Last week at the ODVA Annual Conference--as part of ODVA’s announcement of a new energy initiative and white paper--Cisco’s Bryce Barnes roused a packed-house audience representing ODVA’s ~200 industrial and automation suppliers with a compelling speech on the immediate need for Optimization of Energy Usage (OEU™) in the Production domain. Energy consumption statistics for the industrial sector are staggering, most estimates suggesting half of the world’s total delivered energy, and that amount is projected to increase by 40% over the next 25 years. For Manufacturers, energy typically constitutes the first or second highest portion of product variable costs, and most manufacturing companies now report as part of their governance a sustainability strategy that is core to their overall business strategy. Furthermore, volatility of energy markets--closely linked to the stability of governments, international relations and policies--raises the risk profile for continuity of supply, production and satisfaction of customers. Optimizing energy consumption, minimizing energy costs and mitigating energy risks are clearly top of mind business imperatives for the Manufacturing CEO.
Mark Wylie discusses the importance of energy optimization to sustainable manufacturing operations. Check out Mark’s December blog on factory energy management.
Securing your network is a journey of ongoing vigilance to stay one step ahead of the latest threats, changing technologies.
There’s no such thing as a static network. Just as your company is evolving, your small business network is constantly changing—and your network security must be equally adaptable. Installing a firewall and anti-virus software is just the first step in keeping malicious traffic, hackers, and other security threats out of your network.
Security is a journey. You must continuously monitor your infrastructure so you can adjust to changes in your company’s business, changes in technology, and changes in employee behavior. It’s important to remember that any conversation about security doesn’t usually start with a security issue. It starts with your next business objective.
It is a common belief that a prolonged, nation-wide outage of communications networks would hit developed countries harder than developing countries. A study made by Scott Dynes et al. in 2006 has estimated losses for three segments of US economy if communications networks go down (see “Costs to the U.S. Economy of Information Infrastructure Failures: Estimates from Field Studies and Economic Data”, 2006 for details). The study highlighted three important areas of potential impact: electric, automobile, and oil refining. In a case of an outage affecting the first two segments, the study looked at losses if the Internet goes down. The study found that oil refining is not as dependent on the Internet, so the losses were estimated if their SCADA systems would become unavailable. Total losses for these three segments of US economy are estimated to be in a range of US $500 million for a 10-day outage.
Welcome to our government blog! I hope you will become an active participant and visitor to this community. Each week, we will explore various topics that are top of mind in government. I encourage you to share, comment, and probe so that we can have genuine discussions about what is happening in this ever-changing industry.
The experts on our team, who bring together decades of experience in advanced technologies and government know-how, will be blogging about cloud, cybersecurity, security, teleworking, innovations in government , and much more. If you have a topic of interest related to government and technology that you would like to discuss, please comment on this post. We’d love to hear from you!
Yesterday partners got to enjoy lively music during the General Session, but today, it was all about magic…and the cloud. Technology magician Marco Tempest treated partners to magic tricks using lights and a display, and he was followed onto the stage by Michael Capellas, CEO of VCE, and Padmasree Warrior, Cisco’s CTO. The theme was how to impact innovation, and both Michael and Padma highlighted the Cisco technologies that can help partners to differentiate.
Michael kicked off his talk with the statement that “cloud is not marketing hype,” but in fact will be a foundational part of the IT industry for the next three to five years. Michael sprinkled interesting facts throughout his presentation—for instance, did you know that 200 million users connect to Facebook via mobile devices? Or that 60 billion instant messages are sent per day? According to Michael, stats like those demonstrate that the consumer has already adopted the cloud, and it will spread into the enterprise.
This will open up a whole new world of possibilities for partners, as the world of applications that will be accessed by lots of different devices will change. Businesses will need new applications, location-based applets, new forms of integration, analytics and behavioral analysis, new development networks, development clouds, and software as a service. And all of those will be supported by the cloud. Michael concluded his presentation with his “Fearless Forecasts.” Watch out, partners: There will be a $50 billion converged infrastructure market in three years, and private cloud will lead enterprise and public sector opportunities. Read More »
