It’s time once again to feature some of the highlights from The New Stack sponsored feed that appears at the bottom of every post. The items in the sponsored feed link back to the sponsor’s blog. The more the sponsor posts, the more their posts appear at the top of the feed.
Kinvey: AWS Launches Mobile Services: Mobile is a Key Driver to Cloud Adoption
CEO Sravish Sridhar gives a background on AWS move into the mobile space and why mobile is driving cloud adoption. He explains how AWS is continuing to offer more services to enhance its core IaaS offering. I found his insights into the hardware connection most interesting:
Google, Microsoft, Apple, and now Amazon are in a position that they sell a mobile (and tablet) device, have a developer ecosystem, and also provide a cloud service to host backends for apps that live on a user’s device. Amazon’s announcement conveniently comes just weeks after they launched their Fire phone – a serious driver for app development, and Amazon wants to ensure those app backends stay on AWS.
Additionally, Amazon (like Facebook) receives great insight into a mobile user when the user interacts with the Amazon app. They lose context, however, when users move to other apps on their device. By tying together a mobile device and cloud services, AWS will have a more holistic view of users — a very powerful combination. Amazon has always been on the forefront of using data and analytics to improve sales, so this move is no surprise.
Apigee: Digital Digest: Four Must-Reads for CIOs
Some reading material for the CIOs needing help to bridge the gap between yesterday’s IT and their company’s future as a digital business.
Here’s an excerpt from an Accenture report about digital transformation:
This paper earned a must-read review back in March but it’s important enough to include here too. It provides a holistic overview of the shift to an outside-in enterprise. The report focuses on outside-in as a tool to reorient business toward maximizing great customer experiences. While this doesn’t strictly provide a game plan, it is comprehensive enough for you to share with other executive leaders to help understand the outside-in journey you’re going to lead at your enterprise.
“Digital transformation is not for the faint-hearted. It pushes companies to take stock of who they are—and what they could become. That alone is hard work. But amid the inescapable realities of new customers, new competitors, new partners, and new technologies, success cannot be left to serendipity.
The business imperative for all is to achieve enduring customer relevance at scale through a customer-focused digital transformation. Whether companies perceive digital as a threat, a challenge or an opportunity, those that ignore it do so at their own peril.”
Digital Ocean: Sammy The Shark Gets A Birthday Makeover From Simon Oxley
A short post wioth some updates to Sammy, the Digital Ocean icon, created by Simon Oxley, who also created the original Twitter bird and the Octocat for GitHub:
If you haven’t yet met Sammy, he’s a big help when talking with our community. He’s there when we announce a new datacenter location, when we give thanks for all the love and support, and even when we’re partying down at SXSW.
Now, after 3 years, 2 round raises, 2 million Droplets launched, and over 150,000 developers using our platform, Sammy feels a little more grown up.
Here’s Sammy with a jetpack.
New Relic: Envato Uses New Relic Insights to Ensure User Security [Video]
A look at Envato and how it used New Relic Insights, the company’s data analytics platform, to get its users passwords updated in the wake of Heartbleed.
Since New Relic Insights was already pre-loaded with Envato’s existing APM data, Sean and his team were able to start querying their data instantly, without any programming work. In a matter of five minutes they had run their first NRQL query and created a dashboard. With zero instrumentation, they were able to see, in real time, how their customers were flowing through the Heartbleed security process giving them the information they needed to fine tune the program to ensure all users were secure.
Here’s the video:
Adallom: The Shared Responsibility Model Part 2: Reality check
This post looks at shared responsibilities in the SaaS world and two common misconceptions. The first example looks at “a recent Forrester survey Adallom commissioned which found that a majority of IT decision makers placed accountability for a data breach on SaaS providers.” IT is wrong on this one. The reality: companies are responsible for user activities and data even in the cloud.
The second example examines the misconception that existing security technologies are effective for the cloud. In particular it shows that firewalls and VPNs are still considered as effective ways to prevent attacks on SaaS infrastructure. Why are they not effective? People don’t always use a VPN to access a SaaS. And a firewall does not really help when users access the SaaS services from home without a VPN.
“Unfortunately, security professionals with this mindset are rolling the dice with their sensitive data. Perimeter and endpoint protections provide minimal protection against new, emerging, and largely unknown threats; they are ineffective when the endpoint is unmanaged and off premise.” -Forrester
Tidemark: A New Financial Planning Application Built for Higher Education
The post introduces the new app from Tidemark for the higher education market:
This powerful and flexible Tidemark Application is designed specifically for how institutions should be managing their planning processes, enabling administrators and budget owners to make more strategic use of resources, engage every stakeholder in the planning process, and establish a single platform for planning, budgeting and reporting.
With Tidemark Financial Planning for Higher Education, the Budget Office can align source and use by monitoring strategic planning, departmental budget development, position budgets, and reporting and analysis, no matter how many faculty and staff participate. Tidemark’s collaborative, mobile-first architecture – which enables the App to be accessed from any device – ensures every stakeholder can instantly see (by position or funding source) where they stand against the budget at any time. This makes it easier for faculty and staff to ensure spending and activities are in line with the strategic plan.
Kinvey, Apigee, Digital Ocean, New Relic, Adallom and Tidemark are sponsors of The New Stack.