In 2012, an IDG survey of enterprise cloud computing adoption showed that 70 percent of respondents said security was among their top three concerns, and two years later, not much has changed. The Everest Group Enterprise Cloud Adoption Survey released in March of 2014 shows that 70 percent of enterprises prefer private cloud because it offers higher security – a clear indication that security concerns still weigh heavily on the minds of enterprise leaders. Centralizing cloud resource access could prove to be the path through, addressing security concerns while providing the agility cloud computing promises.
It is understandable how cloud security presents itself as a chief IT concern when you consider that cloud computing transfers control from IT to business users and developers. And that adopting cloud entails replacing numerous IT processes with self-service portals.

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The consumption economy is here and so are cloud applications and solutions that offer more than subscription and flat fee models and at the same time are available on a pure consumption model, which not only reduces IT spend but also lowers infrastructure costs, and offers ease of use and availability.
In their session at 15th Cloud Expo, Ermanno Bonifazi, CEO & Founder of Solgenia, and Ian Khan, Global Strategic Positioning & Brand Manager at Solgenia, will discuss this shifting dynamic with an example of a top European Telco provider. Find out how they are leveraging the power of acloud-based consumption model services to offer more value to the mass market and enable a new revenue model that embraces the true meaning of the Third Industrial Revolution.

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Compuware Corporation (Nasdaq:CPWR) and Thoma Bravo jointly announced that Compuware has entered into a definitive agreement to be acquired by private equity investment firm Thoma Bravo, LLC, in a transaction valued at approximately $2.5 billion.
“Compuware is the clear established leader in the categories of application performance and mainframe productivity tools, and this transaction is the capstone to a series of transformative company initiatives to relentlessly drive value,” said Bob Paul, Chief Executive Officer of Compuware. “We began with the IPO of Covisint, initiated a robust dividend, divested non-core operations, and aggressively reduced corporate expenses. Compuware is now best suited to focus on its core mainframe and APM businesses as a private-equity backed company, where we can continue to serve our customers in a competitive environment with greater flexibility to take a long-term approach.”

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After news broke of a series of leaked photos of female celebrities on Monday morning, there have been a series of developments – with one expert calling for a common sense approach to cloud data.

Ivan Harris, cloud services development director at Eduserv, explained that “things will happen” despite the best laid plans.

“Nothing is 100% secure,” he told CloudTech. “What you have to do is make best efforts and put the appropriate controls in place.

“More often than not it’s not the infrastructure that breaks down, or the security of the infrastructure. It’s normally people closer to the operations who leaks that information.”

For Harris, who has worked in software for over 30 years, it’s nothing he hasn’t seen before. With various opinion articles hitting the stands speculating over the security of the cloud, he was quick to point out the advantages, and call out the scaremongers.

“You can’t govern for absolutely everything,” he said. “Everything’s about risk appetite and balancing the cost of protecting the confidentiality of an asset versus the likelihood of that asset being compromised.

“It’s always a balancing act to be done; however, I would say that cloud services are inherently more secure than non-cloud alternatives.

“It’s just as probable that information could have been found on a CD that had been dropped in a bin, or somebody’s laptop that they’d end-of-lifed and put out to be scrapped.”

So is it a matter of education for users? Is it a case of knowing the cloud isn’t infallible?

“I think that for general cloud services, you have to make the assumption that the information could leak one way or another,” said Harris.

“It could just be user error,” he added. “You think you’re applying the right settings to make your information secure, but you’re not.

“So I think it is a matter of making people security conscious. Don’t assume that things are secure.”

This is all too salient now. According to the Independent Jennifer Lawrence, who has unwittingly become the spearhead of this leak, told a reporter: “My iCloud keeps telling me to back it up, and I’m like, I don’t know how to back you up. Do it yourself.”

Even though the source of the leaks was originally thought of as being from Apple’s iCloud, according to security experts there is evidence that Dropbox was also used.

Rumours persisted that the hackers were able to find an exploit in the Find My iPhone API to breach the iCloud accounts, although this was something the Cupertino firm denied in an official statement.

“After more than 40 hours of investigation, we have discovered that certain celebrity accounts were compromised by a very targeted attack on user names, passwords and security questions, a practice that has become all too common on the Internet,” the statement read.

“None of the cases we have investigated has resulted from any breach in any of Apple’s systems including iCloud or Find My iPhone.

“We are continuing to work with law enforcement to help identify the criminals involved.”

Apple closed the statement by recommending users employ strong passwords and two-factor authentication. But as Graham Cluley noted in a post for Intego, this might be an issue for celebrities.

