In this business, we talk quite a lot about the importance of disaster recovery plans and strategies. Today’s organizations face a multitude of choices when it comes to building a disaster recovery (DR) plan to protect their data and provide business continuity in the case of outages and other disasters. Available options include building out a second data center/disaster site, populating a colocation facility with redundant hardware, outsourcing recovery to a hosting provider or utilizing cloud compute and storage for an on-demand recovery strategy.
Archivo mensual: septiembre 2013
When Should We Switch to VPS
A middle-of-the-road solution between dedicated servers and shared hosting is a balance that makes a lot of sense for many businesses. Such a service exists and is called a virtual private server (or VPS). VPS offers webmasters a way to host their own server, but without the higher costs and complexities of dedicated servers. Here’s more about whether VPS strikes the right balance for you.
When a website uses shared hosting, it shares memory, hard drive space and CPU cycles with other sites on the same server. If one site gets hacked, there is a chance that other sites on the same server can get hacked. If one webmaster uses up all the server resources, other sites on the same server suffer. Some web hosts place hundreds of sites on the same server, so each site is at the mercy of other webmasters.
Before the breach: Cloud breach response best practices
One of the most difficult and damaging events that can occur for any business’ infrastructure is a breach. However, breaches occur when proper planning hasn’t gone into an infrastructure contingency plan.
There are several areas of consideration that need to be fully planned for before any IT strategy and data objectives can be balanced in the face of a potential breach: whether technical, HR, or compliance, have a response plan for each area is necessary before any problem ever arises.
In this post we will explore the technical considerations that go into breach planning. So where do you start in planning your cloud breach response?
Know where the data lives
Understanding what your data is, where it resides in your systems, and how the data flows is of the utmost importance when beginning your technical planning for breach protection. It’s surprising to considering that given the importance of …
Cloud computing and the Church: A match made in heaven?
In the week that Pope Francis decreed that atheists could still go to heaven if they followed their consciences, a new report has come to light showing how churches are taking up the cloud.
Four out of five large churches – comprising 1000 weekly attendees or more – are using cloud technology, with 55% of small churches currently in the cloud.
And the advantages are clear to see. Churches who are using the cloud to support online giving were almost two times more likely to see an upturn in donations. 72% of cloud-based large churches affirmed this, as opposed to just 41% of smaller churches.
Not surprisingly, the report also revealed a spike in engagement for churches in the cloud. Just over half (53%) of large cloudy churches stream their events, compared to just over 32% of those not utilising cloud.
The biggest growth however is in smartphone apps for engagement. Just …
Cloud Expo Silicon Valley: Ceph and DevOps in the Cloud
Is your IT organization being pushed to increase the tempo of your software release cycles? Do you currently automate application builds and the creation of staging environments? Do you always test thoroughly before pushing code out to production? Does your hair catch on fire every time you put out a new release? IT organizations large and small are turning to the set of processes, technologies, and organizational practices called DevOps as a way to deal with the need to release software more often and with less trouble by changing the way the Development and Operations teams cooperate.
In his session at the 13th International Cloud Expo®, Uri Budnik, Director of Business Development at RightScale, will discuss how Ceph, a fully open source distributed object store, network block device, and file system designed for reliability, scalability and performance, is transforming DevOps.
Five Top Trends for 2013 in the SMB Cloud
by Emily Kruger, Sr Manager, Market Research, Parallels
Parallels has just finished our 2013 SMB Cloud Insights™ research and have heard from over 6,000 small and medium businesses from 15 countries around the world about their use of cloud services. Here are five of the most interesting trends we are seeing in the SMB cloud market worldwide:
1. Cloud storage is a hot topic in IaaS for SMBs. The majority of small businesses are willing to pay 25% to 50% more for their VPS if it comes with extra storage.
2. When SMBs buy their web applications varies dramatically by SMB size. Over 40% of micro SMB (< 10 employees) bought their web apps with their web hosting and never returned to buy anything else. Medium SMBs (50 employees +) are much more likely to return to their web hoster for additional purchases.
