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As nearly 150,000 people prepare to descend on the Bay Area for Dreamforce 2016, I’ve been thinking about why people choose applications such as Salesforce to streamline and improve their business effectiveness.
The answer is pretty simple: they want to improve the way they connect to their customers and gain competitive advantage for their businesses. Getting there is a whole other story.
According to a recent study by BlueWolf, an IBM company, 58 percent of companies have integrated or plan to integrate Salesforce clouds, and for good reason. The study found that 39 percent of companies that have integrated clouds cite their data as a competitive advantage or strategic asset. If companies have yet to integrate clouds, the percentage drops to 28 percent.
The value of integration
The paper went on to note that integration is the first step to mitigating employees’ data challenges. Poor access to different types of data, including data outside of Salesforce, topped this year’s list as the number one barrier to deriving insights from Salesforce.
Integrating clouds or other on-premises systems streamlines disparate customer data and allows employees to see a single view of the customer: who they are; what and when they buy; and what activities are currently being driven by sales, marketing, and service teams.
This is where it gets sticky. There is no one, right integration pattern. I am going to briefly touch on four. Let me add the caveat that each has its advantages and disadvantages, and none of them is the right solution all of the time. Often, these patterns can be used together for optimal results.

Data synchronization is the most common pattern and drives a tremendous amount of workload around the Salesforce platform. In this scenario, data is moved from one application into another so that the information in both locations is the same.
Dynamic data access is a pattern that excels in optimizing for currency of information. In this pattern (made possible in Salesforce through the use of OData), the applications exchange information only when the source application needs it.
Event-driven integration is an incredibly useful pattern when an action in one application must trigger actions in one or more target systems. Although not a prerequisite to use this pattern, these actions normally would be completed instantaneously, aided by messaging technologies such as IBM MQ.
API-driven integration is a pattern that flips integration on its head a bit. Rather than focusing on what the target system needs, it builds from the point of view that the source app does some things really well and the rest of the world might want to leverage its capabilities in various ways, including some not previously anticipated.

Real-world uses
Take, for instance, a retailer. A customer service rep working for a large retailer is on the phone with a client. To increase customer satisfaction, the rep upgrades the client’s standing in the customer relationship management (CRM) record form. This change creates an event that is picked up by the real-time events engine and is shared with the retailer’s order management systems, instantly updating its shipment process to change the order handling status. The customer gets a notification from the company stating that her in-flight order, which was due for dispatch in a few days, has been instantly upgraded to free, overnight delivery.
This all happens because this retailer is taking advantage of the cloud integration solutions IBM offers, specifically built to be simple enough that the user can quickly deploy them for a small task. They also offer the flexibility and resilience to handle even some of the most complex integration tasks in the enterprise. New product features allow companies using Salesforce to more easily integrate applications and services that run on the different Salesforce clouds.
Additionally, companies can easily integrate clouds with back-office systems, whether on premises or in the cloud, leveraging a range of integration patterns including event-driven integration and full API lifecycle support. Key, new innovations focusing on real-time, event-based patterns allow businesses to more quickly react to changes across this landscape.
What I’ve outlined are broad brush strokes for how cloud integration is a fundamental first step to creating a path to a truly cognitive business with ubiquitous, real-time data and services integration.
What’s even more exciting are the possibilities when adding cutting-edge artificial, augmented intelligence capabilities and access to data sets such as those from IBM Watson analytics and Weather Company data services on IBM Bluemix. It’s not hard to imagine a company that uses the most accurate weather information available and correlates it against historical sales patterns to determine how to optimally adjust inventory distribution and new manufacturing orders, change sales and marketing priorities by re-weighing lead scoring, and create updated sales scripts in local languages, all automatically.
Companies that embrace cloud and cognitive capabilities, enabled by seamlessly connecting their own and best of breed services and data on-premises and in the cloud using the optimal integration patterns, will be best positioned to win in today’s highly competitive and dynamic markets.
Find out more about how to build with infrastructure, platform, cognitive, and software services on the Bluemix cloud platform.
The post Hybrid cloud integration for the cognitive business appeared first on #Cloud computing news.
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4. Oktober 20164. Oktober 2016

da Agency

Develop Cloud Applications for OpenStack on Murano, Part 1: What is Murano, and why do I need it?

