TierPoint Joins AWS Partner Network

TierPoint has announced that the company has joined the AWS Partner Network (APN), offering dedicated high-speed connectivity to Amazon Web Services (AWS) via AWS Direct Connect through TierPoint’s Seattle data center. 

Seattle is the first TierPoint site to become an AWS Direct Connect location and the company expects to make it available through additional data centers in the future.

“Customers want more options for quickly and cost-effectively spinning up their workloads,” said Octavio Morales, tierpoint senior vice president, operations. “Through AWS Direct Connect we can provide our cloud customers with a dedicated network connection that helps reduce costs with enterprise-level reliability and performance.”

Source: CloudStrategyMag

Red Hat And Ericsson Announce Broad Alliance

Red Hat, Inc. and Ericsson have formed a broad alliance to deliver fully open source and production-ready cloud infrastructure, spanning OpenStack, software-defined networking (SDN), and software-defined infrastructure (SDI). Ericsson and Red Hat are working together to enable customers to embrace the opportunity presented by the Internet of Things (IoT), 5G, and other next-generation communications solutions with modern and agile solutions.

Ericsson is a leading provider of hardware, software and services for the service provider industry and is an industry acknowledged leader in NFV. Red Hat leads the technology industry in offering solutions that are open, scalable, flexible, and secure. It is a leader in OpenStack, which has become a go-to platform for telco and enterprise cloud deployments.

The companies have long worked together to bring Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Red Hat JBoss Middleware to Ericsson customers. Today the companies are expanding the collaboration to focus on NFV infrastructure (NFVi), OpenStack, SDN, SDI, and containers and help define the next generation of modern technology for the communications industry, including:

Upstream collaboration: The companies are taking an “upstream first” approach to collaboration across open source projects and communities — including OPNFV, OpenStack, and OpenDaylight — to address customer concerns about lock-in resulting from proprietary forks, differentiating the partnership from other providers. Engineering teams from both companies will collaborate to address customer requirements in upstream open source projects, helping accelerate technology innovation for scalable cloud deployments.

Solution certification and new joint offerings: Red Hat and Ericsson are collaborating on hardware and software roadmaps, aimed at developing new joint offerings for NFV infrastructure, SDN and SDI. Through the collaboration, the companies plan to work together to certify Ericsson’s platform and portfolio of solutions including Ericsson Cloud Execution Environment, Ericsson Cloud SDN solution, and Hyperscale Datacenter System 8000 for Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Red Hat OpenStack Platform, and backed by reference architectures and labs.

Ericsson is expanding its – NFV infrastructure solution to also include Red Hat OpenStack Platform to meet the needs of service providers across the globe who require a fully open and agile infrastructure. For their joint NFV infrastructure, SDN and SDI solutions, the companies plan to work together to offer easy-to-deploy solutions, including automated deployment and management.

Technical alignment to advance container innovation and adoption: Both Red Hat and Ericsson see container technologies as a major part of the platform evolution and will collaborate in upstream activities, in for example the CNCF and OCI communities.

Backed by industry leaders: Ericsson’s Red Hat Enterprise Linux-based workloads, will participate in Red Hat’s certification program for applications running on Red Hat OpenStack Platform. The joint solutions will be backed by service-level agreements offered by Ericsson.

Professional services: Customers looking to evolve their businesses in NFV, IT and datacenter modernization can benefit from Red Hat’s consulting and training expertise in open source and emerging technology enablement, and Ericsson’s expertise in end-to-end consulting, systems integration, managed services, and support services. The combined portfolio of technologies, services, training, and certifications from Red Hat and Ericsson helps enable our customers to transform their business in NFV, IT and Data Center Modernization. With this joint capability, customers gain access to a global team that can position customers for success in today’s dynamic ICT market.

Source: CloudStrategyMag

StatSocial Moves Its Public Cloud To NYI’s Managed Hybrid Solution

NYI has announced that it has been chosen by StatSocial, a premier provider of social data, to fully manage its critical IT infrastructure. Migrating from a public cloud service to NYI’s fully managed hybrid solution not only reduces StatSocial’s operating costs, but it also increases scalability and enables its core IT team to focus on key business growth and innovation.

StatSocial’s IT environment was initially comprised of unmanaged, dedicated servers and a public cloud service. As the company grew, it quickly became apparent that the environment would be increasingly difficult to manage in-house. Its team looked to NYI to migrate to a more scalable, dynamic and fully managed architecture.

