(c)iStock.com/mediaphotos

The forecast for the digital era is cloudy all over. According to a recent IDC FutureScape on cloud market predictions, 50% of IT spending and 60% of IT infrastructure spending will be cloud based by 2018. Between 60% and 70% of all software, services and technology spending will be on the cloud by 2020. 

IDC also forecast that 65% of organisations’ IT assets will be offsite, in co-located, hosting and cloud data centers by 2018. One-third of IT staff will be working at third-party service providers.

All of this leads to an industrywide shortage of cloud skills. Global Knowledge in 2015 found that one out of five decision-makers was having difficulty finding talent with the skills for cloud initiatives, while cloud computing jobs were one of the highest paying, with a mean salary of $102,000.

In its 2016 IT industry outlook, CompTIA noted the IDC prediction that the cloud would create 7 million jobs between 2013 and 2015. The trade group noted that many of these jobs most likely already existed but were reengineered with a greater cloud focus.

In short, there is a real opportunity for career advancement and success for network and data centre professionals with the right training and certifications. For those weighing a career in IT, cloud skills are in high demand and worth pursuing.

Cloud versus cloud

There are public clouds, private clouds, and hybrid clouds; and there is also no agreement on which type of cloud is best. That depends entirely on each organisation along with the type of data it generates and uses.

Organisations using the public cloud rely on the resources of third-party service providers for cloud storage or online accounting software. The biggest argument in its favour is cost. Organisations can rent public cloud services for monthly or annual fees and it’s up to the provider to keep them running, accessible and updated.

This is known as software as a service (SaaS). Some providers are going further to offer platform as a service (PaaS) and infrastructure as a service (IaaS). PaaS enables an application to run one different infrastructures. IaaS makes an entire infrastructure available as a rentable service.

The public cloud has issues, however. One of them is security and another is accessibility. Data on the public cloud may not be as secure as it should be, especially if it is sensitive financial or health information that is regulated. Also, if the internet is down, then the data and the application may not be available when the organisation needs them.

For these reasons, many organisations are setting up and maintaining their own private clouds. Organisations use private clouds to make their data more secure and to arrange them the way they prefer. They are not interested in selling SaaS but want the benefits of the cloud. The downside is the expense, which can be very big, and the need to hire scarce IT professionals with cloud expertise.

The hybrid cloud blends both approaches. Organisations keep sensitive data more secure on an internally managed private cloud. They then use the public cloud when needed, like in peak demand periods, when individual applications can be sent to the public cloud. Hybrids are also helpful during rough weather, scheduled maintenance or rolling brownouts or blackouts. IDC predicts that 80% of enterprise IT organisations will commit to the hybrid cloud by 2017.

High-demand cloud skills

No matter what type of cloud organisations ultimately choose, they will need IT professionals with certain cloud skills. Some of the fundamental skills are cloud migration and cloud security.

Cloud skills training and certification courses should combine learning conceptual knowledge with developing hands-on skills. Among the topics covered should be:

• Private and hybrid cloud design
• Cloud security design
• Cloud infrastructure launch
• ACI and APIC automation
• Private and hybrid IaaS provisioning
• Application provisioning and lifecycle management
• Cloud systems management

Although many companies have already moved to the cloud, many more are not there yet. They need IT professionals who have a solid grounding in the varying models for clouds. They also need to know how to map the organisation’s current IT infrastructure, including its applications and workloads on existing servers, and how to send all of what they have mapped to a cloud equivalent. The larger the organisation, the more complicated this becomes.

Cloud security is another major skill for IT professionals. Almost every day brings news of yet more data breaches. How to keep data secure, how to build and maintain secure platforms, and securing cloud infrastructure are all high-demand skills.

Additional top cloud skills cover SaaS, PaaS and IaaS. Organizations need IT professionals with knowhow to develop and work with cloud applications. The same applies to cloud platforms and infrastructures. This means they should be fluent cloud programming languages like Python, Perl and Ruby along with traditional languages like .NET, Java and PHP. Linux skills are also in high demand.

So is cloud database expertise. The hyper-connected Internet of Things generates quintillions of bytes of data daily. Organisations want most to uncover insights and new markets from this tsunami of data, and they need IT professionals with cloud database querying skills. SQL along with open source languages like MySQL, Hadoop or Mongo DB are worth learning.

