APIs came about to help companies create and manage their digital ecosystem, enabling them not only to reach more customers through more devices, but also create a large supporting ecosystem of developers and partners. While Facebook, Twitter and Netflix were the early adopters of APIs, large enterprises have been quick to embrace the concept of APIs and have been leveraging APIs as a connective tissue that powers all interactions between their customers, partners and employees.
As enterprises embrace APIs, some very specific Enterprise API Adoption patterns and best practices have started emerging.
In his session at 14th Cloud Expo, Sachin Agarwal, VP of Product Marketing and Strategy at SOA Software, will talk about the most common enterprise API patterns and will discuss how enterprises can successfully launch an API program. Apr. 23, 2014 09:45 AM EDT Reads: 858
The social media expansion has shown just how people are eager to share their experiences with the rest of the world. Cloud technology is the perfect platform to satisfy this need given its great flexibility and readiness. At Cynny, we aim to revolutionize how people share and organize their digital life through a brand new cloud service, starting from infrastructure to the users’ interface.
A revolution that began from inventing and designing our very own infrastructure: we have created the first server network powered solely by ARM CPU. The microservers have “organism-like” features, differentiating them from any of the current technologies. Benefits include low consumption of energy, making Cynny the ecologically friendly alternative for storage as well as cheaper infrastructure, lower running costs, etc. 
Next-Gen Cloud. Whatever you call it, there’s a higher calling for cloud computing that requires providers to change their spots and move from a commodity mindset to a premium one. Businesses can no longer maintain the status quo that today’s service providers offer. Yes, the continuity, speed, mobility, data access and connectivity are staples of the cloud and always will be. But cloud providers that plan to not only exist tomorrow – but to lead – know that security must be the top priority for the cloud and are delivering it now.
In his session at 14th Cloud Expo, Kurt Hagerman, Chief Information Security Officer at FireHost, will detail why and how you can have both infrastructure performance and enterprise-grade security – and what tomorrow's cloud provider will look like. 
Today, developers and business units are leading the charge to cloud computing. The primary driver: faster access to computing resources by using the cloud's automated infrastructure provisioning. However, fast access to infrastructure exposes the next friction point: creating, delivering, and operating applications much faster.
In his session at 14th Cloud Expo, Bernard Golden, VP of Strategy at ActiveState, will discuss why solving the next friction point is critical for true cloud computing success and how developers and business units can leverage service catalogs, frameworks, and DevOps to achieve the true goal of IT: delivering increased business value through applications.
MapDB is an Apache-licensed open source database specifically designed for Java developers. The library uses the standard Java Collections API, making it totally natural for Java developers to use and adopt, while scaling database size from GBs to TBs. MapDB is very fast and supports an agile approach to data, allowing developers to construct flexible schemas to exactly match application needs and tune performance, durability and caching for specific requirements. 
Web conferencing in a public cloud has the same risks as any other cloud service. If you have ever had concerns over the types of data being shared in your employees’ web conferences, such as IP, financials or customer data, then it’s time to look at web conferencing in a private cloud.
In her session at 14th Cloud Expo, Courtney Behrens, Senior Marketing Manager at Brother International, will discuss how issues that had previously been out of your control, like performance, advanced administration and compliance, can now be put back behind your firewall.
More and more enterprises today are doing business by opening up their data and applications through APIs. Though forward-thinking and strategic, exposing APIs also increases the surface area for potential attack by hackers. To benefit from APIs while staying secure, enterprises and security architects need to continue to develop a deep understanding about API security and how it differs from traditional web application security or mobile application security.
In his session at 14th Cloud Expo, Sachin Agarwal, VP of Product Marketing and Strategy at SOA Software, will walk you through the various aspects of how an API could be potentially exploited. He will discuss the necessary best practices to secure your data and enterprise applications while continue continuing to support your business’s digital initiatives. 
