Daily Archives: July 21, 2021

WASHINGTON - Now that the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) officials has canceled their signature $10 billion enterprise cloud computing contract, whats next for the militarys cloud needs? Patrick Tucker writes for Defense One.Continue reading original article.

The Intelligent Aerospace take:

July 19, 2021 -DOD officials say that the solution will look a lot like a marriage between whats being offered by Microsofts Azure and Amazon Web Services. It wont be the single massive cloud envisioned as the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure, affectionately called JEDI.

Scale is the operative word. DOD officials have made clear that theyre not going back to the old days of many clouds from tiny vendors with no central cloud environment for data access and distribution. A cloud on the scale of what Amazon, Microsoft, or Google can provide is essential to realize the Pentagons dream of joint all-domain command and control, or JADC2.

Today, the pathway looks like a joint Amazon and Microsoft cloud, the two largest companies that were fighting over the JEDI contract. Amazon and Microsoft likely will receive contracts under a new program called the Joint Warfighter Cloud Capability. But they wouldn't be the only ones.

Related: Civilian and military aircraft get avionics upgrades

Related: The essentials of trusted computing and cyber security

Related: Lockheed Martin flies mission-enabling Kubernetes onboard U-2

Jamie Whitney, Associate EditorIntelligent Aerospace

Excerpt from:

After JEDI cancellation, military expands competition for cloud computing that can scale to defense needs - Intelligent Aerospace

PALO ALTO, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Data Theorem, Inc., a leading provider of modern application security, today announced that TMC, a global, integrated media company, has awarded Data Theorem with a 2021 Product of the Year Award, presented by Cloud Computing Magazine. The company also announced that its award-winning AppSec solutions will be showcased in a free advanced security training session during Black Hat USA 2021.

Data Theorems AppSec experts will host the training session, titled GraphQL DDoS and OTP Bypass Attacks on Aug. 4 at 11 am PDT / 2 pm EDT. For more information and to register, see: https://resource.datatheorem.com/graphql

The 2021 Product of the Year Award, presented earlier by Cloud Computing Magazine, adds to the decorated list of distinctions for Data Theorem, being recognized for its unique dynamic and run-time analysis with offensive attack surface management and defensive protection toolkits. The unique solutions are differentiated in enabling organizations to conduct continuous, automated security inspection and remediation of their most important cloud-native applications.

Congratulations to Data Theorem for being honored with a Cloud Computing Product of the Year Award, said Rich Tehrani, CEO, TMC. Data Theorems AppSec solutions are truly innovative products, and are among the best solutions available within the past twelve months that facilitate business-transforming cloud computing and communications. I look forward to continued excellence from Data Theorem.

Data Theorems latest offering, Cloud Secure, is the industrys first solution delivering attack surface management security for cloud-native applications that starts at the client layer (mobile and web), protects the network layer (REST and GraphQL APIs), and extends down through the underlying infrastructure (cloud services). Its combination of attack surface management and defensive protections enables both offensive and defensive security capabilities to best prevent data breaches of cloud-native applications and serverless cloud functions.

It is rewarding to accept yet another award for Data Theorem, this time being named a 2021 Product of the Year for our unique design to help customers secure their modern cloud applications, said Doug Dooley, Data Theorem COO. Cloud Secure joins Data Theorems portfolio of award-winning AppSec solutions. Our hacker toolkits continue to showcase cloud-native application attack insights, which we will demonstrate in our upcoming GraphQL DDoS and OTP Bypass Attacks session during Black Hat. We are pleased to offer this free advanced security training opportunity to help educate the security research community on some of todays modern AppSec attacks, and prevention techniques.

Data Theorems broad AppSec portfolio protects organizations from data breaches with application security testing and protection for modern web frameworks, API-driven microservices and cloud resources. Its solutions are powered by its award-winning Analyzer Engine, which leverages a new type of dynamic and run-time analysis that is fully integrated into the CI/CD process, and enables organizations to conduct continuous, automated security inspection and remediation.

About Cloud Computing Magazine

Cloud Computing magazine is the industrys definitive source for all things cloud from public, community, hybrid and private cloud to security and business continuity, and everything in between. This quarterly magazine published by TMC assesses the most important developments in cloud computing not only as they relate to IT, but to the business landscape as a whole.

About Data Theorem

Data Theorem is a leading provider of modern application security. Its core mission is to analyze and secure any modern application anytime, anywhere. The award-winning Data Theorem Analyzer Engine continuously analyzes APIs, Web, Mobile, and Cloud applications in search of security flaws and data privacy gaps. Data Theorem products help organizations prevent AppSec data breaches. The company has detected more than 1 billion application eavesdropping incidents and currently secures more than 8,000 modern applications for its enterprise customers around the world. Data Theorem is headquartered in Palo Alto, Calif., with offices in New York and Paris. For more information visit http://www.datatheorem.com.

Data Theorem and TrustKit are trademarks of Data Theorem, Inc. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

Go here to see the original:

Data Theorem Showcasing Product of the Year with Hacker Toolkits in Advanced Security Training Session During Black Hat USA 2021 - Business Wire

Verizon, Microsoft and Google were just some cloud providers to see their services interrupted so far this year from a variety of issues, from a change in the authentication system to a deadly winter storm. In the cloud computing era, some experts say we can only expect more outages but with less severity.

Miles Ward, chief technology officer at Los Angeles-based Google partner SADA Systems, told CRN that cloud outages can prove less disastrous than when data centers have issues. With cloud-related issues, providers can fix the problem in parallel with a users team, whereas data centers can require an internal team to fix problems.

Outages can mean the end for companies, depending on their choices in design and deployment, or they can be complete non-events, Ward said. Cloud has changed the nature of outages.

As cloud adoption and the number of regions, zones and cloud services grow, everyone should prepare for more outages, Ward said. But he expects the type of global, all-service outages that garner headlines to decrease.

Every cloud engineering team has seen how impossible it is for customers to engineer around these kinds of outages and is working hard to distribute, subdivide, and make fault-tolerant these central services, Ward said. The result may be a shift of focus where you might see even more minor failures in singleton services, while the global services survive seemingly unaffected by minor failures because of this investment in resilience.

Companies today need copies of their data in distant regions, to run instances in multiple zones and automation to cut down on the time it takes to fix an outage, Ward said. At SADA, even demos are designed with high availability to run across Google Cloud and AWS.

