Archivo mensual: enero 2013

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How cloud generates seismic waves across the economics of IT

By Kai Gray, VP of Operations at Carbonite

I feel like tectonic plates are shifting beneath the IT world. I’ve been struggling to put my finger on what it is that is making me feel this way, but slowly things have started to come into focus. These are my thoughts on how cloud computing has forever changed the economics of IT by shifting the balance of power.

The cloud has fundamentally changed business models; it has shifted time-to-market, entry points and who can do what. These byproducts of massive elasticity are wrapped up in an even greater evolutionary change that is occurring right now: The cloud is having a pronounced impact on the supply chain, which will amount to a tidal wave of changes in the near-term that will cause huge pain for some and spawn incredible innovation and wealth for others. As I see it, the cloud has …

Cloud computing

Guest Post: A Wrinkle in the IT Universe

By Kai Gray, VP of Operations at Carbonite

I feel like tectonic plates are shifting beneath the IT world. I’ve been struggling to put my finger on what it is that is making me feel this way, but slowly things have started to come into focus. These are my thoughts on how cloud computing has forever changed the economics of IT by shifting the balance of power.

The cloud has fundamentally changed business models; it has shifted time-to-market, entry points and who can do what. These byproducts of massive elasticity are wrapped up in an even greater evolutionary change that is occurring right now: The cloud is having a pronounced impact on the supply chain, which will amount to a tidal wave of changes in the near-term that will cause huge pain for some and spawn incredible innovation and wealth for others. As I see it, the cloud has started a chain of events that will change our industry forever:

1) Big IT used to rule the datacenter. Not long ago, large infrastructure companies were at the heart of IT. The EMCs, Dells, Ciscos, HPs and IBMs were responsible for designing, sourcing, supplying and configuring the hardware that was behind nearly all of the computing and storage power in the world. Every server closest was packed full of name-brand equipment and the datacenter was no different. A quick tour of any datacenter would – and still will – showcase the wares of these behemoths of the IT world. These companies developed sophisticated supply and sales channels that produced great margins businesses built on some very good product. This included the OEMs and ODMs that produced bent metal to the VARs and distributors who then sold their finish products. Think of DeBeers, the diamond mine owner and distributor. What are the differences between a company like HP and DeBeers? Not very much, but the cloud began to change all that.

2) Cloud Computing. Slowly we got introduced to the notion of cloud computing. We started using products that put the resource away from us, and (slowly) we became comfortable with not needing to touch the hardware. Our email “lived” somewhere else, our backups “lived” somewhere else and our computing cycles “lived” somewhere else. With each incremental step, our comfort levels rose until it stopped being a question and turned into an expectation. This process set off a dramatic shift in supply chain economics.

3) Supply Chain Economics. The confluence of massive demand coupled with near-free products (driven by a need to expand customer acquisition) changed how people had to think about infrastructure. All of a sudden, cloud providers had to think about infrastructure in terms of true scalability. This meant acquiring and managing massive amounts of infrastructure at the lowest possible cost. This was/is fundamentally different from the way the HPs and Dells and Ciscos thought about the world. All of a sudden, those providers were unable to address the needs of this new market in an effective way. This isn’t to say that the big IT companies can’t, just that it’s hard for them. It’s hard to accept shrinking margin and “openness.”  The people brave enough to promote such wild ideas are branded as heretics and accused of rocking the boat (even as the boat is sinking). Eventually the economic and scale requirements forced cloud providers to tackle the supply chain and go direct.

4) Going Direct. As cloud providers begin to develop strong supply chain relationships and build up their competencies around hardware engineering and logistics, they begin to become more ingrained with the ODMs (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Original_design_manufacturer) and other primary suppliers. Huge initiatives came into existence from the likes of Amazon, Google and Facebook that are focused on driving down the cost of everything. For example, Google began working directly with Intel and AMD to develop custom chipsets that allow them to run at efficiency levels never before seen, and Facebook started the Open Compute Project that seeks to open-source design schematics that were once locked in vaults.

In short, the supply chain envelope gets pushed by anyone focused on cost and large-scale.

…and here it gets interesting.

