Category Archives: SaaS
Cloud Integration Predictions – The Year in Review
For the past few years I’ve been posting my cloud integration predictions. It’s always interesting to look back to see what transpired and evaluate where I scored well and where I was off base. Here’s how I did in 2011: 2011 #Cloud Integration Predictions in Review. My 2012 cloud integration predictions centered around Data as a Service, Master Data Management, Business Intelligence and enterprise IT adoption of all flavors of cloud computing. Before I throw my hat into the 2013 predictions ring, here’s a review of 2012.
Data Security from the Inside—Out
Earlier this week I met with security leaders at some of the largest organizations in the San Francisco Bay Area. They highlighted disturbing trends, in addition to the increased incidence of breaches they see increased:
- Numbers of customer who want to do security audits of their company
- Number of RFPs in which information is required about data security
- Litigation from data security breaches— and occurrences of class action lawsuits—as opposed to regulatory fines driving concerns
So much attention has been placed on defending the perimeter that many organizations feel they are in an arms race. Part of the problem is that it’s not clear how effective the firewalls are. While firewalls may be a part of the solution, organizations are increasingly looking at how to make their applications bulletproof and centralize controls. One of the high risk areas are systems where people have more access than they need to.
For example, many organizations have created copies of production environments for test, development and training purposes. As a result this data can be completely exposed and the confidential aspects are at risk of being leaked intentionally or unintentionally. I spoke to a customer a couple of weeks ago who had tried to change the email addresses in their test database. But they missed a few. As a result, during a test run, they sent their customers emails. Their customers called back and asked what was going on. That was when we started talking to them about a masking solution that would permanently mask the data in these environments. In this way they would have the best data to test with and all sensitive details obliterated.
Another high risk area is with certain users, for example cloud administrators, who have access to all data in the clear. As a result, the administrators have access to account numbers and social security numbers that they don’t need in order to do their jobs. Here, masking these values would enable them to still see the passwords they need to do their jobs. But it would prevent the breach of the other confidential data.
Going back to the concerns the security leaders had, how do you prove to your customers that you have data security? Especially, if it’s difficult to prove the effectiveness of a firewall? This is where reports on what data was masked and what it was masked to comes in. Yes, you can pay for cyberinsurance to cover your losses for when you have a breach. But wouldn’t it be better to prevent the breaches in the first place and showing how you’ve done it? Try looking at the problem from the inside—out.
Informatica Advances Cloud Integration and Data Quality
Informatica Cloud Winter 2013 has arrived. This is the fourteenth release of the company’s award-winning family of cloud integration applications and integration platform as a service (iPaaS), which has now expanded to include Informatica Cloud Master Data Management (MDM). In this post I’ll provide an overview of the new cloud integration and cloud data quality capabilities. Be sure to register for a 30 day trial and/or attend the release webinar on Thursday to see Informatica Cloud in action.
#1View for Salesforce Customers – Introducing Cloud MDM from Informatica
Yesterday I attended Informatica’s first annual Cloud Connect conference in San Francisco, which was followed by a Dreamforce 2012 kick-off party sponsored by our partners Astada, Covisint, MicroStrategy and Zyme. It was a busy day, with a keynote from Juan Carlos Soto focused on the three pillars of our cloud computing product strategy, a deep-dive technical update and Ask the Experts stations for one-on-one interaction with product management. We also announced the winners of our 2012 Cloudy Awards! Congratulations to all of the winners! I’ll post some pictures next week. (more…)
Cloud Integration Templates – Past, Present and Future
Managing PowerCenter mappings and automating how to build them – it’s something that Naresh Govindaraj, Informatica Cloud’s Senior Director of Product Management, has spent a lot of time thinking about. After eight years in database and data warehousing roles at IBM, Naresh joined Informatica in 1998 to build and manage the metadata repository team. In 2004 he started focusing on data integration embeddability for the first time. Building out the PowerCenter Software Developer Kit (SDK) and the Java Mapping Framework (JMF) ultimately led him to create the concept of Cloud Integration Templates, which is now one of the pillars of Informatica’s integration platform as a service (iPaas) and the Summer 2012 release.
I sat down with Naresh to learn more about Cloud Integration Templates, where they came from and where he sees this innovation going. (more…)
Burning Man for the Cloud Crowd – #DF12 is Coming!
The 10th annual salesforce.com user conference is just around the corner. Ok, calling Dreamforce a user conference just doesn’t feel right to me. If you haven’t experienced it, I guess you could say it’s like Burning Man for the Cloud Crowd. Dreamforce is billed as the “The Cloud Computing Event of the Year.” In their words…“it’s social,” “it’s inspring,” “it’s innovative,” “it’s money,” “it’s breakthrough,” and “it’s red hot.” A lot of hype indeed, but when Marc Benioff is on his game the event always delivers.
