Piston Cloud Computing, Inc., the enterprise OpenStack company, today announced its co-founder and CTO, Christopher MacGown, will lead a session titled, “CloudAudit: Cloud Security for Regulated Industries” on Wednesday, June 13 at Cloud Expo 2012 East in New York City.
What:
Regulation of consumer and corporate data is increasing in response to the growing movement into cloud service offerings. Coupled with high-profile intrusions by groups such as Anonymous and Lulzsec, the necessity for a standard way to assess the security of cloud service providers becomes apparent.
CloudAudit is an open standard developed by a Cloud Security Alliance working group that provides an open, common, extensible namespace and interface to enable cloud providers and authorized customers to automate audits, assertions, assessments and assurance for their cloud infrastructure, platform or application environments. This session will look at the CloudAudit API and implementations.
Monthly Archives: June 2012
Thinking Beyond “The Cloud”
As the conversations from FIRE sink in, I start to see IT evolve away from the conventional (and highly standardized) data center design to more advanced and highly-tuned architectures customized for particular operating missions. For all of the buzz about commoditized infrastructure there has been very little discussion about the need for customization. Yet, much […]
Cloud Expo NY: "It’s Now Official, Everyone On the Planet is Going To Be There"
“I finally registered for #CloudExpo,” tweeted Michael Baylor (@CloudVisions) Monday. “It’s now official,” he added, “everyone on the planet is going to be there.”
Baylor was just one of thousands of IT professionals who are using Twitter right now to connect with other like-minded Cloud & Big Data experts and compare notes as they prepare to attend The Largest Cloud Computing Event in the World…10th Cloud Expo | Cloud Expo New York.
Salesforce to Buy Buddy Media for Social CRM
As rumored last week, Salesforce.com Monday said it’s going to buy Buddy Media for roughly $689 million in cash and stock.
Buddy Media lets marketers manage their presence on social sites like Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Twitter and YouTube. They can publish content, place social advertising, measure the effectiveness of their social media marketing programs, determine which content is driving the most engagements, test different strategies and isolate the campaigns delivering the best ROI.
Salesforce already owns Radian6, a so-called social media listening platform, and will merge the two platforms together in its Marketing Cloud so it can offer the entire social marketing lifecycle.
Salesforce said it got interested in Buddy Media after Gartner predicted that CMOs will spend more on IT than CIOs by 2017 – and 15% of whatever they plunk down will be for CRM.
That may also explain why Oracle bought Buddy Media rival Vitrue a couple of weeks ago for what TechCrunch said was $300 million.
Buddy’s nearly 1,000 clients include Ford, HP, L’Oreal, Mattel, eight of top 10 global advertisers and ad agencies like Interpublic and WPP, an investor. Salesforce said it was attracted by the size of its major customers.
All Things Digital said last week that Buddy Media spurned an offer from Google to go with Salesforce.
Salesforce said it will pay approximately $467 million in cash and $184 million in common stock and $38 million in vested options and restricted stock units.
It calculates that the acquisition, expected to close by the end of October, should add $20 million-$25 million in revenue to its current fiscal year but cut earnings by 14 cents or 15 cents a share. As a result it tweaked guidance for the year to $1.45 to $1.49 on approximately $2.99 billion-$3 billion, less than the $1.63 on ~$3 billion Wall Street was already expecting.
Buddy Media raised $90 million in financing since getting started in 2007 from Softbank, Greycroft, Bay Partners, Institutional Venture Partners, GGV Capital, Zynga CEO Mark Pincus and VCs Ron Conway and Peter Thiel.
The Financial Times made the observation that Facebook, which Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff called the “new corporate homepage,” lets companies market on its platforms for free, leaving Buddy Media, Vitrue and others like them make money on its free tools. Facebook, by the way, closed at an all-time low Monday: $26.90
GridIron and Brocade Set IOPS Standard for Cloud-Based App Performance
GridIron Systems, a pioneer in Big Data acceleration, has announced record performance and substantial energy savings for a new reference architecture that combines its OneAppliance FlashCube ultra-high bandwidth solid state storage appliances with Brocade 16 Gigabits per second (Gbps) Fibre Channel storage area networking (SAN) technologies in validated tests running a cloud-enabled MySQL clustered database application.
