Five emerging technologies you need to know in 2015
•Download as PPTX, PDF•
1 like•1,190 views
The document discusses 5 emerging technologies: 1) The evolution of apps and cloud computing. Data is increasingly stored in the cloud. 2) Changes in critical infrastructure like data centers moving to the cloud. 3) Virtualization of new things like containers for portable apps. 4) Big data and analytics. 5) Password technologies moving away from passwords to one-time passwords and multifactor authentication. The document concludes with case studies of organizations applying these technologies.
Recommended
Recommended
More Related Content
What's hot
What's hot (20)
Similar to Five emerging technologies you need to know in 2015
Similar to Five emerging technologies you need to know in 2015 (20)
More from David Strom
More from David Strom (20)
Recently uploaded
Recently uploaded (20)
Five emerging technologies you need to know in 2015
- 1. Five emerging technologies that you need to know David Strom Daly Computers May 1, 2015
- 2. My background • Freelance writer and IT speaker • Former Editor-in-Chief at Network Computing, Tom’s Hardware.com • Worked in end-user computing back in the mid 1980s • Written two computer technology books • Last spoke to Daly customers in 2003
- 3. Agenda • The evolution of apps • Five key techs for further study: – The cloud and your data – Changes in critical infrastructure – Virtualization of new things – Big data – Password technologies • Case studies
- 4. Both apps and IT departments have evolved
- 11. The cloud and your data
- 12. 4 Critical infrastructure decisions
- 13. Virtualization of new things (data)
- 15. The rise of Openstack
- 16. Big data
- 20. Old school: OTP tokens
- 21. More old school: password policies
- 25. Case studies Chicago’s data portal CrazyForEducation.com Houston School District Chattanooga, Tenn. city government American Red Cross
- 27. Baltimore Co. School District
- 31. Thanks for your attention! • Contact me: – david@strom.com – Twitter: @dstrom – Web: Strominator.com • Presentation slides available: – Slideshare.net/davidstrom
Editor's Notes
- V6 final apr 15 Hancock Life points and Docker added, Balto Schools added
- I think about how the past 12 years have significantly changed what we are doing in IT. In the old days, IT built networks and data centers that supported computing monocultures of servers, desktops and routers. Back then, IT owned everything from the user’s keyboard on up. Those days are quickly coming to a close. Now we have companies who deliver their IT infrastructure completely from the cloud and don’t own much of anything. IT has moved to being more of a renter than a real estate baron. What I am seeing is that IT is changing the way they delivered their applications to make them accessible from the Internet and migrate their apps to become more browser-based. This is happening because end users are moving from desktops to phones and tablets, and demand a more pluralist approach to how they run their apps. One acronym that you will hear a lot more of these days is called SMAC – for Social, Mobile, Analytics and Cloud. SMAC is changing the way that IT delivers its services, builds its enterprise architectures, and selects its systems.While the PC revolution was pushed forward by then-cheaper desktops running Lotus, SMAC isn’t just about one monolithic app. Instead, IT will have to evolve towards managing multiple app integrations, provisioning several different services, and negotiating more vendor relationships. They will have to examine business processes from a wider lens. So the first part of my talk, let’s talk about this evolution and how apps are are built, deployed, and updated. There are several steps in this process, and not every company follows this path the same way. But you can see it happening and several patterns developing.
- First is the notion of File sharing and how it becomes a collaboration mechanism. Before PCs were first connected to the Internet, there were local area networks and floppy disks. File sharing was cumbersome and crude, because PCs were essentially personal devices and collaboration was difficult. Then came the Internet and one of the first basic ways that work teams used this connectivity was to share documents, usually as email attachments or through tools such as Microsoft SharePoint. But while it solved document version and access issues, SharePoint is a very “heavy” client, meaning that there is a lot of software to install and maintain. It isn’t very friendly to mobile devices, or to Web access. The first step towards changing how apps are supported usually begins when enterprises realize that there is a better way to share files, and have seen IT organizations ditching their SharePoint implementations in favor of using services such as Box or DropBox or using newer services that are more security-aware such as SpiderOak or Wuala.
- Once these file sharing portals take hold, it isn’t much more of step towards running general office productivity apps in the cloud such as Google Docs and Microsoft Office 365. These apps were once the exclusive domain of the desktop, but as endpoints have blossomed into tablets and Web-only access, office productivity means something more pluralistic and functional than merely sharing documents. They are also the first tentative steps into supporting the public cloud too by IT. Many of these decisions are being driven because of what is the endpoint device has become almost irrelevant. Gone are the days, even back in the early 2000’s, when an IT department would studiously determine what kind of PC brand or operating system would be the corporate standard. Now the particular endpoint, whether it is a desktop or a mobile, no longer matters. Mobiles are being used more and more as the main endpoint browser: nearly half of Facebook posts come from mobile devices and more than 75% of Tweets are posted from phones.