In the meantime, CRN has collected a list of some of the largest cloud outages and issues to hit computers this year. Heres what you need to know.

For more of the biggest startups, products and news stories of 2021 so far, click here.

View post:

The 10 Biggest Cloud Outages Of 2021 (So Far) - CRN

VICKSBURG, Miss., July 20, 2021 Modeling the risk of extreme weather and natural disasters along the nations coastline is critical to the U.S. Army Engineer Research and Development Center (ERDC) mission of delivering innovative solutions for safer, better world.

Increasing this modeling capacity and better dissemination of data to climate research is the goal of a new agreement between the ERDC and Microsoft Corporation. This government/industry collaboration is aimed at improving climate modeling and natural disaster resilience planning through the use of predictive analytics-powered, cloud-based tools and Artificial Intelligence (AI) services.

The agreement seeks to demonstrate the scalability of the code of ERDCs premier coastal storm modeling system, CSTORM-MS, inside Microsofts Azure Government, a cloud computing service for building, testing, deploying and managing applications and services through Microsoft-managed data centers specifically for the U.S. Government. CSTORM-MS is a comprehensive integrated system of highly skilled and highly resolved models used to simulate coastal storms. The models provide for a robust, standardized approach to establishing the risk of coastal communities to future occurrences of storm events and for evaluating flood risk reduction measures. With its physics-based modeling capabilities, CSTORM-MS integrates a suite of high-fidelity storm modeling tools to support a wide range of coastal engineering needs for simulating tropical and extra-tropical storms, as well as wind, wave and water levels.

Currently, CSTORM-MS models are run at ERDCs Department of Defense Supercomputing Resource Center, one of the DoD High Performance Modernization Programs (HPCMP) supercomputing centers. In 2020, ERDC and the HPCMP performed a commercial cloud for high-performance computing workload assessment. This initial testing included a feasibility study of the CSTORM-MS models, and was successfully conducted using Microsofts Azure cloud.

Through the Cooperative Research and Development Agreement (CRADA) between ERDC and Microsoft, two goals have been set for this second phase of the project:

Microsofts participation in this effort stems from their Microsoft AI for Earth, a working group within Microsoft established in June 2017 that provides cloud-based tools and AI services to organizations working to protect the planet across five key areas: agriculture, biodiversity, conservation, climate change and water. AI for Earth awards grants to support projects that use AI to change the way people and organizations monitor, model and manage Earths natural systems.

The CRADA between ERDC and Microsoft is made possible through the Federal Technology Transfer Act of 1986. The act provides that federal laboratories developments, such as those of ERDC, should be made accessible to private industry and state and local governments for the purpose of improving the economic, environmental and social well-being of the United States by stimulating the use of federally funded technology developments or capabilities.

Source: ERDC

Read more:

Army Engineers, Microsoft to Analyze Extreme Weather Risk Using Cloud-based Analytics - HPCwire

TOPSHOT - "Yokozuna" or sumo grand champion Hakuho of Mongolia takes part in a traditional ... [+] ring-entering ceremony at Meiji shrine in Tokyo on January 8, 2019. (Photo by Toshifumi KITAMURA / AFP) (Photo credit should read TOSHIFUMI KITAMURA/AFP via Getty Images)

First there was cloud. Then there was public cloud and private cloud which (as we know) spawned hybrid cloud as the much-loved progeny of the two.

Then there was multi-cloud, a coming together of compute resources where an organization uses different cloud services from different Cloud Services Providers (CSPs) to run workloads for different applications, departments, subsidiaries or perhaps even for different specific workflow functions.

Then, after all that, there came the notion of so-called poly-cloud, the separation of different parts of an application or data service workload across different CSPs, an action taken when the price, performance, latency, legislative or other core requirements of a workload can be segmented accurately (and securely enough) to warrant splitting that workload apart over different cloud providers.

What all that creates is a world of many clouds and therefore many concerns this is the world of the multi-cloud poly-hybrid mechanics.

The complexity created here presents a challenge for enterprise organizations seeking to lock down cloud-based resources that now span a hitherto unimaginably complex and interconnected landscape of computing resources.

Aiming to provide a degree of what it likes to brand as continuous intelligence, Sumo Logic has now built a multi-cloud and hybrid threat protection offering powered by Amazon Web Services Inc. (AWS). The Sumo Logic Cloud SIEM Powered by AWS is built on Sumo Logics own branded Continuous Intelligence Platform, with the SIEM denoting Security Information & [software code] Event Management as it does.

This is not anti-virus malware protection at the traditional consumer-level that you might be urged to install when you set up your new laptop; this is software code-centric protection and security intelligence with functions focused on areas like compliance, security analytics and cloud SIEM technologies.

The companies say they have worked together to offer out-of-the-box integration with key AWS security services, plus integrations with cloud-based SaaS and on-premises security services. This is all about creating technology that can perform deep internal inspection of cloud services and eliminate security blind spots across multi-cloud, hybrid (and indeed poly-cloud) environments.

Both Sumo Logic and AWS talk about contextualized data intelligence and, in this case, contextualized threat data. That doesnt mean context surrounding where the source of malware might emanate from, in this case it is contextualized cloud reports to highlight where an enterprises weak spots might be based upon:

For companies that dont have an internal or outsourced Security Operations Center (SOC), the offering will provide security monitoring, visibility and alerting. For organizations modernizing their SOC, the offering will in provide cross-source threat correlation with machine learning detection, automation and orchestration.

Sumo Logic VP Greg Martin claims that his company provides a comprehensive approach to quickly uncover activity that can indicate an early-stage computing event (that could be related to a risk) by identifying spikes and anomalies based on the organizations baseline of historical data.

Unrestricted by the processing power of on-premises hardware, Sumo Logics Cloud SIEM solution addresses the challenges facing todays security practitioners by providing full visibility across their IT, application development and security ecosystem, automating the manual work for security analysts, saving them time and enabling them to be more effective by focusing on higher-value security functions, said Martin and team.

This is another one of those would the CEO actually question this element of company operations in the board meeting questions. Captains of industry may not be familiar with the term security posture today, but as companies spanning a multiplicity of cloud computing supply pipes start to realize the breadth of their own IT footprint, it is arguably among the workable buzzphrases for any self-respecting business manager going forward.

Companies today take in huge amounts of data from their cloud services and applications, because everything tells you what it is doing in immense detail. Its what you can do with that data, is where things get interesting. Security is one area, but this data can be applied to operations and for improving software development. When your business process is digital, you can see the impact of your decisions in real-time, whether that is a software update or IT redesign or something like a marketing project, said Christian Beedgen, chief technology officer at Sumo Logic.

Organizations should know that data coming in can be consolidated and at this point, everyone can make use of it for their own understanding. Beedgen suggests that the smartest companies use this as an opportunity to consolidate their tools and build up their observability approaches across the whole business, as this stops duplication and saves on cost.

The long term trend here is companies have lots of tools gathering data and this can lead to problems around the volume of data coming in over time. Data obviously has a cost to store, so having multiple copies of the same data will lead to more expense and Beedgen reminds us that this can lead to financial challenges

Companies thinking about their data strategy using cloud providers might feel like resources are infinitely scalable, but the reality is that the organization will ultimately run out of budget. Consolidating and cutting duplicate data in different tools reduces that problem, keeps the business on the right side of the data cost curve and ensures that you can carry on innovating, concluded Beedgen.

Many of the resources inside our technology stacks are being exposed (in a positive way) to the benefits of automation and Artificial Intelligence (AI), so that factor needs to be resonated in our cloud operations management layer. In the case of this story, it is. Sumo Logic and AWS have brought together Machine Learning (ML)-driven detection, integrated threat intelligence correlation and deep search-based investigation to look into systems and provide insight. That insight is surfaced through rich data visualization (graphs, dashboards and data speedometers, basically) so that any business manager can see whats happening.

Once we can say we have sorted out our cloud security posture we can perhaps all straighten our backs and work out whether we need a lumbar support pillow. Until then, sit up straight and keep an eye on the multi-hybrid-poly cloud engine room.

Go here to read the rest:

Inside The Multi-Hybrid-Poly Cloud Workshop - Forbes

Amazon's cloud division has rolled out AWS for Health, a set of services and partner solutions for healthcare, genomics and biopharma.

Amazon says the portfolio of solutions will help to accelerate innovation from "benchtop to bedside" as the tech giant pushes further into the healthcare and life sciences markets.

AWS for Health provides "proven and easily accessible capabilities" that help organizations increase the pace of innovation, unlock the potential of health data, and develop more personalized approaches to therapeutic development and care, Patrick Combes, director, head of technology - healthcare and life sciences at Amazon Web Services (AWS), wrote in a blog post.

The services within AWS for Health can help healthcarecustomers create holistic electronic health records to help clinicians make data-driven care plans and power population genomic initiatives to expand precision medicine accessibility, as two examples, Combes wrote.

Microsoft,Google and Amazon Web Services (AWS) are all pushing deeper into healthcare in a battle to provide cloud computing and data storage technologyto hospitals.

RELATED:Amazon launches new tool to help healthcare organizations standardize data

As part of AWS for Health, Amazon announced last week the general availability of Amazon HealthLake, a tool to make it easier for healthcare organizations to search and analyze data.

Healthcare organizations are creating vast volumes of patient information every day, and the majority of this data is unstructured, such as clinical notes, lab reports, insurance claims, medical images, recorded conversations and graphs.

This data must be aggregated, structured and normalized before the data can provide customers with valuable insights, and that is often atime-consuming and error-prone process.

Amazon HealthcareLake,which was announced in December, is a HIPAA-eligible service for healthcare and life sciences organizations that aggregates an organizations complete data across various silos and disparate formats into a centralized AWSdata lake and automatically normalizes this information using machine learning, according to the tech giant.

The service identifies each piece of clinical information, tags and indexes events in a timeline view with standardized labels so it can be easily searched, and structures all of the data into the Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) industry-standard format for a complete view of the health of individual patients and entire populations.

More and more of our customers in the healthcare and life sciences space are looking to organize and make sense of their reams of data, but are finding this process challenging and cumbersome, saidSwami Sivasubramanian, vice president ofAmazonMachine Learning for AWS in a statement

We builtAmazonHealthLake to remove this heavy lifting for healthcare organizations so they can transform health data in the cloud in minutes and begin analyzing that information securely at scale. Alongside AWS for Health, were excited about howAmazonHealthLake can help medical providers, health insurers, and pharmaceutical companies provide patients and populations with data-driven, personalized, and predictive care," he said.

RELATED:Microsoft makes big play for healthcare cloud business in competition with Google, Amazon

Rush University Medical Center says that even in preview mode, Amazon HealthLake was an integral part of its COVID-19 response.

"It has enabled us to quickly store disparate data from multiple data sources in FHIR format in order to gain critical insights into the care of COVID-19 patients, said Dr.Bala Hota, vice president and chief analytics officer atRush University Medical Center.

Rush also used HealthLakes natural language processing to extract information such as medication, diagnosis, and previous conditions from doctors clinical notesto examine barriers to healthcare access.

"With the HealthLake API, we created a mobile app to provide insights into care gaps across theWest SideofChicago.AmazonHealthLake enables us to accelerate insights and drive decisions faster to better serve theChicagocommunity," Hota said.

Other organizations using Amazon HealthLake include Cortica, InterSystems andRedox.

Personalized medicine company CureMatch uses the analytics toolsto turn molecular profile data from the EHR into FHIR format to run advanced analytics and algorithms to assist oncologists, according to Philippe Faurie, vice president of professional services at CureMatch.

Continued here:

Amazon rolls out AWS For Health cloud services for healthcare, genomics and biopharma - FierceHealthcare

Are you looking for some great investments where you can park your money and not worry about it for years? Some of the most exciting opportunities right now are in cannabis and cloud computing stocks. Those industries are getting bigger and the companies that dominate in those areas will be sure to produce some great returns for your portfolio.

Even if you aren't sure which individual stocks to invest in, that doesn't mean you can't get exposure to those industries. There are plenty of exchange-traded funds (ETFs) out there that can give you a great group of stocks to hold without needing to commit to any particular company. Two funds that you will definitely want to consider today are the AdvisorShares Pure US Cannabis ETF(NYSEMKT:MSOS) and the WisdomTree Cloud Computing Fund (NASDAQ:WCLD).

Image source: Getty Images.