The new reference architecture overcomes the challenges many organizations face in scaling and enabling concurrent access to databases, while also reducing costs and data center hardware requirements. The architecture, which was validated by Demartek, an independent analyst firm, is an important development for enterprises that depend on MySQL clusters for mission-critical business applications.
GridIron and Brocade Set IOPS Standard for Cloud-Based App Performance
GridIron Systems, a pioneer in Big Data acceleration, has announced record performance and substantial energy savings for a new reference architecture that combines its OneAppliance FlashCube ultra-high bandwidth solid state storage appliances with Brocade 16 Gigabits per second (Gbps) Fibre Channel storage area networking (SAN) technologies in validated tests running a cloud-enabled MySQL clustered database application.
The new reference architecture overcomes the challenges many organizations face in scaling and enabling concurrent access to databases, while also reducing costs and data center hardware requirements. The architecture, which was validated by Demartek, an independent analyst firm, is an important development for enterprises that depend on MySQL clusters for mission-critical business applications.
Global Cloud Solution Serves SMEs
The idea of serving global cloud customers is coming to fruition, an example being a Philippine BPO-technology vendor serving local customers with servers based in Phoenix, AZ. Goautodial.com is based in Pasig City, Metro Manila, serving small and medium-sized call centers and BPO firms.
“SMEs are beginning to embrace cloud technology to boost the growth of their businesses at a low cost,” according to Raffy Pekson II, Goautodial’s country manager. The company’s software can be downloaded free of charge, and there are no set-up fees, deposits, or long-term contracts, according to Pekson.
The company services centers with between 5 and 500 seats, in the country that has emerged as the major force in the BPO industry, with close to 500,000 employees and more than $11 billion in annual revenue. The government is supporting business initiatives aimed at driving the revenue figure to $25 billion within a few years.
Pekson says Goautodial offers solutions featuring on-site, off-site, and hybrid approaches, and is planning mobile applications as well.
The New Paradigm: Cloud Services, Cloud Tools
In the past year or so, we have witnessed a major shift from client-server to client-cloud. This shift is primarily fueled by two factors: mobile devices exceeding desktop computers and the thousands of different APIs available on the Internet today. What started in early 2000 on eBay and Amazon has become a real revolution in 2012 with thousands of companies, from Twitter and Facebook to AT&T, offering cloud-based services.
In the client-server approach an organization builds applications that consume its own internal content and
resources. However, even large IT organizations such as AT&T, Verizon and Amazon have come to realize that
they are no match for the social consumer and social enterprise developers out there. By making APIs publicly
available, these organizations hope that developers and “citizen developers” will come and build applications
and mobile apps on top of their services.
Cloud Computing: Network Janitors
If Cloud Computing is going to be part of the critical network infrastructure of an enterprise, senior executives better realize that no technology runs by itself. You need people that are very skilled in all aspects of planning, designing, implementing and managing these systems. There are dynamic people and there are also caretakers that can only do minimum maintenance on systems.
The idea that you can run Cloud Computing applications with a bare minimum of skilled people is a nice sales pitch, but in reality organizations better make sure they have skills on staff or skills readily available in times of emergencies as well as day-to-day operations.
Cloud Computing: Network Encryption for the IaaS Cloud at Cloud Expo NY
The Cloud Security Alliance, NIST SP 800-53 and other security frameworks recommend or require encrypting sensitive data in motion in shared cloud environments while delegating control of the encryption keys to the tenant. While many IaaS providers offer secure VPN connections to the cloud, the VPN tunnel often terminates at the “front door” of the cloud infrastructure, leaving data unprotected within the cloud network. This approach also leaves virtual servers in the cloud vulnerable to attacks from other tenants, and applications architected for LAN environments are not typically designed to operate securely in a shared cloud network.
In his session at the 10th International Cloud Expo, Todd Cignetti, vice president of product management with Certes Networks, will review security best practices for encrypting sensitive data in motion in the IaaS cloud while describing Group Encryption, a novel approach to encrypting network traffic without point-to-point tunnels that puts the control of keys and policies in the hands of the tenant.