DoubleHorn is now offering its feature-rich and cost effective Evidence Management System for Law enforcement agencies interested in developing body-worn camera programs across Texas.
DoubleHorn’s Evidence Management System (DEMS) is a unified system suitable for capturing any digital evidence (videos, images and files) and physical evidence end-to-end. It is a fully secure, scalable, cost-effective and compliant solution for law enforcement authorities to managing any type digital evidence. The diverse features of DEMS include collection and storage of physical and digital evidence, chain of custody, managing convenience copies, collection and analysis of metadata, and reporting. DEMS also offers cloud storage options that fit all the major security and compliance requirements including CJIS, FedRAMP, FISMA, HIPAA, FIPS, ITAR, FERPA, etc.

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Global revenues from public cloud services will hit more than $195 billion (£150.2bn) by 2020, according to the latest forecast from analyst house IDC.

The new prediction, which arrives in the firm’s semi-annual public cloud services spending guide, argues 2020 will double 2016’s expected revenues of $96.5bn, and represents a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 20.4% between 2015 and 2020.

“Cloud software will significantly outpace traditional software product delivery over the next five years, growing nearly three times faster than the software market as a whole and becoming the significant growth driver to all functional software markets,” said Benjamin McGrath, IDC senior research analyst for SaaS and business models. “By 2020, about half of all business software purchases will be of service-enabled software, and cloud software will constitute more than a quarter of all software sold.”

According to the IDC analysis, manufacturing, banking, and professional services represent almost a third of public cloud services revenues in 2016. The US is expected to be the largest market for public cloud with almost two thirds of revenues, followed by Western Europe and the snappily-titled Asia/Pacific excluding Japan (APeJ).

“Cloud computing is breaking down traditional technology barriers as line of business leaders and their IT organisations rely on cloud to flexibly deliver IT resources at the lower cost and faster speed that businesses require,” said Eileen Smith, program director of customer insights and analysis. “Organisations across all industries are now free to adapt to market changes quicker and take more risks, as they are no longer bound by legacy IT constraints.”

Previous IDC research focused on EMEA cloud IT infrastructure, which grew by 17% to $1.3bn in the first quarter of this year. The second quarter figures are yet to be disclosed, but the analyst house warned of the potential impact the Brexit EU referendum vote could have.

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When Amazon launched Aurora in 2014, it was presented as a clear challenge to giants in the $34 billion database market. Today it is Amazon’s fastest-growing product and has already surpassed the growth of Amazon Redshift, which is saying something. Customers of the service are among Amazon’s largest and loudest advocates. Since the start of 2016, roughly 7,000 databases have been migrated to AWS Aurora — and the rate of adoption has tripled since March 2016.

Why is Aurora gaining popularity? As we have come to expect from Amazon, Aurora provides enterprises with the performance and reliability of a commercial product at a fraction of the cost of Oracle or IBM. Amazon has also made consistent efforts to reduce the effort of database migration with services like AWS Database Migration Service.

First and foremost, migration to Aurora is about cost: companies want to get out of expensive database licenses. But the popularity of Aurora is also a sign of rising interest in Amazon’s fully-managed tools — overcoming fears that using native AWS tools equates to vendor lock-in.

Traditionally, vendor lock-in worries would cause a company to use only “basic” services in order to make Amazon easy to leave. But It appears that these fears are being eclipsed by a desire to reduce IT management. In other words, the value of a managed or automated approach far outweighs the potential effort of migrating out of that service for a (hypothetical) future transition.

Zynga began with this “tentative” approach to adopting AWS, but now realizes that the value of AWS is not cheap compute — it is reduced infrastructure maintenance. Zynga is infamous for migrating to AWS, then deciding to migrate back to on-premises cloud, then returning to AWS in 2015. This time around, Zynga decided their goal was not just to reduce bottom-line costs, but to be smarter about putting engineering resources towards applications, not infrastructure.  

“As we migrated from our own private cloud to AWS in 2015, one of the main objectives was to reduce the operational burden on our engineers by embracing the many managed services AWS offered,” said Chris Broglie of Zynga on the AWS blog. “Before Aurora we would have had to either get a DBA online to manually provision, replicate, and failover to a larger instance, or try to ship a code hotfix to reduce the load on the database. Manual changes are always slower and riskier, so Aurora’s automation is a great addition to our ops toolbox.”

The adoption rate of Aurora and Redshift seem to indicate that Zynga is not the only company willing to purchase higher-level service offerings from Amazon. Anecdotally, the team at Logicworks has also seen growing interest in Aurora and other services like Redshift and RDS.