Looking ahead

With cloud skills and the certifications, IT professionals can demonstrate that they can help an IT department drive cloud deployments in a consistent and centralised manner. They become more valuable to any organisations because they know how to help to bring about desired business outcomes, such as greater business agility and lower IT architecture spending.

Read more: The top five in-demand cloud skills for 2016 and beyond

(c)iStock.com/mediaphotos

The forecast for the digital era is cloudy all over. According to a recent IDC FutureScape on cloud market predictions, 50% of IT spending and 60% of IT infrastructure spending will be cloud based by 2018. Between 60% and 70% of all software, services and technology spending will be on the cloud by 2020. 

IDC also forecast that 65% of organisations’ IT assets will be offsite, in co-located, hosting and cloud data centers by 2018. One-third of IT staff will be working at third-party service providers.

All of this leads to an industrywide shortage of cloud skills. Global Knowledge in 2015 found that one out of five decision-makers was having difficulty finding talent with the skills for cloud initiatives, while cloud computing jobs were one of the highest paying, with a mean salary of $102,000.

In its 2016 IT industry outlook, CompTIA noted the IDC prediction that the cloud would create 7 million jobs between 2013 and 2015. The trade group noted that many of these jobs most likely already existed but were reengineered with a greater cloud focus.

In short, there is a real opportunity for career advancement and success for network and data centre professionals with the right training and certifications. For those weighing a career in IT, cloud skills are in high demand and worth pursuing.

Cloud versus cloud

There are public clouds, private clouds, and hybrid clouds; and there is also no agreement on which type of cloud is best. That depends entirely on each organisation along with the type of data it generates and uses.

Organisations using the public cloud rely on the resources of third-party service providers for cloud storage or online accounting software. The biggest argument in its favour is cost. Organisations can rent public cloud services for monthly or annual fees and it’s up to the provider to keep them running, accessible and updated.

This is known as software as a service (SaaS). Some providers are going further to offer platform as a service (PaaS) and infrastructure as a service (IaaS). PaaS enables an application to run one different infrastructures. IaaS makes an entire infrastructure available as a rentable service.

The public cloud has issues, however. One of them is security and another is accessibility. Data on the public cloud may not be as secure as it should be, especially if it is sensitive financial or health information that is regulated. Also, if the internet is down, then the data and the application may not be available when the organisation needs them.

For these reasons, many organisations are setting up and maintaining their own private clouds. Organisations use private clouds to make their data more secure and to arrange them the way they prefer. They are not interested in selling SaaS but want the benefits of the cloud. The downside is the expense, which can be very big, and the need to hire scarce IT professionals with cloud expertise.

The hybrid cloud blends both approaches. Organisations keep sensitive data more secure on an internally managed private cloud. They then use the public cloud when needed, like in peak demand periods, when individual applications can be sent to the public cloud. Hybrids are also helpful during rough weather, scheduled maintenance or rolling brownouts or blackouts. IDC predicts that 80% of enterprise IT organisations will commit to the hybrid cloud by 2017.

High-demand cloud skills

No matter what type of cloud organisations ultimately choose, they will need IT professionals with certain cloud skills. Some of the fundamental skills are cloud migration and cloud security.

Cloud skills training and certification courses should combine learning conceptual knowledge with developing hands-on skills. Among the topics covered should be:

• Private and hybrid cloud design
• Cloud security design
• Cloud infrastructure launch
• ACI and APIC automation
• Private and hybrid IaaS provisioning
• Application provisioning and lifecycle management
• Cloud systems management

Although many companies have already moved to the cloud, many more are not there yet. They need IT professionals who have a solid grounding in the varying models for clouds. They also need to know how to map the organisation’s current IT infrastructure, including its applications and workloads on existing servers, and how to send all of what they have mapped to a cloud equivalent. The larger the organisation, the more complicated this becomes.

Cloud security is another major skill for IT professionals. Almost every day brings news of yet more data breaches. How to keep data secure, how to build and maintain secure platforms, and securing cloud infrastructure are all high-demand skills.

