybermarket, the government purchasing cooperative that serves the local, state and tribal governments.
Central Internet Security (CIS) Cybermarket, previously known as the CIS Trusted Purchasing Alliance, makes the most of the purchasing power of the public sector to help them navigate the world of cybersecurity. It specifically collaborates with leading cybersecurity companies to help the public sector take advantage of the advancements made in technology.
This is big news both in government tech and cloud world because this is the first time that CIS Cybermarket has offered the services of a cloud service broker to its members.
In general, security is a major concern for government departments because they deal with sensitive information such as Social Security Numbers (SSN), date of birth and financial details that can bring heavy loss if it falls in the wrong hands.
Moreover, there are still many apprehensions when it comes to storing sensitive information in the cloud, despite all the advancements made in the field of cloud security. Much of these apprehensions can be attributed to the number of hacking incidents that have taken place in the near past as well as lack of knowledge on the processes in place to curb these malpractices.
To assuage these fears, security assurances are important as they give a fair amount of confidence and surety about data safety. In this case, many members of CIS Cybermarket want to move their operations to the cloud, but are wary of the pitfalls. This is why Skyhigh Networks was chosen to provide the much-needed assurance about data safety.
To give you a small brief, Skyhigh Networks is a cloud access security broker that helps organizations to enforce security, compliance and governance policies across all its data points and cloud services, regardless of the device and number of users. In many ways, this cloud-hosted software provider acts as a control point to ensure continuous visibility, so companies can always stay on top of their data and applications. Such a software alleviates many fears and even gives assurance about cloud security.
So, this brings up the next question, why Skyhigh Networks and why not some other cloud access security broker?
One of the primary reasons is that Skyhigh Networks is the only cloud access service broker to be authorized through the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program. This program is used by federal agencies to assess cloud vendors and to make the right choices based on their needs. Almost all state and local governments use this program as a standard for buying all kinds of cloud services.
Besides this authorization, Skyhigh also has the experience and expertise needed to guide members through the enforcement process across all their SaaS, PaaS and IaaS platforms.
This partnership, the first of its kind, is expected to bolster the relationship between public and private sector, particularly in the cloud industry. Let’s hope that this addresses many of the fears and insecurities that plague the public sector when it comes to cloud adoption.
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A common development challenge is accurately scoping the amount of effort required when creating new applications. This can occur when an application’s requirements are first being designed, or even before. Since one of the most frequently-overlooked capabilities of service virtualization is the ability to rapidly prototype and test the impact of new services directly from initial user stories, I’m going to address that today.
At the very beginning of an application’s lifecycle, there comes a time when the team meets to discuss what the code should do. Often, there are many questions surrounding the feasibility of a new application, and the burden falls on the developer to indicate whether something is possible and to scope the level of effort required.
Opinion Imagine a business where the product keeps getting better and better, like storage space and video quality, but the prices keep falling steadily as the product continues to improve. It’s happening in cloud computing – and this ‘race to zero’ has people in the industry deeply worried.
The current leader, Amazon Web Services (AWS), slashed their prices an astounding 44 times in the past six years. Amazon’s strategy, it seems, is more of a low cost, high volume model. This strategy seems to be working according to research company Gartner, who reported that AWS stores twice as much customer data as the next seven leading public cloud companies. AWS profits in 2016 grew over 120% and sales grew over 60%, extinguishing any assumptions that AWS was a loss leader product for Amazon as a whole.
Amazon is betting at such a low cost, enterprise businesses will treat cloud services like you treat products at Walmart. With such low prices on products, you’ll keep adding more to your cart. The other leading cloud providers, like Microsoft and Google, are willing to keep up and match Amazon’s prices, with Gartner analyst Raj Bala describing it as aggressive, even ‘punitive’.
Aaron Levie, CEO of Box, has predicted that storage will be free and unlimited in the future. If the current race to lower prices continues, it looks as if Levie’s prediction will soon come to pass. This means, however, that cloud companies have to build in other functionality besides storage alone. From security improvements to converged storage where data storage is combined with data computing, cloud companies are looking for related and integrated services they can charge for.
In the race to differentiate, Microsoft rolled out a hybrid cloud which integrates into its subscription based Office 365 program in April 2016. Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s CEO, explained how this integration works. “If a certain calculation needs massive resources, the transaction can be handed off to its cloud products to provide a sort of turbo charge,” he said. This strategy might be very successful, since many people already use Office at work and the ease of integration might be the incentive for companies to choose Azure over AWS.
Google’s Cloud Platform has strengths with its big data analytics capability, but also has some restraints as it is unable to integrate with existing data platforms, making it more difficult for late adopters to convert to the service. As Kurt Marko explains, it can be a ‘poor choice for cloud laggards and organisations looking for a place to offload legacy virtual infrastructure and applications’.
In March this year, IBM announced it was rolling out more cloud offerings in an effort to compete with AWS and to make the point that storage is not the aspect of the cloud which enterprises really need. One study predicts 85% of enterprise businesses will move to multi-cloud architectures by 2018. IBM’s new products utilise Watson to help clients manage and leverage data stored between multiple clouds.
One analyst, Rodney Nelson at Morningstar Inc., questioned how effective IBM’s rollout would be, noting “the major cloud vendors are flooding the market with new features on a consistent basis…all have moderate to major leads on IBM in that regard.” IBM’s most competitive idea may be moving focus away from offering cloud services and moving towards offering services that will integrate with all cloud providers.
The intensely competitive cloud computing environment is volatile, with new companies throwing their proverbial hat in the ring, such as the Chinese company Alibaba. It’s also pushing out current competitors, with telecom companies like Verizon and AT&T losing market share due to lack of expensive yet impactful infrastructure investment and innovations.
There are so many facets which will affect the final outcome of the cloud computing industry. From the businesses who are quickly trying to implement and then harness the cloud’s potential, there are CIOs who are actually choosing the cloud provider, business people who are learning how to use big data and cloud computing for business intelligence, to companies who are fighting for the biggest piece of the pie and are investing millions to stay competitive. It’s impossible to predict what the final outcome will be.
Five years ago development was seen as a dead-end career, now it’s anything but – with an explosion in mobile and IoT initiatives increasing the demand for skilled engineers. But apart from having a ready supply of great coders, what constitutes true ‘DevOps Royalty’? It’ll be the ability to craft resilient architectures, supportability, security everywhere across the software lifecycle. In his keynote at @DevOpsSummit at 20th Cloud Expo, Jeffrey Scheaffer, GM and SVP, Continuous Delivery Business Unit at CA Technologies, will share his vision about the true ‘DevOps Royalty’ and how it will take a new breed of digital cloud craftsman, architecting new platforms with a new set of tools to achieve it. He will also present a number of important insights and findings from a recent cloud and DevOps study – outlining the synergies high performance teams are exploiting to gain significant business advantage.