Digital transformation initiatives both increase revenue and decrease expenses according to our upcoming study titled Work AHEAD 2016 by Cognizant’s Center for the Future of Work. For this study we surveyed over 2,000 executives across 18 countries. The expected net business impact over the next 3 years of rapid digital transformation, i.e. hyper-transformation, is an increase in revenue of 11.4% (Revenue = 10.3%, Costs = -1.3%) amongst the companies in our study. These numbers represent the difference between success and failure in many industries.
Latest Changes in Google Cloud Platform – A Peek
Google is the latest of cloud storage providers to announce changes to its service. In the GCPNext Event in London, the company announced the launch of Coldline, a new cold storage service that would store archival data. This storage offers a cheap rate for customers to store data that they’re likely to access less than once a year. The cost for this service is 0.7 cents for every gigabyte of data.
This announcement has come as a surprise because Google’s rates are already one of the lowest in the market. Also, a closely related service called Nearline is already offered by Google for users who access data less than once a month. This service costs only one cent per gigabyte, so a further slash and a new product along the same lines is a surprise.
Besides Coldline, Google made a few other changes to its cloud storage services. Firstly, it has slashed the price of its regular single-region Cloud by 23 percent, which means, it’ll cost only two cents per gigabyte per month starting from November 1st. In addition, calls to its Application Programming Interface (APIs) will cost only half a cent for every thousand operations, and this is a whopping 50 percent cut in price. This rate is applicable for both regional and multi-regional storage, that are also called Class A types of API calls.
If Coldline is one end of the spectrum, Multi-Regional Cloud Storage Service is the other end. This service is available for customers who require incredibly high levels of data availability. To meet the needs of these customers, Google will replicate data across its many cloud data storage centers spread across different regions. This way, latency will be low and customers can access data from any location quickly.
Both these offerings are designed to capture a larger market share in a highly competitive cloud storage industry. It widens their reach to include more types of customers with varying cloud storage needs, within their business circle.
Another interesting change is that Google now allows its customers to move their data from one tier to another at any time, regardless of the bucket in which the data is stored. This is a significant change, and one that corporate customers have been asking for some time now, as it helps them to make the most of economical IT resources without compromising on the needs of the users as well as regulatory stipulations.
These announcements come at a time when Amazon AWS and Microsoft have been making headlines about their cloud business, especially in terms of the new partnerships and offerings they have been able to clinch in the recent past. For Google, these changes represent a significant shift in its cloud business, as it gears up to take on the challenges from AWS and Microsoft. Capturing a larger market share begins with excellent products at affordable rates, and Google is right on target. The next few months is sure to be interesting for Google, and the cloud storage market as a whole.
The post Latest Changes in Google Cloud Platform – A Peek appeared first on Cloud News Daily.
RTC’s Impact on Communications | @ThingsExpo #IoT #M2M #RTC #WebRTC
P2P RTC will impact the landscape of communications, shifting from traditional telephony style communications models to OTT (Over-The-Top) cloud assisted & PaaS (Platform as a Service) communication services. The P2P shift will impact many areas of our lives, from mobile communication, human interactive web services, RTC and telephony infrastructure, user federation, security and privacy implications, business costs, and scalability.
In his session at @ThingsExpo, Robin Raymond, Chief Architect at Hookflash, will walk through the shifting landscape of traditional telephone and voice services to the modern P2P RTC era of OTT cloud assisted services.
RTC’s Impact on Communications | @ThingsExpo #IoT #M2M #RTC #WebRTC
P2P RTC will impact the landscape of communications, shifting from traditional telephony style communications models to OTT (Over-The-Top) cloud assisted & PaaS (Platform as a Service) communication services. The P2P shift will impact many areas of our lives, from mobile communication, human interactive web services, RTC and telephony infrastructure, user federation, security and privacy implications, business costs, and scalability.
In his session at @ThingsExpo, Robin Raymond, Chief Architect at Hookflash, will walk through the shifting landscape of traditional telephone and voice services to the modern P2P RTC era of OTT cloud assisted services.
How cloud storage became a target for hackers – and what can be done about it
(c)iStock.com/4774344sean
With the recent revelations that Yahoo! experienced a hack in 2014 where the accounts of around 500 million users were compromised, it brings back into focus the importance of businesses ensuring their customers’ data is always protected.
