Volume LIII, Issue 9

Posted on by dciadminwp

In This Issue

Plan Now to Participate in NYME Webcast

Excerpted from DMW Blog Post by Ned Sherman

In Partnership News, we are launching the official New York Media Festival (NYME) Video Studio in partnership with the DCIA.

The on-site studio will produce professional video segments from the event including hosted on-camera studio interviews, studio solo presentations, as well as exhibit booth interviews and solo presentations.

To book segments, contact us.

In our Who’s Coming Updates, lots of new people are registering every day from awesome companies including Amazon, Conde Nast, Leap Motion, Pandora, PlayStation, Ubisoft, Vimeo, and Yahoo!

In the What’s Going on Scoop, virtual reality (VR) companies will be exhibiting in our VR Alley and presenting on our Innovation Stage at NYME HQ on October 7th, 8th, and 9th; and on October 8th, NYME is taking over a nightclub from 7 PM to midnight and turning it into the VR Lounge

We’ll be featuring some fun VR games and other activations. Keep tuning in for more to come… Read More

NetApp Wins Four Flash Solutions Leadership Awards

Excerpted from CNN Money Report

NetApp won “Best of Show” at Flash Memory Summit 2015 for its flash innovation with customer Global Eagle Entertainment.

NetApp also took home three 2015 Flash Storage Brand Leader Awards, with the NetApp All Flash FAS (AFF) system winning the Unified SAN/NAS Array category.

Winners are selected by IT professionals who buy and use the products, based on independent surveys conducted by IT Brand Pulse.

“These awards validate the market impact of NetApp flash innovation,” said Lee Caswell, Vice President, Product and Solutions Marketing, NetApp.

“We are especially pleased with the Unified SAN/NAS Array award, as we see more and more customers seamlessly moving high-performance SAN applications to NetApp all-flash systems.”

The NetApp AFF all-flash array, powered by the award-winning NetApp clustered Data ONTAP storage operating system, won individual honors in the All Flash Unified SAN/NAS Array Brand Leader category in Market, Price, Performance, Reliability, and Innovation… Read More

Happy Birthday, Einstein@Home

Excerpted from Light Reading Report by Baruch Sterman

A short while back, an email showed up in my inbox, sent to an old and long-forgotten address. The subject line was “Einstein@Home Newsletter.”

That was a project originally launched ten years ago, and the administrators wanted to commemorate the anniversary with a thank you note to those who had been part of it — a nostalgic nod to a pretty awesome bit of technology and a milestone in computing history.

Einstein@Home was meant to search for anomalies in space, like pulsars and other exotic astronomical phenomena.

It was a project that required vast computing power — in this case, to scour a myriad of images in the sky in a range of wavelengths and to identify slight variations in star brightness over time.

Aside from the noble goals of the project, what was really exciting was that it was built with a distributed algorithm, using volunteers who donated their computer idle time to carry out complex computing.

Anyone with an Internet connection could download a program that would run in the background and communicate with a server… Read More

Report from DCIA CEO Marty Lafferty

Click Here for Video

The DCIA is expanding our partnership with Informa Telecoms & Media to include Cloud Asia Forum.

Taking place on November 24th and 25th in Hong Kong, the sixth annual Cloud Asia Forum is the most comprehensive cloud computing event in Asia.

Coming from the producers of the Cloud World Series, this event is designed to answer all your questions about cloud computing, whether you work at a large or small enterprise, and show you the way to future-proof your business through cloud-based solutions and DevOps.

Since its inception in 2009, Cloud Asia Forum has grown to address an impressive array of topics centering on smarter product and service offerings.

A range of keynotes, interactive panel discussions, brainstorming breakouts, industry briefings, and more will offer expert views on how to engage with your target market through enterprise apps.

Learn how to apply and leverage Internet of Things (IoT) technology, taking into account the unique status of the Asian market.

Learn how to ensure a healthy return on investment (RoI) from Big Data infrastructure, tailoring data analytics to your business needs.

Join information technology (IT) DevOps teams working with leading cloud service providers and broadband network operators for valuable interaction at Cloud Asia Forum.

Distinguished IT experts will explain how to overcome security and privacy concerns and stop fearing hybrid and even public clouds.

Industry leaders will pinpoint how containers are bringing portability — as well as cost savings and process efficiency — to workloads and applications.

A wealth of opportunities are being brought forth by containerization, and you will have your questions answered about how virtualization can simplify your legacy systems.

