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Equinix and Unitas to Bundle Hybrid Cloud Services – Talkin’ Cloud

April 29, 2017 | Author: admin

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IT departments are embracing hybrid cloud models at a record pace. IDC reports that more than 82 percent of enterprises will commit to hybrid architectures, mixing owner-operated servers with cloud services by the end of this year.

That statistic certainly bodes well for cloud services provider Unitas Global and colocation giant Equinix, which announced a collaboration to deliver bundled hybrid cloud services to the enterprise.

The partners describe it as a turnkey, fully managed service, eliminating the need to redesign existing IT architecture or start from scratch. The bundle, based on the Unitas multi-cloud orchestration system, will be available across 150 Equinix data centers around the globe.

According to a press release, the bundled solution includes data center space, power, network, compute, storage, cloud software, direct cloud connections via Equinix Cloud Exchange, cross-connects, bandwidth, and managementall dedicated to a single client, offered at one monthly price, and managed by a single vendor.

Unitas multi-cloud orchestration system connects to Platform Equinix, a platform connecting any number of providers across its global ecosystem.

The announcement comes on the same day Equinix announced its first-quarter earnings. The company reported $950 million for the first quarter, up from $845 million in same period last year. Its net income for the quarter was $42 million, up from a $37 million loss reported in the first quarter of 2016 but down from $61.7 million in income reported for the fourth quarter of last year.

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Why Might Enterprise IT Spending Be Lower Than Expected? The Cloud – BizTech Magazine

April 29, 2017 | Author: admin

IT spending worldwide is going to be lower than expected this year, according to Gartner, thanks in part to the continued shift away from legacy infrastructure to the cloud.

Earlier this month, Gartner slashed its forecast for global IT spending roughly in half. The research firm now projects IT spending will be $3.5 trillion in 2017, which would represent a 1.4 percent increase from 2016, but is down 1.3 percent from the firms fourth-quarter forecast of 2.7 percent.

The strong U.S. dollar has cut $67 billion out of our 2017 IT spending forecast, John-David Lovelock, research vice president at Gartner, says in a statement. Gartner expects these currency headwinds to be a drag on earnings of U.S.-based multinational IT vendors through 2017.

However, currency fluctuations are not the only thing driving down Gartners IT spending forecast.

The data center system segment of the IT market is expected to grow at a rate of 0.3 percent in 2017, which would be up from a shrinking market in 2016. However, Gartner says the segment is experiencing a slowdown in the server market.

We are seeing a shift in who is buying servers and who they are buying them from, Lovelock says. Enterprises are moving away from buying servers from the traditional vendors and instead renting server power in the cloud, from companies like Microsoft and Google, he notes.

That shift has led to lower spending on servers, which is impacting the larger data center market, he says.

Gartner expects the external controller-based storage segment to decline, but at a slower rate than before, according to the forecast. Additionally, the ECB segment, although still suffering from long-term structural challenges from cloud and alternative storage architectures, is benefiting from strong demand and component constraints in the solid-state array segment in particular, the forecast says.

Globally, Gartner expects the enterprise software market will grow by 7.3 percent in 2017, reaching $394.8 billion in constant dollars, a slight increase over the previous forecast. However, in U.S. dollars, enterprise software is expected to grow 5.5 percent ($351 billion) in 2017, slower than the firms forecast from the fourth quarter of 2016.

This is predominantly due to a stronger U.S. dollar against the euro, though the impact of exchange rate shifts is effecting multiple regions, Gartner says. Through 2021, we expect the market to grow at a 7.2% [compound annual growth rate] in constant currency. This breaks down as an 8.8% CAGR for enterprise application software, and a slower 5.8% CAGR for infrastructure software, in constant currency.

Gartner says a change in its expectations for the IT operations management market, particularly in the automation tools and IT service support management tools subsegments, resulted in a new five-year CAGR of 7.8 percent.

This change is focused entirely in North America where, driven by the availability of lower-cost cloud offerings, the number of organizations expected to move to the cloud within the forecast period has increased, Gartner says.

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Cloud computing has another killer quarter – Network World

April 29, 2017 | Author: admin

Fredric Paul is Editor in Chief for New Relic, Inc., and has held senior editorial positions at ReadWrite, InformationWeek, CNET, and PC World. His opinions are his own.

