The world of business is software. No matter the industry vertical or business model, effective software is the key to business success. An even more important aspect of this reality is the application programming interface (API). If you are unfamiliar with this kind of geeky term, APIs are the glue that connects applications to each other and manages the virtual discussions between you and your customers. APIs are also what enables business agility and flexibility of a #FutureReady business
↧
Future Ready in the API Economy By @Kevin_Jackson | @CloudExpo #Cloud
↧
What Has NIST Done for Me Lately? By @Kevin_Jackson | @CloudExpo #Cloud
According to a study, 82 percent of federal IT professional respondents reported that they were using the NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology) cybersecurity framework to improve their security stance. The survey also demonstrated that the document is being used as a stepping stone to a more secure government. When I first read this, my immediate reaction was a resounding, “So what!” These results tell me that US Federal Government agencies are using US Government guidance to do their US Government job. Isn’t that what you would expect? Making an impression on me would require a study across multiple industry verticals. If other industries were voluntarily using the NIST Framework, that would be saying something!
↧
↧
Announcing @FusionConnectSM to Exhibit in New York | @CloudExpo #BigData #IoT #DevOps
SYS-CON Events announced today that Fusion, a leading provider of cloud services, will exhibit at SYS-CON's 18th International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on June 7-9, 2016, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY.
Fusion, a leading provider of integrated cloud solutions to small, medium and large businesses, is the industry's single source for the cloud. Fusion's advanced, proprietary cloud service platform enables the integration of leading edge solutions in the cloud, including cloud communications, cloud connectivity, and cloud computing. Fusion's innovative, yet proven cloud solutions lower customers' cost of ownership, and deliver new levels of security, flexibility, scalability, and speed of deployment.
↧
Finding a Framework for Hybrid Cloud Risk Management By @Kevin_Jackson | @CloudExpo #Cloud
Hybrid cloud is rapidly becoming essential to today’s information technology processes. This is why hybrid cloud risk management has become the keystone to many modern corporate strategies. To effectively manage this shift, leading enterprises are reorganizing how the business side of IT is accomplished. When this reality is coupled with the rising cost of poor cybersecurity, decisions often rise to the board level.
↧
DevOps and Hybrid Infrastructure Synergy By @Kevin_Jackson | @DevOpsSummit #DevOps
The definition of DevOps emphasizes collaboration and communication between software developers and other IT professionals while automating the software delivery and infrastructure change process. While agile software development and the use of automated infrastructure configuration tools stand proudly in the DevOps spotlight, little has been said about the actual infrastructure that modern tools such as Puppet and Chef automate.
↧
↧
Are Electronic Medical Records Worth It? By @Kevin_Jackson | @CloudExpo #Cloud
The use of Electronic Medical Records (EMR) by medical professionals has increased dramatically. According to HealthIT.gov, 2015 statistics show that 56 percent of all U.S. office-based physicians (MD/DO) have demonstrated meaningful use of electronic health records. The downside of these statistics is that when HIPAA was enacted in 1996, privacy was not a major focus and it actually took HHS eight years to publish the initial HIPAA Privacy Rule. It then took the agency several more years to publish initial security rules which directed "covered entities" (e.g., providers, hospitals, health insurers) to perform a risk assessment, understand where their vulnerabilities were, and to adopt reasonable safeguards to fix them.
↧
The Future of Storage By @Kevin_Jackson | @CloudExpo #Cloud
A few weeks ago I had the pleasure of doing a Blab on advanced storage with Daniel Newman and Eric Vanderburg. We covered some pretty interesting points on enterprise storage challenges, advanced storage trends and flash. If you didn't catch it, a replay is now available.
↧
Ten Ways to Flash Forward By @Kevin_Jackson | @CloudExpo #Cloud
Not to long ago I was honored to be included as a storage expert in the Dell ebook, "10 Ways to Flash Forward: Future-Ready Storage Insights from the Experts." This publication provided insight into some of the most recent advances in enterprise storage and gave some excellent recomendations for your advance storage strategy. The full document is available for free download at http://marketing.dell.com/storage-ebook-toprank-Flash-Forward
↧
The Game of Clouds 2016
In the mythical, medieval land of AWS, a civil war brews between the several noble Cloud Services over rulership. Meanwhile, across the sea, the former controlling dynasty, Traditional IT, attempts to make its way back home and reclaim the throne with the help of the "Do It Yourself" old guard. While the conflict of political power ensues in the civilized world, an ancient, forgotten army of an undead race located far north of any inhabited territory begin traveling south for a chilling invasion, known fearfully by living IT professionals as the CFOs!
![Game of Clouds]( "Game of Clouds")
( This content is being syndicated through multiple channels. The opinions expressed are solely those of the author and do not represent the views of GovCloud Network, GovCloud Network Partners or any other corporation or organization.)
