Many technologies have made their presence felt this year and continue to excite us with the promises they hold for the future. Cloud computing has now reached a stage where businesses are seriously experimenting and are starting to reap the transformational benefits it can deliver. If you are in the process of determining how and what to do to get the most out of cloud computing in 2014, then here are five key strategic points to get you started immediately.
Cloud-centric design of your business – whether you are a software product vendor, service provider or even an enterprise business, a cloud-centric design of your product/service or IT-enablement practice highly outweighs any ‘incremental migration’ roadmap. We’ve observed that organizations that take a very strategic shot at cloud-enablement are better placed than those that have jumped from one piecemeal project to another. Cloud-centric considerations, architecture and design principles help optimize the investment along with the end-customer service experience.
Mirror Mirror: Difference Between Identity Management & Access Management
Identity Management (IDaaS) & Access Mgmt (SSO) solve similar but separate issues, but both serve as a cornerstone of an integrated security initiative.
One of the biggest misconceptions in cloud security is the perception that identity management (IDaaS) and access management (SSO) are the same thing.
They’re not.
And it took a viewing of the famous Star Trek episode called Mirror Mirror for me to best illustrate and articulate the difference between the creation and management of a user account and credentialed rights and the funneled applications that entity is allowed to see. For those unfamiliar with the episode, it’s the one where Kirk is transported into an alternate universe and meets evil Spock (the one with the beard)…but more about that soon.
Benefits and Economics of Strong Authentication in the Cloud
As web applications and cloud services continue to proliferate, identity theft, cyber fraud, cyber bullying, and simple misuse of confidential information online expand to chronic levels. Yet cloud providers are expected to ensure high security while maintaining a convenient user experience. MasterCard and Visa spend over $1 billion each year to fight identity theft and web companies are increasingly the subject of class action lawsuits due to online security breaches. Still, hundreds of cloud applications and portals are being hacked monthly leaving millions of passwords and confidential records in the hands of cyber fraudsters.
Recently, many cloud users have started to realize that security in the cloud is, indeed, a serious issue. This trend led ASPs, cloud providers, and enterprises to actively search for more convenient methods of securing the identity of their cloud users with strong authentication. While there are a number of such solutions in the market today, not all “strong” authentication methods are strong enough to stop hackers.
Red Hat Releases OpenShift Enterprise 2
Red Hat, Inc., on Tuesday announced the general availability of OpenShift Enterprise 2, the latest version of its on-premise private Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offering. With OpenShift Enterprise 2, customers can increase the velocity, efficiency and scalability of their IT service delivery, drive faster development of new applications and business services and reduce time-to-market. With new features – including datacenter infrastructure integration, an advanced administration console, support for even more programming languages, and new collaboration capabilities – and expanded global availability, a wider range of developers can achieve the benefits of private PaaS technology for their cloud deployments.
OpenNebula 4.4 Retina Bringing Simplicity to Enterprise Cloud Computing
The OpenNebula Project has just announced the nineteenth stable release of its widely deployed OpenNebula cloud management platform, a fully open-source solution for data center management and enterprise cloud computing. With a sysadmin-centric approach, OpenNebula is the open operating system of choice in the converged data centre, combining a powerful virtualization manager that supports traditional IT features such as fault tolerance and failover, with the dynamic provisioning, elasticity and multi-tenancy of the enterprise cloud.
OpenNebula 4.4 Retina includes support for multiple system datastores, which enables the definition of scheduling policies for storage load balancing. The monitoring subsystem has switched from a pulling mechanism to a massively scalable pushing model, being now able to monitor hundreds of thousands of VMs in a few minutes. An important effort has been also made in enhancing the support for cloud bursting to Amazon, enabling a transparent offload of computing power whenever the local infrastructure cannot cope with the demand. Moreover, the Amazon EC2 and EBS interfaces implemented by OpenNebula have been revisited and extended to support new functionality.
SOA Software API Management Solution Attains PCI DSS 2.0 Compliance
“Validation of our PCI DSS compliance ensures that our API Management customers can leverage our enterprise-class cloud platform to ensure the security and availability of their applications and data, as well as help meet their own requirements for PCI compliance in their API Programs”, said Alistair Farquharson, CTO of SOA Software. “The successful completion of these audits is part of our continued commitment to maintaining a well-governed, high-quality IT service environment.”
SOA Software on Monday announced that its API Management solution and cloud offering have been validated for compliance with version 2.0 of the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS). SOA Software recently underwent a series of rigorous audits by an independent Quality Security Assessor (QSA) to ensure that it met best practices and security controls needed to keep sensitive data secure during transit, processing and storage. This makes SOA Software one of the few API Management solutions able to offer a full end-to-end PCI DSS service based on pre-certified components.
Cloud Marketplaces: SaaS or Pseudo-SaaS?
There is a lot of confusion and hype about the cloud and SaaS (Software as a Service), and at Corent we experience it on a regular basis. One of the things I’ve been seeing and hearing about is the concept of a marketplace of cloud applications. I’ve observed that applications sold this way are often described as SaaS even though the key criteria of SaaS aren’t being provided to either the application vendor, or the application customer.
While it’s true that the cloud is a SaaS product, often the business applications provided on the cloud marketplaces are not.
Load Aware Fabrics
One of the “rules” of application delivery (and infrastructure in general) has been that when scaling out such technologies, all components must be equal. That started with basic redundancy (deploying two of everything to avoid a single point of failure in the data path) and has remained true until recently.
Today, fabrics can be comprised of heterogeneous components. Beefy, physical hardware can be easily paired with virtualized or cloud-hosted components. This is good news for organizations seeking the means to periodically scale out infrastructure without oversubscribing the rest of the year, leaving resources idle.
Except when it’s not so good, when something goes wrong and there’s suddenly not enough capacity to handle the load because of the disparity in component capacity.
Load Aware Fabrics
One of the “rules” of application delivery (and infrastructure in general) has been that when scaling out such technologies, all components must be equal. That started with basic redundancy (deploying two of everything to avoid a single point of failure in the data path) and has remained true until recently.
Today, fabrics can be comprised of heterogeneous components. Beefy, physical hardware can be easily paired with virtualized or cloud-hosted components. This is good news for organizations seeking the means to periodically scale out infrastructure without oversubscribing the rest of the year, leaving resources idle.
Except when it’s not so good, when something goes wrong and there’s suddenly not enough capacity to handle the load because of the disparity in component capacity.
Cloud Storage Adoption Gaining Among Businesses
Cloud computing is helping businesses combat a growing problem: Too much information and not enough storage capacity.
With businesses increasingly facing the prospect of running out of storage capacity, adoption of cloud storage technologies continues to grow, according to a report from cloud-integrated storage solutions specialist TwinStrata.
The survey found that 37 percent of respondents have been using cloud computing for three or more years, more than a one-third increase over last year’s 27 percent number. When compared with last year’s survey, overall adoption of cloud services has steadily increased across all categories, with use of Software as a Service (SaaS) reaching as high as 62 percent and both cloud storage and infrastructure as a service (IaaS) edging closer to 50 percent adoption rates. Platform as a Service (PaaS) experienced the greatest increase in adoption as more organizations become increasingly comfortable with the cloud, the report indicated.