How do you structure your day? Sometimes, it pays to take a page out of a famous creative’s book when it comes to structuring your time for productivity. You’ll see what we mean by checking out the below graphic from Podio, which shows how famously creative minds such as Benjamin Franklin, Maya Angelou and Charles […]
The post The Daily Routines of Famous Creative People appeared first on Parallels Blog.
Nimble Collective has recently closed a round of funding that raked in $8.5 million. This funding was led by venture capital firm New Enterprise Associates. $1 million of this funding comes from individual investors.
With this funding, New Enterprise Associates Partner Greg Papadopoulos joins the board at Nimble Collective. Three executives were from the animated film industry were also named. These executives are Mark Walsh (former director at Pixar), Eric Darnell (previously with DreamWorks), and Peter Ramsey (previously with DreamWorks). The leaders of this startup have a plethora of experience with the animation industry.
The startup aims to develop a platform that could help an estimated 10 million professional and amateur animation artists. The platform will allow artists to create and collaborate and gives them the ability to distribute their work.
The platform will require licenses for existing animation software, but provides artists with a secure cloud environment to work. It will establish a community that allows artists to communicate with ease.
While pricing for this service has not been announced, the startup wants to lower the cost of animation to give as many people possible access to this service.
A beta launch is expected in the second half of 2016.
Comments:
Nimble CCO Rex Grignon, former head of character animation on DreamWorks’ Madagascar, commented, “Nimble is delivering studio caliber tools and collaboration capabilities–all in the cloud–that free-up animators to do what they do best — create. Our goal is to enable a new generation of creatives to create, collaborate and prosper by building their own unique, modern content to reach huge audiences
Howse said: “The animation content market generates $90 billion annually, yet millions of talented animators simply do not have access to the expensive studio-quality technology tools and big budgets currently required to bring high-quality creative projects to fruition. Nimble will change that by democratizing the market with the world’s first collaborative, cloud-based platform for generating content that animators can distribute and profit from in exciting new ways.”
About the Startup:
Based in Palo Alto, the startup was founded in November of 2014. The company was cofounded By Rex Grignon, Scott LaFleur, Michael Howse, and Jason Schleifer. Grignon is Nimble’s president and chief executive officer. He was previously he founding head of character animation at DreamWorks animation. Michael Howse is an entrepreneur who worked at 3dfx and was the CEO of startup Bigfoot Networks.
The post Nimble Collective Funding appeared first on Cloud News Daily.
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The clock is officially ticking for organisations to get their data protection policies in order, now that the final draft and approved text have been made available for the General Data Protection Regulation to replace the existing EU Data Protection Directive.
The new regulation is expected to come into effect in 2018 and will require businesses to put a much stricter focus on data protection. The headline items for organisation that collect or process EU citizen records are:
These increased sanctions mean it is vital that the final legislative text be fully understood by a number of key stakeholders within the business, and that businesses start planning ahead as soon as possible.
To help them with that here are five key steps to help organisations perform a basic assessment of their current data protection strategy and any potential gaps that need filling.
The first task for any organisation must be to identify whether they are considered a data controller or processor. They must then review the relevant obligations these carry, such as issuing notice to citizens and maintaining relevant consent from the data subject.
Businesses should make it common practice to regularly review existing and new business processes to identify Personal Identifiable Information (PII). They can then discover where this data resides – whether it is at-rest, in-motion and/or in-use – have a record of processing activities and understand how this data is protected.
Once PII has been identified organisations must then sure they adequately protect it. Encryption and access control are common control standards, but managing encrypted data across multiple business processes is a hugely difficult task.
Data sovereignty and data lifecycle are key to helping businesses ensure that EU citizen data is processed and stored appropriately. In addition to this, they also need to manage data flows to approved third party processors, monitor for accidental data leakage from negligent or malicious employees and protect against data theft from external agents.
If an organisation does suffer a loss of data then it is vital to detect the breach and identify if PII records were lost or stolen. If they have, the business will be required to notify the necessary authorities within 72 hours of the discovery to initiate a full investigation.
The investigation will focus on identifying the source and destination of the breach through event and incident information from Data Leakage Prevention (DLP) and Data Theft Prevention (DTP) tools. Data forensics will then help to pinpoint the stolen data, at which time the business will be required to issue notice to any affected data subjects.
Incident response is critical to protecting data and protecting EU citizen data. In addition to the mandatory data breach notification requirement, organisations must also ensure they have implemented an effective incident response plan. This plan must have been tried and tested to ensure that employees involved in a data breach response are familiar with and fully understand the new legislation and communication channels.
