Automattic, the hosting company for WordPress.com servers, knows the future is now. They have 123 people that operate like self-employed workers, taking advantage of cloud and mobile apps to communicate across 26 countries and 94 cities. Everyone works from home. Here are six trends driving us out of our offices and into the cloud.
The fact that you are reading this is testament to the increased buzz surrounding SaaS/Cloud computing, a buzz that was absent in previous incarnations of the technology (notably ASP during the 1990s). Whether the buzz is driving vendors to produce applications specific for the cloud, or improved applications are feeding the fervor, is a mute point. The fact is that in order to drive a greater usage of the cloud, applications written specifically for the cloud need to be freely available. Advances in technology, the availability of open-source code, and modern platforms such as AWS, are fueling the development of leading-edge applications. With innovations in distribution like the Apple app store, users are now connected with these applications like never before.
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Security and Control in the Cloud
Cloud computing is so alluring. The public cloud economizes infrastructure resources and creates a scalable, on-demand source for compute capacity. Additionally, the cloud can be a strategic asset for enterprises that know how to migrate, integrate and govern deployments securely.
Apple co-founder, Steve Wozniak recently said, «A lot of people feel ‘Oh, everything is really on my computer,’ but I say the more we transfer everything onto the web, onto the cloud, the less we’re going to have control over it.»
In fact, over 70% of IT professionals worry about security according to an IDG Enterprise Cloud Computing Study.
Boiled down, security, access and connectivity are really issues of control.
As any prudent cloud user, the application has its own unique security features, such as disk encryption and port filtering. But do these layers of security features overlap or conflict? What happens to ownership after migration? Do solutions really have to be architected before and after deployment?
Cloud Expo Silicon Valley: Building an Open Hybrid Cloud with Red Hat
Cloud computing is one of the most strategic initiatives that enterprises will adopt over the next several years. Only an open hybrid cloud can help you unlock the full benefits of cloud economics and gain agility across your entire infrastructure – physical, virtual and public cloud resources included.
In his session at the 11th International Cloud Expo, David Kang, Cloud Practice Manager, Global Strategy and Solutions, at Red Hat, will explain how open standards, open APIs and open source software are changing the structure of an enterprise cloud.
Cloud’s Inevitability Looms As Cloud Expo Nears
I apparently like hitting myself on the head with a hammer, as I’m once again reviewing estimates of global cloud-computing spending and growth.
It’s difficult enough to get insightful estimates of IT spending in general – the most valid number seems to be about $3.6 trillion (coming from IDC), but which includes telco. Where do we draw the line with telco today, with smartphones and tablets and literally zettabytes of information flying around each year?
Anyway, rather than parrot or compare cloud estimates, which are all out there in a tube somewhere on the Internet, I’ll focus on the key aspect of cloud: it’s growing faster than IT overall.
This may seem to an insight from The Book of Duh, but it relates to cloud’s inevitability. Sooner or later, cloud computing will mean the same thing as computing. It may take 50 years or it may take 100. It won’t take 5 or 10. But it is inevitable because the promise of cloud computing is an evergreen: efficiency and elasticity.
The numbers I’ve seen show cloud rising as percentage of overall IT from 2% today to 11% by 2020, to 6% today growing to 22% by 2020. Again, given the mixing of computers and telco into many IT estimates, I don’t see how we can measure this accurately.
But we can simply accept that it’s growing, and it will have specific benefits for everyone.
Counter-arguments are being made today that cloud is not actually less expensive on a cashflow basis, even if it shifts expenses from investment to operations. Counter-counter-arguments are being made that nobody has promised cloud would always be cheaper.
But there is some place in every large organization for cloud, and my own direct experience has been that cloud is the go-to idea for smaller companies that are trying something new. One project I’m on doesn’t have budget for big iron or even much little iron. It does have budget for whatever cloud instances we’ll need for the next year.
So I’ve found the pain stops when I put the hammer back in the toolbox. I’ll be at Cloud Expo West in Santa Clara in a few weeks to see what’s going on, to ignore any information about growth, focus on any information about usability, and enjoy the inevitability of what’s going on.
Security Automation Connects Silos
A wealth of security information exists in our networks from a variety of sources – policy servers, firewalls, switches, networking infrastructure, defensive components, and more. Unfortunately, most of that information is locked away in separate silos due to differences in products and technologies, as well as by companies’ organizational boundaries. Further complicating the issue, information is stored in different formats and communicated over different protocols.