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To most people, Jeff Bezos Amazon is known as the company reshaping the way people buy everything from books to shoes to groceries. But the part of Amazon that is driving Bezos within shouting distance of becoming the worlds richest person doesnt really sell anything, it rents computing power in the cloud.

As the New York Times put it on Thursday, The profit Amazon can make on cloud-computing services is significantly bigger than in its retail sales, and that has helped turn the Seattle company from a consistent money-loser to a respectable moneymaker.

And that, as Boomberg noted, sparked a jump in Amazons stock price in after-hours trading that added more than $3 billion to Bezos nest egg, topping $80 billion for the first time and putting him within $5 billion of becoming the worlds richest person.

The first quarter numbers tell the tale. Amazon Web Services (AWS) booked a whopping $890 million in operating income in the period ending March 31, accounting for most of the companys profits: the company as a whole recorded just $1.01 billion in net income. AWS revenue grew 43 percent, which is amazingly not quite as fast as previous quarters, to hit $3.66 billion. But even with the remarkable growth, competition and price cuts, AWSs net profit margin topped 24 percent, higher than in Q1 2016. Put it all together and AWS delivered almost 90 percent of the companys profits. Thats a really big deal, for reasons Ill discuss later in this post.

Microsoft and Google s parent company Alphabet also recorded strong first-quarter cloud numbers, though apples-to-apples comparisons are difficult because the companies dont break out their results in the same ways.

For example, number-two cloud player Microsoft said its Azure cloud hosting business grew 93 percent year over year. Thats more than twice as fast as AWS, but its hard to tell exactly what that means because Microsoft didnt reveal the actual numbers. Similarly, Microsofts Office 365 productivity software as a service business grew 45 percent, but to what level the company isnt saying. (In contrast to Bezos, Bill Gates fortune actually slipped, as Microsofts mixed overall results drove down the companys stock in after hours trading.)

Alphabet, unfortunately, also does not break out it cloud revenues, lumping them into a category called Google other revenues, which was up 49 percent since the same period last year. In the companys earnings call with analysts, Ruth Porat, Alphabets chief financial officer, reportedly described the Google cloud platform as one the companys fastest-growing businesses, though most observers peg it as a distant third in the cloud hierarchy. (Google co-founders Sergei Brin and Larry Page did get richer, though, as the company stock was buoyed by strong mobile ad sales.)

Its frustrating for cloudwatchers that the number two and three players in this all-important industry dont share more financial information, but no amount of financial fog can obscure the continued and phenomenal rise of cloud computing.

Still, unlike many other hot internet sectorsthink ride sharing, for examplethe clouds growth isnt being fueled by speculative venture capital investment. The cloud is actually earning big bucks even as it experiences hypergrowth. Now thats a real unicorn.

Fredric Paul is Editor in Chief for New Relic, Inc., and has held senior editorial positions at ReadWrite, InformationWeek, CNET and PCWorld.

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Cloud computing has another killer quarter - Network World

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Misconceptions about applying ALM to cloud app development processes – TechTarget

April 29, 2017 | Author: admin

Most application architects and development teams often turn to their application lifecycle management tools and...

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processes to deal with the challenges of the cloud app development, but they often fall prey to common misconceptions about cloud ALM. In this tip, we'll examine the commonly held beliefs about cloud ALM that can hamper app development efforts.

There are three common myths about cloud ALM:

ALM works to stabilize IT by creating a framework in which applications can be added and changed without risking security, compliance and even functional problems. The fundamental principle of ALM is to enforce that framework through the entire cloud app development and deployment process. The cloud -- and cloud ALM -- complicates this in two specific ways: it abstracts resources and it leads inevitably to continuous delivery pressures.

ALM is meaningless if the hosting of applications and components, and their integration, is based on different resources and connections than will be used in production. That's a basic truth of ALM; yet, in the cloud, the location and connectivity of applications and components is never certain.

Most users will try to address this uncertainty by refining their cloud ALM processes, but the problem with that is that it increases ALM complexity, reduces its responsiveness to business problems and eventually creates a lifecycle process so difficult and expensive that its failure is a given.

Continuous delivery is aimed at improving application responsiveness to business needs, and the cloud encourages that by reducing or eliminating the normal capital equipment inertia associated with deploying IT resources. If I can spin up a server in minutes instead of taking a month's worth of procurement and installation time, why wouldn't that make IT more responsive? The only way to have that happen is to accelerate the application lifecycle, which argues against adding extensive accommodation to cloud hosting.