“Like many fast-growing tech companies, we found it easy to spin up environments in the cloud, but quickly realized it made no sense to scale in that environment,” comments Michael Hussey, chief executive officer, StatSocial. “With NYI, we now have a fully managed solution that ensures our core services run reliably, efficiently, and are specifically tailored to our unique needs. NYI has given us back our CTO, who can now focus on supporting development and growth initiatives instead of infrastructure challenges. Perhaps most impressive was how quickly NYI became a seamless extension of our technology team, and at a fraction of the cost of trying to do it all ourselves.”

StatSocial enables brands and publishers to understand, segment and target their web-based audiences by evaluating demographics and lifestyles. Using over 40,000 defining variables, StatSocial provides companies with an incredibly detailed perspective of audience composition and characteristics — a powerful tool in today’s data-driven marketplace.

“For over 20 years, we’ve been helping companies with our customized solutions and ensuring they are fully optimized across the board,” adds Phillip Koblence, co-founder and chief operations officer, NYI. “With our hybrid services, enterprises, SMBs and start-ups can find the right solution for each and every server and application. It would be virtually impossible to find that level of flexibility with a public cloud provider.”

Source: CloudStrategyMag

Gartner Identifies The Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends For 2017

Gartner, Inc. has highlighted the top technology trends that will be strategic for most organizations in 2017. Analysts presented their findings during the sold-out Gartner Symposium/ITxpo, which took place October 16-20 in Orlando.

Gartner defines a strategic technology trend as one with substantial disruptive potential that is just beginning to break out of an emerging state into broader impact and use or which are rapidly growing trends with a high degree of volatility reaching tipping points over the next five years.

“Gartner’s top 10 strategic technology trends for 2017 set the stage for the Intelligent Digital Mesh,” said David Cearley, vice president and Gartner Fellow. “The first three embrace ‘Intelligence Everywhere,’ how data science technologies and approaches are evolving to include advanced machine learning and artificial intelligence allowing the creation of intelligent physical and software-based systems that are programmed to learn and adapt. The next three trends focus on the digital world and how the physical and digital worlds are becoming more intertwined. The last four trends focus on the mesh of platforms and services needed to deliver the intelligent digital mesh.”

The top 10 strategic technology trends for 2017 are:

AI and Advanced Machine Learning

Artificial intelligence (AI) and advanced machine learning (ML) are composed of many technologies and techniques (e.g., deep learning, neural networks, natural-language processing [NLP]). The more advanced techniques move beyond traditional rule-based algorithms to create systems that understand, learn, predict, adapt and potentially operate autonomously. This is what makes smart machines appear “intelligent.”

“Applied AI and advanced machine learning give rise to a spectrum of intelligent implementations, including physical devices (robots, autonomous vehicles, consumer electronics) as well as apps and services (virtual personal assistants [VPAs], smart advisors), said Mr. Cearley. “These implementations will be delivered as a new class of obviously intelligent apps and things as well as provide embedded intelligence for a wide range of mesh devices and existing software and service solutions.”

Intelligent Apps

Intelligent apps such as VPAs perform some of the functions of a human assistant making everyday tasks easier (by prioritizing emails, for example), and its users more effective (by highlighting the most important content and interactions). Other intelligent apps such as virtual customer assistants (VCAs) are more specialized for tasks in areas such as sales and customer service. As such, these intelligent apps have the potential to transform the nature of work and structure of the workplace.

“Over the next 10 years, virtually every app, application and service will incorporate some level of AI,” said Mr Cearley. “This will form a long-term trend that will continually evolve and expand the application of AI and machine learning for apps and services.”

Intelligent Things

Intelligent things refer to physical things that go beyond the execution of rigid programing models to exploit applied AI and machine learning to deliver advanced behaviors and interact more naturally with their surroundings and with people. As intelligent things, such as drones, autonomous vehicles and smart appliances, permeate the environment, Gartner anticipates a shift from stand-alone intelligent things to a collaborative intelligent things model.

Virtual and Augmented Reality

Immersive technologies, such as virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR), transform the way individuals interact with one another and with software systems. “The landscape of immersive consumer and business content and applications will evolve dramatically through 2021,” said Mr. Cearley. “VR and AR capabilities will merge with the digital mesh to form a more seamless system of devices capable of orchestrating a flow of information that comes to the user as hyperpersonalized and relevant apps and services. Integration across multiple mobile, wearable, Internet of Things (IoT) and sensor-rich environments will extend immersive applications beyond isolated and single-person experiences. Rooms and spaces will become active with things, and their connection through the mesh will appear and work in conjunction with immersive virtual worlds.”

