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Risk management consulting provider Leviathan Security Group has released a whitepaper discussing the issues in choosing local and cloud storage, as well as potential vulnerabilities and risks.

The paper on the value of cloud security, and vulnerabilities in storage, assumes three scenarios, based on small, medium and large businesses, and outlines solutions based on their business needs:

• For a small consultancy scenario, the nature of their work means they are unlikely to connect back to the office during the work day, although many will synchronise files from home using an in-house VPN service when they return. The storage space they require for 50 employees is 15TB. Leviathan notes the Dell PowerVault NX400 would be ideal as a storage server, with Windows 2012 R2 as an operating system, backup needs met by a Drobo 5D system, and Symantec Endpoint Protection leverage for protection against malware. Total three year cost for local storage is $48,000, while cloud is $60,000.
• A mid sized regional corporation, which would require around 150TB of storage accessible from the internal LAN as well as for VPN users, would be ideally suited for a Storinator Redundant NAS as a storage server, powered by an Intel Dual-core i3-3240 and 90 Seagate 4TB disks, and a Dell PowerEdge R520 Server as backup with Windows 2012 R2 as OS and 83 LTO-6 backup tapes. Malware protection would be handled by another Dell PowerEdge server, alongside Symantec Endpoint Protection. Total three year cost is $276,000 for local, $377,000 for cloud.
• For a big corporation, 750TB of storage space would be necessary, with 24/7 support requirements and a four hour replacement part guarantee. For this, Leviathan recommends a Petarack High Availability SAN as a storage area network, with two Intel Xeon E5 Sandy-Bridge Processors. Backup solution would be a Tandberg Data T160+ Tape Library, consisting of a Dell PowerEdge R720xd server, Windows 2012 R2, and 2013 LTO-6 backup tapes. A single Symantec console managing Symantec Endpoint Protection, installed and run on a Dell PowerEdge R725xd, would be more than enough to handle malware. Total three year cost is $1.75m for local, $1.86m for cloud.

It’s worth noting here that the researchers are not advocating any of these vendors, just that these vendors were able to provide the best fit for pricing. “As is commonly the case in real-world purchasing, the vendor that was able to provide the most accurate and timely pricing for a solution that met our needs was selected,” they explain.

The report also assesses the different types of vulnerabilities in these kinds of solutions. While CloudTech has examined in-depth data loss and cloud vulnerabilities in the past, this report offers a few interesting insights. Vulnerabilites highlighted include process failure, malicious insiders, and hardware and software failure among others. Cloud-specific threats include a lack of monitoring and audit capabilities and problems with internet connectivity, while local storage threats include a loss of local knowledge, natural disasters, which this publication examined earlier this week, equipment scarcity and geographical restrictions.

The overall aim from the report is to show how capricious choosing a cloud storage solution is. “A simple price calculation – even one that contains significant detail and technical depth – cannot be the deciding factor for organisations with significant storage needs,” the report notes.

“An organisation should consider its predicted rate of expansion, its technical requirements, its appetite for capital outlay, its ability to establish a long-term supply chain, and its ability to recruit adequate technical and security personnel as criteria equal to or more significant than price.”

You can read the full 37-page paper here.

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Google has announced the launch of PerfKit, an open source cloud benchmarking tool aimed at aiding developers evaluating performance features.

The search giant claims it has worked with over 30 leading researchers, companies and customers in developing this tool, as well as educational institutes: Stanford and MIT will be having quarterly discussions on default benchmarks and settings on the back of this development.

Google claims PerfKit is unique because not only does it report on standard metrics such as peak performance, is also measures end to end time provision resources in the cloud. PerfKit also comes with a visualisation tool, PerfKit Explorer, to help developers interpret the results.

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“PerfKit is a living benchmark framework, designed to evolve as cloud technology changes, always measuring the latest workloads so you can make informed decisions about what’s best for your infrastructure needs,” the Google Platform Performance Team posted in a blog.