Additional top cloud skills cover SaaS, PaaS and IaaS. Organizations need IT professionals with knowhow to develop and work with cloud applications. The same applies to cloud platforms and infrastructures. This means they should be fluent cloud programming languages like Python, Perl and Ruby along with traditional languages like .NET, Java and PHP. Linux skills are also in high demand.

So is cloud database expertise. The hyper-connected Internet of Things generates quintillions of bytes of data daily. Organisations want most to uncover insights and new markets from this tsunami of data, and they need IT professionals with cloud database querying skills. SQL along with open source languages like MySQL, Hadoop or Mongo DB are worth learning.

Looking ahead

With cloud skills and the certifications, IT professionals can demonstrate that they can help an IT department drive cloud deployments in a consistent and centralised manner. They become more valuable to any organisations because they know how to help to bring about desired business outcomes, such as greater business agility and lower IT architecture spending.

Read more: The top five in-demand cloud skills for 2016 and beyond

SYS-CON Events announced today that Conference Guru has been named “Media 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.
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.

read more

(c)iStock.com/DrAfter123

“We changed our business model to align with cloud,” explains Nick McNamara, VP sales Europe at connectivity provider Eseye.

The company has doubled down on both the Internet of Things (IoT) and Amazon Web Services (AWS) strategically, as McNamara, speaking at the IoT Tech Expo event last week, explains. “All connectivity providers, whether you’re an MNO, an MVNO, or like us a smart MNO, sell megabytes per month,” he says. “We no longer sell megabytes per month, we sell messages per month.

“The guy who’s building, or has built, his web application inside Amazon, will know how many messages per month his application consumes,” he adds. “We ask him that, he gives us an answer, and he buys enough messages which gives him global security connectivity within that price – it’s very easy to budget with.”

Among the deals Eseye has forged with AWS include achieving AWS IoT competency status, as well as a new product which the company describes as a ‘breakthrough’ in IoT security, called AnyNet.

Here’s how it works; once the factory is connected to the AWS Cloud Console, which triggers the creation of a certificate and policy, AWS sends a unique certificate and request to provision the SIM to Eseye, Eseye sends the certificate to the AnyNet Secure SIM, and the device is provisioned, certified and secured by the manufacturer. Thus secured, it can go out into the field.

Makes sense? It does to Eseye, who spoke with Amazon last year and found many things in common. “We saw blockage in the high volume deployment of our customers’ projects – we saw blockage in their rollouts,” says McNamara. “In trying to speak to [customers], what they were trying to do to deal with those problems, much of it was to do with security, and some of it was to do with global scale and shape inside their organisations scaling.

“[Amazon] expressed exactly the same pain that we saw inside our customer base, which was ‘we have to get security right somehow’. We can’t provide a silver bullet because everybody’s interpretation of risk is different, everybody’s interpretation of security is different, but we can apply a layer of an onion that looks to help.”

Of the various industry areas in which Eseye plays, two stand out; healthcare and consumer. They are both separate, but they of course both overlap. One customer is Everon Biosciences, which produces a wrist-worn device for patients with Alzheimer’s disease. “In terms of how you build one or either of those, it’s very similar, and in particular the greater majority of healthcare programs – non-invasive, so it’s really about assisted living, or support for the elderly, or assisted mobility – is really a consumer product, but it’s positioned inside healthcare,” says McNamara.

Both of those markets are key to the company’s future, but with Europe as his primary focus, McNamara adds that data sovereignty is key, especially in an IoT universe.

“When we hear stories of chief security officers saying [about] 90% of [their] enterprise scale IoT applications ‘we’ll never allow it to happen, because I don’t have the tools, the infrastructure, the people and processes in place to protect the data’, we understand that entirely,” he says.

“Of course, it’s not like the growth of laptops and the enterprise scale they achieved today, where they bought disk encryption to protect themselves when MPs got drunk on trains, or they had mobile device management when people started to do BYOD in enterprise computing.

“None of those commonalities can be crafted because the greater majority of IoT programs are singularly unique.”

(c)iStock.com/DrAfter123

“We changed our business model to align with cloud,” explains Nick McNamara, VP sales Europe at connectivity provider Eseye.