The post Develop Cloud Applications for OpenStack on Murano, Part 1: What is Murano, and why do I need it? appeared first on Mirantis | The Pure Play OpenStack Company.
So many apps, so little time.
Developing applications for cloud can be a complicated process; you need to think about resources, placement, scheduling, creating virtual machines, networking… or do you? The OpenStack Murano project makes it possible for you to create an application without having to worry about directly doing any of that. Instead, you can create your application, package it with instructions, and let Murano do the rest.
In other worlds, Murano lets you much more easily distribute your applications — users just have to click a few buttons to use them.
Every day this week we’re going to look at the process of creating OpenStack Murano apps so that you can make your life easier &8212; and get your work out there for people to use without having to beg an administrator to install it for them.
We&8217;ll cover the following topics:

Day 1: What is Murano, and why do I need it?
In this article, we&8217;ll talk about what Murano is, who it helps, and how. We&8217;ll also start with the basic concepts you need to understand and let you know what you&8217;ll need for the rest of the series.
Day 2: Creating the development environment
In this article, we&8217;ll look at deploying an OpenStack cluster with Murano so that you&8217;ve got the framework to work with.
Day 3: The application, part 1: Understanding Plone deployment
In our example, we&8217;ll show you how to use Murano to easily deploy the Plone enterprise CMS; in this article, we&8217;ll go over what Murano will actually have to do to install it.
Day 4: The application, part 2: Creating the Murano App
Next we&8217;ll go ahead and create the actual Murano App that will deploy Plone.
Day 5: Uploading and troubleshooting the app
Now that we&8217;ve created the Plone Murano App, we&8217;ll go ahead and add it to the application catalog so that users can deploy it. We&8217;ll also look at some common issues and how to solve them.

Interested in seeing more? We&8217;ll showing you how to automate Plone deployments for OpenStack at Boston Plone October 17-23, 2016.
Before you start
Before you get started, let&8217;s make sure you&8217;re ready to go.
What you should know
Before we start, let&8217;s get the lay of the land. There&8217;s really not that much you need to know before building a Murano app, but it helps if you are familiar with the following concepts:

Virtualization: Wikipedia says that “Hardware virtualization or platform virtualization refers to the creation of a virtual machine that acts like a real computer with an operating system.” Perhaps that&8217;s an oversimplification, but it&8217;ll work for us here. For this series, it helps to have an understanding of virtualization fundamentals, as well as experience in the creation, configuration and deployment of virtual machines, and the creation and restoration of VM snapshots.
OpenStack: OpenStack is, of course, a #cloud computing platform that helps to orchestrate and manage these virtual resources for you; Murano is a project that runs on OpenStack.
UNIX-like OS fundamentals: It also helps to understand command line, basic commands and the structure of Unix-like systems. If you are not familiar with the UNIX command line you might want to study this Linux shell tutorial first.
SSH: It helps to know how to generate and manage multiple SSH keys, and how to connect to a remote host via SSH using SSH keys.
Networks: Finally, although you don&8217;t need to be a networking expert, it is useful if you are familiar with these concepts: IP, CIDR, Port, VPN, DNS, DHCP, and NAT.

If you are not familiar with these concepts, don&8217;t worry; you will be able to learn more about them as we move forward.
What you should have
In order to run the software we&8217;ll be talking about, your environment must meet certain prerequisites. You&8217;ll need a 64-bit host operating system with:

At least 8 GB RAM
300 GB of free disk space. It doesn’t matter if you have less than 300 GB of real free disk space, as it will be taken by demand. So, if you are going to deploy a lightweight application then maybe even 128 GB will be enough. It’s up to your application requirements. In the case of Plone, the recommendation is 40MB per site to be deployed.
Virtualization enabled in BIOS
Internet access

What is OpenStack Murano?
Imagine you&8217;re a cloud user. You just want to get things done. You don&8217;t care about all of the details, you just want the functionality that you need.
Murano is an OpenStack project that provides an application catalog, like the AppStore for iOS or GooglePlay for Android. Murano lets you easily browse for cloud applications you need by their name or category, and then enables you to rapidly deploy them to the cloud with just a few clicks.
For example, if you want a web server, rather than having to create a VM, find the software, deploy it, manage IP addresses and ports, and so on, Murano enables you to simply choose a web server application, name it, and go; Murano does the rest of the work.
Murano also makes it possible to easily deploy applications with multiple components. For example, what if you didn&8217;t just want a web server, but you wanted a WordPress application, which includes a web server database, and web application? A pre-existing WordPress Murano app would make it possible for you to simply choose the app, specify a few parameters, and go. (In fact, later in this series we&8217;ll look at creating an app for an even more complex CMS, Plone.)
Because it&8217;s so straightforward to deploy the applications, users can do it themselves, rather than relying on administrators.
Moreover, not only does Murano let users and administrators easily deploy complex cloud applications, it also completely manages application lifecycles such as auto scaling-up and scaling-down clusters, providing self-healing and more.
Murano’s main end users are:

