Cloud computing is more than servers and storage. In a crisis situation it
can actually be a lifesaver. BlackBerry, in fact, has just become the first
cloud-based crisis communication service to receive a Federal Risk and
Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP) authorization from the United
States Government for its AtHoc Alert and AtHoc Connect services. If you're
not familiar with FedRAMP, it is a US government-wide program that provides a
standardized approach to security assessment, authorization, and continuous
monitoring for cloud products and services. The Blackberry certification was
sponsored by the US Federal Aviation Administration.
While you may not need a US Government certified solution in an emergency,
your organization may really want to consider the benefits of cloud computing
for crisis response. From a communications point of view, companies can... (more)
Today’s businesses run in the virtual world. From virtual machines to
chatbots to Bitcoin, physical has become last century’s modus operandi.
Dealing with this type of change in business even has its own buzzword –
Digital Transformation. From an information technology operations point of
view, this has been manifested by organizations increasingly placing
applications, virtual servers, storage platforms, networks, managed services
and other assets in multiple cloud environments.
Managing these virtual assets can be much more challenging than it was with
traditional physical assets in your data center. Cost management and
control are also vastly different than the physical asset equivalent.
Challenges abound around tracking and evaluating cloud investments,
managing their costs and increasing their efficiency. Managers need to
track cloud spending and usage, c... (more)
Runaway cloud computing cost may be causing an information technology
industry crisis. Expanding requirements, extended transition schedules and
misleading marketplace hype have made "Transformation" a dirty word.
Questions about how to manage cost variances and deviations with assets and
cost across different suppliers abound. A recent Cloud Tech article
explained that while public cloud offers considerable cost savings in
comparison to private or on-premises based alternatives, there may also be
significant hidden costs. Operational features like auto-scaling can cause
costs to soar in line with demand for resources, making predicting costs
difficult and budgeting even harder. There is also an acute need for a
holistic and heterogeneous system that can track the costs of cloud services
from the point of consumption (e.g., an application or business unit) down to... (more)
The Internet of Things (IoT) is an uninterrupted connected network of
embedded objects/ devices with identifiers without any human intervention
using standard and communication protocol. It provides encryption,
authorization and identification with different device protocols like MQTT,
STOMP or AMQP to securely move data from one network to another. IoT in
connected Government helps to deliver better citizen services and provides
transparency. It improves the employee productivity and cost savings. It
helps in delivering contextual and personalized service to citizens and
enhances the security and improves the quality of life. With secure and
accessible information government business makes more efficient, data driven,
changing the lives of citizens for the better. IoT focused Connected
Government solution helps in rapidly developing preventive and predictive
ana... (more)
How Quantum Computing with DNA Storage Will Affect Your Health
By Guest Contributor Taran Volckhausen
Contributing Editor at Vector
Moore's Law, which states that processing speeds will double every two years
as we cram more and more silicon transistors onto chips, has been faltering
since the early 2000s when the law started to run up against
fundamental limitations presented by the laws of thermodynamics. While the
chip industry, with Intel leading the charge, has found ways to sidestep the
limitations up until now, many are now saying that despite the industry's
best efforts, the stunning gains in processor speeds will not be seen again
by the simple application of Moore's Law. In fact, there is evidence to show
that we are reaching the plateau for the number of transistors that will fit
on a single chip. Intel has even suggested silicon transistors can only
keep ... (more)
IoT in connected Government helps to deliver better citizen services and
provides transparency. It helps in delivering contextual and personalized
service to citizens, enhances the security, and improves the quality of life.
The reference architecture provides guidance for the development of
government systems, solutions and application architecture. A reference
architecture provides a common framework and allows the design to follow the
consistent definitions for the system of interest, its decompositions and
design patterns.
The vision of any Connected Government in the digital era is "To develop
connected and intelligent IoT based systems to contribute to government's
economy, improving citizen satisfaction, safe society, environment
sustainability, city management and global need."
In Connected Government, IoT-based applications provides many benefits, which
i... (more)
That world of homogenous IT technology managed entirely by the internal IT
organization has long disappeared. Operations today require efficient and
global management of technologically heterogeneous environments. The
challenges and mistakes organizations make when tackling this important task
include:
Operational disconnects caused by ineffective internal communications;
Resource contention when multiple, independently developed project plans
compete; Incompatible technical documentation; and Inconsistent
communications with vendors.
A case in point is the finance industry which has endured some rather unique
pains in this area, especially when it comes to ATM Fleet Management.
According to Diebold Nixdorf, a world leader in connected commerce, this
problem has been caused by three major trends that have changed the nature
of ATM network management.
The first, an... (more)
Enterprise mobility has become table stakes in the world of business. The
ability to access current information at any time, from anywhere, on any
device has really become a cliché. The familiarity we all have with
smartphones and wireless access, actually obscures the true difficulty of
developing and executing an effective corporate mobile strategy. This
reality is driven by the fact that companies must actually have two mobile
strategies.
The first face of mobility is an inside strategy focused on supporting
employees and business partners. From this viewpoint, mobility becomes the
central point of access and the management tool for corporate information and
intelligence. The organizational goal here is to introduce context to
business processes in order to offer viable options and drive better
decisions. An additional benefit of this capability is to create fr... (more)
Over the past few years, the use of artificial intelligence has expanded more
rapidly than many of us could have imagined. While this may invoke fear and
dread in some, these relatively new technology applications are clearly
delivering real value to our global society. This value is generally seen
in four distinct areas:
Efficiency - Delivering consistent and low-cost performance by characterizing
routine activities with well-defined rules, procedures and criteria Expertise
- augment human sensing and decision makingwith advice and implementation
support based on historical analysis Effectiveness - improve the overall
ability of workers and companies by improving coordination and communication
across interconnected activities Innovation - enhance human creativity and
ideation by identifying alternatives and optimizing recommendations.
Photo credit: Shutterstock
... (more)
Did you know that the reservations systems of the biggest carriers mostly run
on a specialized IBM operating system known as Transaction Processing
Facility (TPF). Designed by IBM in the 1960s it was designed to process a
large numbers of transactions quickly. Although IBM is still updating the
code, the last major rewrite was about ten years ago. With all the major
technologies changes since then, it's clear that IBM has already accomplished
a herculean task by keeping an application viable for over 50 years.
Just like Americas aging physical infrastructure, the airlines are suffering
from years of minimal investment in their information technology. This
critical failure has been highlighted by a number of newsworthy incidents
including:
Delta, April 4, 2017 - Following storms that affected its Atlanta hub,
Delta's crew-scheduling systems failed, causing days of op... (more)
As cloud computing becomes the information technology mainstream, data center
technology is accelerating at a breakneck speed. Concepts like software
define infrastructure, data center analytics and Nonvolatile Memory Express
(NVMe) over Fabrics are changing the very nature of data center management.
According to industry research firm IDC, organizations will spend an
additional $142.8 billion oninfrastructure for both public and private cloud
environments in the next three years (2016-2018) to boost efficiency and
business agility.
To support this rapid evolving space, Intel announced a “Cloud for All”
initiative last year in order to help businesses get the most out of their
cloud infrastructure. Specific goals for this initiative include:
Investing in the ecosystem to accelerate enterprise-ready, easy-to-deploy
software defined infrastructure (SDI) solutions; Op... (more)
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