Cloud has dramatically changed how we think about and utilize services. Cloud facilitates rapid deployments due to quick availability of scalable services. It provides the high service velocity to manage changes incrementally and less time for provisioning storage and applications. Cloud can enhance productivity by providing the infrastructure or application platforms and related tools to respond to customer needs faster, giving organizations an edge over others that have not assessed such mechanisms. In addition, the on-demand capabilities can lead to efficient utilization of resources. I have seen applications that traditionally would take months to deploy, being rolled out in several weeks due to the Cloud and new environments being set up very quickly. The key is to carefully assess existing capabilities and focus on service and process integration.
Monthly Archives: April 2012
Three Reasons to Use Cloud Anti-Spam
Guest Post by Emmanuel Carabott, Security Research Manager at GFI Software Ltd.
GFI Software helps network administrators with network security, content security and messaging needs
Budgets are stretched thin, you already work too many hours, and you’re always trying to find a server that can run the latest requested workload.
For companies with the flexibility to take advantage of cloud-based technologies, there’s a quick and simple way to win back some time, save some money, and free up some resources on your email servers and reallocate the ones that are running your current anti-spam solution – cloud anti-spam. Here’s how:
Money
Cloud anti-spam solutions require no up-front costs, no hardware, operating system, or software investments, and operate on a simple per-user subscription model. They are a great solution for companies looking to implement anti-spam technologies without a major investment. They keep your costs low, predictable, and easy to allocate. The subscription model means you even have the option to take what has always been considered a capital expense and turn it into an operational expense, which may make your CFO as happy as your CIO would be about the budget you save.
Time
Cloud anti-spam solutions will give you back hours in your week taking care of the infrastructure, but that’s not all. The best cloud anti-spam solutions offer you a user self-service model, where each user can get a daily summary of messages that were filtered out, and can click a link in that summary to release a false positive, or log onto a web portal at any time to check for missing or delayed messages themselves. They get instant gratification and your help desk works fewer tickets related to spam. Everyone wins, except, of course, the spammers.
Resources
Spam, malware, and phishing messages don’t just cost time and money, they can consume significant server resources. Anti-spam solutions running on your email server take a lot of CPU cycles to run filter lists and scan for malware, RAM to expand all those attachments before they can be scanned, and disk space to quarantine what inevitably will be deleted. Moving that entire load to the cloud anti-spam solution frees up resources on your servers, can free up space in your racks, and will save you tons of bandwidth you can put to better use since spam is stopped before it ever reaches your border.
Companies that for legal and compliance reasons, or that prefer to maintain complete control of all aspects of the email system may not find cloud anti-spam solutions are the best fit, but for companies with the flexibility to do so, they are the right choice for IT teams looking to save money, time and resources, and who also want to provide their end users with a great email experience. You’re already stretched thin; give yourself, your team, and your budget a break by choosing a cloud anti-spam solution today.
Case Study: Making Cloud ROI a Reality
IT managers at enterprises of all sizes are exploring cloud computing and virtualization as a way to address conflicting demands within their organizations. These mounting pressures include a lack of internal resources, mandates from the CFO to lower costs, and the struggle to complete key initiatives while also performing mundane server maintenance and application storage tasks. These same IT professionals are also being asked to build and implement battle-tested disaster recovery and business continuity plans that not only reduce data loss and downtime, but present a recovery time objective that prevents the organization from further interruption in the wake of an outage.
You may have read some controversial articles in the early days of cloud computing stating that there is no such thing as ROI for cloud computing. These early cloud pundits believed that buying into cloud services is not an investment, but an avoidance in an investment – therefore, ROI cannot be measured.
Meet the Cloud API – The New Enterprise Control Point Description
The mantra of “reusing” existing application assets as services has become established as part of the lingua franca, or common language, associated with Cloud-based infrastructure sharing. The key to exposing application functionality is through APIs and this is well understood by developers. While, at first glance, API management might be an old concept, cloud-based API management presents a new discipline with added security, visibility, integration, and scale requirements. As applications are shared outside the protective firewall to/from the cloud and among cloud providers, traditional firewalls do not provide the mediation or XML threat protection required to expose these applications safely. Management of Cloud APIs presents a challenge and tremendous business opportunity that some are calling “the single biggest growth area for cloud computing.” In this webinar, Forrester Research will decompose the cloud broker’s role as an on premise or third-party intermediary and how cloud API management opens new doors to connect smartphone applications, browsers, middleware, legacy apps and just about anything that can talk HTTP.
Fast Data Hits the Big Data Fast Lane
While Big Data has been thought of as large stores of data at rest, it can also be about data in motion.
Of the 3 “V’s” of Big Data – volume, variety, velocity (we’d add “Value” as the 4th V) – velocity
has been the unsung ‘V.’ With the spotlight on Hadoop, the popular image of Big Data is large petabyte data stores of unstructured data (which are the first two V’s). While Big Data has been thought of as large stores of data at rest, it can also be about data in motion.
