AI, Artificial intelligence, China, Dell, Enterprise IT, News & Analysis

Dell targets SMBs in China with launch of new company

Location China. Green pin on the map.Dell has prioritized growing its presence within the Chinese market targeting SMBs and public sector organizations, according to China Daily.

Speaking at the China Big Data Industry Summit in Guiyang, Dell CEO Michael Dell announced the launch of a new company, alongside its local partner, to gain traction within the lucrative market. Guizhou YottaCloud Technology will now act as a means for Dell to access the local market, prioritizing small and medium-sized enterprises and local governments in the first instance.

“China will play an increasingly important role in the big data era and the United States-based tech giant will speed up efforts to develop new products for the market,” said Dell at the conference.

Dell is one of a number of organizations who have prioritized local partnerships in the Chinese market, as locals tend to favour Chinese businesses and technologies over foreign counterparts, quoting security as the main driver. The country itself is a big draw for Dell as a business, representing its second largest market worldwide, only behind the US. The company also highlighted in September it plans to invest $125 billion in the Chinese market over the next five years, with cloud computing being the focal point.

Last year Dell launched it’s ‘In China for China’ strategy, which not only included the above investments, but also a drive from its Venture Capital arm in China to encourage entrepreneurialism, expanding its R&D function in the country, as well as establishing an artificial intelligence and advanced computing joint-lab, with the Chinese Academy of Sciences. The AI research will focus on the areas of cognitive function simulation, deep learning and brain computer simulation.

“The Internet is the new engine for China’s future economic growth and has unlimited potential,” said Dell in September. “Being an innovative and efficient technology company, Dell will embrace the principle of ‘In China, for China’ and closely integrate Dell China strategies with national policies in order to support Chinese technological innovation, economic development and industrial transformation.”

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451 Research argues ‘race to the bottom’ in cloud is a red herring

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The cloud services sector is still a long way off from being a commodity market, according to the latest note from analyst house 451 Research.

The results, which have been published in the firm’s latest Cloud Price Index (CPI), show the ‘race to the bottom’ in cloud pricing, as exemplified by continued price cuts from Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft, Google and others, is something of a misnomer and that the supply of higher value services will be key to long term growth for vendors. Despite this, the researchers argue VM pricing went down 12% on average over the past 18 months, while NoSQL, load balancing, and bandwidth among others remained stable.

As a result, 451 has come up with the ‘cloud commodity score’ (CCS) metric, which measures customers’ sensitivity to price by region. The researchers found that the US was the region most likely to have market share driven by cheaper prices, yet argued Europe and APAC present more opportunities to vendors because the markets are ‘fractured’.

“Despite all the noise about cloud becoming a commodity, our research demonstrates a very limited relationship between price and market share,” said Owen Rogers, 451 Research digital economics unit research director. “Cloud is a long way from being a commodity. In fact, the real drama is the race to the top rather than the race to the bottom.”

This publication has examined the supposed disparity between the major cloud players and how their pricing stacks up. Research from Cloud Spectator back in March found 1&1 to be the best ranked European cloud provider, based on performance as well as price, well ahead of Google, Azure, and AWS. Kenny Li, CEO of Cloud Spectator, told this publication that smaller players have an advantage by offering high-performance infrastructure at more competitive prices.

cyber security, Intel, News & Analysis, Threat Detection

CIOs prioritize collaboration to increase security – Intel

a safe place to workIntel Security has released new findings which claims CIOs are targeting collaboration as a means to shore up defences against cyber threats.

Respondents to the survey believe their own organizations could be between 38-100% more secure if threat management and incident response personnel and systems could simply collaborate better. The team believe collaboration is one area which is often overlooked, with decision maker’s often favouring new threat detection or prevention tools, though security operations’ effectiveness can be increased through better collaboration between silos within the organization.

“Threat management contributions are almost evenly spread among different roles, but there are some notable areas of specialization,” the company stated in its “How Collaboration Can Optimize Security Operations” report. “Every handoff or transition can add significant operational overhead—along with the potential for confusion and chaos and delays in responding. But, on the upside, there is also huge potential for collaboration and increased efficiencies.”

