All posts by Richard

NSA, Opinion, PRISM, Research, Snowden

Survey Shows Extent of NSA/PRISM’s Damage to US Cloud Companies

A survey by the Cloud Security Alliance  found that 56% of non-US residents were now less likely to use US-based cloud providers, in light of recent revelations about government access to customer information.

During June and July of 2013, news of a whistleblower, US government contractor Edward Snowden, dominated global headlines. Snowden provided evidence of US government access to information from telecommunications and Internet providers via secret court orders as specified by the Patriot Act. The subsequent news leaks indicated that allied governments of the US may have also received some of this information and acted upon it in unknown ways. As this news became widespread, it led to a great deal of debate and soul searching about appropriate access to an individual’s digital information, both within the United States of America and any other country.

CSA initiated this survey to collect a broad spectrum of member opinions about this news, and to understand how this impacts attitudes about using public cloud providers.

Amazon AWS, Amazon Web Services, Central Intelligence Agency, Government, Government Accountability Office

AWS Files Complaint Over CIA $600 Million Procurement Bid Complaint by IBM

Amazon Web Services has filed a complaint in the U.S. Court of Federal Claims related to Central Intelligence Agency action in following recommendations made by the Government Accountability Office following an action filed in February by IBM after the CIA awarded AWS a contract worth up to $600 million over four years to build a private cloud for the entire intelligence community.

FCW has the details.

Collaboration, Document Management, Inforama

Inforama Updates Document Production and Automation Platform

Inforama has released the latest version of its Cloud Document Production and Automation Platform which includes a number of new features and enhancements. Inforama is delivered as a SaaS application that allows users to manage their projects in the cloud and switch seamlessly between public cloud, private cloud and on-premise solutions. With Inforama, users can manage their projects and templates in the browser-based studio and generate documents via the Inforama API.

Version 3.0 includes a number of new features including the ability to produce Open Office letters from templates while inserting custom data fields, text blocks and images. Also included are enhancements to document packs where output formats can be specified and background files can be applied to generated documents. A 30 day free trial is available at http://www.inforama.com

Amazon Web Services, Guest Post, Open Source, OpenStack, Rackspace

OpenStack’s Third Birthday – a Recap with a Look into the Future

Guest Post By Nati Shalom, CTO and Founder of GigaSpaces

OpenStack was first announced three years ago at the OSCON conference in Portland. I remember the first time I heard about the announcement and how it immediately caught my attention. Ever since that day, I have become a strong advocate of the technology. Looking back, I thought that it would be interesting to analyze why.

Is it the fact that it’s an open source cloud? Well partially, but that couldn’t be the main reason. OpenStack was not the first open source cloud initiative; we had Eucalyptus, then later Cloud.com and other open source cloud initiatives before OpenStack emerged.

There were two main elements missing from these previous open source cloud initiatives: the companies behind the initiatives and the commitment to a true open movement. It was clear to me that a true open source cloud movement could not turn into an industry movement, and thus meet its true potential if it was led by startups. In addition, the fact that companies whose businesses run cloud services, such as Rackspace, brought its own experience in the field and a large scale consumer of such infrastructure such as NASA, gave OpenStack a much better starting point. Also, knowing some of the main individuals behind the initiatives and their commitment to the Open Cloud made me feel much more confident that the OpenStack project would have a much higher chance for success than its predecessors. Indeed, after three years, it is now clear that the game is essentially over and it is apparent who is going to win the open source cloud war. I’m happy to say that I also had my own little share in spreading the word by advocating the OpenStack movement in our own local community which also grew extremely quickly over the past two years.

OpenStack as an Open Movement

Paul Holland, an Executive Program Manager for Cloud at HP, gave an excellent talk during the last OpenStack Summit, comparing the founding of the OpenStack Foundation to the establishment of the United States. Paul drew interesting parallelization between the factors that brought a group of thirteen individual states to unite and become the empire of today, with that of OpenStack.

OpenStack1

Paul also drew an interesting comparison between the role of the common currency that fostered the open market and trade between the different states with its OpenStack equivalent: APIs, common language, processes, etc. Today, we take those things for granted, but the reality is that common currency isn’t yet trivial in many countries even today, yet we cannot imagine what our global economy would look like without the Dollar as a common currency or English as a common language, even if they have not been explicitly chosen as such by all countries.

