When it seems like every technology company in the world is throwing the term “Cloud Computing” around it’s refreshing when you can get past the 50,000 foot view of a solution and understand what is really happening. I’ve tried to create a walkthrough of building a cloud disaster recovery from scratch using a real product stack from EVault, a Seagate company.
Perhaps you’ve heard of this new technology floating around the internet called “Cloud Computing” and maybe, just maybe you’ve even thought about using this to satisfy some of your IT needs. Sarcasm aside, leveraging cloud computing services for disaster recovery is an example for how cloud computing can be applied to the business. EVault, a Seagate Company, has a product that helps you create an automated cloud based disaster recovery solution that includes the backup and recovery of your critical applications and data.
Monthly Archives: August 2012
Cloud Expo Silicon Valley: Are Enterprises Ready for Private SaaS & PaaS?
A dedicated SaaS and PaaS deployment model can support more sophisticated and multi-tiered business apps with highly customizable components. Enterprises are poised to run their key business apps in the cloud but today’s solutions are designed for simple and fixed stacks. Enterprise apps that are multi-tiered and multi-languages still require manual operations.
SaaS and PaaS have been gaining popularity in recent years. Why aren’t all enterprises ready to adopt them? The reason is that most enterprise apps don’t fit into standard SaaS and PaaS offerings due to the inflexibility of choosing components and lack of customization. As a result, thousands of enterprise apps are still running in their legacy environments, leading to inefficiency, lack of agility and higher cost.
The Rebirth of SOA on the Wings of SaaS and Cloud Computing
Service Oriented Architecture was hailed as the next major leap ahead in the ICT industry and was predicted by many to be as big a leap forward as that achieved with Object-Oriented software design patterns. For example, in 2006, Joseph Bih introduced SOA in a research article as an innovative new way to conduct e-business . While much published and promoted in the marketplace, SOA adoption has been the subject of significant controversy, not least of which is the publication of a landmark article by now Gartner Fellow Anne Thomas Manes in January 2009 in which SOA was declared “dead”. This publication examines the health of SOA as a relevant paradigm in the ICT industry three years after some market opinion leaders declared SOA dead.
Research and Markets: IBM IBM SmartCloud Workload Automation and TWS Fix Pack 1
On June 14, 2012, IBM released Fix Pack 1 (FP1) for Tivoli Workload Scheduler (TWS). On the same day, the company also launched SmartCloud Workload Automation (SCWA). SCWA combines TWS and TWS for Applications into one platform, belonging to IBM SmartCloud Foundation. At the same time, IBM announced a fundamental change of its pricing structure, away from its traditional resource-based approach and toward a per-job pricing model. This new usage-based pricing scheme was launched to make SCWA more attractive for today’s cloud-centric data center.
In this impact brief, Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) will evaluate the importance of TWS FP1, SCWA, and the new pricing model for the overall workload automation marketplace, as well as for the market for cloud platforms. For more details on IBM Tivoli SmartCloud’s ability to provide the necessary management capabilities for multi-hypervisor cloud deployments, please review EMA’s whitepaper on this topic.
For more information visit http://www.researchandmarkets.com/research/ltjk95/ibm_releases_ibm_s
Cloud Brings Foreign IT Spending to U.S.
U.S.-based corporations and government agencies have been shipping application development work to offshore IT services providers for years.
Now, thanks to cloud computing, foreign companies are starting to bring their business to providers of data center services located in this country, according to an article at ComputerWorld.com.
Case in point: Grupo Posadas, a hotel company in Mexico that relies on five data centers to support more than 17,000 guest rooms in over 100 hotels. Grupo Posadas IT personnel run three of those data centers. The other two are run by outsourcing partners.
By moving some operations to the cloud, the Posadas IT group will have more time to focus on developing mobile and social networking tools that could help the business grow, he added.
“Our IT strategy is aligned to our growth, and our growth means that we need to be flexible and agile,” he said. Cloud computing makes it possible to deploy new services in a matter of weeks. “That is the type of capability that we were lacking – that agility,” said Toro Bala.
Loggly to Exhibit at Cloud Expo Silicon Valley
SYS-CON Events announced today that Loggly, a San Francisco startup developing a cloud-based logging platform, will exhibit at SYS-CON’s 11th International Cloud Expo, which will take place on November 5–8, 2012, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
With over 2,500 customers, Loggly is the world’s most popular online log management service. It’s simple, scalable and fast. Growing online businesses rely on Loggly to simplify log management and investigate brewing issues and trends.
Cloud – Vision to Reality
Understanding the impact of factors such as security/compliance, application architecture, integration, the pattern of demand and operational maturity is crucial when performing a cloud feasibility assessment. Additionally, many organizations perceive cost-reduction as one of the primary benefits of adopting a cloud hosting model. In practice however, this is not always an accurate assumption. There are nuances to the financial analysis: public cloud computing is not necessarily cheaper than traditional dedicated hosting. Furthermore, there are considerations around the impact on Total Cost of Ownership (TCO), transformation/migration costs and the position of an organization with the IT lifecycle.
During his general session, Rackspace VP Andrew Schroepfer explores each of these areas in order to illustrate some of the factors an organization needs to consider when contemplating a migration to the cloud.
Zscaler gets £24m VC fund for increased cloud security
Zscaler, the SaaS cloud security company, has for the first time received venture capital investment to the tune of £24 million ($38m), mainly from Lightspeed Venture Partners.
The San Jose startup was traditionally funded internally, but according to Zscaler the money will be used to “further accelerate its go-to-market strategy, and further develop its cloud security offering with a high emphasis on mobility”.
In other words: it’s not because Zscaler needs the cash, more upgrading what it already has.
And according to CEO Jay Chaudhry, it represents a shift in company policy.
“To date, we have resisted outside investment despite inquiries from top-tier investors,” he said, adding: “Our new strategic partners share our vision and are committed to helping Zscaler build a long-lasting business”.
Zscaler’s security solution revolves around a unified SCG (Secure Cloud Gateway) and famously requires no hardware or software to enforce multiple security policies. As …
FFIEC’s Recognition of Cloud Security Advantages
With the endorsement by the Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council (FFIEC), smaller financial institutions which a beholden to many compliance audits and security issues can now explore the possibility of outsourcing security features from the cloud. Now these organizations can get the same level of security afforded by the major banks.
Google BigQuery Gets Two New Features
As of this week, Google BigQuery is offering Big Data developers new ways to work with data by adding two new features. Introduced in limited preview in November 2011 and made publicly available May 1, 2012, BigQuery is Google’s chosen way to “bring Big Data analytics to all businesses via the cloud.”