The report states CIOs are still prioritizing new tools as a means to shore up their own perimeters, though collaborations technologies were not far behind in the rankings. 40% of the respondents highlighted their spend would be prioritized on better detection tools, 33% pointed towards preventative tools and 32% said improved collaboration between SOC analysts, incident responders and endpoint administrators.

One of the main challenges for these organizations is the process, accuracy and trust in communication. For a number of organizations data is shared manually and potentially reprocessed several times, increasing the possibility of inaccuracy. Automated collaboration tools ensure data is shared quickly and accurately through an array of different functions and responsibilities. “Trust arises from good communication, transparency, and accountability, all of which engender confidence in the outcome,” the report states.

The number of tools being used within these organizations is also a challenge, as data is often transferred between or collected centrally manually. The average number tools companies use to investigate and close an incident is four, though 20% of the respondents said they can use up to 20 different products to achieve the same aims, further increasing the challenge. Though larger and more geographically diverse organizations will by definition use more tools, the same principles of collaboration and automation apply, and in theory could increase the security of an organizations perimeter.

“Tougher new EU data privacy regulations, which are currently in the process of being modernized, will be implemented in 2017,” said Raj Samani, EMEA CTO for Intel Security, in the report. “Organizations will be legally required to implement a security architecture that ensures a secure and trustworthy digital exchange of data throughout the EU. Data privacy needs to be assured at every level and across the entire infrastructure. In light of that, improved incident investigation and response processes that bring together collaborative tools and teams are imperative.”

While most organizations are answering the threat of more advanced cyber threats with the implementation of more advanced defence solutions, collaboration is an area which could be seen as a complementary means. Collaboration can contribute to real-time visibility for various teams, improve execution capabilities, as well as speed of response.

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Here’s why private and hybrid cloud are here to stay

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When private and hybrid cloud technology first appeared, some pundits predicted that they wouldn’t last. Wasn’t everything going to the public cloud? But last they did, and there are several good reasons why private and hybrid cloud are here to stay.

For one thing, some companies are balking at the cost of maintaining public cloud deployments once their workloads and storage grow into the tens of petabytes. In addition, some vertical markets (financial services, for example) mandate tight internal security controls, so the public cloud is not an option for many aspects of their business. Finally, enterprise customers want to be able to choose the cloud solution that’s best for them, and they don’t want to be mandated to use public cloud if their circumstances dictate otherwise.

Public cloud providers rake in billions of dollars in service fees because using a public cloud is an easy thing to do. With a few mouse clicks, users can activate cloud resources and scale them indefinitely without having to worry about housing or maintaining hardware or developing the in-house expertise to build a cloud on premises. Cloud computing was born as public cloud, and many cloud computing advocates felt that on-premises or co-located clouds were just a fancy name for the same old data center resources.

But rather than declining, private and hybrid cloud deployments are growing because these approaches have valid roles within enterprises. In most cases, it’s not an either/or decision between one type of cloud and another. A more likely scenario is that most enterprises will use a mix of public, private and hybrid clouds as IT departments try to balance security, costs, and scalability.

Leveraging a private or hybrid cloud computing model has three advantages. First, it provides a clear use case for public cloud computing. Specific aspects of existing IT infrastructure (storage and compute, for example) can be placed in public cloud environments while the remainder of the IT infrastructure stays on premise. For example, with business intelligence applications, it may be better to keep the data local and do the analytical processing in the public cloud rather than migrating gigabytes of operational data to the public cloud.

Secondly, using a private or hybrid model delivers more flexibility in gaining maximum leverage from computing architecture, considering you can mix and match the resources between local infrastructure (which is typically a sunk cost but is difficult to scale), with infrastructure that’s scalable and provisioned on demand. IT departments can choose where best to place applications depending on their needs and cost structure.

Finally, the use of hybrid or private cloud computing validates the idea that not all IT resources should exist in public clouds today, and some resources may never be moved to public clouds. Considering compliance issues, performance requirements, and security restrictions, the need for local is a fact of life. This experience with the private or hybrid model helps users better understand what compute cycles and data have to be kept local and what can be processed remotely.