OpenStack2

As individuals, we often tend to gloss over the details of the Foundation and its governing body, but it is those details that make OpenStack an industry movement that has brought many large companies, such as Red Hat, HP, IBM, Rackspace and many others (57 in total as of today), to collaborate and contribute to a common project as noted in this report. Also, the fact that the number of individual developers has been growing steadily year after year is another strong indication of the real movement that this project has created.

OpenStack3

Thinking Beyond Amazon AWS

OpenStack essentially started as the open source alternative to Amazon AWS. Many of the sub-projects often began as Amazon equivalents. Today, we are starting to see projects with a new level of innovation that do not have any AWS equivalent. The most notable one IMHO is the Neutron (network) and BareMetal projects. Both have huge potential to disrupt how we think about cloud infrastructure.

Only on OpenStack

We often tend to compare OpenStack with other clouds on a feature-to-feature basis.

The open source and community adoption nature of OpenStack enables us to do things that are unique to OpenStack and cannot be matched by other clouds. Here are a few examples:

  • Run the same infrastructure on private and public clouds.
  • Work with multiple cloud providers; have more than one OpenStack-compatible cloud provider with which to work.
  • Plug in different HW as cloud platforms for private clouds from different vendors, such as HP, IBM, Dell, Cisco, or use pre-packaged OpenStack distributions, such as the one from Ubuntu, Red Hat, Piston etc.
  • Choose your infrastructure of choice for storage, network etc, assuming that many of the devices come with OpenStack-supported plug-ins.

All this can be done only on OpenStack; not just because it is open source, but primarily because of the level of adoption of OpenStack that has made it the de-facto industry standard.

Re-think the Cloud Layers

When cloud first came into the world, it was common to look at the stack from a three-layer approach: IaaS, PaaS and SaaS.

Typically, when we designed each of the layers, we looked at the other layers as *black-boxes* and often had to create parallel stacks within each layer to manage security, metering, high availability etc.

The fact that OpenStack is an open source infrastructure allows us to break the wall between those layers and re-think where we draw the line. For example, when we design our PaaS on OpenStack, there is no reason why we wouldn’t reuse the same security, metering, messaging and provisioning that is used to manage our infrastructure. The result is a much thinner and potentially more efficient foundation across all the layers that is easier to maintain. The new Heat project and Ceilometer in OpenStack are already starting to take steps in this direction and are, therefore, becoming some of the most active projects in the upcoming Havana release of OpenStack.

Looking Into the Future

Personally, I think that the world with OpenStack is by far healthier and brighter for the entire industry, as opposed to a world in which we are dependent on one or two major cloud providers, regardless of how good of a job they may or may not do. There are still many challenges ahead in turning all this into a reality and we are still at the beginning. The good news, though, is that there is a lot of room for contribution and, as I’ve witnessed myself, everyone can help shape this new world that we are creating.

OpenStack Birthday Events

To mark OpenStack’s 3rd Birthday, there will be a variety of birthday celebrations taking place around the world. At the upcoming OSCON event in Portland from July 22-26, OpenStack will host their official birthday party on July 24th. There will also be a celebration in Israel on the 21st, marking the occasion in Tel Aviv.

For more information about the Foundation’s birthday celebrations, visit their website at www.openstack.org.

Nati-GigaSpaces

Nati Shalom is the CTO and founder of GigaSpaces and founder of the Israeli cloud.org consortium.

 

Integrated Digital Enhanced Network, PTT, Push-to-talk, Telecommunications Industry, Twisted Pair Solutions, Voice

Twisted Pair Adds Private Call Capability to its WAVE Mobile Communicator

Twisted Pair Solutions today announced that it has added point-to-point Private Call capability to its WAVE Mobile Communicator application for smartphones and tablets.

With Private Call mode selected, users can use a secure, one-to-one PTT capability with any other member of a WAVE communications system. Once the Private Call is complete, either user simply hangs up and the device returns to its pre-call state.