An open standard from the Trusted Computing Group (TCG) offers the capability to centralize communication and coordination of information to enable security automation. The Interface for Metadata Access Points – IF-MAP for short – is like Facebook for network and security technology, allowing real-time sharing of information across a heterogeneous environment.
Cbeyond Offers Businesses More Secure, Customized Access to the Cloud
Cbeyond Inc. on Monday announced the launch of its new TotalCloud(TM) Data Center managed service. With TotalCloud Data Center, small and medium-sized businesses can now access secure, enterprise-class, customizable cloud services without having to purchase, configure, install and manage servers.
Cbeyond’s TotalCloud Data Center service is built on Microsoft Corp.’s Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V platform. It combines enterprise-class networking, storage and security to handle demanding, real-time business application workloads. Available in both public and private formats based on security needs, the service includes managed and monitored security features, backup services and round-the-clock infrastructure monitoring and support.
Day 3 Keynote at Cloud Expo Silicon Valley | Cloud Apps: Assembly Required
Today we present ten imperatives for constructing next generation applications that we have defined based on research findings from a community of 1,500 application building companies. Emerging applications will not just be cloud-enabled, but also mobile, connected to social media networks and able to consume and respond in real-time to patterns in Big Data. Most important, application building must become more productive with a reduced time-to-market. To meet these demands, there is an imperative to move from a model of “build everything” to a model of “application assembly” from available customizable parts.
In his Day 3 Keynote at the 11th International Cloud Expo, Dr. John Bates, Executive Vice President and Chief Technology Officer at Progress Software, will illustrate what has to go into a platform and model to deliver the 10 imperatives of next-generation applications. As part of this, he will present how existing applications and services can be wrapped and exposed as cloud APIs. These APIs can be assembled like Lego blocks to rapidly create new mobile, social and big data aware cloud applications. Examples of cloud APIs that he will discuss include: smart data connectors that integrate with and analyze the data of existing cloud applications such as Salesforce.com, Workday, NetSuite, etc.; services that track social media sentiment on Twitter, Facebook etc.; back-end services for mobile applications; services that analyze massive clusters of Hadoop nodes; and services that track and respond to mobile user locations to enable location-aware applications.
Cloud Computing: Amazon Reportedly Interested in TI’s ARM Unit
Amazon is negotiating to acquire Texas Instruments’ abandoned ARM business, according to Calcalist, the Israeli business daily written in Hebrew. It says the companies are in advanced talks.
According to the story Amazon wants to be a merchant chip house competing with Qualcomm, Samsung, and Apple, not just for its cheap sold-at-cost Kindle tablets, which will be facing competition soon from Apple’s fabled iPad mini.
Amazon is also understood to be working on its own smartphone.
Calcalist figures it for a multibillion-dollar deal.
Amazon sourced its ARM OMAP chips from TI, which is giving up its tablet and smartphone chip line in a bow to superior competitive forces. It means to focus on industrial and automotive chips instead.
Barnes & Noble also uses TI processors in its Nook e-readers.
Cloud Expo Silicon Valley: Anatomy of an Internet Scale Application
Planning scalable environments isn’t terribly difficult, but it does require a change of perspective.
In his session at the 11th International Cloud Expo, Phil Jackson, Development Community Advocate for SoftLayer, will broaden your views to think on an Internet Scale by dissecting a video publishing application built with The SoftLayer Platform, Message Queuing, Object Storage, and Drupal. By examining a scalable modular application build that can handle unpredictable traffic, you’ll be able to grow your development arsenal and pick up a few strategies to apply to your own projects.
Nimbula Joins OpenStack Community
Nimbula on Monday announced it has joined the OpenStack community. As an active member of the community, Nimbula will collaborate on a range of improvements to the OpenStack codebase, and will incorporate OpenStack services in future Nimbula Director releases. Nimbula customers such as Russian Internet company, Yandex, and US Government service provider, Solers, will continue to benefit from Nimbula Director’s extended, fully functional, automated self-service infrastructure built around a standard platform.
«OpenStack is the right idea and project, and having smart, innovative companies join the initiative is a positive step,» said Ben Kepes, industry observer and commentator. «Nimbula has great technology and expertise and their joining OpenStack will help develop it as the Cloud platform of choice for the market.»