Cryptocurrencies have gained traction in the past half-decade for a variety of reasons. Bitcoin has become the most popular cryptocurrency in the world due to its sudden rise in value and acceptance within the international marketplace. You might be wondering: What does cloud computing have to do with cryptocurrencies?

Cloud computing is beginning to revolutionize the cryptocurrency industry. When cryptocurrencies first began gaining popularity, amateur miners would create rigs in their basements, garages and bedrooms that consisted of computing gear that sometimes housed dozens of video cards with high performance GPU chips. These cryptocurrency mining rigs generated enormous electric bills for consumers with power companies sometimes mistaking the sudden spike in power use as a drug operation. These sets of circumstances along with other economic factors have caused bitcoin miners to rethink the way that they handle their hash workload.

Enter cloud computing

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As our devices continue their inexorable march to greater variety and maturity, customer preferences represent the cutting edge, driving enterprises to accelerate their digital transformation initiatives to offer unified omnichannel interactions. However, this transformation goes well beyond retail, and even beyond B2C to the B2B world, as consumerization of enterprise technology takes hold in office buildings, factories, supply chains, and logistics networks around the globe.

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HP charts a better path to simplified, just-in-time, and pan-IT support improvements — despite dynamic and complex IT environments.
Much of the attention to coping with mega IT challenges such as cloud, bring your own device (BYOD), mobile applications, and big data focuses on adoption and implementation strategy. Yet the added complexity and requirements of how to support these technologies once they are in place has now also become top of mind.
So how do enterprises deliver improved user experiences, leverage new reactive support tools and diagnostics, and increasingly rely on self-help and automation to keep their far-flung systems and services fully functional?

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I unintentionally watched all three hours of this video series in one sitting. The presenter hooked me and before I knew it, it was three hours later. It is a very fast paced tour of the security issues that can arise when using the Android platform. The tour is built around the Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) top 10 Mobile Security Risks as a guideline.

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The process of getting a successful mobile application deployed can be complex and daunting. Architecting, designing and developing natural user interfaces for touch and gesture on mobile devices is not the same as web and desktop UI design and development. Mobile devices are used in different contexts, and bring different personas to the table. Having web and desktop architecture, development, and UI design experience does not make you a qualified mobile architect, developer, or UI designer.

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SYS-CON Media announced that Centrify, a provider of unified identity management across cloud, mobile and data center environments that delivers single sign-on (SSO) for users and a simplified identity infrastructure for IT, has launched an ad campaign on Cloud Computing Journal.
The ads focus on security: how an organization can successfully control privilege for all of the organization’s identities to mitigate identity-related risk without slowing down the business, and how Centrify provides Active Directory Group Policy-based configuration to control the security settings of Red Hat systems and provides IT with the benefit of leveraging a familiar tool.

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SAP is delivering break-through innovation combined with fantastic user experience powered by the market-leading in-memory technology, SAP HANA.
In his General Session at 15th Cloud Expo, Thorsten Leiduck, VP ISVs & Digital Commerce, SAP, discussed how SAP and partners provide cloud and hybrid cloud solutions as well as real-time Big Data offerings that help companies of all sizes and industries run better. SAP launched an application challenge to award the most innovative SAP HANA and SAP HANA Cloud platforms applications. Out of many contenders, the best applications have been selected by members of the SAP Community Network via crowd-voting. At this exciting session SAP recognized the winners and finalists for their great accomplishment and showed the winning applications live on stage.

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Nearly half of organisations polled in a recent survey admitted they had failed or stalled their cloud hosting implementations, with a further half claiming they had to alter their budget and a whopping 70% force to make changes to their design.

These are the latest figures from a study of 358 respondents conducted by INetU and THINKStrategies entitled “The Adventures of Moving to the Cloud”, which aims to show CIOs and business managers it’s not a “walk in the park” to migrate over.

Only 27% of respondents said they were “extremely satisfied” by their experience with a cloud vendor, according to a post from THINKStrategies’ Jeff Kaplan on Datamation.

“While I’ve always been a tireless advocate for the fundamental advantages of cloud-based alternatives to traditional on-premise systems and software, I’m also a realist who believes our survey findings show that there are still plenty of potential pitfalls associated with migrating important business applications and processes to the cloud,” he noted.

Security remains the toughest hurdle to clear with regards to cloud implementation according to the survey respondents, with 27% citing it as the most difficult. This compares with compliance (20%), capacity planning (13%), monitoring (9%), provisioning (4%) and billing (4%).

Similarly, billing was the easiest function according to those polled (50%), ahead of provisioning (34%), monitoring (30%), compliance (27%), security (22%) and capacity planning (21%).

A recent seminar at the Public Sector Enterprise ICT conference in London found four key ways to overcome security in the cloud: build your knowledge up, be a smart buyer, bust the ‘in-house is best’ myth, and prioritise the quick wins.

Yet there was one piece of good news which came from the survey data: 96% of respondents who said they were extremely satisfied with their solution were managed by their cloud hosting provider.

You can find out more here. What do you make of the results?

Picture credit: iStockPhoto

Ten days ago I hosted a seminar on cloud security at the Public Sector Enterprise ICT conference in London. In a show of hands at the start of the discussion, the forty or so attendees were unanimous in their agreement that the issue of security is one of the most important considerations in the journey to the cloud.

Joining me on the panel was Tony Richards, the head of security at G-Cloud and Ian Gale from Bristol City Council. The panel had some great advice about how to overcome common security concerns. Here is a summary of what they think organisations can do:

• Build your knowledge: The Government’s policy around data and IT security has shifted considerably in the past few months. The objective is to reduce the amount of non-sensitive data which is unnecessarily over-protected and ensure that the most sensitive data is dealt with in the right way. It is essential that IT leads have a good understanding of these changes in order to shape conversations about security requirements with business managers. The guidance from the Cabinet Office is written for a non-technical audience and is a great tool for helping colleagues understand where they need to change their thinking.

• Be a smart buyer: The release of G-Cloud 6 puts the onus on organisations to assess their security needs in order to source the right solution. This means buyers need to do the right upfront work as part of the procurement process. The first step is to understand how the security assessment process works on G-Cloud. The digital market place blog has guidance on this along with regular updates to any changes. A second area where organisations can prepare is by assessing whether they need to compliment their in-house skills to map out their security requirements and align them to the security principles.

• Bust the ‘in-house is best’ myth: One critical area to tackle according to Bristol City Council’s Ian Gale is the perception that in-house solutions are more secure because they are controlled by the organisation. Ian pointed out it is in fact often the opposite – a supplier will invest a lot more in security than a council ever could. As G-Cloud’s Tony Richards pointed out, 60% of security breaches are internal, so working with a cloud based IT supplier shouldn’t represent additional risk.

• Prioritise the quick wins: The last piece of advice addresses the issue of gaining confidence that cloud security can work for your organisation. Recognise that moving to the cloud isn’t a ‘big-bang’ change. It needs to be gradual migration based on the business priorities. Pick what you want to migrate, do it well and build confidence.

We’ll be looking at this issue in more depth in the coming weeks through a survey with local government and central government IT leads. If you’d like to be involved in the research, please drop me a line: ivan.harris@eduserv.org.uk.

“We help companies that are using a lot of Software as a Service. We help companies manage and gain visibility into what people are using inside the company and decide to secure them or use standards to lock down or to embrace the adoption of SaaS inside the company,” explained Scott Kriz, Co-founder and CEO of Bitium, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at 15th Cloud Expo, held Nov 4–6, 2014, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.

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