SureSkills, in association with CME Group recently organised an unmissable event where SME's took attendees through three interactive presentations which included Phil Hearsum, ITSM Portfolio Manager for AXELOS, discussing how cloud computing is a disruptive innovation and what it means to IT organizations across the globe. Phil then explored the effect of the cloud on existing best practice frameworks such as ITIL and shared examples of how to adapt the existing framework. Next up was Bill Heffernan, CEO at SP3 Services, who took us through the facts about getting real business value from best practice. Last but not least was Ian Fitzgerald, Director of Cloud Platform Services at EMC. His session covered a real life case study and showed our audience what it really takes to implement your cloud strategy using best practice.

Over the years, we have seen a rise in both attack frequency and diversity of malicious software used. With increases in cloud incidents related to vulnerability scanning, web application attacks and brute force attacks, it is crucial for you to understand the types of threats potentially targeting you on the cloud so you can build a security-in-depth strategy to defend your environment from malicious attacks.

Are you responsible for your organisation’s Cloud security ? Is it at the forefront of your Cloud strategy? Have you assessed all the Cloud security options available to you?

A recent Cloud survey* found that 73 percent of respondents cited security concerns as the top challenge holding back cloud projects. Therefore companies need to put time and effort into fully investigating the many Cloud security options that are available to enable them to choose the right one to fit their chosen Cloud strategy

*Sixty-four percent of IT hiring managers rate certifications as having extremely high or high value in validating the skills and expertise of job candidates.

The national Tech Excellence Awards are Ireland’s principal badge of honour in the IT industry. The Awards will take place on May 14th in the Ballsbridge Hotel Dublin. These awards celebrate success in the country’s most vibrant sector, with an annual prize giving and Gala Dinner which has become the principal networking event in the technology business calendar.

Apache Hadoop provides a platform for building distributed systems for massive data storage and analysis using a large cluster of standard x86 based servers. It uses data replication across hosts and racks of hosts to protect against individual disk, host, and even rack failures. A job scheduler can be used to run multiple jobs of different sizes simultaneously, which helps to maintain a high level of resource utilisation. Given the built in reliability and workload consolidation features of Hadoop it might appear there is little need to virtualise it. However, there are several use cases that make virtualisation of this workload compelling: