The nature of the technology business is forward-thinking. It focuses on the future and what’s coming next. Innovations and creativity in our world of software development strive to improve the status quo and increase customer satisfaction through speed and increased connectivity. Yet, while it's exciting to see enterprises embrace new ways of thinking and advance their processes with cutting edge technology, it rarely happens rapidly or even simultaneously across all industries.

Automation is enabling enterprises to design, deploy, and manage more complex, hybrid cloud environments. Yet the people who manage these environments must be trained in and understanding these environments better than ever before. A new era of analytics and cognitive computing is adding intelligence, but also more complexity, to these cloud environments. How smart is your cloud? How smart should it be? In this power panel at 20th Cloud Expo, moderated by Conference Chair Roger Strukhoff, panelists looked at the evolving nature of hybrid cloud, how it affects enterprise IT staffing requirement...

Our cities have been connected since the dawn of urbanization in the Indus Valley and on the plains of Mesopotamia nearly ten millennia ago. Cities exist to gather and connect people, bringing us together into communities and joint ventures that need complex networks of communication. But in recent years the connected city has come to mean something more. Today and in the future, the connected city will not just be about people connecting with people, but people with machines, people with people via machines, and perhaps most importantly, machines with machines.

Every time there’s a notable cybersecurity breach, someone (even me) writes a comprehensive primer on the proper way to create “secure” passwords. Lather, rinse, repeat. Until a few years ago, everyone (including me) based their password advice on a 2003 paper from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), with the catchy title “NIST Special Publication 800-63.” The paper recommended that passwords be cryptic, contain special characters, and be as close to nonsense as possible.

These days, APIs have become an integral part of the digital transformation journey for all enterprises. Every digital innovation story is connected to APIs . But have you ever pondered over to know what are the source of these APIs? Let me explain - APIs sources can be varied, internal or external, solving different purposes, but mostly categorized into the following two categories. Data lakes is a term used to represent disconnected but relevant data that are used by various business units within an enterprise. APIs are created as the easy access points for these siloed data lakes.

Today most companies are adopting or evaluating container technology - Docker in particular - to speed up application deployment, drive down cost, ease management and make application delivery more flexible overall. As with most new architectures, this dream takes significant work to become a reality. Even when you do get your application componentized enough and packaged properly, there are still challenges for DevOps teams to making the shift to continuous delivery and achieving that reduction in cost and increase in speed. Sometimes in order to reduce complexity teams compromise features ...

21st International Cloud Expo, taking place October 31 - November 2, 2017, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA, will feature technical sessions from a rock star conference faculty and the leading industry players in the world. Cloud computing is now being embraced by a majority of enterprises of all sizes. Yesterday's debate about public vs. private has transformed into the reality of hybrid cloud: a recent survey shows that 74% of enterprises have a hybrid cloud strategy. Meanwhile, 94% of enterprises are using some form of XaaS – software, platform, and infrastructure as ...

Thanks to the plethora of communication and messaging apps available to the average user, unified communications (UC) is becoming more important than ever before. UC is a set of products and services designed to give employees a uniform communications experience, integrating different apps and channels to a singular point of interaction. For example, UC might allow a transcript of a voicemail to be delivered to a recipient’s email, enabling a central communication location that comprises multiple mediums at once.

Blockchain. A day doesn’t seem to go by without seeing articles and discussions about the technology. According to PwC executive Seamus Cushley, approximately $1.4B has been invested in blockchain just last year. In Gartner’s recent hype cycle for emerging technologies, blockchain is approaching the peak. It is considered by Gartner as one of the ‘Key platform-enabling technologies to track.’ While there is a lot of ‘hype vs reality’ discussions going on, there is no arguing that blockchain is being taken very seriously across industries and cannot be ignored.

Agile has finally jumped the technology shark, expanding outside the software world. Enterprises are now increasingly adopting Agile practices across their organizations in order to successfully navigate the disruptive waters that threaten to drown them. In our quest for establishing change as a core competency in our organizations, this business-centric notion of Agile is an essential component of Agile Digital Transformation. In the years since the publication of the Agile Manifesto, the connection between building better software and business agility has been a tenuous one at best. But now...

