In this demo at 15th Cloud Expo, Nitin Akarte, VP of System Engineering at TaaSera Inc., discussed cybersecurity in the cloud, focusing on forensic analysis and advanced response systems.
Our upcoming June 9-11, 2015, event in New York City will present a total of 10 simultaneous tracks (the largest conference content in the world) by an all-star faculty, over three days, plus the popular two-day «Cloud Computing Bootcamp» presented by Janakiram MSV, an analyst with the Gigaom Research analyst network where he covers the Cloud Services landscape.
Archivo mensual: enero 2015
Data Security Platform with @Vormetric | @CloudExpo [#Cloud #BigData]
In this demo at 15th Cloud Expo, Derek Tumulak, Vice President of Product Management at Vormetric, takes you through what Vormetric does, and some of the data security capabilities they offer. A lot of times you don’t need high-tech solutions to solve problems; a lot of times it’s education and training that’s crucial in implementing a proper data security solution.
A Guide to Recurring Revenue Success By @AriaSystemsInc | @CloudExpo [#Cloud]
Regardless of the business or industry you’re in, there’s no doubt that a successful year is at the forefront of your strategy. And at the helm driving that success is revenue. But not just any kind of revenue… we’re talking recurring revenue. When an average of 80% of a company’s future profits comes from 20% of its existing customers, it’s a telling sign of where your focus should be. And if you’re like nearly 50% of U.S. businesses today, you’ve either already adopted or are planning to adopt a recurring revenue model in your business. If you haven’t, there’s no better time than now to do so.
But why recurring revenue? What’s wrong with your old legacy billing system? If your goal is expansion, these old billing systems can’t handle or support the growth required for increased usage-based businesses objectives and new subscription options. You need a more modern, sophisticated system that guarantees your success today and in the future.
Analyst report shows where the value lies for buying a cloud computing solution
(c)iStock.com/RomoloTavani
A report from infrastructure as a service performance monitoring analysts Cloud Spectator has found that Amazon EC2 offers “significant” cost advantages over a long term investment.
The report finds different wins for different providers, with SoftLayer remaining the least expensive provider for larger Windows offerings, Microsoft Azure being the most inexpensive block storage offering, while CenturyLink and Rackspace block storage was most expensive yet could “provide more value to the right type of users.”
In all, 10 IaaS providers were vetted – AWS, CenturyLink, DigitalOcean, Google, HP, Joyent, Microsoft Azure, Rackspace, SoftLayer and Verizon – with Cloud Spectator analysing a wide variety of metrics.
The CSPs were ranked over sub hour, hourly, monthly, year, and three year contracts, with Amazon, Joyent and Rackspace having the most wide ranging payment options, yet only three providers – Google, Microsoft and Rackspace – provide sub hour billing.
IBM and Joyent were the only providers assessed who offer a 100% SLA. CloudTech readers will be aware of how that stance has backfired on companies in the past, although SoftLayer came through 2014 with a clean bill of health according to recent CloudHarmony metrics. Joyent, by comparison, suffered 19 outages at an availability of 99.9945%.
The research found a huge spike for hourly 2x large Linux virtual machines for HP, with Amazon consistently having the lowest price for small to medium VMs. For Windows, it was a similar story; Amazon holding the lowest numbers for small to medium, with SoftLayer performing better over large and 2x large VMs.
These figures may not be too surprising; Amazon prides itself on price cuts, while SoftLayer introduced its move towards price drops last year against its traditional policy. EMEA head Jonathan Wisler told this publication at the time that “we don’t want to have a race to the bottom, but we need to make sure we’re competitive in the marketplace.”
The report also delves into yearly and three yearly price comparisons, as well as block storage and data transfer.
“The cloud infrastructure industry is changing constantly,” the report notes. “Although other benefits are associated with cloud infrastructure, the low upfront costs and inexpensive payments for servers attract a large segment of customers and are always mentioned as major incentives for cloud adoption.
This is an important point to consider, particularly given recent research from KPMG which argued cost shouldn’t be the primary driver for choosing a cloud solution, yet the Cloud Spectator report adds: “It is important to understand provider pricing in this industry to make informed decisions on IT spending optimisation.”
You can take a look at the full report (registration required) here.
Google announces Cloud Monitoring in beta for Cloud Platform and AWS customers
(c)iStock.com/zmeel
Google has announced its Cloud Monitoring service, which tracks usage and uptime for Cloud Platform and Amazon Web Services customers, is now in beta availability.
The announcement comes just days after the search giant released Cloud Trace, which allows developers to create reports on their app’s performance issues by finding traces of slow requests.
First announced at Google I/O last year, Cloud Monitoring enables users to get a wide variety of information, from metrics and dashboards on Platform usage, to functionality tests for uptime, latency and error rates for performance, and receiving alerts when security incidents occur.
Developers can access figures for Google App Engine, Compute Engine, Cloud Pub/Sub and CloudSQL, as well as featuring native integration with MySQL, Nginx, Apache, MongoDB, and RabbitMQ among others.
The service also puts together a series of ‘overall health’ dashboards, which can incorporate application or business statistics using custom metrics, to create aggregate views of environments and systems.
Picture credit: Google
Back in May, Google announced the acquisition of intelligent monitoring service Stackdriver. The latest update to Cloud Monitoring shows integration of Stackdriver’s technology into the Cloud Platform product. Google Cloud Platform product manager Dan Belcher confirmed in a blog post the plan to continue integrating the rest of Stackdriver into Cloud Platform, with the aim of “providing a unified monitoring solution for Google Cloud Platform, Amazon Web Services and hybridcustomers.”