ALM alone can't solve the cloud problems. You need to have two new dimensions of management: virtual resource management, and service and microservice management. A cloud-ALM approach absolutely must deal with the cloud by establishing a consistent way of viewing virtual resources. If all hosting, cloud or data center, is considered virtual, and if management processes are suitable for any hosting option that's adopted, then ALM can be made independent of hosting. Similarly, if the services and microservices used for multiple applications are lifecycle-managed as a group, then applications that use them aren't impacted nearly as much by the cloud-driven trend toward shared services.

Another destructive misconception about cloud ALM is that adopting DevOps will fix everything. DevOps tools are wonderful ways of enforcing structure and consistency on ALM practices, but they can't frame those practices.

Even adopting virtual resource and service/microservice management is best handled if there's a specific IT model that you're managing to secure. That model can come only from tighter integration between enterprise architecture (EA) and ALM. EA practices must feed ALM with the business goals and the operational framework in which application lifecycles are managed. That is true not only for traditional ALM, but also for virtual resource and service/microservice lifecycle management.

EA integration is the starting point for effective definition of service/microservice sharing policies, because common business practices that are evolving in harmony are the very place where service/microservice componentization will benefit most. EA business requirements also set the resource availability constraints that both cloud and data center must meet. Getting ALM extended across the EA boundary to capture this information is critical, and will require some work on both sides to accomplish.

DevOps could change, based on this EA integration, into something more broadly useful for cloud ALM. If DevOps tools are used to structure resource management and service/microservice lifecycle management, along with ALM, the result can be an automated and responsive process for continuous delivery that works at cloud speed. Making this happen demands a revision in some DevOps methods; it's important to use modular features and event-driven behavior more, no matter what specific DevOps product you adopt.

Perhaps the most critical of all cloud ALM misconceptions is that "there will always be ALM." The truth is that every trend in cloud app development is taking us to a place where there is no such thing as an application in a monolithic sense.

Applications are evolving into a set of event-driven microservices connected through a loose specification of business requirements, almost a cloud-centric form of an enterprise service bus. In this model, the number of applications and the variations on each are enormous, and no testing of all the possible combinations could ever hope to succeed.

ALM today has to work against the tendency, common in all technology concepts, to enshrine itself in practices and become a goal rather than a means to a goal. A model of the future where EA defines the component relationships based on functional needs of business activities, and where resources are managed against an experience-driven vision of responsiveness and availability, fits the trends we can already see. That model would have to recognize the decreasing value of an application-centric view of IT.

The problem is that while it's technically reasonable to look at the future as a set of event-driven, business-composed components using abstract resources, it's a lot harder. Neither current tools and practices nor the experience of DevOps personnel prepare a business for this cloud app development evolution. They never will, though, if we continue to see that future through monolithic-colored glasses. ALM has to break out and redefine itself in terms of how it integrates certified classes of resources and tools -- not how static tools support dynamic business processes.

Planning application lifecycle management in the cloud

Explore new technologies for cloud ALM

What are application security concerns in cloud-based ALM?

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Misconceptions about applying ALM to cloud app development processes - TechTarget

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Credit Suisse Bullish on Microsoft Cloud Business – Investopedia

April 29, 2017 | Author: admin

Investopedia
Credit Suisse Bullish on Microsoft Cloud Business
Investopedia
The way analyst Michael Nemeroff sees it, Microsoft will see big earnings growth and earnings power over the course of the next few years thanks to growth in its commercial cloud computing business and higher gross margins for the unit. The analyst ...

and more »

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Avira Internet Security Suite v15.0.26 – TechCentral.ie

April 28, 2017 | Author: admin

AviraInternet Security Suiteprovides strong antivirus protection anda host of other extras.

The core antivirus engine is a good one, which normally scores very well with the independent testing labs. Itranked5th out of22 in theSeptember 2014 AV-ComparativesReal World Protection tests, for instance (equivalent to Bitdefender),with a very creditable detection rate of 99.2%.

The program also provides capable browsing protection, though, detecting and blocking malicious websites before they can even load, and preventing drive-by downloads.

Integration with the Avira Protection Cloud improves performance,with unknown files classified in real time.

The Browser Tracking Blocker helps to maintain your privacy online by preventing more than 600 networks from recording your web activities.

