After a couple of false starts, cloud-based desktop solutions are picking up steam, driven by trends such as BYOD and pervasive high-speed connectivity.
In his session at 15th Cloud Expo, Seth Bostock, CEO of IndependenceIT, cuts through the hype and the acronyms, and discusses the emergence of full-featured cloud workspaces that do for the desktop what cloud infrastructure did for the server. He’ll discuss VDI vs DaaS, implementation strategies and evaluation criteria.Jul. 29, 2014 11:45 AM EDT Reads: 1,497
There will be 50 billion Internet connected devices by 2020. Today, every manufacturer has a propriety protocol and an app. How do we securely integrate these "things" into our lives and businesses in a way that we can easily control and manage? Even better, how do we integrate these "things" so that they control and manage each other so our lives become more convenient or our businesses become more profitable and/or safe?
We have heard that the best interface is no interface. In his session at Internet of @ThingsExpo, Chris Matthieu, Co-Founder & CTO at Octoblu, Inc., will discuss how these devices generate enough data to learn our behaviors and simplify/improve our lives. What if we could connect everything to everything? I'm not only talking about connecting things to things but also systems, cloud services, and people. Add in a little machine learning and artificial intelligence and now we have something interesting...
Cloud computing started a technology revolution; now DevOps is driving that revolution forward. By enabling new approaches to service delivery, cloud and DevOps together are delivering even greater speed, agility, and efficiency. No wonder leading innovators are adopting DevOps and cloud together!
In his session at DevOps Summit, Andi Mann, Vice President of Strategic Solutions at CA Technologies, will explore the synergies in these two approaches, with practical tips, techniques, research data, war stories, case studies, and recommendations.
SYS-CON Events announced today that Cloudian, Inc., the leading provider of hybrid cloud storage solutions, has been named “Bronze Sponsor” of SYS-CON's 15th International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on November 4–6, 2014, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
Cloudian is a Foster City, Calif.-based software company specializing in cloud storage. Cloudian HyperStore® is an S3-compatible cloud object storage platform that enables service providers and enterprises to build reliable, affordable and scalable hybrid cloud storage solutions. Cloudian actively partners with leading cloud computing environments including Amazon Web Services, Citrix Cloud Platform, Apache CloudStack, OpenStack and the vast ecosystem of S3 compatible tools and applications. Cloudian's customers include Vodafone, Nextel, NTT, Nifty, and LunaCloud. The company has additional offices in China and Japan.
SYS-CON Events announced today that Esri has been named “Bronze Sponsor” of SYS-CON's 15th International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on November 4–6, 2014, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
Esri inspires and enables people to positively impact the future through a deeper, geographic understanding of the changing world around them.
For more information, visit http://www.esri.com.
Cloud Computing is evolving into a Big Three of Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure.
Cloud 360: Multi-Cloud Bootcamp, being held Nov 4–5, 2014, in conjunction with 15th Cloud Expo in Santa Clara, CA, delivers a real-world demonstration of how to deploy and configure a scalable and available web application on all three platforms. The Cloud 360 Bootcamp, led by Janakiram MSV, an analyst with Gigaom Research, is the first bootcamp that introduces the core concepts of Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) based on the workings of the Big Three platforms – Amazon EC2, Google Compute Engine, and Azure VMs.
Bootcamp attendees will get to see the big picture and also receive the knowledge needed to make the best cloud decisions for their business applications and entire enterprise IT organization. 
“Distrix fits into the overall cloud and IoT model around software-defined networking. There’s a broad category around software-defined networking that’s focused on data center, and we focus on the WAN,” explained Jay Friedman, President of Distrix, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at the Internet of @ThingsExpo, held June 10-12, 2014, at the Javits Center in New York City.
Internet of @ThingsExpo 2014 Silicon Valley, November 4–6, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA, will feature technical sessions from a rock star conference faculty and the leading IoT industry players in the world.
The Internet of Things promises to transform businesses (and lives), but navigating the business and technical path to success can be difficult to understand.
In his session at 15th Internet of @ThingsExpo, Chad Jones, Vice President, Product Strategy of LogMeIn's Xively IoT Platform, will show you how to approach creating broadly successful connected customer solutions using real world business transformation studies including New England BioLabs and more. 