![Cloud Musings]()
( Thank you. If you enjoyed this article, get free updates by email or RSS - © Copyright Kevin L. Jackson 2016)
![]()
![]()
![]()
![]()
![]()
![]()
![]()
![]()
![]()
![]()
( This content is being syndicated through multiple channels. The opinions expressed are solely those of the author and do not represent the views of GovCloud Network, GovCloud Network Partners or any other corporation or organization.)
↧
↧
Enterprise Networking in a Cloud World
Enterprises must rethink network management in the cloud computing world. This new reality is driven by the rise of software defined networking, the virtualization of everything and a business imperative to create and deploy even newer information delivery models. With the entire infrastructure stack now fully programmable, the need to integrate the network with cloud compute services is essential. Another important environmental change is that both servers and applications have joined data with respect to mobility. This leads to an increased need to categorize those assets and apply appropriate security controls with respect to business/mission functions, data user role, location of access, legal/regulatory guidelines and user devices. In meeting the challenges of mobility and globalization, enterprises must address their lack control or complete visibility into the networks they use.
Organizations often lose the economic and operational benefits of the cloud if the network provider lacks the agility afforded by network management automation. Requirements to support cloud brokerage and to bridge services between different cloud service vendor marketplaces are also coming to the forefront. Network performance expectations that are driving more advanced network management requirements include:
- Data-intensive analytics;
- Parallel and clustered processing;
- Telemedicine;
- Remote expert consultation and collaboration; and
- Community cloud services.
- Network latency management - Acceptable response times on the web have steadily been decreasing. While 10 seconds used to be considered reasonable, a 2009 study showed that 40 percent of visitors will abandon a web page if it takes more than three seconds to load. Interactions that take 1 second or less maintain a user’s seamless flow of thought.
- Network Reliability - Reliability is an attribute of any computer-related component that consistently performs according to its specifications. It has long been considered one of three related attributes that must be considered when making, buying, or using a computer product or component.
- Network Performance - Metrics of the service quality of a network as seen by the customer. These metrics usually address bandwidth, throughput, latency, jitter and error rate. All of these factors, coupled with user requirements and user perceptions, play a role in determining the perceived utility of a network connection.
- Internet path visibility - Cloud computing’s placement of critical infrastructure components outside traditional network boundaries increases enterprise IT dependence on the complex interactions between enterprise and public IP networks. In order to ensure reliable application delivery, this fact drives a requirement to provide visibility into the routing and traffic dynamics spanning enterprise and Internet domains to the enterprise network manager.
- Automated routing ruleset – the real-time use of genetic adaptive routing algorithms (e.g. path mutation and path crossover) to identify and make available new network paths for message propagation
- Dynamic bandwidth allocation - Dynamic bandwidth allocation is a technique by which traffic bandwidth in a shared telecommunications medium can be allocated on demand and fairly between different users of that bandwidth. This is a form of bandwidth management, and is essentially the same thing as statistical multiplexing.
New identity access and authorization use cases are also challenging current network design best practices. Virtual equivalences to physical and infrastructure-centric protection norms are mostly non-existent. An inability to enforce current, geographic-centric legal frameworks in the virtual world poses a major barrier to the development of a practical, economical and international cloud computing legal framework. Some of the operational issues dependent on major advances in this realm include:
- Mobile device-based access to everything;
- Internet-of-Things;
- Mobile office productivity;
- The broadening project economy;
- Virtual organizations; and
- Virtual reality.
When accepting this network management leap forward, enterprises need vendor partners that provide tools necessary to manipulate the operational levers of cloud networking. Your network may, in fact, be impeding your efforts to embrace cloud, big data, mobile, social and security technology trends. Primary among these tools is a software-defined networking (SDN) solution. Such a solution can virtualize your network and create centralized controls to provide more agile and flexible network services. When built on open standards, a software-defined network helps you:
- Realize faster time to market by deploying networks in minutes
- Reduce management complexity and operating expenses through automated controls
- Enhance security by inserting patterns in the software
- Boost innovation by using cloud resources more easily
- Build an agile platform to enable analytics and gain actionable business insights
Software Defined Networking - Nothing works without the Networking
This post was brought to you by IBM Global Technology Services. For more content like this, visit Point B and Beyond.
↧
Getting Your Network in the Cloud
Virtual Newsmakers is a webcast show featuring virtual newsmakers, who are bridging traditional and digital communications and empowering human communications through technology. The show highlights people who are using technology as a conversation to bring communications to a human level and who are making things happen between traditional and digital communications. Some of the aspects of the show will be to bridge alternate communications media (digital and traditional), create a new vocabulary, and bring the world together with human interactions.
↧
Parallel Processing and Unstructured Data Transforms #Storage | @BigDataExpo #Cloud #BigData #Microservices
Enterprise storage is trending away from traditional, enterprise managed network-attached storage (NAS) and storage area networks (SAN) towards a more complex environment that includes software-defined and cloud-based solutions. Spinning disks are also being replaced with flash arrays and solid state devices. These transformations are driven by challenges associated with the parallel processing of unstructured data within a near-real-time business operational tempo.
