While trawling the blogs, feeds and news I came across an analyst’s article about best security practices in which he kept referring to “the stack.” And by this he meant a multitude of various solutions that address certain security needs and capabilities; everything from email filtering, firewalling, authenticating, credentialing, logging and intrusion detection, etc…

And, if you read my blogs often enough, you know I am a big proponent of unified security. However, unified security is not a stack. It is easy to be confused as both look to utilize best of breed tools to prevent negative impact on IP assets. A stack references a number of technologies where each operates independently from one another. Single sign on by itself is a sufficient tool, but when operating alone in its own silo, important contextual information is lost.

The unified approach, as I describe in REACT, is a collaborative practice …

New research from enterprise IT solutions provider Damovo UK has revealed that, for 80% of IT top brass, if they move their services to the cloud, it’s their responsibility if it goes wrong.

The UK-based research, conducted by Vanson Bourne which spoke to 100 IT directors catering for more than 1000 employees, also found that for nine in ten respondents, cloud providers should in turn be more accountable, and provide greater transparency when it comes to data governance.

Interestingly, nearly 70% of respondents believed the hype around the cloud was responsible for the delay in their utilising cloudy software – as the hype meant it was difficult to establish which was good or not due to ‘vanilla statements’ from cloud vendors.

This accounted for 80% of financial service companies, 76% in manufacturing, and 52% in retail, distribution and transport.

Research from Navint Partners in October found that four in five …

Tony Baer, Principal Analyst, Ovum IT Enterprise solutions, Ovum

Announcements of new data platforms were highlighted at Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) first ever “re: Invent” user conference this week. Among the headlines, AWS announced Amazon Redshift, a managed, petabyte-scale data warehouse service that includes technology components licensed from ParAccel. Amazon Redshift will deliver the power of massively parallel columnar databases at a commodity price for data warehousing customers.

AWS also announced AWS Data Pipeline, a utility to simplify orchestration of data flows between both AWS-based and on-premise data sources and AWS-based processing services.

These new platforms and services will help fill out and add connective tissue to the various AWS platforms and services. Now that Amazon is automating data flows, it should take the next step and add integrated SQL views to NoSQL data stores, something that other providers, including Microsoft, Cloudera, and Hortonworks, are already pursuing.

AWS’s evolving …

Journey to the Cloud recently sat down with GreenPages Chief Information and Technology Officer Kevin Hall to talk about the outlook for 2013.

JTC: As CIO at GreenPages what are your major priorities heading into 2013?

KH: As CIO, my major priorities are to continue to rationalize and prioritize within the organization. By rationalize I mean looking at what it is we think the business needs vs. what it is we have, and by prioritize I mean looking at where there are differences between what we have and what we need and then building and operationalizing to get what we need into production.  

We are working through that process right now. More specifically, we’re actively trying to do all of this in a way that will simultaneously help the business have more velocity and, as a percentage of revenue, cost less. We’re trying to do more with less …

Showing signs of growth through 2013 and beyond, the latest round of CRM forecasts illustrate how quickly behavioral and predictive analytics, greater usability, integration with social media and mobility are transforming this market.

Even with the most usable, easily learned CRM systems, enterprises at times struggle with adoption rates however.  That problem has venture capitalists very interested in finding the next Salesforce.com, which a few have told me will look more like Facebook than a traditional CRM application.

Facebook’s future is going to be defined by how well they manage their migration to mobility, and the same holds true for CRM.  Today there are 110 CRM applications in the Apple App Store and 47 in the Android App Store.  Gartner predicts an exceptional growth rate of 500% by 2014 for mobile CRM.  For CRM vendors to get there from here, they need to make usability and streamlined user …

Adam Holtby, ITSM Research Analyst, Ovum

Through discussions with vendors, clients, and research into technology trends and disruptors, Ovum has identified what it believes will be the key IT service management (ITSM) advances of 2013. More detailed information and analysis can be found in our recently published report, 2013 Trends to Watch: IT Service Management.

Technology is evolving to assist with changing business demands

Technology continues to advance, and we are finally starting to see some good ITSM tool innovations around technology disruptors such as social and mobile. For example, BMC recently announced MyIT, an enterprise IT helpdesk solution that was developed with the objective of empowering users through giving them more visibility and control over their IT services from any device.

As a market leader, it is encouraging to see BMC make such a bold move in embracing and investing in mobility and social technology. BMC was slower than …

Recent research has shown that mobile browsers can take advantage of cloud hosting, permitting the use of multiple servers in order to complete complex tasks which would be impossible using mobile technology alone.

Due to their limited computational capabilities, smartphones and tablets are not able to carry out complex tasks, however such mobile browser cloud servers could alleviate this problem. Complex tasks can be carried out via the cloud thus sending the user information on a web page.

This could however have repercussions. For instance, a cybercriminal could anonymously hack and crack computer networks via a mobile based system, according to William Enck a professor of North Carolina State University. Enck said that “Because the person getting the bill for that computation is really the cloud browser provider, it gives those using the resources anonymously for other purposes an added advantage.”

Enck and his researchers were able to exploit a …

Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory have announced that they will be looking to make use of cloud computing platforms in order to power the administration’s next generation of projects.

The news was revealed at the 2012 re:Invent conference as Nasa IT CTO, Tom Soderstrom, and software engineer, Khawaja Shams, explained that the staff at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory are using cloud hosting platforms in order to power the Mars Curiosity rover mission.

So, not only have we proved that cloud computing could potentially help save the planet but it can also help discover other planets!

The rover has already made some fantastic discoveries on Mars and it makes use of computing and storage platforms in order to communicate with and process date gathered in the mission. This then gets sent back to mission control.

Furthermore, Tom Soderstrom and Khawaja Shams have stated that the rover was a basis …

“The ‘how,’ many change, but the ‘what’ is fundamental to risk management.”

I heard these sage words at a recent ISSA (Information Systems Security Association) meeting from a CIO speaking about security from the cloud.

He continued, “Risk is not unique to the cloud. It experiences the same issues that affect any outsourcing or third party deliverable. It is bounded by the same concerns regarding governance—does it meet the requirements of my industry? Is my data free from co-mingling? Are the proper notification protocols in place?”

Do a Google search on “cloud security” and the first entry is “How secure is the cloud?” True professionals know the argument is not about technology or how security is delivered, but rather one of governance. You need to know exactly who HAS access to what resources and if these levels of access are appropriate.

You need to know who IS accessing resources …