When was the last time you went to your favorite office superstore to buy a piece of packaged software?
Software as a Service (SaaS) and cloud storage have completely changed the consumer computing market. Other than Microsoft Office and a few resource-intensive applications for photo and video editing, everything else is either running in the cloud, delivered and managed from the cloud, or storing data in the cloud.
The same trend is coming to enterprise IT. While many organizations have moved their packaged software to IaaS providers like AWS and Azure, many more will simply adopt pure SaaS offerings. These new services align with user and organizational demands, and their pay-as-you-go pricing model fits current business budgeting and purchasing needs. They also get IT departments out of the costly business of building, maintaining, and securing datacenters.
Monthly Archives: November 2014
Cloud Computing Security Issues and Challenges By @GiladPN [#Cloud]
The US Federal Communications Commission has recently reported that “theft of digital information has become the most commonly reported fraud, surpassing physical theft.” Businesses can do a lot to protect themselves. The FCC issued a Tip Sheet for small businesses to promote employee security training, firewalls, securing of WiFis, and more. But for business operating in (or migrating to) cloud environments; data security, cloud computing security issues, and challenges take on new meanings and require new strategies.
What I Learned at Cloud Expo
The 15th International Cloud Expo and 2nd ThingsExpo finished up last week at the Santa Clara Convention Center. There were many exhibitors, many attendees, and many great sessions. Discussions were lively throughout, continuing after hours after each of the three days of the show.
Here’s what I learned:
Hybrid cloud and multi-cloud are a reality. This may seem obvious to anyone in the industry, and it was confirmed throughout each day last week. Cloud is not going to be a ubiquitous utility anytime soon, as might have been thought a few years ago. The market for private cloud – derided as cloudwashing a few years ago – will continue to grow rapidly, as it turns out that many enterprises have funny ideas about controlling their data and securing it on-site.
Public cloud is just getting started. This statement may seem to contradict my first statement, but it reflects the reality that cloud computing is not a zero-sum game. With only 5 to 10 percent of enterprise IT in the US employing cloud computing in any form so far, there is a limitless horizon for growth, and the instant testability and near-instant scalability provided by the public-cloud companies will benefit from hundreds of billions of dollars of this growth. Now, if only Amazon would tell us how much of its business is from public-cloud services, we can have a real benchmark from which to grow.
Homebrew is back. It was cute how presenters from behemoths such as Google and Cisco showed up with handcrafted things for the Internet of Things. Decades from now, when the world is paved with sensors, these days will be remembered fondly as the time when old-fashioned homemade engineering, the Makers movement, and entrepreneurial ingenuity delivered a number of very clever beacons, monitors, and wearable thingys in forms that reminded one of the days of playing “Daisy, Daisy” on an Altair 8800 in the early days of the PC revolution. Stanley Kubrick and Ed Roberts live!
The IoT is moving at warp speed. Another statement that may seem contradictory to the one preceding it, this observation is based on many conversations I had with attendees. Whereas most new computing waves are greeted first with skepticism then with cautious inquiry, the vibe about the IoT is that of a nascent Gold Rush. The first few years of Cloud Expo were characterized by people asking about the “what” of cloud, then the “why,” and then the “how.” Now, IT managers, representing significant budgets at big companies, have jumped straight to the “how.” They’re ready to deploy; no time to question what or why. At least that’s what I got from talking to people.
Big Data is creating jobs. We’ve struggled a bit with this term, as I guess it’s hard to define. But there was a lot of talk about the need for data scientists—as soon as we can define what a data scientist is. Think of data collection, monitoring, analysis, and actions based on the analysis, and you have the modern data-driven corporation. This has been the case for a long time. In the era of Big Data, everything is just a magnitude or two larger and more intense. Jobs are ensuing.
Oh yes, and DevOps. Because DevOps. That is all.
Why growing cloud commoditisation still won’t rain on the data centre’s parade
Picture credit: iStockPhoto
By Nick Razey, CEO, Next Generation Data
Rackspace’s recent decision to discontinue its pure infrastructure as a service (IaaS) offering in favour of “managed cloud” services is further evidence that it is the cloud rather than the data centre providers most at risk of becoming commodities – as I originally predicated here back in May.
Take Rackspace’s exit from IaaS as a sign of things to come. Many more Cloud services are already well on the way to being commoditised and their providers will see their margins increasingly competed away.
During the past couple of years Rackspace has been attempting to compete with low-price competitors such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft with its Azure Service and Google in the IaaS market. But now they are going back to their roots as a managed provider rather than attempting to be a carbon copy of Amazon. That’s how they made it in the early days. The business model of a managed cloud provider is much different to the approach taken by AWS and Google which offer pay-as-you-go IaaS on-demand services.
