We're launching the "Tap In Open Forum": a new series of blog posts where we detail a current topic being discussed in the software development and testing community and invite you to participate in an open discussion with our best and brightest here at Skytap. Feel free to share your thoughts and we'll do the same! InformationWeek and IBM Mobile Technical Sales Leader Dustin Amrhein presented a webinar last week as part of their “DevOps Rado” series. The Frictionless Enterprise: Built for Business, looked at DevOps as a viable solution for removing the friction that prevents enterprises from innovating at not just the speed they would like, but at the speed absolutely required to stay relevant, and hopefully ahead of their competition.

Since the birth of Hadoop in 2005-06, the way we think about storing and processing information has evolved considerably. The term “Big Data” has become synonymous with this evolution. But still, many of our customers continue to ask, “What is Big Data?”, “What are its use cases?”, and “What is its business value?”. The Internet is overloaded with definitions, characteristics, and benefits; however, few discussions synthesize all three of these topics in one place. This paper answers these questions, and proposes a total cost calculation framework for CTOs and CIOs that are evaluating solutions for their organization’s use case(s). In the text below, I examine an on-premise Hadoop ecosystem as a general purpose Big Data solution in relation to alternative commercial purpose-built storage technologies (-e.g. Oracle, Teradata, IBM, SAP, Microsoft, EMC, etc). It may be difficult to determine the exact point at which you should leverage one over the other. It is my contention that when the total cost of using all your data exceeds what you are able to spend using purpose-built technologies, it is time to consider using a general purpose solution like Hadoop for process offloading....

Public cloud service adoption is already a mainstream phenomenon in most organizations. Meanwhile, many large enterprises see a private cloud in their future. But choosing whether to invest in building an internal cloud infrastructure or buy from a cloud service provider will become more challenging – in anticipation, savvy IT leaders are becoming brokers of dynamic business technology solutions.

Hybrid cloud resource management and progressive operational process adoption are the key focal points in preparation for this transition. Moreover, Line of Business demand for emerging use cases and just-in-time IT workload creation requires speedy access to a managed self-serve DevOps deployment model.

That’s why comprehensive management and provisioning tools -- such as Red Hat CloudForms -- have become essential platforms. Besides, given the pervasive trends in the marketplace, every business will eventually need an actionable hybrid cloud adopt...

Read more about how AppDynamics helps foster DevOps and take five minutes to get complete visibility into the performance of your production applications with AppDynamics Pro today!

Good morning! Or evening, if you happen to be reading this on the other side of the world. Our topic for today is the internet. What? You already know about the internet? No, no, I don’t mean that internet, the boring old one you use to access YouTube and send Facebook updates, email and tweets and stuff. That’s the internet of people and it’s so, well, yesterday. I’m talking about the new internet, which is going to be the latest thing Real Soon Now. It’s called the Internet of Things or IoT and it’s got everybody very excited over in Silicon Valley, where they hyperventilate a lot about technology.

Accomplish much more, very rapidly, while spending less -- this is the business technology trend that savvy executives everywhere have embraced. Worldwide IT spending will reach a total $3.7 trillion in 2014, that's a 2.1 percent increase from last year, according to the latest global market study by Gartner. This forecast, however, is down from their earlier projections of 3.2 percent growth. What's driving the ongoing transition to lower business technology spending? The slower outlook for 2014 is attributed to a reduction in growth expectations for end-user devices, data center systems and IT related services.

This week in the States, the Nation celebrates it’s Independence and many people will be attending or setting off their own fireworks show. In Hawaii, fireworks are shot off more during New Year’s Eve than on July 4th and there is even Daytime Fireworks now. Cloud computing is exploding like fireworks with all the Oooooooo’s and Ahhhhhhh’s of what it offers but the same groan, like the traffic jam home, might be coming to an office near you. Recently, Ponemon Institute and cloud firm Netskope released a study Data Breach: The Cloud Multiplier Effect, indicating that 613 IT and security professionals felt that deploying resources in the cloud triples the probability of a major breach. Specifically, a data breach with 100,000+ customer records compromised, the cost would be just over $20 million, based on Ponemon Institute’s May 2014 ‘Cost of a Data Breach’. With a breach of that scale, using cloud services may triple the risk of a data breach. It’s called the ‘cloud multiplier effect’ and it translates to a 3% higher risk of a data breach for every 1% increase in the use of cloud services. So if you had 100 cloud services, you would only need to add 25 more to increase the pos...