The growth opportunities in the cannabis sector are undeniable; analysts from MarketsAndMarkets project that the global market will be worth more than $90 billion in just five years and it will grow at a compound annual rate of 28%.

And it wouldn't be surprising if those estimates were upgraded given the rate at which cannabis legalization has been moving. In 2021, several states have passed legislation, including New York, New Mexico, Connecticut, and New Jersey. A total of 19 states have passed legislation to permit recreational marijuana and more than 30 states already allow marijuana for medical use. There is even hope that marijuana will be legal at the federal level soon, with Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer recently introducing draft legislation that could pave the way to legalization. Even though it may be a long shot, if it is able to pass, it could open up the floodgates and instantly make the marijuana industry a scorching-hot one to invest in.

The Pure US Cannabis ETF, which launched in September 2020, is an excellent way to gain exposure to the U.S. pot market specifically. Big names like Green Thumb Industries,Curaleaf Holdings, andTrulieve Cannabis each account for more than 10% of the portfolio's total weight. And those are the heavyweights, the pot stocks that are industry leaders and that look to be safe bets to do well. Last year, they combined for more than $1.7 billion in revenue -- accounting for about 10% of the $17.5 billion U.S. pot market.

They will definitely surge in value once legalization takes place if for no other reason than it will allow them to trade on major exchanges like the New York Stock Exchange or Nasdaq, where they aren't permitted today because they are plant-touching businesses and thus operating in violation of federal U.S. laws.

Tech is always a popular place to invest, and there are many different areas you can focus on. One that stands out right now is cloud computing, especially as more businesses do their work in the cloud and workers want to be more remote than ever before. According to ResearchAndMarkets, the cloud computing market will more than double in size by 2025 to $832 billion, growing at a compound annual rate of 17.5%.

The WisdomTree Cloud Computing Fund is another great example of an ETF you can hold while you take advantage of a high-growth sector. Unlike the cannabis ETF, this one is much more diverse simply because there are more companies in the industry -- the largest holding is Asana, a work management platform that accounts for just over 3% of the fund's total weight. Other notable names in the fund are Adobe andDocuSign, two businesses that provide professionals with cloud-based software that they can use anywhere. The top 10 holdings in the fund account for just under one-quarter of its total weight, giving you some excellent diversification.

One of the downsides of that much diversification is that it can lead to underwhelming numbers. But that hasn't been the case for the Cloud Computing Fund, as its 39% returns over the past 12 months are higher than the S&P 500's gains of 35%. If you aren't sure which tech stock will be the big winner from the rising popularity of cloud computing, investing in this ETF can be a safe way to ensure long-term returns that could continue to outperform the markets.

This article represents the opinion of the writer, who may disagree with the official recommendation position of a Motley Fool premium advisory service. Were motley! Questioning an investing thesis -- even one of our own -- helps us all think critically about investing and make decisions that help us become smarter, happier, and richer.

The rest is here:

2 Unstoppable Trends to Invest in for the Long Term - The Motley Fool

Airlines operating aircraft powered by Pratt & Whitney engines, such as the PW1100-GM pictured here, now have access to Teledyne's cloud-based avionics data service under a new partnership between the two OEMs. (Pratt & Whitney)

Pratt & Whitneys new avionics cloud computing partnership will open the aircraft engine manufacturers analytics platform EngineWise to information captured by Teledyne Controls flight data acquisition systems about the health and status of nearly every airframe part and component on a per-flight basis.

The partnership will allow operators using Pratt & Whitney's EngineWise data analytics platform to start feeding their data centers with all of the parameters captured by onboard Quick Access Recorders (QAR), such as Teledynes GroundLink Comm+ wireless cellular connectivity system. By giving EngineWise users access to this data through Teledynes Data Delivery Solution (DDS) Pratt customers now have instant cloud-based post-flight access to the same amount of raw data that is captured by the Flight Data Recorder in a clean actionable format.

Teledyne describes DDS as a cloud computing service that can redact or mask certain data parameters that airlines prefer not to share with OEMs.

"Pratt & Whitneys Geared Turbofan (GTF) engine incorporates significantly more sensors than prior engines and can generate millions of data points per engine per flight, providing significant improvements in avoiding unplanned maintenance. These parameters, when collected via devices on board over the full flight, allow us to develop a very thorough picture of the health of the engine," Joe Sylvestro, vice president of Global Aftermarket Operations at Pratt & Whitney told Avionics International.

EngineWise was first launched by the company in 2017 featuring a suite of web-based software tools that analyze engine data in search of anomalies or trends captured by the sensors mentioned by Sylvestro. As an example, an airline maintenance team can use the system for a sensor configured to monitor how much fuel is required to generate a set amount of thrust or power. As that engine completes more flights, they may assume that the engine's efficiency is degrading if the amount of fuel required to generate that set amount of power continues to increase over time.

An example of the type of engine data parameters and analysis EngineWise provides for operators. (Pratt & Whitney)

"The collaboration with Teledyne Controls will enhance engine health management services offered to Pratt & Whitney-powered aircraft, focused on Teledyne Controls global customers. Teledynes Data Delivery Solution is one option for collecting full-flight data. In any case, our goal is to minimize the data management burden on the customer," Sylvestro said. "With regard to [Aircraft Communications Addressing and Reporting System] ACARS, we continue to use snapshot data to provide customers with analytics services while full-flight data-enabled services capture data throughout the flight."

Teledyne's quick access recorders and GroundLink Comm+ cellular system enable real-time data streaming, cabin and flight crew connectivity, wireless distribution of field-loadable software parts and automated flight operational quality assurance (FOQA) data downloads. The technology is used by more than 200 commercial airlines on more than 14,000 aircraft.

Mike Penta, vice president of Sales and Marketing at Teledyne Controls told Avionics that the partnership opens up access to QAR data for Pratt & Whitney operators, and removes some of the past barriers that have prevented such access.

"Pratt & Whitney operators can now feed EngineWise with any aircraft data captured by Teledyne avionics onboard, predominately digitally distributed by the Teledyne GroundLink Comm+ system. As to what new type of data, it is specific to each airline as some are more e-enabled than others," Penta said. "Teledyne can assist in enabling full flight data to supply the EngineWise platform everything that it needs, in a timely manner, at a more precise, higher resolution level than traditional data feeds such as ACARS messages. Being able to also enable additional data points within the aircraft data frame was part of the attraction of working directly with Teledyne."

