ESG Blogs

ESG's "Delta-V" awards recognize the top 20 companies that made an impact in big data and analytics in 2015. Here are the ones to applaud for their success in the category of Databases. Though there are way more than 20 databases on the market, we have only 20 spots for all of big data and analytics, so I've picked exactly two offerings that I think stood out this year.

To learn a little more about the awards, go to this post.

Avid readers will have no doubt noticed I've been unusually quiet lately. It's been a busy end to the year, wrapping up a lot of holiday gifts project deliverables for clients. Thankfully, I've also had some extra time to reflect on 2015 and all the big developments in the wide, wide world of big data and analytics. I'd like to share my lasting impressions of the year that was, and to make it even more special, I'm introducing the ESG "Delta-V" awards to give credit where credit is due.

I’ve been writing about the cybersecurity skills shortage for many years and unfortunately, things seem to be getting worse. Here are a few data points:

I’m a bit reluctant to blog about 2016 cybersecurity predictions as it seems like everyone is getting into this act. Alas, this end-of-year tradition used to be the exclusive domain of the analyst community and a few industry beacons, but now it seems like every security tools vendor in the world is reaching out to me to tell me what they see in their crystal ball.

There is a lot of excitement in the halls of HP, as well there should be. According to shipment numbers published by IDC last week, HP showed Q3 '15 storage revenue growth of 16% (Q3 '14/Q3 '15) while the other major vendors lost ground. HP gained 2 points of overall market share while market leader EMC lost 2 points. At the end of Q3 2014, HP was 6 points behind EMC in market share, now its only 2.1 points behind. So what does all this mean?

It's important to look behind the headlines. 

A few months ago, HP (sic) held its US Discover conference in Las Vegas; the European version of the same happened early this month….only this time it was HPE that was holding the event. It’s fair to say that the name does not yet roll easily off the tongues of long-established [ex-] HP personnel, but I don’t think it was the new moniker or even the new green rectangle logo that had the interest of attendees at the conference in London’s Docklands. What mattered was whether HPE could bring something to the contemporary party.

For 50 years we’ve bought stuff based on what the “box” could do – how much capacity, how fast, how expensive. We made our decision, picked our vendor, and we lived with it.

When we ran out of something, we bought another box. And another. We loved our first box, and hated our 87th. Such has been the life of the infrastructure buyer.

Cybersecurity professionals often complain about the number of disparate tools they’ve deployed on their networks. Ask any enterprise CISO and he or she will come up with a list of around 60 to 80 various security tools from a myriad of distinct vendors.

We cybersecurity professionals spend a heck of a lot of time in areas like endpoint security, network security, and overall threat management. In the dozen years I’ve been focusing on cybersecurity, this situation hasn’t changed. Unfortunately, this means that we haven’t paid enough attention to software security in the past, and we continue to maintain this basic status quo approach today.

The Internet of Things will place new pressures on many fronts for enterprise networks, including DNS and management requirements. A lot of people believe the Internet of Things will create challenges due to the additional number of devices being placed into the network. While it's true that more devices places additional stress on the core infrastructure, IoT is more complex than just having more computers or mobile devices on a given network.

Preparing enterprise networking infrastructure for IoT isn’t just a matter of pulling more cables, putting in more WiFi access points and WAN links, and it's not like supporting BYOD. It requires addressing increased DNS demands, new protocols, and different management requirements.

I recently published a new ESG brief on Cisco APIC-EM. The Brief is available to ESG subscription clients only, but you can find an abstract of the Brief, as well as a key takeaway, below:

I had the pleasure of attending a presentation given by Dr. Ron Ross, a fellow at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). Ron’s areas of specialization include information security, risk management, and systems security engineering.

Modern application development and deployment is built around the principles of virtualization, agility, scalability, and manageability.

"Come together, right now…over me"
-The Beatles

Many IT decisionmakers find themselves at a crossroads today: how do they best maintain two distinct sets of IT environments? There's the legacy applications that run the business; and the next-generation, cloud-native applications that in many respects, represent the long-term health and future of the business. 

On December 1 2015, HPE announced its composable hybrid infrastructure, called HPE Synergy. I wanted to take a look at the announcement from both the technological side and from the developer's practical perspective.