Oktober 2016 - Seite 69 von 145 - Cloud Computing Köln

Eduardo Munoz / Reuters

If you’re covered by an unlimited data plan from T-Mobile, you may have been led to believe that the service you’ve purchased is faster than what you truly receive, according to the Federal Communications Commission, the nation’s telecommunications regulator. As a result, T-Mobile will be forced to pay $48 million in fines and consumer benefits to settle an investigation into the way the company conveys what “unlimited data” actually means.

According to the FCC, T-Mobile failed to make clear to its customers that its unlimited plan includes restrictions on speed and data. Under its policies, T-Mobile can throttle the internet service of its customers who use the most data each month, but the FCC found that this information wasn’t properly shared with customers through ads and disclosures, depriving these people of the real internet speeds that were marketed to them. Based on complaints from T-mobile and MetroPCS customers who felt misled, the internet slow-down policy left their services “unusable’ for many hours each day,” which limited their access to the internet, and runs counter to transparency rules on adequate disclosure.

“Company advertisements and other disclosures may have led unlimited data plan customers to expect that they were buying better and faster service than what they received,” the FCC found. T-Mobile “failed to adequately inform its ‘unlimited' data plan customers that their data would be slowed at times if they used more than 17 GB in a given month.”

As part of the settlement, eligible T-Mobile and MetroPCS customers will be offered 4 GB of additional data if they’re covered by the “Simple Choice Mint” plan and a 20% discount off of phone accessories. The company will also be forced to provide free tablets to public school students as part of a 4-year initiative to close the “homework gap,” totaling at least $5 million.

To address what the FCC concluded were inadequate disclosures to customers, T-mobile will now clearly define who may be affected by these slow-downs and notify them when they near the 17 GB threshold. And when the company markets its services, it must either remove the term “unlimited,” spell out the restrictions that come with those plans, or stop throttling its customers.

“Consumers should not have to guess whether so-called ‘unlimited’ data plans contain key restrictions, like speed constraints, data caps, and other material limitations,” FCC Enforcement Bureau Chief Travis LeBlanc said in a statement. “When broadband providers are accurate, honest and upfront in their ads and disclosures, consumers aren’t surprised and they get what they’ve paid for.”

When asked for comment on the settlement, a T-Mobile spokesperson directed BuzzFeed News to a tweet sent by CEO John Legere.

Quelle: <a href="T-Mobile Fined Million For Hidden Limits On Unlimited Data Plans“>BuzzFeed

20. Oktober 201620. Oktober 2016

da Agency

The Business Value of Red Hat CloudForms

When talking to IT leaders about Red Hat CloudForms, we often point out the time and cost savings that CloudForms can have on their organization. While we have several customer success stories that highlight the various benefits of CloudForms to each organization, we wanted a more formal study of the business value that CloudForms could bring to an organization. To that end, Red Hat commissioned a study, conducted by IDC, to look at the business value of CloudForms. This blog post will highlight some of their findings, with IDC’s complete report available for review.
For this study, IDC conducted in-depth interviews with seven organizations, of various sizes and from a variety of industries, that had deployed CloudForms. The organizations were running application workloads across physical, virtualized, and private cloud environments, with some also using public cloud or container-based environments. All of the organizations cited the pressure to manage these diverse environments as a key reason to implement CloudForms. The interviews sought to uncover both quantitative and qualitative impacts that could be traced to the implementation of CloudForms. Let’s take a closer at some of IDC’s findings.
Increasing IT Agility
In most organizations, responding to IT service requests requires significant staff time and can take weeks to deliver on a request. This makes the IT operations team a bottleneck for new initiatives required by the business. Organizations in the study showed a significant increase in their ability to deliver on service requests in a more timely manner. On average, they took 89% less calendar time to deliver on requests and requests required 92% less staff time. This improvement has allowed IT organizations to increase the number of requests that they can process, handling more than 20 times more requests on average. This in turn has allowed the IT organization to become more agile, supporting application development teams in their bid to accelerate application development.

Accelerating Application Delivery
In fact, IDC found that CloudForms can have a dramatic impact on application development teams and their ability to support the business. The efficiency CloudForms brings to the service delivery process translates into greater productivity for application development teams because they spend less time waiting for resources. Organizations using CloudForms were able to reduce the time to deliver a new application by 37% and almost double the number of new applications that could be delivered in a year (93% more on average). Delivering more applications, faster should be what every business strives for today.