Digital Twin

A digital twin is a dynamic software model of a physical thing or system that relies on sensor data to understand its state, respond to changes, improve operations and add value. Digital twins include a combination of metadata (for example, classification, composition and structure), condition or state (for example, location and temperature), event data (for example, time series), and analytics (for example, algorithms and rules).

Within three to five years, hundreds of millions of things will be represented by digital twins. Organizations will use digital twins to proactively repair and plan for equipment service, to plan manufacturing processes, to operate factories, to predict equipment failure or increase operational efficiency, and to perform enhanced product development. As such, digital twins will eventually become proxies for the combination of skilled individuals and traditional monitoring devices and controls (for example, pressure gauges, pressure valves).

Blockchain and Distributed Ledgers

Blockchain is a type of distributed ledger in which value exchange transactions (in bitcoin or other tokens) are sequentially grouped into blocks. Each block is chained to the previous block and recorded across a peer-to-peer network, using cryptographic trust and assurance mechanisms. Blockchain and distributed-ledger concepts are gaining traction because they hold the promise to transform industry operating models. While the current hype is around the financial services industry, there are many possible applications including music distribution, identity verification, title registry and supply chain.

“Distributed ledgers are potentially transformative but most initiatives are still in the early alpha or beta testing stage,” said Mr. Cearley.

Conversational Systems

The current focus for conversational interfaces is focused on chatbots and microphone-enabled devices (e.g., speakers, smartphones, tablets, PCs, automobiles). However, the digital mesh encompasses an expanding set of endpoints people use to access applications and information, or interact with people, social communities, governments and businesses. The device mesh moves beyond the traditional desktop computer and mobile devices to encompass the full range of endpoints with which humans might interact. As the device mesh evolves, connection models will expand and greater cooperative interaction between devices will emerge, creating the foundation for a new continuous and ambient digital experience.

Mesh App and Service Architecture

In the mesh app and service architecture (MASA), mobile apps, web apps, desktop apps and IoT apps link to a broad mesh of back-end services to create what users view as an “application.” The architecture encapsulates services and exposes APIs at multiple levels and across organizational boundaries balancing the demand for agility and scalability of services with composition and reuse of services. The MASA enables users to have an optimized solution for targeted endpoints in the digital mesh (e.g., desktop, smartphone, automobile) as well as a continuous experience as they shift across these different channels.

Digital Technology Platforms

Digital technology platforms provide the basic building blocks for a digital business and are a critical enabler to become a digital business. Gartner has identified the five major focal points to enable the new capabilities and business models of digital business — information systems, customer experience, analytics and intelligence, the IoT, and business ecosystems. Every organization will have some mix of these five digital technology platforms. The platforms provide the basic building blocks for a digital business and are a critical enabler to become a digital business.

Adaptive Security Architecture

The intelligent digital mesh and related digital technology platforms and application architectures create an ever-more-complex world for security. “Established security technologies should be used as a baseline to secure Internet of Things platforms,” said Mr. Cearley. “Monitoring user and entity behavior is a critical addition that is particularly needed in IoT scenarios. However, the IoT edge is a new frontier for many IT security professionals creating new vulnerability areas and often requiring new remediation tools and processes that must be factored into IoT platform efforts.”

Source: CloudStrategyMag

Equinix Collaborates With VMware

Equinix, Inc. has announced that it is offering direct and private access to VMware vCloud® Air™ on Platform Equinix™ in major markets across North America and Europe. Access is available either via Equinix Cloud Exchange™, the company’s cloud interconnection platform, or via Direct Connect, depending on location. These dedicated, private connections reduce network costs and provide higher and more consistent network performance than Internet-based connections for enterprise customers looking to build out their VMware-based hybrid clouds.

By combining the flexibility of public cloud with the control and security of private cloud, hybrid cloud deployments are on the rise within enterprise IT, with an estimated annual growth rate of 45%*. Direct access to vCloud Air inside Equinix provides seamless hybrid cloud enablement for VMware customers by enabling them to easily combine on-premises vSphere investments with the agility of public cloud without the inherent control, latency and security concerns and limitations of the public Internet. The solution is now available via Equinix Cloud Exchange in London, Silicon Valley and Washington, D.C. International Business Exchange™ (IBX®) data centers, and also via Direct Connect in Frankfurt, London, New York, Silicon Valley, and Washington, D.C.

“VMware has a strong history and established foothold within the enterprise market, and therefore it is important that we provide direct access to their solution via our Equinix Cloud Exchange as enterprise demand for high-performance, enterprise-grade cloud services continues to grow. Cloud Exchange was developed with the intent of providing improved performance of cloud-based applications and workloads through high-throughput, low-latency connections and we are thrilled to be able to provide this to VMware customers,” said Mark Adams, chief development officer, Equinix.

