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RALEIGH, N.C., Dec. 19, 2019 Red Hat, Inc., the worlds leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that the National Science Foundation (NSF) Division of Computer and Network Systems hasawarded a grantto a research team from Boston University, Northeastern University and the University of Massachusetts Amherst (UMass) to help fund the development of a national cloud testbed for research and development of new cloud computing platforms.

By providing capabilities that currently are only available to researchers within a few large commercial cloud providers, the new testbed will allow diverse communities to exploit these technologies, thus democratizing cloud-computing research and allowing increased collaboration between the research and open-source communities, said Michael Zink, Associate Professor, Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Massachusetts Amherst.

The testbed, known as the Open Cloud Testbed, will integrate capabilities previously developed for the CloudLab testbed into the Massachusetts Open Cloud (MOC), a production cloud developed collaboratively by academia, government, and industry through a partnership anchored at Boston Universitys Hariri Institute for Computing. As a founding industry partner andlong-time collaboratoron the MOC project, Red Hat will work with Northeastern University and UMass, as well as other government and industry collaborators, to build the national testbed on Red Hats open hybrid cloud technologies.

Testbeds such as the one being constructed by the research team, are critical for enabling new cloud technologies and making the services they provide more efficient and accessible to a wider range of scientists focusing on research in computer systems and other sciences.

By combining open source technologies and a production cloud enhanced with programmable hardware through field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), the project aims to close a gap in computing capabilities currently available to researchers. As a result, the testbed is expected to help accelerate innovation by enabling greater scale and increased collaboration between research teams and open source communities. Red Hat researchers plan to contribute to active research in the testbed, including a wide range of projects on FPGA hardware tools, middleware, operating systems and security.

Beyond this, the project also aims to identify, attract, educate and retain the next generation of researchers in this field and accelerate technology transfer from academic research to practical use via collaboration with industry partners such as Red Hat.

Since its launch in 2014, Red Hat has served as a core partner of the MOC, which brings together talent and technologies from various academic, government, non-profit, and industry organizations to collaboratively create an open, production-grade public cloud suitable for cutting-edge research and development. The MOCs open cloud stack is based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat OpenStack Platform and Red Hat OpenShift.

Beyond creating the national testbed, the grant will alsoextend Red Hats collaboration with Boston University researchersto develop self-service capabilities for the MOCs cloud resources. For example, via contributions to the OpenStack bare metal provisioning program (Ironic), the collaboration aims to produce production quality Elastic Secure Infrastructure (ESI) software, a key piece to enabling more flexible and secure resource sharing between different datacenter clusters. And by sharing new developments that enable moving resources between bare metal machines and Red Hat OpenStack or Kubernetes clusters in open source communities such as Ironic or Ansible, Red Hat and the MOCs researchers are helping to advance technology well beyond the Open Cloud Testbed.

This testbed will help accelerate innovation in cloud technologies, technologies affecting almost all of computing today, said Michael Zink, associate professor, Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE), University of Massachusetts Amherst. By providing capabilities that currently are only available to researchers within a few large commercial cloud providers, the new testbed will allow diverse communities to exploit these technologies, thus democratizing cloud-computing research and allowing increased collaboration between the research and open-source communities. We look forward to continuing the collaboration in MOC to see what we can accomplish with the testbed.

About Red Hat

Red Hatis the worlds leading provider of enterprise open source software solutions, using a community-powered approach to deliver reliable and high-performing Linux, hybrid cloud, container, and Kubernetes technologies. Red Hat helps customers integrate new and existing IT applications, develop cloud-native applications, standardize on our industry-leading operating system, and automate, secure, and manage complex environments.Award-winningsupport, training, and consulting services make Red Hat atrusted adviser to the Fortune 500. As a strategic partner to cloud providers, system integrators, application vendors, customers, and open source communities, Red Hat can help organizations prepare for the digital future.

Source: Red Hat

Excerpt from:
NSF Awards Grant to Research Team to Develop Next-Generation Cloud Computing Testbed - HPCwire

Google CEO Sundar Pichai

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In early 2018, top executives at Alphabet debated whether the company should leave the public cloud business, but eventually set a goal of becoming a top-two player by 2023, according to a report from The Information on Tuesday.

If the company fails to achieve this goal, some staffers reportedly believe that Alphabet could withdraw from the market completely.

After the report was published, a Google spokesperson told CNBC the article was "not accurate," and disputed that the company debated leaving the cloud market in 2018.

While Alphabet subsidiary Google is dominant in web search and advertising, the company is still a small player in cloud computing, which involves renting out computing and storage resources to other companies, schools and governments. In 2018 the company lagged Amazon, Microsoft and Alibaba in that market, according to industry research firm Gartner.

Alphabet doesn't break out revenue for the Google cloud business but said in July that it had reached $8 billion in annualized revenue. Amazon Web Services, the market leader, generated $9 billion in revenue during the third quarter alone. Microsoft doesn't specify revenue from its Azure cloud, but Griffin Securities analyst Jay Vleeschhouwer estimated that Azure delivered $4.3 billion in revenue in the third quarter.

