Saurabh Sharma, Senior Analyst, IT Solutions

Many organisations are struggling with integration issues created by the rapid rise of social, mobile, and cloud platforms, and given the persistent time and budget constraints, are not inclined to use traditional integration approaches for hybrid integration scenarios.

IT has no other option but to combine traditional and cloud-based integration approaches to deliver the desired integration capabilities on time and within the allocated budget.

The growing adoption of integration PaaS (iPaaS) solutions signifies the increasing importance of “middleware-as-a-service” and marks the transition of integration from being a “one-to-one” to a “many-to-one” function. An increasing number of integration processes are moving to the cloud, and “hybrid integration middleware” paradigms are no longer uncommon, with this trend expected to become steadily more pervasive.

The rise of hybrid IT calls for a hybrid integration strategy

The rapid rise of cloud services is driving the proliferation of hybrid …

Conspiracy theorists and other concerned citizens will insist the government is watching every keystroke, keeping a record of every website, transaction, text and email. Shades of 1984’s Big Brother, right?

These last few weeks, the news has been brimming with revelations of data surveillance and monitoring by the government (not to mention data harvesting corporations like Google, Yahoo, Facebook etc…). Everyone is sensitive as to what is being looked at, stored, and analyzed for hazily defined purposes. Privacy is no longer as private as you think; and hasn’t been for many years.

Politics, ethics and debates over 4th amendment interpretation aside (as they serve no useful purpose in this analysis), a question was asked on one the security forums that in light of these alleged breaches of trust, whether cloud security-and more specifically, identity-as-a-service (IDaaS) is still a feasible and trustworthy option?

Short answer: of course it is …

The Government Accountability Office (GAO) has released a report examining why the CIA chose Amazon ahead of IBM for its recent $600m private cloud contract, and whether IBM has a case to answer with its protests against the decision.

And the conclusion it came to was, to quote The Simpsons, a little from column A and a little from column B. The GAO both sustained and rejected IBM’s complaint in part, and surmised that Amazon’s offer was both “the best value” and a “superior technical solution”.

This comes despite Amazon’s proposal being over $50m a year more expensive – the bean counters found that Amazon would cost $148m annually, as opposed to IBM’s $94m.

In terms of technical specs, the two vendors were put side by side, with Amazon coming out on top. The CIA found that Amazon’s SLA, technical approach and past performance was superior …

According to the latest push from analyst house Gartner, to misquote Mark Twain, the reports of legacy’s death are greatly exaggerated.

Gartner’s most recent figures show that cloud office systems only represent 8% of the total office market – rising to 33% by 2017, and 60% – or 665 million users – by 2022.

The latter figures suggest a healthy state of affairs, with Gartner suggesting that the big push to cloud would occur in the first half of 2015.

Similarly, the use of email as software as a service (SaaS) will be at 10% by the end of 2014, and 33% by 2017.

Tom Austin, Gartner VP and fellow, said: “Despite the hype surrounding migration to the cloud, big differences in movement rates continue, depending on organisations’ size, industry, geography and specific requirements.”

Plenty of reports give greater adoption figures, but these can range from BYOD policy to the proliferation …

Over 95% of respondents in a comScore survey of French SMBs said cloud adoption had a positive impact on security, as well as noticing unexpected benefits, such as up-to-date systems and antivirus protection.

The study of French small to midsize businesses with between 25 and 499 PCs was conducted by comScore and commissioned by Microsoft Trustworthy Computing, although the respondents were made unaware of Microsoft’s involvement.

88% of those polled said they had noticed improved uptime as a result of the cloud, with the same number claiming they were “confident” that their CSP could get back up and running after an outage.

The report also looked at return on investment in the cloud, and came up with positive conclusions. Seven in 10 say that they had been able to “pursue new opportunities” – which could ostensibly mean anything – because of time saved in the cloud, whilst a whopping 87% said …

Researchers at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have come up with a model designed to show the full extent of cloud’s energy efficiency.

The report, put together by a research team comprising McCormick School of Engineering Northwestern University and Lawrence Berkeley and part funded by Google, unveils the CLEER (Cloud Enery and Emissions Research) model, described as the ‘first ever open-access, fully transparent systems model for energy analysis of cloud systems by the research community’.

What’s more, the model predicts an 87% reduction in primary energy use if companies moved their business software – comprising CRM, productivity and email tools – to the cloud.

The report rightly notes that not all modelling attempts are 100% accurate, but adds: “Despite uncertainties, the energy savings potential of cloud-based software is likely to be substantial on a national scale given the vast differences between the energy efficiencies of local and cloud data centres …

HP Enterprise Services has become the second CSP (cloud service provider) to announce it has passed Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP) protocols to get the official US government cloud security stamp.

Amazon, as you’d probably expect, led the way by announcing its FedRAMP seal of approval last week.  So what’s that stomping sound you’re hearing? It’s all the public cloud competition rushing to catch up…

With FedRAMP compliance, federal organisations can instantly assess whether a CSP’s solution works for them, as well as increase levels of consistency and attainment in cloud security.

That’s the theory, at least. The FedRAMP official website lists a series of ‘program goal’ bullet points which includes “accelerat[ing] the adoption of secure cloud solutions through reuse of assessments and authorisations”, increase[ing] confidence in security of cloud solutions”, as well as an increase in automation and near …

Businesses are increasingly opting for a hybrid cloud model, in which they use both their own virtualized private set up as well as systems hosted by other providers. There are a number of clear benefits, but also challenges, to this arrangement.

On the plus side, with a hybrid cloud setup companies have the opportunity to keep particularly sensitive data within their data center’s own four walls, ensuring security, and allowing rapid system customization where required. Those same companies can push less-sensitive data out to a public cloud, allowing a host company to affordably handle spikes in traffic and manage some of the infrastructure.

Mitigating the challenges

There are also a number of issues associated with managing a hybrid cloud setup, and these require specific solutions. Firstly, businesses favoring a hybrid cloud need to be extremely clear how their public and private clouds serve them and what the differences are …

Nearly nine in 10 small to medium businesses have experienced “cost-related challenges” with backing up and recovering virtual servers, according to the latest industry report from virtualisation provider Veeam.

These fiscal frustrations primarily included ongoing management costs, backups requiring too much storage and expensive licensing models, according to the report.

Conducted in November and December 2012 by independent market research specialists Vanson Bourne, the report surveyed C-level executives or higher from the US, UK, Germany and France.

And the underlying theme from the research was that, in spite of how important it is to back up VMs and servers, it’s not a walk in the park.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, as is the way of these things, the research from a virtualisation provider advocates virtualisation as the primary solution, yet the statistics on their own still make interesting reading.

The most eye-opening of the lot was that more than half (55 …