The company has doubled down on both the Internet of Things (IoT) and Amazon Web Services (AWS) strategically, as McNamara, speaking at the IoT Tech Expo event last week, explains. “All connectivity providers, whether you’re an MNO, an MVNO, or like us a smart MNO, sell megabytes per month,” he says. “We no longer sell megabytes per month, we sell messages per month.

“The guy who’s building, or has built, his web application inside Amazon, will know how many messages per month his application consumes,” he adds. “We ask him that, he gives us an answer, and he buys enough messages which gives him global security connectivity within that price – it’s very easy to budget with.”

Among the deals Eseye has forged with AWS include achieving AWS IoT competency status, as well as a new product which the company describes as a ‘breakthrough’ in IoT security, called AnyNet.

Here’s how it works; once the factory is connected to the AWS Cloud Console, which triggers the creation of a certificate and policy, AWS sends a unique certificate and request to provision the SIM to Eseye, Eseye sends the certificate to the AnyNet Secure SIM, and the device is provisioned, certified and secured by the manufacturer. Thus secured, it can go out into the field.

Makes sense? It does to Eseye, who spoke with Amazon last year and found many things in common. “We saw blockage in the high volume deployment of our customers’ projects – we saw blockage in their rollouts,” says McNamara. “In trying to speak to [customers], what they were trying to do to deal with those problems, much of it was to do with security, and some of it was to do with global scale and shape inside their organisations scaling.

“[Amazon] expressed exactly the same pain that we saw inside our customer base, which was ‘we have to get security right somehow’. We can’t provide a silver bullet because everybody’s interpretation of risk is different, everybody’s interpretation of security is different, but we can apply a layer of an onion that looks to help.”

Of the various industry areas in which Eseye plays, two stand out; healthcare and consumer. They are both separate, but they of course both overlap. One customer is Everon Biosciences, which produces a wrist-worn device for patients with Alzheimer’s disease. “In terms of how you build one or either of those, it’s very similar, and in particular the greater majority of healthcare programs – non-invasive, so it’s really about assisted living, or support for the elderly, or assisted mobility – is really a consumer product, but it’s positioned inside healthcare,” says McNamara.

Both of those markets are key to the company’s future, but with Europe as his primary focus, McNamara adds that data sovereignty is key, especially in an IoT universe.

“When we hear stories of chief security officers saying [about] 90% of [their] enterprise scale IoT applications ‘we’ll never allow it to happen, because I don’t have the tools, the infrastructure, the people and processes in place to protect the data’, we understand that entirely,” he says.

“Of course, it’s not like the growth of laptops and the enterprise scale they achieved today, where they bought disk encryption to protect themselves when MPs got drunk on trains, or they had mobile device management when people started to do BYOD in enterprise computing.

“None of those commonalities can be crafted because the greater majority of IoT programs are singularly unique.”

The U.S. Presidential election is finally over. The protests are winding down, they’ve stopped burning cars in Oakland (for now), and the talks of California succession are waning. But I am struggling to return to “normal” because in this election, truth got hammered. Many candidates treated opinions as “truth” and a large portion of the American public grabbed a hold of these “truths” as gospel. It may have been a good time to be in the “fact checking” business, but I’m not sure how effective even the fact checkers could be given the spontaneous nature of “opinions as facts” being thrown around, not to mention the people who create fake news intentionally.

read more

(c)iStock.com/bestdesigns

Blockchain is the new buzzword on the block; and while many business leaders, managers, developers and IT departments are Googling it and left scratching their heads, others are wising up to it, are realising how brilliant it is, and are recognising the opportunity it’s going to bring and the potential impact it will have.

If we put aside the tech behind it and focus on what it can do, it’s actually capable of disrupting many industries and bringing new innovations not only into finance, but also property, automotive, music, trading and healthcare.

To make it easier to understand what blockchain can bring to businesses, think about how a Google Doc enables people to access and make updates in real time. No need to save over and send new files to all and sundry, as the next time someone opens the doc it will be the most up to date as the file automatically keeps a record of who made which changes and when, as that digital address is native to the cloud, not the local hard drive. Google Docs is to Microsoft Word what blockchain is to a traditional ledger system.