The Website Safety Advisor adds icons to your search results (if theyre carried out via the Avira toolbar), warning you of potentially dangerous sites before you click.

Integration with the free Avira SocialShield helps protect your kids on Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and others.

Security Suite also includes Aviras System Speedup module to tune your PC for maximum performance.

The 2015 edition adds little, other than your products cannow be managed through Avira Online Essentials, a web dashboard for installing and displaying information on all your Avira apps and devices (computers, tablets and phones).

Please note, there is no stand-alone trial of Avira Internet Security Suite. The download link gets you Avira Antivirus Pro. To add other features sign in at my.avira.com, find your device (if youve more than one), scroll to the bottom of the screen and click Add for whatever extras you need (Browser Safety, System Speedup, Identity Safeguard and Dropbox again).

Whats new in update 26?

Rework the user interface flow of update in case predictable reboots. New Scanner (shell extension scanner) writes specific warnings from AIRS, Engine and LocalDecider into the scanner log file (separate log files for each scan session). New Scanner users can scan their EFS-encrypted files.

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Cloudflare debuts a security solution for IoT – TechCrunch

April 28, 2017 | Author: admin

TechCrunch
Cloudflare debuts a security solution for IoT
TechCrunch
Cloudflare, the content delivery network that promises speed and security for websites, announced today that it's moving into the internet-of-things industry with a security product called Orbit. Now, instead of just securing websites, Cloudflare wants ...
A Clever Plan to Secure the Internet of Things Could Still Have Big DrawbacksWIRED
The Internet of Thieves? Why IoT urgently needs to be securedDATAQUEST
Cloudflare Shores Up Defenses For Internet Of (Easily Hackable) ThingsFast Company
CSO Online -The Register -Yahoo Finance
all 13 news articles »

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Russian-controlled telecom hijacks financial services’ Internet traffic – Ars Technica

April 28, 2017 | Author: admin

Enlarge / A map that visualizes network changes being announced by Rostelecom.

On Wednesday, large chunks of network traffic belonging to MasterCard, Visa, and more than two dozen other financial services companies were briefly routed through a Russian government-controlled telecom under unexplained circumstances that renew lingering questions about the trust and reliability of some of the most sensitive Internet communications.

Anomalies in the border gateway protocolwhich routes large-scale amounts of traffic among Internet backbones, ISPs, and other large networksare common and usually the result of human error. While it's possible Wednesday's five- to seven-minute hijack of 36 large network blocks may also have been inadvertent, the high concentration of technology and financial services companies affected made the incident "curious" to engineers at network monitoring service BGPmon. What's more, the way some of the affected networks were redirected indicated their underlying prefixes had been manually inserted into BGP tables, most likely by someone at Rostelecom, the Russian government-controlled telecom that improperly announced ownership of the blocks.

"I would classify this as quite suspicious," Doug Madory, director of Internet analysis at network management firm Dyn, told Ars. "Typically accidental leaks appear more voluminous and indiscriminate. This would appear to be targeted to financial institutions. A typical cause of these errors [is] in some sort of internal traffic engineering, but it would seem strange that someone would limit their traffic engineering to mostly financial networks."

Normally, the network traffic bound for MasterCard, Visa, and the other affected companies passes through services providers that the companies hire and authorize. Using BGP routing tables, the authorized providers "announce" their ownership of the large blocks of IP addresses belonging to the client companies. On Wednesday afternoon at around 3:36pmPacifictime, however, Rostelecom suddenly announced its control of the blocks. As a result, traffic flowing into the affected networks started passing through Rostelecom's routers. The hijacking lasted five to seven minutes. When it was over, normal routing was restored. The event is nicely captured in a graphic here.

The hijacking could have allowed individuals in Russia to intercept or manipulate traffic flowing into the affected address space. Such interception or manipulation would be most easily done to data that wasn't encrypted, but even in cases when it was encrypted, traffic might still be decrypted using attacks with names such as Logjam and DROWN, which work against outdated transport layer security implementations that some organizations still use.

Madory said that even if data couldn't be decrypted, attackers could potentially use the diverted traffic to enumerate what parties were initiating connections to MasterCard and the other affected companies. The attacker could then target those parties, which may have weaker defenses.

According to shareholder information provided by Rostelecom, the Russian government owns 49 percent of the telecom's ordinary shares. The US Department of Commerce lists Rostelecom as a state-owned enterprise and reports that one or more senior government officials have seats on Rostelecom's board of directors. Rostelecom officials didn't respond to e-mail seeking comment for this post.

