The increasingly complex landscape of data management for enterprises has brought to light the need for tools to manage diverse platforms and provide overall management. These tools focus on efficient test data management; integration, lifecycle management, security, compliance, and storage optimization.

The delivery of secure and compliant data for the purposes of development, testing, and analysis is realized through data masking. It is used by enterprises to anonymize sensitive data, obfuscate real-time data to prevent unauthorized access, and control how data appears in reports. Data masking techniques irreversibly replace sensitive data with realistic but fictional information, ensuring the original data is protected. This helps organizations comply with privacy regulations, such as GDPR, CCPA, HIPAA, and PCI, and minimize the risk of data breaches. Additionally, data masking allows companies to safely share datasets with internal teams (developers, testers, and data scientists) and third parties and use data for non-production purposes without compromising the confidentiality of sensitive information.

Among notable players in the test data management market are Delphix and IBM Optim, each with unique capabilities and features. This report analyzes the annual cost of ownership of these two leading solutions in a typical midsize enterprise, defined in this report as an organization with between $50 million and $1 billion in annual revenues and/or 100 to 1,000 employees.

We also provide insight into the functionality, ease of use, and overall performance of Delphix and IBM Optim. This is accomplished through a series of tests that examine each category from the user perspective. The cumulative score at the end of each test was used to rank the two systems. By shedding light on these aspects, the report will aid informed decision-making for those considering implementing these test data management solutions.

We analyzed labor costs for the deployment, configuration, and expected typical midsize enterprise usage for both IBM Optim and Delphix in the context of data provisioning management and data masking. Labor and Infrastructure costs favored Delphix by 31%. Further, Delphix averages a licensing cost of 20% less than IBM Optim.

We determined that for the equivalent usage (consisting of typical deployment, provisioning, and masking activities), IBM Optim would result in labor and infrastructure costs of $109,300 compared to $75,164 for Delphix over the first year (one setup), a difference of 31%.

Again, these figures reflect our findings for a midsize enterprise no larger than 1,000 employees and $1 billion in annual revenue. In our analysis, the cost differential between Delphix and IBM Optim widens considerably—even exponentially—in large enterprise scenarios, where implementations grow and utilize more test data management functions like connecting to more application sources, executing hyperscale masking, and implementing continuous data.

The post TCO for Data Masking and TDM Solutions appeared first on Gigaom.

As the demand for agile development grows due to digital modernization, organizations are turning to software development kits (SDKs) to build real-time customer engagement solutions. These SDKs enable businesses to quickly and efficiently interact with their customers in real-time, providing personalized experiences and building trust and loyalty.

Live, multi-participant audio/video SDKs are a type of software that enables multiple users to communicate with each other in real-time using audio and video. These SDKs provide functionality for online meetings, webinars, and video conferencing, as well as activities like employee training and customer support. They typically provide capabilities like screen sharing, file sharing, and text chat. They are used to develop enterprise applications that require video interaction in real-time and are cloud-hosted platforms offered by service providers.

The decision to invest in live, multi-participant audio/video application functionality is typically influenced by key factors, including time to value and total cost of ownership (TCO). We implemented the same enterprise-applicable application using two industry-leading solutions—Zoom and Jitsi.

This benchmark report provides insight into how well each product supports enterprise applications requiring real-time customer engagement. We capture time to value by assessing the steps involved in initial setup, scaled deployment, and production integration, and we assess TCO by evaluating both software and labor costs associated with a deployment. The benchmark can also be used to determine the implementation steps for each solution.

The post Video SDK Benchmark Comparison appeared first on Gigaom.

Many organizations find that one aspect of this digital transformation—procurement—has not changed. It often still takes several pre-sales meetings, days or even weeks of waiting for estimates and quotes, potential negotiations, and finally, a review of agreements and additional approvals before moving from the selection of a product or solution to the integration and usage phase. This makes it more important for organizations to have visibility into the status of their procurement process and manage their cloud spend across all vendors to control costs and avoid surprises down the line.

Through cloud marketplaces, companies are aiming to change the procurement experience. The Microsoft commercial marketplace helps connect customers to thousands of solutions—many that are pre-configured to run on the Microsoft Azure cloud platform. It offers a wide range of products from leading software vendors, open source projects, and Microsoft products. Customers can find, try, purchase, deploy, and manage thousands of applications and services from a single catalog. The applications and services can be found by browsing or searching for them, and they can filter results by attributes such as software category or application type.