The revolution that happened in the server universe over the past 15 years has resulted in an eco-system that is more open, more democratically innovative and produced better results in technically challenging dimensions like scale. The underpinnings of the revolution were common hardware, standards based APIs (ex. POSIX) and a strict adherence to layering and isolation between applications, daemons and kernel drivers/modules which allowed multiple types of development happen in parallel without hindering others. Put simply, today's server model is built on a consistent x86 platform with few surprises in its core components. A kernel abstracts away the platform, so that applications and daemons are decoupled from the hardware. In contrast, networking equipment is still stuck in the mainframe era. Today, networking equipment is a single appliance, including hardware, OS, applications and user interface come as a monolithic entity from a single vendor. Switching between different vendor'...
Cloud backup and recovery services are critical to safeguarding an organization’s data and ensuring business continuity when technical failures and outages occur. With so many choices, how do you find the right provider for your specific needs?
In his session at 14th Cloud Expo, Daniel Jacobson, Technology Manager at BUMI, will outline the key factors including backup configurations, proactive monitoring, data restoration, disaster recovery drills, security, compliance and data center resources. Aside from the technical considerations, the secret sauce in identifying the best vendor is the level of focus, expertise and specialization of their engineering team and support group, and how they monitor your day-to-day backups, provide recommendations, and guide you through restores when necessary.
Cloud scalability and performance should be at the heart of every successful Internet venture. The infrastructure needs to be resilient, flexible, and fast – it’s best not to get caught thinking about architecture until the middle of an emergency, when it's too late.
In his interactive, no-holds-barred session at 14th Cloud Expo, Phil Jackson, Development Community Advocate for SoftLayer, will dive into how to design and build-out the right cloud infrastructure.
You use an agile process; your goal is to make your organization more agile. What about your data infrastructure?
The truth is, today’s databases are anything but agile – they are effectively static repositories that are cumbersome to work with, difficult to change, and cannot keep pace with application demands. Performance suffers as a result, and it takes far longer than it should to deliver on new features and capabilities needed to make your organization competitive. As your application and business needs change, data repositories and structures get outmoded rapidly, resulting in increased work for application developers and slow performance for end users. Further, as data sizes grow into the Big Data realm, this problem is exacerbated and becomes even more difficult to address. A seemingly simple schema change can take hours (or more) to perform, and as requirements evolve the disconnect between existing data structures and actual needs diverge. 
SYS-CON Events announced today that SherWeb, a long-time leading provider of cloud services and Microsoft's 2013 World Hosting Partner of the Year, 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.
A worldwide hosted services leader ranking in the prestigious North American Deloitte Technology Fast 500TM, and Microsoft's 2013 World Hosting Partner of the Year, SherWeb provides competitive cloud solutions to businesses and partners around the world. Founded in 1998, SherWeb is a privately owned company headquartered in Quebec, Canada. Its service portfolio includes Microsoft Exchange, SharePoint, Lync, Dynamics CRM and more. 
The world of cloud and application development is not just for the hardened developer these days.
In their session at 14th Cloud Expo, Phil Jackson, Development Community Advocate for SoftLayer, and Harold Hannon, Sr. Software Architect at SoftLayer, will pull back the curtain of the architecture of a fun demo application purpose-built for the cloud. They will focus on demonstrating how they leveraged compute, storage, messaging, and other cloud elements hosted at SoftLayer to lower the effort and difficulty of putting together a useful application. This will be an active demonstration and review of simple command-line tools and resources, so don’t be afraid if you are not a seasoned developer. 
SYS-CON Events announced today that BUMI, a premium managed service provider specializing in data backup and recovery, 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.
Manhattan-based BUMI (Backup My Info!) is a premium managed service provider specializing in data backup and recovery. Founded in 2002, the company’s Here, There and Everywhere data backup and recovery solutions are utilized by more than 500 businesses. BUMI clients include professional service organizations such as banking, financial, insurance, accounting, hedge funds and law firms. The company is known for its relentless passion for customer service and support, and has won numerous awards, including Customer Service Provider of the Year and 10 Best Companies to Work For. 
