Today I am honored to be named a GovTech Innovator by Government Technology. My personal thanks goes out to Hilton Collins for letting me Hangout with him on Google+.
Govtech.com is the online portal to Government Technology, a division of e.Republic, Inc. Government Technology and its sister publications are an award-winning family of magazines covering information technology's role in state and local governments. Through in-depth coverage of IT case studies, emerging technologies and the implications of digital technology on the policies and management of public sector organizations, Government Technology chronicles the dynamics of governing in the information age. Managers, elected officials, CIOs and technology staff at all levels of government gain IT news and event information from Government Technology magazine.
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GovTech Innovator: Kevin Jackson
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2013 Will Be Dominated by Mobile, Cloud Developments: IDC
one of the main movers of the IT world.
The IT industry's transition to "The Third Platform," built on mobile computing, cloud services, social networking and Big Data analytics technologies, has dominated annual predictions from IDC over the course of the last several years.
For 2013, IDC predicts the transition to The Third Platform will gain momentum as the industry accelerates past the exploration phase and into full-blown, high-stakes competition, according to an article on BizTech2.com.
"The IT industry as a whole is moving toward the mobile / social / cloud / Big Data world of the Third Platform much more quickly than many realize: from 2013 through 2020, these technologies will drive around 90 percent of all the growth in the IT market," said Frank Gens, senior vice president and chief analyst at IDC, according to the article. "Companies that are not putting 80 percent or more of their competitive energy into this new market will be trapped in the legacy portion of the market, growing even slower than global GDP."
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How Cloud Computing Will Make the Workplace More Accessible
Cloud computing is changing the way big business communicates and is fast becoming the new technological standard for enterprises.
With employees working across so many devices from numerous locations, cloud computing is taking on a growing importance for a seamless work experience. Whatever solutions companies decide to buy, they all have to work on the range of devices people now carry. According to an article on CalgaryHerald.com, cloud computing is making business life easier by allowing users access to the same information regardless of which gadget they have logged on with.
A new mobile workforce means that software and file storage must be accessible anywhere, on any device, and cannot be stuck in one static place anymore. People want to be able to access work while at the beach or the soccer field. Simply dropping a file into a centralized location using cloud storage technology offers easy access and version control with the click of a button. This also means that your IT team will be able to focus on their core competencies rather than getting bogged down by contextual issues from their fellow, less tech-savvy colleagues.
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Top 10 Transformational Impacts of the Cloud in 2013
NJVC®, an information technology solutions provider headquartered in northern Virginia and supplier of Cloudcuity™ AppDeployer, and Virtual Global, a provider of cloud-enabled enterprise IT solutions based in northern Virginia, have teamed up to offer the top 10 transformational impacts of the cloud in 2013—all of which will transform business and government in the biggest disruption IT has experienced in 25 years.
"The disruptive impact of cloud is uprooting old industries and making way for new ,” said Cary Landis, NJVC senior architect, Cloudcuity AppDeployer and Virtual Global CEO. Whereas change is not new, the rate of change may be accelerating faster than many imagined. “In the coming year, the cloud's impact on business and government strategies will continue to accelerate, and it will be the biggest driver behind major IT decisions. This, in turn, will cause the biggest disruption to the IT industry in the past 25 years.”
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TwinStrata Reports Record Year
TwinStrata, Inc., on Tuesday highlighted results for its fiscal year ended December 31, 2012. The year was punctuated by a series of corporate and product milestones.
TwinStrata CEO Nicos Vekiarides noted that the company’s “tremendous growth this year validates not only the TwinStrata value proposition, but also the increasing traction of cloud storage as a whole.”
TwinStrata ended the year with substantial growth across all measures of its business:
Throughout 2012, TwinStrata experienced sequential bookings growth of 35 percent or more quarter over quarter.