3. Hosted business email took off this past year and was the fastest growing cloud service category in many countries. Perceived security of business class email and better integration with mobile devices are the leading reasons to switch from free to paid email accounts.
4. Hosted PBX is another cloud service that is growing quickly. Automated attendant and call control are the most popular features for SMBs – and ones not omit from a hosted PBX offering.
5. The most popular SaaS applications remain file sharing, instant collaboration and online backup & storage…but there is growing interest in support / help desk apps, online conferencing (phone and web) and online accounting.
Find out much more about the SMB cloud market in Parallels SMB Cloud Insights™ reports. Look for the 2013 research for Europe and Asia-Pacific to be released this Fall at WHD.local events or download all the research at www.parallels.com/smbreport.
Coraid Appoints Dave Kresse as CEO
Coraid has appointed Dave Kresse as Chief Executive Officer. Kresse will lead the company’s continued expansion into the enterprise and cloud markets, building on the company’s growth and award-winning EtherDrive® and EtherCloud™ platforms.
“Enterprise and cloud datacenters are undergoing a massive shift towards commodity scale-out designs and software-driven automation. Coraid is ideally positioned with top-tier customers and a proven storage platform to help customers deliver enterprise-class storage within an elastic, programmable cloud architecture,” said Kresse. “Coraid has the team and is delivering the right solutions to become the storage platform of choice for the world’s largest private and public cloud infrastructure buildouts.”
Kevin Brown, who has served as the company’s CEO since 2009, has moved to the Coraid board of directors as an independent director, where he will contribute to company strategy and key industry initiatives, including participation in the OpenStack community.
Coraid Appoints Dave Kresse as CEO
Coraid has appointed Dave Kresse as Chief Executive Officer. Kresse will lead the company’s continued expansion into the enterprise and cloud markets, building on the company’s growth and award-winning EtherDrive® and EtherCloud™ platforms.
“Enterprise and cloud datacenters are undergoing a massive shift towards commodity scale-out designs and software-driven automation. Coraid is ideally positioned with top-tier customers and a proven storage platform to help customers deliver enterprise-class storage within an elastic, programmable cloud architecture,” said Kresse. “Coraid has the team and is delivering the right solutions to become the storage platform of choice for the world’s largest private and public cloud infrastructure buildouts.”
Kevin Brown, who has served as the company’s CEO since 2009, has moved to the Coraid board of directors as an independent director, where he will contribute to company strategy and key industry initiatives, including participation in the OpenStack community.
Better Process Control in the Cloud
Employee benefits provider Unum Group has been building a DevOps continuum, and is further exploring the benefits of a better process around cloud-assisted applications development and deployment.
This interview highlights how employee benefits provider Unum Group has been building a DevOps continuum, and is further exploring the benefits of a better process around cloud-assisted applications development and deployment.
To learn more about how they’ve been using certain tools and approaches to improve their applications delivery, we sat down with Tim Durgan, an Enterprise Application Architect at Unum Group, and Petri Maanonen, Senior Product Marketing Manager for Application Performance Management at HP Software.
Cloud Expo: Delivering Guaranteed Performance Through an SDS Framework
For cloud providers, offering predictable storage performance backed by firm SLAs will become a competitive differentiator that drives greater customer affinity and a better application experience. Many providers feel that a Software Defined Storage (SDS) frameworks hold the key to delivering guaranteed performance, yet this “software abstraction layer” is only half of the solution. SDS frameworks are dependent on the virtualized resources presented to it, and without the granular abstraction of physical storage resources, these frameworks will remain limited.
In his session at the 13th International Cloud Expo®, Dave Wright, Founder & CEO of SolidFire, will explore how to deliver guaranteed performance today, through intelligent storage architectures and software defined control planes of CloudStack, OpenStack, and VMware.