A myriad of new methodologies and technologies from cloud computing to BYOD have changed the IT landscape demonstrably. In parallel, higher-value functions around data, customer engagement and revenue growth are pushing CIOs to consider alternative approaches. The nexus is moving IT to a zero footprint infrastructure model. Organizations including Healthcare, Financial Services, Insurance and Airlines are moving in this direction. Unfortunately, traditional IT paradigms present a challenge to adopting these new methodologies. Mar. 17, 2014 09:00 AM EDT Reads: 1,418
In the Subscription Economy, purchase-to-use is winning, and purchase-to-own is on its way out. The key to success is that customers are actually using a product or service and in the Subscription Economy, the future is clear: delivering value drives revenue. Accessing this data to understand usage, and resulting customer value, is mandatory to survival.
In his session at 14th Cloud Expo, Matthew Shanahan, SVP of Marketing and Strategy at Scout by Service Source, will discuss how businesses in industries such as telecom, SaaS, financial services, healthcare and education can, and are, leveraging data science methods to predict and avoid customer churn and increase revenue.
A trendsetter in intimate women’s apparel, Frederick’s of Hollywood, needed a cloud strategy that merged stability, security and PCI compliance needs with the ability to scale up during retail busy season.
In her session at 14th Cloud Expo, Malorie Lanthier, VP of Information Technology at Frederick’s of Hollywood, will discuss how migrating to the cloud enhanced the scalability, resiliency and flexibility of Frederick’s of Hollywood’s IT infrastructure while elevating the ability to address company-wide business objectives. She’ll also share her cloud evaluation process, successful practices used to make the wholesale move to the cloud and advice for organizations looking to develop and execute a holistic cloud plan quickly and effectively. 
Cloud environments have created situations that allow users, customers, consumers, and employees to access Public, Intranet, and Extranet applications from different locations, devices, and as different personas. The focus of all the Internet and enterprise front-end applications today is to enhance the user experience. In addition, with advances in mobility and BYOD, the line between public and private becomes a deep shade of gray.
At the same time, organizations are leveraging SaaS applications, such as Google Apps and DropBox, for their internal business communication and collaboration. This opens up challenges in providing a universal identity for the user, while at the same time retaining the flexibility to segregate access depending on the scenario. While cloud computing environments may offer different levels of abstraction to its users, federated identity management does not leverage these abstractions; each user must set up her identity management solution. This situation is...
Netflix has long been known for being a leader and innovator in delivering its Netflix service by leveraging public cloud service provider, Amazon Web Services (AWS). However, Netflix’s IT team wasn’t quite there, and still had many legacy applications and infrastructure in place. One thing is to start a platform from the ground up solely leveraging cloud. It’s an entirely different process to do so from a legacy environment to more SaaS based and infrastructure as a service. The goal for Netflix is to achieve 100% of this by beginning of 2015. Mike Kail joined Netflix in 2011 as VP of IT Operations and is tasked with ensuring that this migration happens as smoothly as possible.
SYS-CON Events announced today that Ambernet Technologies, the innovative “Cloud Management Center” company, will exhibit at SYS-CON's 14th International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on June 10–12, 2014, at the Javits Center in New York City, New York.
Ambernet Technologies is a leading global provider of cloud management software (CloudTruOps) and IT professional services to the enterprise, service provider and government markets. CloudTruOps is the industry’s first infrastructure-independent and service-aware software solution that provides a fully transactional single pane of glass for cloud service provisioning & orchestration, governance, policy, security, performance, self-service storefront, and billing/chargeback for multiple clouds. Ambernet's IT professional services provide consulting services, solutions, and support. Ambernet is a global company with headquarters in Dallas, Texas and regional offices in Toronto, Canada, and Bangalore, India.
The evolutionary nature of mobile presents a security-centric challenge for businesses with corporate content on these devices. Enterprises put themselves at risk when users access sensitive information through email and applications across smartphones and tablets, while mobile. Organizations can choose to ignore this security threat or enhance employee productivity through secure corporate containers.
In his session at 14th Cloud Expo, Eric Owings, an enterprise account executive at AirWatch®, will discuss best practices and strategies to ensure global security and workforce enablement by leveraging enterprise mobility management (EMM) across the enterprise. He will also provide attendees with a deeper understanding of enterprise mobility in a connected ecosystem, while ensuring security and compliance in the cloud.