If you’re planning on attending the 10th anniversary of Dreamforce in San Francisco on September 18th, I thought I’d share a few useful resources as well as point you to some of the activities the Informatica team has planned for the conference. If you haven’t registered yet, be sure to use our partner promo code for a discount: ECMINFMTCA. There are also free keynote passes available. (more…)
How Integration Platform-as-a-Service Impacts Cloud Adoption
Did you know that Forrester estimates in their 10 Cloud Predictions For 2012 blog post that on average organizations will be running more than 10 different cloud applications and that the public Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) market will hit $33 billion by the end of 2012?
However, in the same post, Forrester also acknowledged that SaaS adoption is led mainly by Customer Relationship Management (CRM), procurement, collaboration, and Human Capital Management (HCM) software and that all other software segments will “still have significantly lower SaaS adoption rates”. It’s not hard to see this in the market today, with cloud juggernaut salesforce.com leading the way in CRM, and Workday and SuccessFactors doing battle in HCM, for example. Forrester claims that amongst the lesser known software segments, Product Lifecycle Management (PLM), Business Intelligence (BI), and Supply Chain Management (SCM) will be the categories to break through as far as SaaS adoption is concerned, with approximately 25% of companies using these solutions by 2012. (more…)
Informatica Cloud Summer 2012 Release Advances Integration PaaS
Today we announced Informatica Cloud Summer 2012, the latest release of our cloud integration applications and integration platform as a service. With this release our continued focus is on building out the cloud platform, which is ideally suited for hybrid IT organizations seeking to keep up with the rapid pace of software-as-a-service (SaaS) application adoption, while ensuring the highest possible return on data – whether it’s cloud-based, social, mobile or on premises. This week and next we’ll be posting a series of articles that will focus on the growing recognition of the importance of data integration to cloud computing success as well as highlighting a few of the new features that will be available to all Informatica Cloud customers with the August upgrade. But to get started, here’s a brief overview of what’s new. (more…)
A Cloud Connector for Google’s Big Data Analytics
Today Informatica announced that we have joined Google’s Cloud Platform Partner Program, with the introduction of a true cloud-based connector for Google BigQuery. Taking advantage of the power of social media, Google made the announcement through their Developer Blog, noting that the new members of their partner program will, “make it much easier to automatically load data from a broad set of sources, as well as to analyze and visualize the data with spectacular dashboards. (more…)
Electronic Trading Systems Moving to the Cloud
More and more business applications are moving from the desktop to the cloud, and electronic trading applications are no different.
Over the last five or ten years, application vendors have established several advantages of running major applications, even mission-critical applications like salesforce.com, over the cloud.
These advantages include:
- Easier and smoother upgrades, which provides much better adaptability and agility in the face of changing market and business conditions, plus a better user experience,
- Better scalability, with newer technology advances, and
- Better portability across a wide array of device types, including smartphones and tablets (especially in the last 2-3 years).
Recent improvements in Web technology, such as HTML5 WebSockets, are helping to speed this transition along by providing several throughput and latency advantages over earlier iterations of Web technology, and even over native Windows applications. Now, application architects can freely choose the technology that provides a better path for growth, agility, and scalability, which is often a Cloud-based solution.
As I write this, a few of our customers who provide electronic trading solutions to their clients are making the strategic move to develop a next generation application based in the Cloud. The main driver for one customer was to be able to take on more clients more quickly and therefore grow the business faster by increasing marginal revenue and profitability. They found that the list of challenges with a thick desktop client to be just too big for growing the business as quickly as they wanted to — or needed to.
Messaging middleware, especially peer-to-peer solutions such as Informatica Ultra Messaging, can be a very important piece of a Cloud-based application. The peer-to-peer “nothing in the middle” model provides applications not just ultra-high performance (whether for high throughput or low latency), but also near-linear scalability, true 24×7 reliability and availability, and business and IT agility. These qualities tie directly to the advantages listed above.
Cloud-based applications, of course, must also contend with the Internet and all that comes with that: support for various browsers and platforms (and versions of each), scalability and bandwidth issues, and mobile devices like smartphones and tablets. New web technologies like HTML5 WebSockets from Kaazing are best positioned to take care of the path from server to the smartphone or tablet, and with JMS connectivity to Ultra Messaging on the back end, can provide a Cloud-based application with a lean, scalable and agile infrastructure, usually with less hardware.
For more, please see our 2011 Efficiency series (#1, #2, #3) on our Perspectives blog, or whitepapers such as Modern Messaging Middleware for Big Data in Motion or Enterprise Messaging Data for the Web.
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