In the aftermath of a data breach businesses must ensure they maintain ongoing communication with the relevant authorities. This will ensure secondary loss factors are managed and keep affected data subjects regularly informed.
Data protection and the safeguarding of EU citizen data has always been an important requirement for businesses and the impending GDPR places even greater emphasis on the value of this data. It is therefore more important than ever for businesses to fully understand their role and apply the appropriate security controls that allow them to identify and protect this data. Having an established data breach plan in place will then help businesses be familiar with the detect, response and recovery phases to ensure they limit the effect of the attack.
(c)iStock.com/baona
While the vast majority of organisations hope for 99.9% uptime throughout the year, 57% of companies polled by CloudEndure say they had at least one outage in the past three months.
The survey, which quizzed 141 IT global IT professionals, found organisations are, in general, gaining confidence in cloud disaster recovery (DR) solutions. This is noticed in the key risks to system availability. The number one risk remains human error, followed by network failures and application bugs. Downtime of cloud providers fell from the third highest risk last year to #6 in 2016.
CloudEndure found the key challenges in meeting availability goals were insufficient IT resources, followed by budget limitations and a lack of in-house expertise. Yet in some cases, it is difficult to perceive how companies assess their uptime levels; 22% of organisations polled say they do not measure service availability at all.
More than half (54%) of respondents use the public cloud for disaster recovery target infrastructure, compared to private cloud (35%) and physical resources (11%). Of the public cloud users, more than half use AWS (53% and 26% overall). VMware vSphere (20% overall) was also highly cited, with Microsoft Hyper-V and Azure (10% overall) trailing.
84% of respondents say service availability is at least seven or higher out of 10 in terms of how critical it is to their customers. 38% say uptime is most critical – 10 out of 10 – while only 4% deem is as not critical. 19% say their goals for uptime is the magical ‘five nines’, or less than five minutes of outages per year, while only 3% say they have a goal of 99% uptime, or more than 88 hours down.
“While more companies continue to migrate large portions of their business data to the cloud, our survey findings are clear,” said Ofer Gadish, CloudEndure CEO. “Companies that invest in DR are likely to reap an upside in savings from the cost of downtime disrupting their operations.”
Regular readers of this publication will be aware of how the trend of cloud disaster recovery is shaping up in 2016. Writing in January Monica Brink, EMEA marketing director at cloud provider iland, explained: “Disaster recovery as a service [has] continued to claw its way to the top of CTO priority lists. With IT budgets tight and faster adoption of cloud in general, we’ve noticed a growing comfort level and confidence in cloud-based disaster recovery solutions.”
Microsoft has launched a trio of initiatives aimed at widening the options of its potential clients of its Azure cloud services.
It made the announcements through the Azure Blog, which promises the availability of new RedHat Enterprise Linux ‘instances’ (i.e. units of computing resources), a new application lifecycle manager, OneOps, and showcased a preview of an imminent Azure Container service.
The Red Hat Enterprise Linux instances are available from the Azure Marketplace. According to the blog, 60 percent of the images available are now Linux-based. Microsoft claims its hybrid model can be running ‘in minutes’ with Red Hat Enterprise Linux images available on Azure Marketplace on a Pay-as-you-go model with hourly billing.
Among the eligible products are Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat JBoss Enterprise Application Server, Red Hat JBoss Enterprise Web Server, Red Hat Gluster Storage and Red Hat OpenShift.
“Both Microsoft and I love Linux,” said Corey Sanders, Azure’s Director of Program Management. The new instances will help cloud users cater for on-demand workloads, development and testing and cloud bursting in a simple, easily quantifiable system, Sanders said. The Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.7 and 7.2 images are now live in all regions, except China and the US Government.
The imminent Azure Container Service – currently available for preview – will build on previous Docker and Mesosphere initiatives to make it easier to provision clusters of Azure Virtual Machines onto containerized applications. The process will be a lot quicker since the machines will have been pre-configured with open source components, Sanders said.
Sanders also disclosed that Microsoft has certified for the Azure Marketplace a group of Linux images created by Bitnami. Meanwhile, Microsoft’s new OneOps offering on Azure, which gives clients the user of an open-source cloud and application lifecycle management platform, is a product of a collaboration with the WalmartLabs team (the IT offshoot of retail giant Walmart).
Global technology distributor turned cloud service provider Ingram Micro is to be bought by Chinese conglomerate HNA Group for $6 billion.