More and more businesses are now using the cloud to store their data. As with all new technologies though, hackers will look to exploit any security vulnerabilities they can find. While it is not yet clear whether the attack on Yahoo! was on a cloud-based system or was due to vulnerabilities present in a third-party application on the Yahoo! website, other high profile attacks have taken place against cloud storage systems in recent years.
In this article, David Midgley, head of operations at Total Processing, examines what has made cloud storage vulnerable to attack and how to make cloud storage more secure going forward.
Consumers are now increasingly comfortable making online financial transactions – I’d even argue that consumers have now come to expect the ease and convenience of making financial transactions in this way. More and more businesses have entered the eCommerce marketplace in order to keep pace with their rivals or seize upon the opportunities that eCommerce presents. However, the public should be wary of handing over their financial details so easily.
Businesses have increasingly begun to embrace cloud storage options in recent years to store their data; among other reasons, cloud storage solutions have meant they no longer need to incur the numerous costs associated with storing all their information in physical data centres. However, some businesses don’t seem to understand the potential hazards of using such a method for storing customer data.
While the cloud has opened up new frontiers, it’s also opened up a whole new world of security issues, as hackers now have another way to try and access people’s personal and financial information. Therefore, it is vitally important that businesses processing and storing customer information do their utmost to ensure it is secure and safe from those with sinister motives.
This unfortunately is not always the case though. The last two years in particular have seen a number of high profile attacks against cloud storage systems being highlighted. For instance, the attack on Apple’s iCloud platform that resulted in the release of the personal photographs of many high profile figures was a big talking point in the summer of 2014. On that occasion, as with the recent attack on Yahoo!, the hacker was able to access highly sensitive and confidential information following a single hack.
As someone who works in the fintech sector, where we are processing large amounts of financial data on a daily basis, I find this very worrying particularly given more and more people now make online transactions due to the proliferation of eCommerce as part of our everyday lives.
It may be unfair though to only shine the spotlight on cloud storage solutions, as hackers will attack wherever they can find a weak spot in a company’s security. This certainly appears to be the case with the attack on Yahoo!, as there is still uncertainty as to whether the hackers gained access via cloud storage or by exploiting a vulnerability they had found in a third-party application that had access to the website. It may simply be that the high profile attack on Apple put the spotlight onto cloud storage systems in my mind, and this has been reaffirmed by the scale of the attack on Yahoo! that has come to light in the last month. Either way, I think it will mean that attention will now start to increasingly focus on cloud storage in the minds of hackers.
Given these most recent revelations, I’m sure we can all agree that online security needs to be a top priority. It really is not difficult either – common sense practices will go a long way to keep your business and the information you’re holding secure. Keep all your security software up to date and implement two-factor authentication. Even keeping the security settings on your email systems rigid will do a lot to keep you protected from external threats.
Watson Crowdsources Cloud Computing | @CloudExpo #Cloud #CognitiveComputing #DigitalTransformation
Recently I’ve been doing quite a bit of analysis work using the IBM Watson cognitive business platform. The really exciting thing about this opportunity is the way data can seem to have a conversation with you. This got me wondering if social media data could carry on a conversation as well. Given my almost unhealthy interest in cloud computing, we ran a one week experiment to «crowdsource the internet» in order to see if it held any interesting cloud computing insights.
[session] Legacy with #WebRTC | @ThingsExpo #IoT #M2M #RTC #UCaaS
Fact is, enterprises have significant legacy voice infrastructure that’s costly to replace with pure IP solutions. How can we bring this analog infrastructure into our shiny new cloud applications? There are proven methods to bind both legacy voice applications and traditional PSTN audio into cloud-based applications and services at a carrier scale. Some of the most successful implementations leverage WebRTC, WebSockets, SIP and other open source technologies.
In his session at @ThingsExpo, Dan Cunningham, CTO of ReadyTalk, will cover real world examples of how enterprises and vendors alike can modernize infrastructure without ditching existing investments.
VMworld EU – Live from Barcelona Day 2
Hello All! Another day at VMworld Europe and more information on what’s new in the VMware ecosystem. As their recent press release has made obvious, VMware has gone all in with making their ecosystem more developer friendly: REST-based APIs, Container Support, expanded PowerCLI to name a few.
vSphere 6.5
VMware vCenter Server® Appliance – The new vCSA appliance has made many significant improvements. From the migration path to the ability to now have HA to the new scales of what it can manage. There are now fewer and fewer reasons to stay with the windows version of vCenter, though there are still some use cases.