“As new design patterns, tools, and providers emerge, we’ll adapt PerfKit to keep it current,” they add. “It already includes several well-known benchmarks, and covers common cloud workloads that can be executed across multiple cloud providers.”

There are plenty of cloud benchmarking tools out on the market at the moment. CloudHarmony is one of the best known, and the company updated its metrics in January to provide a list of the most reliable public cloud providers. Amazon Web Services, Google and SoftLayer were the most reliable according to CloudHarmony, while Aruba Cloud’s storage facility clocked up a whopping 407 outages across five regions in 2014.

Given Google’s perspective as one of the most reliable cloud providers for performance, it makes sense that they want to move into the benchmarking game. Google’s Cloud DNS had a 100% record, while Cloud Storage suffered eight outages at an SLA of 99.9996%, App Engine suffered just one outage and Compute Engine had 66 outages for a 99.982% SLA.

You can find out more about PerfKit here.

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Amazon Web Services (AWS) remains the most popular enterprise cloud service, according to the latest quarterly report from Skyhigh Networks, while the number of cloud services used by firms continues to rise.

According to the report the average employee uses 27 apps at work, while the average number of cloud services in use per company was 897 in Q414, which compares favourably against 831 in Q3 and 626 in Q413. The biggest rise in app type was development, which saw a 97% spike in usage year on year. Collaboration went up 53%, file sharing 20%, business intelligence 18% and social media 17%.

As this publication reported back in October, Amazon continues to assert its dominance in enterprise cloud services. For Q414 figures, AWS finished top ahead of Microsoft Office 365, Salesforce, Cisco WebEx, and ServiceNow. Yammer, Box and Zendesk also made the top 10 while Workday was in the top 20, leading Skyhigh to comment: “Representing a new generation of enterprise software players, four companies in the list went public in the last 36 months.”

The top file sharing service, as it has been for the past year, was Dropbox, with Google Drive, OneDrive, and Box behind. Office 365 continues to be the most popular collaboration service, ahead of Gmail, Yammer, Yahoo Mail and Cisco WebEx.

Yet the report had an interesting undercurrent, and proposed the concept of the “enterprisation of consumer IT”. Never mind the consumerisation of the enterprise, Skyhigh argues: Facebook, Dropbox, Google Drive and Gmail, frequently used by consumers, now offer enterprise versions which provide greater controls for businesses. The top consumer cloud services, according to the report, are Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn and Pinterest.

There’s a problem however; four of these top five consumer apps also appeared in the list of top apps which don’t encrypt data at rest. 37% of users in Q414 uploaded at least one file containing sensitive or confidential data to a cloud service, while 22% of files uploaded overall contained private data.

The Q3 report briefly touched upon this, arguing how companies are struggling to block consumer products. Yet there’s been a shift in thinking. Whereas shadow IT – employees bypassing IT admin controls to use their own cloud services for greater productivity – was once a disaster, CIOs are now beginning to see the positive side, as sister publication Enterprise AppsTech has explored in depth.

The Skyhigh research also examined the fastest growing cloud services, with Loggly, Todoist and ToutApp in the top three – the latter two appearing on the fastest growing list for two consecutive quarters.

 “From the perspective of the end-user, there is an unprecedented amount of choice, and people are inclined to use things that help them while discontinuing their use of things that either don’t help them or are inferior to other solutions,” the report notes.

“It is this idea that led us to think that, by measuring usage patterns across thousands of cloud services, we could help identify the up-and-coming solutions that are on the path to mainstream adoption based on their growth rates.”

You can find the full report here.

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According to survey figures released by Gartner, 95% of attendees at the analyst house’s Datacentre Conference in Las Vegas are unhappy with their private cloud deployments.

The 140 respondents were given six potential options to explain what was going wrong with their private cloud, alongside a ‘nothing is going wrong’ option. 31% cited a failure to change the operational model, 19% said it was simply doing too little, and 13% cited a failure to change the funding model.