Changing your database schema has traditionally been difficult and expensive. Early adopters of the cloud usually just want to get their databases running on Amazon EC2 — choosing speed and ease of migration over long-term licensing cost savings. As cloud adoption matures, expect more companies to make a (slow) migration over to cloud-native systems. Because in the end, it is not just about licensing costs. It is about removing management burden from IT — and choosing to focus engineering talent on what really matters.

The post appeared first on Logicworks Gathering Clouds.

The development of your app isn’t something that happens overnight, but rather it is something that takes place over time and through multiple iterations. While you may have developed the framework for your app already, improving engagement and innovating to provide a better user experience is a completely different process. There are plenty of ways that you can improve user engagement, but these five strategies will help you improve your app while also reducing the risk that your “innovative” updates actually decrease user engagement.

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As good Venn diagrams always show it’s the intersection areas that offer the sweet spot for trends and markets, and an especially potent one is the intersection of Cloud computing, with the blockchain and also digital identity, particularly when considered within contexts such as Digital Democracy.

Given the diversity of each field alone there are multiple perspectives to this, more the start of a conversation rather than a definitive design.

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No modern enterprise stands alone; each is dependent upon a network of trading partners to remain competitive in today’s global marketplace. But in most cases, the lack of business to business (B2B) integration is holding back efforts to evolve into a true digital business.
A high-performing supply chain is essentially a dynamic digital network, and every link in the supply chain is vital for business. But, remarkably, “over 50 percent of the information exchanged among business partners is still done so manually — not automatically — via email, phone calls and faxes.”1
Many enterprises are stymied by silos of data, complex linear processes and disparate application landscapes. Moreover, each enterprise is reliant on its own unique set of applications, further exacerbating the struggle to exchange key information with partners.

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Picture credit: Rackspace Afterparty TechStars Boulder 2011, by Andrew Hyde, used under CC BY / Modified from original

Liquid Web, a Michigan based hosting and cloud services provider, has announced an agreement to purchase Rackspace’s Cloud Sites business unit, based in San Antonio.

The acquisition of Cloud Sites, which supports WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, .NET, and PHP among others, will give Liquid Web 550 more employees and 30,000 more global customers.

“With the addition of Cloud Sites, we further our mission to empower web professionals all over the world to create content and commerce without worry, free of problems and devoid of even one bit of hesitation by providing absolutely flawless web hosting,” said Jim Geiger, CEO of Liquid Web in a statement. “Our job is to delight and every single human being in our company is empowered to do so. Each of them has a relentless devotion to simplifying how our customers experience web hosting and cloud services.”

The news comes amidst interesting times at Rackspace. The company’s most recent financial results, had some illuminating stats – 277 customers on its AWS service in the last nine months, with 60% of them choosing the higher service option, compared to 211 Microsoft cloud customers by the end of July – as well as other titbits.

Chief executive Taylor Rhodes cited Gartner statistics on the impact of the Brexit EU referendum vote to analysts – 2017 IT spending growth would ‘almost certainly’ be negative, he said – and added that Cloud Sites was a ‘non-core’ business which would give Rackspace “more focus” by selling it.

Responding to an analyst question, and as transcribed by Seeking Alpha, Rhodes explained: “In our Cloud Sites business, it runs several hundred thousand websites for its customers and it competes in a market that if we wanted to really focus there, we’d have to make some substantial investment and instead, what we’ve been able to do is find a strategic buyer in Liquid Web, who will buy the company at a higher multiple than it was producing for us and allow us to both focus our portfolio, as well as find a happy home for that business and hope us raise some incremental funds that we can invest in growth.”

In a series of articles, I am going to share my thoughts on the state of IT infrastructure and how we’ve arrived with current architecture trends. The topic today is SAN.
Storage Area Networking (SAN) is a technology that solved a real problem that existed a couple decades ago. SANs have been a foundational piece of IT infrastructure architecture for a long time and have helped drive major innovations in storage. But how relevant are SANs today in the age of software-defined datacenters? Let’s talk about how we have arrived at modern storage architecture.

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Windstream has recently completed construction of a new colocation point of presence (PoP) in Dallas, Texas, and plans to complete construction of a new colocation PoP in Columbus, Ohio, in October – both in facilities operated by Cologix, a network-neutral interconnection and data center company. This adds to Windstream’s already-established presence in the Cologix Minneapolis and Jacksonville data centers, and aligns with Windstream’s continued aggressive Data Center Interconnect (DCI) efforts, adding carrier neutral data centers to its network and giving its wholesale and enterprise customers more options to access cloud resources.

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As the title suggests one way to approach the ‘Platform Business Model’ (described in detail in our library section), is to consider how it is being adapted for specific industry sectors, via Cloud-centric acronyms such as:
GaaP – Government as a Platform
BaaP – Banking as a Platform
TaaP – Telco as a Platform

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