For a rapidly growing network of companies with critical data, migrating to the cloud has moved from an idea to reality.

But while cloud services promise rich economic benefits, scalability and flexibility, they also can trigger significant perceived risks for companies that are highly concerned about security, data protection, reliability and availability.

Primarily, breaches of one’s data can  prove both devastating and costly, with any breaches sparking downtime that could lead to potential loss of business, credibility or integrity. Still, for increased security, you may actually want to consider the cloud. While this goes against conventional wisdom, there are reasons it makes sense…

One, partnering with a vendor with a network of dedicated data centers and one that follows a holistic approach to serving customers can alleviate security concerns. Why? Because of the single-minded obsessiveness that these vendors must bring to bear.

Indeed, a third-party data center with SSAE16 …

Enterprise IT organizations are under increasing pressure to do more with less. As such, they are highly motivated to leverage existing investments for maximum efficiencies rather than spend time and resources on acquiring, integrating and managing pricey new equipment. Enterprises are already deriving efficiencies through data center consolidation and virtualization initiatives. However, we know the cloud promises to offer further potency in the form of infrastructure savings on IT services and hardware expenses. In fact, according to Rackspace, 60 percent of IT professionals said the cloud has reduced the need for their IT team to maintain infrastructure, giving them more time to focus on strategy and innovation, while 88 percent point to cost savings.

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In many contexts, Cloud isn’t the solution. It’s part of the answer, and whether the money should go to Cloud or to some alternative will depend on the nature of the problem.
We know we want it, so Cloud must be a thing, right? If we’re carrying our enterprise IT shopping basket around, we know we want to stop at the Cloud shelf. Once there, we might select a nice fresh IaaS or perhaps some of this SaaS or that. And whatever our selection, we’ll pay the bill at the register. Good thing we brought our shopping list, and with it, our budget for Cloud, right?
Such is what the Cloud marketing machines at the various vendors and service providers want you to believe. Need Cloud, budget for Cloud, pay for Cloud. Cloud is a thing, after all, and we all want that thing.
Not so fast. Cloud isn’t a thing at all. It’s in reality dozens of different things: compute, storage, network, database, development platform, business applications, and more. The value these offerings provide is similarly varied: pay for automated self-service, pay for elasticity, pay for managed services, and so forth.

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In many contexts, Cloud isn’t the solution. It’s part of the answer, and whether the money should go to Cloud or to some alternative will depend on the nature of the problem.
We know we want it, so Cloud must be a thing, right? If we’re carrying our enterprise IT shopping basket around, we know we want to stop at the Cloud shelf. Once there, we might select a nice fresh IaaS or perhaps some of this SaaS or that. And whatever our selection, we’ll pay the bill at the register. Good thing we brought our shopping list, and with it, our budget for Cloud, right?
Such is what the Cloud marketing machines at the various vendors and service providers want you to believe. Need Cloud, budget for Cloud, pay for Cloud. Cloud is a thing, after all, and we all want that thing.
Not so fast. Cloud isn’t a thing at all. It’s in reality dozens of different things: compute, storage, network, database, development platform, business applications, and more. The value these offerings provide is similarly varied: pay for automated self-service, pay for elasticity, pay for managed services, and so forth.

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Racemi, a provider of automated server migration software that streamlines the process of migrating workloads to public, private, and hybrid clouds, has announced global support for IBM public cloud offerings, providing clients an automated migration path to their IBM cloud of choice, at no charge for a limited time.
Racemi’s Cloud Path software as a service (SaaS) enables IBM customers to migrate server workloads to IBM’s SoftLayer cloud services at no charge (see terms and conditions here).
“Working closely with IBM, we are offering customers free migrations to IBM SoftLayer’s public cloud services,” said James Strayer, vice president of product management, Racemi. “This ensures there a fast, easy way to move existing workloads to IBM’s cloud computing platforms.”

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Cloud Computing – the buzz words of the technology sector this decade: if you’re not already doing it, you’re missing out. Articles have been written. Experts have been crowned. Events have been attended. We all agree – the cloud presents opportunities for cost savings, elasticity, and scalability.
But for companies that are bound by Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS), securing financial data in “the cloud” presents new issues.
How is the Cloud Different? Securing brick and mortar businesses was one thing, securing data centers and hardware was an added level, but securing the foggy boundaries of the cloud presents a new set of challenges.
The skills and knowledge you acquired in the data center are still very relevant to the cloud world. However, the most obvious change is that physical walls are no longer available to protect your systems and data. Cloud Encryption is the answer – producing “mathematical walls” to replace the physical ones.

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Cloud Computing – the buzz words of the technology sector this decade: if you’re not already doing it, you’re missing out. Articles have been written. Experts have been crowned. Events have been attended. We all agree – the cloud presents opportunities for cost savings, elasticity, and scalability.
But for companies that are bound by Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS), securing financial data in “the cloud” presents new issues.
How is the Cloud Different? Securing brick and mortar businesses was one thing, securing data centers and hardware was an added level, but securing the foggy boundaries of the cloud presents a new set of challenges.
The skills and knowledge you acquired in the data center are still very relevant to the cloud world. However, the most obvious change is that physical walls are no longer available to protect your systems and data. Cloud Encryption is the answer – producing “mathematical walls” to replace the physical ones.

read more

For cloud providers, offering predictable storage performance backed by firm SLAs will become a competitive differentiator that drives greater customer affinity and a better application experience. Many providers feel that a Software Defined Storage (SDS) frameworks hold the key to delivering guaranteed performance, yet this “software abstraction layer” is only half of the solution. SDS frameworks are dependent on the virtualized resources presented to it, and without the granular abstraction of physical storage resources, these frameworks will remain limited.
In his session at the 13th International Cloud Expo®, Dave Wright, Founder & CEO of SolidFire, will explore how to deliver guaranteed performance today, through intelligent storage architectures and software defined control planes of CloudStack, OpenStack, and VMware.

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Sporting events are periodic events that suddenly demand lots of information technology resources and a good example where cloud technology can be applied effectively.
At VMWorld, a marketing executive from a technology company asked me what kinds of workloads were inappropriate for the cloud with today’s technology. Core banking and manufacturing execution systems immediately came to mind. Banks do not want their security compromised, and manufacturing plants do not want any downtime. Current cloud technology is not ideally suited for these applications.

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