“Fast Data” refers to processes that require lower latencies than would otherwise be possible with optimized disk-based storage. Fast Data is not a single technology, but a spectrum of approaches that process data that might or might not be stored. It could encompass event processing, in-memory databases, or hybrid data stores that optimize cache with disk.
Fast Data is nothing new, but because of the cost of memory, was traditionally restricted to a handful of extremely high-value use cases.
Teradata Claims to Put Wings on Big Data Analytics
Teradata, the doyen of the Big Data set, has got a new purpose-built appliance for SAS high-performance analytics that uses an in-memory approach for hyper-fast results.
In other words, it distributes complex analytics in parallel across a vast pool of memory looking for patterns in large volumes of data.
It reportedly whittled what would normally have been a 167-hour project in financial risk analysis at some Wall Street bank or another down to 84 seconds.
Teradata claims other customers can expect as much and expects it to “kick competitive butt.” It claims IBM, Oracle and SAP, which have their own in-memory systems, “lack the foundational analytics.”
5 ways to protect against vendor lock-in in the cloud
Recently Google announced a significant price increase for use of its App Engine Platform-as-a-Service. The increase itself was not a huge surprise. Google had been making noises that something like this was in the offing for a number of months. But the size of the increase shocked the Web development and cloud applications community. For most users, the cost of using the Google runtime environment effectively increased by 100% or more.
A huge online backlash ensued. For its part, Google put off the increase by a month and moderated some of the increases. But the whole incident brought many nagging doubts about the cloud to the surface. Said one poster on one of the many threads that lit up the Google Groups forums after the increase:
“I like so many of us have spent a lot of time learning app engine – I have been worried like so many that using …
Virtual Appliances and the Networking Team
Over the last few years there has been a lot of progress made towards virtualizing a decent amount of the traditional, network-centric appliances that used to be just hardware based. Why are some companies still resistant to this software-based approach? Is it because that’s the way it has always been, or is it inherent to the networking geeks who may be less virtualization-savvy than some of their cohorts in the other technology silos? It reminds me of the days when VoIP was first being introduced and the subsequent lack of acceptance that some of the old-school, traditional telephony engineers fueled. Some of them accepted it and others retired. The point is though that it makes sense and those who accept it will be much the better for it.
With the dynamic today moving towards private and public cloud offerings, the virtual appliance marketplace will most certainly continue to grow and mature. There are many reasons why this makes a lot of sense.
Take a look at the time it takes to implement a physical network appliance. Let’s use an application delivery controller – or load-balancer if you prefer that term. How long does it take to implement a physical box into an existing environment? Between ordering the unit(s) which usually come in pairs, shipping, and installing, it takes some time. The cables need to be run, the box racked and stacked and then physically powered on and provisioned. We have been doing this for years and this used to be standard operating procedure. Now that works well and good, kinda, in your own data center. What about a public cloud offering? Sorry, you don’t own that infrastructure. How about downloading a virtual appliance, spinning up a VM and you are off to the races. Again, this happens after provisioning the unit, but there is a lot less moving parts going that route. Cloud or not – either way it still makes sense. There will be less infrastructure requirements: power, rack space, cabling etc.
There are some other tangible benefits as well. From a refresh perspective it just makes sense to upgrade a virtual appliance with a newer image – or adding memory –rather than a hardware-based forklift upgrade every five years (with potentially more downtime required). The ability to shrink or grow a virtual appliance is one of the things that set it apart. We don’t have to repurchase anything – other than license keys and annual service contracts. Regrettably, those won’t go away. But coupled all together with the flexibility to move your virtual appliances along with your data from one environment to another is key. We will see more and more network-centric appliances become virtualized. There will most assuredly always be some physical boxes that the network folks can get their hands on, but that will be for access purposes only.
The companies/manufacturers/network-engineers who don’t embrace this trend could quickly find themselves behind the eight ball. Analog phones anyone?
Security Gateway Buyer’s Guide
Independent industry security expert Gunnar Peterson provides the analysis and decision support that will enable you make an informed choice when evaluating Security Gateways.
Guide describes security architecture capabilities, common business use cases, and deployment considerations. Upon registration you will receive access to the white paper and a customizable technical RFP matrix.
Cloud Expo New York: A New Programming Paradigm for the Cloud
The cloud has raised the bar and changed the game for software development. However, the current software development paradigms are fundamentally introverted and rooted in a siloed approach to development. The cloud provides an opportunity for the emergence of a silo-free and elastic programming paradigm that is built to automatically scale and enable inside-out integration at its core.
In their session at the 10th International Cloud Expo, Ash Massoudi, CEO & Co-Founder of NextAxiom Technology, and Sandy Zylka, VP Products & Technology and a Co-Founder of NextAxiom, will discuss the seven defining characteristics of this elastic programming paradigm and their implications.