Some cloud pundits believe Rackspace’s move is a sign of broader changes in the market. The pure IaaS market is now perhaps between Amazon, Google, Microsoft and IBM who have the financial muscle to invest in research and development and new data centres, and can also afford to do so without offering high-margin support services on top.
In contrast, the data centre product comes in many different ‘non-standard’ varieties such as where it’s located affecting price of real estate and wages, tier level, type of colo space required, total power capacity and what’s available per rack, connectivity choices, service levels, and so on.
All of these directly influence both the quality of the product and its price, therefore keeping modern purpose designed data centres well clear of the ‘commodity zone’. And because of the high upfront investment required for land, power, planning and construction, data centre operators expect long term contracts with customers for ensuring cast iron returns on investment.
So for most data centre operators the forecast remains good – there’s still no sign of the cloud’s growing commoditisation raining on their parades.
vOneCloud: The Simplest Alternative to vCloud [#Cloud]
The OpenNebula Project has just announced the Beta release of vOneCloud, a CentOS Linux virtual appliance for vSphere that contains all required OpenNebula services optimized to work on existing VMware vCenter deployments. vOneCloud is for companies that want to create a self-service cloud environment on top of their VMware infrastructure without having to abandon their investment in VMware and retool the entire stack. vOneCloud deploys an enterprise-ready OpenNebula cloud just in a few minutes where the infrastructure is managed by already familiar VMware tools, such as vSphere and vCenter Operations Manager, and the provisioning, elasticity and multi-tenancy cloud features are offered by OpenNebula.
BYOD & the Importance of the Remote Wipe By @RickNotDelgado | @CloudExpo
Long story short, remote wipes aren’t a perfect solution. The original intent had some validity, but it also raises too many concerns. Wiping is really only an effective solution in an ideal world. Unfortunately, thieves don’t play by the rules and find ways around our solutions. For the moment, employees should always ask questions regarding BYOD policies in order to know what the remote wipe procedure is. Also, partition your device, which will increase the likelihood of personal data being protected in the event of a wipe.
New @OpenNebula 4.10 Enables Private Clouds on VMware vCenter [#Cloud]
Code-named “Fox Fur”, the twenty-third release of OpenNebula is available today with complete support to build clouds on existing VMware environments. OpenNebula 4.10 seamlessly integrates vCenter virtualized infrastructures leveraging the advanced features such as vMotion, HA or DRS scheduling provided by the VMware vSphere product family. On top of it, OpenNebula exposes a multi-tenant, cloud-like provisioning layer, including features such as virtual data centers, data center federation or hybrid cloud computing to connect in-house vCenter infrastructures with Amazon EC2, IBM SoftLayer and Microsoft Azure public clouds.
The #BigData Marketing Creepiness Factor By @TheEbizWizard
The pace of innovation in such big data-driven targeting technology is advancing unabated. There is so much noise in today’s omnichannel world that anything a marketer can do to get your attention is welcome – and furthermore, the more information they can collect about you, the better. For the marketer, big data mean big cha-ching.
We’ve all been there: on our lunch hour we surreptitiously visit our favorite My Little Pony fan site. Then hours later we bring our laptop to a meeting and project our client’s corporate web site for all to see – and right there at the top is a banner ad for My Little Pony: The Movie. How did that site know about our secret fetish? How embarrassing! How creepy!
Getting a Grip on Identity Management By @Dana_Gardner [#Cloud]
A BriefingsDirect discussion centers on learning new best practices for managing the rapidly changing needs around identity and access management.
Any modern business has been dealing with identity and access management (IAM) from day one. But now, with more critical elements of business extending beyond the enterprise, access control complexity has been ramping up due to cloud, mobile, bring your own device (BYOD), and hybrid computing.
And such greater complexity forms a major deterrent to secure, governed, and managed control over who and what can access your data and services — and under what circumstances.The next BriefingsDirect thought leader discussion then centers on learning new best practices for managing the rapidly changing needs around IAM.
Perhaps You Prefer Cloudy Concepts By @JPMorgenthal | @CloudExpo [#Cloud]
As I continue to engage customers around cloud and DevOps, I am amazed at the percentage of customers where there is pushback against cloud computing. Even more interesting are the reasons and roles responsible for denying advancement in the use of cloud in companies. For example, one IT executive is caught between the business, where the board is pushing for use of cloud and the Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) that is saying, “you can move processes out to the cloud, but not data.”
One thing is clear, there is a lot of misunderstanding going around when the word “cloud” is used. Many still immediately associate it with public, multi-tenant cloud solutions where their processes and data will be co-located with those from many other businesses. Security is still high on the list of reasons for businesses not engaging with cloud solutions faster. Those with cloudaphobia cite examples, such as Target and JP Morgan Chase as reasons against using cloud, which is hysterical when you consider that these are examples of breaches that occurred against privately managed data center systems.