No one argues that networks have not exploded in terms of speeds and feeds in the past decade. What with more consumers (and cows), more companies going “online”, and more content it’d be hard to argue that there’s less traffic out there today than there was even a mere four or five years ago. The increasing pressure put on the network is often mentioned almost in passing, as though merely moving from 10Gbps to 40Gbps to 100Gbps will solve the problem. Move along now, nothing to see here but a higher flow of packets.
But that higher density of packets along with greater diversity of content coupled with distribution through cloud computing that’s creating other issues for network services whose purpose it is to collect, analyze, and act upon those packets.
Todas las entradas hechas por Latest News from Cloud Computing Journal
Cloud Security – Implementing a Secure Cloud Backup Case Study
Secure cloud backup is a scenario which increasingly gains traction. It allows organizations to implement an off-site backup while maintaining costs at a minimum. In this blog post I would like to focus on a specific use case of secure cloud backup. The system we describe is comprised of an on-premise replication server, Porticor Cloud Security, and Amazon S3 as the final backup destination, all integrated by one of our fine cloud integrators.
In this use case, an enterprise organization was struggling with an inefficient and costly offsite backup infrastructure that was meant to manage an incrementally expanding database. An offsite server farm was costly to operate and maintain and the tape backup and recovery methods used were time consuming. Furthermore, the company failed to meet regulatory requirements with regard to data availability. T
Enabling Security and Compliance in Big Data
An interesting subplot of this burgeoning, “capture everything” big data culture, is whether a single, byte size piece of information really matters anymore. Big data, after all is really about big picture thinking. At a high level, it’s about how we assemble – on a massive scale– unrelated bits of information to better inform our worldview.
Dropbox, The Woz, & Public Cloud
Public cloud computing is in the news in a bad way, with Dropbox’s latest security breach and The Woz’s new fears about giving up local control of one’s data.
The Woz seemed to be thinking more out loud than making a prediction; he’s allowed to say whatever he wants in any case. As a Founding Father of the personal-computing revolution, he’s no doubt horrified at the idea of handing over one’s personal stuff to some faceless corporation who promises to store said stuff somewhere, somehow. What if they lose it?
I don’t know whether Woz is also worried about government snooping of all this stuff. I know I certainly am, and I am thoroughly disheartened to see the Obama Administration continue to act as if 1984 has finally, and truly, arrived in this great nation of ours.
Meanwhile, Dropbox seems to be the latest public-cloud company to be victimized by its customers. People with bad intentions allegedly stole passwords from somewhere in cyberspace, and found that some of them also worked at Dropbox. The company has promised tighter security, including required two-stage authentication.
Really, it’s like leaving your laptop in your unlocked car or apartment. But Dropbox has hardly been pro-active in heading these problems off at the pass. eCommerce sites with similarly flimsy security at least have the good stuff – credit card info – encrypted or outsourced and doubly encrypted.
With Dropxbox, the good stuff is rather larger in size than credit-card info, and my clear 20/20 hindsight says the company should have been more serious about securing it, dumb customers or no.
I don’t think these headlines are going to impede public cloud adoption by large enterprises. Any enterprise IT department that wishes, or has been directed to wish, for public cloud in its strategy will have a detailed checklist to head off amateur-hour mistakes.
I also don’t think these headlines will impede the growth of Apple’s iCloud. Myrmidons will continue to follow their departed leader’s vision for several more years, it seems.
I do think these headlines represent a grave threat to all who sell public-cloud ideas to small and medium-sized businesses. Public cloud security lapses look like the inevitable result of hare-brained scchemes to these folks. Since a super-majority of them run their companies on Windows, it seems that Microsoft has a large opportunity here to jump in more aggressively with cloud, integrate ironclad security with Windows 8, and save the day.
The hard reality that our modern era of viruses and malware was largely spawned by Microsoft’s sloppiness in integrating Internet Explorer as an ostensibly key part of Windows gives me little faith this will happen.
