No seriously, I mean it. There are serious correlations and similarities between smuggling alcohol and piracy in any form, whether it’s the real life bad guys on ghost ships in the seas or digital pirates who download stuff off the internet thinking it’s all free stuff while some artist starves to death, or for that matter an enterprise user; quite specifically a certain type of enterprise user. The ones that love free applications and start using them, well and not just use them but spread it to the entire department. You probably have a Bob or Sally or Travis in your department who sends you an innocent link to Dropbox or Google Drive with the Excel file that was too big to send through email. How about that file from accounting that is conveniently shared on Google drive that can be accessed by everyone, including the CFO from his home? Convenient right? Well yes, convenient but also an early preparation to being sued by your customers or probably tens of other people as well. I am really not trying to scare you off but I know this drum has been beaten too many times. Only 19% of organizations have adopted something that does not put their business at risk doing something almost illegal.
[slides] Managing Remote Operations Teams By @WebairSagi | @CloudExpo #Cloud
Advances in technology and ubiquitous connectivity have made the utilization of a dispersed workforce more common. Whether that remote team is located across the street or country, management styles/ approaches will have to be adjusted to accommodate this new dynamic.
In his session at 17th Cloud Expo, Sagi Brody, Chief Technology Officer at Webair Internet Development Inc., focused on the challenges of managing remote teams, providing real-world examples that demonstrate what works and what doesn’t. He covered proper training and integration of these teams into the corporate structure, and the most effective ways to introduce them to customers. He also discussed proper vetting of third-party teams should these functions be outsourced.
Why Application Modularization Matters: Testing By @MassHaste | @CloudExpo #Cloud
A few weeks ago my colleague PJ Hagerty wrote about driving your existing monolithic application toward a more modular design. This time around I’ll dive a little bit deeper into its importance and the benefits of application modularization.
One of the most important best practices in application development is testing, and more specifically automated and continuous testing. When your application is a monolith with multiple functionalities and responsibilities, automated testing becomes massively unwieldy. To illustrate this issue let’s use the following illustration of conceptual (and, admittedly trivial) photo gallery web application.
[session] Data as a Service By @LakshmiLJ | @CloudExpo #Cloud
Data-as-a-Service is the complete package for the transformation of raw data into meaningful data assets and the delivery of those data assets.
In her session at 18th Cloud Expo, Lakshmi Randall, an industry expert, analyst and strategist, will address:
What is DaaS (Data-as-a-Service)?
Challenges addressed by DaaS
Vendors that are enabling DaaS
Architecture options for DaaS
Privacy Shield data agreement dismissed as ‘reheated Safe Harbour’
The new framework for transatlantic data flows proposed by legislators for the European Commission has had a mixed reaction from the cloud industry.
The EU-US Privacy Shield agreement over data transfer replaces the 15 year arrangement that was voided by the Court of Justice of the European Union in October. The new arrangement has to meet official approval from all 28 member states of the European Union. If it does both sides will finalise the details of the new pact in the next fortnight and the agreement could come into effect in April.
The foundation of the agreement is that American intelligence agencies will no longer have indiscriminate access to Europeans’ data when it is stored in the US. EC Commissioner Vera Jourová claimed that Europeans can now be sure their personal data is fully protected and that the EC will closely monitor the new arrangement to make sure it keeps delivering.
“For the first time ever, the United States has given the EU binding assurances that the access of public authorities for national security purposes will be subject to clear limitations, safeguards and oversight mechanisms,” said Jourová, who promised that EU citizens will benefit from redress if violations occur. “The US has assured that it does not conduct mass or indiscriminate surveillance of Europeans,” said Jourová.
Whether the decision really will build a Digital Single Market in the EU, a trusted environment and closer partnership with the US remains a moot point among cloud industry experts.
Approval of the arrangement cannot be taken for granted, according to a speaker for The Greens and the European Free Alliance. “This new framework amounts to little more than a reheated serving of the pre-existing Safe Harbour decision. The EU Commission’s proposal is an affront to the European Court of Justice, which deemed Safe Harbour illegal, as well as to citizens across Europe, whose rights are undermined by the decision,” said Green home affairs and data protection spokesperson Jan Philipp Albrecht. The proposal creates no legally binding improvements and the authorities must make clear that this ‘legally dubious declaration’ will not stand said Albrecht.