Cascading is the popular Java-based application development framework for building Big Data applications on Apache Hadoop. This open source framework allows you to leverage existing skillsets such as Java, SQL, R, and more to create enterprise-grade applications without having to think in MapReduce.
In his session at 5th Big Data Expo, Alexis Roos, a Senior Solutions Architect focusing on Big Data solutions at Concurrent, Inc., will give an introduction to Cascading, how it works, and then dive into how enterprises can start building applications with Cascading. Come and see how companies like Twitter, eBay, Etsy, and other data-driven companies are taking advantage of Cascading and how Cascading is changing the business of Big Data in the enterprise.
The world’s largest and most successful private cloud operations are revolutionizing their approach to demand management. These organizations have recognized that while self-service portals are a component in the overall cloud architecture, these tools do not enable demand management. In fact, in many cases the portals and end-user interfaces don’t actually capture anything to do with demand, but instead force the user to enter the capacity “supply” requirements that they think will meet their demands. This is very different. Large enterprises have recognized the need to look beyond immediate requests to also model the “pipeline” of new demands that will be coming down the road. It is only by capturing new immediate requirements, an understanding of the pipeline and what is running in environments that organizations can possibly hope to accurately model demand and properly allocate compute, storage and network resources. 
Almost everyone sees the potential of Internet of Things but how can businesses truly unlock that potential. The key will be in the ability to discover business insight in the midst of an ocean of Big Data generated from billions of embedded devices via Systems of Discover. Businesses will also need to ensure that they can sustain that insight by leveraging the cloud for global reach, scale and elasticity. Without bringing these three elements together via Systems of Discover you either end up with an Internet of somethings and/or a big mess of data.
In his session at @ThingsExpo, Mac Devine, a Distinguished Engineer at IBM, will focus on how to ensure businesses have the right plans in place for Systems of Discovery for the Internet-of-Things world we are entering.
Nominations for participating vendors will be accepted through Twitter at @ThingsExpo. The "Open Cloud Shoot-Out at @ThingsExpo New York," in which leading cloud providers are expected to participate, will be held live on stage at the event. The Shootout will provide the vendors with an opportunity to demonstrate the features and capabilities of their products, with a particular focus on interoperability, scalability, security, and reliability in terms of development, deployment, and management.
As businesses aspire to move more and more application workloads outside of the boundaries of their private cloud data centers, public cloud service providers are increasingly implementing a private cloud staple: resiliency.
In his session at 14th Cloud Expo, John Roese, SVP and Chief CTO at EMC Corporation, will summarize the key architectural tenets of resilient private cloud architectures. These tenets can be implemented in any service provider cloud implementation, regardless of hypervisor choice (e.g., VMware, Hyper-V, Xen), cloud orchestration software (e.g., vSphere, OpenStack), network implementation (e.g., SDN, NFV), or storage implementation (file, block, object). A resilient public cloud will naturally attract increased workload migration, and the rest of the session will describe foundational technologies that facilitate not only secure and seamless application workload migration, but secure and seamless data set migration as well. 
Fueled by the global economic situation, the government's focus on datacenter consolidation and the "Cloud First" initiative, Cloud Computing continues to be the buzzword of the year. As government agencies start to adopt cloud computing, additional challenges including security in the cloud have become prominent barriers to adoption.
In his session at 14th Cloud Expo, Majed Saadi, Director of the Cloud Computing Practice at SRA International, will focus on providing a quick Cloud Computing technology update with an emphasis on current Cloud Computing security trends and drivers. Examples of these trends include: the utilization and evaluation of Clouds in both active and passive surveillance systems and the use of High Performance Clouds for expanding scientist ability to access data. He will also introduces best practices and lessons learned for securing both public and private cloud environments. It offers insight into how Cloud Computing coupled with other technical advancements i...
With Windows Server 2003 end of extended support approaching, enterprises must begin their migration planning for all affected production applications. There are a variety of approaches and many people will take a “mix and match” approach. Whatever the approach, it’s important to have a migration plan now – 200 business days goes by quickly when some applications take weeks to migrate. This is the perfect opportunity to move those applications to the Cloud. There’s a way to move your applications and modernize (move to the cloud) at the same time.