Cloud providers now account for more supplier revenue than the Big IT companies. Or, maybe better stated — cloud providers account for more hope of revenue (HoR) than Big IT. So, what does that mean? That means that the Big IT companies no longer receive the biggest discounts available from the suppliers. The biggest discounts are going to the end users and the low-margin companies built solely on servicing the infrastructure needs of cloud providers. This means that Big IT is at even more of a competitive disadvantage than they already were. The cycle is now in full swing. If you think this isn’t what is happening, just look at HP and Dell right now. They don’t know how to interact with a huge set of end users without caving in their margins and cannibalizing their existing businesses. Some will choose to amputate while others will go down kicking, but margin declines and openness of information will take their toll with excruciating pain.

What comes of all this? I don’t know. But here are my observations:

1) Access to the commodity providers (ODMs and suppliers) is relatively closed. To be at all interesting to ODMs and suppliers you have to be doing things at enough volume that it is worthwhile for them to engage with you. That will change. The commodity suppliers will learn how to work in different markets but there will be huge opportunity for companies that help them get there. When access to ODMs and direct suppliers gets opened up to traditional Enterprise companies so they can truly and easily take advantage of commodity hardware through direct access to suppliers then, as they say, goodnight.

2) Companies that provide some basic interfaces between the suppliers and the small(er) consumers will do extremely well. For me, this means configuration management of some sort, but it could be anything that helps accelerate the linkage between supplier and end-user . The day will come when small IT shops have direct access to suppliers and are able to custom-build hardware in same way that huge cloud providers do today. Some might argue that there is no need for small shops to do this — that they can use other cloud providers, that it’s too time consuming to do it on their own, and that their needs are not unique enough to support such a relationship. Yes, yes, and yes… for right now. Make it easy for companies to realize the cost and management efficiencies of direct supplier access and I don’t know of anyone that wouldn’t take you up on that. Maybe this is the evolution of the “private cloud” concept but all I know is that, right now, the “private cloud” talk is being dominated by the Big IT folks so the conflict of interest is too great.

3) It’s all about the network. I don’t think the network is being addressed in the same way as other infrastructure components. I almost never hear about commodity “networks,” yet I constantly hear about commodity “hardware.” I’m not sure why. Maybe Cisco and Juniper and the other network providers are good at deflecting or maybe it’s too hard of a problem to be solved or maybe the cost isn’t a focal point (yet). Whatever the reason, I think this is a huge problem/opportunity. Without the network, everything else can just go away. Period. The entire conversation driving commodity-whatever is predicated around delivering lots of data to people at very low-cost. The same rules that drive commoditization need to be applied to the network and right now I only know of 1 or 2 huge companies that are even thinking in these terms.

There are always multiple themes in play at any given time that, when looking back, we summarize as change. People say that the Internet changed everything. And, before that, the PC changed everything. What we’re actually describing is a series of changes that happened over a period of time that have the cumulative effect of making us say, “How did we ever do X without Y?” I believe that the commoditization of infrastructure is just one theme among the change that will be described as Cloud Computing. I contend, however, the day is almost upon us when everybody, from giant companies to the SMB, will say, “Why did we ever buy anything but custom hardware directly from the manufacturer?”

This post originally appeared on kaigray.com.  It does not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of GreenPages Technology Solutions.

To Learn more about GreenPages Cloud Computing Practice click here.

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Don’t Stick Your Head in the Sand, Create a Proactive Security Strategy

The lack of a proactive security strategy is much like an ostrich putting its head in the sand. It is a matter of when, not if attacks will happen. As enterprise systems are exposed to substantial risk from data loss, theft, or manipulation, a proactive unified approach deployed and managed from the cloud can provide a better balance of data leakage prevention, protection of IP assets, maintenance of compliance standards versus cost/resource responsibility.
In business, data is currency. It is the oil that keeps the commercial engine in motion and databases are the digital banks that store and retrieve this valuable information. And, according to IDC, data is doubling every two years. But as the overall amount of data grows, so does the amount of sensitive and regulated data. All this data stored by enterprises requires high levels of security. Presently (again, according to IDC) only about a quarter of that data is being properly protected now. Like all currency, data must be protected.