Independant cloud users, who can use Murano to easily find and deploy applications themselves.
Cloud Service Owners, who can use Murano to save time when deploying and configuring applications to multiple instances or when deploying complex distributed applications with many dependent applications and services.
Developers, who can use Murano to easily deploy and redeploy on-demand applications, many times without cloud administrators, for their own purposes (for example for hosting a web-site, or for the development and testing of applications). They can also use Murano to make their applications available to other end users.

In short, Murano turns application deployment and managing processes into a very simple process that can be performed by administrators and users of all levels. It does this by encapsulating all of the deployment logic and dependencies for the application into a Murano App, which is a single zip file with a specific structure. You just need to upload it to your cloud and it&8217;s ready.
Why should I create a Murano app?
OK, so now that we know what a Murano app is, why should we create one? Well, ask yourself these questions:

Do I want to spend less time deploying my applications?
Do I want my users to spend less time (and aggravation) deploying my applications?
Do I want my employees to spend more time actually getting work done and less time struggling with software deployment?

(Do you notice a theme here?)
There are also reasons for creating Murano Apps that aren&8217;t necessarily related to saving time or being more efficient:

You can make it easier for users to find your application by publishing it to the OpenStack Community Application Catalog, which provides access to a whole ecosystem of people across fast-growing OpenStack markets around the world. (Take a look how huge it is by exploring OpenStack User-stories.)
You can develop your app as a robust and re-usable solution in your private OpenStack сloud to avoid error-prone manual work.

All you need to do to make these things possible is to develop a Murano App for your own application.
Where we go from here
OK, so now we know what a Murano App is, and why you&8217;d want to create one. Join us tomorrow to find out how to create the OpenStack and developer environment you&8217;ll need to make it work.
And let us know in the comments what you&8217;d like to see out of this series!

The post Develop Cloud Applications for OpenStack on Murano, Part 1: What is Murano, and why do I need it? appeared first on Mirantis | The Pure Play OpenStack Company.
Quelle: Mirantis

4. Oktober 20164. Oktober 2016

da Agency

The Colorful History of Mirantis Swag

The post The Colorful History of Mirantis Swag appeared first on Mirantis | The Pure Play OpenStack Company.
As many of you have probably noticed by now, Mirantis likes to get creative in our participation within the OpenStack and Open Source communities. For the upcoming OpenStack Summit in Barcelona, we have a special booth design that pays homage to many of our past designs. We’re also asking summit attendees to play a game and find some of these designs within our booth, so we thought it would be a great opportunity to collect them all here in a retrospective that you can use as a reference at the summit. We hope you enjoyed them as much as we did, and we&8217;re looking forward to showing a few new designs in Barcelona.

Ever since our early days as OpenStack pioneers, we&8217;ve cultivated an iconoclastic and unconventional culture that is still going strong today. We&8217;re also not afraid to poke fun at ourselves. Paying “homage” to our company&8217;s Russian origins, playing off stereotypes of Russia from the Cold War, the Mirantis Bear made its first appearance in one of our earliest promotional designs.

As one of the leading contributors to the OpenStack source code, Mirantis has also started a number of projects within the &8220;Big Tent&8221;. One of those was Sahara, and the Sahara Elephant character made an appearance on a t-shirt design.

While OpenStack deployment is still not easy, several years ago it was considerably more difficult. Mirantis parodied this complexity in an Ikea-inspired t-shirt design that remains one of our most popular designs.

Capitalizing on the popularity of &8220;Keep Calm&8221; memes from a couple of years ago, Mirantis makes a t-shirt that hints at the &8220;calming influence&8221; of OpenStack deployments using Fuel

To celebrate with our neighbors to the North and their love of ice hockey, Mirantis made a maple leaf logo to wear proudly on our hockey jerseys at the summit in Vancouver.

As one of the early innovators with the Murano project, Mirantis was instrumental in launching the OpenStack Community App Catalog, and produced this Zelda-inspired app &8220;inventory&8221; t-shirt design.