The argument against private or hybrid cloud points to large hardware and software investments required and the depth of in-house expertise needed to make it happen. However, newer cloud platforms address these pain points.

In some cases, cloud infrastructure vendors are offering converged (compute/storage/networking) appliances that can be set up and running in minutes. These appliances provide scalable building blocks to support private and hybrid clouds with ample resources, and they deliver a better ROI than traditional data centre hardware.

Another approach is to use standard OpenStack APIs with a self-healing architecture that reduces the management burden. A few vendors use SaaS-based portals that handle management and operations with complete health monitoring and predictive analytics to prevent problems before they occur. By enabling curated updates through automated patching and upgrades, the end user receives the best possible service experience with minimal effort required of the administrator.

So while private and hybrid cloud once required plenty of in-house cloud-building expertise, it’s not true today. Modern cloud platforms address many of the objections to using private or hybrid cloud, and these architectures can work together with public cloud to give enterprises the performance and cost-effectiveness they seek. Today’s private and hybrid cloud platforms provide the same ease-of-use as public cloud infrastructure while delivering the flexibility, security, performance and control many enterprises demand. 

AWS, CRM, data centre, Database, Datacentre, News & Analysis, Salesforce

Salesforce to run some core services on AWS

Salesforce 1Salesforce has announced it will run some of its core services on AWS in various international markets, as well as continuing investments into its own data centres.

The announcement comes two weeks after the company experiences a database failure on the NA14 instance, which caused a service outage which lasted for 12 hours for a number of customers in North America.

“With today’s announcement, Salesforce will use AWS to help bring new infrastructure online more quickly and efficiently. The company will also continue to invest in its own data centres,” said Parker Harris, on the company’s blog. “Customers can expect that Salesforce will continue to deliver the same secure, trusted, reliable and available cloud computing services to customers, regardless of the underlying infrastructure.”

While Salesforce would not have appeared to have suffered any serious negative impact from the outage in recent weeks, the move could be seen as a means to rebuild trust in its robustness, leaning on AWS’ brand credibility to provide assurances. The move would also give the Salesforce team options should another outage occur within its own data centres. The geographies this announcement will apply to have not been announced at the time of writing.

Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, App Cloud, Community Cloud and Analytics Cloud (amongst others) will now be available on AWS, though the move does not mean Salesforce is moving away from their own data centres. Investment will continue as this appears to be a failsafe for the business. In fact, Heroku, Marketing Cloud Social Studio, SalesforceIQ and IoT cloud already run on AWS.

“We are excited to expand our strategic relationship with Amazon as our preferred public cloud infrastructure provider,” said Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff. “There is no public cloud infrastructure provider that is more sophisticated or has more robust enterprise capabilities for supporting the needs of our growing global customer base.”

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MangoApps to Exhibit at @CloudExpo New York | @MangoSpring #Agile #IoT #DevOps

SYS-CON Events announced today that MangoApps will exhibit at SYS-CON’s 18th International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on June 7-9, 2016, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY.
MangoApps provides modern company intranets and team collaboration software, allowing workers to stay connected and productive from anywhere in the world and from any device.
For more information, please visit https://www.mangoapps.com/.

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IoT-Blueprint for a Connected Economy | @ThingsExpo #IoT #M2M #DigitalTransformation

The IoT is changing the way enterprises conduct business.
In his session at @ThingsExpo, Eric Hoffman, Vice President at EastBanc Technologies, discuss how businesses can gain an edge over competitors by empowering consumers to take control through IoT. We’ll cite examples such as a Washington, D.C.-based sports club that leveraged IoT and the cloud to develop a comprehensive booking system. He’ll also highlight how IoT can revitalize and restore outdated business models, making them profitable again. Lastly we’ll provide insight on the importance of properly establishing IoT in the cloud and the four steps you need to take in order to make your IoT program improve your service quality.

