…scrolls across the small 16:9 LCD protruding from my chest cavity.
In case you missed it, I’m from the future, where we all have become our own personal cloud. Some clouds you can actually see, like auras, but look somewhat like the classic Peanuts character Pigpen. We’ve all become walking antennas, routers, hotspots and hubs for all the other personal clouds. If auto-discovery is enabled, once you are in range of a ‘friend’ that you ‘like,’ a few beeps go off and they appear as an icon right in our own retina. You remember those smart phones that allowed users to tap the phones to send a picture or file? Now, all we have to do is crank up some digital audio and do a move called ‘The Bump.’ It’s based on some ancient 1970′s fad dance where participants would lightly ‘bump’ hips to the beat of the music. Today we use it to exchange data. A bump or two and you’ve shared your music library. A hip-check, your movie collection. Passing gas is kinda like your old computer’s recycle bin that you need to empty every so often.
I’ve been granted an incredible opportunity. Over the past three and a half months I have gotten to lead a real world large-scale delivery of a cloud solution. The final solution will be delivered as Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) to the customer via an on-premise managed service. While I have developed SaaS/PaaS (Platform-as-a-Service) solutions in the past, I was fortunate enough to have been able to build those on public cloud infrastructures. This has been a rare glimpse into the “making of the sausage” having to orchestrate everything from delivery of the hardware into the data center in four countries to testing and integration with the customer environment.
The lack of ability to achieve compliance in a cloud environment is one of the main factors slowing or stopping enterprises from migrating to the cloud. But cloud advantages, specifically the significant flexibility, push more and more organizations to open up to the cloud and demand cloud security assurances from their cloud and service providers. […]
Action for Children, one of Britain’s foremost charities has used a cloud hosting provider to create a hybrid cloud with which to support its website as well as applications, especially during peak surges in visitor numbers.
Action for Children’s Data Scientist, Darren Robertson explained how their data cloud arrangement worked.
Less sensitive data is kept with the cloud provider, whilst sensitive information (accounting for around 60% of total data) is kept separately on hard drives at the Action for Children HQ. The provider’s public cloud is used to host the website itself. This hybrid cloud arrangement also means that migrating the website is made much easier, should the need arise.
Robertson said that before using the cloud arrangement, hosting was done with their “web development agency, which was a shared environment of other charities.” This was problematic as it was expensive to change to a different agency …
A new research report from Symantec has warned against the use of ‘rogue’ clouds for best practice.
The survey, entitled ‘Avoiding the Hidden Costs of Cloud’, spoke to IT execs at 3,236 organisations across nearly 30 countries worldwide and found that there was a link between using rogue clouds and losing confidential information, resulting in hidden costs.
A rogue cloud is one which is unauthorised, or as Symantec put it, “business groups implementing public cloud applications that are not managed by or integrated into the company’s IT infrastructure.”
In a related blog post, Symantec came up with four tips to ensure avoiding these cost traps:
Focus cloud policies on information and people rather than technologies and platforms
Educate, monitor and enforce policies
Embrace platform-agnostic tools
Remove all duplicate data in the cloud
The results of the survey showed that rogue clouds were an issue in three quarters of …
Virtualization is spreading through the enterprise for a variety of mission-critical workloads. According to statistics from an August 2012 blog post on eginnovations.com, 59 percent of workloads are being virtualized. As we move forward into 2013, we need to decide how we will proceed with virtualization in order to remain effective and efficient.
As many organizations ready themselves to make the transition to cloud, they find that they are not prepared to meet the demands of virtualization infrastructure. As a result of this discovery, they will begin assessing the current state of their IT, make firm decisions regarding where their IT plan should be and begin to implement their plans for the year around virtualization.
If you’ve been following our blog series for any length of time, you already know that “the cloud”, in the form of Windows Azure, is becoming an option for IT organizations in which to extend their datacenters. And believe it or not, this includes the ability to create an Active Directory domain controller in the cloud and have it be in just another site in your directory services.
On second thought: Believe it. Today in part 20 of our “31 Days of Servers in the Cloud” series, Keith Mayer (teammate and friend with an awesome blog) gives us the rundown on how to configure this very thing.
What if you could make informed decisions on critical business issues by leveraging insights from the volume, velocity and variety of structured and unstructured data?
Register for January’s TechTalk, and you’ll discover how to combine the big data processing capabilities of IBM InfoSphere® BigInsights™ with the self-service business intelligence reporting of IBM Cognos® to create one powerful analytics solution.
Join us on Tuesday, January 22, 2013 at 11:00 am EST and find out how this combination of business tools gives organizations a powerful solution to translate large amounts of data into valuable, actionable insights and offers benefits.
The article I’m writing for part 13 our “31 Days of Servers in the Cloud” series involves using App Controller to create a virtual machine. But to do this, you first need to connect and associate App Controller (a component of System Center 2012) with your Windows Azure subscription.
So in today’s Part 12, as a preliminary document for part 13, in this article I’m going to show you how to connect App Controller to your Windows Azure account.
To make this happen, you first have to have a management certificate in place. This makes up the bulk of the complexity involved. It must be a management certificate that has a key length of at least 2048 bits and resides in the Personal certificate store.
EMC said Tuesday that it means to offer its cloud-based online file-sharing service Syncplicity, acquired last May, with its Isilon and Atmos widgetry so customers can store files as in the cloud as well as on-premise.
The stuff’s in beta.
It’s supposed to increase productivity, flexibility and ease of management, and reduce compliance risks.