Having established ourselves as the leading Pure Play OpenStack company, at the summit in Paris we &8220;highlighted&8221; the purity of our OpenStack distribution in several tongue-in-cheek designs.

Underscoring our commitment to open, vendor-agnostic OpenStack, at the summit in Tokyo we launched Megarantis, our mechanized defender of Pure Play OpenStack.

As Mirantis and the OpenStack community continued to invest in Fuel as the leading purpose-built OpenStack installer, our lovable &8220;sick cloud&8221; made its first appearance on a special edition t-shirt for Fuel design session participants.

As a tribute to the ongoing success of OpenStack and its consistent semi-annual releases with alphabetical names, Mirantis created unique beer labels for each release and distributed them on stickers in our &8220;OpenStack Bar&8221; at the summit in Austin.

For over 200 successful enterprise deployments, we&8217;ve proudly served Mirantis OpenStack, the King of Distros. In Austin, this design was included in the beer label set of stickers.

To complement our OpenStack Bar&8217;s &8220;urban&8221; theme, our booth staff in Austin were outfitted in OpenStack graffiti tag hats and t-shirts with a popular design based on the Run-D.M.C. logo.

As the highlight of our OpenStack Bar, and arguably our design team&8217;s tour-de-force, this booth backdrop generated nearly universal praise for its originality and visual impact. A 10-foot tall reproduction was printed for an interior wall at Mirantis HQ.

The post The Colorful History of Mirantis Swag appeared first on Mirantis | The Pure Play OpenStack Company.
Quelle: Mirantis

3. Oktober 20163. Oktober 2016

da Agency

3 security questions to ask your cloud managed services provider

IT security is a top priority for most CIOs. After all, gaps in infrastructure could leave their companies and customers vulnerable to attacks.
So when evaluating a cloud managed services provider, asking the right security questions can be critical in determining if the solution is a good fit. Choosing a cloud solution that meets a company’s unique requirements can help reduce operational costs and drive innovation while enhancing security.
With this in mind, IBM has published this Cloud Managed Services Comparison Guide, which includes security-related questions you may want to ask potential cloud managed services providers.
A focus on security
Source: Redefining Connections: Insights from the Global C-Suite Study – The CIO Perspective, IBM Institute of Business Value, 2016
A recent study conducted by IBM found that 76 percent of CIOs consider IT security their biggest risk. It was far and away the top response.
To avoid potential problems, a cloud managed services provider should incorporate built-in security layers at every level from the data center to the operating system, delivering a fully-configured solution with industry-leading physical security and regular vulnerability scans performed by highly-skilled specialists.
Questions to ask
When deciding whether a cloud managed services provider can meet your security requirements, start with these questions:
1. Who is responsible for security?
The answer may not be as obvious as you think.
Some cloud managed services providers might not take the full responsibility of maintaining a security-rich environment for your data. After they provide the hardware, the security and compliance responsibilities could rest with you. Also, some providers may require an agreement stipulating that your company is responsible for anything you do on your system that might affect your “neighbors” on that same cloud infrastructure.
Choose a cloud managed services provider capable of taking full responsibility for the security of the infrastructure rather than placing the onus on your company or a third party.
Be certain that your data is managed with the same tools, standards and processes that the provider uses for its own systems. To avoid confusion that can lead to serious issues later on, make sure this division of responsibility is clearly defined in your agreement with the provider.
2. How do I know security is adequate?
Your cloud solution should be able to help you manage regulatory compliance standards. While some providers may use certifications as a way of demonstrating security, it’s important to know what you’re looking at. Some certifications may cover only certain services or locations.
Choose a cloud managed services provider that covers the security of the entire infrastructure as well as policies and procedures. The security section of the Cloud Managed Services Comparison Guide includes a list of certifications you may want to look for when evaluating cloud providers.
3. What if something goes wrong?
Quick recovery after a disaster is crucial to your business operations. Failure to properly handle outages can lead to lost revenue, productivity challenges and a damaged reputation with your customers.
Choose a managed cloud hosting solution that includes offsite disaster recovery options to help you get back online quickly. Make sure your agreement includes production-level service level agreements (SLAs) and regular testing of emergency backup options.
For more questions on security, choice, management and global presence in your cloud managed services solution, get the IBM Cloud Managed Services Comparison Guide.
The post 3 security questions to ask your cloud managed services provider appeared first on #Cloud computing news.
Quelle: Thoughts on Cloud