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No-Code/Low-Code Apps | @CloudExpo @Kintone_Global #IoT #DataCenter

Cloud-based NCLC (No-code/low code) application builder platforms empower everyone in the organization to quickly build applications and executable processes that broaden access, deepen collaboration, and enhance transparency for all team members.
Line of business owners (LOBO) and operations managers know best their part of the business and their processes. IT departments are beginning to leverage NCLC platforms to empower and enable LOBOs to lead the innovation, transform the organization, and build the infrastructure for lasting productivity and agility.

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Artificial intelligence, Big Data, data analytics, News & Analysis, Salesforce, SMB

Salesforce SMB’s business leader talks data analytics, AI and the age of entrepreneurship

Sanj Salesforce

Sanj Bhayro, SVP EMEA Commercial at Salesforce

While the business world has traditionally favoured the biggest and the richest, cloud as a technology is seen as the great equalizer. Through a transition through to the cloud, SMBs are being empowered to take on the nemesis of enterprise business, with the number of wins growing year-on-year.

This, according to Salesforce’s Sanj Bhayro, is one of the most exciting trends we’re now witnessing in business throughout the world. Bhayro currently leads the EMEA SMB business at Salesforce and for almost 11 years has been part of the team which has seen the power of intelligent CRM systems grow backroom businesses to industry giants. Just look at the growth and influence of companies such as Uber and AirBnB for justification of his claims.

“The SMB business in Salesforce is one of the most exciting, because we get to work with really innovative companies,” said Bhayro. “All the innovation in the industry is coming from these small to medium sized businesses. They are disrupting the traditional market which is in turn forcing the traditional players to transform their own business models.

“Something which is interesting from our perspective at Salesforce is that when we started 17 years ago the internet wasn’t that prevalent, the cloud wasn’t a word that was used that often, and it was the SMB companies who adopted our technology. The cloud offered them the operational efficiency, the scale and the reach to take on these traditional players. These smaller organizations are looking more and more towards technology as the enabler for innovation.”

The majority of the SMBs could be considered to be too small to drive innovation in-house. For the most part, the IT department is small, and responsible for ‘keeping the lights on’, working through the cloud has enabled innovation and created opportunities for these organizations. And for the most part, the ability to be innovative is much more prominent in the smaller organizations.

Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post’s poll.

The fail-fast business model is one which has captured the imagination of numerous enterprise organizations around the world. Amazon CEO Jeffrey Bezos recently claimed the fail-fast model was the catalyst for recent growth within the AWS business, though the majority are seemingly struggling to implement the right culture which encourages learning and innovating through failing. For the majority, failure is simply failure, not part of the journey to success.

But this in itself is one of the ways in which the smaller, more agile organizations are innovating and catching enterprise scale businesses. The implementation of cloud platforms speeds up the failures and lessens negative impacts on the business, to further drive the journey to innovation.

“For start-ups and early stage companies, failing is an accepted mentality. How many companies are actually the same as when they started? They failed, learned and then progressed. As businesses become bigger and bigger it becomes a lot more difficult. Certainly for larger companies there is a lot more friction around the fail-fast model. Smaller companies are culturally set up to allow them to pivot and try new things, whereas larger ones, purely because of their size, are constrained.”

Outside of the SMB team, Salesforce engineers have been prioritizing the use of artificial intelligence for future product launches and updates. This was reinforced during the company’s quarterly earnings call in recent weeks as CEO Marc Benioff backed AI as the next major growth driver. While there is potential for AI in the SMB market place, for the moment it is only for those who are ahead of the curve.

For the most part, data analytics is starting to drip down into smaller organizations, though there is still a substantial amount of data which is not being utilized. For Bhayro, as the concept of the cloud is now ubiquitous, the opportunities are almost limitless. But only once these organizations have got on top of managing their own data, breaking down the silos within the business.

Robotic hand, accessing on laptop, the virtual world of information. Concept of artificial intelligence and replacement of humans by machines.“AI translates well into the SMB business model and it will be the SMBs who drive where AI goes,” said Bhayro. “There are generally two camps when it comes to the SMB market, those who are cloud-native, those who capitalizing on the sharing-economy and those who are more traditional organizations. The shift that the traditional business has to make to break down the silos, and to move towards a cloud back-end is far more difficult than a company like Deliveroo who started in the cloud and can scale. Never the less that shift has to be made.”