Software development, like engineering, is a craft that requires the application of creative approaches to solve problems given a wide range of constraints. However, while engineering design may be craftwork, the production of most designed objects relies on a standardized and automated manufacturing process. By contrast, much of what's typically involved when moving an application from prototype to production and, indeed, maintaining the application through its lifecycle remains craftwork. 
Once you learn the definition of shadow IT, it shouldn’t be too shocking to learn how widespread it is at companies large and small all over the world. I hate to assume, but the odds are, that you yourself have used a non-IT approved SaaS option for the same reason as everyone else, myself included. We’re all expected to do our jobs faster, and at a higher quality than we did in the past, and sometimes it’s just too easy to go behind the backs of those whom we perceive to slow us down, or act as a blocker.
A recent study showed that eighty percent of those polled admitted using SaaS applications and tools without IT’s approval, which, when you’re part of that eighty percent, isn’t all that shocking. The real kicker is the revelation of who has been using shadow IT SaaS solutions more than anyone. 
Digital Ocean is a NY based hosting provider specializing in SSD based virtual machines. A majority of our customers choose to deploy and manage databases on Amazon AWS. However running large scale write intensive databases on AWS is a fairly difficult and time-consuming operation. If you are interested in the reasons you can read the [...]
Windows Azure is currently offering an exclusive promotion. You can get $200 in free credits just for test driving the innovative public cloud service designed by Microsoft. What's the catch? When you sign up, Microsoft asks that you provide your credit card and a phone number so that they can verify your identity. Once verified, you are able to dive into the world of Windows Azure. 
Skyhigh Networks releases their second edition of the Cloud Adoption and Risk Report. As with the first edition of the report, the purpose of the report is to provide hard data on the actual use of cloud services within enterprises of all sizes. This report summarizes data from approximately 6 million users across 175 companies and 10 industries. 
Most of the discussions on Big Data begins and ends with Hadoop. It is the commercial version of HPC (High Performance Computing), whose underlying technologies have been around for years: clustering, parallel processing, and distributed file system. In today’s parlance you can read Hadoop clusters on commodity hardware, map-reduce algorithm, and HDFS in that order. There is no doubt that Hadoop has taken off in a big way, but it does not address one big emerging area called real time query and analysis on data that is moving all the time. Data can be categorized into three buckets – transactional data, analytics on data at rest, and analytics on data in flight (streaming, real time). We are talking about the last one here.
It is not about just velocity, but also latency. When an event occurs, we need to act on it within seconds or minutes. We have to “react in the moment”. First, the enterprise data warehouse (EDW) needs to be loaded with real time data, as opposed to the offline batch loading. What we need is continuous loading and data ingestion. Second, we have to do query and analysis on this fresh data as it comes for split-second decisions. The EDWs were designed years ag...
In my experience when you work in IT the executive team rarely focuses on your team until you experience a catastrophic failure – once you do you are the center of attention until services are back to normal. It is easy to ignore the background work that IT teams spend most of their days on just to keep everything running smoothly. In this post I will discuss how to quantify the value of DevOps to organizations. The notion of DevOps is simple: Developers working together with Operations to get things done faster in an automated and repeatable way. 
There are a few ‘The ______ of Our Lives’ out there: Days. Time. Moments. Love. They define who we are, where we’ve been and where we are going. And today, many of those days, times, moments and loves interact with applications. Both the apps we tap and the back end applications used to chronicle these events have become as much a part of our lives as the happenings themselves.
There are people who take life slowly, accept it on its terms, meditate, read about meditation, and internalize books like "Wherever You Go, There You Are," a bestseller by a guy with a hyphenated name. I'm more of a Malcolm Gladwell fan -- Outliers or his newest book “David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants."
Maybe I'm just naturally the type that will spend 10,000 hours practicing, sharpening, mastering, thinking about the advantages a startup has over leaders in the market, getting back in the game. I've been in enterprise software for 30 years and the cloud since its formation. A long time ago, I faced the fact that I don't have the basketball gene (although I do coach several boys' sports teams) and I'm pretty sure meditating will not increase my productivity as a start-up CEO. I could be wrong on the meditating part.