Scott Jenson leads a project called The Physical Web within the Chrome team at Google. Project members are working to take the scalability and openness of the web and use it to talk to the exponentially exploding range of smart devices.
Nearly every company today working on the IoT comes up with the same basic solution: use my server and you'll be fine. But if we really believe there will be trillions of these devices, that just can't scale. We need a system that is open a scalable and by using the URL as a basic building block, we open this up and get the same resilience that the web enjoys.
“The Internet of Things is a wave that has arrived and it’s growing really fast. The concern at Aria Systems is making sure that people understand the ramifications of their attempts to monetize whatever it is they build on the Internet of Things," explained C Brendan O’Brien, Co-founder and Chief Architect at Aria Systems, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at the Internet of @ThingsExpo, held June 10-12, 2014, at the Javits Center in New York City.
Internet of @ThingsExpo 2014 Silicon Valley, November 4–6, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA, will feature technical sessions from a rock star conference faculty and the leading IoT industry players in the world.
The Internet of Things is a natural complement to the cloud and related technologies such as Big Data, analytics, and mobility.
In his session at Internet of @ThingsExpo, Joe Weinman will lay out four generic strategies – digital disciplines – to exploit emerging digital technologies for strategic advantage.
Joe Weinman has held executive leadership positions at Bell Labs, AT&T, Hewlett-Packard, and Telx, in areas such as corporate strategy, business development, product management, operations, and R&D. 
SYS-CON Events announced today that DevOps.com has been named “Media Sponsor” of SYS-CON's “DevOps Summit at Cloud Expo,” which will take place on June 10–12, 2014, at the Javits Center in New York City, New York.
DevOps.com is where the world meets DevOps. It is the largest collection of original content relating to DevOps on the web today Featuring up-to-the-minute news, feature stories, blogs, bylined articles and more, DevOps.com is where the thought leaders of the DevOps movement make their ideas known.
There are 182 billion emails sent every day, generating a lot of data about how recipients and ISPs respond. Many marketers take a more-is-better approach to stats, preferring to have the ability to slice and dice their email lists based numerous arbitrary stats. However, fundamentally what really matters is whether or not sending an email to a particular recipient will generate value. Data Scientists can design high-level insights such as engagement prediction models and content clusters that allow marketers to cut through the noise and design their campaigns around strong, predictive signals, rather than arbitrary statistics.
SendGrid sends up to half a billion emails a day for customers such as Pinterest and GitHub. All this email adds up to more text than produced in the entire twitterverse. We track events like clicks, opens and deliveries to help improve deliverability for our customers – adding up to over 50 billion useful events every month. While SendGrid data covers only abo...
SYS-CON Events announced today that the Web Host Industry Review has been named “Media Sponsor” of SYS-CON's 15th International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on November 4–6, 2014, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
Since 2000, The Web Host Industry Review has made a name for itself as the foremost authority of the Web hosting industry providing reliable, insightful and comprehensive news, reviews and resources to the hosting community. TheWHIR Blogs provides a community of expert industry perspectives. The Web Host Industry Review Magazine also offers a business-minded, issue-driven perspective of interest to executives and decision-makers. WHIR TV offers on demand web hosting video interviews and web hosting video features of the key persons and events of the web hosting industry. WHIR Events brings together like-minded hosting industry professionals and decision-makers in local communities. TheWHIR is an iNET Interactive property. 
SYS-CON Events announced today that O'Reilly Media has been named “Media Sponsor” of SYS-CON's 15th International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on November 4–6, 2014, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
O'Reilly Media spreads the knowledge of innovators through its books, online services, magazines, and conferences. Since 1978, O'Reilly Media has been a chronicler and catalyst of cutting-edge development, homing in on the technology trends that really matter and spurring their adoption by amplifying "faint signals" from the alpha geeks who are creating the future. An active participant in the technology community, the company has a long history of advocacy, meme-making, and evangelism.
The Internet of Things (IoT) is a new hot buzzword and like most buzzwords, its purpose and definition are grossly misunderstood. When some people hear the term IoT they immediately associate it with a refrigerator reminding us to order milk or our Fitbit wearable device tweeting how we just “crushed a 4.1 mile run”. Neither of those use cases are very compelling to most of us which makes it hard to fathom how experts can predict that by 2020 there will be greater than a one trillion dollar market that vendors will be trying to claim a piece of.