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Enterprise Mobility, Cloud Computing, BYOD and Unified Communication

Analysis and insight on the famous four buzzwords in the IT world… Enterprise Mobility, Cloud Computing, BYOD and Unified Communication; how they complement, assist and disrupt each other; and the potential impact of the underlying forces in action on their future….
Cloud computing is providing organizations with low-cost applications and storage, making it easier to manage the growing amount of information. Increased adoption of cloud-based systems (IaaS, SaaS, PaaS and everything else) in the enterprise will pave a way for a faster pace of adoption and acceptance of the cloud-based back end for mobile devices. With increased use of smartphones, tablets in enterprise (BlackBerry, Nexus, Surface, etc.), increased acceptance of BYOD, more and more business information and data will be moved outside the firewall. The trend will fuel the use of cloud infrastructure for mobile applications, and platform and infrastructure including storage. It’s a no-brainer. Private mobile cloud, private mobile app stores, standalone enterprise class mobile app stores, etc., will start taking shape. The mobile app and platform ecosystem will evolve.The growth will, however, also depend on the ability of SaaS and PaaS vendors to facelift their applications and platforms for the mobile devices.

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AlienVault, AlienVault Unified Security Management, Amazon, Amazon AWS, AV-USM, OSSIM, Security engineering

AlienVault Unified Security Provides Security Visibility for Amazon EC2

AlienVault today announced its latest 4.1 release, which aims to resolve the biggest challenges associated with traditional SIEM solutions including cost, complexity and difficult deployments. AlienVault Unified Security Management (AV-USM) platform 4.1 simplifies and speeds SIEM deployments and provides intelligent security incident response guidance. AV-USM 4.1 also extends AlienVault’s best-of-breed security monitoring capabilities to Amazon EC2 to enable greater control over hybrid environments.

“Lack of security visibility and control is a primary concern when businesses move workloads to the cloud,” said Russ Spitler, VP of Product Management at AlienVault. “Traditional SIEM solutions are extremely limited in their ability to monitor cloud environments, leaving companies with siloed assets and glaring holes in their security risk posture. By enabling the AV-USM platform to monitor Amazon EC2, AlienVault customers can lower their costs, optimize their IT environments and get security wherever they need it to be, without sacrificing visibility in their own private datacenters or the public cloud.”

New features in the AlienVault Unified Security Management platform 4.1 include:

  • Support for Amazon EC2: “Instant-on” essential security
    capabilities match the elasticity of the EC2 cloud environment and
    enable unified security monitoring whether assets are in the cloud or
    data center.
  • Auto-Deploy: Automatically identifies potential data sources
    upon deployment with integrated discovery capabilities and removes the
    “guesswork” common with traditional SIEM deployments.
  • Dynamic Incident Response Templates: Extends SIEM functionality
    past the alert by providing customized, contextually relevant
    workflow-driven response procedures so that analysts know exactly what
    to do next.
  • Suricata IDS Profile: Provides an alternative to the SNORT IDS
    engine with enhanced threat detection, analysis and performance.

Based on the open source project OSSIM, the AV-USM platform combines more than 30 of the best security technologies and provides security analysts with five essential security capabilities including asset detection, vulnerability assessment, threat detection, behavioral monitoring and security intelligence capabilities in a single, unified solution and management console. The AlienVault Open Threat Exchange™ is the largest community-sourced threat database and intelligence feed, and is built into the AV-USM platform and OSSIM to provide security analysts with real-time collaborative defense.

“Since our business is completely built on IaaS providers, we need to find a way to get reliable security visibility in this environment,” said Fredrick Lee, Lead Security Engineer for Twilio. “A lot of traditional security solutions fall short when facing the challenges of deploying in the cloud. AlienVault USM provides a great way to deploy the security capabilities I find essential – IDS, vulnerability assessment, SIEM – quickly and completely.”

AlienVault has also launched a new documentation portal, the AlienVault Repository of Knowledge (ARK), which complements the support forum and provides access to interactive assets, product documents and how-to videos for the larger OSSIM community.

The latest version of the AlienVault Unified Security Management platform 4.1 is available now.

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How location is crucial to cloud data security

Anyone who has ever dealt in real estate—either buying a house, renting, or just living with someone in the industry—has heard the mantra «location, location, location.» As it turns out, location matters in the cloud, too. In particular, if you work for a regional or global company, you’ll find that certain governments, regional political entities (eg. the EU), and industries impose restrictions on where specific types of data can physically reside.

