How many net-connected doodads are secure? The answer: none of them. Every device is woefully unprotected from various attacks, and to make matters worse, many of them might contain confidential information ripe for the picking. And if all that weren’t sufficiently disconcerting, the vendors of such miscellany aren’t particularly motivated to make them secure – even if they knew how to do it properly. Which they don’t. Nevertheless, we blindly forge ahead, building out the Internet of Things (IoT), as though the security issues will somehow resolve themselves. Just how worried should we be?
Monthly Archives: November 2013
Cloud Expo 2014 New York Call for Papers Now Open
Despite the economy, cloud computing is doing well. Gartner estimates the cloud market will double by 2016 to $206 billion. The time for dabbling in the cloud is over!
The 14th International Cloud Expo, co-located with 5th International Big Data Expo and 3rd International SDN Expo, to be held June 10-12, 2014, at the Javits Center in New York City, N.Y., announces that its Call for Papers is now open. Topics include all aspects of providing or using massively scalable IT-related capabilities as a service using Internet technologies.
Cloud Mystery: What’s the Tech Secret Behind Amazon Glacier?
ITProPortal has a good writeup on Amazon Glacier technology: tape? cheap disks they power down? It’s more than just a post filled with wild speculation because it includes informed reasoning on the current state of the art for each of the candidate technologies behind Glacier:
…of all the services offered by AWS, none have fuelled the same level of speculation and interest as Amazon’s Glacier. Though the service is well-known and widely-used in enterprise, no one knows exactly what’s behind it.
Amazon has retained a thick veil of secrecy around its most mysterious web service. The Seattle-based company has always kept the processes behind its services fairly quiet, but the omerta surrounding Glacier has been especially strict, leaving experts in the tech community perplexed about what Amazon could be hiding.
TL;DR: It might be old-fashioned robot tape libraries; it might be cheap disks they fill up then turn off until they need them for retrieval; it might be some clever hybrid of the two.
Get Me Outta Here! Avoiding Vendor Lock-In with Cloud-Based Software
You probably know from personal experience how tough it can be to change from one service provider to another. Think about the last time you changed your Internet service or gym membership. It was probably a pain, and there’s a reason. Most vendors don’t want you to have a seamless transition from their product to a competitor’s.
vendor lock in cloud software. But you might not know that some less-trustworthy vendors build roadblocks specifically designed to lock customers into their service. They make it hard for you to switch vendors so they can raise prices or change policies without worrying too much about losing customers—a practice called “vendor lock-in.”
How to Select a Cloud Provider Effectively
Moving your data storage to the cloud is a smart move as there is an explosion of data day by day and systems are struggling to store all that data effectively and securely. Cloud computing has proven not only to be cost effective but also frees the businesses to concentrate on the daily workings while the cloud takes care of details such as security, support, maintenance and the ever-so-important backup. Therefore, the demand for cloud computing is also growing and there are many companies sprouting up by the minute. So the consumer ends up in a dilemma of how to choose the right one.
To select the right type of cloud for you, analyze what type of data you are basically dealing with. For example, videos, photos and online documents will require software based cloud services. Other type of cloud services include Infrastructure as a service (IaaS) where the customer can transfer his data with virtually no changes made. All that the customer needs to manage is the operating system and its applications. When the customer wants to use the cloud or offer it as a service to others, then the Platform-as-a-service (PaaS) is the right choice.
People power: Why staff are driving cloud adoption
By Eoin Jennings, General Manager Hosting Services, Easynet
As St Jude raged around the UK last month felling trees and bringing commuter trains to a standstill, a collective sigh could be heard: cloud naysayers finally admitting defeat.
Whether or not businesses had a mobility or cloud strategy, those tech-savvy employees across the country armed with BlackBerries, tablets and Dropbox accounts were comfortably and productively working away, and their organisations were thankful. For many businesses, it will take these 90mph winds to blow in the seeds of change.
Businesses are adopting cloud services, albeit more cautiously than anticipated. Much has been written about vendors hyping cloud services, and adoption rates not living up to the propaganda. Indeed TechTarget’s Cloud Pulse Survey found that public and private clouds have reached the same level of market penetration at around 25%.
Adoption is moving in the right direction, though, and research from ISG …
IBM patent offers greener cloud computing options
IBM has patented a solution which the tech giant claims is a “green button” that distributes a cloud service to lower power systems to help save environmental costs.
According to the Armonk firm, patent 8,549,125 took its inspiration from energy firms offering consumers alternate, environmentally-friendly energy streams.
“We have invented a way for cloud service providers to more efficiently manage their data centres and, as a result, significantly reduce their environmental impact,” said Keith Walker, IBM master inventor.
In a supporting blog, Walker goes into more detail about the idea behind the patent, stating that there would be an ‘environmentally friendly option’ on the CSP’s setup wizard.
“It’s like purchasing a computer – you have the choice of buying a high speed hard drive, but do you need it for what you actually plan to do with the computer?” Walker wrote.
“Would something less powerful, but more …
The Time Is Now for 21st Century Leadership
I’ve just had the opportunity to preview my good friend Melvin Greer’s newest effort, “21st Century Leadership: Harnessing Innovation, Accelerating Business Success”. Now in pre-release, this book highlights the compelling linkage between internet scale technology, advance business models and the need for forward thinking leadership.
From the vantage of hindsight, I can see how my own professional career has been molded by the global changes Gartner describes as the Digital Industrial Revolution. In my consulting engagements, I’ve characterized this environment as the confluence of four major transitions:
Rackspace Enhances Hybrid Cloud with New Performance Cloud Servers
Rackspace® Hosting has announced its architecturally redesigned public cloud with Performance Cloud Servers. These new servers are designed to deliver enhanced levels of application performance with greater speed, throughput and reliability. This public cloud offering creates a powerful hosting platform for a variety of workloads, ranging from basic web hosting to large scale NoSQL data stores like MongoDB and Cassandra.
“In today’s world of instant demand, applications must be capable of scaling fast, and performing at scale without compromise. As a cloud provider, our role is to enable that without customers having to over-provision and constantly re-architect their applications,” said Rick Jackson, chief marketing officer at Rackspace. “Our mission is to provide our customers with the best-fit infrastructure to optimize the performance of their applications, and today we are redefining the benchmark for performance in a public cloud offering as part of our hybrid cloud portfolio.”
Rackspace Enhances Hybrid Cloud with New Performance Cloud Servers
Rackspace® Hosting has announced its architecturally redesigned public cloud with Performance Cloud Servers. These new servers are designed to deliver enhanced levels of application performance with greater speed, throughput and reliability. This public cloud offering creates a powerful hosting platform for a variety of workloads, ranging from basic web hosting to large scale NoSQL data stores like MongoDB and Cassandra.
“In today’s world of instant demand, applications must be capable of scaling fast, and performing at scale without compromise. As a cloud provider, our role is to enable that without customers having to over-provision and constantly re-architect their applications,” said Rick Jackson, chief marketing officer at Rackspace. “Our mission is to provide our customers with the best-fit infrastructure to optimize the performance of their applications, and today we are redefining the benchmark for performance in a public cloud offering as part of our hybrid cloud portfolio.”