The EU/US data sharing deal won’t stop surveillance, according to former Whitehouse security advisor French Caldwell. As a Gartner research VP, Caldwell once advised on national and cyber security and led the first ever cyber wargame, Digital Pearl Harbor. As the new chief evangelist at software vendor MetricStream, Caldwell said there were many flaws in the logic of the agreement.
“The legal definitions of personal data are so antiquated that, even if that data covered under privacy law is protected, there is still so much data around people’s movements and online activities that an entire behavioural profile can be built without accessing that which is considered legally protected,” said Caldwell.
Privacy protections have evolved significantly in the US, Caldwell said, and US authorities are much more aggressive than EU authorities in penalising companies that don’t follow privacy policies. “It is hard to discount nationalism and trade protectionism as underlying motivations [for European legislation],” said Caldwell.
It should alarm cloud customers to see how little has been done to give assurance of their privacy, said Richard Davies, CEO of UK based ElasticHosts. “This gives little assurance to EU customers trusting a US provider with hosting their websites or sensitive data.” Customers with servers with US companies in the EU are likely to move their data to non-US providers to minimize risk, Davies said.
Businesses will need to be much more involved with where their information exists and how it is stored. Until details emerge of the new privacy shield, many European companies wont want to risk putting data on US servers, warned Ian Wood, Senior Director Global Solutions.
However, this could be a business opportunity for the cloud industry to come up with a solution, according to one commentator. The need for transparency and accountability calls for new data management skills, according to Richard Shaw, senior director of field technical operations at converged data platform provider MapR.
“Meeting EU data privacy standards is challenging at the best of times, let alone when the goal posts are constantly being moved,” said Shaw. The only way to give the US authorities the information they demand, while complying with regulations, is to automate governance processes around management, control and analysis of data, Shaw said.
Would the Privacy Shield and the attendant levels of new management affect performance?
Dave Allen, General Counsel at Internet performance specialist Dyn said regional data centres are a start but that the data residence perspective is incomplete at best and give a false sense of confidence that the myriad of regulations is properly addressed.
“Businesses will now need to understand the precise paths that their data travels down, which will be a more complex problem given the amount of cross-border routing of data across several sovereign states. Having access to traffic patterns in real time, along with geo-location information, provides a much more complete solution to the challenges posed by the EU-US Privacy Shield framework,” said Allen.
Hitachi launches Hyper Scalable Platform with in-built Pentaho
Hitachi Data System (HDS) has launched a rapid assembly datacentre infrastructure product that comes with a ready-mixed enterprise big data system built in.
The HDS hyper scalable platform (HSP) is a building block for infrastructure that comes with computing, virtualisation and storage pre-configured, so that modules can be snapped together quickly without any need for integrating three different systems. HDS has taken the integration stage further by embedding the big data technology it acquired when it bought Pentaho in 2015. As a consequence the new HSP 400 system creates a simple to install but sophisticated system for building enterprise big data platforms fast, HDS claims.
HDS claims that the HSP’s software-definition centralises the processing and management of large datasets and supports a pay-as-you-grow model. The systems can be supplied pre-configured, which means installing and supporting production workloads can take hours, whereas comparable systems can take months. The order of the day, says HDS, is to make it simple for clients to create elastic data lakes, by bringing all their data together and integrating it in preparation for advanced analytic techniques.
The system’s virtualised environments can work with open source big data frameworks, such as Apache Hadoop, Apache Spark and commercial open source stacks like the Hortonworks Data Platform (HDP).
Few enterprises have the internal expertise for analytics of complex big data sources in production environments, according to Nik Rouda, Senior Analyst at HDS’s Enterprise Strategy Group. Most want to avoid experimenting with still-nascent technologies and want a clear direction without risk and complexity. “HSP addresses the primary adoption barriers to big data,” said Rouda.
Hitachi will offer HSP in two configurations, Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) disk drives, generally available now, and all-flash, expected to ship in mid-2016. These will support all enterprise applications and performance eventualities, HDS claims.
“Our enterprise customers say data silos and complexity are major pain points,” said Sean Moser, senior VP at HDS, “we have solved these problems for them.”