REST APIs – gives developers, DevOps, and Operations teams greater flexibility and automation options.
VMware vSphere Client – Goodbye flash-based web client, hello HTML5!, VMware listened to customer feedback and created an interface that is more responsive and (hopefully) more resilient.
VMware vSphere Integrated Containers™ – by getting in on containerized applications in a fashion that is consumable by their existing VMware infrastructure/employees, VMware is making it easier for their infrastructure and development teams to work together more cohesively.
VSAN 6.5
iSCSI Support – will enable Virtual SAN storage to be presented as an iSCSI target for external physical workloads including clustered applications such as Microsoft SQL Server with Failover Clustering on a limited number of physical servers.
Containers Support – Virtual SAN will provide persistent data layer for containerized applications via VMware vSphere Integrated Containers.
Two-node Direct Connect – having an option for ROBO sites gives customers more flexibility & options.
Expanded PowerCLI – now that PowerShell is available Linux and Mac, the new PowerCLI integrations will be even more useable.
vRealize Automation 7.2
AWS, Microsoft Azure, and container support will give IT and DevOps teams greater flexibility in deploying cross-cloud, multi-tier applications. In addition, Log Insight 4.0 and vRealize Operations 6.4 were announced and will with all of the aforementioned technologies.
In addition, the vBrownBag Tech Talks that I’ve been helping to create have proved to be a great resource of exposure to new technical topics. We’ve published the VMworld Europe vBrownBag tech talks here. We recorded 21 videos! Next week I’ll be doing the OpenStack Summit Tech Talks, so expect many more videos in the coming week!
More to come! In the meantime, register for our upcoming webinar. CTO Chris Ward will be doing a full deep-dive into all of the biggest VMworld announcements.
Chris Williams – GreenPages Enterprise Consultant
Google announces low latency cold storage Coldline in “major refresh”
(c)iStock.com/Bernhard_Staehli
Google has announced a ‘major refresh’ of its cloud storage options, including Coldline, a new storage class aimed at long-term archival and disaster recovery.
The revamped storage classes are multi-regional, for highest availability of frequently accessed data, such as video and business continuity, regional, for data accessed frequently within a region such as data analytics and general compute, Nearline, for infrequent access, and Coldline.
“Whether a business needs to store and stream multimedia to their users, store data for machine learning and analytics or restore a critical archive without waiting for hours or days, Cloud Storage now offers a broad range of storage options to meet those needs,” wrote Kirill Tropin, product manager in a blog post.
Picture credit: Google
The move is particularly interesting given Nearline, which was launched in March last year, was already considered as the lower cost yet higher latency data solution. In a graph outlining Nearline, the ‘time to first byte’ was seconds, ahead of ‘hours’ for more traditional cold storage.
“(Near) online data at an offline price” was the tag line. Yet in August Google announced a revamp of Nearline, promising lower latency and improved performance. Now, all four classes in the latest move promise millisecond access, with Google hoping it “changes the way that companies think about storing and accessing their cold data.”
As you’d expect, Google also rolled out a customer to showcase its new offerings; this time, it’s video hosting provider Vimeo, which is using the multi-regional storage class for high availability and Nearline to minimise overall costs in tandem with Fastly, a content delivery network service. Other companies announced today in the expanded Google cloud storage partner ecosystem include hyperconverged provider Cohesity, who said it was “excited” by the collaboration in a statement, Cloudian, and Veritas.
Back in September, Google announced eight new locations for its Cloud Platform service across five continents. The company cited its machine learning potential as a key aspect for potential new customers, with note-taking app Evernote a case in point when it recently confirmed it was moving onto Google’s platform.
Coldline is priced at $0.007 per gigabyte per month, which Google claims is the most economical storage for data accessed less than once per year.
Ops, APIs and Compression | @DevOpsSummit #API #APM #DevOps
I’ve been reading up on APIs cause, coolness. And in particular I really enjoyed reading Best Practices for Designing a Pragmatic RESTful API because it had a lot of really good information and advice.
And then I got to the part about compressing your APIs.
Before we go too far let me first say I’m not saying you shouldn’t compress your API or app responses. You probably should. What I am saying is that where you compress data and when are important considerations.