According to Penta, airlines operating aircraft powered by Pratt & Whitney engines that do not feature GroundLink Comm+ can still take advantage of the new partnership and DDS without modifying their existing avionics systems.

"Even for airlines who do not have GroundLink Comm+ units onboard but are still using sneaker net to take data from their aircraft data acquisition units, we can still make it work. It technically does not have to be exclusively Teledyne hardware. Teledyne DDS is agnostic and can work with other QAR systems as well as other various OEMs," Penta said.

Penta said other OEMs have also expressed interest in what he describes as an "instant data lake" that can be enabled once their native analytics platforms are digitally linked to Teledyne's flight data cloud computing analytics service. Thus far, the expanded version of EngineWise is being used by one European low-cost carrier and an airline based in the Middle East, both of which requested to remain unnamed.

Read this article:

Pratt & Whitney Engine Operators Get Increased Control Over Flight Data Shared with OEMs - Aviation Today

Key Takeaways

This article summarizes how we currently see the "cloud computing and DevOps" space, which focuses on fundamental infrastructure and operational patterns, the realization of patterns in technology frameworks, and the design processes and skills that a software architect or engineer must cultivate.

Both InfoQ and the QCon conference series focus on topics that we believe fall into the "innovator, early adopter, and early majority stages" of the diffusion of technology, as defined in Geoffrey Moores book "Crossing the Chasm." What we try to do is identify ideas that fit into what Moore referred to as the early market, where "the customer base is made up of technology enthusiasts and visionaries who are looking to get ahead of either an opportunity or a looming problem." We are also looking for ideas that are likely to "cross the chasm" to broader adoption. It is perhaps worth saying, in this context, that a technology's exact position on the adoption curve can vary. For example, microservices are widely adopted amongst Bay Area companies but maybe less widely adopted and perhaps less appropriate elsewhere.

In this edition of the cloud computing and DevOps trend report, we believe that hybrid cloud approaches have evolved to become more "cloud native". In late 2019 all the three prominent public cloud vendors brought new hybrid cloud products to the market and over the last two years they have continued to invest heavily in them - Google with Anthos, Microsoft with the Azure Arc and Stack offerings, AWS with Outposts, and more recently, Amazon ECS Anywhere. For enterprises, for instance, it is about not only bringing workloads to the Cloud but also running them on-premise or both, or on multiple clouds. Thus, managing the infrastructure for the workloads centrally with a service like Arc or Anthos delivers value. Furthermore, these products allow enterprises to extend their platform.

There has been increasing adoption (and technological evolution) in the space of "edge cloud" and "edge computing", and so we believe this topic should move to the early adopter stage of our graph. There is a fair amount of traction here from specific vendor tools, such as Cloudflare Workers, Fastlys Compute@Edge, and Amazon CloudFronts Lambda@Edge.

The participants of this report have also identified an emerging trend named "no copy data sharing." This can be seen in data management services such as Snowflake, which do not copy or move data, yet enable users to share data at its source. Another example is the Azure Synapse service, which supports no-copy data sharing from Azure Cosmos DB via Azure Synapse Link. The recently announced Delta Sharing open standard is also contributing to the upward trajectory of the no-copy data sharing tendency.

Observability continues to be a popular topic within DevOps and SRE. While most organizations have begun to implement some form of observability stack, as Holly Cummins notes, the term is overloaded and therefore should be broken down into its various components. Ideas such as centralized log aggregation are currently commonplace in most organizations, however, logs only make up one of the three pillars of observability.

The increasingly popular OpenTelemetry project provides a consistent framework for capturing not just logs, but also traces and metrics. The consistency provided by adopting a single framework helps with capturing data across hybrid and heterogeneous environments and also monitoring tooling. The use of service level objectives (SLOs) as a tool to communicate the desired outcome of monitoring and observability is also gaining popularity as seen with the first ever SLOConf earlier this year.

"DevOps for Data" has seen increasing adoption over the past year with the rise of both MLOps and DataOps. MLOps focuses on using DevOps style practices (such as CI and CD) to implement continuous training for machine learning models. Open source tooling and commercial services exist to help in this area, such as KubeFlow for deploying ML models on Kubernetes, and Amazon SageMaker Model Monitor for automating monitoring of ML models. DataOps looks to shorten the cycle time of data analytics by applying similar concepts used by DevOps teams to reduce their own cycle times.

In the people and organisational space of DevOps we have seen the Team Topologies book, from Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais, become the de facto reference for arranging teams within an organization to enable effective software delivery. Team Topologies describes four fundamental team types and three team interaction patterns, and dives into the responsibility boundaries of teams and how teams can communicate or interact with other teams.

There is also increasing focus on post-incident "blameless postmortems" in becoming more akin to "healthy retrospectives", from which the entire organisation can learn from. Key leaders in the computing domain of resilience engineering and the "Learning From Incidents" community have been influential in driving this discussion.

For context, here is what the topic graph looked like for the first half of 2019. The 2021 version is at the top of the article.

The following is a lightly edited copy of the corresponding internal chat log between several InfoQ cloud computing DevOps topic editors and InfoQ contributors, which provides more context for our recommended positioning on the adoption graph.

Lena Hall - Director, Large-Scale Systems @ Microsoft, who contributed the recent 'Can We Trust the Cloud Not to Fail?' and 'Evolution of Azure Synapse: Apache Spark 3.0, GPU Acceleration, Delta Lake, Dataverse Support' articles:

Moving to Early Majority

Moving to early adopters

New topics in early innovators

Furthermore, Hall discussed the evolution of the hybrid cloud model with InfoQ:

Cloud-Native Hybrid Approaches (e.g., Azure Arc, Google Anthos). In its traditional understanding, a hybrid cloud means using on-premises infrastructure for parts of the company's workloads and using the public cloud for other parts of it, where relevant. For example, a hybrid cloud strategy could mean running some applications in the cloud (e.g., serverless processing) and some applications on local infrastructure (e.g., business ERP system). The hybrid data approach could look as simple as storing backups of data in the cloud, or using more advanced cloud gateways and precisely-tuned data sync, caching, or movement patterns.