Direct access to VMware vCloud Air inside Equinix is ideal for customers looking to seamlessly extend their on-premises VMware vSphere® infrastructure and move workloads to and from vCloud Air in a more secure, reliable and compliant manner. This offering also enables customers to consolidate multiple network siloes into an Equinix IBX data center and directly connect to vCloud Air, enabling a unified and truly hybrid architecture. And, direct access to vCloud Air offers a robust disaster recovery solution for customers. Customers with aggressive recovery time objective (RTO) and recovery point objective (RPO) requirements can place critical applications close to vCloud Air for direct instant recovery, or establish a secondary disaster recovery site for vSphere workloads, thus avoiding application downtime.

Equinix offers the industry’s broadest choice in cloud service providers, such as VMware vCloud Air, and offers direct connections to many of these platforms via Equinix Cloud Exchange or Equinix Cross Connects. Equinix Cloud Exchange is an advanced interconnection solution that provides virtualized, private direct connections that bypass the Internet to provide better security and performance with a range of bandwidth options. It is currently available in 21 markets, globally.

Source: CloudStrategyMag

State Bridge Authority Selects The Fusion Cloud

Fusion has announced that the company was recently awarded a three year, $165,000 contract to provide its award-winning cloud communications and cloud connectivity solutions to a large state government corporation. The Authority, which is mandated to ensure safe, reliable, and convenient bridge crossings for millions of residents and visitors, cited Fusion’s ability to integrate its communications solutions with a safe, reliable connection to the cloud, delivering quality of service and a single contract, point of contact and invoice. The Authority also cited Fusion’s robust national network, local presence for on-site support and enhanced, cost-effective feature set as important reasons for its selection. The award reflects Fusion’s increasing success in serving the government sector.

“The selection process was rigorous, reflecting the trust that millions of people place in the Authority to protect the integrity of the many bridges linking communities across the state. Fusion was gratified to have been selected over multiple potential providers through the intensive bid process. The Authority was particularly impressed by our high value, cost-effective communications solutions, our flexibility in meeting the specialized regulatory requirements of a state authority, and our ability to provide local support while maintaining a truly diverse national network,” said Russell P. Markman, president of business services, Fusion.

“The Authority’s challenge was to upgrade its legacy, premise-based communications infrastructure in order to significantly improve its mission-critical communications, driving increases in productivity while protecting taxpayer investments. Invoking the public trust, the Authority expressed its confidence in Fusion to migrate its communications safely to the cloud. We were pleased to have the opportunity to deliver a secure single source cloud solution that will scale with the Authority’s future communications needs,” Markman added.

Source: CloudStrategyMag

Report: CTERA Reveals Enterprise Disconnect With In-Cloud Data Protection Strategies

According to new research announced by CTERA Networks, enterprise data protection strategies may not be fully aligned with IT modernization initiatives driven by cloud computing. The research shows that while enterprises continue to migrate workloads to the cloud at a rapid pace, protection of cloud-based servers and applications has not fully evolved to meet enterprise requirements for business continuity and data availability.

CTERA’s new eBook, Game of Clouds, showcases the findings of CTERA’s inaugural cloud backup survey, and presents a deep look at the state of enterprise cloud data protection. A CTERA-commissioned study was conducted by independent research firm Vanson Bourne to examine the data protection strategies of 400 IT decision makers and IT specialists in organizations using the cloud for application deployment at U.S., German and French organizations. The study analyzes the benefits and pitfalls of current backup strategies, offers key considerations for organizations moving to the cloud, and looks at the impact of poor backup practices on business continuity. The Game of Clouds eBook can be downloaded here.

Key findings from the research include:

• Organizations are moving to the cloud at a rapid pace to realize efficiency gains, real-time scalability and cost savings. More than two-thirds (67%) of organizations deploy more than 25% of their applications in the cloud, and 37% plan to grow their cloud use by at least 25%, if not more. In addition, 54% of organizations are embracing a hybrid cloud strategy that leverages both on-premises and cloud services.
•  But two out of three companies (66%) strongly agree or somewhat agree there is less focus on backing up applications in the cloud due to a misconception that the cloud is inherently resilient compared to on-premises applications. This is not a surprise considering that 62% of organizations rely on the cloud provider to back up applications running on their platform.
• As more enterprise applications move to the cloud and threats such as ransomware become more pervasive, the criticality of business continuity prevails. Thirty-nine percent of respondents claim that ensuring business continuity is the highest priority when backing up applications and data running in the cloud. And 71% of organizations cite data protection and availability as one of the biggest challenges when moving to the cloud.
• With more than a third of respondents (36%) reporting that the loss of data in the cloud would be more catastrophic than their data center crashing, and 14% of respondents claiming it would cost them their jobs, the need to get a cloud strategy right the first time is imperative.