Picture credit: Gartner

Bittman admitted he was “a little surprised” at the results, although some commentators below the line argued the question was leading in focusing too much on the negative side of public cloud.

Regardless, the increasing prevalence of hybrid cloud models – as Matt Asay wrote for Tech Republic, “no wonder private cloud vendors have started calling themselves ‘hybrid’ clouds” –  has meant the private cloud as we know it is facing a tipping point.

In a report last October, Verizon argued the long-held public v private cloud discussion was “inadequate to describe the massive variety of cloud services available today.” The report noted how more companies were taking a planned, lifecycle approach to adopting cloud, and that each application warranted a different approach on its own merits.

Some companies are trying to blur the lines. CenturyLink’s newest private cloud, released in August, has private cloud instance plugged in to public cloud nodes thus running off the same platform. It’s certainly hybrid IT, but the company was insistent it was still a private cloud. David Linthicum, writing in the same month, argued private clouds had a new role of being points of control, or interfaces, into public clouds.

Yet a report from Piper Jaffray in January found CIOs were still concerned over public cloud solutions. 35% of respondents said the security of public cloud was the primary reason for keeping data on premise.

What do you make of the survey results?

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Microsoft is giving $500,000 (£328,000) of free Azure hosting credit to Y Combinator (YC) startups, according to YC president Sam Altman.

The Redmond giant will also be offering YC firms in the Winter 2015 batch and beyond three years of Office 365 subscription, access to Microsoft developer staff, as well as one year of CloudFlare and DataStax enterprise services.

In a blog post published on February 9, Altman notes the company “[doesn’t] want to leave software companies out”, after biotech startups benefited to the tune of $20,000 in Transcriptic credits and hardware firms were able to leverage a partnership with Bolt.

“This is a big deal for many startups,” Altman wrote. “It’s common for hosting to be the second largest expense after salaries.”

Naturally, Microsoft isn’t the only cloud provider to be so altruistic. November 2013 saw Rackspace launch the Rackspace Startups Programme announce support to the tune of £250,000 to give UK-based startups a foothold in the cloud, with the programme expanding globally the year after, while IBM launched the slightly less snappily titled IBM Global Entrepreneur Program for Cloud Startups, with £75,000 of potential investment on tap, a year later. At the time, Big Blue trilled in its press notes that it was offering more dollar than Google, Microsoft, and Amazon Web Services.

This sort of move is altruistic only to a point, however. Microsoft will doubtless be ploughing this money into YC in the hope that its more successful startups will become major Redmond customers. Two of the most famous YC graduates, Dropbox and Docker, are partnering with Microsoft.

Elsewhere, Microsoft has topped the January rankings of influential cloud organisations, according to Compare the Cloud. The table, which is calculated from an analysis of “all major global news, blogs, forums and social media interaction” over 90 days, saw Microsoft finish ahead of SAP, Amazon, Apple and Oracle to make up the top five.

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It seems Microsoft can’t give away enough cloud storage at the minute: US-based users of Bing Rewards can grab 100GB of free OneDrive storage for two years.

Bing Rewards, as you’d expect, is an incentive-based service that allows users to collect points the more they use Microsoft’s search engine which can then be exchanged for rewards such as e-gift cards. However according to Windows Central, the OneDrive offer is completely free and is not linked to any incentive-based usage.

This continues to play into the market of commoditisation of storage; giant tech vendors being able to offer storage at extremely low prices alongside other services, putting pressure on standalone players.

Back in October Microsoft offered unlimited OneDrive storage for Office 365 customers, expanding on its June offer of 1 terabyte per customer. At the same time, storage provider Bitcasa stopped its unlimited offerings, putting the landscape into intriguing perspective. The lowest Office price plan, Office 365 Personal, amounts to approximately $7 a month, with cloud storage, while Bitcasa’s previous unlimited offer was at $10.

