SYS-CON Events announced today that SoftLayer, an IBM Company, has been named “Gold Sponsor” of SYS-CON’s 18th Cloud Expo, which will take place on June 7-9, 2016, at the Javits Center in New York, New York. SoftLayer, an IBM Company, provides cloud infrastructure as a service from a growing number of data centers and network points of presence around the world. SoftLayer’s customers range from Web startups to global enterprises.

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Does a Content Delivery Network (CDN) protect against Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks? It’s a good question. A CDN by its very nature will absorb DDoS attacks for the content that it serves and this could be considered protection but, as is often the case, this is only the beginning of the story.
If we consider what is actually going on here, the CDN isn’t actually ‘blocking’ the DDoS attack – it is simply reducing its impact by throwing more resources at the problem. This means that the size of the DDoS attack a CDN can deal with is inherently dependent on the size of the CDNs infrastructure, which for some of the market-leading players means that pretty much any current attack targeting CDN served content can be ‘absorbed.’

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(c)iStock.com/Leslie Achtymichuk

The fact of the matter is thus: if you want to stay ahead of the pack, you’ll need to get your head into and around the cloud. However, the reasons and rationale behind cloud migration are very different to that which greeted CTOs in the mid-2000s, and it is this shift that businesses and their staff need to be aware of today.

According to IDC: «more than 70% of western Europe enterprise IT organisations will commit to hybrid cloud architectures by 2017, vastly driving the rate and pace of change in IT.” And just this week, a new IBM Study, ‘Tailoring hybrid cloud: designing the right mix for innovation, efficiency and growth’, documented the meteoric rise of hybrid cloud. In responses from over 1000 C-suite executives from 18 industries, 78% of them now say their cloud initiatives are coordinated or fully integrated, compared to just 34% in 2012.

Executives expect hybrid cloud adoption (in particular) to support their organisation’s growth in three main ways: by facilitating innovation, lowering total cost of ownership and by enhancing operational efficiencies and enabling them to more readily meet customer expectations.

Cloud has evolved and attitudes towards it have matured from a ‘nice to have’ technological innovation in the mid-2000s, to an integral part of business enablement strategy today.  Successful organisations understand that technologies like cloud and (moving towards the future), cognitive computing are key to improving operations, customer experiences and, crucially, bottom lines. 

But even with the rising use and acceptance of cloud technologies overall, almost half of computing workloads – 45% – are expected to remain in on premise data centres for the foreseeable future. Given this, it is imperative that companies determine and regularly re-assess which mix of traditional IT, public and private cloud best suits their needs.

Until relatively recently, cloud was viewed by many as (primarily) a cost reducing project. However, today, the realisation of what cloud can actually proactively provide has led to a more rounded and balanced overview of it as a platform for innovation and competitive advantage too. 

But once every business is in the cloud (as will be the case in due course if adoption rates are to be believed), just who will win and how is the key question many are keen to understand.

Based on its findings, the most recent study recommends three areas, all current and future adopters of the technology need to understand, if they are to drive sustainable and competitive advantage through cloud adoption:

Deepen your understanding of business implications and financial cases of cloud

A custom-made environment will be possible when employees truly understand business needs and how IT technologies can help deliver these successes.  This includes identifying key business stakeholders of cloud initiatives, selecting target improvement areas, and establishing a current performance baseline for comparison.

Strengthen your ability to manage the complexity of multiple cloud ecosystem partners

Ecosystems by design will be in continual flux as companies collaborate with value chain participants. Success will depend on fostering the next generation of business and IT hybrid talent, embracing the full cloud ecosystem as a community in which participants can deliver more value as a group than acting alone.

In establishing collaborative, long term relationships with partners through mutually beneficial opportunities, companies will be able to tap into the API economy and other ‘open’ technologies that allow them to build on top of existing innovation.

Extend the limits of compliance with security and regulation through new internal capabilities and external solutions

This requires a re-work of operations to build data protection and security measures into system and IT infrastructure by design, rather than retrofitting. It’s also imperative that you select vendors with security and compliance expertise in the cloud space. 

