Join IBM November 2 at 19th Cloud Expo at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA, and learn how to go beyond multi-speed it to bring agility to traditional enterprise applications.
Technology innovation is the driving force behind modern business and enterprises must respond by increasing the speed and efficiency of software delivery. The challenge is that existing enterprise applications are expensive to develop and difficult to modernize. This often results in what Gartner calls «Bimodal IT,» where business struggle to apply modern tools and practices to traditional monolithic applications. But these existing assets can be modernized and made more efficient without having to be completely overhauled. By leveraging methodologies like DevOps and agile, alongside emerging technologies like cloud-native services and containerization, traditional applications and teams can be more easily modernized without risking everything that depends on them. This session will describe how to apply lessons learned from modern app development, including the starting point to modernization that many enterprises are using to quickly improve speed, efficiency, and software quality.

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Cloud services are supposedly known for being highly available but various types of outages prevent users from accessing those services, sometimes on very large scale. What are the implications of DDOS attacks on Cloud services and what are the alternatives?
Last Friday, DDOS attacks disrupted major parts of the internet in both North America and Europe. The attacks seems largely targeted on DNS provider Dyn disrupting access to major service providers such as Level 3, Zendesk, Okta, Github, Paypal, and more, according to sources like Gizmodo. This kind of botnet-driven DDOS attack is a harbinger of future attacks that can be carried out over an increasingly connected device world based on the Internet of Things (IoT) and poorly secured devices.

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(c)iStock.com/Alex Sava

Hybrid cloud object storage system provider Cloudian has announced the completion of a $41 million (£33.8m) financing round, with the funds helping the company expand sales and marketing as well as growing international operations.

The funding round includes existing investors including Intel Capital, INCJ, Eight Roads, and Goldman Sachs, as well as new investors Lenovo, City National Bank, Epsilon Venture Partners, and DVP Investment.

“Connected devices are already generating millions of terabytes of information every day. The challenge is both to manage that information and to analyse and derive value from it,” said Lisa Spelman, vice president and general manager of Intel’s data centre marketing group in a statement. “We believe Cloudian’s unified storage approach, which combines data management and data analytics in a single platform running on Intel Architecture, positions data centre managers exceptionally well to extract value from the massive volumes of information created by accelerating device connectivity and advances in machine learning.”

The path of Lenovo integrating with Cloudian dates back to an OEM agreement back in June which enables Lenovo’s salesforce to offer Cloudian-based object storage. The manufacturer added that Cloudian’s storage solution was the ‘clear winner’ for driving ‘innovation, efficiency and investment protection into the data centre’.

Similarly, Cloudian is one of the various vendors integrating with Coldline, Google’s latest cold storage service announced earlier this month. Cloudian’s HyperStore product is seamless integrated with Coldline, offering up to hundreds of petabytes of on-premise storage, as this company blog post explains.

Total funding for Cloudian stands at $81.68 million, in five rounds from eight investors. 

(c)iStock.com/Dmitrii Guzhanin

By Mary McCoy

By now, most MSPs recognise that offering backup is table stakes.

Your clients can receive this service from any number of your competitors. In order to stand out and increase monthly recurring revenue (MRR), focus on the disaster recovery (DR) aspect of backup and disaster recovery (BDR). Offer your clients DR testing.

To fully capitalise on the advantages of DR testing, keep the following four best practices in mind when adding this service to your IT portfolio. 

Test everything

Technology alone won’t save businesses paralysed by an IT emergency. DR testing should also engage on the business level, considering continuity of operations and processes along with the validation of actual data availability. How robust is your client’s DR plan? Being properly prepared can be as simple as knowing who to call and having an up-to-date contact list.

Your DR plan should also avoid ambiguity and set expectations when it comes to designating team and individual roles and responsibilities. Do both you and your clients know what to hold each other accountable for or who to reach out to when something goes wrong?

Pro tip: Your DR plans are not one-size-fits-all, which means your testing should vary across your client base. Each business you serve has different needs. Many organisations have specific compliance and regulatory statutes that they’re required to adhere to. You may back up and store some clients’ data at a physical location offsite and others’ in the cloud. No two clients are alike. When DR testing, processes and procedures should be optimised for each individual client. 

Test regularly 

How often should you be conducting disaster recovery tests? There is no hard and fast rule, and it really depends on the client in question. That being said, you should run annual DR tests, at the very least. Your clients’ disaster readiness depends on every employee’s understanding of the current DR plan, which they can ultimately only achieve after familiarisation with the DR testing process. And when factoring in employee turnover, testing every year helps acclimate any new hires to the proper procedures and protocol, thereby helping you fine-tune your clients’ disaster response. 

Considering that a company’s DR strategy is only as strong as its least prepared employee, you’d think more would advocate frequent DR testing to mitigate risk. According to the 2016 Disaster Recovery as a Service Attitude and Adoption Report, however, 22% of respondents test their DR plans less than once a year or in many cases, never test at all. Help them avoid this liability and package regular DR tests into your overall BDR offering.

Sure, testing backups every year should be the standard, but even this may be too conservative in certain circumstances. Let’s examine a scenario in which you may want to test more frequently. Perhaps you serve a bank or any other financial services business bound by PCI DSS compliance. To comply with regulatory standards, you may need to test this client’s DR plan every three months to ensure your BDR solution meets the necessary requirements. In contrast, a barber shop’s DR plan may only need to be tested two to three times per year. Again, when formulating DR plans, always make sure you optimise procedures and processes at the client level.