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Gravitant Enhances Cloud Governance Capabilities
Gravitant has announced enhancements coming this month to its award winning cloudMatrix cloud brokerage and management platform:
Continuous cloud asset discovery and sync (starting with Amazon Web Services today with additional providers added over time), which enhances internal governance capabilities to discover and control shadow I.T. and provide alternate sourcing options.
Integration of government certified cloud providers into the cloudMatrix electronic services catalog, which enhances external governance capabilities through secure clouds.
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Why the Cloud Will Shake Markets
"Recently, I predicted that in 2013, cloud computing will provide the biggest disruption information technology has experienced in 25 years. These impacts extend to the $128 billion data center industry, which will never be the same as the traditional business model is disrupted, and new rules for success are written."
This is how I started my most recent article for SC Magazine In it, I address the how the datacenter marketplace is bifrucating and how operators need to rethink their current business model in order to survive. Data centers that do not evolve – quickly – will face plummeting profit margins as more and more information moves to the cloud.
Please read the article (http://www.scmagazine.com/the-cloud-will-shake-markets/article/276463/) and comment. The industry is currently undergoing an inflexion which will require agressive changes by many.
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Please read the article (http://www.scmagazine.com/the-cloud-will-shake-markets/article/276463/) and comment. The industry is currently undergoing an inflexion which will require agressive changes by many.
( Thank you. If you enjoyed this article, get free updates by email or RSS- © Copyright Kevin L. Jackson 2012) --> --> -->
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Leveraging Cloud and Virtualization for Disaster Recovery
With cloud computing, more users and an increase in data bring with it the challenges associated with disaster recovery and business continuity. All distributed systems have to be checked and the data points must all be monitored. In working with these more complex data centers, many administrators are turning to the cloud and virtualization to help them create a more robust DR plan, according to an article on DataCenterKnowledge.com.
A well-planned out cloud and virtualization solution can truly help any organization create a more agile environment. There are inherent benefits to working with specific types of cloud models and virtualization platforms. A large part of IT is creativity – that’s why using new types of technologies can help reduce management costs and keep an environment running longer.
One way to prepare for disaster is using cloud for replication. Site-to-site replication has become easier with the utilization of both private and public cloud technologies. With better storage systems and more control over the WAN, organizations are able to better replicate their environments. This can be entire virtual machines, specific databases or just data points.
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Bahrain International eGovernment Forum 2013
I am honored to announce that I will be a speaker at the Bahrain International eGovernment Forum, April 8-10, 2013, being held at the Ritz-Carlton Bahrain Hotel and Spa, in Manama, Bahrain.
Under the Patronage of His Highness Shaikh Mohammed bin Mubarak Al Khalifa, Deputy Prime Minister and Chairman of the Supreme Committee for Information and Communication Technology (SCICT), the highly-anticipated Bahrain International eGovernment Forum has cemented its place as one of the region's leading ICT events, growing steadily and expanding its reach year-by-year. It aims to share and exchange productive technological concepts, exhibit and highlight innovations as well as provide a platform for the latest technological practices and trends through featuring numerous up-to-date topics and workshops that embrace Innovation and Open Data, Mobile Trends, Cloud Computing and Shared Services, Social Networks, and eGovernment.
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NJVC Announces Winner of Cloudcuity AppDeployer Contest Pilot at GMU
NJVC, an information technology solutions provider headquartered in northern Virginia, is pleased to announce the winner of the George Mason University (GMU) Student PaaS Developer Contest. For the contest, students used the Cloudcuity AppDeployer platform as a service (PaaS) to develop business software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications in the cloud. The winning team entry, “Nimbus Solution Scheduler,” is a workforce scheduling application.
The Nimbus Solution Scheduler team members—James Hays (team leader), Christopher Le, Anthony Nester and Ed Rubins—each received a monetary award and certificate for their innovative application. The students were honored at a special ceremony on February 22 during National Engineering Week at the Volgeneau School of Engineering Nguyen Engineering Building, Fairfax, Va. Donald Gantz, Ph.D., chair of the GMU Applied Information Technology Department attended the ceremony.