These jurisdictions apply regulations that protect individual and corporate data privacy pertaining to their citizens, public entities, or private sector firms. The most sensitive data of which, Personally Identifiable Information (PII), can be used to identify, locate, or contact specific individuals. Typically, the governance and compliance requirements that they specify require one or more of the following:

  • PII and other data must remain physically resident within the jurisdiction.
  • PII and other data must be protected from …
GoGrid, Intellectual Property, SOASTA, United States Patent and Trademark Office

SOASTA Patents Cross-Cloud Grid Provisioning

SOASTA, Inc. today announced that the United States Patent and Trademark Office has issued SOASTA a patent for Cross-Cloud Grid Provisioning, U.S. Patent No. 8,341,462. The technology, which SOASTA invented in 2008, enables SOASTA and its customers to realistically simulate mobile and web traffic by deploying thousands of servers across different cloud providers simultaneously. Cross-Cloud Grid Provisioning is part of SOASTA’s platform to ensure the performance and reliability of mobile apps and websites for companies and organizations like NASA, the London 2012 Olympics, Microsoft, Netflix, Intuit, and American Girl.

“SOASTA was one of the first companies in 2008 to deliver cloud computing as a service,” said Tom Lounibos, SOASTA CEO. “We knew it was critical for our customer to quickly simulate mobile and web traffic anywhere in the world to reliably test their online properties. SOASTA’s engineering team responded by developing and designing innovative technology to automate the difficult task of manually provisioning across different clouds. Now our customers and employees can easily set up and tear down huge cloud grids on-demand, deploying thousands of servers in minutes.”

Before Cross-Cloud Grid Provisioning, a lack of servers constrained performance testing. Even today, setting up servers in the cloud can take many hours. However, with Cross-Cloud Grid Provisioning, SOASTA’s Global Test Cloud is now able to leverage more than 500,000 servers in 60 global locations running on 20 providers, including Amazon, Rackspace, IBM, Microsoft, and GoGrid. Setup takes minutes – even for the largest tests.

“Cloud computing depends on rapid deployment and on-demand access,” said Melinda Ballou, Program Director for IDC’s Application Life-Cycle Management research. “Workloads like load and performance testing that can depend on a large number of variegated servers driving traffic from different locations are a logical application for cloud computing. Grid provisioning technology like SOASTA’s can provide immediate access to these load servers across environments to help with the problems users face when trying to utilize different cloud platforms for testing.”

“As the largest born-on-the-Internet apparel eCommerce company in the US, it is critical for our web applications to perform to our customer expectations, no matter where they are located,” said Michael Hart, Chief Technology Officer at Bonobos. “This latest SOASTA patent is unique in the cloud computing industry, allowing fast, scalable access to over 20 major public cloud providers to ensure that web applications like ours perform to their maximum capacity.”

applications, APS, APS Partners, Cloud Services, Hosting, Parallels Summit, Software as a service

Just providing best- of – breed is no longer good enough

By John Zanni, Vice President, Marketing and Alliances, Parallels

 

In this ever changing cloud environment, service providers are telling us that whenever they think they have a handle on what SMBs want, SMBs indicate their “wants” are expanding. What this means is that service providers cannot linger on what was a key service last year. SMBs are constantly trying to grow their business and furthering their understanding of their customers, so as their customers branch out into new territories whether accounting, health care, entertainment, retail (you get the picture), SMBs will look to service providers to be nimble enough to accommodate those developments with cloud offerings they can use – and use with ease. In fact, best-of-breed is no longer as relevant or as meaningful as are specificity and ease of use.

 

Luckily for everyone, need generates innovation and development. There is a burgeoning of cloud services applications for a world of vertical markets, and many SMBs are looking for the application that specifically serves their needs rather than the most well-known or most often used applications.

 

From open source applications to complex solutions, through Application Packaging Standards, ISVs can create any applications that are needed or can be invented. (You can learn more about APS at appstandards.org.) Of note, this is an open standard, and Parallels does not need to approve an application for it to become available through APS.