Many organizations are now looking to DevOps maturity models to gauge their DevOps adoption and compare their maturity to their peers. However, as enterprise organizations rush to adopt DevOps, moving past experimentation to embrace it at scale, they are in danger of falling into the trap that they have fallen into time and time again. Unfortunately, we've seen this movie before, and we know how it ends: badly.

Internet of @ThingsExpo, taking place October 31 - November 2, 2017, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA, is co-located with 21st Cloud Expo and will feature technical sessions from a rock star conference faculty and the leading industry players in the world. The Internet of Things (IoT) is the most profound change in personal and enterprise IT since the creation of the Worldwide Web more than 20 years ago. All major researchers estimate there will be tens of billions devices - computers, smartphones, tablets, and sensors - connected to the Internet by 2020. This number w...

I’ve always felt that bringing an economics perspective to our big data and digital transformation discussions is more important than a traditional accounting or even information technology (IT) perspective. Heck, I believe that a Chief Data Officer’s background should be more along the lines of economics than IT. Economics brings a forward-looking perspective on creating value (wealth). In fact, economics is defined as “the branch of knowledge concerned with the production, consumption, and transfer (capture) of wealth.”

Fintech is a lucrative, yet quite saturated market. In order to stay competitive, businesses should keep track of the emerging trends and be able to capitalize on them before their competitors do. Artificial Intelligence is currently among the most promising fintech trends. Leading financial brands such as Capital One, MasterCard, as well as hundreds of startups have set the pace for the adoption of virtual financial advisors. If you want to stay ahead of your competition or simply explore the opportunities for AI in fintech, this article is for you.

The Internet giants are fully embracing AI. All the services they offer to their customers are aimed at drawing a map of the world with the data they get. The AIs from these companies are used to build disruptive approaches that cannot be used by established enterprises, which are threatened by these disruptions. However, most leaders underestimate the effect this will have on their businesses. In his session at 21st Cloud Expo, Rene Buest, Director Market Research & Technology Evangelism at Arago, will discuss the digital enterprise evolution in the context of artificial intelligence.

SYS-CON Events announced today that DXWorldExpo has been named “Global Sponsor” of SYS-CON's 21st International Cloud Expo, which will take place on Oct 31 – Nov 2, 2017, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA. Digital Transformation is the key issue driving the global enterprise IT business. Digital Transformation is most prominent among Global 2000 enterprises and government institutions.

Leading companies, from the Global Fortune 500 to the smallest companies, are adopting hybrid cloud as the path to business advantage. Hybrid cloud depends on cloud services and on-premises infrastructure working in unison. Successful implementations require new levels of data mobility, enabled by an automated and seamless flow across on-premises and cloud resources. In his general session at 21st Cloud Expo, Greg Tevis, an IBM Storage Software Technical Strategist and Customer Solution Architect, will explore how storage and software-defined solutions from IBM have evolved for the road ahead....

Floyd “Money” Mayweather made headlines last weekend for making light work of Mixed Martial Arts superstar Conor McGregor. But he also made tech headlines recently by endorsing the Hubii Network, an initial coin offering (ICO), on his Instagram and Twitter accounts. This isn’t the first time Mayweather (who’s dubbed himself Floyd “Crypto” Mayweather) has endorsed an ICO. In late July, he promoted the ICO for the Stox project, which went on to raise more than $30 million in its token sale. (BTW: There are subtle differences between an ICO, a token sale, and a crowdsale, although the terms are ...

Everyone could agree that silos created unnecessary separation, protectionism, and bureaucracy. No one would dare argue that having rigid silos were somehow good for the organization. Silos were, therefore, the easy target. They became the mantle onto which leaders could lay all past transgressions, and, in so doing, they became a convenient artifice to allow the leader to proclaim the dawn of a new era of integration, collaboration, and communication. Silos are dead! Except they never quite died, did they? In spite of all the talk, silos have persisted. They now just have different names....

Over the last several months, intent-based networking (IBNS) has gained momentum as a newly viable technology that aims to further automate traditional network management. Although IBNS has existed for a few years now as a general concept, it was more buzz than reality until Cisco® launched its first IBNS software package earlier this year. What is intent-based networking? Traditionally, network administrators manually translate business policies into network device configurations, a time-intensive and error-prone activity that contributes to rising OpEx. But as digital transformation initi...