In the recent months and years, hybrid options have evolved beyond the traditional definition. They have expanded to enable the functionality of cloud services to run outside of the cloud, allowing for a much more seamless and smooth experience. We can think of the new cloud-native hybrid options as an extension of cloud services to our on-premises or multi-cloud environments. Azure Arc and Google Anthos are perfect examples. One of the ideal examples is Azure Arc. It allows the running of Azure SQL Managed Instance and Azure Database for PostgreSQL Hyperscale in hybrid and multi-cloud environments. It also provides the management of applications consistently on-premises and in the cloud with Azure App Service, Functions, Logic Apps, and more. Another fantastic example is Google Anthos powering BigQuery Omni, enabling its query engine to be deployed and managed on multiple clouds.

It's important to note that these new cloud-native hybrid approaches like Azure Arc and Google Anthos are different from more standard hybrid cloud approaches, such as Azure Stack or Amazon Outposts. To understand it more clearly, both Azure Arc and Azure Stack offer hybrid solutions (and can be used together). Azure Stack is a hardware approach to run Azure environment on-premises. On the other hand, Azure Arc is a software approach treating the on-premises and multi-cloud resources, consisting of virtual or physical servers and Kubernetes clusters, as something natively managed and accessible by Azure Resource Manager. Similarly, we can make a distinction between Google Anthos/Azure Arc and AWS Outposts. Even though AWS Outposts extends the AWS cloud platform to on-premises, it has specific hardware requirements and only works with hardware devices designed and supported by AWS.

Hall also shared an interesting insight into the emerging trend of "no copy data sharing":

No Copy Data Sharing (Snowflake,Google BigQuery, Azure Synapse, Presto/Starburst, etc.)There are quite a few approaches to working with data when the same data needs to be accessed or shared between different services or different environments. There might be a variety of scenarios when it comes to data sharing.One scenario could be storing the same data (or parts of the same data) in several services running in the same cloud. Often, the compute and storage of such services aren't independent. To work with the data from another service, we'd have to copy or move it.

In the emerging no-copy data-sharing approach, and with separation of compute and storage, it's not necessary to move or replicate the data to be able to access it from different services. As a result, it enables better scalability, cost-efficiency, and direct access to data. As an example, this can be enabled by features such as Azure Synapse Link for Azure Cosmos DB, BigQuery external data sources, or Snowflake data sharing.

Recently announced Delta Sharing is an open standard, contributing to the upward trajectory of no-copy data sharing tendency. According to its website, "Delta Sharing is the industry's first open protocol for secure data sharing, making it simple to share data with other organizations regardless of which computing platforms they use."

Holly Cummins, an innovation leader in IBM Corporate Strategy who has spent several years as a consultant in the IBM Garage, shared and contributed the "Cloud-Native Is about Culture, Not Container" talk and article shared with InfoQ:

Wow, some things in tech change so fast, and some hardly change at all. Most of the introduction of the 2019 DevOps and Cloud InfoQ Trends Report feels like it could have been written now.

I don't think there's been any progress on undoing the confusion between continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD) tooling and CI/CD practices, and I don't think there's been progress on adopting CI and CD practices.

One thing which seems to be missing in the discussion is observability. Like "AIOps", it's overloaded and buzz-wordy, but it feels a bit like how "cloud-native" was in 2018. So if your product is anywhere remotely in this space, you have to throw in the word 'observability.' Then other people will point out that it's not really observability because observability means something distinct, and then there's an extensive discussion. 🙂

In the chart itself, breaking it down into things like "centralized log aggregation" seems wise because then it avoids the argument, but it would be worth mentioning in the discussion. Another subcategory to include might be OpenTelemetry, in the innovator section.

I feel like service meshes have slipped out of the conversation a bit.

FinOps should be in the innovator section. A related topic is cloud cost optimization. There's an exciting conversation started by James Governor from the RedMonk team "Shifting cost optimisation left: Spotify Backstage Cost Insights" where he makes a distinction between FinOps (real-time information flow for cost analysis, aimed at finance team) and "shifting cloud cost optimization left" (aimed at engineering team).

Sustainability accounting is another innovator category. Again, it's very early - I can't think of many products with enough maturity in this area - but the conversations are happening, and I think it's coming.

I think DevOps for data and ML at the edge have moved to early adopters. DevOps for Data has two subcategories, MLOps and DataOps.

I'd say site reliability engineering (SRE) is now the early majority. I'm seeing a lot of banks adopting it.

I see a lot of conversation around GitOps, but I'm not sure that's translating into implementation in prod, or at least not enough to push it to the early majority. Likewise, I feel like momentum around ChatOps has slowed, and it hasn't pushed into Early Majority.

Renato Losio, Cloud architect, remote work enthusiast, and speaker:

Jared Ruckle, Cloud Editor @ InfoQ; Product Marketing @HashiCorp:

Changes in the Innovator bucket

Changes in the Early Adopter bucket

Changes in the Early Majority bucket

Aditya Kulkarni, Blogger, Reader, and Iteration Manager at Tenerity:

Moving to Early Majority

Moving to early adopters

New topics in early innovators

Steef-Jan Wiggers, Technical Integration Architect at HSO and Microsoft Azure MVP:

Moving to Early Majority

New topics in early innovators

Daniel Byrant, Director of DevRel @ Ambassador Labs | InfoQ News Manager | QCon PC:

Innovators

Early Adopters

Early Majority

Late Majority

Helen Beal, DevOps speaker, writer, and strategic advisor:

1)

2)

Rupert Field, Delivery Lead @Duffle-bag Consulting and DevOps Editor @InfoQ:

Shaaron A Alvares, Editor at InfoQ for DevOps, Culture & Methods | Agile Coach

Is Continuous Verification contained in "Shift left on Sec/InfoSec"?

Add to Innovators: Sociotechnical architecture DevOps value stream management platforms Developer Velocity (or it can be contained in DevEx?)

Add to Innovators or to Early Adopters: Low Code No Code (LCNC) Hybrid Cloud

Move: AIOps and MLOps move to Early Adopters

Matt Campbell, Lead Editor, DevOps | Engineering Director @ D2L

Observability practices and tooling continue to mature. I think we should be looking at splitting the topic of observability into some newer sub-topics such as OpenTelemetry and service level objectives (SLOs). As noted by others, the logging portion of the three pillars of observability is a relatively well-adopted piece. Monitoring of metrics is probably close to the same level of adoption at this point so I'd say EM for that. The tracing pillar of observability is still a less adopted portion and there are new advancements recently, especially with the more widespread adoption of OpenTelemetry.