“The enterprise’s move beyond traditional data centers has rewritten the playbook for data protection in the cloud,” said Jeff Denworth, SVP Marketing, CTERA. “As organizations adopt cloud and multi-cloud strategies, traditional backup tools fall down. Our research spotlights the key data protection considerations and challenges for enterprises as they look for simple, efficient and automated solutions that protect critical cloud-based applications.”

Source: CloudStrategyMag

Common Controls Hub™ Provides Microsoft With A Harmonized View Of Compliance

Microsoft has licensed for use for their global customer base the Common Controls Hub™ (CCH). By doing so, Microsoft underscores its commitment to assist their clients in meeting and retaining the highest level of compliance in all aspects of their enterprise.

Why the Common Controls Hub™ Is Significant

The Common Controls Hub is the SaaS portal to the data in the Unified Compliance Framework® (UCF). It is a research and information database that provides compliance professionals with the ability to maintain regulatory compliance for both national and international standards that apply to their enterprise and industry. The CCH connects the various criteria, policies, and lexicons of over 200,000 individual compliance mandates across over 800 laws, standards, and regulations (referred to by the UCF as Authority Documents) from around the world. By creating a standardized structure that traces the what, why, and how of every Authority Document, the CCH harmonizes the rules and regulations with which they must comply. It also provides the means to track compliance activities over time, for both internal and external audit purposes.

To achieve its objective, the CCH incorporates all the elements of each body of rules into its database, where it maps each separate mandate in relation to all other mandates. Dividing every rule set into five domains, 15 “Impact Zones” and three categories, the program identifies all the controls that affect their organization, the authority documents that establish those controls, and the details of implementation that will demonstrate compliance.

Why Microsoft’s Licensing Is Significant

At Microsoft, compliance with the rules is an ethical matter. The company’s Standards of Business Conduct embody its values of integrity and ethical business practices, and every Microsoft employee is expected to follow the company’s internal standards, as well as national and international laws.

In its Trust Center, the company offers its customers the proprietary programs and services that help them do the same high level of ethical business in this complex, digital world. Products related to digital and corporate security, privacy, transparency and, compliance, are utilized by millions of consumers each year. Until now, however, the company did not have a tool that provided the comprehensive analytics necessary to identify both the rule sets and the mandates with which each of its customers was required to follow.

The addition of the Common Controls Hub in a branded whitebox in Microsoft’s Trust Center marks the first time the technology giant has placed the product of an outside content provider alongside their already sizeable and significant proprietary programming as a valid and valuable resource for its existing and potential customers.

Source: CloudStrategyMag

Logicalis US Ranked Among Top 100 Cloud Service Providers

Logicalis US has announced that it has ranked among the world’s top 100 cloud service providers (CSPs) according to Penton’s sixth annual Talkin’ Cloud 100 report.

Based on data from Talkin’ Cloud’s online survey, conducted between June and August 2016, the Talkin’ Cloud 100 list recognizes top CSPs considering annual cloud services revenue growth and input from Penton Technology’s channel editors.

“There’s a significant change taking place in IT today, and cloud computing is at the heart of it,” says Eric Brooks, Cloud and Automation Practice Leader, Logicalis US.  “Organizations that want to be agile enough to quickly respond to changes in business environments need to rely on a host of compute capabilities delivered as-a-service in the cloud. To take advantage of these offerings, CIOs are shifting their thinking about IT as a technology-defined function to one that is services defined, and they need partners like Logicalis that can help them with this digital transformation. Being recognized among the world’s top cloud service providers is, therefore, both an honor and an industrywide acknowledgement of the proficiency Logicalis displays in delivering services via the cloud and helping our clients chart their course toward becoming service-defined organizations.”

“On behalf of Penton and Talkin’ Cloud, I would like to congratulate Logicalis for its recognition as a Talkin’ Cloud 100 honoree,” says Nicole Henderson, editor in chief, Talkin’ Cloud. “Cloud services providers on the Talkin’ Cloud 100 set themselves apart through innovative cloud offerings and new support models demonstrating a deep understanding of their customers’ needs and future cloud opportunities.”

Source: CloudStrategyMag

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Source: CloudStrategyMag