The GMU contest is serving as a pilot for a regional contest for university students to design SaaS applications for a scholarship award and additional rewards. This contest will launch during the first quarter of 2013.
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AWS Cuts Prices Again
Amazon Web Services ratcheted up the cloud price war again Tuesday when it cut new EC2 Reserved Instances running Linux/Unix, Red Hat Enterprise Linux and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server by up to 27% or up to 65% compared to On-Demand instances.
Amazon said in a blog that the new pricing applies to all three Reserved Instance models (Light, Medium and Heavy Utilization) for purchases made on or after March 5.
It suggested that customers review their Reserved Instance usage monthly and offered a few economical guidelines: If your server is running less than 15% of the time, use an On-Demand instance; if your server is running 15%-40% of the time, use a Light Utilization Reserved Instance; if your server is running 40%-80% of the time, use a Medium Utilization Reserved Instance; and if your server is running 80%-100% of the time, use a Heavy Utilization Reserved Instance.
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Guest Post: Typical CIO Conversation
Using cloud brokerage to provision and manage services from multiple cloud service providers.
Here's a snapshot of a typical conversation I've had with large enterprise CIOs.
I've had a number of free lunches this way, but my colleagues at Gravitant have built this technology and have already proven it with a successful implementation in the State of Texas!
The technology is known as cloudMatrix. It is a culmination of online marketplaces driven by SOA and powered by advanced analytics. Under the hood is an electronic services catalog that contains a list of providers and their offerings as well as API connectivity for auto provisioning. The exterior is also pretty slick with a single pane of glass for drag and drop cloud architecture design. Advanced analytics then kicks in to show the best fit provider, followed by continuous recalibration for optimal performance. I know that sounds more like an automobile ad, but cloudMatrix technology is in fact a layer of abstraction even above the cloud.
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Cloud Continues Its Move into the Mainstream
Big businesses are finding out they have something in common with their smaller counterparts. Both like to save cash, and both like to be prepared in the event of a disaster. And they have an affinity for the cloud.
A recent article in the Wall Street Journal found large organizations are adopting cloud technology for many of the same reasons held by smaller organizations: greater flexibility and cost savings, resiliency in the face of natural disasters and the ability to implement new technologies without long-term commitment. While they acknowledge concerns about cyber-security, they believe they can safely pursue their cloud strategies while taking appropriate precautions.
“For every application, we look at whether the cloud can be used, and at that moment we look at all aspects, including security. When all criteria are met we will launch on the cloud and therefore we believe that the cloud is secure enough for a number of scenarios,” said Johan Krebber, Shell group IT architect and lead architect for the Projects and Technology Business, according to the Journal.
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Egnyte Leverages New Public Cloud Economies
Egnyte, the file-sharing, file-storage, not to mention backup hybrid cloud for business, is integrating with third-party public cloud storage starting with the ever-popular – and increasingly cheap – Amazon S3, Google Cloud Storage, Microsoft Azure and NetApp StorageGrid so its EgnytePlus users can access and share their files in the ether.
The company thinks it’s the first integration of its kind.
EgnytePlus combines Egnyte’s own cloud storage with the user experience and performance of local storage.
The company reckons that the promise of the cloud to deliver competitively priced utility-like service has been unrealized when it comes to SaaS solutions. But since Amazon, Google and Microsoft slashed their cloud storage prices 25%-30% just in the last quarter, this “race to the bottom” signals a commodity market that enterprises have to leverage.
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Telecommuting and Cloud Computing
Home is where the cloud is.
The work-at-home movement has given some momentum recently to cloud computing, as well as finding itself in the middle of the debate on whether companies should allow their employees to work from home.