- This is the ultimate consequence of a “bring your own device” policy; because in effect the IT department recognizes that the apps trump whatever device they are running on. There are some big benefits here for IT: they don’t have to invest time in their “nanny state” approach in tracking which users are running what endpoints. Instead, they can free up these staffers to improve their apps.
- The next step is in delivering a single place where end users can consume the necessary business apps to be productive. Users don’t want to wait on IT to finish a requirements analysis study or go through a lengthy approvals process: they want their apps here and now. Users want apps that are intuitive, purposeful and easy to use, and they now carry these same expectations into the workplace. There is dwindling patience for the convoluted, frustrating user experiences that many enterprise users have tolerated from corporate systems of the past. One of the best ways to enable this new app universe is in the form of an app portal or corporate app store where users can download the most current apps to their endpoint devices, or login and connect to them in the cloud using some kind of single-sign-on tool, or a combination of approaches.
- As these app stores take hold, more companies are now testing their apps in production. This movement grew out of strategies that Google, Amazon, and others used to roll out new features of their SaaS services and code several years ago. The tools used for these kinds of testing include ramped or limited deployment and A/B tests. This has created a new kind of IT department: one that delivers continuous app upgrades, just like the consumer social clouds of Facebook and Twitter are doing. Today these IT groups add improvements without waiting for formal requirements documents from a ponderous and seemingly endless architecture review process. Instead, user interfaces are added almost on a whim, and these continual changes make the notion of a “version number” for software seem almost quaint. Think about this for a moment: back in the early 2000s, the thought of actually doing this kind of testing would have probably gotten an IT director fired. Now it is becoming common practice.
- So let’s take a closer look at five broad categories of emerging tech and how they are helping to accelerate this app evolution. Some of them are still not well adopted, while others are underway in many IT shops.
- These days, everyone talks about the cloud. And while you may be sick of hearing the term, there’s no doubt that cloud technologies have had — and will continue to have — a direct impact on the business world. And while there are many myths about cloud computing, one thing about the cloud in business remains apparent: Cloud computing is here to stay — at least for now. According to IDG research, 61 percent of technology decision-makers are utilizing at least one cloud-based app and are expecting to build more in coming years. In order to understand how the cloud can play a more critical role in your company’s IT operations, take a look at current trends and opportunities — and what they can mean for your business. Here are five tips for cloud integration: 1. Build your apps with the cloud in mind The days of having to custom build software from scratch are over. Running your apps in the cloud means you can quickly assemble what you need and have it scale up or down to match your demand. You don’t have to maintain any servers, or have much in the way of a large data center infrastructure. 2. Invest in real-time analytics Today’s analytics tools have the ability to collect and correlate events in real time (or nearly so). And you don’t have to have a data background to understand reports: Most tools can clearly display analyses on a dashboard, so that even the most non-technical user can easily spot and act on particular trends. With these analytics tools, you can collect information from a variety of different sources, including already-running software programs and logs from servers, as well as network events like firewalls and security systems. These tools avoid the delay in analysis that older business intelligence products incurred, and enable more iterative, ad-hoc types of queries. Users can refine their questions as they go along in the data, gaining deeper insights into complex questions. This kind of real-time analysis enables your business to be a truly data-driven organization, where analysts can drill down to a particular user or event and discover what happened and why. With this information, you can adapt to secure the best opportunities for your business, understand why your customers’ purchase patterns are changing and focus on how to meet demand. 3. Understand network latency In order to utilize the cloud to its fullest potential, you will need a basic understanding of how it operates with your network. Network latency, or the expression of how long it takes data to move from point A to point B, occurs with cloud computing because you don’t own the end-to-end paths connecting your users to your servers. As such, there are wider latency variations, which can create more room for a network slow down. You may need better Internet infrastructure connections for your business to handle more traffic, or you may consider investing in a content delivery network or other technologies to speed up access. 4. Consider hybrid cloud options Hybrid clouds can offer businesses significant utility, so spend some time thinking about ways these options can work for your business. Hybrids are a great option to handle network loads and demands for storage resources at peak times, for example. 5. Automate provisioning of your cloud resources Yes, having your apps in the cloud means you can scale up and down as demands and needs change. But the hidden bonus behind this scalability is you are also able to automate the provisioning of cloud-based servers. This includes policy-based workload management and deployments, as well as real-time resources and orchestration. Understanding what these automation tools do and how they work with your cloud deployments can save time and money for your business.
