When I was asked about innovation, the first thing I did was review my research to get an idea of what my peers in the industry were predicting for our parallel IT futures. Not surprisingly, they all reflected the same sentiment: the cloud is growing, and employees will continue to bring their own devices (BYOD). BYOD is a trend that has remained a hot topic, and point of controversy, throughout the year. Now that we’re entering the second half of 2013, I think we can safely say that those predictions have been realized. Because the cloud is the common theme throughout all innovation and tech conversations, I am going to focus solely on where I believe the cloud is heading. At this time I would like to take this opportunity to look even deeper into the crystal ball and provide some insight into where the cloud conversation is heading for the remainder of 2013 and 2014.

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“The government’s desire to think ‘cloud first’ is critical in reducing federal IT costs and AWS GovCloud should ease the transition, while maintaining the necessary security and compliance requirements demanded by the public sector,” said Anthony Robbins, vice president of Federal at Brocade, on the release of the Brocade Vyatta vRouter, a robust virtual router, firewall and VPN solution for AWS GovCloud.
This new AWS Region is designed to help U.S. government agencies and contractors move more sensitive workloads into the cloud by addressing their specific regulatory and compliance requirements.
With the introduction of the Brocade Vyatta vRouter for AWS GovCloud, federal agencies and approved affiliates can build secure, elaborate n-tier networks to better handle sensitive workloads within the cloud. Robbins noted, “The Brocade Vyatta vRouter provides the ability for network architects to replicate current data center infrastructures in the cloud, as well as simplify the provisioning of hybrid cloud environments.”

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In their General Session at 12th Cloud Expo, Kedar Poduri, Director of Product Management, Cloud Platform Group, at Citrix Systems, and Jonathan Cohen, Technology Solutions Business Development Professional at Alcatel-Lucent, discuss CloudBand, a joint cloud solution and architecture.
Kedar Poduri is Director of Product Management, Cloud Platform Group, at Citrix Systems.
Jonathan Cohen is a Technology Solutions Business Development Professional at Alcatel-Lucent.
Cloud Expo 2013 Silicon Valley, November 4–7, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA, will feature technical sessions from a rock star conference faculty and the leading Cloud industry players in the world.

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Want the secret to user provisioning/de-provisioning in an enterprise setting, The one word answer,…Integration.The question is why, how & with what?
The need to credential authorized users to your network and other proprietary assets is clear. You only want those with the proper rights in…and all others out. Complicating matters is that there are so many users these days…employees, channel partners, contract employees, suppliers, vendors, customers, prospects–all needing some sliver of access. Further muddying the water is that each of the mentioned user types are not all equal. Consider employees. Do you want your junior admin assistant to have access to payroll information or other files type specifically aimed at senior executives? The volunteer coordinator at a local branch of a national non-profit may need social media access to spread activity messaging, but probably doesn’t need the log in credentials to ServiceNow.

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Cloudwatt and UShareSoft have announced a partnership to deliver a suite of services dedicated to helping enterprise customers, value-added integrators and ISVs to migrate, build, deploy and manage workloads on Cloudwatt’s public cloud or hybrid environments requested by clients.
“Today, cloud providers need to differentiate themselves against their competitors,” said Alban Richard, CEO of UShareSoft, “the ability to make software delivery to cloud as easy and self-service as the underlying VM compute is a must-have.”
Cloudwatt selected UShareSoft for software onboarding tools in line with Cloudwatt’s strategy: security, governance, and reversibility for no customer lock-in.

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SYS-CON Events announced today that Appcore, provider of the industry’s only complete automated cloud management platform, has been named “Bronze Sponsor” of SYS-CON’s 13th International Cloud Expo, which will take place on November 4–7, 2013, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
Appcore® automates the business of cloud computing® by delivering cloud automation management platforms for enterprise private clouds and service provider public clouds. Appcore AMP™ is cloud automation designed to simplify cloud environments through a single management and monitoring interface; delivered in three deployment methods as cloud appliance, converged infrastructure or white label, in under 30 days. As a fully integrated cloud solution, Appcore AMP reduces the complexity of your cloud environment with technology agnostic and scalable best practice solutions backed by end-to-end support. Appcore AMP features Launch to Cloud® technology for easy provisioning of applications and servers in minutes, giving end users access to on demand usage and resources.

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As you may have read in prior installments of this series, businesses whose IT infrastructure resides on-premise can ease the integration of cloud infrastructure into their existing environment by adopting a phased roadmap that provides numerous benefits along the way.
The final installment of this series examines how organizations can improve and streamline their business by utilizing analytics based on cloud infrastructure. Unlike prior stages of the roadmap geared toward reducing costs, this stage can help increase top-line revenues, an even more attractive driver than cost-efficiency.

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Eliminating Single Points of Failure From Your Private Cloud

– Brought to you by 2X Cloud Computing guest blogger Brien M. Posey –

When an organisation deploys a private cloud, that private cloud quickly becomes an indispensable, mission critical infrastructure component. That being the case, it is important to construct the private cloud in a way that avoids the potential for a single point of failure.

Although it is impossible to delve into a comprehensive discussion of fault tolerance within the confines of a blog post, I wanted to take the opportunity to discuss some strategies for eliminating single points of failure within your private cloud.

Eliminating single points of failure means implementing redundancy for critical system components. In the case of a private cloud the redundant components that you will need and your overall fault-tolerant strategy will depend on what the private cloud is designed to and on the ways in …

As all eyes were on Australia in the Asia Pacific cloud computing space, New Zealand has taken a similar leap through the Institute of IT Professionals NZ (IITP) and published an updated cloud policy, called the Cloud Code.

The v2.0, released today, has two key agreements for all potential signatories: no cloud washing, and upfront disclosure of cloud products and services.

New Zealand’s cloudy code of practice was first developed in 2011, in partnership with the major CSPs, so it could be argued that this release is a long time coming. Yet it certainly appears timely, with Australia pushing forward its National Cloud Computing Strategy back in May.

And with 86% of Australian enterprises currently in the cloud, according to figures recently published by IDC, the growth potential is clear – as CloudTech examined in its editorial earlier this month.

But what will this latest development mean for New …