(c)iStock.com/mushakesa

While two thirds of organisations polled by cloud storage and data protection provider CTERA Networks deploys more than a quarter of its applications in the cloud, protecting them is a different story altogether.

The findings appear in a report entitled ‘Game of Clouds’ – no prizes for guessing the theme – which makes the research concept clear.

“The emergence and tremendous growth of cloud computing in the enterprise is taking IT environments to uncharted territory, where unprecedented efficiency and cost benefits battle with new challenges around privacy, security, and the data protection and availability of critical business data,” the report opens. “Like most IT evolutions, there will be winners and losers. The key to victory in this ‘Game of Clouds’ lies in the alignment of an organisation’s data protection strategies with its business goals.”

The report found that while more than a quarter of apps are in the cloud at two thirds of firms, and while 37% of the 400 IT decision makers polled plan to grow their cloud use by at least 25% if not more, two thirds (66%) either ‘strongly’ or ‘somewhat’ agree that there is less focus on backing up applications in the cloud.

The reason? CTERA argues there is a ‘misconception that the cloud is inherently resilient compared to on-premises applications’. Furthermore, 62% say they rely on the cloud provider to back up applications running on their platform. “It is clear these organisations have faith in the perceived inherent resilience of their cloud providers, but they should be wary of relying on a third party to serve as both a platform to run applications and to maintain the only backups of those applications,” the report notes.

More than half (54%) of respondents say they are embracing a hybrid cloud strategy, while more than a third (36%) admit loss of data in the cloud would be more catastrophic than their data centre crashing. The message is clear, CTERA argues. “The enterprise’s move beyond traditional data centres has rewritten the playbook for data protection in the cloud,” said Jeff Denworth, CTERA SVP marketing in a statement.

“As organisations adopt cloud and multi-cloud strategies, traditional backup tools fall down. Our research spotlights the key data protection considerations and challenges for enterprises as they look for simple, efficient, and automated solutions that protect critical cloud-based applications.”

You can find out more about the report here (registration required).

It’s an exciting time to be a part of the cloud world, as new products are coming up every day to add value to businesses and to end customers at large. One of the new entrants to the cloud is CloudCoreo – a Seattle based startup in the cloud management arena. Located in South Lake Union District – the cloud computing capital of the world, this company is all set to take a share of the huge potential in cloud management.

This company is led by Tom Hull, its CEO, who previously was a founding member of a company called Union Bay Networks. After it was acquired by Apple in 2004, Hull, along with a few others came together to create CloudCoreo. Jason Needham, the current CMO, and Paul Allen (CTO) are the other co-founders. Hull has worked with Needham in Union Bay Networks, so it was only natural that they came together again to start this company. In fact, their relationship goes many years back, and started when they worked together at Seattle’s F5 Networks.  They are being joined by Soma Somasegar, a former Microsoft executive and a venture partner at Madrona.

In the last week, this company has received a $2.9-million seed stage funding from Seattle’s Madrona Venture Group, and is also supported by Divergent Ventures, Data Collective, and Aristos Ventures to continue with their product development.

At this point in time, the company is keeping their product plans a secret, and they plan to reveal a prototype during re:Invent – Amazon Web Services’ conference that is being held in Las Vegas from November 28 to December 2.

The CEO said that the company plans to use this money to help with product development, and is recruiting software and DevOps engineers to work on its product. Currently, there are about 10 employees in the company, and they’re believed to be working on a next-generation cloud management platform that will enable DevOps and SecOps team to scale effectively and efficiently across different cloud providers.

In an interview, Hull said that though there are many cloud management platforms available in the market, the one offered by CloudCoreo is likely to be different. This is why he opined that there is no point in comparing CloudCoreo’s platform with any of the existing ones.  Though the exact details of the product are not known at this time, inputs from the company’s websites and interviews by its CxO executives suggest that they are looking to create an integrated product that’ll manage public, private, and hybrid cloud systems efficiently.

A possible reason for this foray can be attributed to the fact the cloud management platform market is fragmented, and there is no vendor with a dominant market share. According to a report by Gartner, most cloud management platforms address only a portion of a business’ requirements, so there is always scope for many cloud platforms to have a presence in this market. In addition, the report says that the next 18 months should see more vendor consolidation, so this is the right time for CloudCoreo to make an impact in this niche market segment.

The post CloudCoreo – A Promising Cloud Startup appeared first on Cloud News Daily.

In the next five to ten years, millions, if not billions of things will become smarter. This smartness goes beyond connected things in our homes like the fridge, thermostat and fancy lighting, and into heavily regulated industries including aerospace, pharmaceutical/medical devices and energy. “Smartness” will embed itself within individual products that are part of our daily lives. We will engage with smart products – learning from them, informing them, and communicating with them. Smart products will accumulate information and data wherever they go and will be able to recount this information on command when needed.

read more

(c)iStock.com/4x-image

Data is everywhere – masses of it. And it’s helping businesses to make better decisions across departments. Marketing can utilise data to discover the effectiveness of email campaigns, Finance can analyse past trends to make predictions and projections for the future, and Sales can target their follow-up with detailed information on prospective customers.