With security questions such as asking for your mother’s maiden name, or your first pet, the average user would be assured in having that information to themselves. But for celebrities, whose minutiae and humdrum remarks are splashed on a variety of sources, it could become a goldmine for hackers.

For Harris, the leaks brought a series of regularly seen characters to the surface.

“I think some common sense has to apply, and there’ll always be the scaremongers,” he said. “As technology has evolved, there are always inflection points where technology advances and there are always the naysayers who have something negative to say about it.”

As for perceptions on the cloud itself, we like the analogy security expert Raj Samani told Bloomberg: just think of the data as being on someone else’s computer.

I’ll be heading to Southeast Asia immediately following our upcoming @CloudExpo @ThingsExpo in Santa Clara. I’ll rekindle some previous business relationships I had when I lived in the region in 2009-2012. I’ll also investigate new ways to bring the messages of socio-economic growth through Cloud Computing, Big Data/Analytics, and the Internet of Things.

Our team focus for the next two months is on producing the best event ever in Santa Clara. We’re well on the way. (It’s easy to keep up with the latest developments.)

From Talk to Action
But as I read about a job opening with ASEAN (the Association of Southeast Asion Nations), a job for which I’m spectacularly unqualified in many respects, I’m reminded of the uniqueness of this region and its potential.

ASEAN has been criticized in the past as merely a “talk shop,” a place in which many government functionaries huff and puff but at which little is accomplished. I prefer to be more optimistic. The organization is surprisingly far along a path of liberalizing trade, EU and NAFTA style, and talks explicitly of regional peace and perhaps a unified currency some day.

The challenge is very difficult. The organization was almost shunned by Western leaders as it grappled with how to handle the military dictatorship of Myanmar, former Burma. Yet today the country has loosened things a bit, foreign businesspeople, NGOs, and tourists are getting in, and the economic potential of a nation of 50 million people with a glorious past is closer to being realized than it has been in decades.

Complexity as a Virtue
The ASEAN nations comprise a highly complex fabric of languages and cultures that make the entirety of Europe seem rather simple and drab by comparison.

Try to get a grip on, say, Thai, Vietnamese, and Tagalog at the same time and you’ll get the idea. If you’re a religious sort, you’ll encounter myriad varieties of Abrahamism, Confucianism, and Buddhism, with some local syncretism thrown in for extra spice. There are also more than 600 million people here, twice the population of the United States.

So I’m looking forward to spending some more time there. The region is jut up against the two giants of glowering China and ambitious India, with Hong Kong and Taiwan also in the neighborhood. The northern Asian economic engines of Japan and South Korea are reached in reasonable flights; even Australia and New Zealand are not unduly accessible and in the same region of time zones.

Take Heed
So here’s my buried lead to this story: the ASEAN Secretariat, headquartered in Jakarta, should take notice of what we’re accomplishing with @CloudExpo @ThingsExpo and the research we’re doing at the Tau Institute.

The technology and solutions more than 7,500 visitors will see in Santa Clara in November are ripe for adoption throughout the world. We live in a time of near-instant communications and wildfire-like global adoption of new technology, when the governments of nations are willing to embrace it.

Singapore is, of course, the most developed, and remain heads-and-shoulders above its fellow members. The place can still astonish the Western visitor, even those aware of its starting economic development over the past few decades. Singapore is now among the world leaders in deploying IoT technology to continue to improve itself.

Yet Singapore is also a city-state and doesn’t have to grapple with the needs of the tens of millions of people populating most other ASEAN nations.

Who is Most Dynamic?
So our research digs beneath the surface to find who is doing the best on a relative basis, ie, who is doing the most with the economic resources that have? This research has shown that (perhaps ironically) Communist Vietnam leads the ASEAN region in its rate of adoption relative to its income level; Vietnam is the most dynamic of the ASEAN regions, edging out Singapore. They are followed in our rankings by Malaysia, Philippines, and Thailand.

The region’s largest nationa, Indonesia, now a member of the G20 and Jim O’Neil’s new MINT (Mexico, Indonesia, Nigeria, Turkey) designation, trails most of its ASEAN siblings. I’d be glad to explain why.

We have copious amounts of other data on this region, with different measurements for long-term rates of change, immediate rates of change, challenges facing each nation on a per-person basis, challenges facing each nation on a total population basis, and much more.

I’m looking forward to spreading the word about our shows and research after the long flight to this highly dynamic, hugely interesting part of the world.

