So, with the Christmas presents unwrapped, and yet with New Year resolutions still to be self-negotiated, it's about time for me to put forth my predictions for infrastructure in 2018.
by Mark Peters, on Dec 27, 2017
So, with the Christmas presents unwrapped, and yet with New Year resolutions still to be self-negotiated, it's about time for me to put forth my predictions for infrastructure in 2018.
by Scott Sinclair, on Dec 26, 2017
We live in a truly fascinating era of technology. Multiple avenues of innovation, such as blockchain, machine learning, and artificial intelligence, are poised to fundamentally transform business. Will it happen over night? No. Will it happen in 2018? To a degree. But more importantly, 2018, and probably 2019, will be about preparing for these new innovations by transforming IT to compete in the digital age. The bottom line is that in five years or so, the more digitally adept businesses will have already won, and it will be too late for a company to redefine itself. In other words, the time for IT transformation is now. It is this urgent need for transformation that provides the background for my 2018 predictions for enterprise storage.
by Dan Conde, on Dec 22, 2017
As 2018 rolls in, we're here to make predictions for cloud platforms. Unfortunately, I'm not here to come up with a present of a crystal ball that predicts all the exciting news to come, so I'm a bad Santa.
However, I do want to discuss some major trends that are underway, and how they may become important in 2018.
by Jon Oltsik, on Dec 22, 2017
In part 2 of the video with Kenna Security, CEO Karim Toubba continued to explain why and how vulnerability and risk management have a fundamental place within a security operations and analytics platform architecture (SOAPA). Our discussion focused on:
by Dan Conde, on Dec 21, 2017
Networking is a conservative area, but it has been undergoing many changes in the last few years. Here are some of my thoughts for 2018. I include an obligatory discussion of SD-WAN since I like to cover it, but who can avoid talking about the cloud (and the cloud is a major driver for SD-WAN)?
I will focus on what you ought to look at and perhaps it will affect your purchase, architecture or deployment decisions.
by Jon Oltsik, on Dec 21, 2017
Most people have a few New Year’s resolutions – lose some weight, exercise more, spend more time with the family, etc. Based upon ESG research and many discussions with cybersecurity professionals, here’s a list of New Year’s resolutions for enterprise CISOs:
by Dan Conde, on Dec 21, 2017
Citrix has always been a company that provides the glue between disparate enterprise resources. This goes back many years. From app virtualization and VDI, application delivery controllers, or file sync and share, it served as glue to fill in areas where other companies lacked an adequate solution, or provided a multi-vendor solution where other companies, due to a single vendor focus, failed to provide an adequate answer.
As traditional vendors opened to interoperate in a multi-vendor environment, Citrix’s DNA allowed it to stay innovative, even as other firms introduced competing products, such as in remote desktop access.
I attended their Industry Analyst Meeting in Santa Clara, CA, and came away with a view to try to put a framework around their offerings.
by Jon Oltsik, on Dec 20, 2017
Karim Toubba, CEO of Kenna Security, stopped by the ESG studio to discuss SOAPA and its application to vulnerability management. In part 1 of our video, Karim and I discuss:
by Dan Conde, on Dec 20, 2017
Juniper held its NXTWORK conference in San Francisco last week. There were some announcements that showed this firm's continued evolution to be cloud-centric and to integrate security into its offerings.
by Jon Oltsik, on Dec 19, 2017
As part of the recently published research report from ESG and the information systems security association (ISSA) titled, The Life and Times of Cybersecurity Professionals, 343 infosec pros were asked to identify the cybersecurity actions their organizations have taken over the past few years. This list serves as a good foundation for what we can expect in 2018.
The top responses were as follows:
by Mark Bowker, on Dec 19, 2017
Mobility and cybersecurity. While those two areas may have very different roles inside an IT organization and business, they both play integral parts in identity and access management. Given that, I’m always getting asked, “Who owns IAM?”
by Mark Peters, on Dec 18, 2017
Here is my summary video from HPE's latest Madrid installment of its Discover user event series. It's a little different from the usual ESG On Location video format inasmuch as I spent the vast majority of my camera time interviewing HPE execs and customers, rather than my ESG colleagues. The customer interviews were done for HPE and will appear on its channels over the coming weeks. Meantime, in this summary video you'll find sample "snippets" from some of the HPE exec interviews (with full versions to follow soon), together with a comment from me about mega-events in general, and then specifically my key takeaway from Discover in Madrid.
by Mark Bowker, on Dec 15, 2017
More and more people are proactively protecting their personal identities. But it’s not only individuals that must take steps to keep their identities safe. Companies must also be vigilant about protecting corporate identities. Between fraud and identity theft, and bad actors committing nefarious acts while impersonating a company’s CEO, the integrity of a company can easily be compromised.
by Jon Oltsik, on Dec 14, 2017
Over the past few weeks, dozens of people have reached out to me with their cybersecurity predictions for 2018. Some prophecies are fairly obvious (ransomware will continue in 2018) while at the other extreme, some people are pushing doomsday forecasts aimed at garnering press hits (i.e., the US will suffer a cyber-attack in 2018 that knocks out the power grid for a substantial amount of time).
by Mark Bowker, on Dec 12, 2017
When it comes to identity and access management (IAM), the cloud, mobility initiatives, and app dev are driving chaos. Security risks are on the rise due to the expanded perimeter, and though IT operations shoulders a great deal of IAM responsibility, who actually owns identity and access management?