This isn’t to mention Microsoft’s partnership with Dropbox for cloud storage, which at the time raised eyebrows given the position of OneDrive, but it makes sense. Dropbox is in need of a more enterprise-centric focus, while analysts argued that Microsoft needed to further assure the industry it could “play nicely” with competitors; CEO Satya Nadella, building upon the availability of Office for iPads and Android tablets, has made it quite clear he wants to go as far away as possible from the previous walled garden approach Microsoft employed.

Aaron Levie, the CEO of Box, told CNBC on the advent of his company’s IPO that the cost of storage going down over time benefits Box’s infrastructure costs, rather than affecting profits in an adverse way.

The move towards a service-based economy and storage as a feature, not a product, is continuing apace. You can visit here to claim your free 100GB of OneDrive storage (US only).

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Microsoft has released a series of instruction guides for setting up hybrid cloud environments, including putting together a SharePoint intranet farm and a web-based line of business application in a hybrid cloud.

The tech giant cites a lack of previous resources in this field as the reason for putting pen to paper – while there is plenty of content out there for creating a test environment in a cloud-only virtual network, for instance, hybrid environments have scant documentation in comparison.

For the tutorial on setting up a hybrid cloud environment, the configuration provides a basis and starting point for users to develop and test apps, as well as create test configurations of computers on the Corpnet subnet and within the TestVNET virtual network.

“When complete you can begin performing application development, experimenting with simplified IT workloads, and gauge the performance of a site-to-site VPN connection relative to your location on the Internet,” explained senior content developer Joe Davies in a blog post.

Hybrid has been given a kick start in recent news, thanks to VMware’s announcements about its hybrid cloud strategy going forward, which was then criticised by Red Hat. The open source tech provider described VMware’s vision of a unified platform of virtualised compute, networking and storage for the hybrid cloud was “fundamentally flawed”, adding  that its own solution, through an open hybrid cloud approach, was superior.  

A survey in March 2014 from Microsoft showed almost half (49%) of more than 2000 execs polled had deployed some form of hybrid cloud. These most recent guides, however, show that while the idea of hybrid cloud is a nice one for IT professionals to grasp, setting up and testing a deployment is another issue entirely.

You can find the full documentation here.

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The latest figures from public cloud management workload provider 2nd Watch has found a significant uptake in network access storage (NAS) products from customers using Amazon Web Services (AWS).

2nd Watch, which manages more than 10,000 AWS instances for enterprise, put together a scorecard showing the hits and misses of Q414. EC2 remains the most popular AWS service, with 98% of customers using it, just ahead of S3 (97%). Amazon’s SNS push notification service was the next most popular (65%), ahead of hosted message queuing service SQS (46%), and relational database RDS (45%).

Yet it was storage that proved the most interesting entry in this quarter’s scorecard, with three SoftNAS services making the top five product rank. SoftNAS Cloud (#2), Cloud Standard (#3) and Cloud Express (#5) all featured, but all behind Barracuda Web Application Firewall which topped the chart. NGINX Plus rounded off the top five.

The majority of users plump for small EC2 types (35%), compared alongside medium (19%), large (17%) and extra large (13%). Performance monitoring analysts Cloud Spectator mused in a January report that EC2 offered “significant” cost advantages over a long term investments, therefore expect this trend to arguably increase in the coming quarters. AWS was also at the summit when CloudHarmony examined the most reliable public cloud providers in 2014.

The average rate for EC2-SQL Server Standard was $0.786, while it was $0.465 for EC2-SQL Server Web. By region, South America ($0.578) was the most expensive, followed by US East ($0.403), EMEA ($0.137), Asia Pacific ($0.135) and US West ($0.125).

Even though EC2-SQL Server Standard was the most expensive on the card, it had dropped from $1.27 in Q314. 2nd Watch attributes this to more companies leveraging the T2 class instance over the traditional M class – and adds that this trend will continue apace for Q115.

Figures from CloudEndure in January found AWS had a 41% reduction in performance issues quarter to quarter during 2014. With these numbers on top, it certainly provides a compelling argument. 2nd Watch has had a busy couple of months itself, announcing its Cloud Factory service to offer a fixed fee migration service to AWS, as well as doubling its revenue in 2014.