There’s been a lot of talk recently about the “Internet of Things,” where all kinds of devices – everything from clothing to appliances to vehicles — will be interconnected via the cloud.
Sounds enticing, but really not much of a stretch from what’s already happening now via smartphone apps connecting us with the physical world.
Let’s look at a typical recent Saturday for a twenty-something New Yorker who I’ll call Fred.
It’s 2:30 pm. Fred is in an unfamiliar area of Brooklyn finishing a great brunch that he’d found due to a deal he’d picked up on Groupon. He checks Facebook and sees that his friend Joe has posted about going to today’s Mets game at Citi Field. It’s a 4pm game, followed by a Huey Lewis & the News concert. Fred likes those old bands, but can’t quite place Huey Lewis. So he checks the group out on Spotify – hey, that song “Power of Love” is pretty good. He adds it to his music collection and decides it’s a good day for a ballgame
Cisco has been ridding itself of consumer products for some time, which is why it was surprising to see Cisco at the International Consumer Electronics Show this year. According to CEO John Chambers, however, the new IoE (Internet of Everything) plan at Cisco is set to change the trajectory of everyone on Earth, in both the consumer and the professional arenas.
Bigger than anything that’s come before. Now, don’t get the wrong idea: Cisco isn’t going to sell IoE to consumers directly. But Internet of Everything will impact our daily lives in ways we can’t yet possibly imagine. From improved efficiency in the industrial arena to personalized retail encounters to the ability to control an entire building’s infrastructure with one simply smartphone app, IoE means big.
I love receiving gifts in the form of new insights! It doesn't matter if others received the same gift years ago and I am just getting it now. If it is new to me, I get excited. It is like waking up in the morning and discovering a new room in your house. I read an article by Thomas Friedman in the New York Times this weekend titled, "And Now for a Bit of Good News." The subject of the article was the new "sharing economy," think Uber, Lyft, Airbnb, etc. In the article, Friedman calls Airbnb a "Trust Platform." To me, this weekend, this term was a gift. He is so right.
I have used Airbnb many times when traveling with my family, and to date have been very pleased with our experiences. Often the transactions are sizeable as I am reserving a home in a desirable location for a week. I am engaging in a transaction of some size with a person I don't know, in a home I have never visited, most often in a foreign country using different currency, involving different laws and customs. Why did I risk it? I trusted the platform.
I like this word re-imagination from Mary Meeker’s Internet Trends presentation. We are seeing so many aspects of our life being transformed by the internet.
Take for example, ordering a cab to go somewhere. Either we phone for a yellow cab here in California or if you are in New York city, then you stand and wave for an incoming yellow cab to stop. The new game-changer is Uber. All you do is touch your smartphone screen for UberX or Black car and you get an instant message about the car coming in less than 5 minutes time with the driver and car info. It is cheaper and you pay by card (pre-registered in your Uber account). This is re-imagining the transport sector. Uber, a San Francisco company is worth about $17B and is operating in 70 cities around the world. Quite a disruptive force! 
We live in interesting times for sure. Who would have thought ten years ago that IBM and Apple would become partners? Here is the announcement as reported in eWeek:
Apple and IBM surprised many on July 15, announcing a global partnership that will see the companies attempt to “transform enterprise mobility.” The announcement, punctuated with comments from Apple CEO Tim Cook and IBM CEO Ginni Rometty, served notice of the companies’ intentions to make Apple smartphones, tablets and mobile services pre-eminent in the enterprise, replacing the BlackBerry devices and security services that long held the dominant position in that market. The partnership only confirms what Apple has been doing for years with its smartphones, tablets and even its notebook and desktop PCs, moving deeper into enterprises. The company has been touting its success in the corporate world, saying that many of the top companies in the world are now using its iPhones and iPads. In the IBM announcement, Apple’s Cook said that the company’s iPhones and iPads are now running in more than 98 percent of the Fortune 500 and 92 percent of the Global 500. Both Apple and IBM expect those figures to grow with this new pa...
A key development for the Internet of Things will be the evolution and emergence of the ‘Cloud Name System’, a directory system for Cloud applications in the same way DNS (Domain Name System) works for the web and email.
Lori MacVittie wrote a while back about the need for an ‘SNS’ – a Service Name System, a DNS type directory approach but for Cloud Services so that they can be entirely loosely coupled from their IT infrastructure.
Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the web, himself described a scenario of ‘Socially Aware Cloud Storage‘ that applies this same ideal of abstraction to our personal data across all the social networks we use. This refers to a distributed (Cloud) storage service that is used to store personal user data for social networks, rather than the social sites holding it themselves.
When people talk about Big Data, the emphasis is usually on the Big. Certainly, Big Data applications are distributed largely because the size of the data on which computations are executed warrants more than a typical application can handle. But scaling the network that provides connectivity between Big Data nodes is not just about creating massive interconnects.
In fact, the size of the network might be the least interesting aspect of scaling Big Data fabrics.
Do you avoid stores that have had a credit card breach?
You are not alone. About 52% of people avoid merchants who have had a data breach according to a recent Lowcards survey. They surveyed over 400 random consumers to better understand the impact of identity theft on consumer behavior. 17% said they or a family member was a victim of identity theft over the last year with half the cases being credit card theft. 94% said they are more concerned or equally concerned about ID theft. They estimate that there were 13.5 million cases of credit card identity theft in the United States over the last 12 months.
Internet of Things is the current hip phrase of technology evangelists, geeks and all kinds of clairvoyants. If, according to tech blogs and websites, 2013 was the year of big data, then 2014 certainly is the year of Internet of Things. New projects, big funding rounds, the general hype and excitement are everywhere. And yet, we don’t really get the whole thing right. The general media seem more concerned with new smart thermostats design than how the concept of IoT is changing our lives. It’s time to approach this massive subject properly and start avoiding common misconceptions. The problem with Internet of Things is that everyone seems concerned only about the Things, maybe because the name, which kind of implies that.
If you've had to test one of today's composite applications, you know that "access" has become one of the most daunting barriers to SDLC acceleration. Whether we're talking about access to dev/test environments or access to dependent applications, the ability to pull all the required pieces together in order to test thoroughly is equivalent to herding feral cats.
If you haven't experienced this fun firsthand, consider this: our recent research revealed that systems under test have an average of 30 dependencies, but team members have consistent access to only 6. The time available to access test environments is extremely limited (4 hour slots) and 30% of that limited time was consumed by configuration/setup tasks. Ultimately, testers had time to execute only 50% of the available test plan.
Service virtualization is a revolutionary new technology that helps you break through these constraints by providing ubiquitous, global access to complete dev/test environments. Organizations leveraging service virtualization are able to conduct testing earlier, faster, more thoroughly, and more accurately—significantly reducing the risk of application failure.
In case you're just starti...
In a post Snowden world it is clear that for cloud data security, we need strong encryption. When properly implemented, encryption in the cloud reduces risk to levels acceptable for sensitive data.
There is no doubt data protection in the cloud computing era is never going to be a ‘one size fits all’ kind of a solution. It requires a 360-degree view of the company with 365-days a year dedication.
The best place to start is with a risk analysis so you know what kind of data you have, its levels of sensitivity, who’s using it, where it’s used and stored, and how and where and over what technologies it’s going to ‘commute’. You need to understand your company’s data – in terms of technology and human weaknesses. Data should be unreadable to an attacker. It must be incoherent at all times to anyone other than you and your trusted personnel: while it’s travelling – or you are; whether it’s in transit, storage, stopping, or resting, data is safest in encrypted form.
Some people are never satisfied. These fearless agents of change are everywhere. They're informed, confident and willing to experiment. They seek out the best business technology solution for the job at hand. They act on instinct. Yes, you could say that they're driven.
However, they're also at risk of being labeled as "rogue employees" because they ordered a software-as-a-service (SaaS) offering and perhaps expensed it without prior approval. Sometimes they're the champion of progressive projects that are referred to as Shadow IT -- intentionally bypassing their company's formal evaluation and procurement process. How can this happen?
Is it just because their activities are tolerated, or are they being encouraged? If so, by whom? Why would any business leader applaud a team member that breaks the rules? Maybe, the simple answer is that staying within the confines of the status-quo won't enable a top-performer to fully apply their talent, achieving their absolute best.
The GovCloud Media Network features agency specific video playlist for registered members. Please enjoy this feature on the Army IT. Please visit the new GovCloud Network Media Library for more video content. For membership information please send request to 
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