Many enterprise and government IT organizations are realizing the benefits of cloud computing by extending IT delivery and management processes across private and public cloud services. But they are often challenged with balancing the need for centralized cloud governance without stifling user-driven innovation. This strategy requires an approach that fundamentally reshapes how IT is delivered today, shifting the focus from infrastructure to services aggregation, and mixing and matching the best services for meeting organizations’ current and future needs.

To get the most out of their data, successful companies are not focusing on queries and data lakes, they are actively integrating analytics into their operations with a data-first application development approach. Real-time adjustments to improve revenues, reduce costs, or mitigate risk rely on applications that minimize latency on a variety of data sources. In his session at @BigDataExpo, Jack Norris, Senior Vice President, Data and Applications at MapR Technologies, reviewed best practices to show how companies develop, deploy, and dynamically update these applications and how this data-firs...

Coca-Cola’s Google powered digital signage system lays the groundwork for a more valuable connection between Coke and its customers. Digital signs pair software with high-resolution displays so that a message can be changed instantly based on what the operator wants to communicate or sell. In their Day 3 Keynote at 21st Cloud Expo, Greg Chambers, Global Group Director, Digital Innovation, Coca-Cola, and Vidya Nagarajan, a Senior Product Manager at Google, discussed how from store operations and optimization to employee training and insights, all ultimately create the best customer experience b...

The cloud revolution in enterprises has very clearly crossed the phase of proof-of-concepts into a truly mainstream adoption. One of most popular enterprise-wide initiatives currently going on are “cloud migration” programs of some kind or another. Finding business value for these programs is not hard to fathom – they include hyperelasticity in infrastructure consumption, subscription based models, and agility derived from rapid speed of deployment of applications. These factors will continue to drive cloud adoption into the foreseeable future.

From our perspective as consumers, perhaps the best thing about digital transformation is how consumerization is making technology so much easier to use. Sure, our television remote controls still have too many buttons, and I have yet to figure out the digital display in my Honda, but all in all, tech is getting easier for everybody. Within companies – even very large ones – the consumerization of technology is gradually taking hold as well. There are now simple mobile apps for a wide range of big company tasks, ranging from changing your benefits to replacing a security badge. As enterpri...

Artificial intelligence, virtual reality, software-defined networking, Hyperconverged Infrastructure, the cloud. These are all technological advancements intended to improve how IT systems and operations work, to give the business better agility and reduced costs, and ultimately to give end-users a new and better experience.  Quite often, however, IT’s creators and consumers alike lose sight of the […]

The post Consider the Human Side of IT appeared first on Dec. 7, 2017 04:15 PM EST  Reads: 1,148

Digital experience monitoring plays a vital role in the ecommerce economy. The industry is booming with millions of websites selling everything imaginable. Online stores are expected to be super fast and easy to navigate; users are quick to assess website performance and if said perceived performance is below expectations, they will quickly move on to competitor’s website.

Java 9 ships with some minor—yet awesome—new language features that make developing easier and cleaner. In this post, we’ll take a look at three of these new features. You probably remember interface methods, which were introduced in Java 8. These are required so that Java itself, as well as framework vendors, can add new methods to interfaces without breaking pre-existing implementations. As these methods can become rather complex, Java now enables you to declare interface methods as private. This allows for extracting common code from interface methods while hiding the code from external us...

The Federal Communications Commission announced that it will vote on December 14 to enact the exceptionally misleadingly titled “Restoring Internet Freedom” order. If passed, it will do the opposite of restoring anything resembling freedom — it will repeal the current net neutrality rules which were enacted to ensure that Americans would have equal access to the Internet. If you’re reading this, chances are you’re already interested in the topic. Still, some quick background: Renamed “Open Internet” a while back, net neutrality provided a regulatory framework that specifically prohibited:...

One problem that all developers and companies struggle with is trying to decide if they should "build it" or "buy it". Software developers love to build things. That is what we do! Their natural reaction tends to lean towards building things. We are also always up for a new challenge. There are very good reasons for building or buying software. There are also good reasons to use open source projects, which is a third option.

Organizations around the world are struggling to cope with the current data explosion. A vital characteristic of this data is that it is unstructured and represents things like email, images, and videos. Storage of this form of data is typically in an object format which differs significantly from the database norm. Databases housed data grows very slowly because most of it is structured. Object storage formats are now being used to optimize access to large amounts of non-transactional files across a growing number of vertical markets.

These days, no matter what task you’re trying to accomplish within your online properties, chances are there’s at least one cloud solution that provides it. However, with so much of our personal and business data living now online, there’s perhaps no functionality more important than cloud security. With cyber attacks more prevalent than ever, it’s imperative that organizations – regardless of their size and scope – protect both themselves and their clients from nefarious individuals who prey on unsecured networks and data.

"CHEETAH is not just a training company. What we are trying to do is something fun – how to learn the cloud in a fun way. So you can learn Docker, Cloud Foundry, a lot of complex technologies but in a fun way," explained Etienne Cointet, CEO of App2Cloud, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at 21st Cloud Expo, held Oct 31 – Nov 2, 2017, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.

How much does it cost to make an app is almost as popular a question as it is confusing. No one tries to learn the exact costs of, say, making a movie: people realize that there’s an overwhelming amount of variables involved on which they depend. But almost every day a new inquiry is posted on a tech forum, Quora, or Reddit as to how much it’d take to build a mobile business app.

MongoDB, an open-source document store and most popular NoSQL database on the market today, offers a variety of advanced features to administer security over your MongoDB deployments. In this tutorial post, we’re going to show you how to set up role-based access control (RBAC) to manage user access across your MongoDB systems for reIndex, mongodump and mongorestore. If you're the administrator of your MongoDB databases, you've likely received requests to provide an individual user with the capabilities to perform a certain action(s). MongoDB's security features are fairly mature now, and allo...

A few years ago – in the early days of Blockchain – a lot of people were taken with the idea of a multifunctional chain on which all transactions could be handled. After Ethereum was launched in 2014, its advocates were talking themselves hoarse about the transformative opportunities the platform introduced. Decentralized applications, they predicted, along with all sorts of value transfers would be executed exclusively on Ethereum from that point on, and no other networks would ever be needed.

Digital technologies have altered how people and businesses interact. The potential for dislocation from ongoing digital transformation has created unprecedented levels of C-suite discussion. The decisive market leaders have heeded the warnings and taken bold actions. That said, if you’re one of those Chief Technology Officers (CTO) that previously responded to this scenario by making small incremental adjustments to your IT agenda, then you’re potentially at risk. Any relief from those prior tweaks tend to be short lived. The same issues will likely resurface.

So data warehousing may not be cool anymore, you say? It’s yesterday’s technology (or 1990’s technology if you’re as old as me) that served yesterday’s business needs. And while it’s true that recent big data and data science technologies, architectures and methodologies seems to have rendered data warehousing to the back burner, it is entirely false that there is not a critical role for the data warehouse and Business Intelligence in digitally transformed organizations.

Quick quiz! What’s the first thing that comes to mind when you hear the following phrases? Artificial grass Artificial sweeteners Artificial flavors Artificial plants

"This all sounds great. But it's just not realistic." This is what a group of five senior IT executives told me during a workshop I held not long ago. We were working through an exercise on the organizational characteristics necessary to successfully execute a digital transformation, and the group was doing their ‘readout.' The executives loved everything we discussed and agreed that if such an environment existed, it would make transformation much easier. They just didn't believe it was realistic.