Google Docs is to Microsoft Word what blockchain is to a traditional ledger system

Startups and large corporations are working together to figure out how this ‘shared ledger’ concept can benefit their businesses. And this concept of data retention is at the heart of cloud-based technology.

Cloud technologies are the forerunners to blockchain and developers and designers who are creating new innovations in this space, should keep an eye on blockchain opportunities too. Private blockchain networks can run in secure cloud environments and we have witnessed test collaborations between Google’s cloud services, IBM, Microsoft and Amazon and if successful, these cloud services could play a role in blockchain deployments.

Applying blockchain to business

Let’s take a look at some use cases and how blockchain can be implemented in different industry sectors to speed up processes, guarantee security, trust and transparency and keep accurate records that can be accessed by stakeholders, no matter where they are in the world.

Property: You’re buying a house and want to know when the last repairs and updates were carried out, which companies provided them and when. Blockchain could help homeowners and estate agents keep a record of information relating to a property, which would be centrally located for anyone in the house buying and selling process to access – reducing hours of paper pushing and phone calls and create transparent information on the status and maintenance of the house before putting in an offer.

Automotive: In a similar way to housing, tracking the value of second hand vehicles through blockchain would make purchases a lot easier for buyers and traders. Information on the car’s mileage, services, and driving history would be accurate, and if the car was ever written off the information could be accessed digitally to salvage the new gearbox that was installed only two months ago.

Music: There has already been massive disruption in the music industry but in the age of streaming services, blockchain could show musicians, creators, fans, marketers and labels the data and dialogue involved in listening to their songs and albums. Artists would be much closer to their fans and over time they could influence and reward them. A truly democratic and commercially viable way of promoting music. Thanks to blockchain.

Banking: Most big banks have a headline piece highlighting how they are working with blockchain especially within security. The technology promotes security and trust and allows all parties to work with one single reference point, which can cut manpower and middlemen costs.

As with any new technology, there are stumbling blocks. Commercial banks may not want all that information to be managed by developers so private blockchains may need to be created. It’s important to take a collaborative approach so banking organisations can pool their resources, identify and share hurdles and resolutions.

Trading stocks and shares: Nasdaq has successfully completed a blockchain test in Estonia to run proxy voting on its exchange and is now assessing whether to implement the new system as it has streamlined a process that was highly manual and time consuming. Nasdaq is one of the early adopters and a supporter of the technology in the exchange industry and already uses it to power its market for share of private companies It is also launching a marketplace powered by blockchain for pre-IPO private securities exchange in the USA.

Blockchain as a service is the most viable way for the technology to scale

Healthcare: Within healthcare, blockchain promises to address security and data integrity issues relating to patient information within healthcare providers, hospitals, insurance companies and clinical trials. IBM Watson teamed up with the US FDA to trial a data sharing initiative to keep track of patients involved in a particular trial and they are going on to explore how a blockchain framework could potentially provide benefits to public health.

Blockchain as a service: Blockchain as a service is the most viable way for the technology to scale. Start-ups like Chain.com are making blockchain applications much more accessible to big corporations. It is probably the most recognised ‘blockchain as a service’ platform startup as it lets enterprises use blockchain technology in a variety of network infrastructures.

Where to next

To put into perspective how big it could become, the World Economic Forum predicts that by about 2027 about 10% of the global GDP would be stored on blockchains so companies looking to get their piece of the action should start investigating now.

Silicon Valley investor Marc Andreessen cites blockchain as “one of the most fundamental inventions in the history of computer science» and we’d agree. 2017 is going to be the year it is tested, trialled and iterated to suit individual market and business requirements.

All that without even mentioning Bitcoin – we’ll save that for another day.

Read more: Blockchain beyond Bitcoin: Assessing the enterprise use cases

(c)iStock.com/bestdesigns

Blockchain is the new buzzword on the block; and while many business leaders, managers, developers and IT departments are Googling it and left scratching their heads, others are wising up to it, are realising how brilliant it is, and are recognising the opportunity it’s going to bring and the potential impact it will have.

If we put aside the tech behind it and focus on what it can do, it’s actually capable of disrupting many industries and bringing new innovations not only into finance, but also property, automotive, music, trading and healthcare.