Twisted Pair’s announcement comes as many organizations seek a secure, reliable replacement for Sprint’s iDEN push-to-talk (PTT) network which was decommissioned at the end of June.

“The enterprise customer wants seamless communication, from radio systems to telephony systems to PTT systems to workforce apps,” said Tom Guthrie, Twisted Pair president and CEO. “WAVE is the only platform- and device-independent PTT solution proven to deliver secure, high-quality communications for the enterprise.”

The WAVE Mobile Communicator turns your smartphone or tablet into an instant communication PTT device. When equipped with the WAVE Mobile Communicator, a smartphone acts like a multichannel radio handset that sends and receives secure audio. WAVE servers residing in an enterprise data center, in a cloud environment or, if needed, on an individual PC, manage audio processing, management and distribution. The Private Call capability further differentiates WAVE as an over-the-top PTT solution that combines the richness of enterprise communications with workforce communications while offering increased flexibility over proprietary solutions.

Customers may deploy WAVE as an on-premise enterprise solution or as a cloud service. Twisted Pair offers its own cloud service, called WAVE Connections, which subscribers can access over any carrier or WiFi data network.

Denial-of-service attack, Domain Name System, Network Solutions, Opinion, Outage Alert

Hey Network Solutions, New Rule: Use Social During an Outage

Network Solutions is in trouble today. Rumor has it DNS issues are the root cause, but it’s unclear. What is clear is if your site is hosted by NetSol it is unreachable.

If you dig really hard you can get links to their blog which might offer more detail. But… it’s unreachable (duh).

I picture NetSol personnel happily posting critical updates to a blog only they can reach.

New Rule: If your servers/dns/routers/network is experiencing problems, use your Twitter and Facebook accounts to communicate with customers. Don’t want your dirty laundry messing up your marketing? Set up Twitter/FB Support accounts.

EMEA, European Union, Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, Government, Hosting, Legal, National Security Agency, Opinion, PRISM, Switzerland

PRISM Scandal Generates Renewed Interest in Non-US Cloud Providers

Guest Post by Mateo Meier, founder of Swiss hosting provider Artmotion

Businesses vote with their feet, in light of the recent PRISM scandal. Up until recently, the US had been considered the leading destination for cloud services with its vast infrastructures and innovative service offerings, but recent leaks have sparked panic amongst many business owners and is driving demand for Non US cloud providers.

The most concerning aspect for many is the wide ranging implications of using US-controlled cloud services, such as AWS, Azure and Dropbox. As a result, businesses are now turning to Switzerland and other secure locations for their data hosting needs.

Swiss ‘private’ hosting companies are seeing huge growth because privacy in Switzerland is enshrined in law. As the country is outside of the EU, it is not bound by pan-European agreements to share data with other member states, or worse, the US. Artmotion, for example, has witnessed 45 per cent growth in revenue amid this new demand for heightened privacy.

Until now the PRISM scandal has focused on the privacy of the individual, but the surveillance undertaken by NSA and Britain’s own GCHQ has spurred corporate concern about the risks associated with using American based cloud providers to host data. It is especially troubling for businesses with data privacy issues, such as banks or large defence and healthcare organisations with ‘secret’ research and development needs.

Before PRISM, the US was at the forefront of the cloud computing industry and companies worldwide flocked to take advantage of the scalable benefits of cloud hosting, as well as the potential cost savings it offered.

However the scandal has unearthed significant risks to data for businesses, as well as for their customers. With US cloud service providers, the government can request business information under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) without the company in question ever knowing its data has been accessed.

For businesses large and small, data vulnerabilities and the threat of industrial espionage from US hosting sites can present real security risks or privacy implications, and it’s causing a real fear. Business owners are worried that by using US based systems, private information could potentially be seen by prying eyes.

The desire for data privacy has therefore seen a surge in large corporations turning to ‘Silicon’ Switzerland to take advantage of the country’s renowned privacy culture. Here they can host data without fear of it being accessed by foreign governments.

Mateo-Meier

Mateo Meier, founder of Artmotion, spent the early stages of his career in the US before returning home to Switzerland to start Artmotion. Artmotion was started in early 2000 and provides highly bespoke server solutions to an international set of clients.