Business Technology Roundtable

During the course of the last twelve months the OpenStack community has advanced as more users of the leading open-source cloud technology have been reporting their progress -- with the help of their partners -- towards making a meaningful impact on their business goals and objectives. We've also learned how these progressive technology users are pioneering changes in their own organizations -- enabling them to become more competitive in the Global Networked Economy. The OpenStack Summit 2014 opened with a keynote on the first day of the conference featuring lessons learned from industry leading organizations that have already deployed these open cloud technologies. Each case study had multiple instances of OpenStack that have been applied for a variety of commercial application scenarios. Jonathan Bryce, the Executive Director of the Foundation, introduced the growing community of  OpenStack Superusers . Glenn Ferguson, Head of Private of Cloud Enablement at Wells Fargo Ba...

Verizon Communications is extending the range of its TelePresence offering to enable virtual face-to-face collaboration in more locations around the world, made possible by a new agreement with Tata Communications. The collaboration enables meetings to take place between Verizon's telepresence customers and any public or private telepresence room on the Tata Communications Global Meeting Exchange -- one of the broadest telepresence networks accessible today and a gateway to the company's public room network spanning 31 cities on five continents. This will supplement Verizon's telepresence offering powered by its expansive global Private Internet Protocol (IP) Network service. Similarly, Tata Communications telepresence customers can use Verizon's facilities to communicate with Verizon customers. Enterprise TelePresence replicates face-to-face interactions so realistically that it feels as though everyone is in the same room, even though they may be hundreds or t...

My conversation with Jonathan Nguyen-Duy, Director of Product Management for Verizon, ended up being very thought-provoking. We were supposed to talk about a new security offering, a backbone-based solution aimed at stopping Internet-based attacks even before they hit a company's network. (I'd spoken previously to Nguyen-Duy about Verizon's risk-correlation service .) Nguyen-Duy is a fount of knowledge about the changing landscape of international cybercriminals. Verizon is expanding its denial-of-service (DOS) detection and mitigation capabilities into eight network management centers serving 24 countries with new levels of scalability -- in part because of an increase in international cybercrime, according to Nguyen-Duy. "Our customers are telling us that the frequency and complexity of DOS attacks has grown. We're now seeing cyberattacks based on social and political activism. We're also seeing less sophisticated hackers getting access to attack methodologie...

Managed services provider Verizon Business has added an interesting twist to its security toolbox. Traditionally, managed security services are tactical: they monitor a network for potential attacks, using virus signatures and other definitions. Earlier this month, Verizon upgraded its customers' security capabilities with what it calls its " Risk-Correlation Service ," designed to add strategic insight to security. The RCS works with vulnerability scans -- either those it does for customers or those from vendors such as McAfee, Qualys, and others -- to determine where potential vulnerabilities exist. The service also documents your system to create a map of devices and the business processes that run on them. "It marries threat information with vulnerability information," says Jonathan Nguyen-Duy, Director of Product Management for Verizon. Calculating Risks The result is a Web-based scorecard that shows Verizon customers not only where potential problems exist...