Fast applications, agility, improved collaboration — all under one roof.

See how DevOps methodology will improve the operations of your organization.

Hear from pioneering broadband network operators about how they are transforming their businesses to become competitive cloud providers.

And gain valuable advice on go-to-market cloud strategies.

Cloud Asia Forum provides the perfect platform to discuss your challenges and exchange ideas. Share wisely, and take care.

10 Things You Need to Know about Cloud Computing

Excerpted from Tech Republic Report by Conner Forrest

From shared documents to smartphone data backups, the cloud touches many of the technological aspects of our daily lives.

Once merely a novelty, the cloud has become a productivity tool that is helping individuals and organizations to truly get work done more efficiently.

While not right for every business, cloud computing has certainly proven its value.

As the cloud industry has matured, many things have changed from its early days. Here are ten things you need to know about cloud computing and its capabilities.

1. The size of the market: According to a report by Global Industry Analysts, the global market for cloud computing services will reach $127 billion by the year 2017.

Centaur Partners projects that the software-as-a-service (SaaS) market itself will grow to $32.8 billion in revenue in 2016, up from only $13.5 billion in 2011.

2. Cloud is changing software deployment models: One of the key factors in the growth of cloud is the way it has changed licensing… Read More

Collaboration Now Tops List of Cloud Computing Drivers

Excerpted from ChannelWorld Report by Thor Olavsrud

With cloud computing maturing, the competitive advantages provided by cloud adoption are declining, but not being in the cloud is turning into a serious disadvantage, according to a new report by Harvard Business Review Analytic Services.

“The benefits are starting to flatten out,” says Abbie Lundberg, Contributing Editor at HBR.

But that’s because CIOs and their peers are no longer debating the benefits of cloud as they once did. With “everyone” now leveraging cloud, you have to use cloud in imaginative ways to get a leg up on the competition.

But as one respondent told HBR, cloud computing may no longer give you the competitive advantage it once did, but not using cloud can put you at a significant disadvantage.

“Cloud has become much more of an accepted part of enterprise IT operations,” Lundberg says.

“In the early days, cloud adoption really grew out of two things. The first was IT leaders who were really tech savvy and looking for alternative ways of doing things.”

“The second was line of business leaders saying, ‘We can just go out and buy our own capabilities… Read More

The Cloud Gets Mobile Apps Moving

Excerpted from Computerworld Report by Sharon Gaudin

Immediately after Hurricane Sandy tore through New York City in October 2012, city officials needed a quick way to show the damage that had been done to streets and infrastructure.

They needed an app — and they needed it immediately.

For a quick turnaround, Cordell Schachter, Chief Technology Officer at New York City’s Department of Transportation, asked his crew to stop work being done on what was eventually to be a street excavation permit app and had programmers repurpose it to show street damage instead.

And because they were doing their app dev on the cloud, they were able to get the application quickly built, tested and in use on the city’s storm-damaged streets, according to Schachter, who said using the cloud was “much faster” than traditional app-dev methods.

“We had sand and water in the roads, damaged street signs,” he told Computerworld. “We had inspectors all over the city taking pictures with their iPads.”

“And when the commissioner, who had to justify why we needed restoration money, had to show pictures of damage… Read More

Cloud Reliability Matters: Check Performance Markers

Excerpted from CloudTech Report by Jamie Tyler

Cloud vendors claiming to be the “fastest” or “best performing” deserve a little skepticism.

While speed and performance can appear impressive if conditions are aligned in a particular way, it doesn’t mean they will hold up in the long-term.

For companies searching for the right cloud provider, data on performance expectations is essential as it relates to picking the right host, managing scalability, and effectively spending on resources.

Companies can use the following three tips to correctly gauge cloud performance and reliability.

First, get the most out of every pound, euro, or dollar.

In the best case scenario, you want reliable performance at a fair price while also escaping any hidden costs that may ruin the true ROI. You want servers that can offer superb disk read performance and disk write capabilities while also performing well under varied test scenarios.

For instance, ask for test data that shows the servers’ I/O profile for both large and small block sizes… Read More

Gartner: 5 Years for Hybrid Cloud to Reach Productivity

Excerpted from CloudTech Report by James Bourne

Gartner has released its latest hype cycle for emerging technologies, and while the likes of autonomous vehicles and the Internet of Things (IoT) sit atop the peak of inflated expectations, hybrid cloud computing is a bit further down the line heading straight for the trough of disillusionment.