Barracuda’s New Essentials for Office 365
Barracuda has recently released its new Essentials for Office 365 offering. In the past, I would get questions from customers about wanting to back up Office 365 to be able to control it themselves and not rely on Microsoft. I unfortunately never had much to tell them. You’re option was to go through Microsoft. Barracuda is now offering single email recovery without recovering the entire mailbox, associated attachments recovery, and conversation recovery. Barracuda has heard customers and delivered on those requests in a great way. If you’d like to hear me discuss Office 365 in more detail, check out a webinar I recently did.
Essentials for Office 365
Would you like to hear more from David around Office 365? Download his webinar, “Microsoft Office 365: Expectations vs. Reality“
By David Barter, Practice Manager, Microsoft Technologies
How cloud providers are fighting the data sovereignty fight for European customers
(c)iStock.com/caracterdesign
For many US-centric cloud providers, Europe is quickly becoming a fierce battleground for their business. Earlier this week, Oracle announced plans to recruit up to 1400 cloudy salespeople across EMEA, while data centres are popping up all over the continent, from Microsoft’s commitment to the UK by the end of 2016 to IBM SoftLayer opening a data centre in Italy last year.
With two UK data centres, in London and Manchester respectively, infrastructure as a service (IaaS) provider iland is acutely aware of the issues European customers want to get solved in terms of latency and, more importantly, data sovereignty. Monica Brink, who has recently taken up the post of EMEA marketing director at the Houston-based firm, tells CloudTech of the issues underlying the data sovereignty scares.
“It’s obviously very important for European customers, that whole data sovereignty issue, and that’s where we noticed a real difference between our European and North American customer database,” she explains. “With all of the hacking attacks we’ve seen, and natural disasters over the last year, there is a very keen focus on advanced security, things like vulnerability scanning, encryption, intrusion detection, and the cloud provider being able to prove they are meeting all of those regulations for the customer.”
The problem is, however, that the customer is sometimes hard to please. Research conducted by iland back in June found that, in two in five cases, customers argued their cloud provider “doesn’t know [them] or [their] company.” Brink argues that many of the larger scale IaaS public cloud vendors are ‘high on functionality but low on support, transparency and visibility’, but with data sovereignty and compliance, the issue is far more complex.
“It’s making sure they’re protecting their own customers’ data, they’re following all those rules on opting in and opting out, they know exactly where their customers’ data is at any point in time, and that they have assurance from their cloud providers that it’s not across different data centre borders,” says Brink.
As a result, iland has invested significantly in a compliance professional services arm, headed by director of compliance Frank Krieger. Writing for this publication in January on changes to the Safe Harbour ruling, Krieger noted: “Data sovereignty is ever-changing and new rules are being implemented constantly. This is a disruptor but not a destroyer for business. If you make sure your business is staying on top of the regulations, you’ll not get caught out when new laws come into play in the near future.”
Brink argues the two key issues for companies are data privacy and data security, and in particular putting the intrusion detection and vulnerability scanning within the cloud infrastructure. “It is complex for customers to navigate this post-Safe Harbour world – they need help,” she says. Overall, it represents another potential pain point for customers – and as ever, due diligence is its own reward.
Hybrid Cloud Versus Hybrid IT: What’s the Hype? By @Kevin_Jackson | @CloudExpo #Cloud
Once again, the boardroom is in a bitter battle over what edict its members will now levy on their hapless IT organization. On one hand, hybrid cloud is all the rage. Adopting this option promises all the cost savings of public cloud with the security and comfort of private cloud. This environment would not only check the box for meeting the cloud computing mandate, but also position the organization as innovative and industry-leading. Why wouldn’t a forward-leaning management team go all in with cloud?
How Are Cloud-Based Solutions Benefiting Procurement Organizations? | @CloudExpo #Cloud
I sat down with Michael Rösch, COO of POOL4TOOL, to chat about cloud computing. With a lot of buzz about the impact of the cloud on business, it was a chance to get a perspective, as well as a few hints and tips, from someone who has been at the coalface of procurement cloud services for the past 15 years. Michael has been at POOL4TOOL since 2000, becoming COO in 2012, and has worked on projects with German giants like Behr, Hansgrohe, Heidelberger Printing Presses, Carl Zeiss and ThyssenKrupp Presta in that time.