Improving Business Results
The result of increasing the application development’s team efficiency and ability to deliver means that the business can respond faster and more effectively to changes in the business environment. IDC found that CloudForms contributed in this area as well. Approximately one-half of the organizations in the study reported that they were generating more revenue with CloudForms than without. The average revenue increase was $3.85 million per year and was a result of the businesses being enabled to respond more quickly to customer demands. It’s not often that you find an IT operations solution that can contribute to your organizations top-line.
Business Value of CloudForms
These are just some of the key highlights. IDC collected all of the benefits they found and categorized them into four main areas: IT staff productivity benefits, business productivity benefits, risk mitigation, and IT infrastructure cost reductions. When summed up, they found that, on average, organizations could realize $3.46 million in benefits per year (or $11,937 per 100 users per year), a . And when factoring in costs, they found that CloudForms offered an ROI of 436% and a payback period of only 8 months.

This report has given us new insights into the benefits that CloudForms can have on organizations, beyond just the IT operations team. It has also provided a more methodical study of the benefits. I invite you to take a look at the complete report and determine how CloudForms can benefit your organization.
Quelle: CloudForms

19. Oktober 201619. Oktober 2016

da Agency

Not born on the cloud yesterday: Easing into continuous deployments with blueprints

As traditional IT enterprises embrace the cloud to handle continuous delivery, they face challenges posed by their existing legacy systems handling complex applications and environments. For example, mainframe-based systems (typically located within the firewall) often have tighter restrictions on security and data management, which can lead to slower iteration cycles.
According to a recent ADT Mag survey of IT executives, nearly two-thirds of respondents are integrating legacy applications with new mobile or front-end applications. Not surprisingly, managing complex environments was the top challenge when deploying applications that touch both legacy and new systems.
Check out this summary video of the main findings.
As these companies look at adopting some of the benefits offered by the cloud, they might want to start slowly to help address the differences in speeds between different environments. This is otherwise referred to as “multi-speed IT,” where user-facing (mobile, web) development is often executed at a greater velocity than traditional development on mainframe and database systems. This might be an impediment to some, but for those who embrace hybrid cloud, it’s a challenge easily overcome.
When it comes to continuous deployment, companies can achieve the most success in the early stages of adopting the cloud by moving some development and test efforts to the cloud. There, they can get early feedback on an application in a cloud environment that can be easily created and torn down. This can prevent the common backlog in which development teams need operations teams to create or customize an environment to address a new development feature.
During the later stages of delivery — whether it’s Q/A, staging or production — companies can still rely on traditional IT resources or more secure hybrid or on-premises cloud solutions. One downside to this approach can be maintaining consistency in the infrastructure as the app delivery progresses to different stages in the development cycle, no matter whether you are using cloud or different virtualization environments.
One of the newest solutions to the problem of handling cloud complexity is the UrbanCode Deploy Blueprint Designer. A cloud blueprint is a document that describes the full stack of both the application content and the infrastructure as a service (IaaS) environment required to provision the application. Check out this article on the developerWorks blog about Blueprint Designer to find out more.
Many of our enterprise customers are using blueprints to develop their infrastructure and application layers across different cloud environments. They can quickly use a blueprint to deploy, test and destroy environments as needed. UrbanCode Deploy Blueprint Designer is especially useful for customers who want to get early feedback in their development process on their latest application updates, leveraging the notion of “infrastructure as code” provided through the blueprint designer to create, provision, and manage cloud environments for their applications.
Consider this use case from one of our enterprise customers: User error resulted in the inadvertent deletion of a large portion of the customer’s data center – around 250 configured virtual machines. Fortunately, since this infrastructure had been initially created with cloud blueprints, the customer was able to simply re-provision the blueprints to rebuild its data center, and all its VMs were back online within a day.
The benefits of the UrbanCode Deploy Blueprint Designer include:

Portability, in that the same blueprint can be created once and provisioned with minor configuration changes across different clouds. Today, supported cloud providers include OpenStack (included IBM BlueBox), IBM Softlayer, VMware vCenter, Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services.
Optimization for OpenStack using the Heat (HOT) language, an open-source, industry-standard format for orchestrating infrastructure and applications.
Support of “infrastructure as code” through blueprint versioning via built-in integration with Git.
Support for multiple software deployment tools, including UCD and Chef, or use of existing automation scripts in a blueprint.
A rich graphical editor with drag-and-drop infrastructure components such as virtual machines, storage volumes, networks, drop in app components and build a blueprint in an easy-to-use user interface
Composite blueprints that enable the separation of roles within an organization by allowing different teams to create blueprints for their area of specialty (compute, networking, application), and combine them into a single, deployable blueprint.

While complexity is still the biggest challenge facing enterprises today, a cloud blueprint from UrbanCode Deploy can help organizations with legacy applications take those first steps toward the cloud.
The post Not born on the cloud yesterday: Easing into continuous deployments with blueprints appeared first on #Cloud computing news.
Quelle: Thoughts on Cloud