 

There are a number of examples of such offerings in the Parallels APS catalogue, including:

  • ·         MoySklad – a Russian business that produces a contact resource management and accounting service
  • ·         SpamExperts – an Anti-virus/anti-spam/archiving solution very popular throughout Europe
  • ·         BackupAgent – produces backup services for hosters and service providers and is popular in Europe and Asia.

 

Service Providers have access to these cloud services and applications and can easily enable them on Parallels Plesk Panel or Parallels Automation service providers; it then simply becomes a matter of marketing those applications to their customers with those particular requirements.   

 

For service providers looking for more information on how to grow their business through the bundling of new applications that live in the cloud, Parallels Summit 2013, Feb 4-6, at Caesars Palace, Las Vegas is the place to be. Hundreds of ISVs with be demonstrating their services. There will be technical, developer, and business tracks on how to enable and promote applications in the cloud along with best practices on working with Parallels products that push your business up the ladder. Be there to experience and assess what you could use for your customers.

 

AppExchange, Customer Relationship Management, Salesforce AppExchange, salesforce.com, SpringCM

AppExtremes’ Conga Composer Adds HTML Email Capabilities, Cloud Storage to AppExchange

AppExtremes, Inc., developers of the Conga Suite, today announced availability of their Conga Composer Winter ’13 release which includes HTML email capabilities, tight integration with SpringCM™ content cloud services platform, and support for the PerspecSys™ cloud data security solution and the CipherCloud™ cloud information protection solution.

HTML email output capabilities complement Conga Composer’s extensive output formats (Microsoft Word®, Excel®, PowerPoint® and Adobe Acrobat PDF®) enabling presentation of data from multiple related Salesforce objects and lists in the body of an HTML email message. This key capability may be used alone, or in combination with file-based template options that generate email attachments. This further expands the power of Conga Composer to create and distribute sophisticated documents, reports and presentations to recipients both inside and outside an organization.

“We have leveraged the HTML Email Template functionality to generate weekly, scheduled, comprehensive deal updates for key internal recipients. This functionality lets us present far more detailed content than would otherwise be possible in a simple, easy to assemble manner,” said David Braidman, Senior Manager, Sales Systems & Tools for ServiceSource. “Conga Composer has become a key member of our sales operations team allowing us to generate countless documents across our entire enterprise.”

The Conga Composer Winter ’13 release also adds tight integration with SpringCM empowering Composer customers to distribute final output to SpringCM from within Salesforce. This gives joint customers one-click access to all their content as well as powerful workflow for putting content to work.

AppExtremes’ continued commitment to the highest data security standards has driven the integration with ISV technology partners CipherCloud and PerspecSys. The added support for these leading cloud security and information protection solutions enables Conga Composer to merge sensitive data into documents, while allowing for the data to remain encrypted or tokenized at rest and in flight. Using these gateways empowers organizations to keep control of their sensitive business data in real-time.

“As Conga Composer continues to grow in popularity globally and within organizations we are continually looking for ways to expand its capabilities to meet our clients’ increasing needs,” said Michael Markham, AppExtremes CTO. “The HTML email functionality and ISV technology partner integrations play key roles in extending our position as a leading provider of document generation and reporting solutions on the Salesforce AppExchange.”

Conga Composer is a document generation and reporting solution on the AppExchange. Conga Composer makes it possible for users and administrators to be more productive and serves as the backbone for nearly any operation or process by enabling them to:

  • Create sophisticated documents using any data in just a few clicks
  • Distribute content to anyone, anywhere, any way they like
  • Automate operations with powerful workflow, batch operations and
    scheduling.

 

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The IT Talent Shift: Preparing Your Enterprise IT Talent for the Cloud

One of the cloud’s biggest draws is the capability to virtualize computing resources, allowing it to be consumed with the click of a mouse. But behind that simple click is an enormous infrastructure challenge that has recently been cited as a major cause for slower enterprise adoption. Enterprises can better prepare for this shift and take full advantage of future computing benefits. Between architecture design and migration planning, the road can be long, so what do you do with your talent?
In this General Session at Cloud Expo Silicon Valley, Lisa Larson, VP of Enterprise Technical Sales for Rackspace, shows how you can best prepare your IT talent for this seismic shift in computing.

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