Not that I need to tell you, but there are several things in your network that you could have better control of. Whether it is consistent application of security policy or consistent configuration of servers, or even the setup of network devices, they’re in there, being non-standard.
And they’re costing you resources in the long run. Sure, the staff today knows exactly how to tweak settings on each box to make things perform better, and knows how to improve security on this given device for this given use, but eventually, it won’t be your current staff responsible for these things, and that new staff will have one heck of a learning curve unless you’re far better at documentation of exceptions than most organizations.
Sometimes, exceptions are inevitable. This device has a specific use that requires specific settings you would not want to apply across the data center. That’s one of the reasons IT exists, is to figure that stuff out so the business runs smoothly, no?

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What are the best practices for deploying managed cloud services? Case studies have now confirmed that cloud services can be a better, faster, less expensive and less risky way to source Information and Communications Technology (ICT) solutions, according to the latest market study by Ovum.
Results from recent research conducted by Ovum details the experiences of five public sector organizations that have successfully deployed cloud services — either with Infrastructure-as-Service (IaaS), Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) or Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS).
Highlighting the known benefits and the catalysts that empower organizations to embrace the cloud service delivery model, Ovum says they have developed a framework to assist government agencies in understanding the organizational factors associated with early adoption of managed cloud services.

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Although self-service -together with elasticity, pooling/sharing, etc. – is a defining attribute of cloud computing, many of the companies expressing an interest in cloud computing do not seem to be aware of that.
In fact, when asked: who do you expect to provision your services to the cloud?; who will monitor your services’ performance and availability? and; who do you expect to take action if something goes wrong?, a majority of the companies asked look to be somewhat surprised by the question, as they simply assumed that their service provider would do so.
This is a bit like going to a supermarket (a typical self-service facility), pointing to the ingredients you like and expecting the cashier to clean, cook and serve them for you. The name we generally use for such a service however is “restaurant” and it comes with significant different expectations and pricing, as demonstrated by the price of a bottle of the wine in a restaurant versus that same bottle at a supermarket (which is one reason restaurants prefer to buy from exclusive wine merchants and not to put bottles or their wine list that are available in retail).

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China is the latest country to realise the full potential of cloud computing as they are now pushing a huge amount of money into it.

Chinese cloud computing now accounts for 3% of the global cloud computing market share, which in monetary terms equates to an awful lot – especially if you consider the fact that the market was said to be worth around $90 bn US dollars back in 2011 and it has continued to grow exponentially since.

Growth Plans

It is expected that the Chinese cloud computing market will grow to around 117.4 billion CNY, which is equal to $18.6bn US dollars, or £11.5bn, by 2013.

Furthermore, it has been reported that the Internet Society of China predicts that the country will have reached 1 trillion CNY by 2015 – a simply staggering amount of money!

The Chinese government is said to be encouraging the growth of …

As the name suggests our Government SaaS Entrepreneur program tailors their venture accelerator for apps for the public sector.
Examples of apps that have already gone through this process include Huddle IL3, referring to it being suitable for the UK’s information security classification IL3. This has resulted in the Huddle app grabbing the lions share of the G-Cloud market.
[Dave Nicholl] In this interview with Dave Nicholl, CIO for Ontario Province, talks about how they would consider this type of service for key requirements like their Drivers Licence applications, with a critical point about security.

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If they plan to remain viable in today’s markets, now is the time for real estate firms to make some dramatic changes by offering intelligent amenities in their commercial properties.
How do we prop up our dying shopping center?
How do we develop and maintain more business for our stadium?
How do we raise our commercial properties’ occupancy from 45% to 85%?
These questions are being asked more and more in the commercial real estate industry as the economy remains in a slump in many locations. Many executives are baffled because their usual management techniques are not working. In addition, assessments and property appraisals that overlook or discount technology within the property’s infrastructure are inadequate at best, and totally erroneous at worse.

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Are you aware of the new reality that cloud computing is bringing to bear? Cloud is not as global as you might think.
The global acceptance of cloud computing has caused a spike in demand for multi-national cloud capability. As a result, cloud companies are facing an intimidating next step – expanding to new international markets. The Netherlands is the leading cloud hub in Europe that can address this process specific to transatlantic cloud expansion and how to intelligently establish the highest performing Cloud environment between North America and Europe.

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A coworker and I put a couple pieces of open source software (OSSEC and Snort) together to respond to certain types of automated attacks we were seeing in our IDS (we use Snort in this case). Prior to this, an engineer would manually respond to alerts by logging into our firewall and blocking the IP address causing the alert. This process was tedious, repetitive, and time consuming. By the time the firewall change would be pushed, generally the scan (it was usually a scan) was over and the attacker had moved on. So we took advantage of a feature in OSSEC called “active response”, which is used to react to events on the network. OSSEC was configured to watch for Snort alerts, and would run a script on our Internet routers (running Vyatta core 6.3) to block the IP for 10 minutes. This response runs almost immediately. We hand selected alerts that we had associated with simple scans, such as FTP Brute Force attacks, and set them up to block the addresses. But this wasn’t enough for us.

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IBM will be adding another one of its Oracle Exa-like converged PureSystems in a webcast from Boston on October 9.
AllThingsD broke the news in a piece that has mysteriously disappeared from the Wall Street Journal’s site.
It said the thing – which IBM is advertising as an integrated solution for Big Data and the cloud – was developed under the codename Project Sparta, which makes some sense since the first PureSystems – PureFlex and PureApplications – announced in April, were reportedly codenamed Project Troy.

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