The journey to the cloud has created demanding new challenges for IT departments who are tasked to support global users accessing applications from a multitude of devices. As the pace of application development and deployment increases, organizations need ways to provide global scale and optimal performance without sacrificing security.
In his session at the 11th International Cloud Expo, Brian Goleno, Product Manager at Akamai Technologies, will provide technical details for how dynamic content can be accelerated with a globally distributed platform and how applications can be instantly supported with minimal effort.
Monthly Archives: September 2012
Adopt a balanced approach to private clouds
By Laurent Lachal, Senior Analyst, Software – IT Solutions
Users are unsure of – or have very different views on – what constitutes a private cloud, which makes any survey about the subject rather meaningless.
They approach private clouds from a variety of viewpoints including bottom–up versus top–down, technology versus design, and long-term versus short-term perspectives.
Ovum does not advocate moving from a short-term, technology-centric, bottom-up approach to a long-term, design-centric, top-down approach, but we do believe the latter is more useful than the former.
In the Ovum report, Cloud Computing Needs Service Level Management, Ovum advocates a balanced approach according to specific company requirements and culture, based on a shift from supply-led to demand-led IT.
Look at private cloud from all angles
The bottom-up viewpoint is that of the IT department. It looks at private clouds from a data centre industrialisation, consolidation, and standardisation perspective based on:
- virtualisation technologies (to …
WILS: The Data Center API Compass Rose
There’s an unwritten rule that says when describing a network architecture the perimeter of the data center is at the top. Similarly application data flow begins at the UI (presentation) layer and extends downward, toward the data tier. This directional flow has led to the use of the terms “northbound” and “southbound” to describe API responsibility within SDN (Software Defined Network) architectures and is likely to continue to expand to encompass in general the increasingly-API driven data center models.
But while network aficionados may use these terms with alacrity, they are not always well described or described in a way that a broad spectrum of IT professionals will immediately understand.
Interoute taps Unisys to make cloud easy
Backbone operator and cloud services provider Interoute has teamed up with IT services firm Unisys to develop a ‘more disciplined’ approach to cloud computing. The partnership focuses on a combination of Interoute’s IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) and virtual data centre offering with Unisys’ management suite.
Cloud Expo Silicon Valley: A Cloud-Based Application Delivery Strategy
With business application traffic over the Web expected to double in less than five years, the need for a solution that can meet and exceed this demand grows increasingly urgent.
In his General Session at the 11th International Cloud Expo, Gary Ballabio, a Product Line Director for Akamai’s Application Performance Solutions, will discuss how to meet this challenge head on and extend application delivery out of the origin and across the public Internet without sacrificing security, performance or control.
The CIO’s Next Imperatives: Social, Mobile and Touch
The cloud is a commercial vehicle. This undeniable truth must now be accepted as a deeply entrenched truism by CIOs who are looking to manage the forward-looking growth of their technology architectures.
We can actually refine this statement further. The cloud is a commercial vehicle designed to facilitate customer engagement, sales and therefore profits.
These are not inconvenient truths, but it is an undeniable truth if you believe the proclamations being made by some of the new change-makers driving cloud computing from the Platform-as-a-Service level.
This commercialization of the cloud is facilitated by the way users are interacting with cloud services. Although that may sound like stating the obvious, what we mean by this use of the term “interacting” is now increasingly impacted by social applications. Analyst firm McKinsey estimates that there is $1.3 billion dollars waiting to be unlocked in the global economy if we harness enterprise level social technologies effectively.
Self-Service, Automated Software Delivery to the Cloud
“Cloud computing is still in the early stages of adoption and demand will continue to grow,” noted Alban Richard, CEO of UShareSoft, in this exclusive Q&A with Cloud Expo Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan. “Pricing, however, will vary,” Richard continued. “Many cloud providers are playing a volume game and will reduce prices for compute, storage and network resources to meet the needs of price-sensitive customers.”
Cloud Computing Journal: Just having the enterprise data is good. Extracting meaningful information out of this data is priceless. Agree or disagree?
Alban Richard: Agree. Making sure you collect data is an essential first step, and new technologies including cloud computing make data collection easier than ever. But there is little value inherent in the data itself. You need to be able to extract information that can be used in a concrete way to help set, then achieve your business goals and objectives.
Study: If Federal Agencies Move Three Applications Each to the Cloud, Savings Top $16 Billion
MeriTalk recently surveyed Federal IT professionals to understand if and how they are moving mission critical applications to the cloud. They found that Feds estimate they can save $16.6 billion annually if all agencies move just three mission-critical applications to the cloud.
