Week Commencing 17th October 2016
Last week the IT industry was buzzing with news around the new announcements at one of the biggest conferences in the industry, VMworld. There have been product updates and releases, partnership announcements and demonstrations. In this issue of the BizTech Brief series, we have highlighted the key announcements from VMworld and highlighted other industry articles that we found interesting.
VMworld Keynote – Day 1
Last Tuesday one of the biggest industry events, VMworld kicked off with their first keynote presentation of the week. Pat Gelsigner, VMware CEO took to the stage to reflect on where the industry has been, where he believes it is going and how the VMware vision will help to shape this. Pat and his team have predicted that by 2030, 50% of workloads will be in the public cloud.
Pat then went into brief detail about the new VMware product updates such as vSphere 6.5, VSAN 6.5 and the new Cross-cloud services. The main announcement and focus of this keynote presentation was around the new partnership between VMware and Amazon Web Services (AWS). We saw a demonstration of the user interface and were taken through the details of how the VMware suite including vSphere, VSAN , NSX and ESXi will all run on the public AWS cloud.
Barry Coombs, ComputerWorld Director was in Barcelona attending the event and condensed all the key information from the 90 minute presentation into one doodle below.
For more in-depth detail about what was announced and demonstrated during the keynote and a recording of the keynote take a look at Barry Coombs (@VirtualisedReal) overview blog post: VMworld Barcelona 2016 – Part 2.
VMworld Keynote – Day 2
The final keynote of VMworld was opened by Sanjay Poonen, VMware General Manager for End-User Computing who updated the audience on how the VMware vision within EUC is transforming and that the divide between users demanding freedom and flexibility and IT demanding security is ever growing and becoming more complex than ever before. VMware believe that they are able to overcome this with their Workspace ONE suite (combination of Airwatch, VMware Identity Manager and Horizon) being at the heart of their EUC portfolio.
Ray O’Farrell then took to the stage to talk through the details of vSphere 6.5, VSAN 6.5 and vSphere Integrated Containers. The three challenges that VMware aim to address with this update are:
- Complex Environments
- Increasing Security Threats
- Support for new and existing apps
For more details about the new features of vSphere 6.5 take a look at our overview blog post, vSphere 6.5 – What’s New?
During the keynote, our Operations Director Barry Coombs summarised all the key details into a doodle again, see below;
For more details about what was announced during the keynote, a recording of the presentation and more information about what happened at VMworld outside of the keynote presentation, take a look at Barry’s blog post; VMworld Barcelona 2016 – Part 3.
Massive cyber-attack turned ordinary devices into weapons
Last week a mass cyber attack was undertaken around the world that took down large areas of the internet through devices connected to the internet. A security firm, Flashpoint believes that video recorders in people’s homes were encrypted with malware and used to help execute the mass cyber-attack. Using this malware, hackers were able to flood a website with so much traffic it impaired normal service.
As a result, users were unable to connect to platforms such as Twitter, Spotify and Netflix, however, this was just a small number of sites that were affected. Dynacentre monitors websites and found that 77 of the 150 sites they monitor were impacted during the attack.
This attack demonstrated how venerable the internet’s infrastructure is and how intelligent the hackers are becoming. There are increasingly more devices connected to the internet and traditional security methods are unable to help with attacks such as this.
To read the full article, click here.
Cloud backup saves data after fire destroys school
After the Academy Secondary School in the town of Selsey burnt down, their data was recovered just hours after due to cloud backup agreement. The fire that broke out at the school just a couple weeks before students were due to return to the school burnt down most of the buildings including the server room. This, however, wasn’t an issue for the school as all their data was backed up into a third party cloud platform.
The platform ensured that all the school’s data was backed up to the cloud once a day in case of an incident such as this occurred. As all the data was in the cloud, the school was able to restore all critical data within 2 hours and had access to all student and staff data within 10 hours of the incident.
Incidents such as this are always viewed as something that will never happen to you. However, it could occur in any organisation at any unexpected time. This highlights the importance of backing up your data and ensuring that you aren’t taking a major risk
To read the full article, click here.
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