Proponents of pure software infrastructures often point to rapid provisioning (like right now, push a button and blam! Instant scale) as one of the reasons to "go software." Superficially this is true. If your infrastructure is all software (or virtual, if you prefer) then when you need more X you can simply grab some available resources and provision more X. No procurement process, no PO, no approvals, no waiting.
But did you notice what's ultimately required for this to happen? Available resources.
The dirty little secret of on-demand scalability is that no matter what, you need available resources. You need a pool of available (idle) resources from which to draw in order to provision, well, anything. Whether you need to scale server, storage, or network services, those services have to be provisioned on some kind of hardware.
The term "Big Data" is quite possibly one of the most difficult IT-related terms to pin down ever. There are so many potential types of, and applications for Big Data that it can be a bit daunting to consider all of the possibilities. Thankfully, for IT operations staff, Big Data is mostly a bunch of new technologies that are being used together to solve some sort of business problem. In this blog post I'm going to focus on what IT Operations teams need to know about big data technology and support.
One of the most often questions/feedback we get regarding Windows 8.1 is where is my start menu. These conversations can get very passionate, and usually turn into a commentary around on how much we miss our start menu. I am sure some folks want to punch the screen.
I totally understand your frustration and I went through this as well. While Windows 8 does provide a big change to how we do things in the interface, it did make me re-think why I used my start menu. What I learned from my own usage and talking to all you wonderful folks, is that the start menu is used for small common set of minimum tasks. Here is a list of the most common things folks like yourselves have told me, and I personally had problems finding in Windows 8.1:
•Shutdown and Sign Out
•Search
•Launch and Find Recently Installed Applications
Like all of you once I learned how to get around Windows 8 and find these basic tasks, I found that I will never need my start menu again. In this article, I am here to help show you how to accomplish these tasks with ease in Windows 8.1. In the end I hope you learn some new tips and tricks to improve how you use Windows 8.1,
IoT is not a new concept. Wikipedia says: “The term Internet of Things was proposed by Kevin Ashton in 1999 though the concept has been discussed in the literature since at least 1991.” In its early stages, the concept relates to the use of radio-frequency identification (RFID) and how “if all objects and people in daily life were equipped with identifiers, they could be managed and inventoried by computers.” Finally, Wikipedia adds that, “Equipping all objects in the world with minuscule identifying devices or machine-readable identifiers could transform daily life.” And this is exactly what is happening today and also what makes IoT more important than ever.
Gordon E. Moore's famously predicted tech explosion was prophetic, but it may have hit a snag. While the number of transistors on integrated circuits has doubled approximately every two years since his 1965 paper, the ability to process and transact on data hasn't. We're now ingesting data faster than we can make sense of it, leaving computing at an impasse. Without a new approach, the innovation promised by the combination of big data and internet scale may be like the flying cars we thought we'd see by 2014. Fortunately, this is is not the case, as in-memory computing offers a way to bridge this impasse.ning the doors to mass adoptiong of in-memory computing through open source.
Back in the noughties I made the conscious decision as a Storage guy to immerse myself into what was being termed server virtualization and understanding the product offerings of a relatively new company named VMware. To this day I remember the incredulous looks and responses I received from my Storage counterparts, who were convinced that the VMware fad was nothing more than a system admin tool. Indeed the organizations that were early adopters of VMware ended up assigning the virtualization responsibility to the system admins team; at no point was there ever a thought that a dedicated virtualization team could or should be established. Fast forward to 2014 and virtualization teams are the norm and Storage administrators are constantly being hard pressed to have a better understanding of VMware as they provision and manage virtualized environments. Such a culture change was unthinkable 10 years ago, yet here we are again with the emergence of another silo, the Converged Infrastructure team.
One of the questions I have been asked for a while is how do you set static IP address in Windows Azure Virtual Machines. Well you can!
While it is like a DHCP reservation for the VM itself (the VM is still DHCP configured), it is treated as a static IP to Windows Azure. Now this does involve new Windows Azure PowerShell cmdlets. You will need to download and install the Windows Azure PowerShell cmdlets (possibly again) to get the new functionality. 
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