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Open cloud provider Red Hat has hit out at end user computing giant VMware in a blog post, describing its recently outlined hybrid cloud vision as “appealing” but “fundamentally flawed in implementation.”

The post, written by Red Hat cloud product strategy general manager Bryan Che, argues VMware’s vSphere and virtualisation technology is not as effective at scaling out cloud apps compared to OpenStack, adding that while you can run both cloud-native and traditional apps with OpenStack on top of vSphere, it doesn’t do either particularly well.

“Virtualisation infrastructure – whether with VMware vSphere or Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization – is not designed to scale out but to scale up traditional applications,” Che wrote. “When these traditional applications need additional capacity, you give them bigger virtual machines. And these workloads depend upon the underlying virtual machines being resilient and never going away.

“The problem then, with running a scale-out cloud like OpenStack on a scale-up platform like vSphere is that vSphere has limited capacity to scale out,” he added. “Once you run so many virtual machines in vSphere, you reach the limit of your cluster.

“This inherently limits the ability of cloud-native apps on OpenStack to scale out horizontally because they will run into the cluster size constraints of the underlying vSphere platform.”

As this publication noted, VMware has unleashed a series of announcements in recent days, launching what was claimed to be the industry’s first unified platform of virtualised compute, networking and storage for the hybrid cloud, alongside a series of new collaborators for its Partner Network. Not everyone was convinced, however – not least because VMware still has plenty of work to do to convince the wider community of its cloud-first vision.

Not surprisingly, Red Hat advocates its own solution, through an open hybrid cloud approach, as superior. “By providing native platforms suited to their particular workloads and the ability to bridge these environments together, an open hybrid cloud offers a no-compromise approach to cloud: optimised traditional apps, optimised cloud-native apps, and a unified experience across them,” Che wrote.

Red Hat uses its blog as a semi-informational, semi-propagandist tool. CEO Jim Whitehurst penned a few thoughts in September over the “huge opportunity” to become the leader in enterprise cloud, for instance. It’s not the first time rival vendors have taken a pot shot at VMware’s strategy, either; following the acquisition of enterprise mobility provider AirWatch in January 2014, Citrix senior director Chandra Sekar posted a rebuttal describing VMware’s vision for end computing as “laughable on many counts”; however, the post was swiftly rubbed out.

There’s at least one body which thinks VMware is doing something right, however – and it couldn’t be any bigger. The White House announced earlier this week that VMware CIO Tony Scott has been appointed the next US CIO.

Read the full Red Hat blog post here.

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A report published by BCSG has revealed how awareness and uptake of cloud services in small to medium businesses (SMBs) is on the rise.

The survey, of 600 European participants across all stages of small business, from micro businesses to pre-startups, found 64% of SMBs are already using cloud-based software, while the average number of applications in use is three.

78% of respondents say they are considering purchasing new solutions in the next two to three years – potentially the average number of cloud software applications in use will be 7, with 88% consuming at least one service.

The report assesses eight primary areas which will see a significant uptake of cloud services, from marketing and financial management to managing customers and legislation. 35% of users are currently using cloud apps to manage marketing duties, with a further third expecting to adopt cloud software for marketing within the next three years. As businesses go through the lifecycle, uptake in cloud services increases.

In terms of collaboration, 25% of firms surveyed said they were currently using cloud apps, while 36% expect to see uptake in the next three years. Again, this figure rises the further a business gets into making profit.

For small businesses ensuring they keep their heads about water, it comes at a cost. Two thirds (66%) of those surveyed say they put more than 40 hours a week in at work. 56% polled cited a lack of customers as a primary issue, compared to lack of money (46%), lack of time (36%) and lack of support (28%).

“Getting a business off the ground means hard work, difficult decisions and learning on the job,” commented John Davis, BCSG managing director. “Access to much-needed expertise and support can be hard to find. However, cloud-based services are increasingly providing a viable solution.”

Do you agree with these survey results?