- These are the key questions to ask as you are trying to evolve your IT infrastructure towards this new collection of apps. Can your current internal apps be converted into something with a Web front end? I will talk more about this when I come to my case study with the Red Cross. But lots of companies are building their own web portals for their internal apps, this conversion frees up supporting outdated endpoint devices and the need to maintain either customized apps or outdated mainframe terminal communication tools. Can your business logic be hosted elsewhere and be made more scalable? If you move your servers to the cloud, you can ramp up (or down) your capacity quickly without having to purchase the hardware. One IT shop calsl it “buying our baseline capacity but renting what we need for handling seasonal spikes.” Can you provide security as a service layer for your apps? When companies employ a single-sign-on tool, they migrate their security needs to a single point of service delivery, and make things easier for both end users and their IT department. But a single-sign-on isn’t sufficient. Security needs to be part of every app, more of security-as-a-service, moving from the network edge to the individual app. This is what Mitsubishi Motors did to connect its North American car dealers to its headquarters infrastructure. In the past they relied on a VPN to get their users inside a secure perimeter; now each app authenticates each user individually. We’ll talk more about this in a moment. Can you virtualize each of your servers without losing performance, security and reliability? You want to look at server CPU utilization as a good decision point before virtualizing them. When you do this, you will found that many of yourphysical servers were operating at very low levels and could easily be converted into either virtual machines or migrated to the cloud. This frees up other data center resources and also spreads the cost of an expensive server across equipment that can run at higher loads.
- As I said, the cloud is playing a larger role in our enterprise computing decisions and infrastructure. Let me highlight three emerging trends in this new virtual world. First is this notion that data can be a service layer. This is the ultimate end state of a completely cloud-based universe is where everything becomes a feed; data is streamed from where it is curated to where it is consumed, and the user doesn’t know and doesn’t necessarily care. Think of how once Netflix only mailed out its movie DVDs – now a goodly percentage of its content is streamed to its customers. In the early days of digital music, people ripped CDs into MP3 files: now we have providers like Spotify or Pandora that stream music directly to smartphones. The same is becoming true for enterprise data usage. There are now DaaS from Microsoft Azure Marketplace, Amazon, Google, SalesForce.com, Infochimps, Informatics and Intuit’s Quickbooks.com. Microsoft’s five-year old Azure Marketplace is composed of two major pieces: apps and data. Both are available through monthly subscriptions that you as an individual select. Microsoft has gone after some of the largest data repositories to show they are a “leader.” For example, included so far are collections from D&B, geo-related Esri, Wolfram, and sports-related Stats.com. Azure Marketplace works with a set of query tools that can integrate with desktop apps (PowerPivot, Tableau and Excel links), an open data protocol (OData), its own preview engine (Service Explorer) and of course the cloud service which serves as the backend for hosting all these datasets and running various SQL databases.
- Docker is an open platform for developers and sysadmins to build, ship, and run distributed applications. It consists of several different pieces so that apps can be quickly assembled from components and eliminates the friction between development, QA, and production environments. As a result, IT can ship faster and run the same app, unchanged, on laptops, data center VMs, and any cloud. With Docker, developers can build any app in any language using any set of development tools. “Dockerized” apps are completely portable and can run anywhere. Think of them as taking a Linux process, and adding the configuration information so the two can travel together. In the past, we set up individual VMs that ran specific applications but were dependent on a lot of virtual infrastructure. With Docker, an app can run as an isolated process in userspace on the host operating system, sharing the kernel with other containers. Thus, it enjoys the resource isolation and allocation benefits of VMs but is much more portable and efficient. Docker is less than 2 years ago but already getting a lot of traction, and Google has blessed it as one of its preferred technologies. Expect to hear more about it over the coming years.
- Founded by Rackspace and NASA, OpenStack has grown to be a global software community of developers collaborating on a standard and massively scalable open source cloud operating system. And it is a on a very fast track, with the upcoming tenth – or is it 11th-- major release. the builds are more sophisticated with more mature components, there are more distributions available, better VMware integration and training programs have also blossomed. There some notable exemplary uses of OpenStack by established businesses: Best Buy was spending $20,000 to spin up a single managed virtual machine (VM) back in 2011. That was motivation to rebuild its ecommerce site and use OpenStack to serve up its Web product pages. Now they integrate 40 different development teams' work using this software and produce pages that take on average 2.5 seconds to load. Before OpenStack, it was taking anywhere from seven to 30 seconds to load the same content. OpenStack can be very cost effective alternative to expensive enterprise virtualization tools, and it is based on Apache open source projects that can proven to scale up and have a boatload of APIs.
