Category: News

Grazed from SysCon Media.  Author: Jnan Dash.

I saw more discussion on big data at CES 2015 this week, compared to previous years. Everyone talked about data as the central core of everything. The IoT (Internet of Things), NFC (near Field Communication) and M2M (Machine to Machine) communication are enabling pieces for many industries  – security monitoring, asset and inventory tracking, healthcare, process control, building environment monitoring, vehicle tracking and telemetry, in-store customer engagement and digital signage. Big data is the big deal here.

The Big Data ecosystem includes – cloud computing, M2M/IoT, dumb terminal 2.0 (devices getting dumber – more cloud, better broadband, less about storage and more about broadband access and high quality display), and analysis. The big data business is slated to be a $200B business in 2015. Every company must insert the big data ecosystem into their future roadmap or get left out. The key here is not the technology, but its business value…

Grazed from SysCon Media.  Author: Roger Strukhoff.

Cloud computing adds flexibility to enterprise IT. When companies wish to take advantage of this, they are finding they need to turn to microservices instead of their traditional, monolithic architectures to accommodate frequent change.

Microservices can overcome the challenges presented by frequent change, "by splitting monoliths into multiple independent services, each with its own simple business logic," according to Sergey Sverchkov, a Solutions Architect with Altoros. Doing so leads to another issue: "choosing either PaaS or IaaS for microservices is an open question, " he says…

Grazed from AlgorithmsAndMe.  Author: Editorial Staff.

Essentially virtualization means to hide the physical object from user and present to him a copy of underlying object. This object can be anything like hardware, servers, or network. In between real object and the end user, they resides a intermediate layer which provides view of real object to user as per his/her requirement.

For example, same hardware is allocated to many users and they install operating systems of their choice on that hardware to use it. Even though there is only one consistent copy of hardware, every user will see it as his copy when accessing through his operating system. Intermediate layer in this case will be software like Virtualbox or VMware etc…

Grazed from Click2Houston.  Author: Editorial Staff.

A large fire lit up the roof of an Amazon data center that’s still under construction in a Virginia suburb outside Washington, D.C.  No one was hurt in the blaze, according to the local fire department, which was able to put out the fire in under an hour.  Amazon said the facility was in the early stages of becoming an Amazon Web Services cloud computing center.

The company noted that the incident didn’t impact company production or shipping.  The nondescript building will one day be one of Amazon’s massive data centers — the kind that keep websites running and store computer information for companies…

Grazed from CloudWards.net.  Author: Denise Sullivan.

The January 2015 Netskope Cloud Report has been released and in it there are shocking facts about how files are being shared on an enterprise level. Netskope, the company responsible for the paper, also noticed there was an increase in the number of business credentials that were compromised.

In the Cloud Report, Netskope noted that as much as 15% of business users had an account compromised during the October to December quarter. The company found that many of these customers often re-use passwords across several different applications. Which is what leads to possible data exposure of sensitive information…

Grazed from InformationWeek.  Author: Charles Babbcock.

The Apollo Education Group, parent organization of the University of Phoenix, wanted to modernize its IT operations to support larger-scale online education. As the producer of a pioneer system for working adults, Apollo needed to take greater advantage of digital outreach, or "distance education."

"We said we wanted to build the classroom of the future. We also wanted to use analytics to understand the data in our student platform and in student behavior," said Michael Sajor, CIO of the Apollo Education Group, in an interview with InformationWeek…

Grazed from eWeek.  Author: Chris Preimesberger.

Years ago, when he was asked whether Web services were going to be the "next big thing," Oracle co-founder and then-CEO Larry Ellison responded: "I’ve spent too much time in Italy to know that you shouldn’t ignore fashion."  In tech, we like nothing better than a new trend, because they become new products—and eventually new income streams—for enterprises.

We also know that fashion matters, so we’ve learned that it’s generally best to get on board with it—or at least become familiar with fashionable trends—if at all possible. In the IT industry, we also like to look ahead, based on what we experienced in the past, to anticipate what important trends are coming, so that we can be aware of new ideas in order to stay competitive…

Grazed from FierceMobileIT.  Author: Fred Donovon.

As more companies grapple with the challenges of allowing employees to bring their own devices to work, they can perhaps gain some insight from a bunch of rocket scientists at NASA.  Surprising as it might sound, the Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL) at NASA has embraced BYOD and implemented some innovative BYOD measures, a report by Lifehacker explains.

Tom Soderstrom, IT chief technology and innovation officer at the lab, says that to keep ahead of IT trends he maps out three-year IT increments and crowdsources innovation during seminars with JPL staff…

Grazed from DataCenterKnowledge. Yevgeniy Sverdlik.

Mirantis, which helps companies stand up OpenStack clouds of their own, has launched the latest release of its distribution of the popular open source cloud architecture. Mirantis OpenStack 6.0 is based on OpenStack Juno, the most recent release of the open source software package.

Juno came out in October 2014. This is the first OpenStack distribution companies can write their own plug-ins for that can be installed and deployed automatically. Lots of vendors want to be part of the rapidly growing OpenStack ecosystem and want customers to use their products as part of their OpenStack clouds…

Grazed from MSPMentor. Author: Stuart Crawford.

The year 2015 has just started, and the smell of change is in the air. Last year was full of upheaval for the MSP world, and if you haven’t started making a gameplan to keep up with the evolving industry we find ourselves in, you’re going to find yourself left behind. Listen to an interview with BJ Farmer on what his MSP in Houston is doing to win in 2015. Click here to check out the interview.

BJ Farmer from Houston Microsoft Award-winning company CITOC knows that this has always been the case for our industry. “CITOC, the company name, stands for ‘change is the only constant,’” says BJ. “That holds true in the technology world. We need to be surfers — we need to ride different waves all the time. Don’t get stuck on any one wave, you’ll get squished; you need to keep moving to new waves.”…