“So much data is being created and there’s so much that you can do with it. The problem is that so many companies are not doing enough with their data. Recent reports stated that most companies can only analyse 1% of their data. Even before we start moving towards AI technologies, the way we service intelligence is through insight. We need to provide the right tools to make data available and malleable, to everybody in your business. These data analytics tools are the first steps and then we can look forward to AI technologies.”

The UK government has made numerous schemes available to SMBs to encourage the growth of this subsector in recent years, and Bhayro believes these efforts have been playing off in the international markets.

“I delighted to say that the UK takes a leadership position (in relation to SMB growth and innovation in comparison to the rest of Europe),” said Bhayro. “Something in the region of 95-96% of the companies in the UK are SMBs, and the government is currently doing the right things to encourage and propel entrepreneurs. I think we’re in the time of entrepreneurship, and this is the time for people to have the vision and grow. These companies are having wonderful ideas, and they are moving into the growth period, but it’s the customer experience which really differentiates them from the competition. Not many of these companies are set up to achieve customer experience objectives, but this is where we (Salesforce) come in.”

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Data sovereignty: How to shield your business from changing regulations

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International data privacy regulations can be complex and ever-changing. The invalidation of the Safe Harbour agreement by the European Court of Justice, and the ongoing negotiations about its replacement, means than many companies are now forced to rethink their approach to information governance, without the certainty of knowing exactly which regulations they will need to comply with.

Classifying information that is subject to data privacy regulations, from information that is not, can be a difficult task, one that requires businesses to implement a sound information governance strategy. When done properly – by classifying content with the right metadata – complying with any change in the shifting regulatory landscape becomes a lot easier. Yet businesses attempting to implement the correct information governance platform can face difficulties. So what do organisations need to consider?

  • The whole picture: Looking at just one system, such as emails or file shares, does not work. Organisations must consider all the information entering the enterprise and every touch point where data enters or leaves
  • Co-operation: Business stakeholders and the IT department must co-operate on the implementation of the strategy to ensure it addresses new regulations without blocking business productivity
  • Prepare to be flexible: Laws and regulations constantly change so organisations must prepare an information governance strategy in which both the policies and the data model itself can be flexible. If the data model is not flexible, businesses may be able to tweak policy but could be faced with the herculean task of reclassifying terabytes of existing data for new regulations

Beyond these considerations, businesses must also take the continued growth of cloud-based services into account when preparing to become compliant with data privacy laws. Choosing a cloud provider is no longer just about functionality, features and price. Data privacy is a key consideration, particularly as widespread adoption of consumer-grade software in the workplace, especially cloud-based services, has exploded over the last couple of years. Employees are using these consumer-grade services – such as Google Drive, Dropbox and Evernote – to boost productivity in the workplace but they can make it very difficult for companies to address data privacy regulations.

When choosing a cloud provider, IT and business professionals should ensure that the company can address data privacy requirements. With the invalidation of the “Safe Harbour” agreement – and the on-going negotiations between US and EU regulators over its replacement – the current regulatory environment in Europe is unclear. For this reason alone, organisations must ensure their cloud provider consistently maintains security procedures and protocols to protect all customer data and ensure compliance with current and future EU data privacy requirements. Many businesses may prefer to use a provider which can offer them a dedicated European data zone, with complete network segregation of all hardware and access levels. Whatever the end decision, a secure, global information management strategy must be a cornerstone of any corporate cloud adoption.

Whatever method businesses choose to solve the issue, action must be taken sooner rather than later. By avoiding the problem or tackling it in many different stages, organisations are opening themselves up to potentially huge penalties and fines. The reality is that most regulations do not require organisations to implement any dramatically new features in order to become compliant. They just require businesses to ensure a comprehensive information governance strategy is in place to monitor data and guarantee compliance with the shifting regulatory landscape.

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