Ingram will continue to be based in California but is now a subsidiary of marine logistics specialist Tianjin Tianhai, which is owned by The HNA Group, an aviation, tourism and logistics outfit. The deal is expected to close in the second half of 2016. Ingram CEO Alain Monié and his management team will remain and its business is expected to continue as normal.
“The addition of Ingram Micro would help the logistics sector of HNA Group transform from a logistics operator to a supply chain operator, and provide one-stop services while improving efficiencies,” said Adam Tan, CEO of HNA Group.
Founded in 1989 when IT was a hardware defined industry Ingram Micro became the world’s largest wholesale technology products distributor with clients such as Acer, Apple, Cisco, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Lenovo, Microsof and Samsung. It ranks 62nd in the 2015 Fortune 500. As the IT industry evolved to become software driven, it has taken steps to transform itself. It announced cloud partnerships with IBM and Parallels at its Ingram Micro Cloud Summit 2014 and promised tools to help its reseller clients make the transition to selling cloud services. To this end Ingram Micro added three new services, Hosted Exchange, Virtual Private Server and Web Hosting.
However, the funding from the new owners could help it make more of a transition, according to a statement from Alain Monié, Ingram Micro CEO. “Our agreement to join HNA Group delivers near-term and compelling cash value to our stockholders and we expect it to provide exciting new opportunities for our vendors, customers and associates,” said Monie, “innovation, new services introduction, brand management and ensuring the stability and continuity of the businesses joining their enterprise are fundamental to HNA Group’s overall strategy.”
Analyst Clive Longbottom at Quocirca said TTI seems to be ‘paying high’ in order to gain direct access to western markets. “Whether this will work remains to be seen,” said Longbottom, “will the US government and all its dependent departments shy away from Ingram now, fearing that the Chinese will be implementing back doors via firmware or software changes?”
For the general user, this will probably make very little difference, the analyst predicted. “It’s likely that TTI will be hands off, using Ingram to optimise its overall buying power on a global basis to be able to either provide better margins or to compete on price more effectively where required, ” said Longbottom. Ingram shareholders, meanwhile, are getting a 39% premium over Ingram’s closing price.
We live in a hyper-connected, mobility-enabled world, one in which carriers must make drastic changes to how they do business if they are to survive and thrive in the future. Accordingly, great strides have been made over the last three years to prove the viability of Network Functions Virtualization (NFV). Many Proof of Concept (PoC) trials have proven that workloads can be migrated to virtual environments running on standard hardware, and there are even examples of carrier deployments using NFV.
The next step is to determine how to make NFV work effectively so it will deliver on its promise. The issue is no longer whether a service can be deployed using NFV, but whether we can manage and secure that service in an NFV environment. In other words, the challenge now is to operationalize NFV. How can we ensure that NFV is ready for this challenge?
A year ago, I wrote a two-part series on how lower cost, higher performance on-premise storage and nearly free cloud based storage were driving both innovation and disruption in the storage industry. Applying Clayton Christensen’s theory of innovation and disruption to the storage industry, my premise was that flashy startups, (e.g. Pure, Nimble, VMem, Tegile and Tintri) that were first to introduce credible data reduction to flash arrays were innovators but not disruptors in the space and would therefore disappoint investors; storage incumbents (e.g. HDS, EMC and IBM) who added data reduction would continue to survive; but the real disruptors would be the cloud players (e.g., Amazon, Google and Microsoft). The combination of struggling share prices, weak earnings reports, recent acquisitions, and raging cloud revenue witnessed throughout 2015 and into 2016 continue to point to Christensen’s theory as the explanation for an ongoing economic transformation that will forever change the storage industry as we know it.
Here’s a short video I did discussing how we’ve helped clients use the cloud as a disaster recovery site. This can be a less expensive option that allows for test fail over while guaranteeing resources. If you have any questions or would like to talk about disaster recovery in the cloud in more detail, please reach out!
Or click to watch on YouTube
By Chris Chesley, Solutions Architect
SYS-CON Events has announced today that Roger Strukhoff has been named conference chair of Cloud Expo and @ThingsExpo 2016 New York.
The 18th Cloud Expo and 5th @ThingsExpo will take place on June 7-9, 2016, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY.
«The Internet of Things brings trillions of dollars of opportunity to developers and enterprise IT, no matter how you measure it,» stated Roger Strukhoff. «More importantly, it leverages the power of devices and the Internet to enable us all to improve the state of the world and lives of people.»