But data is only useful when business tools transform it into valuable information. Data intelligence through algorithms and analytics make business data relatable. The most advanced solutions require enormous amounts of data to be able to offer accurate insight to users. As a result, many solutions are cloud based, as most businesses do not have the IT capacity or budget to store this amount of information.

So where does all this data reside? The data centre.

Powering the analytics movement

The data centres that power business applications vary from tiny rooms in office buildings to enormous, purpose-built data halls with their own systems, controlled climates and land-use regulations.

Unsurprisingly, hyper-scale facilities require hyper-scale amounts of energy and water to power them, which is adding to the pressure already facing the world’s natural resources. For example – data centres account for 3% of the global electricity supply and this will likely grow with the increase in data.

The cost of building the very largest facilities can reach billions of dollars, so any mistake, no matter how small, is damaging to a company’s bottom line. Accuracy is crucial in the planning stage to ensure the best return on investment yet many data centres are managed with basic data techniques. And it’s surprisingly common for spreadsheets to be used!

It seems slightly ironic that the data centres providing such advanced data analytics tools are built and run on such basic, unintelligent software.

Using analytics for good

Something has to change. The data centre is business-critical after all, and the more it is viewed as an important strategic asset the better. Interestingly the answer lies in analytics itself.

Business intelligence applications are proving crucial for improving data centre accountability and as a way of delivering tangible benefits across the entire organisation.

The visibility gained from real-time analytics enables executive teams – and the shareholders who hold them to account – to improve the forecasting, construction and management of facilities and to ensure funds are being invested wisely.

This insight is most beneficial during the planning stages. Predictive modelling software assists with site selection, project management and IT purchasing by validating designs and identifying the most economical options. All of this can be decided before a facility is even built, ensuring the best possible chance for success.

These analytics can also be used to calculate and measure natural resource use, including water and fossil fuel consumption. The data centre has a major impact on company CSR policies. Investors are likely to look elsewhere if a company is committed to unsustainable business practices or unable to provide detailed evidence of efforts to improve efficiency and environmental impact.

From a practical management perspective, analytics grants businesses the ability to compare the effects of using different energy and water technologies. This can be analysed over the entire lifespan of a data centre to determine the best choice for the facility and then once built, data can be provided on water and energy use to adhere to company CSR policies.

Turn to the machines

For businesses further along in their analytics journey, there is Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning and Predictive Analytics. Many cloud-based software applications can and do benefit from these advancements to provide richer data to users. This technology can and should be used for the data centre as well.

Recently Google’s DeepMind AI software showed the financial outcomes from using its own proprietary AI to reduce data centre energy usage. It is important, however, to not solely depend on these emerging technologies as they cannot predict every outcome, especially in the case of human intervention.

Many are still evolving, but even at this early stage utilising these technologies to ensure availability of the facilities that power applications is becoming crucial for data-dependent businesses. There is so much intelligence to be gained across the business, for customers and the business itself, and the data centre is the key to storing and utilising this data. If you’ve come to expect insight from every other department, why should the data centre be any different? 

Governments around the world are adopting Safe Harbor privacy provisions to protect customer data from leaving sovereign territories. Increasingly, global companies are required to create new instances of their server clusters in multiple countries to keep abreast of these new Safe Harbor laws. Is it worth it?
In his session at 19th Cloud Expo, Adam Rogers, Managing Director of Anexia, Inc., will discuss how to keep your data legal and still stay in business.

read more

Without lifecycle traceability and visibility across the tool chain, stakeholders from Planning-to-Ops have limited insight and answers to who, what, when, why and how across the DevOps lifecycle. This impacts the ability to deliver high quality software at the needed velocity to drive positive business outcomes.
In his session at @DevOpsSummit 19th Cloud Expo, Eric Robertson, General Manager at CollabNet, will show how customers are able to achieve a level of transparency that enables everyone from Planning-to-Ops to make informed decisions based on business priority and leverage automation to accelerate identifying issues and fast fix to drive continuous feedback and KPI insight.

read more

About a year ago we tuned into “the need for speed” and how a concept like «serverless computing” was increasingly catering to this. We are now a year further and the term “serverless” is taking on unexpected proportions. With some even seeing it as the successor to cloud in general or at least as a successor to the clouds’ poorer cousin in terms of revenue, hype and adoption: PaaS.
The question we need to ask is whether this constitutes an example of Hype Hopping: to effortlessly pivot to the next new thing once the previous one turns out to be just a bit less attractive and certainly a lot more complex then we all thought at first. The Gartner Hype Cycle has been calling this for years the trough of disillusionment, a valley that only the strongest of innovations manage to pass in order to reach the slope of enlightenment or even the plateau of productivity that lies beyond.

read more

The Open Connectivity Foundation (OCF), sponsor of the IoTivity open source project, and AllSeen Alliance, which provides the AllJoyn® open source IoT framework, today announced that the two organizations’ boards have approved a merger under the OCF name and bylaws. This merger will advance interoperability between connected devices from both groups, enabling the full operating potential of IoT and representing a significant step towards a connected ecosystem.

read more