To make it easier to understand what blockchain can bring to businesses, think about how a Google Doc enables people to access and make updates in real time. No need to save over and send new files to all and sundry, as the next time someone opens the doc it will be the most up to date as the file automatically keeps a record of who made which changes and when, as that digital address is native to the cloud, not the local hard drive. Google Docs is to Microsoft Word what blockchain is to a traditional ledger system.

Google Docs is to Microsoft Word what blockchain is to a traditional ledger system

Startups and large corporations are working together to figure out how this ‘shared ledger’ concept can benefit their businesses. And this concept of data retention is at the heart of cloud-based technology.

Cloud technologies are the forerunners to blockchain and developers and designers who are creating new innovations in this space, should keep an eye on blockchain opportunities too. Private blockchain networks can run in secure cloud environments and we have witnessed test collaborations between Google’s cloud services, IBM, Microsoft and Amazon and if successful, these cloud services could play a role in blockchain deployments.

Applying blockchain to business

Let’s take a look at some use cases and how blockchain can be implement in different industry sectors to speed up processes, guarantee security, trust and transparency and keep accurate records that can be accessed by stakeholders, no matter where they are in the world.

Property: You’re buying a house and want to know when the last repairs and updates were carried out, which companies provided them and when. Blockchain could help homeowners and estate agents keep a record of information relating to a property, which would be centrally located for anyone in the house buying and selling process to access – reducing hours of paper pushing and phone calls and create transparent information on the status and maintenance of the house before putting in an offer.

Automotive: In a similar way to housing, tracking the value of second hand vehicles through blockchain would make purchases a lot easier for buyers and traders. Information on the car’s mileage, services, and driving history would be accurate, and if the car was ever written off the information could be accessed digitally to salvage the new gearbox that was installed only two months ago.

Music: There has already been massive disruption in the music industry but in the age of streaming services, blockchain could show musicians, creators, fans, marketers and labels the data and dialogue involved in listening to their songs and albums. Artists would be much closer to their fans and over time they could influence and reward them. A truly democratic and commercially viable way of promoting music. Thanks to blockchain.

Banking: Most big banks have a headline piece highlighting how they are working with blockchain especially within security. The technology promotes security and trust and allows all parties to work with one single reference point, which can cut manpower and middlemen costs.

As with any new technology, there are stumbling blocks. Commercial banks may not want all that information to be managed by developers so private blockchains may need to be created. It’s important to take a collaborative approach so banking organisations can pool their resources, identify and share hurdles and resolutions.

Trading stocks and shares: Nasdaq has successfully completed a blockchain test in Estonia to run proxy voting on its exchange and is now assessing whether to implement the new system as it has streamlined a process that was highly manual and time consuming. Nasdaq is one of the early adopters and a supporter of the technology in the exchange industry and already uses it to power its market for share of private companies It is also launching a marketplace powered by blockchain for pre-IPO private securities exchange in the USA.

Blockchain as a service is the most viable way for the technology to scale

Healthcare: Within healthcare, blockchain promises to address security and data integrity issues relating to patient information within healthcare providers, hospitals, insurance companies and clinical trials. IBM Watson teamed up with the US FDA to trial a data sharing initiative to keep track of patients involved in a particular trial and they are going on to explore how a blockchain framework could potentially provide benefits to public health.

Blockchain as a service: Blockchain as a service is the most viable way for the technology to scale. Start-ups like Chain.com are making blockchain applications much more accessible to big corporations. It is probably the most recognised ‘blockchain as a service’ platform startup as it lets enterprises use blockchain technology in a variety of network infrastructures.

Where to next

To put into perspective how big it could become, the World Economic Forum predicts that by about 2027 about 10% of the global GDP would be stored on blockchains so companies looking to get their piece of the action should start investigating now.

Silicon Valley investor Marc Andreessen cites blockchain as “one of the most fundamental inventions in the history of computer science» and we’d agree. 2017 is going to be the year it is tested, trialled and iterated to suit individual market and business requirements.

All that without even mentioning Bitcoin – we’ll save that for another day.

Read more: Blockchain beyond Bitcoin: Assessing the enterprise use cases