HID Global, a worldwide leader in trusted identity solutions, today announced the availability of its HID Origo cloud platform that opens a brand-new world of opportunities for partners to create more seamless and intuitive workplace experiences that are built on HID’s proven access control infrastructure. The platform combines HID’s technologies for mobile IDs (and location services in the future) with its expansive access control architecture to bring together physical security and a wide range of building applications, services and IoT use cases via a unified cloud experience.

"HID Origo lays the foundation for a broad ecosystem of cloud-based access control technologies, products, services and business models that will accelerate workplace innovation; it dramatically increases our partners’ capabilities to create more connected and seamless building experiences for end users," said Hilding Arrehed, Vice President of Cloud Services, Physical Access Control, with HID Global. "The platform will remove integration barriers between access control systems and smart building applications, and we will continue to expand its value with capabilities that further improve how people securely move through a facility and interact with its services."

DataGryd’s MegaSuite 6, the high-power data center offering cost-effective megawatt configurations, is housed in the largest single-footprint data center space available in New York City. The facility features 1,000 kilowatts (kW) of utility power generators and cooling towers with a cooling load of 280 tons. DataGryd’s power source is a direct feed from the utility, with dual power feeds completely separate from the building. The turnkey data center leverages future-proofed technology with a cost-effective IT infrastructure to drive operational efficiencies and deliver the highest value in energy efficiency and power reliability in Manhattan.

Google dominates all code contributions made across projects of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), dwarfing all other contributors, according to analysis done via Stackalytics, an open source code analysis framework hosted by the OpenStack Foundation. Google is not only the largest contributor with 52.9% of all code commits, but it has seven times more contributions than the second largest contributor, Red Hat, with only 7.4%.

CNCF is an open source software foundation dedicated to making cloud native computing universal and sustainable. Cloud native computing uses an open source software stack to deploy applications as microservices, packaging each part into its own container, and dynamically orchestrating those containers to optimize resource utilization. Cloud native technologies enable software developers to build great products faster. CNCF projects include Kubernetes, Prometheus, Envoy and a number of others.

"Many would assume that Google’s dominance over CNCF code contributions is because of its work in Kubernetes (which originated in Google), but Stackalytics data reveals that this is not the case," said Boris Renski, Co-Founder and CMO at Mirantis. "In fact, it is GRPC, a Google dominated distributed queuing project that is still in CNCF incubation, that has the most all-time commits from Google, with Kubernetes in second place."

According to NetEnrich’s survey, large enterprises are eagerly adopting cloud infrastructure, applications and services. In fact, 85% of respondents reported either moderate or extensive production use of cloud infrastructure, while 80% said their companies had moved at least a quarter of all their applications and workloads to the public cloud. Meanwhile, 86% of respondents have re-architected some or all of their applications to use cloud-native services.

By making these moves, companies are benefiting from a faster time-to-market for new digital products and services, reduced costs and optimized use of IT infrastructure. However, the pace, scale and priorities associated with public cloud adoption differs from company to company. In conducting its survey, NetEnrich sought to clarify how far along companies are in their cloud adoption, and their goals and challenges. Following are some of the survey’s key findings:

Oracle today announced the opening of a Toronto data center to support in region customer demand for Oracle’s public cloud, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. Oracle’s next-generation cloud infrastructure offers the most flexibility in the public cloud, allowing companies to run traditional and cloud-native workloads on the same platform. With Oracle’s modern cloud regions, only Oracle can deliver the industry’s broadest, deepest, and fastest growing suite of cloud applications, Oracle Autonomous Database, and new services in security, Blockchain and Artificial Intelligence, all running on its enterprise-grade cloud infrastructure. 

"Enterprises in the region still have limited ability to run mission-critical applications in the cloud and are struggling to attain the level of performance they have on-premises without a major overhaul," said Don Johnson, executive vice president, product development, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. "With this new location Oracle is delivering on its promise to deliver even more customers with consistent high performance, low predictable pricing and the flexibility our cloud brings to the table."

While cloud adoption has increased, many organizations are still hesitant to make the transition to the cloud due to security concerns and a desire to protect existing investments. First generation public cloud offerings were not architected to accommodate traditional application architectures. Oracle’s next-generation cloud infrastructure is built specifically to help organizations of any size run the most demanding workloads securely while delivering unmatched security, performance, and cost savings.

Kemp announced the release of the Kemp total cost of ownership (TCO) calculator, which enables enterprises to gain visibility into the overarching costs associated with cloud migration and application delivery.

To calculate your costs, try the TCO calculator here: https://kemptechnologies.com/total-cost-ownership/calculator

Unlike traditional load balancer/ADC deployments, where the customer pays a license per appliance and must predict future throughput, Kemp’s metered licensing and per-app ADC deployment model benefits customers by enabling them to provision any number of Kemp LoadMasters as needed with unlimited throughput. This reduces the total cost of ownership for load balancing, especially in multi-cloud environments.

Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS) announced AWS Backup, a fully-managed, centralized backup service that makes it faster and simpler for customers to back up their data across AWS services and on-premises, helping customers more easily meet their business and regulatory backup compliance requirements. AWS Backup makes protecting storage volumes, databases, and file systems easier by giving customers a single service to configure and audit the AWS resources they backup, automate backup scheduling, set retention policies, and monitor recent backups and restores in one place. To get started with AWS Backup visit: aws.amazon.com/backup.

As enterprises move more and more applications to the cloud, their data can become distributed across multiple services, including databases, block storage, object storage, and file systems. While these services in AWS provide backup capabilities, customers often create custom scripts to automate scheduling, enforce retention policies, and consolidate backup activity across several services in order to better meet their business and regulatory compliance requirements. AWS Backup removes the need for custom solutions or manual processes by providing a centralized place to manage backups across AWS. With just a few clicks in the AWS Management Console, customers can create a policy that defines how frequently backups are created and how long they are stored. Customers can then assign these policies to their AWS resources, and AWS Backup automatically handles the rest by automatically scheduling backup actions for the assigned AWS resources, orchestrating across AWS services, and managing their retention period.

Given the rate at which smartphones have drastically adapted in such as short space of time, it’s only natural to look ahead and consider just how big a part they will play in our future. See below a list of predictions from mobile app development companies that we’re likely to see sooner than you think: 

Utilising Virtual and Augmented Reality

Virtual and augmented reality has already started to infiltrate our lives, particularly in terms of gaming – take Pokémon Go for example. However, there’s more to come from virtual reality and our mobile devices. Increasingly, companies such as Samsung, Apple and Facebook are looking into ways to create a more immersive world for better user experience. One in which we don’t even need to look away from our screens. This, combined with the fact that Virtual Reality is developing terribly fast with the support of applications and technologies such as SLAM (Simultaneous Localization And Mapping) is probably the biggest venture for what concerns the mobile development sphere. 

Higher App Security

Zenoss Inc., a leader in software-defined IT operations, today announced it was named a representative vendor in Gartner’s Market Guide for IT Infrastructure Monitoring Tools. According to the report, IT infrastructure monitoring tools capture the availability of IT infrastructure components that reside in a data center or are hosted in the cloud as infrastructure as a service.

A Gartner Market Guide defines an emerging market and explains what clients can expect it to do in the short term, outlining the attributes of representative vendor offerings and how those offerings are likely to evolve.

According to Gartner, "With the onset of more modular and cloud-centric architectures, many organizations with disparate monitoring tools are reassessing their monitoring landscape. I&O leaders must adopt more holistic IT infrastructure monitoring tools to gain visibility into their IT landscape."