Cloud Computing and Big Data Strategy
In this CEO Power Panel at the 10th International Cloud Expo, moderated by Cloud Expo Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan, David Canellos, President and CEO of PerspecSys; Lawrence Guillory, CEO of Racemi; John Keagy, Founder, Chairman and CEO of GoGrid; Treb Ryan, Co-Founder & CEO of OpSource; Joe Weinman, Sr. VP of Cloud Services & Strategy at Telx; Jeff Newlin, Vice President and General Manager of OutSystems North America; and Darryl Brown, CMO at Appcore discussed such topics as: Is it just wishful thinking to depict the Cloud as more than just a technology solution? If not, then what concrete examples best demonstrate cloud computing as an engine of business value?
The Age of Big Data: How to Gain Competitive Advantage
We have entered the “Age of Big Data” according to a recent New York Times article. This comes as no surprise to most organizations already struggling with the onslaught of data coming from an increasing number of sources and at an increasing rate. The 2011 IDC Digital Universe Study reported that data is growing faster than Moore’s Law. This trend points to a paradigm shift in how organizations process data where isolated islands and silos are being replaced by large clusters of commodity servers that keep data and compute resources together.
Another way of looking at this paradigm shift is that the growing volume and velocity of data require a new approach to networked computing. A good example of this change is found at Google. The industry now takes Google’s dominance for granted, but when Google launched its beta search engine in 1998, the company was late entering the market. At the time, Yahoo! was dominant; other contenders included infoseek, excite, Lycos, Ask Jeeves and AltaVista (dominating technical searches). Within two years, Google was the dominant search provider. It wasn’t until 2003, when Google published a paper on MapReduce, that the world got a glimpse into Google’s back-end architecture.
Data Centers: Where Big Data Will Be Exploited
On any given day, it’s not uncommon for a company to generate 2.5 quintillion bytes of data, pushing the amount of data that must be processed and managed to unimaginable levels. Because of the requirements for power and low-latency connections that such data growth entails, many companies have become more inclined to outsource their big data needs to colocation data center facilities. In turn, this has created a huge demand for colocation space as additional processing grounds for big data. According to analyst firm Nemertes, colocation providers will not have the available space to capitalize on approximately $869 million of market demand by 2015. This is with good reason, though, as colocation data centers offer huge benefits for big data, including high-density power, opportunities to decrease latency and a community of like-minded companies with which to cross-connect.
Public Cloud Reportedly Coming from VMware
VMware is going to go up against Amazon, Microsoft, Google and presumably Rackspace with its own public cloud Infrastructure-as-a-Service developed as Project Zephyr according to CRN, which thinks it could create some channel conflict for vCloud service providers that will have to compete with VMware.
The story is unconfirmed but the book quotes “sources with knowledge of the matter” saying that VMware has been quietly beta testing Zephyr for the last few months on Cisco USC servers and EMC Avamar storage at a big data center space in Nevada.
Apparently it’s afraid if it waits much longer it’ll be closed out. Market share will depend a lot on how aggressive its pricing is.
The Cloud Computing Transition
“ServiceMesh is an enterprise software company. Our product is the agility platform, which is an enterprise-ready cloud application management platform,” stated Frank Martinez, Chief Strategy Officer at ServiceMesh, in this SYS-CON.tv interview with Cloud Expo Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan at the 10th International Cloud Expo, held June 11–14, 2012, at the Javits Center in New York City.
Cloud Expo 2012 Silicon Valley, November 5–8, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA, will feature technical sessions from a rock star conference faculty and the leading Cloud industry players in the world.
SYS-CON.tv Interview: Building Secure Multi-Tenant Environments
“We are a cloud hosting provider with 14 years of experience and we are focused on building multi-tenant secure environments,” stated Aaron Hollobaugh, Vice President of Marketing at Hostway Corporation, in this SYS-CON.tv interview with Cloud Expo Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan at the 10th International Cloud Expo, held June 11–14, 2012, at the Javits Center in New York City.
Cloud Expo 2012 Silicon Valley, November 5–8, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA, will feature technical sessions from a rock star conference faculty and the leading Cloud industry players in the world.