Everyone in the IT industry knows how amazing cloud computing is – it can cut overheads, introduce flexibility and make previously unobtainable services affordable for even the smallest of businesses. But with 60 per cent of the American public claiming to have no clue at all about cloud services, it seems that the sector’s enthusiasm is yet to turn into mainstream awareness.
It’s tempting to dismiss such findings out of hand – after all does it really matter if people don’t know how iTunes, Gmail and other products work as long as they actually do what customers want? The answer is a resounding yes, it does matter. Too many small business owners don’t understand the benefits of cloud computing and they’re missing out.

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Public cloud, private cloud, hybrid cloud, cloud bursting, cloud storming, elastic compute, IaaS, PaaS, SaaS, the list of terms goes on and on ad-nauseam. Like it or not, cloud computing has taken hold as an important design consideration in companies ranging from small startups to large established enterprises. The concepts and technologies behind cloud computing have been around for quite a long time now so why is it taking so long for so many companies to move their applications and realize the benefits that cloud computing offers?
Getting beyond the ridiculous fear of the unknown, security concerns are a major inhibitor to cloud adoption but between private cloud and a slew of security technologies and methods that should only impact a small portion of applications. The real problem, in my opinion, is that nobody wants to fail and suffer damage to their personal and/or corporate brands. I’ve seen so many companies make a poor transition to cloud computing and it impacts their revenue and customer retention.

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While IT vendors typically lead a product pitch with cost benefits, it should be no surprise that cost savings alone don’t always drive IT purchases. For many organizations, revenue growth may represent an even more compelling driver.
Cloud compute and cloud storage have in many circles become synonymous with cost savings and improving an organization’s bottom line. Perhaps a lesser known aspect of the cloud is the ability to help organizations increase their top line revenues.

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SYS-CON Events announced today that Mellanox Technologies, a leading supplier of high-performance, end-to-end interconnect solutions for data center servers and storage systems, will exhibit at SYS-CON’s 12th International Cloud Expo, which will take place on June 10–13, 2013, at the Javits Center in New York City, New York.
Mellanox Technologies is a leading supplier of end-to-end InfiniBand and Ethernet interconnect solutions and services for servers and storage. Mellanox interconnect solutions increase data center efficiency by providing the highest throughput and lowest latency, delivering data faster to applications and unlocking system performance capability. Mellanox offers a choice of fast interconnect products: adapters, switches, software and silicon that accelerate application runtime and maximize business results for a wide range of markets including high performance computing, enterprise data centers, Web 2.0, cloud, storage and financial services.

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You’ve got SIEM, you employ log management. You even have access and or identity management. Each performs a specific security function for your enterprise, but unless they are working across all your information silos and collaborating their collective capabilities, you still might have vulnerability gaps…like a thoroughbred running with blinders.
While trawling the blogs, feeds and news I came across an analyst’s article about best security practices in which he kept referring to “the stack.” And by this, he meant a multitude of various solutions that address certain security needs and capabilities; everything from email filtering, firewalling, authenticating, credentialing, logging and intrusion detection, etc…

And, if you read my blogs often enough, you know I am a big proponent of unified security. However, unified security is not a stack. It is easy to be confused as both look to utilize best of breed tools to prevent negative impact on IP assets. A stack references a number of technologies where each operates independently from one another. Single sign on by itself is a sufficient tool, but when operating alone in its own silo, important contextual information is lost.

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Cloud compliance is always a hot topic, but recent updates to the HIPAA and PCI regulations, have further enhanced the need to clarify some important points around cloud compliance and regulatory compliance. In this blog post, I would like to address some issues as highlighted in the valuable PCI DSS Cloud Computing Guidelines (available here), around compliance and Infrastructure as a Service cloud computing. (While the trigger is the PCI guideline, the discussion applies to HIPAA as well).
First and foremost, the level of control and your ability as a cloud customer to implement security in your cloud environment is dictated by your cloud type. For example a customer using Software as a Service (SaaS) will have the least amount of control and the SaaS provider will have the greatest level of responsibility for data security, while in Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), the customer has much more control on data security implemented in his cloud account while the IaaS provider will emphasize “shared responsibility”. And to translate it to compliance: A customer in a SaaS environment must rely heavily on the provider’s compliance (which is either there or not), while in a IaaS environment the customer must take active responsibility for compliance together with tools provided by the IaaS cloud provider.

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The way humans understand the world, the way we think, and the way we put our thoughts into language require both vagueness and ambiguity. Without them, we lose important aspects of meaning. Furthermore, how we structure our language is culturally and linguistically relative. As a result, current semantic interoperability efforts will be able to address a certain class of problems, but in the grand scheme of things, that class of problems is a relatively small subset of the types of communication we would prefer to automate between systems.

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“With order of magnitude improvements in price/performance, Amazon Redshift makes big data analytics accessible to more people, allowing large organizations to analyze more of their data and smaller ones to afford fast, scalable data warehousing technology,” said Raju Gulabani, Vice President of Database Services at Amazon Web Services as AWS today announced that Amazon Redshift is now broadly available for use.

Amazon Redshift is described by the company as “a fast and powerful, fully managed, petabyte-scale data warehouse service in the cloud,

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If you’ve been around the block a few times, you’re probably wondering why the title of this post isn’t, 50 Reasons VPNs Suck in the Cloud.

VPNs have long been the bane of both administrators and users (and lets not forget, support). They’re clunky, complex, and costly, and the same is true when they’re deployed to secure cloud access.

Today, VPNs are increasingly used to connect to cloud computing resources. Either by routing traffic back through the corporate network or direct to the cloud provider, VPNs offer authentication and transport-layer encryption to keep the bad guys out and sensitive information secure. But at what cost?

Both VPN configurations (corporate and provider) are complex to set up, require client agents with loads of support, and can be expensive to maintain. Arguably, there’s room for – and exists – a better approach to securing access to cloud servers …

Cloud security is once again on the agenda after a report from Lieberman Research showed that nearly half of IT professionals were wary of keeping sensitive data in the cloud due to government intervention.

The survey was conducted at November’s Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) Congress and found that the majority of respondents prefer to keep their most sensitive data on private networks rather than on the cloud.

Other top-line findings were:

• Nearly nine in 10 (88%) of IT professionals believe some cloudy data could be lost, stolen or corrupted
• Less than half of respondents (46%) believe that moving to the cloud has increased their IT security
• Yet 56% think migrating to the cloud has saved money, and 86% think their move to the cloud has been successful overall

“There are a number of reasons why so many IT professionals are apprehensive about storing corporate data in the cloud,” writes …