«Vicom Computer Services is a service provider and a value-added reseller and we provide technology solutions, infrastructure solutions, security and management services solutions,» stated Amitava Das, Chief Technology Officer at Vicom Computer Services, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at 16th Cloud Expo, held June 9-11, 2015, at the Javits Center in New York City.

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(c)iStock.com/Tuomas Kujansuu

Today, many UK-based organisations face a significant set of data sovereignty challenges when they are considering moving their data to the cloud. Data residency and privacy rules and regulations differ from country to country, so users of cloud services need to think about the rules that cover each of the jurisdictions they operate in, as well as the rules that govern the treatment of data at the places where cloud service providers store their data. There are various merits of storing data within a UK data centre as opposed to an international location.

Data sovereignty laws

After France, Germany and several other EU governments proposed new data sovereignty laws which require all data to be stored locally, many enterprises have become increasingly concerned that these foreign governments will now request access to data stored in the cloud within their international border.

However, if enterprises choose a cloud within their domestic border, they are able to ensure data sovereignty. Research from Vanson Bourne discovered that 86 per cent of UK enterprise customers believe it’s important for business-critical data to be stored within a UK-based cloud provider.

Data stored in a UK-based multinational company can still be backed up elsewhere

By choosing a cloud provider that only stores its data in a UK location, customers have the ability to physically go and visit their data, as well as seeing where the backups and archives are kept, which remains perhaps a surprisingly common request for CIOs.

If data stored in the cloud is provided by a foreign multinational company, it can still be subject to the influence of foreign governments, and global cloud providers need to have safeguards in place to ensure data is never transferred cross-border around their data centres worldwide. Even if primary data may be stored in the UK, if the cloud provider back-ups or archives information in another country, data sovereignty is eroded.

Environmental risks

Knowing where the cloud provider is registered and headquartered as a business will greatly determine which laws your information will be subject to. Yet, environmental risks such as earthquakes and floods remain a key consideration for businesses that are cloud shopping. Although it’s considerably cheaper to store data in a location where these are likely to occur, the risks are rarely worth taking. Therefore, knowing where the data centre is physically located is an important factor to consider.

UK data centres can address both data sovereignty concerns whilst ensuring high availability, compliance and security. The reality is that no global cloud provider can provide the same peace of mind that a UK data centre offers UK businesses looking to keep important data secure.

(c)iStock.com/dolphfyn

Google has unveiled itself as the newest corporate sponsor of the OpenStack Foundation, promising to commit engineering resources and further collaborate on technologies such as app catalogue Murano and API service Magnum.

Mark Collier, chief operating officer of the OpenStack Foundation, wrote in a blog post announcing the news: “Few companies understand cloud-native apps at scale like Google, so I expect big things as Google developers contribute to OpenStack projects like Magnum.”

He added: “OpenStack gives [companies] a solid platform to explore new and compelling technologies as they emerge, and I know they’ll be even more confident in that path knowing that Google has joined our mission to make OpenStack the platform for containerised workloads.”

Google joins the more than 100 current corporate sponsors, which practically reads like a who’s who of tech. The eight platinum members, of whom the majority of funding derives, includes AT&T, HP, IBM, Rackspace and Red Hat. The search giant’s key selling point for OpenStack is its expertise in software containers, notably gaining prominence due to products such as Docker. Google currently launches two billion containers a week.

The move is being seen as a fillip for OpenStack, after recent venture capital investments were beginning to run dry. Similarly, the likes of EMC buying Cloudscaling in October signified a wider trend of larger companies dominating and swallowing up smaller firms.

There is one other angle this announcement could be viewed from. While the list of companies tied up in OpenStack is impressive both in length and breadth, two notable absentees remain Microsoft and Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google’s main rivals in cloud infrastructure as a service. As Matt Weinberger of Business Insider points out, Microsoft’s dominance in hybrid cloud, through a combination of Windows Server and Azure public cloud, and AWS’ huge market lead in cloud infrastructure – latest estimates put Amazon’s revenue at more than its four main competitors put together.

Earlier this month, CSC chief enterprise architect David Auslander wrote for this publication that OpenStack was ready for prime time, with the right planning and the support of an integrated vendor.

Analysts predict that 268 billion mobile apps will be downloaded by 2017, further evidence that mobile apps have become the most diverse and broadly adopted software in existence. To thrive in this new reality, developing and delivering applications that drive superior user experiences and engage your customers and staff is the new business imperative. Examples of this new cloud-centric, mobile-first application economy are everywhere, and they are radically changing the world of business.
In entertainment, applications like Netflix and Hulu have already transformed video delivery, and are becoming the new standards. In the payments sector, applications like Google Wallet and PayPal are challenging the dominance of traditional banks and credit cards. In transportation, software-driven services like Uber and Lyft are rewriting both the back office and customer experience world of taxi and limo services.

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The Software Defined Data Center (SDDC), which enables organizations to seamlessly run in a hybrid cloud model (public + private cloud), is here to stay. IDC estimates that the software-defined networking market will be valued at $3.7 billion by 2016.
Security is a key component and benefit of the SDDC, and offers an opportunity to build security ‘from the ground up’ and weave it into the environment from day one.
In his session at 16th Cloud Expo, Reuven Harrison, CTO and Co-Founder of Tufin, will discuss the main security considerations enterprises face when rolling out SDDCs and how they can harness key functionality of a virtual environment to achieve more granular security controls across hybrid environments.

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Yes, you read that right. The price/performance of your cloud computing infrastructure could vary as much as 1000 percent depending on time and location. High levels of variability have actually been seen within the same cloud service provider (CSP) processing the exact same job. This also means that the cost to you of processing the exact same job in the cloud could vary by this much as well.
This surprising result was discovered by a Rice University group, headed by Dr. T. S. Eugene Ng, that has been focusing on cloud computing. Recently they published their joint work with Purdue University: Application-Specific Configuration Selection in the Cloud: Impact of Provider Policy and Potential of Systematic Testing, in the IEEE INFOCOM 2015 Conference Proceedings. That paper took a first step towards understanding the impact of cloud service provider policy and tackling the complexity of selecting configurations that can best meet the price and performance requirements of applications. That work resulted in a collaboration between Rice University and Burstorm, a developer of computer aided design (CAD) software specifically built to support cloud computing architects.

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I’ve always had a fascination with the way information is acquired and process. Reading back through the history of this site, you can see this tendency towards more fanciful thinking, e.g. GPGPU assisted network analytics, future storage systems using Torrenza-style processing. What has once been theory has made its way into the realm of praxis; looking no further than ICML 2015, for example, to see the forays into DML that nVidia is making with their GPUs. And on the story goes. Having said all this, there are elements of data, of data networking, of data processing, which, to date, have NOT gleaned all the benefits of this type of acceleration. To that end, what I am going to attempt to posit today is an area where Neural Networking (or at least the benefits therein) can be usefully applied to an area interacted with every single nanosecond of every day: the network.

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«We have an new division call the Cloud Monetization Division, based on our platform Powua, which empowers enterprises and organizations to take the journey to cloud monetization and to make it a reality,» explained Ian Khan, Manager, Innovation & Marketing at Solgenia, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at 16th Cloud Expo, held June 9-11, 2015, at the Javits Center in New York City.

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