In this benchmark, we set out to test the value of the marketplace.

We used the marketplace to buy and deploy three well-known products and contrasted that experience with buying each service separately. We selected a public cloud cost-saving solution provided as a service, an event streaming platform, and an application delivery solution frequently used for its load balancing and web firewall capabilities.

Thousands of carefully chosen apps and services are arranged by category, workload, and industry in the marketplace, where you can find and assess them. Additionally, some apps offer free, time-limited trials so you can see if they’re right for you. Consolidating your marketplace transactions onto a single invoice through the Azure portal can help you save time and money. You can control spending across your company by using defined user roles and permissions.

The post Procurement Efficiency with the Microsoft Commercial Marketplace appeared first on Gigaom.

What a solution for large, high-performance data needs today is a parallel file system. These systems operate on a clustered basis to improve throughput and IOP performance for process workloads and may leverage object-based storage to allow for virtually unlimited scaling and resiliency. However, integrating a parallel file system into a complex production environment may require additional components and storage technologies to support data movement in and out of the HPC cluster. This creates more points of failure, bottlenecks, and architectural and operational complexity.

The WEKA Data Platform aims to mitigate these challenges by simplifying the HPC storage design and supporting workloads, both on-premises and in the public cloud. The WekaFS file system is at the core of the WEKA data platform and contains built-in storage tiering, snapshot and snap-to-object backup capabilities, file system cloning, encryption at rest and in-flight, and support for a host of storage protocols. Organizations looking for a parallel file system, object-based storage, or a high-performance storage option often look to the public cloud for guidance.

We benchmarked the usability, effort, and performance of the WEKA Data Platform against Amazon FSx for Lustre on AWS. In this hands-on benchmark, we found that WEKA provided comparable or superior usability and outperformed FSx for Lustre at similar capacities by up to 300% or more. On some of our tests, WekaFS IO latency was less than 30% that of FSx for Lustre. Our usability tests also found WEKA to be a mature and easily deployed and operated solution in AWS specifically.

The post Cloud Parallel File Systems appeared first on Gigaom.

Azure Stack HCI is a hybrid cloud solution that merges the power of the Azure control plane with hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) and enables organizations to advance digital modernization goals with cost-effective technology.

Hybrid cloud solutions play an integral role in the digital transformation of enterprise IT. Organizations that fail to leverage technology that aids in the transition of legacy, on-premises workloads into the cloud face multiple challenges:

• Multiple support models for both on-premises and public cloud infrastructure
• Mixed cost model overhead with CapEx infrastructure and cloud OpEx
• Added lifecycle and redundancy costs

Azure Stack HCI is an opportunity for organizations to keep high performance workloads or workloads tied to data sovereignty on-premises while using Azure’s control plane to administer and monitor those environments. Further, Azure Stack HCI supports Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) enabled by Azure Arc and Azure Virtual Desktop (AVD), which provide a very simple way to run these solutions on-premises.

Hybrid cloud management is only one facet of the Azure Stack HCI solution, however. Hyperconverged infrastructure provides benefits over traditional infrastructure deployments, including:

• Robust scalability
• Reliability
• Improved performance
• Simplified deployments and management
• Software-defined infrastructure and reduced infrastructure costs

A primary element of digital modernization for any organization is software-defined infrastructure (SDI) implementation. Aiding automation, resiliency, security, and redundancy, Azure Stack HCI offers software-defined networking as an available feature and software-defined storage as a core technology.

In our testing, Azure Stack HCI showed an advantage in each activity completed. This reflects the product’s advantage in providing the benefits of a unified infrastructure management across clouds for forward-looking IT organizations. Of particular note is the familiarity current administrators and engineers in the Microsoft Windows space will find with much of the tooling, leveraging existing resource expertise.

Our testing aligned numeric values to score the level of effort and skill needed to complete common activities in Azure Stack HCI compared to a typical IT environment without it. Azure Stack HCI needed fewer resources with fewer skill sets to accomplish the same work as current or legacy on-premises infrastructure administration. Additionally, Azure Stack HCI provides the only way to operate Azure Virtual Desktop on-premises and managed from the same portal as in-cloud deployments.

We hope this report is informative and helpful in reviewing the capabilities of Azure Stack HCI and presenting the time-to-value total cost of ownership (TCO).

The post Managing Microsoft Azure Arc-Enabled Infrastructure from the Azure Portal appeared first on Gigaom.