- Bid Data has has some interesting bedfellows. FedEx is collaborating with General Electric – which is providing the company with commercial charging stations for its electric vehicles. While Fedex can tell you where a particular package is located in its network, it has other Big Data dilemmas including whether it makes sense for them to use electric power for its delivery trucks. They got together with GE, utility Con Edison and Columbia University researchers. The group are developing artificial intelligence programs to manage when and where the electric trucks charge in a 10-vehicle pilot project .They collect data on what is the load on the facility, what is the load of each truck, how many miles does that truck drive, The algorithms from Columbia will identify that a truck is going to drive 16 miles tomorrow, so don’t give it 30 amps, give it 8 amps so we minimize the load on the entire facility.
- Still think big data is a lot of bull? Well, not according to the USDA. 8 million Holstein dairy cows in the United States, there is exactly one bull that has been scientifically calculated to be the very best in the land. He goes by the name of Badger-Bluff Fanny Freddie, who has 346 daughters who are on the books already. Their equations predicted from his DNA that he would be the best bull in terms of milk production from his cattle progeny. USDA research geneticist reviewed pedigree records and looked at things such as milk production and fat and protein content to optimize the breed. To give you an idea of how this industry has changed, In 1942 the average dairy cow produced less than 5,000 pounds of milk in its lifetime. Now, the average cow produces over 21,000 pounds of milk. Monsanto has purchased several big data analytics companies and is incorporating these tools into its programs, to help farmers become more productive with their crops.
- A few weeks ago John Hancock Life Insurance became the first American insurer to offer reward points to its customers based on lifestyle choices. People who sign up for this program get a Fitbit monitor and agree to let the company monitor their activities. The most active customers may earn a discount of up to 15 percent on their premiums, in addition to Amazon gift cards, half-price stays at Hyatt hotels and other perks. For example, nonsmokers automatically earn 1,000 points. This raises all sorts of data privacy issues, but is an example of a program that is working in other countries and how Big Data can be used for one of the more conservative businesses around. Essentially, John Hancock’s term and universal life policies will be priced continuously for these customers. Of course, they claim that they won’t sell this data to others.
- I would like to move into one last topic before looking at some specific case studies about some typical leading IT organizations, and focus on something that is very practical. That is how broken we are with respect to handling our passwords. I was reminded of this recently when I was trying to help my wife manage her passwords. She gets very wiggy when she has to enter a password, and sometimes spends minutes trying to remember what she chose for a particular website. On the enterprise side, we hear almost daily about password breeches and attacks where millions of user accounts and passwords have been stolen. So let me give you a quick tour about where I see the password industry changing and how you can get on top of things.
- 12 years ago or so, we had these old school one time password tokens that were used to strengthen our logins. They worked great, but users and IT managers hated them for different reasons. They were easily lost, difficult to manage, and often you left them at work when you needed them at home and vice-versa.
- Another mechanism was to set up a series of password policies that strengthened logins but also were annoying to our end users
- This is the many policy screen for Lastpass Enterprise, showing their granularity.
- Okta also has wide multifactor authentication support, including its own mobile soft tokens, a security question, and Google Authenticator. You can enforce the multiple factors when users are outside the corporate network, or for specific groups, but not for specific applications.
- OneLogin also has a long list of multifactor token choices that can be used to secure your account.
- Chicago WindyGrid http://www.mongodb.com/customers/city-of-chicago and their data portal https://data.cityofchicago.org/ STL County GIS apps http://gis.stlouisco.com/ The site hosts over 200 datasets presented in easy-to-use formats about City departments, services, facilities and performance. The catalog presented below lists datasets alphabetically and links back to each set on the Portal. The site is a great place for those interested in building applications, or creating interesting visualizations that use City data
- Then there is the Baltimore Co. school district. Through the BCPS One system, all the district's programs and initiatives around student data, assessments, curriculum, instruction, reporting, and analysis are being fully integrated into a single, user-friendly, platform. It provides a web-based communication portal to distribute loads of information and enable educators to communicate with colleagues, parents, and students. The district is planning on providing digital devices to every student, and put wireless and broadband infrastructure into every one of its elementary, middle and high schools.