SLOs as a tool for communicating outcomes and goals have started to see a resurgence with the recent SLOConf leading the way. I expect to see the various observability platforms start to add SLO-creation and tracking tooling soon. I would put this in late innovator/early EA.

Security continues to be a hot topic as more and more high-profile attacks make the news. While infrastructure as code is probably within EM or later, tooling and techniques to automate IaC vulnerability scanning are not as well utilized (maybe EA). Newer approaches such as Policy as Code (as promoted by Open Policy Agent (OPA)) and remote access management tooling (such as HashiCorp's Boundary) are pushing forward identity as code and privacy as code, so these are probably within the innovator space. These trends are a continuation of the "shift left for security" approach or the newer DevSecOps ideas. With the continued push for early security practices I think we will see more tools and processes introduced in the upcoming year.

The InfoQ editorial team is built by recruiting and training expert practitioners to write news items and articles, and to analyze current and future trends. Apply to become an editor or to contribute articles and get involved with the conversation.

Lena Hall - Director of Engineering: Big Data at Microsoft. She is leading a team and technical strategy for product improvement efforts across Big Data services at Microsoft. Lena is the driver behind engineering initiatives and strategies to advance, facilitate and push forward further acceleration of cloud services. Lena has more than 10 years of experience in solution architecture and software engineering with a focus on distributed cloud programming, real-time system design, highly scalable and performant systems, big data analysis, data science, functional programming, and machine learning. Previously, she was a Senior Software Engineer at Microsoft Research.

Holly Cummins - Innovation Leader, Corporate Strategy SPEED @IBM and spent several years as a consultant in the IBM Garage. As part of the Garage, she delivers technology-enabled innovation to clients across various industries, from banking to catering to retail to NGOs. Holly is an Oracle Java Champion, IBM Q Ambassador, and JavaOne Rock Star. She co-authored Manning's Enterprise OSGi in Action.

Renato Losio - Cloud architect, remote work enthusiast, speaker, and Cloud Editor @InfoQ. Renato has many years of experience as a software engineer, tech lead and cloud services specialist in Italy, UK, Portugal and Germany. He lives in Berlin and works remotely as principal cloud architect for Funambol. Location-based services and relational databases are his main working interests. He is a AWS Data Hero.

Jared Ruckle - Cloud Editor @ InfoQ; Product Marketing @HashiCorp. Jared has over 20 years experience in product marketing and product management. He has worked at numerous IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS companies, including VMware, Pivotal, and CenturyLink. Currently, Jared is director of product marketing at HashiCorp.

Aditya Kulkarni - Blogger, Reader, Iteration Manager at Tenerity, and DevOps Editor @InfoQ. Starting from the developer role, Aditya has evolved into the management domain. Having worked with organization on their journey of agility, Aditya has kept in touch with the technical side of things.

Steef-Jan Wiggers - Technical Integration Architect at HSO, Microsoft Azure MVP and Cloud Lead Editor @InfoQ. His current technical expertise focuses on integration platform implementations, Azure DevOps, and Azure Platform Solution Architectures. Steef-Jan is a board member of the Dutch Azure User Group, a regular speaker at conferences and user groups, writes for InfoQ, and Serverless Notes. Furthermore, Microsoft has recognized him as Microsoft Azure MVP for the past eleven years.

Daniel Byrant - DevRel @ Ambassador Labs | InfoQ News Manager | QCon PC. His current technical expertise focuses on DevOps tooling, cloud/container platforms and microservice implementations. Daniel is a leader within the London Java Community (LJC), contributes to several open source projects, writes for well-known technical websites such as InfoQ, O'Reilly, and DZone, and regularly presents at international conferences such as QCon, JavaOne, and Devoxx.

Helen Beal - DevOps speaker, writer, strategic advisor, and InfoQ DevOps Editor. Herfocus is on helping organisations optimise the flow from idea to value realisation through behavioural, interaction based and technology improvements.

Rupert Field - Delivery Lead @Duffle-bag Consulting and DevOps Editor @InfoQ. He loves learning about technology and helping people harness it to fix problems. His experience includes defining, designing and delivering technology team strategy. This includes delivering coaching, training, operating model design and business transformation.

Shaaron A Alvares - Editor at InfoQ for DevOps, Culture & Methods | Agile Coach. She is Certified Agile Leadership, Certified Agile Coach from the International Consortium for Agile, and Agile Certified Practitioner, with a global work experience in technology and organizational transformation. She introduced lean agile product and software development practices within various global Fortune 500 companies in Europe, such as BNP-Paribas, NYSE-Euronext, ALCOA Inc. and has led significant lean agile and DevOps practice adoptions and transformations at Amazon.com, Expedia, Microsoft, T-Mobile. Shaaron published her MPhil and PhD theses with the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS)

Matt Campbell - Lead Editor, DevOps | Engineering Director @ D2L, an education technology company, responsible for their Infrastructure and Cloud platform teams. His area of focus is DevOps and SRE and implementing these at enterprise scale. He also instructs programming courses with Conestoga College.

Read the rest here:

DevOps and Cloud InfoQ Trends Report - July 2021 - InfoQ.com

Cloud computing has been in the limelight since last year, aided by the worldwide adoption of remote working and learning. The significant increase in employee productivity and relatively lower overhead costs delivered by remote working structures have incentivized major businesses to adapt to these structures, which are underpinned by cloud computing technologies. A recent CNBC survey revealed that 45% of the companies are planning to adopt a hybrid working model in the second half of 2021.

Furthermore, the threatening Delta variant of COVID-19 is expected to further delay the reopening of offices, keeping fully remote or hybrid working structures as the norm in the coming months. This, coupled with the gradual 5G rollout, should drive spending on cloud services. Worldwide spending on public cloud services is expected to increase 23.1% year-over-year to $332.30 billion in 2021.

Given this backdrop, we think established cloud computing companies Alphabet Inc. (GOOGL), Salesforce.com, inc. (CRM) and Workday, Inc. (WDAY) could be ideal bets now.

Click here to check out our Cloud Computing Industry Report for 2021

Alphabet Inc. (GOOGL)

GOOGL is one of the most popular technology companies in the world. Ranked #9 on the Fortune 500 list, the company operates through three segmentsGoogle Services, Google Cloud, and Other Bets.