Google co-founder Larry Page, who was Alphabet's CEO at the time, reportedly thought being a distant third-place in cloud was not acceptable. But eventually he, CFO Ruth Porat, and then-Google CEO Sundar Pichai decided that Alphabet should remain in the cloud business, according to the report. The company set a five-year budget for capital expenditures of $20 billion, in part to reach that cloud goal.

The company replaced VMware co-founder Diane Greene, who had been leading the cloud business, with Oracle executive Thomas Kurian at the start of 2019. Pichai replaced Page as Alphabet's CEO earlier this month.

Read the full Information article here.

Update: This article has been updated to reflect that on Tuesday afternoon, a Google spokesperson told CNBC the report was "not accurate" and denied the company debated leaving the cloud market in 2018.

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Google reportedly set a goal of being a top-two cloud player by 2023 - CNBC

2019 has been a year of profound change as organisations across the globe have recognised the importance of digital transformation. As a result, more businesses have started experimenting and deploying new smart tools and workflow solutions which in return have enabled rapid information sharing, increased productivity and automation of some of the more mundane tasks. According to Y Soft Corporation, companies have recognised how Cloud has become a crucial part of their companys print IT strategy and this transformation is set to go even further with the advent of Edge computing disrupting the print sector.

In light of this transformation, Ross Penman, Head of Global Delivery Management at Y Soft, notes the following key predictions for the year ahead:

1. Cloud and Edge computing

While cloud adoption has been around for several years now, plenty of companies still struggle to move into the cloud completely because of old legacy technology and hardware. However, in a world of increased remote and flexible working, cloud adoption will not only help companies to improve their overall productivity, but it can also help companies to improve costs and risk management.

In the next 12 months more companies will see a cloud approach as a crucial part of their business strategy. By prioritising models such as Software-as-a-Service and Platform-as-a-Service companies can begin to consume applications without having to invest in skills to build solutions themselves from the ground up. Following on from this, more companies will also begin exploring Edge computing as part of the print setup to solve issues that Cloud can introduce, such as latency and bandwidth costs, which can, in turn, impact productivity and efficiency.

2. Green credentials

Sustainable lifestyles have become increasingly important not only for individuals but for organisations no matter how large or small they might be. Green movements such as Extinction Rebellion have created a huge political movement that has made climate change more imperative. As a result, individuals hold organisations more accountable than ever before, not only for their consumption but also for their contribution to the environment. Organisations are expected to improve their green credentials and do more to achieve energy efficiency goals. For most companies, print IT will play a huge role in this and organisations are expected to report on elements such as how many trees are used to print as well as report on their water and energy consumption. As a result, more companies will adopt automated scan workflows, which transform paper-based work processes into digital workflows, helping companies to keep track of their consumption and be more productive, while focusing on their core everyday tasks.

3. Security and identity

While security has always played a crucial role for IT staff, the huge amount of high-profile data breaches in recent years have made businesses more security-conscious than ever before. As companies continue to adopt smarter and integrated workflow solutions, the security of the entire system must be considered as a whole. Unfortunately, too often the security of the print IT is overlooked. However, print hacks such as the PiewDiePie incident showed that organisations can never play it safe.

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Therefore, better collaboration between an enterprise solution provider, the MFD service provider and an organisations IT department is crucial. In addition, companies that adopt a good identity management will not only improve their overall security but will also simplify the complexity of managing multiple sets of credentials. This is especially important as more people within organisations adopt flexible and remote working.

4. Reseller and customer agility

Customers have recognised that having one integrated supplier across all their hardware and software solutions will not only reduce overall costs but also provide a smoother and much more integrated experience. It is important that resellers should look to make software that supports this demand and integrate with key manufacturers in the tech space. In addition, resellers should harness new technologies to refurbish old legacy technology rather than try to completely replace them.

5. Artificial intelligence

While many predicted at the beginning of 2019 that artificial intelligence and robotics would eliminate a huge number of jobs by 2020, there is now a consensus that the increased efficiencies delivered through these technologies could actually result in more jobs. In the next 12 months, more companies will experiment with AI and robotics to run security and quality assurance tests on software and hardware solutions. This in return will help companies to detect security attacks, programme mistakes, and viruses much more quickly in addition to providing higher quality products and services.

Link:
2020 vision: Y-Soft print industry predictions - Gigabit Magazine - Technology News, Magazine and Website

As the number of IoT devices continues to increase a predicted 75 billion by 2025 to be exact so do data requirements. In fact, its estimated that IoT will generate more than 500 zettabytes of data per year by the end of 2019.

To create an environment where IoT devices and applications are seamlessly connected to one another, and their end-users, sufficient computational and storage resources are needed to perform advanced analytics and machine learning, which the cloud is capable of doing. However, cloud servers are often located too far away from the IoT endpoints to be able to effectively transmit time-sensitive data to and from billions of "things" across vast distances. This has driven the move towards edge and fog computing.

Living Life on the Edge

Edge computing allows for data to be processed closer to its origination, significantly reducing network latency. By physically bringing processing closer to the data source (such as IoT devices), there's less distance that data needs to be sent across, improving the speed and performance of devices and applications. However, there are limitations with undertakings, like real-time analysis and machine learning.