- 1. Building fiber is more than just Internet. While you can point out civic pride, or as a mechanism to attract broadband geeks with startup ventures, there are other reasons you want gigabit fiber in your city. What made Chattanooga's fiber network work was the backing of its municipal electric utility as a means of improving its power delivery system. Having a smarter grid minimized power outages. Once they had capitalized their fiber grid, the 'Net followed. 2. It has to go everywhere. When done correctly, gigabit fiber becomes a community asset that can benefit both small and large employers, so wiring up just homes is somewhat self-defeating. The early Google Fiber installations were just for residential addresses, which had the effect of “hacker homes” whereby entrepreneurs would buy up homes and open them up as unofficial coworking spaces. Chattanooga was able to attract a new Volkswagen auto assembly plant and an Amazon.com distribution warehouse because of many reasons, but having a ubiquitous business fiber network was certainly one of them. And smaller entrepreneurial efforts have blossomed everywhere around town. 3. Work directly with academia and City Hall. Chattanooga figured out early on that they needed a university-based research partner to help establish a supercomputing center and a way to help license and commercialize new technologies. They also got the municipal government involved, and the city has more than 50 different apps that make use of their ubiquitous fiber connection, such as apps to monitor street and traffic lights and road conditions. Both will eventually come with Google Fiber cities, just because of Google's size and impact.
- Some organizations have always had their infrastructure in the cloud. This is the strategy that the startup CrazyForEducation.com used when began its operations last year. We are looking at an internal operations provider diagram. Let me tell you how they put all this technology together. The company is a SaaS provider of tutorials and is used as a way to post short online video lessons by K12 classroom teachers who explain common concepts such as short algebra or geography lessons to students. These lectures are viewed by students the world over. The notion is referred to as flip teaching, meaning that the classroom time is used for working on what would be traditionally homework assignments, and the readings and lectures that were normally part of the classroom day are done in the evenings at home. To deploy their solution, the startup uses a complete online infrastructure. The company is also using a variety of customer-facing apps and SaaS/IaaS infrastructure so that they can quickly scale as demand for their services rises. This means that there is no single cloud provider that is used but rather they leverage more than a dozen different vendors for their various infrastructure needs. When the company began operations the principles wanted to build their infrastructure incrementally, using a Lego approach to build interchangeable parts that could easily connect together. They understood that each part could be replaced if the provider went out of business or when they found something more appropriate or cost-effective. As they added new providers, they looked at what the incremental return on their investment would be for that particular tool. In some cases, they found they could build their own tool for less than the monthly cost for one of their providers. In other cases, such as for CRM providers, they found that there were many solid alternatives and so they shouldn’t even attempt to build their own. As another example, they needed a solid video-rendering engine since so much of their content was video-related. They looked at a number of providers but eventually ended up using the UK-based provider Vzaar.com, which was much less expensive than any American provider they could find. The firm spends about $1500 a month on their infrastructure, and has purchased services from vendors around the world for its accounting, Web hosting, payment processing and databases. They have chosen more than a dozen different vendors, some of them offering consumer apps and some that are geared towards businesses. As another example, they purchased their email using Google’s business-grade hosting service and Box for their file sharing but use Join.me for their video conferencing solution. For each provider, they look at what happens to their performance when they scale up and support more traffic as the company grows. They do all sorts of stress testing to see what happens when their loads are ten times what they currently support and make sure that any of their providers continue to deliver the same latency and performance they currently have. They also have segmented their data security so that they don’t store customer financial data in the cloud, other than using their payment processor to handle credit card transactions when it is time for their teachers to be paid for their video lessons. They originally looked at Paypal but ended up with Stripe.cc because they had a better and more developed API that could be incorporated into their other programs.
- The American Red Cross has changed how it now deploys its apps. A few years ago it was one of the more conservative IT shops around. Most of its apps ran on its own mainframes or were installed on specially provisioned PCs that were under the thumb of the central IT organization based in Washington, D.C. But then people started bring their own devices along to staff its disaster response teams. Their IT department started out trying to manage their users’ mobiles and standardize on them. But within two or three months their IT staff found the mobile vendors came out with newer versions, making their recommendations obsolete. Like many IT shops, they found that their teams would rather use their own devices. In the end, they realized that they had to change the way they delivered their applications to make them accessible from the Internet and migrate their apps to become more browser-based. The Red Cross, like many other IT organizations, has learned that they have to be able to adapt to the rapidly changing mobile environment. But the good news is that they don’t have to buy as many laptops. , the American Red Cross is using a variety of cloud providers: Microsoft’s Office 365, Unisys for its regular web hosting needs, an Oracle-hosted cloud service for several database apps, and Teradata’s Aprimo cloud CRM apps.