We are all aware of the United States military, and that it is the largest in the world. It has a budget of over £340 billion and employs in excess of 3 million people. 1.5 million of those people are in active duty, or regular military personnel.

Of course, such a large organisation will have a monumental IT infrastructure as well as some of the tightest data security on the planet. Such an infrastructure also brings with it an inevitable large hardware stack.

Currently, the Department of Defence has some 1500 data centres which it is planning on reducing substantially.

A combination of budget cuts and security concerns has meant that the substitute for hardware has come in the form of Cloud Computing – high security Managed Servers, Cloud Hosting services and so on.

The DoD is moving towards cloud computing, using it to collect data as well as the …

By Jon Smith

With more and more firms looking to cut down on digital storage space in 2013, one area of IT management that is set to expand is the reliance on cloud computing. The cloud industry is still in its relative infancy, although there are already key trends that are expected to develop in the industry this year.

Integrated cloud and mobile

The reliance between mobile and cloud activities is expected to become all the stronger in 2013.

More and more mobile applications are linked to cloud back-end services and the majority of cloud services have a mobile application. One firm proving this link is CloudOn, which aims to optimise Microsoft services for mobile devices. The company’s software is hosted on an application housed in the Amazon Web Services cloud.

Personal clouds

In the old days, an employee’s computer would be the one location where information is …

If your business has made the leap into the cloud, then it is very likely that IT processes have become transparent and business productivity is improving.

The whole idea behind the concept of cloud computing is to remove the backend maintenance and inconsistencies that may happen with even the best in house server systems.

Users should have less functionality issues, as many that would formerly stem from any number of hardware or software related issues are mostly eliminated as cloud computing generally only requires a web access through a browser and a functional computer.

Unless an organisation purchased a subscription through an underdeveloped cloud service provider, business has the tools it needs to optimise processes. So now the question remains, is your cloud service being utilised to its fullest potential?

As of this point in time, no cloud is impervious to disaster. There are events that can cause serious problems …

Using the cloud to store your data via virtual datacentres is great! You can have lots of space for a cheap price, which you can access virtually anywhere. You don’t get issues such as threat of contracting aggressive malware and snooping software etc. However, having an account on the cloud does not mean total safety, and it is easy to forget this. Here are 10 tips to ensure total security, even if our entire data has been put there.

1. Passwords

This should seem obvious, but try and create a unique username and password for every account. At least, create a unique password including various symbols. Cracking a password takes significantly longer where symbols and upper-case are used, compared with a lower-case alternative.

2. Security Questions

Choose a question which isn’t obvious, something which can’t be found on Facebook for instance. Choose a question and answer it …

The cloud is commonly envisaged as a utilitarian service, enabling those companies using it, to experience ease of access to data in various accounts, homogenisation of such accounts, the external management of servers, negating the need for expensive hardware, and so on.

This utilitarian approach has, broadly speaking, meant that some cloud services lose a certain personal element with their clients.

The cloud has been associated with a lack of customer service, with some of the large providers simply erecting web pages and FAQs to tackle customer problems. It is often very difficult to phone up and talk to a human being.

For a fair few businesses, customer service is something which takes a back seat.

However, so long as dissatisfied customers reject bad customer service, such offenders will invariably lose business or be bought up by companies which do regard customer satisfaction as paramount.

The cloud’s growth was …

With the analysts predicting cloud computing to rise and rise in 2013, it can be refreshing to get a consumer perspective on how they use the cloud and their overall knowledge of it.

Yet the signs don’t appear to be good – a new survey from UK-based hosting group Webfusion has revealed that two thirds of UK consumers don’t have a clear view of what the cloud entails.

Webfusion polled over 1,000 people, with their findings giving little credence to a consumer shift in cloud perception.

When asked the question ‘when it comes to computers, do you understand what ‘cloud’ means?’, just over a third (33.8%) related most closely to the response ‘yes, I have a clear understanding’. 28.5% emphatically said ‘no!’ whilst 18.3% agreed with the response ‘I have some understanding’.

Not particularly good signs there and the response was similar when concerning understanding …

By John Dixon, Senior Solutions Architect

A few weeks ago, I took part in another engaging tweetchat on cloud computing. The topic: is cloud computing ready for enterprise adoption? You can find the transcript here.

As usual with tweetchats hosted by CloudCommons, five questions are presented a few days in advance of the event. This time around, the questions were:

1. Is public cloud mature enough for enterprise adoption?
2. Should public cloud be a part of every business’s IT strategy?
3. How big of a barrier are legacy applications and hardware to public cloud adoption?
4. What’s the best way to deal with cloud security?
5. What’s the best way to get started with public cloud?

As far as question #1, the position of most people in the chat session this time was that public cloud is mature enough for certain applications in enterprises today. The technology certainly exists to run …

Although Microsoft Windows still dominates the desktop operating system popularity, Linux has become a dominant force in cloud servers and virtual private servers (VPS). Linux is not only a cheaper way to host cloud applications, but it also comes in several distribution flavors.

Customers looking at cloud hosting as a solution can choose from CentOS, Fedora, Ubuntu and Debian. Each of these distributions offers the same basic functions, but they have different tweaks that some administrators like over other distributions.

Linux VPS versus Windows solutions

Aside from the more affordable option, what makes Linux better than Windows? First, the Apache hosting environment and the Linux operating system are free, so, no surprise, Linux is a cheaper hosting solution.

Apache hosting usually includes the «cPanel» control panel. cPanel is popular with end-users and is more easily managed than Plesk, the equivalent Windows solution for managing cloud web servers.

Linux hosting naturally …

If you’re like most, cloud is going to be a big part of your life in 2013. So to help you start the year off right, we’ve prepared the following tips for securing your cloud servers.

Here are your 5 cloud security tips for 2013 (in no particular order):

Tip #1: Lock down the server firewall
Big surprise – a firewall management service provider telling you to lockdown the firewall, but putting aside the brand of our soap box, the firewall is the front-line defence for all security.

In fact, 73% of IT professionals agree, according to the Ponemon Research study on cloud security. But while there’s a general consensus to use the firewall, few know how to do it properly.

So here’s one little tip from the experts: Make sure you only open admin and other service ports when, for whom/what, and for as long …