↧
Networking the Cloud for the Internet of Things | @CloudExpo #IoT #Cloud
The "Internet of Things" depends on the "Cloud" for the processing and storage of data. The Cloud's backbone, however, is the network. This logic train reveals the importance of professional rigor and solid System Engineering (SE) of the network.
Imagine a sea of sensors, put out in the field by multiple independent vendors. Complying with specifications only in an informal sense, these sensors are sending Terabytes of data to the cloud. The availability of this data to anyone globally is impressive enough. But even more amazing is the fact that anyone in the world can also develop an application or a powerful API to filter out the "nuggets" of valuable information.
↧
↧
Case for Cloud Network Systems Engineering | @CloudExpo #IoT #M2M #API #Cloud
IoT networking requirements are vastly different from those supported by today's cloud network. The processing and transport levels are multiple orders of magnitude higher than ever seen before. More importantly though, societal economic and the safety ramifications of making mistakes during this transition are off the scale. This is why system engineering of the cloud computing network is now an immediate global imperative.
↧
Part 2: Networking the Cloud for the IoT - Stressing the Cloud | @CloudExpo #IoT #Cloud
Karen Field, Penton Communications' IoT Institute director, in her article "Start Small to Gain Big," postulated an oil drilling platform with 30,000 sensors would generate about 1 Terabyte of data per day. She also stressed that only 1% of that data would likely be used. From a systems engineering point of view this data flow is multiplied by the trillions of other IoT sensors in the cloud, introducing unprecedented data processing and data transport stress. Industries and competing companies within those industries will also be forced to weigh the economic impact of paying for this transport and processing.
↧
System Integration Morphs to Cloud Service Integration | @CloudExpo #API #Cloud #BigData
Cloud Service Brokerage is changing from an industry footnote toward becoming a major system integration play. This role has now become a crucial component of a cloud computing transition because they help organizations aggregate multiple cloud services, integrate services with in-house applications, and customize these services to better meet customer needs. CSBs also help by consulting and recommending the best fit cloud services according to business requirements and goals. Cloud brokers may also be granted rights to negotiate with different service providers on behalf of their customers. This transformation is driven by the rapid rise of cloud computing, which has risen from under $6B in 2008 to a point where the market is expected to almost reach $160B in 2020. The global Cloud Service Brokerage Market itself is expected to grow from $5.24 Billion in 2015 to $19.16 Billion by 2020.
↧
AWS and Azure Focused on Application Services
AWS (Amazon Web Services) has emerged has a market leader in the cloud because of cost and rich application services. Microsoft Azure is following a similar path and catching pretty fast with AWS. Most of the public cloud provider focused on Infrastructure services. But AWS and Azure are focusing more on services beyond the infrastructure. Cloud started to realise the concept of IaaS and PaaS but now it is going beyond that. AWS and Azure services are difficult to categorise in terms of ‘as a Service’ model. Services are crossing the boundary of IaaS, PaaS and SaaS model. AWS and Azure both are having similar services like we have two different operating system Windows and Linux. Both provide a similar feature to end user and at the same time differentiate with each other. Consumption of rich cloud services will unlock the true potential of the cloud. So I decided to list down similar services related with application layer for both AWS and Azure together with a possible scenario.
↧
↧
Cloud: Disrupting Application Architecture | @CloudExpo #SaaS #PaaS #ITaaS #Cloud
A revolutionary change in the industry was the foundation of cloud on the automation of virtualization technologies. Initially it was meant for infrastructure, but with the advent of new and innovative cloud services it has crossed the boundary of Infrastructure and invaded the application space. The concept of ‘as a Service' model has three pillars: IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service), PaaS (Platform as a Service) and SaaS (Software as a Service). Over a period of time cloud services have grown and diversified to the extent that clubbing the services into these three pillars is not only difficult but unattainable. That's the reason none of the public cloud providers classify their services in ‘as a Service' model category.
↧
When Cloud and Cognitive Computing Merge | @CloudExpo #ML #Cloud #CognitiveComputing
Cloud computing has taken over the business world! With almost maniacal focus, single proprietors and Board Directors of the world's largest conglomerates see this new model as a "must do". This rapid shift is, in fact, accelerating. As Jeff Bertolucci observes in "The Shift to Cloud Services Is Happening Faster Than Expected":
"According to the sixth annual Uptime Institute Data Center Industry Survey, which examines the big-picture trends shaping IT infrastructure delivery and strategy, the move to cloud services is accelerating. The Uptime Institute's February 2016 poll of more than 1,000 data center and IT professionals predicts that an even faster shift to the cloud will occur over the next four years, reports ZDNet."
↧
Proven Protection Against Cloud Horror Stories | @CloudExpo #API #Cloud #BigData
Cloud computing is now entering adolescent. With all the early adopters now swimming in the cloud pool with that “I told you so” smug, fast followers are just barely beating the early majority. The gold rush to cloud is also driving the IT herd to get cloud computing training. Training vendors from multi-billion dollar behemoths to little Mom and Pop shops are ready to cash in with fast and easy, vendor-specific certifications for just about any cloud service provider.
↧