Chief Security Officers (CSO), CIOs and IT Directors are all concerned with providing a secure environment from which their business can innovate and customers can safely consume without the fear of Distributed Denial of Service attacks. To be successful in today's hyper-connected world, the enterprise needs to leverage the capabilities of the web and be ready to innovate without fear of DDoS attacks, concerns about application security and other threats. Organizations face great risk from increasingly frequent and sophisticated attempts to render web properties unavailable, and steal intellectual property or personally identifiable information. Layered security best practices extend security beyond the data center, delivering DDoS protection and maintaining site performance in the face of fast-changing threats.
loud providers Google, AWS and Microsoft are doing some spring-cleaning - out with the old, in with the new - when it comes to pricing services.
With the latest cuts, here's a news flash:
There's a new business model driving cloud that is every bit as exponential in growth -- with order of magnitude improvements to pricing -- as Moore's Law has been to computing. Let's call it "Bezos' Law," and go straight to the math
Over the past few years, the SaaS community has gained a solid understanding of SaaS financial metrics, as well as many of the operational principles required to achieve them. However, there has always been an obvious gap between what happens on the top line and what happens on the ground. It’s one thing to claim that a 50% reduction in churn will result in a 2X increase in recurring revenue, but it’s quite another thing to make it happen. Achieving that 50% reduction in churn is usually a tedious and unreliable process of trial and error. This is about to change. As the SaaS industry matures, we are witnessing the evolution of SaaS metrics beyond simple, historical financial measures toward sophisticated operational measures in the form of new SaaS customer success metrics and predictive analytics.
In the beginning there was a simply acronym: MTTI (mean time to innocence). Weary after years of costly and time-consuming war room battles, IT organizations turned to AppDynamics to give an objective application-level view of production incidents. As a result, application issues are swiftly pinpointed and fixed, accelerating time to repair by up to 90%.
In fact, gravitation towards fact-based constructive issue management spawned a whole new movement – DevOps – with the goal of ingraining this maturity and cooperative spirit into IT organizations from the ground up. The movement was discussed by Jim in a previous blog post. Of course, AppDynamics (or at least, easily accessible fact-based information about application behaviour in production) is a necessary prerequisite to this.
We've talked before about the bifurcation of the network, which is driven as much by the evolution of network services from "nice to have" to "critical" as it is by emerging architectures. The demarcation line in the network stack has traditionally been - and remains - between layers 3 and 4 in the OSI model. The reason for this is that there is a transition as you move from layer 3 to layer 4 from stateless networking to stateful networking.
Like moving to IPv6, simply picking up your existing network architecture and moving it to a completely new one is not going to happen overnight. There will undoubtedly still be "traditional" networks hanging around even when SDN adoption is considered mainstream and fully mature. That's the nature of evolution; it doesn't happen in the blink of eye, it takes time.
Right now organizations are faced with a variety of options in networking. From VXLAN to NVGRE, from traditional to software-defined, choices abound today. And chances are that most largish networks will actually take advantage of several of those choices, depending on what phase of adoption they're in.
Appthority is an app risk management company with a Software-as-a-Service solution that analyzes mobile apps for hidden behaviors that pose privacy and security risks. Our main customers are large organizations and we provide them with the first all-in-one App Risk Management service to uncover the hidden actions of apps and enable enterprises to create custom policies to prevent unwanted app behaviors. Appthority combines the largest global database of analyzed public and private apps with advanced policy management tools to automate control over risky app actions to protect corporate data on company-issued and BYOD mobile phones as employees bring their own apps to work.
Like every one I am updating my terminology to reflect the shift that occurred – Business and technical executives immediately get that when combined with a world of smart, connected devices then Cloud computing only makes more sense.
We have entered an age where IoT Cloud Computing will become the dominant form of enterprise IT architecture.
Smart devices aren’t much use if they aren’t sharing their feeds with some kind of enterprise system, and so new forms of middleware as well as entirely new forms of ERP will emerge too. In short how will that RFID device on the tin of beans ordered by your smart fridge, actually place the order into the supermarket logistics systems?