Edge computing has led the way for the emergence of fog computing a term first coined by Cisco to signify decentralized computing architecture that acts as an extension of cloud computing. The storage and computing of data are distributed most logically and efficiently, located between the cloud and the data source. Fog computing is seen as a complementary strategy for how edge computing can be effectively implemented while providing the compute, network, and storage capabilities of the cloud. It is estimated that the revenue produced by the fog computing market will increase by 55% between 2019 and 2026.

Seeing Through the Mist

When broken down, fog computing was created to accompany edge strategies and serve as an additional architectural layer to provide enhanced processing capabilities that the edge alone cannot always do. There are many similarities between fog computing and edge computing, such as that they both bring processing closer to the data source. However, the main difference between the two is where the processing is taking place.

While fog computing offers many of the same advantages as the cloud, the cloud has limitations such as being centralized and located further away from the data source, thus increasing latency and limiting bandwidth. It's not always practical to transmit vast amounts of data all the way to the cloud and back again, especially for scenarios when processing and storage on a cloud-scale are not necessary.

Solving the Data Problem

Digital transformation means something different to every business. Meeting these new transformation challenges is forcing organizations to reconcile new architectural paradigms. For example, a highly centralized architecture often proves to be problematic as there is less control over how organizations can connect to their network service providers and end-users, ultimately causing inefficiencies in their IT strategies. At the same time, however, solely relying on small, "near edge" data centers could become expensive, putting constraints on capacity and processing workloads, and potentially creating limitations on bandwidth.

Increasingly were seeing organizations look to multi-tenant data centers to better support distributed architectures. Its best to think of IT infrastructure in terms of layers. The first layer consists of enterprise core data and applications, where intellectual property, high-density computing, and machine learning can live. From there, organizations can continue to add layers such as cloud computing services, distributed multi-site colocation, and 5G aggregation as part of an edge delivery platform. Through a multi-tier distributed architecture, organizations will gain control over adding capacity, network, compute, storage, and shortening distances between your workloads and end-users. Ultimately this enhances performance and promotes an improved data exchange.

Rod Glover, data centre operations director, Australia at Digital Realtywrote this article.

The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of CDOTrends.

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Solving the Data Explosion with Fog and Edge Computing - CDOTrends

RALEIGH Cymatic,a Raleigh-based provider of user and entity behavior analytics, today announced that is has been names a finalist as the 2019-2020 Most Promising Startup in the international Cloud Computing Awards program, The Cloud Awards.

To be shortlisted for our revolutionary work in web application defense is not only an honor, but a clear recognition of our early success in leading secure cloud technologies, said Cymatic Founder and Chief ExecutiveJason Hollander, in a statement. We offer the only unified WAF that deploys at the client through a simple line of JavaScript without agents or proxies to deliver first-look, first-strike capability that is earliest in the kill chaina fundamental shift from traditional approaches to security.

Founded in 2011, Cymatic has developed a next-generationall-in-one web application defense platformthat moves protection from the network side to the client to defend against todays most sophisticated client and browser-based attacks.

The startup says it is the only UEBA platform to provide web applications with deep visibility into and proactive remediation of the threats from human and non-human attacks, as well as the vulnerabilities users bring with them on their devices.Instead of just protecting network-based threats like traditional WAFs, Cymatic said it uses sophisticated artificial intelligence and machine-learning algorithms to identify page mutations and user anomalies. The platform protects against user-derived and device-based threats such as poor credential hygiene, dark web vulnerabilities and potentially risky devices. It is invisible and frictionless to users, deploys in mere minutes and has immediate time-to-value.

Web applications continue to be highly vulnerable to human derived threats such as poor credential and device hygiene. Unfortunately, todays current security solutions fail at really understanding how a users security hygiene directly affects the cyberhealth of companies they interact with, said Hollander.

Back in August, the firm raised $4.5 million in seed fundingfrom prominent private angel investors.

Cymatic was selected from hundreds of organizations that entered from the Americas, Australia, Europe and the Middle East. Its advanced cloud-based microservices and real-time message-bus architecture offer unparalleled scale to provide the resilience necessary to validate and process the millions of users and transactions that touch web properties every second. The platform is engineered to work across all web applications regardless of operating system, browser or device. It eliminates the OWASP top 10, bots, CAPTCHAs, dark web threats, forced MFA, shared accounts, IP threats, device vulnerabilities and other cloud-based threats with no erosion of the user experience.

The Cloud Awards is an international program which recognizes and honors industry leaders, innovators and organizational transformation in cloud computing. The awards are open to large, small, established and start-up organizations from across the entire globe, with an aim to find and celebrate the pioneers who will shape the future of the Cloud as we move into 2020 and beyond. The Cloud Awards currently offers two awards programs, the Cloud Computing Awards and the Software-as-a-Service Awards.

Raleigh analytics firm Cymatic raises $4.5M in seed funding

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Raleigh analytics firm Cymatic named most promising startup finalist in The Cloud Awards - WRAL Tech Wire