The analyst house groups a bunch of technologies in three different stages and heavily influenced by its nexus of forces — mobile, social, cloud and information.

Hybrid cloud comes under the digital marketing banner, whereby enterprises focus on new ways to reach consumers.

Other technologies in this bucket include IoT, machine learning, and gesture control.

For the ‘post-nexus’ stages, Gartner describes the first as digital business, whereby physical assets will be digitalized and will become equal actors in the value chain. Wearables, virtual and augmented reality and quantum computing form part of this sector.

The second, autonomous, defines an enterprise’s ability to leverage technologies that, in essence, replace human capabilities… Read More

Is the Cloud the Right Spot for Your Big Data?

Excerpted from Network World Report by Brandon Butler

That’s a controversial question, and the answer changes depending on who you ask.

Last week I attended the HP Big Data Conference in Boston and both an HP customer and an executive told me that Big Data isn’t a good fit for the public cloud.

I’ve heard many cloud vendors tell me the opposite.

CB Bohn is a senior database engineer at Etsy, and a user of HP’s Vertica database.

The online marketplace uses the public cloud for some workloads, but its primary functions are run out of a co-location center, Bohn said.

It doesn’t make sense for the company to lift and shift its Postgres, Vertica SQL, and Hadoop workloads into the public cloud, he said.

It would be a massive undertaking for the company to port all the data associated with those programs into the cloud.

Then, once it’s transferred to the cloud, the company would have to pay ongoing costs to store it there… Read More

Best Practice Cloud Security

Excerpted from B2C Report by Simon Mitchell

Last year, the UK government’s Cabinet Office outlined what constitutes Cloud Security Principles in a guidance document published on August 14th 2014.

These principles involve the protection of data in transit, asset protection such as customer data, a need to create some level of separation between customers in order to ensure that a compromised customer account won’t affect the service or the data of another customer, the need to develop a governance framework, and the screening of Managed Service Provider (MSP) or Cloud Service Provider (CSP) staff, to name a few areas.

Cloud security is such a burning issue because data is the gold and the oil of any modern organization.

Enterprises large and small need to think about how they can prevent hackers from compromising their cloud services.

Yet not all attacks occur from outside of an organization.

Sometimes they start from within an organization or from within a service provider.

But so long as a security audit is undertaken and cloud security principles are put in place, a cloud environment can be secure… Read More

Managing Expectations Is Everything in the Cloud

Excerpted from Forbes Report by Joe McKendrick

As more enterprises adopt more cloud for important applications, they’re finding they’re dealing with new types of relationships, unlike anything they’ve encountered before.

Unlike software purchases in the past, there’s no longer an up-front installation, followed by tech support as needed.

Instead, the relationship is more akin to a marriage in which the spouses not only live together, but also work together all day long — 24X7.

That means a highly co-dependent relationship.

So cloud consumers need to expect their providers to have well-functioning data centers, running in top form at all times.

That’s why if you want your cloud engagements to succeed, it’s important to set expectations as early and often as possible, and be ready to hold vendors’ feet to the fire when things aren’t working out well.

This evolving relationship cloud engagements was explored earlier this year in a panel held at Cloudscape VII in Brussels, led by Joe Weinman, author of Cloudonomics: The Business Value of Cloud Computing… Read More

Open Source First Starting to Converge with Cloud First

Excerpted from Talkin’ Cloud Report by Mike Vizard

Ed Boyajian, CEO of EnterpriseDB, a provider of a commercially supported instance of the open source PostgreSQL database, contends it’s now only a matter of time before hybrid cloud computing deployments wind up driving more open source adoption on premise.

With a large contingent of the open source community gathering this week at the LinuxCon Conference there are two trends that are clearly starting to converge in a way where the sum of the parts is much greater than the whole.

The first involves the shift toward an “open source first” mentality among enterprise IT organization that would rather spend money on developing their own engineering talent than pay for commercial support. The second has been the rapid shift to the cloud; with many organizations now adopting a “cloud first” mentality to complement an existing “open source first” mantra.

The end result is a critical mass of open source software that is starting to build in the cloud.

Right now, two of the world’s largest cloud service providers are driving database-as-a-service (DBaaS) adoptions using PostgreSQL: in the case of Amazon Web Services (AWS), the Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL provides access… Read More

Attackers Abuse Home Routers for DDoS Attacks

Excerpted from PC World Report by Lucian Constantin

Attackers are taking advantage of home routers and other devices that respond to universal plug-and-play (UPnP) requests over the Internet in order to amplify distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks.