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In today’s application economy, enterprise organizations realize that it’s their applications that are the heart and soul of their business. If their application users have a bad experience, their revenue and reputation are at stake.
In his session at 15th Cloud Expo, Anand Akela, Senior Director of Product Marketing for Application Performance Management at CA Technologies, will discuss how a user-centric Application Performance Management solution can help inspire your users with every application transaction.

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The old monolithic style of building enterprise applications just isn’t cutting it any more. It results in applications and teams both that are complex, inefficient, and inflexible, with considerable communication overhead and long change cycles.
Microservices architectures, while they’ve been around for a while, are now gaining serious traction with software organizations, and for good reasons: they enable small targeted teams, rapid continuous deployment, independent updates, true polyglot languages and persistence layers, and a host of other benefits.
But truly adopting a microservices architecture requires dramatic changes across the entire organization, and a DevOps culture is absolutely essential.

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As the chief executive at your company, if you discovered that you had some major financial standards compliance issues within your organization, would you be concerned about the risks associated with that exposure?

If your designated outside auditor had bypassed your internal finance department and chose instead to work directly with your individual Line of Business leaders, would you want to know why? Moreover, would you intervene?

Yes, it’s a rhetorical series of questions. And I think we all know the answers.

Did you know there’s a movement that’s already in progress that could impact your company’s provision and consumption of IT services, with a corresponding potential exposure concern that’s related to compliance issues?

Have you heard about the Shadow IT phenomenon? According to the assessment of several leading IT market analysts, it’s a trend that’s already quite pervasive across a broad cross-section of industries. It’s also been a hotly debated topic.

Who is championing this cause from a horizontal organization perspective? According to market research from last year, it’s primarily the marketing leadership.

The Need for Greater Speed and Deep Knowledge

Granted, some of the inherent friction within the ongoing quest for strategic business technology competitiveness can be uncomfortable for some people. But in the grand scheme of things, it’s all good. This is the path to progress. Let’s consider the upside opportunities.

IT used to be primarily about operations, cost reduction, and management controls. That’s no longer the scenario at forward-thinking companies. Today, corporate IT departments are being asked to plan, build or procure, manage, and continuously improve upon their organization’s business technology infrastructure and associated processes.

As if that weren’t enough, you will likely also expect your re-energized IT leadership team to help your organization innovate, grow, and deliver unique customer experiences. If you haven’t yet reached that pivotal point, don’t fret…you will soon.

Besides, you’re most likely to be highly motivated to navigate this key market transition. As an informed executive, you’ve made it a personal goal to insure that you surround yourself with the best available talent.

While business technology deployments can’t provide you a permanent competitive advantage, the timely deployment of new IT systems can enable you to build a strong competitive position that will stand the tests of time.

Moreover, while cloud service adoption moves towards ubiquity in the global marketplace, the ability to perform the essential task of crafting a unique and powerful business application development environment is still somewhat scarce. Again, that’s an opportunity, not a problem.

IT Talent with New Skills and Big Aspirations

Granted, we’ve already reached an inflection point where software-as-a service offerings have made it easier for any Line of Business leader to deploy an IT solution, just-in-time. However, being able to attain the much broader business agility benefits — that are truly possible with cloud computing — requires a comprehensive strategic plan.

Now’s the time to encourage and coax your business unit leaders and open-minded IT managers to work together and collaborate on mutually beneficial projects. If you need help to bring this essential project orchestration together, then consider seeking out an accomplished pioneer.

Companies with an evolved ecosystem of integration channel partners, such as Cisco, has the depth and breadth of information, education and guidance resources that today’s forward thinking leaders need to execute their multifaceted cloud-enabled strategies.

Why Cloud Service Brokering Really Matters

By increasing their inherent sourcing flexibility, your current business technology managers can more successfully assume the role as a broker of IT services — thereby increasing transparency, and better aligning your business and IT agendas into a cohesive plan.

A valued and trusted broker, in this context, is an individual or group within your own IT team that acts as a mediator between the Line of Business end-user of a managed cloud service capability and the providers of that service offering.

But how does a top performing IT department gain the trust to carry out this evolving role?

What’s needed is a comprehensive, consistent cloud strategy that will offer an enlightened perspective, provide compelling direction, and build confidence in your IT team’s enabling platform procurement decisions.

As an example, when acting as a credible service broker, just imagine how your IT team can now take full advantage of multiple sourcing options and become a value-added intermediary of cloud services for their Line of Business internal customers. Now, that’s the makings of a solid foundation for a meaningful partnership and substantive progress towards your bold goal.

So, are you ready to enhance your business flexibility with a choice of consumption models in the world of many clouds? Are you fully prepared to embrace the emerging hybrid cloud era?