Does Hadoop makes the storage and operation of arbitrary enterprise data both scalable and cost effective?
In his session at the 11th International Cloud Expo, Ari Zilka, Chief Products Officer at Hortonworks, will answer frequently asked questions like, “What does it take to move Hadoop from one or two use cases in the average organization to an enterprise-wide data management platform?” and “What can a Hadoop user do to make their jobs easier and more efficient?” He will also project a roadmap two to five years out, explaining how the community can help Hadoop find its rightful place at the core of big data storage and management.
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Keep the Old, In with the New
For decades, the infrastructure needed to keep your public-facing websites online has had a relatively simple design. After all, it was all contained in one or a few datacenters under your control, or under the control of a contractor who did your bidding where network architecture was concerned.
Requests came in, DNS resolved them, the correct server or pool of servers handled them. There was security, and sometimes a few other steps in between, but that still didn’t change that it was a pretty simplistic architecture. Even after virtualization took hold in the datacenter, the servers were still the same, just where they sat became more fluid.
Cloud Encryption and Healthcare “as a Service” Solutions
Healthcare “as a Service” providers are coming up strong in the market right now. It’s a growing segment, attracting a lot of interest from businesses and investors, but as expected, cloud security, and more specifically cloud encryption and HIPAA requirements, is critical customers considering a healthcare application as a service. In this article I’ll review some aspects as well as relate to data security solutions such as split-key management.
Our recent conversations with Healthcare SaaS providers have highlighted several common aspects, across many solutions.
Obviously, they all need to be “cloudy” (else they would not be SaaS providers). Their customer will access them through the web and their business model includes a pay-as-you-go component. They need their underlying infrastructure to support this model.
A More Practical View of Cloud Brokers
#cloud The conventional view of cloud brokers misses the need to enforce policies and ensure compliance
During a dinner at VMworld organized by Lilac Schoenbeck of BMC, we had the chance to chat up cloud and related issues with Kia Behnia, CTO at BMC. Discussion turned, naturally I think, to process. That could be because BMC is heavily invested in automating and orchestrating processes. Despite the nomenclature used (business process management) for IT this is a focus on operational process automation, though eventually IT will have to raise the bar and focus on the more businessy aspects of IT and operations.
Alex Williams postulated the decreasing need for IT in an increasingly cloudy world. On the surface this generally seems to be an accurate observation. After all, when business users can provision applications a la SaaS to serve their needs do you really need IT? Even in cases where you’re deploying a fairly simple web site, the process has become so abstracted as to comprise the push of a button, dragging some components after specifying a template, and voila! Web site deployed, no IT necessary.
While from a technical difficulty perspective this may be true (and if we say it is, it is for only the smallest of organizations) there are many responsibilities of IT that are simply overlooked and, as we all know, underappreciated for what they provide, not the least of which is being able to understand the technical implications of regulations and requirements like HIPAA, PCI-DSS, and SOX – all of which have some technical aspect to them and need to be enforced, well, with technology.
See, choosing a cloud deployment environment is not just about «will this workload run in cloud X». It’s far more complex than that, with many more variables that are often hidden from the end-user, a.k.a. the business peoples. Yes, cost is important. Yes, performance is important. And these are characteristics we may be able to gather with a cloud broker. But what we can’t know is whether or not a particular cloud will be able to enforce other policies – those handed down by governments around the globe and those put into writing by the organization itself.
Imagine the horror of a CxO upon discovering an errant employee with a credit card has just violated a regulation that will result in Severe Financial Penalties or worse – jail. These are serious issues that conventional views of cloud brokers simply do not take into account. It’s one thing to violate an organizational policy regarding e-mailing confidential data to your Gmail account, it’s quite another to violate some of the government regulations that govern not only data at rest but in flight.
A PRACTICAL VIEW of CLOUD BROKERS
Thus, it seems a more practical view of cloud brokers is necessary; a view that enables such solutions to not only consider performance and price, but ability to adhere to and enforce corporate and regulatory polices. Such a data center hosted cloud broker would be able to take into consideration these very important factors when making decisions regarding the optimal deployment environment for a given application. That may be a public cloud, it may be a private cloud – it may be a dynamic data center. The resulting decision (and options) are not nearly as important as the ability for IT to ensure that the technical aspects of policies are included in the decision making process.
And it must be IT that codifies those requirements into a policy that can be leveraged by the broker and ultimately the end-user to help make deployment decisions. Business users, when faced with requirements for web application firewalls in PCI-DSS, for example, or ensuring a default «deny all» policy on firewalls and routers, are unlikely able to evaluate public cloud offerings for ability to meet such requirements. That’s the role of IT, and even wearing rainbow-colored cloud glasses can’t eliminate the very real and important role IT has to play here.
The role of IT may be changing, transforming, but it is no way being eliminated or decreasing in importance. In fact, given the nature of today’s environments and threat landscape, the importance of IT in helping to determine deployment locations that at a minimum meet organizational and regulatory requirements is paramount to enabling business users to have more control over their own destiny, as it were.