On July 8, GOOGL announced plans to acquire Japanese smartphone start-up, Pring. Valued at more than 20 billion ($181.66 million), the acquisition will help GOOGL gain access to the Japanese smartphone market.

GOOGLs cloud segment this month unveiled new solutions developed alongside AT&T, Inc. (T). Ts 5G solutions combined with Google Cloud technologies are expected to facilitate new customer experiences and business services, which should make it highly demanded.

On June 30, GOOGLs cloud services segment partnered with one of Belgiums largest retailers, Carrefour Belgium, to support the latters digital transformation. This demonstrated GOOGLs immense market reach in the cloud computing segment.

GOOGLs revenues increased 34% year-over-year to $55.31 billion in its fiscal first quarter, ended March 31. Its operating profit grew 106.1% from its year-ago value to $16.44 billion, while its net income improved 162.3% year-over-year to $17.93 billion. Its EPS increased 166.4% from its year-ago value to $26.29.

A $19.21 consensus EPS estimate for the fiscal second quarter (ended June 2021) represents an 89.6% improvement year-over-year. The company has an impressive earnings surprise history; it beat the Streets EPS estimates in each of the trailing four quarters. In addition, analysts expect its revenues to come in at $56.02 billion in the about-to-be-reported quarter, indicating a 46.3% rise from the same period last year. Over the past year, the stock has gained 63.63% to close Fridays trading session at $2,539.40.

GOOGLs POWR Ratings reflect this promising outlook. The stock has an overall B rating, which translates to Buy in our proprietary rating system. The POWR Ratings are calculated considering 118 different factors, with each factor weighted to an optimal degree.

GOOGL has an A grade for Sentiment, and B for quality. Of the 74 stocks in the Internet industry, it is ranked #1.

To see additional GOOGL ratings for Growth, Value, Momentum, and Stability, click here.

Salesforce.com, inc. (CRM)

CRM primarily develops customer relationship management-related cloud computing services. Its popular software includes Sales Cloud, Services Cloud, Marketing Cloud, and Customer 360 platform. The companys primary supply channels involve direct sales, systems integrators, and consulting firms.

On July 14, CRM launched a new industry-specific applicationAdvertising Sales Management for Media Cloud. It is designed to help companies manage their advertising revenues through a consolidated platform, thereby eliminating the hassles of managing multiple databases.

On June 29, CRM announced an offering of $8 billion of senior notes in multiple tranches. The company plans to use the offerings proceeds to fund its acquisition of Slack Technologies and finance its sustainability projects.

On June 23, CRM expanded its partnership with Amazon.com, Inc. (AMZN) to integrate CRM and Amazon Web Services (AWS) capabilities to develop and deploy new business applications that aid digital transformation. Regarding this, CRM Chair and CEO Marc Benioff said, This is a milestone partnership for the technology industry and one that will enable our customers to experience an even more powerful Salesforce Customer 360 and achieve a new level of success in their business.

In its fiscal first quarter, ended April 30, 2021, CRMs net sales increased 23% year-over-year to $5.96 billion. This can be attributed to a 21% rise in subscription and support revenues and a 47% rise in professional services and other revenues. Its gross profit stood at $4.41 billion, up 22.1% from its year-ago value. Its net income and EPS increased 373.7% and 354.5%, respectively, from the same period last year to $469 million and $0.50.

The Street expects CRMs revenues to rise 22.3% year-over-year to $26 billion in the current year. The companys EPS is expected to increase at a 10.1% CAGR per annum over the next five years. Furthermore, CRM beat the consensus EPS estimates in each of the trailing four quarters. Shares of CRM have gained 28.5% over the past year and 11.9% over the past six months.

CRM has an overall B rating, which equates to Buy in our POWR Ratings system. In addition, it has a B grade for Quality and Sentiment. CRM is ranked #25 of 132 stocks in the Software Application industry.

In total, we rate CRM on eight different levels. Beyond what weve stated above, we have also given CRM grades for Momentum, Value, Stability, and Growth. Click here to view all CRM ratings.

Workday, Inc.(WDAY)

WDAY enterprise delivers cloud applications mainly for financial and human capital management. It offers Workday Financial Management, Workday Human Capital Management, and Other Applications. The companys cloud computing software is highly demanded in the healthcare, financial and higher education industries.

On June 8, WDAY announced its plans to offer Workday Payroll for Australia and Germany. The rising demand for payroll across the EMEA and Asia-Pacific regions should boost WDAYs market reach substantially.

On July 14, WDAY inked a partnership with the countrys fifth-largest accounting firm (by revenues) RSM US LLP, to scale the latters rapidly growing business and improve customer satisfaction. This demonstrates WDAYs standing as a leading cloud financial management service provider.

WDAYs revenues increased 15.4% year-over-year to $1.18 billion in its fiscal first quarter ended April 30. This can be attributed to a 17% rise in subscription revenues over this period. Its operating cash flow increased 71.6% from the same period last year to $452.40 million.

Analysts expect WDAYs revenues to increase 16.5% in the current year and 18.1% next year. The companys EPS is expected to rise at a 16.3% CAGR over the next five years. Also, WDAY has an impressive earnings surprise history; it beat the Streets EPS estimates in each of the trailing four quarters. WDAY has gained 25.2% over the past year to close Fridays trading session at $227.53.

WDAYs strong fundamentals are reflected in its POWR Ratings. The stock has an overall B rating, which equates to Buy in our POWR Ratings system. WDAY has an A grade for Growth and a B for Sentiment. It is ranked #27 in the Software Application industry.

View additional WDAY ratings for Value, Momentum, Stability, and Quality here.

Click here to check out our Cloud Computing Industry Report for 2021

GOOGL shares were trading at $2,484.64 per share on Monday afternoon, down $54.76 (-2.16%). Year-to-date, GOOGL has gained 41.77%, versus a 13.80% rise in the benchmark S&P 500 index during the same period.

Aditi is an experienced content developer and financial writer who is passionate about helping investors understand the dos and don'ts of investing. She has a keen interest in the stock market and has a fundamental approach when analyzing equities. More...

See original here:

GOOGL: 3 Top Cloud Stocks to Buy This Summer. - StockNews.com