The answer isn’t clear-cut. It actually depends on a number of things, including: an organization’s maturity, its security posture, and how aggressively the company is pursuing identity and access management strategies.
by Jon Oltsik, on Dec 12, 2017
Everyone is busy writing their cybersecurity predictions for 2018 and while I haven’t published my list yet, here’s an easy call – the cybersecurity skills shortage will continue to be an existential threat in 2018.
As a review, here are a few data points that lead me to this conclusion:
by Mark Bowker, on Dec 12, 2017
With growing numbers of people using personal devices for work, most organizations no longer have ultimate control over their employees' devices. Today, it’s essential for CISOs and other security professionals to provide their employees with safe and secure access to the corporate data, applications, and devices they need to perform their jobs. Across industries, organizations are dealing with this challenging lack of corporate control, combined with the necessity of ensuring security, and providing employees with easy access.
by Jack Poller, on Dec 11, 2017
As I discussed in Motive, Means, and Opportunity for Evaluating HCI Performance, performance is a key HCI buying criteria.
by Dan Conde, on Dec 8, 2017
It’s time for Juniper NXTWORK in San Francisco next week. At this time of the year between Thanksgiving and Christmas and New Year, it’s the tail end of the conference season and announcements.
What presents may be in store from Juniper? It’s hard to say, but some earlier announcements on bots provide a hint on how their vision of Self-Driving Networks may start to get realized.
Their trio of new bot-apps: The AppFormix HealthBot for telemetry, Contrail TestBot for auditing, and PeerBot for peering monitoring were recently announced for beta, for availability in the first half of 2018. This may be a hint of things to come.
by Jon Oltsik, on Dec 8, 2017
Last week, I wrote a blog describing how 2018 will be the year of advanced prevention. Now we’ve had technologies for blocking cyber-attacks and malware for decades (i.e., antivirus software, firewalls, IPS, etc.), so what exactly is advanced prevention? I believe advanced prevention sits at the intersection of two other cybersecurity trends:
by Edwin Yuen, on Dec 7, 2017
As we say goodbye to 2017 and hello to 2018, it's time again for my yearly predictions for Systems Management, PaaS, and DevOps. I've posted a video with my predictions below but here are the key points that I talk about in the video.
by Mark Bowker, on Dec 6, 2017
Synchronoss is excited about having Glenn Lurie as its new CEO—and no wonder. With some business “speed bumps” at Synchronoss, Lurie’s leadership experience and business relationships (after all, he was AT&T’s Mobility and Consumer Operations President and CEO) will give Synchronoss an opportunity to tune its focus in the market, and potentially create significant partnerships with technology, media, and telecommunications (TMT) ecosystems. Lurie clearly recognizes the multiple market opportunities Synchronoss has right in front of it, and is able to swiftly connect the dots between Synchronoss innovation, TMT ecosystems, and the digital transformation increasing numbers of companies are undergoing.
by Jon Oltsik, on Dec 5, 2017
I’ve written a lot about the cybersecurity skills shortage lately, based upon data from a new research report titled, The Life and Times of Cybersecurity Professionals, a collaborative effort done by ESG and the information systems security association (ISSA). The report indicates that:
by Dan Conde, on Dec 4, 2017
The most exciting announcement during AWS re:Invent for cloud computing infrastructure foundation was Fargate. There were a slew of new announcements and I don't want to de-emphasize the other ones too much, but this one was the most interesting to me.
First, a bit of background. There's lot of confusion on VMs, containers, and functions. Here are the differences:
The key thing is that the VMs allow a server to run as one big piece (OS + whatever apps are installed), containers allow applications (which includes providing microservices, but no OS, but the underlying system beneath the container layer provides the Linux interface) to run, and serverless is a place to run code (or functions). Each stage enables slicing a workload into smaller pieces.
by Edwin Yuen, on Dec 4, 2017
At AWS re:Invent 2017, AWS continued to show the domination it has over the public cloud market. During Andy Jassy's keynote, he talked about AWS now having an $18 billion run rate with 42% growth. That's impressive in both the size and the continued growth at that size, which should be a bone chilling statistic for competitors. It extends beyond financials, with AWS showing share numbers to be over 44% of the market and more than the next 12 competitors combined.
by Doug Cahill, on Dec 1, 2017
Man, talk about the proverbial firehose. AWS re:Invent 2017 proved to be a wide open torrent of announcements from AWS and the partner ecosystem alike, making recap blogs such as this a bit of a mission impossible. For starters, AWS’s security announcements included:
by Bob Laliberte, on Dec 1, 2017
This year was my first re:Invent and it was an impressive event. There were over forty-three thousand people in attendance and the show occupied a number of hotels along the Vegas strip. It wasn’t just that there were a lot of people there, it was that there were a lot of people who wanted to be there – after attending hundreds of trade shows and user group events you get to know the difference. There was a buzz and excitement at the show that reminded me of early VMworld and TechEd shows. Sessions were sold out and queues were long as people waited for the doors to open. All the attendees I spoke to had specific reasons for attending; many were in the process of moving to a cloud first strategy and were there to learn.
by Dan Conde, on Dec 1, 2017
I attended a session at AWS re:Invent titled “Planning for your advanced AWS networking architectures” that was held by Matt Lehwess and Nick Matthews, who were rightfully dressed as networking wizards.
Without going into the details of the presentation, I have a few “meta” comments:
It’s so easy to set up networking in a public clouds (you set up VPCs and elastic load balancers without the need to purchase and configure hardware) that we are tempted to experiment with different architectures to see what happens.
However, one needs to still plan appropriately. There are several issues that cannot be ignored.
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