So while cloud brokers currently appear to be external services, often provided by SIs with a vested interest in cloud migration and the services they bring to the table, ultimately these beasts will become enterprise-deployed services capable of making policy-based decisions that include the technical details and requirements of application deployment along with the more businessy details such as costs.
The role of IT will never really be eliminated. It will morph, it will transform, it will expand and contract over time. But business and operational regulations cannot be encapsulated into policies without IT. And for those applications that cannot be deployed into public environments without violating those policies, there needs to be a controlled, local environment into which they can be deployed.
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Lori MacVittie is a Senior Technical Marketing Manager, responsible for education and evangelism across F5’s entire product suite. Prior to joining F5, MacVittie was an award-winning technology editor at Network Computing Magazine. She holds a B.S. in Information and Computing Science from the University of Wisconsin at Green Bay, and an M.S. in Computer Science from Nova Southeastern University. She is the author of XAML in a Nutshell and a co-author of The Cloud Security Rules |
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It’s DevOps, or It’s the Wrong Conversation
As I was watching this thread develop, with various comments from people that live and breathe IT, one thing kept coming to mind. IT people often try and justify new technology with technology reasoning. It’s analogous to answering a question with another question.
Far too often, because IT has almost always been looked at as a cost-center and measured for ROI based on cost-reduction or productivity improvements, technologist feel the need to drive the justification for a new project based on cost.
How To Define Cloud Education?
You could say I believe in cloud computing. You could say the same for anyone reading this article. And you could say the same for anyone attending or exhibiting at the upcoming Cloud Expo.
We’ve now moved well beyond the basic question, “what is cloud computing?”
But I’m curious: what is a cloud computing education? How should college students, mid-career technologists, and senior executives be informed, trained, and certified? Should there be such a thing as a cloud computing major and post-grad cloud computing studies?
These questions spring to mind as I prepare to deliver a short seminar on the topic at the Tau Institute, a small research organization I’ve co-founded in two locations: my Illinois hometown and Manila, Philippines.
There is certainly a global aspect to cloud computing, now that we’re in an era where technological advancement happens simultaneously (if unevenly) throughout the world.
But more important is the idea of a universal foundation to cloud. What should people know, and when should they know it?
I’m participating in a new podcast series called Run!, which tackles the subject of “what we do with technology and what it’s doing to us.” We recorded an episode last night in which a major cloud company CTO talked of dealing with three dozen platforms in his job.
Is there such a thing as a basic, standard cloud education? If so, what languages, frameworks, and general understanding should it encompass? Please let me know your thoughts, as I work to build such a thing – a cloud computing education/certification program – within the Tau Institute.
Monitoring in the Cloud
“To manage a private cloud infrastructure, we have focused our efforts on the challenges that face our customers when deploying a private cloud for their collaboration environment.”
How did you come to the private cloud approach?
Bystran: As you may know, we have had over 600 customers for more than 15 years now. Most of our customers are large companies with multiple operating units and an International footprint. For example in Europe, we’ve provide our services for many of the big banks and major industries like Total, Technip, and Bayer etc.
These customers have high expectations, so we continuously improve our product with their feedback and future concerns in mind. Because of these deep relationships our product management and development teams often work in a very direct way to fit their needs.
Amazon Starts Spot Market for Reserved Instances
Amazon Web Services has set up an online marketplace where customers can sell their excess EC2 Reserved Instances to other AWS customers.
Reserved Instances cost less because buyers make a one-time payment to reserve compute capacity for a specified term and get a discount on the hourly charges for that instance.
Amazon will charge sellers a 12% fee.
Interested parties can browse the site for term lengths and pricing options outside the standard one-year and three-year term lengths.
AWS suggests owners may want to move instances to a new AWS Region, change to a new instance type or sell capacity for projects that end before the term expires.
Zendesk Pulls in $60 Million
Zendesk, the cloud-based help desk, has gotten $60 million in added financing split between $45 million in equity and $15 million in debt.
That gives it a total of $70.5 million in equity backing since it started in 2007.
Redpoint Ventures led the D round. New investors include Index Ventures, GGV Capital and Goldman Sachs. Existing investors Charles River Ventures, Benchmark Capital and Matrix Partners also kicked in.
Silicon Valley Bank is providing the debt financing.
The start-up wanted the money for global expansion, talent and development. It’s rebuilding its widgetry from the ground up but will reportedly keep the old application around to placate customers who hate change. The remake will tie into third-party systems like Salesforce.
Cloud Expo Silicon Valley: Managing the Consolidation of Data in the Cloud
IT departments are experiencing storage capacity needs doubling every 12-18 months, 50x the amount of information and 75x the number of files. IT managers are dealing with growing constraints on space, power and costs to manage their data center infrastructure. Intel is helping businesses and users realize the benefits of cloud computing technology by working to develop open standards that operate across disparate IT infrastructures and with the Intel Cloud Builder and Intel Cloud Finder programs, which help people build cloud infrastructure as well as deploy cloud services. These tools together give Enterprise IT decision-makers information they need to plan both private cloud build out and public cloud service integration into their IT departments.