It's understood that a public cloud platform are typically better at providing IT services over the open Internet than enterprise IT is capable of doing. The public cloud can better serve a workforce that's as likely to work at the local Starbucks as the corner conference room because they can push processing, storage and enterprise applications to a middle tier between the company and the user. In other words, connectivity, security, capacity management and resiliency become somebody else's problem, according to an article on Infoworld.com.
The more distributed your workforce, the more public cloud computing can benefit the support of that workforce.
While a remote workforce issue is typically not the only benefit that drives business to the cloud, it's often on the radar. Companies innovative enough to create a strong remote workforce are typically the organizations that accept cloud computing. If they trust people to work poolside, writes Infoworld’s David Linthicum, then trusting public clouds is not much of a stretch.
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CloudCheckr: Amazon Complexity Challenges Many Users
A recently released infographic from CloudCheckr sheds quite a bit of light on the importance of expert advice when an enterprise decides to deploy to the cloud.
When AWS made Trusted Advisor free for the month of March, they took that opportunity to conduct an internal survey of their customers' usage. CloudCheckr compared the initial scans of 400 users against a list of 125+ best practice checks. The survey was limited to users with over 10 EC2 instances. In aggregate, the users represent a total of just over 16,000 EC2 instances.
They categorized survey results into 3 main categories: Cost, Availability, and Security; and that over 99% of their users were operating with at least one serious best practice exception. Their primary conclusion was that although cost often grabs the headlines, users suffer from a large number of availability and security issues
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NJVC Cloudcuity Management Portal Provides Secure Cloud Brokerage Services
NJVC® will lead efforts to provide secure cloud brokerage services to the Network Centric Operations Industry Consortium using its first-to-market CloudcuityTM Management Portal during a series of 2013 geospatial community cloud demonstrations that will be conducted on behalf of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA). NJVC's partners are The Aerospace Corporation, The Boeing Company and Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC).
"NJVC is honored that NCOIC chose the Cloudcuity Management Portal as its brokerage of choice to offer cloud services to the geospatial community," said Kevin L. Jackson, vice president and general manager of NJVC Cloudcuity. "This NCOIC demonstration is significant as it will represent a new procurement model for the geospatial community, which is at the frontlines of protecting and responding to national and international crises in times of conflict. Procurement of cloud services will be less complicated, making deployments to the cloud easier and more efficient than ever before. This will benefit first responders and other non-traditional NGA users."
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How Cloud Brokerage Enables a Practical Path to Cloud IT
More and more business and governmental agencies are migrating to the cloud but the reality is that move can often be slow, painful, and complicated. Even expert system integrators are struggling to stay relevant and help their customers use cloud in a practical way. Challenges that siphon away time and money and introduce risk and governance issues include:
Designing and matching different applications to the best cloud offering
Learning to provision and integrate using phone book-sized cloud API guides
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Demystifying PaaS for Federal Government
The PaaS market is plagued with confusion, and agencies are slow to adopt technologies that they do not fully understand. With the high costs of software development, the Government stands to save billions of dollars by adopting PaaS and other cloud technologies. The Federal CIO's office suggests that Shared Platforms will improve efficiencies by building once and using many times - but what does that mean to Federal buyers?
The format will be one hour with 5 minutes presentations by each of five panelists, followed by dynamic Q&A. The format will be similar to the recent 'Shared Cloud Services in Government' event, in which panelists from GSA, NIST, the Canadian Cloud Council and Industry helped raise awareness to the Federal cloud computing community about Shared Services in Government.
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Just in Time IT
The concept of "Just-in-Time" was pioneered in the manufacturing supply chain as a critical way to reduce costs by minimizing inventory. Implementing a just-in-time system that can handle unexpected demand is not a trivial undertaking. It requires the confluence of a number of disciplines such as analytics, statistics, sourcing, procurement, production management, brokerage and economics.
An interesting new idea is to take this concept pioneered in manufacturing and apply it to Information Technology resources. Doing this can provide an effective way to meet dynamically changing needs while minimizing the inventory of unused IT resources across a set of cloud services platform and providers.
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