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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Picture credit: iStockPhoto

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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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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Enable continuous testing and expand test coverage and traceability by integrating API testing, service virtualization, and test environment management.
We’re excited to announce Parasoft’s latest release: a consolidated platform uniting API testing, service virtualization, and test environment management. The new release is designed to help organizations “shift left” the testing effort and accelerate the SDLC to meet the growing time-to-market pressure for software applications.

The ability to rapidly develop and continuously execute end-to-end tests-even in complex or frequently-evolving environments-is essential to accelerating application delivery while minimizing business risks. That’s why Parasoft allows users to create a simulated test environment in less than a minute, then immediately start defining and executing tests against the appropriate test environment configurations.

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From a software development perspective IoT is about programming “things,” about connecting them with each other or integrating them with existing applications.
In his session at @ThingsExpo, Yakov Fain, co-founder of Farata Systems and SuranceBay, will show you how small IoT-enabled devices from multiple manufacturers can be integrated into the workflow of an enterprise application. This is a practical demo of building a framework and components in HTML/Java/Mobile technologies to serve as a platform that can integrate new devices as they become available on the market.

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Employee collaboration and access to communication tools are essential for workplace productivity. Organizations are increasing their use of Microsoft Office 365, a subscription-based service that provides hosted versions of familiar Microsoft applications. Most businesses choose Exchange Online as the first app in Office 365 they adopt.

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With the blurring of technology lines, the rise of competitive companies, and a shift in buying models all before us, it would appear we are at the cusp of ushering in the next era in IT—the Third Platform Era. But as with the other transitions, it is not the technology or the vendors that trigger a change in buying patterns. There must be fundamental shifts in buying behavior driven by business objectives.

The IT industry at large is in the midst of a massive rewrite of key business applications in response to two technology trends: the proliferation of data (read: Big Data) and the need for additional performance and scale. In many regards, the first begets the second. As data becomes more available—via traditional datacenters, and both public and private cloud environments—applications look to use that data, which means the applications themselves have to go through an evolution to account for the scale and performance required.

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