The affected company networks also included those belonging to security provider Symantec and technology company EMC. A list of 36 affected network prefixes and registered owners and locations of those prefixes are:

The above list filtered out 14 Russia-based prefixes that Rostelecom announced around the same time.

Such hijacks underscore the implicit trust governments and corporations all over the world place in BGP routing announcements. For years, engineers have proposed a variety of measures to ensure service providers can announce only those networks they're authorized to carry. At the moment, however, there is no authoritative way to do so. Dyn, BGPmon, and similar services do a good job detecting when unauthorized announcements are made, but those detections inevitably come after improper redirections or hijackings have already occurred.

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WhatsApp has end-to-end encryption, but dissatisfied customers are free to quit, Facebook tells SC – Scroll.in

April 28, 2017 | Author: admin

Apr 25, 2017.

Dreaming of writing that book or taking that cruise when you hit your 40s? Well, this dream need not be unrealistic.

All it takes is simple math and the foresight to do some smart financial planning when you are still young. If you start early and get into the discipline of cutting down on unnecessary expenditure, using that money to invest systematically, you can build wealth that sets you free to tick those items off your bucket list sooner than later.

A quick look at how much you spend on indulgences will give you an idea of how much you can save and invest. For example, if you spend, say Rs. 1,000 on movie watching per week, this amount compounded over 10 years means you would have spent around Rs 7,52,000 on just movies! You can try this calculation for yourself. Think of any weekly or monthly expense you regularly make. Now use this calculator to understand how much these expenses will pile up overtime with the current rate of inflation.

Now imagine how this money could have grown at the end of 10 years and overcome the inflation effect if you had instead invested a part of it somewhere!

The fact is that financial planning is simpler than we imagine it to be. Some simple common sense and a clear prioritization of lifes goals is all you need:

A mutual fund is a professionally managed investment scheme that pools money collected from investors like you and invests this into a diversified portfolio (an optimal mix) of stocks, bonds and other securities.

As an investor, you buy units, under a mutual fund scheme. The value of these units (Net Asset Value) fluctuates depending on the market value of the mutual funds investments. So, the units can be bought or redeemed as per your needs and based on the value.

As mentioned, the fund is managed by professionals who follow the market closely to make calls on where to invest money. This makes these funds a great option for someone who isnt financially very savvy but is interested in saving up for the future.

So how is a mutual fund going to help to meet your savings goals? Heres a quick Q&A helps you understand just that:

The essence of mutual funds is that your money is not lying idle, but is dynamically invested and working for you. To know more about how investing in mutual funds really works for you, see here.

Disclaimer: Mutual Fund investments are subject to market risks, read all scheme related documents carefully.

This article was produced by the Scroll marketing team on behalf of Mutual Funds Sahi Hai and not by the Scroll editorial team.

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Bitcoin and Ether prices hit all-time high – TechCrunch

April 28, 2017 | Author: admin

Something is going on in the cryptocurrency world, but its hard to figure out why prices are jumping. Both bitcoin and Ether prices are currently trading at an all-time high.

According to Coindesks price index, you could buy one bitcoin for $1,343 earlier today. It roughly represents a 6 percent increase in 7 days, and a 34 percent increase in a month.

And when it comes to the price of an ether, things are even more impressive. One ether is currently worth $64.04, up around 24 percent in just a week.

Ether prices are a bit correlated to bitcoin prices as many people trade bitcoins against Ethers. But it doesnt explain why it was such a good week for Ethers price.

Bitcoin still faces a scalability issues. It seems like bitcoin stakeholders cant agree on a solution to make some improvements on the core bitcoin protocol to speed up transactions and lower transaction fees. As a result, it has never been so expensive and slow to send and receive bitcoins.

But theres one thing I noticed. Prices tend to go up when theres bad news around the world. If Donald Trump tweets about North Korea, chances are it will have positive effect on cryptocurrencies.

Conversely, I noticed a micro-crash minutes after the results of the first round of the French election prices went up again minutes later. Marine Le Pen arrived second, which was a good sign for traditional currencies like USD and EUR.

Its still hard to predict those market changes as many depend on macro-economic rules in China. But as many worry about the current political outlook, cryptocurrencies could counterintuitively look like a safe investment.

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