Hybrid cloud represents a pivotal transformation for businesses. But managing a dynamic and symbiotic cloud environment will require both a new mind-set to traditional approaches, but also new skills to deliver upon these. 

Large enterprises today are juggling an enormous variety of network equipment. Business users are asking for specific network throughput guarantees when it comes to their critical applications, legal departments require compliance with mandated regulatory frameworks, and operations are asked to do more with shrinking budgets. All these requirements do not easily align with existing network architectures; hence, network operators are continuously faced with a slew of granular parameter change requests, trying to meet ongoing network requirement changes without having the proper tools in place.

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Canadian nonprofit SOCAN faced digital disruption and fought back by adopting storage innovation that allows for faster responses to end-user needs and opens the door to new business opportunities.
The next BriefingsDirect Voice of the Customer digital business transformation case study examines how Canadian nonprofit SOCAN faced digital disruption and fought back with a successful storage modernizing journey. We’ll learn how adopting storage innovation allows for faster responses to end-user needs and opens the door to new business opportunities.

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Big Data has been changing the world. IoT fuels the further transformation recently. How are Big Data and IoT related?
In his session at @BigDataExpo, Tony Shan, a renowned visionary and thought leader, will explore the interplay of Big Data and IoT. He will anatomize Big Data and IoT separately in terms of what, which, why, where, when, who, how and how much. He will then analyze the relationship between IoT and Big Data, specifically the drilldown of how the 4Vs of Big Data (Volume, Variety, Velocity and Value) intersect with the 4Cs of IoT (Connectivity, Collection, Context and Cognition).
He will dive deep into the matrix chart of the 1-to-1 mapping of individual aspects. Case studies and best practices will be discussed to further dissect the synergy in real-world business solutions.

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«You have a memory like an elephant,» is truly a compliment. Researchers document all kinds of remarkable examples of the recall power of elephants, and this is credited with their ability to survive harsh environments as noted in this Scientific American article http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/elephants-never-forget/.
Our human memory also helps us learn from past experiences and mistakes, avoid recognizable hazards and keep track of our very busy lives. Our memories for the most part have served us well, but the same might not always be said about digital memory in an always connected, real-time world.

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(c)iStock.com/deepblue4you

More than half of respondents in a survey from cloud migration services provider SADA Systems say cloud-based apps are improving patient satisfaction and leading to better treatment.

The survey, which polled more than 300 North American IT professionals, found Microsoft was the primary cloud infrastructure platform for healthcare organisations, cited by 42% of respondents. Google (29%) and Amazon (27%) trailed behind. In terms of mobile device management, Microsoft (55% of respondents) was again the leader, ahead of IBM (27%) and MobileIron (5%).

Healthcare is traditionally one of the laggards when it comes to cloud adoption due to the severity of any potential data loss. Yet the survey shows cloud concerns seem to be abating; 61% said they had greater confidence in the security and reliability of cloud providers.

This seems to be the case even if issues occur; even though half (49%) of organisations polled had suffered a security breach or patient data leak – a major issue in itself – less than 10% attributed the issue to their cloud provider.

In terms of usage, laptops (88%), tablets (80%) and smartphones (77%) were all naturally very common, but wearables, with 24% adoption, are gaining traction in healthcare, according to the research. Email was the most popular cloud app, used by 68% of respondents, followed by patient care (64%) and file sharing (55%).

“Cloud-based IT infrastructure and applications are apparently providing healthcare organisations the opportunity to operate more efficiently, innovate faster and better engage so-called millennials,” said Tony Safoian, president and CEO at SADA Systems. “This is consistent with what we’re hearing from customers and partners.

“Cloud apps and tools that connect administrators to suppliers, doctors to patients and hospitals to staff are increasingly important – not only because they improve productivity and enhance patient care and satisfaction, but because they distinguish modern organisations from legacy providers, which is attractive to the younger generation of healthcare users.”