Collaboration in the cloud is a genius idea. Massively scalable and low-cost infrastructure is just what businesses need to bring seamless communication back to a mobile, global workforce. But the way that cloud has taken hold in most enterprises, via software-as-a-service (SaaS), may be too fast and loose for some of today’s enterprise data, which is highly regulated and thus must be highly secured.
Private clouds are growing in popularity as a result. A private cloud provides scalability while slashing IT costs and complexity, all without compromising security. For many organizations, it offers the best blend of public and private network.
As organizations plan their private cloud deployment, they should be aware of the typical issues that they may face. According to a June 2012 Forrester survey of US IT decision-makers that had deployed private clouds at their enterprise, 62 percent encountered problems with security and compliance, while 52 percent faced trouble integrating the cloud with existing tools and apps. Meeting service level agreements with customers and end users was a problem for nearly four out of 10 users, while nearly a third of IT buyers faced problems with software licensing or creating self-service access for users. The likelihood of these issues arising increases if your organization is running high-bandwidth applications such as video collaboration.
With IaaS combined with the many features Windows Azure offers, the opportunities for enterprise IT as well as small and medium businesses are real and exciting to employ cloud as a delivery platform for LOB services including media and phone apps.
As an Infrastructure-as-a-Service provider, Bluelock sees a lot of migration of applications. Migration is occurring from physical servers to cloud, from private cloud to public cloud and back to private cloud from public cloud.
Migration can be tricky and a poor migration strategy can be responsible for costly time delays, data loss and other roadblocks on your way to successfully modernizing your infrastructure.
While each scenario is different, I’d like to identify three key best practices that will help your team create a solid, successful plan for migrating your application.
Even before you begin to move your application, there’s a lot of best practice that goes into choosing which application to migrate to the cloud. Regardless of whether you are migrating that app to a public cloud or a private cloud, you should assess the app for data gravity and connectivity of the application.
Rackspace Hosting has partnered with Alamo Colleges to provide job training using a $2.5 million Skills Development Fund grant from the Texas Workforce Commission (TWC).
Rackspace CEO Lanham Napier stated that “Rackspace fully understands the importance of a highly engaged, cloud savvy workforce. We are thrilled to be partnering with Alamo Colleges and see this as an exciting step forward in our journey to bridging the IT skills gap.”
“This grant will provide training for skills that companies would have previously had to search for globally,” said state Sen. Carlos Uresti. “We are pleased that this partnership will result in good-paying jobs here in Texas.”
“This partnership is good for our families, good for our businesses, and good for San Antonio,” said state Sen. Donna Campbell. “Together, the State of Texas, Alamo Colleges, and Rackspace are creating 1,000 new jobs and providing workers with opportunities to develop the skills that will ensure Texas remains a leader in 21st Century technology.”
SYS-CON Events announced today that Zimory, the cloud management software company, 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.
Zimory provides heterogeneous, independent IaaS cloud management software for private, public, hybrid and database clouds. Zimory is working with leading service providers, enterprises and governments due to its proven security and carrier-grade quality.
Eucalyptus, the open source private cloud platform partnered with Amazon to give people hybrid clouds, has found selling support and professional services, the usual way an open source company makes money, isn’t working as a business because would-be customers are too tight-fisted.
As a result it didn’t grow as much as expected last year.
So it’s regrouping. It’s open sourcing its services and training, CEO Marten Mickos said, to focus on its product business, where it’s seeing early indications of large cloud implementations and the potential for a big business thanks in part to its alliance with Amazon, whose APIs are the recognized cloud standard.
Unifying identity and access management has been a stretch goal for IT for nearly a decade. At first it was merely the need to have a single, authoritative source of corporate identity such that risks like orphaned or unauthorized accounts could be addressed within the enterprise.
But with a growing number of applications – business applications – being deployed “in the cloud”, it’s practically a foregone conclusion that organizations are going to need similar capabilities for those applications, as well.
It’s not easy, there are myriad reasons why unifying identity and access control is a stretch goal and not something easily addressed by simply deploying a solution. Federation of identity and access control requires integration. It may require modification of applications. It may require architectural changes.
Avanade, the global enterprise IT services company started by Accenture and Microsoft in 2000 to focus on Microsoft widgetry, has acquired the software written by a young 15-month-old SaaS operations start-up by the name of Opstera that helps manage cloud solutions, the underlying platform and dependent cloud services.
The price it paid is unknown.
The pair has reportedly been working together on a public cloud management service for Azure. The technology provides application monitoring and management of Windows Azure apps.
The start-up said in a FAQ that “There is a strong need in the enterprise for comprehensive managed services that can guarantee a high level of availability and operational efficiency of the infrastructure similar to what they are used for on-premises solutions. Opstera software will be an addition to an already strong portfolio focused on cloud managed services.”
Racemi, the moving company for the cloud, announced on Thursday updates to its cloud migration software that add support for the SoftLayer CloudLayer platform. As part of the launch, Racemi has also announced special pricing of $99 per migration to CloudLayer for the next 30 days.
SoftLayer is the largest, privately held, cloud infrastructure provider in the world, with 13 data centers and 17 points-of-presence spanning the U.S., Asia and Europe.
The updates to Racemi’s Cloud Path software as a service (SaaS) and DynaCenter on-premises software now support physical and virtual server migrations to CloudLayer cloud servers built on SoftLayer’s automated infrastructure and Citrix XenServer. It’s also possible to automatically migrate cloud instances from other cloud providers to CloudLayer. This provides customers with additional flexibility and choice when it comes to migrating existing workloads to public cloud computing resources. Additional information is available at www.racemi.com/index.php/softlayer.