Document outcomes 

Strong DR documentation starts with a client’s disaster recovery plan, which should outline everything anyone would need to know in the event of an emergency. This includes contact information, a detailed outline of the steps and procedures that individuals need to follow in order to activate a disaster recovery, expected time frames for recovering data and more. 

Only when your response policy is put to the test, can you adequately assess the effectiveness of a DR plan. Maybe certain directions are unclear and create friction across teams. Document any and all outcomes during and after testing. What worked? What didn’t? Where were the failure points? Why did those failures occur? How do you address these in your client’s plan? Were any employees or team leads unavailable? In the event that you can’t reach these people in the future, who are their backups? Little details like this can mean everything when the clock is ticking and your clients’ business continuity is at stake. To help ensure a more seamless DR response, record all results that may be used to improve your clients’ disaster readiness. Then, conduct a post-mortem with all involved, to review lessons learned and areas for improvement.

Update DR plans

Finally, update your clients’ DR plans as necessary. This testing is all for naught if you don’t do anything with the data you record. It’s not enough to simply remember what to do next time around. Recall the conversation around client employee churn. If your client onboards a new hire after your DR test, this employee will only have the existing DR documentation to follow. Rather than repeat the same mistakes in your next round of DR testing, correct now to save your clients later. And remember, disaster readiness is ongoing. Continue to frequently revisit and strengthen your DR plans so that testing runs smoother going forward. 

The article ‘4 Essentials MSPs Forget When Disaster Recovery Testing‘ first appeared on Continuum Blog.

Intelligent machines are here. Robots, self-driving cars, drones, bots and many IoT devices are becoming smarter with Machine Learning.
In her session at @ThingsExpo, Sudha Jamthe, CEO of IoTDisruptions.com, will discuss the next wave of business disruption at the junction of IoT and AI, impacting many industries and set to change our lives, work and world as we know it.

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As companies adopt the cloud-to-streamline workflow, deployment hasn’t been very seamless because of IT concerns surrounding security risks. The cloud offers many benefits, but protecting and securing information can be tricky across multiple cloud providers and remains IT’s overall responsibility.
In his session at 19th Cloud Expo, Simon Bain, CEO of SearchYourCloud, will address security compliance issues associated with cloud applications and how document-level encryption is critical for supplementing existing enterprise security solutions. He will draw from case studies, outline best practices for businesses and demo how data can be transported and stored to and from the cloud already encrypted and securely accessed no matter where it’s stored.

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operations aren’t merging to become one discipline. Nor is operations simply going away. Rather, DevOps is leading software development and operations – together with other practices such as security – to collaborate and coexist with less overhead and conflict than in the past.
In his session at @DevOpsSummit at 19th Cloud Expo, Gordon Haff, Red Hat Technology Evangelist, will discuss what modern operational practices look like in a world in which applications are more loosely coupled, are developed using DevOps approaches, and are deployed on software-defined, and often containerized, infrastructures – and where operations itself is increasingly another “as a service” capability from the perspective of developers.

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Enterprises have been using both Big Data and virtualization for years. Until recently, however, most enterprises have not combined the two. Big Data’s demands for higher levels of performance, the ability to control quality-of-service (QoS), and the ability to adhere to SLAs have kept it on bare metal, apart from the modern data center cloud. With recent technology innovations, we’ve seen the advantages of bare metal erode to such a degree that the enhanced flexibility and reduced costs that clouds offer tip the balance in favor of virtualization for Big Data deployments. And for organizations concerned about performance, virtualized environments can address that issue or in some cases even perform better than bare metal.

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(c)iStock.com/RapidEye

A new report from enterprise cloud services provider ServiceNow argues that a tipping point has finally been reached with more than half of enterprises surveyed would use cloud as the default choice for business application rollouts.

52% of the 1,850 senior managers polled across four continents said they now prefer cloud as a platform compared with on-premise data centres, while more than three quarters (77%) of respondents expect to shift to a cloud-first model in the next two years.

The primary reason for this shift, the report argues, is the emergence of DevOps. 94% of respondents said they were involved with the DevOps movement in some way, while three quarters (76%) admitted it was a major factor driving the move to cloud-first operations. 88% of those polled said that cloud could replace a formal IT department “at least some of the time.”

Just under three quarters of those polled (72%) said IT’s relevancy is on the rise following a cloud-first reorganisation, while 68% said IT will be ‘completely essential’ in the future. Ultimately, ServiceNow argues, the role of IT will have to shift from ‘builder’ to ‘broker’ to succeed in the cloud-first environment.

“Amidst the cloud-first shift, there are ominous signs for IT if there’s no change,” said Dave Wright, chief strategy officer at ServiceNow. “We believe this presents a real opportunity for those visionary IT organisations who can become strategic partners to the enterprise during this shift to cloud-first.”

Not all the findings were rosy, however, with almost nine in 10 (89%) companies polled who had shifted to a cloud-first model saying their current IT staff lacked the required skill sets to be successful. Achieving 360 degree visibility for the business (64%) was named as the biggest priority going forward.