Dana Gardner's BriefingsDirect

MuleSoft this week launched Mule iON SaaS Edition, providing a broad set of new tools and services for swift software-as-a-Service (SaaS) integration in the cloud, and lowering the barrier to SaaS adoption for SaaS providers and developers. The Mule iON integration platform as a service (iPaaS) connects across cloud-based applications and also connects SaaS to on-premise applications. MuleSoft's Anypoint technology for on-demand API connectivity eliminates the need for copious custom point-to-point code, said MuleSoft. [Disclosure: MuleSoft is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.] In recent commentary, Ross Mason, founder and CTO of Mulesoft, said, "The world today is moving at lightning speed to SaaS and cloud applications, and the idea of gaining competitive advantage through legacy enterprise applications is no longer relevant." I agree. Key differentiators l... (more)

Virtualization Simplifies Disaster Recovery

When Hurricane Ike struck Texas in 2008, it became the second costliest hurricane ever to make landfall in the U.S. It was also a wake-up call for Houston-based insurance wholesaler Myron Steves & Co., which was not struck directly but nonetheless realized its IT disaster recovery (DR) approach was woefully inadequate. Supporting some 3,000 independent insurance agencies in the Gulf Coast region, with many insured properties in that active hurricane zone, Myron Steves must have all it resources up and available, if and when severe storms strike. The next BriefingsDirect discussio... (more)

IT Investments Have Big Payoffs

The latest BriefingsDirect enterprise IT trends discussion surfaces some fascinating new findings from a recent survey on chief information officer (CIO)-level priorities. We uncover what distinguishes leaders from laggards among businesses, and identify which IT approaches and solutions are driving the most powerful business results these days. To help dig into the HP-sponsored, blind survey, explain what it means, and learn how these results can lead to establishing winning new IT strategies we're joined by Joel Dobbs, President and CEO of Compass Talent Management Group. He's... (more)

Fast Data Hits the Big Data Fast Lane

Of the 3 "V’s” of Big Data – volume, variety, velocity (we’d add "Value” as the 4th V) – velocity has been the unsung ‘V.’ With the spotlight on Hadoop, the popular image of Big Data is large petabyte data stores of unstructured data (which are the first two V’s). While Big Data has been thought of as large stores of data at rest, it can also be about data in motion. "Fast Data” refers to processes that require lower latencies than would otherwise be possible with optimized disk-based storage. Fast Data is not a single technology, but a spectrum of approaches that process data t... (more)

Strategic Approach to Disaster Recovery and Data Lifecycle Management

The latest BriefingsDirect case study discussion focuses on how business standards and compliance services provider SAI Global is benefiting from a strategic view of IT enabled disaster recovery (DR). Learn here how SAI Global has brought advanced backup and DR best practices into play for its users and customers. Examine too how this has not only provided business continuity assurance, but it has also provided beneficial data lifecycle management and virtualization efficiency improvement. Mark Iveli, IT System Engineer at SAI Global, based in Sydney, Australia, details on how s... (more)