In many contexts, Cloud isn’t the solution. It’s part of the answer, and whether the money should go to Cloud or to some alternative will depend on the nature of the problem.
We know we want it, so Cloud must be a thing, right? If we’re carrying our enterprise IT shopping basket around, we know we want to stop at the Cloud shelf. Once there, we might select a nice fresh IaaS or perhaps some of this SaaS or that. And whatever our selection, we’ll pay the bill at the register. Good thing we brought our shopping list, and with it, our budget for Cloud, right?
Such is what the Cloud marketing machines at the various vendors and service providers want you to believe. Need Cloud, budget for Cloud, pay for Cloud. Cloud is a thing, after all, and we all want that thing.
Not so fast. Cloud isn’t a thing at all. It’s in reality dozens of different things: compute, storage, network, database, development platform, business applications, and more. The value these offerings provide is similarly varied: pay for automated self-service, pay for elasticity, pay for managed services, and so forth.
Monthly Archives: September 2013
Don’t Budget for Cloud
In many contexts, Cloud isn’t the solution. It’s part of the answer, and whether the money should go to Cloud or to some alternative will depend on the nature of the problem.
We know we want it, so Cloud must be a thing, right? If we’re carrying our enterprise IT shopping basket around, we know we want to stop at the Cloud shelf. Once there, we might select a nice fresh IaaS or perhaps some of this SaaS or that. And whatever our selection, we’ll pay the bill at the register. Good thing we brought our shopping list, and with it, our budget for Cloud, right?
Such is what the Cloud marketing machines at the various vendors and service providers want you to believe. Need Cloud, budget for Cloud, pay for Cloud. Cloud is a thing, after all, and we all want that thing.
Not so fast. Cloud isn’t a thing at all. It’s in reality dozens of different things: compute, storage, network, database, development platform, business applications, and more. The value these offerings provide is similarly varied: pay for automated self-service, pay for elasticity, pay for managed services, and so forth.
Racemi Automates Migrations to IBM Cloud Services
Racemi, a provider of automated server migration software that streamlines the process of migrating workloads to public, private, and hybrid clouds, has announced global support for IBM public cloud offerings, providing clients an automated migration path to their IBM cloud of choice, at no charge for a limited time.
Racemi’s Cloud Path software as a service (SaaS) enables IBM customers to migrate server workloads to IBM’s SoftLayer cloud services at no charge (see terms and conditions here).
“Working closely with IBM, we are offering customers free migrations to IBM SoftLayer’s public cloud services,” said James Strayer, vice president of product management, Racemi. “This ensures there a fast, easy way to move existing workloads to IBM’s cloud computing platforms.”
The Notion of the File is Fading Away
The most interesting takeaway from a Wired article on Box’s move to include collaborative editing in its file sharing service:
“…what’s happening now is that the applications are becoming the primary portals to our data, and the notion of the file is fading away. As Levie indicates, you never browse a PC-like file system on your phone. You access your data through applications, and so often, that data resides not on your local device, but on a cloud service somewhere across the net.”
PCI Compliance in the Cloud: What You Need to Know
Cloud Computing – the buzz words of the technology sector this decade: if you’re not already doing it, you’re missing out. Articles have been written. Experts have been crowned. Events have been attended. We all agree – the cloud presents opportunities for cost savings, elasticity, and scalability.
But for companies that are bound by Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS), securing financial data in “the cloud” presents new issues.
How is the Cloud Different? Securing brick and mortar businesses was one thing, securing data centers and hardware was an added level, but securing the foggy boundaries of the cloud presents a new set of challenges.
The skills and knowledge you acquired in the data center are still very relevant to the cloud world. However, the most obvious change is that physical walls are no longer available to protect your systems and data. Cloud Encryption is the answer – producing “mathematical walls” to replace the physical ones.
PCI Compliance in the Cloud: What You Need to Know
Cloud Computing – the buzz words of the technology sector this decade: if you’re not already doing it, you’re missing out. Articles have been written. Experts have been crowned. Events have been attended. We all agree – the cloud presents opportunities for cost savings, elasticity, and scalability.
But for companies that are bound by Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS), securing financial data in “the cloud” presents new issues.
How is the Cloud Different? Securing brick and mortar businesses was one thing, securing data centers and hardware was an added level, but securing the foggy boundaries of the cloud presents a new set of challenges.
The skills and knowledge you acquired in the data center are still very relevant to the cloud world. However, the most obvious change is that physical walls are no longer available to protect your systems and data. Cloud Encryption is the answer – producing “mathematical walls” to replace the physical ones.
Cloud Expo: Delivering Guaranteed Performance Through an SDS Framework
For cloud providers, offering predictable storage performance backed by firm SLAs will become a competitive differentiator that drives greater customer affinity and a better application experience. Many providers feel that a Software Defined Storage (SDS) frameworks hold the key to delivering guaranteed performance, yet this “software abstraction layer” is only half of the solution. SDS frameworks are dependent on the virtualized resources presented to it, and without the granular abstraction of physical storage resources, these frameworks will remain limited.
In his session at the 13th International Cloud Expo®, Dave Wright, Founder & CEO of SolidFire, will explore how to deliver guaranteed performance today, through intelligent storage architectures and software defined control planes of CloudStack, OpenStack, and VMware.
The U.S. Open Tennis Tournament and Cloud Technology
Sporting events are periodic events that suddenly demand lots of information technology resources and a good example where cloud technology can be applied effectively.
At VMWorld, a marketing executive from a technology company asked me what kinds of workloads were inappropriate for the cloud with today’s technology. Core banking and manufacturing execution systems immediately came to mind. Banks do not want their security compromised, and manufacturing plants do not want any downtime. Current cloud technology is not ideally suited for these applications.
Better Process Control in the Cloud
Employee benefits provider Unum Group has been building a DevOps continuum, and is further exploring the benefits of a better process around cloud-assisted applications development and deployment.
This interview highlights how employee benefits provider Unum Group has been building a DevOps continuum, and is further exploring the benefits of a better process around cloud-assisted applications development and deployment.
To learn more about how they’ve been using certain tools and approaches to improve their applications delivery, we sat down with Tim Durgan, an Enterprise Application Architect at Unum Group, and Petri Maanonen, Senior Product Marketing Manager for Application Performance Management at HP Software.
Big Data Spending to Reach $114 Billion in 2018
“Global spending on big data by organizations will exceed $31 billion in 2013, finds a new market forecast by ABI Research. The spending will grow at a CAGR of 29.6% over the next five years, reaching $114 billion in 2018. The forecast includes the money spent on internal salaries, professional services, technology services, internal hardware, and internal software.” This is great news to everyone who is already betting big on Big Data, and will obviously leave room for those still innovating. Clearly as our data explodes, we must manage it better, and right now Big Data innovations are managing and exploiting that data to great success. The US Federal government is investing heavily in Big Data solutions and may even drive this spend higher.