Blog – Page 2 – Accelerate your business through cloud technology

10 11, 2020

Databases and History Maintenance

By Jan|Categories: Best Practices, How to|Tags: data auditory, database audit|

Most companies have a large set of structured data. That is why it is important to keep a close eye on the constancy of that data, to make sure you have good backups and the data is always accurate, available and actionable.

One of the most frustrating questions a support engineer faces is “but can you tell us what was there before?” Many people seem to think that structured data also implies that you can tell what the data was at any point in time. As admin wizards, we pull our backups, restore them quickly on a new machine and indicate

06 11, 2020

Monitoring your cloud infrastructure

By Jan|Categories: Best Practices, How to|Tags: cloud infrastructure, cloud infrastructure monitoring|

While most cloud providers have a monitoring system in place, we prefer to run our own. The main reason is that if you drill down you want to be able to monitor the services that are relevant to your business. This often means you monitor very specific services or build your own plugins to scan whatever you find important.

What to use

There are many monitoring solutions out there that offer a multitude of plugins and add-ons. There are two aspects to consider. You need a collector and a system to get the information to the collector. Some systems have a server

27 10, 2020

A new perspective on cloud and data backups

By Jan|Categories: Best Practices, How to|Tags: cloud data backup|

Backing up critical business data is essential to ensuring business continuity in case of data breaches, system outages, cybercrime, or natural calamities.

While many service providers offer backup-as-a-service, we will not be talking about moving your personal data into the cloud.

In this paper, we will be focusing on your cloud infrastructure and how you can and must be taking care of backing up relevant data, as much as you would do when you run your own in-house infrastructure.

Noteworthy, the backup strategy differs based on the type of data. But how do we differentiate the data categories? A possible way to determine

22 10, 2020

Building a Proof of Concept in the IBM Cloud in virtually no time

By Jan|Categories: Best Practices, How to|Tags: cloud foundry proof of concept, how to build a cloud poc, ibm cloud poc|

This blog series demonstrates how easy it is to quickly build a small app based on a new or existing service and to run it as a service in the cloud.

We will build the proof-of-concept for a web app that enables people to better understand how written communication is perceived by their end-users and how to improve the tone of communication.

We’ve explored the options and we’ve selected the IBM Tone Analyzer service. Why this service? It leverages cognitive linguistic analysis to identify the tone of input content enabling users to refine and improve communications.

The diagram below describes the flow

19 10, 2020

How to build a secure proof-of-concept cloud web application

By Jan|Categories: Best Practices, Cloud Migration, How to|Tags: building secure cloud web app, cloud foundry web app, secure cloud web app|

In previous posts, we developed an application which uses IBM Tone Analyzer to analyze a given text and return tone scoring per sentence, then we improved it into an app which evaluates the content of a web page.

In this post, we will focus on security and logging. They are often considered irrelevant when it comes to proof-of-concept building to return like a boomerang when building a production-ready application. The framework we used for developing the web app provides some general security options that can easily be implemented. Addressing them from the beginning will help us prevent later security issues.

Always

15 10, 2020

How to Build a Cloud Foundry Application: Evaluating Content from an URL

By nxpcloud|Categories: Cloud Migration, How to|Tags: cloud foundry web app, cloud migration|

In previous posts, we developed a small web application that runs in the IBM Cloud, then we transformed it into an application that analyses given text and returns tone scoring per sentence. As the app output was rather rude, we also improved its look and feel.

Now let’s consider the situations when someone would like to evaluate the content of a web page. We will further enhance the application to evaluate the content of a web page from a given URL instead of analyzing copy-pasted text. Obviously, after all the hard work we’ve done, it would be great

07 10, 2020

Total Cost of Ownership Comparison Pre and Post IBM Cloud Migration

By Oana|Categories: Case Studies, Cloud Migration|Tags: cloud tco study, cloud total cost of owmership|

In a previous post we presented a cloud migration success story focusing on the challenges and the benefits of migrating in the cloud a project infrastructure which was hosted on a legacy Data Center that was going to be decommissioned.

Now we’ll take a closer look at the total cost of running the project on premises versus running it in the IBM Cloud.

Cloud TCO comparison pre and post cloud migration

TCO for running the project infrastructure on premises

To calculate the TCO for running the infrastructure on premises, we audited the existing infrastructure. It

02 10, 2020

How to Improve the Look and Feel of a Cloud Foundry Application

By Jan|Categories: Best Practices, Cloud Migration, How to|Tags: building a cloud app, how to build a cloud foundry app|

In previous posts, we developed a small web application that runs in the cloud then we transformed it into an application that analyses given text and returns tone scoring per sentence. As we’ve been focusing on the functionality, the extended application was returning a rude output.

With most people judging a web app based on its look and feel, we’ll turn our bare application into something more presentable.

For this, we will use bootstrap as a CSS base and Perl HTML::Template to improve the overall readability of the code.

1. Build the Page Library

We’ll start by building a small library that

29 09, 2020

How to Extend a Basic Cloud Foundry Application

By Jan|Categories: Best Practices, Cloud Migration, How to|Tags: building a cloud app, how to build a cloud foundry app|

In this article, we will extend the simple “Hello World” routine that we created last week to more formal use. The cloud comes with many features, so we picked one that is called “Tone Analyzer”.

The Tone Analyzer service leverages cognitive linguistic analysis to identify the tone of input content enabling users to refine and improve communications.

We will use this cloud service to transform our basic “Hello World” application into an application that analyzes given text and returns tone scoring per sentence.

Let’s find out how to extend our basic application to use the Tone Analyzer.

Getting the IBM Cloud “Tone

24 09, 2020

Cloud Migration Success Story

By Oana|Categories: Case Studies, Cloud Migration|Tags: cloud migration|

The Trademark Clearinghouse (TMCH) is the central repository for validated trademarks for the purpose of protecting brands in Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) new Generic top-level domains (gTLDs) program.

The Trademark Database (TMDB) is the central database of validated brands with the services to registries and Registrars about their validated marks. There is only one TMDB in the Trademark Clearinghouse Global System that concentrates the information about the “verified” Trademark records from the different TMCH Validation systems and organizations.

In the context of the projects’ infrastructure being hosted on a legacy Data Center that was going to be decommissioned (old infrastructure),