This past weekend, like many of you, I started getting the blood curdling password resets from a bunch of OpenSSL affected sites. I also got a few emails from sites indicating that I had nothing to worry about. Bad news, good news. Probably the biggest security story thus far for 2014 is Heartbleed, the OpenSSL vulnerability which potentially allows attackers to extract 64 kilobyte batches of memory at random without being noticed and leaving no trace. Sounds like the perfect crime. 
When I visit clients to talk about DevOps, I usually ask them what their monitoring strategy is. Too often, the answer I hear is "We use Nagios". I think Nagios is a great tool, but it sure is not a strategy. Nagios does a good job of monitoring infrastructure. It will alert you when you are running out of disk, CPU, or memory. I call this reactive monitoring. In other words, Nagios is telling you that your resources are getting maxed out and you are about to have issues. Proactive monitoring focuses more on the behavior of the applications and attempts to detect when metrics are starting to stray away from their normal baseline numbers. Proactive monitoring alerts you that the system is starting to experience symptoms that can lead to a degradation of performance or capacity issues which is more preferable than Nagios telling you are about to be screwed. With reactive monitoring, it is not uncommon that customers start complaining about the same time that the Nagios alerts start going off. The goal of proactive monitoring is to head off issues so that customers don't even notice. 
One of the most powerful aspects of the Internet of Things is the process of synthesis it achieves; it provides a mental model for people to associate and relate a number of different technologies under one umbrella concept and trend.
Therefore one early quick win is a simple taxonomy for listing what these different technology camps are, so here is a first draft approach for this that is now included as the guiding framework in our IoT Technology Roadmap.
OpenStack. OpenDaylight. SDN. Cloud. It's all about abstraction, about APIs and "software-defined" (which really means software-controlled, but this is neither the time or place to get into that debate).
It's about jailbreaking the network. Enabling access to features and functionality in a way that results in new services, increased responsiveness and overall, the operationalization of the network. 
The Information Technology Acquisition Advisory Council (ITAAC) and the Telecommunications Industry Association (TIA) are announcing a slate of innovative leaders to serve as facilitators for the upcoming "Agile Sourcing Environment for Commercial Cloud" brainstorming session being held in Alexandria, VA on April 23, 2014. Enjoying a great response thus far, industry participants include Boeing, Oracle, Google,SAP, Leidos and Capgemini. Government participants include the US Navy, US Army, US House of Representatives and GSA. 
Not too long ago, it took even the most successful entrepreneurs several centuries or at least decades to reach a valuation of a billion and thus become a member of the exclusive Billionaire Boys Club*. Families like the Rothschilds, the Waltons or the Brenninkmeijers have indeed built up impressive capital wealth, but because it took them several generations, it often became quite diluted among brothers, sons, daughters, nieces, and even third-degree-nephews.
With the advent of first: IT; then the Internet and now the cloud, that time frame has rapidly shrunk. Today companies with as little as 50 or even 13 employees reached valuations where reputable companies and world-renowned artists can only dream of. This acceleration is even more poignant when we look at applications in the heart the nexus of Social, Mobile, Cloud and Analytics (SMAC), such as Instagram , Tumbler and recently WhatsApp. And just like in the music industry there is a lot of interest in the tip parade: the list of runner ups; ideas and products getting ready to become the next mega hit. 
Despite claims that there exists (or will, look out!) a mythical "god box" for the enterprise data center, capable of performing every data center function imaginable, it remains, well, mythical. Efforts to effectively secure the data center and the applications it delivers therefore requires a collaborative approach between best-of-breed technologies.
But if collaboration across functional IT groups - development, operations, network and security - remains as elusive as nirvana, then collaboration across products has traditionally been seen as likely as sighting the Loch Ness Monster. The arrival of cloud and more recently SDN has changed that, not only encouraging but requiring changes in collaboration capabilities in order to remain considered best-of-breed.
We love analogies. No matter what the topic, analogies are a great way to explain something in a different context to make a specific point with a frame of reference that may be more familiar to those we are making a point to. There is one that seems to come back over and over again in our industry, the one that compares the network to the power grid, network connections to power plugs. I had not heard it for a while but at Interop last week, I heard it used twice in booth demonstrations as part of plug and play pitches. And I really do not like that analogy.
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