Has the Time Come for Cloud Insurance?
In the enterprise market much of the adoption for public cloud IaaS services so far has been driven by innovators and early adopters. One of the defining characteristics of these early adopters is their willingness to accept and manage risk. These risks can come in many forms, including technological, organizational, operational and financial. Financial risk [...]
Another Data Point on Ascendancy of OpenStack Cloud
Earlier this week, I gave the keynote address at the Storage Plumbing and Data Engineering Conference in Santa Clara (it’s abbreviated SPDEcon and pronounced, “Speedy-con,” by the way). Sponsored by the SNIA, the event is targeted for hardcore storage development and data engineers who configure, integrate and support storage and data management solutions – often called “storage [...]
Hacking Into The Indian Education System Reveals Score Tampering
Debarghya Das has a fascinating story on how he managed to bypass a silly web security layer to get access to the results of 150,000 ISCE (10th grade) and 65,000 ISC (12th grade) students in India. While lack of security and total ignorance to safeguard sensitive information is an interesting topic what is more fascinating [...]
Back in the Bosh Bunker
In the last post on the topic of Bosh I put together a simple Cloud Foundry environment using the tools & repos of Stark & Wayne. Even though the bootstrap is a great way to get an environment up and started, it doesn’t explain a lot of things about Bosh. So let’s take a look [...]
The Prophecy of Meraki
I like to prognosticate around the end of the year, but sometimes the signs (omens) just can’t wait. I am referring of course to the Prophecy of Meraki, or Cisco’s Wi-Fi from the clouds. I’ve always liked Meraki, I think the concept makes a lot of sense. But it’s over. Meraki is unlikely to see 2015. [...]
Truth about the SAP HCM Customer Connection Program
In February of 2012, SAP announced that it was replacing the defunct Development Request (DRQ) process, which had long been ineffective, with a new ASUG support Customer Connection Program. The programs goal was to allow customers to submit smaller improvements, and assuming they got the minimum support of five other customers, that SAP would review, [...]
The Inevitable Cloud Outage: 5 Key Essentials to Safe Guard Your Application
A while back, I was starting up an EC2 instance on the AWS cloud when it entered an endless restart loop. All the application deployment efforts we’d made (installation and service configuration) over two weeks just went down the drain. So we called support. The support rep redirected us to his team leader who simply [...]
Unsupervised Machine Learning, Most Promising Ingredient Of Big Data
Orange (France Telecom), one of the largest mobile operators in the world, issued a challenge “Data for Development” by releasing a dataset of their subscribers in Ivory Coast. The dataset contained 2.5 billion records, calls and text messages exchanged between 5 million anonymous users in Ivory Coast, Africa. Various researchers got access to this dataset [...]
Enterprise Grade Cloud Enabled by the Ecosystem
While investing in building new data centers all over the world and creating the management overlay in order to be able to sell their hardware, IaaS operators are also relying on their ecosystem to support the evolving enterprises that go to the cloud (e.g. the “Enterprise Grade Cloud”). API First – The move to the [...]
You Can’t Automate Your Way to the Cloud
When racing to execute a ‘cloud’ strategy, it can be very tempting for IT organizations to try and automate their way to the cloud. A key benefit of the cloud is operational efficiency. We know that humans are error prone and costly, which makes automation such an enticing solution. Add to this the fact that [...]
Yes, Android is winning (at least by what Google cares about)
John Kirk recently took issue with the spate of stories about Android’s increasing share of the smartphone market. In his polemic, “Android’s Market Share Is Literally A Joke“, he argues that Apple is actually winning the smartphone battle because it has a majority of the profits: “Not only do the high priests of market share [...]
Google Voice Disconnected
I was using Grand Central long before Google bought them. Grand Central was an exciting concept as it brought advanced telephony features to existing phone services. You could not use Grand Central unless you already had a phone. Ater Google re-launched Grand Central post acquisition as Google Voice, the world was prepared for Google to [...]
What Makes Cloud Transformation So Hard?
Transformation is not a new concept, and has been around a long time before cloud and big data. It has always been a pretty nebulous term, but generally has referred to the fundamental reinvention or redesign of a business or function. From an enterprise-wide perspective this typically has meant redefining everything from target markets, products [...]
Unpicking the multi-cloud at GigaOM Structure
Image © Mission Bay Conference Center Last month, RightScale’s State of the Cloud report got me thinking about the rise of multi-cloud solutions. Next month, I’ll be moderating a Mapping Session at GigaOM’s Structure event to work out how, where, when, why and if this trend is going to prove significant. Hybrid clouds, in which one [...]
Discussing Virtual Machine interoperability with the Open Data Center Alliance
The Open Data Center Alliance (ODCA) is holding its Forecast event in San Francisco in June, and I’ve been invited to moderate the panel discussing Virtual Machine Interoperability. As moderator, I’ll be far more interested in facilitating insights from panel and audience than in wittering on about what I think, so I wanted to use this [...]