Software-defined architectures are critical for achieving the right mix of efficiency and scale needed to meet the challenges that will come with the Internet of Things If you've been living under a rock (or rack in the data center) you might not have noticed the explosive growth of technologies and architectures designed to address emerging challenges with scaling data centers. Whether considering the operational aspects (devops) or technical components (SDN, SDDC, Cloud), software-defined architectures are the future enabler of business, fueled by the increasing demand for applications.

On the one hand, the BYOX trends that drive cloud service adoption and worker self-enablement are transforming traditional IT into a User-Centric IT model that focuses on empowering and enabling workers. On the other hand, the free-wheeling nature of the cloud and the regular news of breaches creates a gap in security teams’ ability to quickly assess risk and exposure for these types of events. Further, with the cloud-based self-service model, it becomes more difficult to identify affected users and formulate a rational response plan.

Inarguably one of the drivers of software-defined architectures (cloud, SDDC, and SDN) as well as movements like DevOps is the complexity inherent in today's data center networks. For years now we've added applications and services, and responded to new threats and requirements from the business with new boxes and new capabilities. All of them cobbled together using traditional networking principles that adhere to providing reliability and scale through redundancy.

Security and Defense People offers a tremendous opportunity for experts and consultants, whether you are focused on building your brand or seeking work. You can target your messages and interactions to the right targeted audience, publish your content that connects with that audience, and extend engagement both on and off the network, by combining mass reach with accurate targeting, we can guide your effective use of advertising. Engage your target from among the most affluent, influential, and educated B2B professionals, Increase awareness, credibility and impact through the power of your organizations social network. Drive traffic and leads to your personal listing. We have led a variety of groups on how to increase leads, interact with prospects, publish content, social media etiquette and profile design that extends the reach of the profile listing. We are the leading experts at helping candidates conduct an effective job search. Career coaching, job search plans, build connections to leading associations, non-profits and NGO’s is our expertise. It provides the inside connections you need to launch a premium career.

Welcome to the fourth era of digital. The first three periods or ages or phases — call them what you like — were each defined clearly by transformative events. First, the dawn of the personal computer age in April 1977 with the debut of the Apple II (and validated in August 1981 with the introduction of the IBM PC). Next, the beginning of the Internet age when the Netscape browser was released in 1994, which redefined forever the way we connect. Then, on June 29, 2007 — ushered in again by Steve Jobs and Apple — the mobility era began with the unveiling of the first iPhone, which ushered in a “Mobile First” mindset for the masses.

By now we’ve seen plenty of cost justification on the efficiency of using cloud infrastructure. You can easily Google “Cloud Computing Value” and get a stack of analyst and vendor reports. Or just pop open Amazon’s AWS value calculator and plug in some numbers. There are huge one-time and recurring IT cost savings to be realized by moving on-premise systems to cloud infrastructure. So we get a better deal on compute cost with cloud. That’s something. Now let’s wring value out of one the most expensive and high-risk IT activities: software development and testing.

North Bridge in partnership with GigaOm Research released their 2014 Future of Cloud Computing – 4th Annual Survey Results. As you examine the 124 slides, one thing is obvious that the greatest growth in cloud computing is coming from Software-as-a-Service (SaaS). Market research like this is very important because it provides tangible proof for our anecdotal hypotheses. That said, the report does not extrapolate what is the most interesting facet of SaaS hyper growth—59% in three years—the model for commoditization of business function is market validated.

Anyone who has been involved with security knows there is a balance to providing both security and privacy and performance at the same time. Security is often blamed for performance woes, particularly when cryptography is involved. SSL and TLS have long addressed this balance by leveraging custom-built hardware to enhance the performance of the most taxing components of these protocols: session setup. The "easy" part of securing communications (if one can use easy with respect to cryptography) is bulk encryption. While certainly more taxing on performance than clear text, relative to the more complex and compute intensive process of the handshaking required to set up such sessions, easy is an appropriate term.