A report released Tuesday by cloud services provider Akamai Technologies shows that the number of DDoS attacks is on the rise. During the second quarter of 2015 it increased by 7 percent compared to the previous three months and by 132 percent compared to the same period last year, the company’s data revealed.

Overall, attackers launched less powerful attacks, but their duration was longer.

Even so, the company saw 12 attacks that exceeded 100Gbps during the second quarter and five that peaked at more than 50 million packets per second.

Very few organizations have the infrastructure necessary to deal with such attacks on their own.

The largest one recorded during the second quarter across Akamai’s Prolexic Routed network peaked at 214Mpps and was capable of disrupting high-end routers used by ISPs, the company said… Read More

Verizon Rolls Out Rapid Response Retainer Program

Excerpted from CRN Report by Gina Narcisi

Verizon is rolling out its cybersecurity portfolio into the channel.

The carrier’s Rapid Response Retainer program will now be available for its VAR and master agent partners to sell to their end customers, Adam Famularo, Verizon’s Global Channel Vice President told CRN.

Basking Ridge, NJ based Verizon revealed availability of the security offering to partners at XChange 2015 in Washington, DC hosted by CRN parent company The Channel Company.

Making Rapid Response Retainer — otherwise known as “Triple R” to the carrier — available through the channel will allow Verizon’s VAR and agent partners help their customers manage risk and react to security threats.

“It’s like an insurance policy for the CIO or the CSO,” Famularo said.

The new program combines Verizon’s security offerings with its infrastructure.

According to Famularo, Verizon provides much of the backbone of the Internet — about 70 percent.

“This is essentially us leveraging our expertise and ownership of the network, and doing forensics on the network… Read More

Financial Sector Defends Cyber Bill

Excerpted from The Hill Report by Cory Bennett

The battle over a stalled cybersecurity bill has spilled into the August recess.

Over the weekend, Tim Pawlenty, the former Republican governor of Minnesota who now heads a major financial sector trade group, defended the bill that has been hung up for months amid privacy concerns.

The measure, known as the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act (CISA), would shield companies from legal liability when sharing data on hackers with the government.

“We need a team America approach,” Pawlenty, CEO of the Financial Services Roundtable, said on C-SPAN’s “Newsmakers.”

“We’ve got to work as a team if we’re going to successfully identify and defend against those kind of threats. No one company, no matter how large they are, can do it by themselves.”

American businesses have been hammered by cyber-attacks in recent years.

Last fall’s data breach at JPMorgan Chase exposed sensitive data on 76 million households.

Industry groups have heavily backed CISA, but privacy concerns have derailed the bill in the Senate… Read More

Coming Events of Interest

Cloud Partners 2015 — September 16th-18th in Boston, MA. This Informa-hosted conference is totally focused on how the cloud can mean business for you. Learn how to enable scale, impact, and action based on cloud services.

The Internet of Things (IoT) Show — September 2nd-23rd in Singapore. The IoT Show will facilitate new collaborations and partnerships as well as generate new ideas and thinking. The IoT Show is about getting the prototypes out of the lab and into the market.

ADRM Working Group Meeting — September 24th via Global Videoconference. Contact the DCIA for information about joining the group and attending the meeting that will focus on interoperability among DRM platforms and simplifying DRM implementation.

New York Media Festival — October 6th-9th in New York, NY. NYME brings together 5,000 expected attendees including 1,500 senior digital, games, music, television, advertising and video leaders, brands, investors and start-ups. Networking, meetings and deal-making.

Digital Hollywood Fall — October 19th-22nd in Marina Del Rey, CA. The future of the entertainment industry. Digital Hollywood debuted in 1990 and has from its start been among the leading trade conferences in its field.

2015 US Cyber Crime Conference — November 14th-20th in National Harbor, MD. This is the only event of its kind that provides both hands-on digital forensics training and an interactive forum for cyber professionals to network.

Cloud Asia Forum — November 24th-25th in Hong Kong. Now in its sixth year, this major highlight of the Cloud World Series sponsored by Informa Telecoms & Media is the most comprehensive cloud computing event in Asia.

Internet of Things World Forum (IoTWF) — December 6th-8th in Dubai, . IoTWF is an exclusive event that brings together the best and brightest thinkers, practitioners, and innovators from business, government, and academia to accelerate the market adoption of the Internet of Things.

Posted in Newsletters