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. Apr. 18, 2014 08:45 AM EDT Reads: 1,407
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.
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.
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.
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'...
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.
From data center to cloud to the network. In his session at 3rd SDDC Expo, Raul Martynek, CEO of Net Access, will identify the challenges facing both data center providers and enterprise IT as they relate to cross-platform automation. He will then provide insight into designing, building, securing and managing the technology as an integrated service offering.
Topics covered include:
High-density data center design
Network (and SDN) integration and automation
Cloud (and hosting) infrastructure considerations
Monitoring and security
Management approaches
Self-service and automation
In his session at 14th Cloud Expo, David Holmes, Vice President at OutSystems, will demonstrate the immense power that lives at the intersection of mobile apps and cloud application platforms. Attendees will participate in a live demonstration – an enterprise mobile app will be built and changed before their eyes – on their own devices.
David Holmes brings over 20 years of high-tech marketing leadership to OutSystems. Prior to joining OutSystems, he was VP of Global Marketing for Damballa, a leading provider of network security solutions. Previously, he was SVP of Global Marketing for Jacada where his branding and positioning expertise helped drive the company from start-up days to a $55 million initial public offering on Nasdaq. 
Performance is the intersection of power, agility, control, and choice. If you value performance, and more specifically consistent performance, you need to look beyond simple virtualized compute. Many factors need to be considered to create a truly performant environment.
In his General Session at 14th Cloud Expo, Marc Jones, Vice President of Product Innovation for SoftLayer, will explain how to take advantage of a multitude of compute options and platform features to make cloud the cornerstone of your online presence.
Are you interested in accelerating innovation, simplifying deployments, reducing complexity, and lowering development costs? The cloud is changing the face of application development and deployment, with enterprise-grade infrastructure and platform services making it possible for you to build and rapidly scale enterprise applications.
In his session at 14th Cloud Expo, Gene Eun, Sr. Director, Oracle Cloud at Oracle, will discuss the latest solutions and strategies for application developers and enterprise IT organizations to leverage Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS) to build and deploy modern business applications in the cloud.
Hybrid cloud refers to the federation of a public and private cloud environment for the purpose of extending the elastic and flexibility of compute, storage and network capabilities, in an on-demand, pay-as-you go basis. The hybrid approach allows a business to take advantage of the scalability and cost-effectiveness that a public cloud computing environment offers without exposing mission-critical applications and data to third-party vulnerabilities.
Hybrid cloud environments involve complex management challenges. First, organizations struggle to maintain control over the resources that lie outside of their managed IT scope. They also need greater infrastructure visibility to help reduce maintenance costs and ensure that their company data and resources are properly handled and secured. 
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.
There is probably never going to be a perfect balance in the industry between Do-it-yourself (DIY) and Do-it-for-you (DIFY) networking. It seems exceedingly unlikely that there is a one-size-fits-all type of solution out there. And so we will invariably end up with a bifurcated market that requires multiple solutions for its constituents. But if there is not a perfect balance, which one of these is likely to see the most action?
If you were to base your guess on industry chatter, you would have to conclude that DIY has the upper hand.
There is a ton of momentum right now with both SDN and bare metal switching. On the SDN front, it is all about orchestration and automation. The ability to streamline customized workflows is attractive, especially for the large IT shops that sink tens of millions of dollars into managing their monstrosities. Once you get into anything that is customized, there is a degree of DIY-ness that is required. No product is designed expressly for your particular environment, so you need to the ability to customize what you buy to do what you want. Beyond that, there is an awful lot of talk about APIs and programmability.
There’s a new craze occurring in homes, highways, workplaces and everywhere imaginable – the Internet of Things or as I like to call it, The Internet of Nouns. Sensors, thermostats, kitchen appliances, toilets and almost every person, place or thing will have a chip capable of connecting to the internet. And if you want to identify and find those things with recognizable words instead of a 128-bit IP address, you’re going to need DNS.
DNS translates the names we type into browser or mobile app into an IP address so the services can be found on the internet. It is one of the most important components of the internet, especially for human interaction. With the explosion of mobile devices and the millions of apps deployed to support those devices, DNS growth has doubled in recent years. It is also a vulnerable target.
The industry often talks about how the data center perimeter is expanding,necessarily, due to technological shifts such as cloud and mobility and BYOD. But that isn't really the case. If you look closely, you'll see that the perimeter is actually shrinking, getting tighter and tighter around the data center. With just about everything web-enabled these days, the need for access to network to enable access to applications is, well, nearly gone. I can as easily share a file via a web-enabled application today as I could by copying it onto a network share using a VPN last year. With mobile devices inside the corporate walls as well as out, it's no longer effective to just implicitly trust what's on the local network.
Nick Lippis, who writes the eponymously named Lippis Report, had a fascinating report on the differences between enterprise and service provider environments with respect to network virtualization.
He observes, through a survey of the ONUG (Open Networking User Group) membership, that what the enterprise needs is Network Service Virtualization (NSV), which he and ONUG define as the virtualization of "enterprise appliances, such as firewalls, load balancers, application accelerators, application delivery controllers, Intrusion Protection Systems, WAN optimizers, call managers, etc., instantiated for each application." (Lippis Report 217: It’s Network Service Virtualization in the Enterprise rather than Network Function Virtualization ) 
In any space, there is a very small vocal minority. Most people lack the time, interest, or even confidence to say what they think in public. So we are left with a vocal few who drive the conversation. In networking, the vocal minority consists mainly of the vanguards for change. For these people, the network is more than just some connective tissue inside a nebulous infrastructure. It is their life. They live and breathe it. Accordingly, they have strong opinions about how things work and, more importantly, how they ought to work.
But what is happening now is that we are at some risk of the luminaries creating an impassable distance between their vision and the on-the-ground reality in many IT shops today.
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