As Federal agencies are making cloud progress, the early-adopters that are moving their mission-critical applications to the cloud are realizing cost savings and improved access to IT, according to the report, which was sponsored by EMC Corporation, VMware and Carahsoft. The report says the Feds spend more than half their IT budget on supporting mission-critical applications – and that private cloud is the platform of choice for mission-critical application transition. The study reveals how Federal IT executives view the barriers, current status, and future plans related to this shift.
Not surprisingly, Feds say security is a challenge – 73 percent identify security as a primary barrier. As a result, most favor private clouds. Thirty-eight percent of respondents say they have moved a mission-critical application to a private cloud; 11 percent say they have moved a mission-critical application to a hybrid cloud; and, 10 percent say they have moved a mission-critical application to a public cloud.
“Private and hybrid clouds offer significant cost-saving benefits along with the necessary security infrastructure that have not yet been realized through public cloud models,” said Kyle Keller, Cloud Business Director at EMC Federal. “The benefits of moving mission-critical applications to the cloud can be realized while also maintaining confidence in the security of those resources.”
Agencies spend 70 percent of their IT budget maintaining outdated legacy applications[1] – this is identified as a significant obstacle to cloud transition. Federal IT executives report that 52 percent of their mission-critical applications are custom built. When asked what would be required to make mission-critical applications ready for the cloud, 45 percent of Federal IT executives said these applications will require major re-engineering to modernize for the cloud.
Forty six percent of Federal IT executives say moving mission-critical applications to the cloud will improve their agencies ability to fulfill their mission, and 43 percent say it will improve their agencies’ big data analytics capabilities.
Of those who have moved a mission-critical application to the cloud, 91 percent report success. Federal IT managers surveyed report moving applications including financial management, procurement, logistics, customer relationship management systems, and project management.
“Our customers who are migrating their mission critical applications to the private cloud are realizing great benefits in cost savings, efficiency, availability and agility,” says Aileen Black, Vice President of U.S. Public Sector, VMware. “These benefits, enabled by the cloud, are the keys to customer success in the cloud.”
“Transitioning legacy, mission-critical applications to the cloud is not a forklift exercise – in many cases it’s more like an organ transplant,” said Steve O’Keeffe, founder, MeriTalk. “With the complexity and security concerns, it’s not surprising many agencies want a private room.”
“It’s been our experience that agencies are moving to the cloud in great numbers and are, as this survey clearly indicates, achieving significant benefits from doing so,” said Craig P. Abod, President, Carahsoft. “What began with virtualization now encompasses mission-critical applications as the next step in the journey and the value chain.”
Despite the barriers, many Federal IT executives see mission-critical applications in the cloud in their agencies’ futures. In two years, they expect 26 percent of their mission-critical applications to live in the cloud. In five years, they expect 44 percent to be in the cloud. In order to accomplish implementation goals, Federal IT executives recommend promoting cloud savings opportunities, identifying cloud-ready mission-critical applications, clarifying FedRAMP, and encouraging early adopters to share best practices.
“Mission-Critical Cloud: Ready for the Heavy Lift?” is based on a survey of 151 IT Federal government managers and systems integrators in June 2012. The report has a margin of error of +/- 7.95 percent at a 95 percent confidence level.
Cloud Computing: Rackspace Lets Go of OpenStack
control, turned over to an independent foundation charged with developing, distributing, promoting the adoption of the open source cloud platform and strengthening its ecosystem.
To achieve this grand design, the OpenStack Foundation, which claims 5,600 individual members, has gotten $10 million in funding and Rackspace, which had been supplying most of the management and money, has recently turned over the OpenStack trademark and technical assets like the cloud controller.
Since Rackspace and NASA concocted OpenStack it has gotten the support of 180 companies and 550 contributing developers.
Healthcare Provider Pays a Steep Price for Patient Data Privacy Breach
Earlier this week, the Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary and Massachusetts Ear and Eye, Inc. (MEEI) agreed to pay a hefty $1.5 million settlement to the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services for alleged HIPAA violations. According to MEEI, a personal laptop that contained unencrypted electronic protected health information (ePHI) was stolen, exposing a large amount of personal, clinical, and patient prescription data.
The government’s investigation found that MEEI failed to take steps necessary to comply with several HIPAA Security Rule requirements regarding data protection, and that the failures occurred over an extended period of time. And while this healthcare data breach involved a laptop, data security risks like this extend to larger “secure” IT environments as well. Just take a look at the largest healthcare data breaches in the last few years, and you’ll see that intrusions have taken place not only on portable devices, but on enterprise servers, client-server systems, centralized back-up systems, and cloud implementations.