If there are any problems with Google Cloud Platform’s performance, it’ll be a rare event, according to figures published earlier this week by benchmarking provider CloudHarmony. Google Cloud DNS had a 100% record in 2014, while Compute Engine hit 78 outages at an overall downtime of 3.35 hours, Cloud Storage had eight outages while Google AppEngine went down for just over six minutes last year.
Google’s push towards creating a better user experience for its cloud products continues to gain pace; alongside this announcement, and Cloud Trace, the company has been pushing regular price cuts for its infrastructure, as well as offering startups $100,000 in Cloud Platform credits to help get their companies off the ground.
You can find out more about Google Cloud Monitoring here.
Is It Time for Hadoop Derivatives?
Is there an emerging market for OEM-ed Hadoop? Altoros Founder and CEO Renat Khasanshyn (pitured below) saw initial evidence of this recently, at a meetup he organized in San Ramon, CA.The meetup was ostensibly about Cloud Foundry and Docker, and featured speakers discussing the use of Hadoop with Docker Containers, and “Dockerizing” enterprise IT.
“The nature of questions about multi-tenant deployments these folks were asking brought me to a conclusion: many of them are in the early stages of building stuff not so much for internal use but for sale to external customers,” Renat says.
He adds that “I know what internal Hadoop deployments in Fortune 500 look like; but (now I’m seeing) offerings that do not look like Hadoop in the first place. (It seems that) many F500 are in a huge rush to OEM-ing Hadoop technology so they can start selling ‘derivatives.’”
Aberration or Trend?
The meetup was attended by “a highly unusual” group of people compared to previous events, he says. He notes that there were more than 40 people in attendance from large, non-tech companies, including 20 attendees from GE (which hosted the event), as well as attendees from AT&T and other Fortune 500 companies.
San Ramon lies on the edge of Silicon Valley and the SF Bay Area, and is home to many large corporations, including Chevron, 24-Hour Fitness. It also serves as the western headquarters of AT&T (having been Pacific Bell’s headquarters location prior to its acquisition by AT&T). Other non-techs such as Safeway, Clorox, and Macy’s are highly visible in this general area.
It’s Asymptotic, Dude
My experience in serving as Conference Chair for Cloud Expo and ThingsExpo last year was that enterprises are indeed moving at an unprecedented pace to gain expertise in the underlying technologies and overarching strategies that are emerging in this era.
The normal, steady growth curve I’ve seen with so many technologies—dating to the original LANs and PCs through the early days of the Worldwide Web—is being replaced today by a seemingly asymptotic expansion. Companies want not only to know “what” and “why” but “how” and most important, “when” they can deploy cloud and integrate their Big Data and their IoT potential into the mix. Renat’s anecdote seems to reflect this phenomenon.
Secure the ‘Internet of Things’ By @JamesKobielus | @ThingsExpo [#IoT]
The security devil is always in the details of the attack: the ones you’ve endured, the ones you prepare yourself to fend off, and the ones that, you fear, will catch you completely unaware and defenseless. The Internet of Things (IoT) is nothing if not an endless proliferation of details. It’s the vision of a world in which continuous Internet connectivity and addressability is embedded into a growing range of human artifacts, into the natural world, and even into our smartphones, appliances, and physical persons.
In the IoT vision, every new «thing» – sensor, actuator, data source, data consumer, routing intermediary, etc., is a new security-relevant detail that stirs up a wide range of collateral security issues. In other words, every new networked IoT endpoint is a new potential attack vector or launching point that the baddies can exploit. Potentially, every time you plug in a new IoT-networked device that is infected with malware or simply open to unauthorized third-party exploitation, the vulnerabilities start. Someone somewhere might exploit the new access point to gain illicit access to sensitive secrets (business, consumer, government, etc.), to damage software and data, and to wage distributed denial of service attacks.
.@CloudTest and NTT Resonant Announce Distribution Agreement | @CloudExpo
SOASTA and NTT Resonant on Tuesday announced a global distribution agreement expanding the mobile device access of Remote TestKit for use with SOASTA TouchTest. The new partnership will provide a complete mobile testing solution that improves the quality, reliability and overall user experience of mobile apps for NTT Resonant and SOASTA customers worldwide. The combined solution includes cloud-based device access for manual testing, automated continuous integration and performance analysis.
Starting at $99 USD per month, the integrated solution allows customers to create manual and automated tests for mobile apps and run them on demand against hundreds of real devices in the cloud.
The Consumption Cloud with @Solgenia_Corp | @CloudExpo [#Cloud]
In this demo at 15th Cloud Expo, Ermanno Bonifazi, CEO & Founder of Solgenia, introduces Solgenia Powua, a platform that allows developers and cloud providers to do business with the cloud, to monetize the cloud.
Bringing Shadow IT into the Light By @BCFerryCoder | @CloudExpo [#Cloud]
Shadow IT, aka Rogue IT, has a bad rep. And it probably should. It can compromise security, increase IT costs, result in dangerous leakage of data and IP, and get people fired. It also generates friction and thus expands the already too wide rift between developers and IT.
In a nutshell, Shadow IT is practicing IT without IT’s permission. I’ll focus on Shadow IT as practiced by developers here. A common example is bypassing the internal resource request process and spinning up VMs on AWS for application development. Or using a DBaaS like MongoHQ or Google Cloud Datastore for instant access to a fast, redundant, reliable, always-available datastore. Other examples include using DropBox to store corporate files, using Evernote to store notes, github to store source code, collaboration software too like yammer, and LastPass for password management.