IBM claims leadership in Data Responsibility

Data is the phenomenon of our time. It is the world’s new natural resource, growing exponentially. Every event occurring in any of the world’s complex systems, natural and human-made, is now being expressed as data. The companies dealing with big data know that this transition also introduces the need for greater responsibility. Concern about data residency, security and personal data protection are very high on their agenda while they all are waiting for pending regulatory and compliance requirements including the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). In December 2017, IBM will roll out a new support model and capabilities for IBM Cloud in Frankfurt, Germany. The news was announced as an important step forward in the ongoing commitment to data responsibility. With this new support model IBM Cloud in Frankfurt, Germany has taken a step further to ensure access to data is restricted. It will give clients control over and transparency with where their data lives, who has access to it and what they can do with this. It will roll out new controls to ensure access to client content is restricted to and controlled by EU-based IBM employees only. Clients will review and approve all non-EU access requests to their content if an instance requires support or access from a non-EU based employee. It will provide 24×7 in-region operations and support. This added benefit is provided at no additional charge to EU clients. In 2018, IBM will roll out advanced capabilities that enable clients to encrypt their data — at rest and in-transit — with their own master keys.  IBM plans to take the improvements outlined here and adopt them across other IBM locations in the future. Read more on >>

inspiring Per-Second Billing from aws

When Amazon Web Services (aws)  launced Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) in 2006,  The pay-as-you-go model inspired aws customers to think about new ways to develop, test, and run applications of all types. Now aws is introducing Per-Second Billing for EC2 and Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS). Effective October 2nd, usage of Linux instances that are launched in On-Demand, Reserved, and Spot form will be billed in one-second increments. Similarly, provisioned storage for EBS volumes will be billed in one-second increments. Per-second billing also applies to several other services like aws EMR, aws Batch, Elastic GPUs, Provisioned IOPS. This change is effective in all aws regions and will be effective October 2, for all Linux instances that are newly launched or already running. There is a 1 minute minimum charge per-instance. Per-second billing is not currently applicable to instances running Microsoft Windows or Linux distributions that have a separate hourly charge.  Aws points out that "One of the many advantages of cloud computing is the elastic nature of provisioning or deprovisioning resources as you need them. By billing usage down to the second we will enable customers to level up their elasticity, save money, and customers will be positioned to take advantage of continuing advances in computing." Read more on >>

Landscape changed - BI vendors reshuffled

The Forrester Wave applied 22-criteria evaluation to enterprise business intelligence (BI) platforms which also have cloud deployment options, and identified the 15 most significant ones as BOARD International,  IBM, Information Builders,  Looker, MicroStrategy,  OpenText,  Panorama,  Pyramid Analytics,  Qlik,  SAP,  SAS,  Sisense,  Tableau Software,  TIBCO Software,  Yellowfin  As a result of its research, analysis and scoring,  a new Report compiled will help businesses   working on BI initiatives make the right choice of BI platforms. Leaders are: MicroStrategy, IBM, TIBCO Software, Qlik High Competitors are: Information Builders, Looker, Pyramid Analytics, Tableau Software, SAP, Open Text, Yellowfin, Sisense, SAS The vendor segmentation that Forrester used in 2012 and 2015 to evaluate BI platform capabilities no longer holds. Forrester have completely realigned its BI platforms evaluation. Forrester now "Treats enterprise versus self-service and agile BI as one category. For about three decades until approximately two years ago, enterprise BI platforms (e.g., IBM Cognos and SAP BusinessObjects), while highly scalable, required technology professionals to develop most of the BI content. Conversely, end-user-focused BI platforms, which became popular in the early 2000s (e.g., Qlik and Tableau), empowered business users to produce most of their own BI content (reports, dashboards) with little to no reliance on tech pros. These newer platforms, however, did not scale beyond workgroups and departments. Vendors in these two categories did not sit on their laurels: Over the last several years they’ve addressed most of the missing functional and technology requirements in their product portfolios. As a result, all earlier-generation enterprise BI vendors now offer end-user-centric capabilities (built into the same platform or as separate tools). And the newer end-user-focused vendors innovated on acquired technologies and capabilities that let them scale across large enterprises.  "Do not consider data visualization as a separate market segment. Until a few years ago, Forrester saw a clear differentiation between BI platforms with mostly static reporting and visualization features and those with more advanced, dynamic, highly interactive data visualization.This is no longer the case - all leading BI vendors have acquired or developed advanced data visualization capabilities. Forrester now sees advanced data visualization as one of many capabilities of BI platforms, not a separate market segment. "Do not consider cloud BI as a separate market segment. While some of the enterprise and agile BI platforms Forrester evaluated in 2015 had single-tenant cloud-hosting capabilities, they were not based on modern, cloud-native, multitenant architectures. Conversely, some of the cloud BI platforms evaluated in 2015 had very basic on-premises deployment capabilities. While most of the vendors evaluated in this Forrester Wave still deploy their BI platforms on-premises, they have developed modern cloud architectures and have some customers (albeit still less than 50%) deploying BI platforms in the cloud. "Assess only differentiated BI platform features. Forrester now sees many BI platform features as table stakes and no longer uses them as evaluation criteria —including querying and reporting, data visualization, descriptive analytics, end user self-service, scalability, administration, and database connectivity. " Read more on why >>

Cloud Access Security Broker - CASB

"The benefits of being in the cloud are so overwhelmingly positive that the move is essential for business growth. So what can you do to prevent your business being exposed to the consequences of a data breach: lost data, outages, lost revenues, loss of intellectual properties, potential damage to your hard-won reputation?... "Great place to start is a Cloud Access Security Broker, or CASB. In June 2016, Gartner issued a list of the top 10 information security technologies, and put CASBs right up at number one. "CASBs are an effective and easy way to mitigate the top cloud security threats. They provide data security, cloud service visibility, threat protection, and compliance. No wonder then, that CASBs are one of the fastest growing security technologies today. While many SaaS apps have limited visibility and control options, CASBs provide businesses with one critical control point for the secure and compliant use of cloud services – even across multiple cloud providers. "You can find out more about CASBs elsewhere on this site." Source >>