“Regulations and compliance are key trust topics with regards to cloud solutions and technology,” noted Sven Denecken, Vice President, Strategy and Co-Innovation Cloud Solutions, SAP AG, in this exclusive Q&A with Cloud Expo Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan. “But it is also more than security of access – it is portability of data and a clear definition of where the data resides.”
Cloud Computing Journal: The move to cloud isn’t about saving money, it is about saving time – agree or disagree?
Sven Denecken: Cloud of course does support more cost effective and quick approaches to a solution, if done right. Though the main business benefit is velocity, the right speed and direction is a combination that enables dedicated business functions, for example, HR, sales, finance and procurement, with the right solution, dedicated to their need, integrated into the existing environment (hybrid) and the ability to consume at the right speed.
A High Velocity Application Monitoring Solution
Today, more and more IT organizations have stated plans to migrate to the cloud to improve operational cost efficiencies and to provide better services to the business users.
The challenge that these companies face lies around the choice of an application performance management solution which would best fit their need and at the same time gives them the desired output.
For many of the public cloud service providers anticipating the demand from businesses to prove performance of application delivery with Service Level Agreements is at the forefront.
Businesses today demand Service Level Agreements from their service providers and a view of the performance of the services they subscribe to. So the choice of the solution needs to be capable of collecting and reporting service level metrics, such as end user response time, traffic usage, and volume for each business accounts. The architecture of such solutions needs to be multi-tenant – meaning it can collect, analyze, host and report on performance metrics for each individual business account.
Dupaco to Resell Appcara’s Cloud App Management Solutions in Europe
Infrastructure software distributor Dupaco from the Netherlands has recently signed a distribution agreement with the California-based cloud application management company Appcara. With this agreement, Dupaco adds a vital component to its ecosystem of cloud solutions.
Appcara’s flagship product AppStack solution enables enterprises, MSPs and service providers to build and deploy complex distributed infrastructures on top of generic IaaS clouds. This capability helps customers to distinguish themselves from the competition and engage specific market verticals.
This fits perfectly in Dupaco’s “Move up the stack” message towards its MSP customers. In the near future, providing generic compute power from the cloud (IaaS) will not be enough to survive and protect margins. Market differentiation is key for a successful cloud strategy. With Appcara’s AppStack organizations can build and market more profitable PaaS & SaaS solutions for specific market verticals.
Dupaco to Resell Appcara’s Cloud App Management Solutions in Europe
Infrastructure software distributor Dupaco from the Netherlands has recently signed a distribution agreement with the California-based cloud application management company Appcara. With this agreement, Dupaco adds a vital component to its ecosystem of cloud solutions.
Appcara’s flagship product AppStack solution enables enterprises, MSPs and service providers to build and deploy complex distributed infrastructures on top of generic IaaS clouds. This capability helps customers to distinguish themselves from the competition and engage specific market verticals.
This fits perfectly in Dupaco’s “Move up the stack” message towards its MSP customers. In the near future, providing generic compute power from the cloud (IaaS) will not be enough to survive and protect margins. Market differentiation is key for a successful cloud strategy. With Appcara’s AppStack organizations can build and market more profitable PaaS & SaaS solutions for specific market verticals.
The Importance of Cloud
Three HP executives discuss the implications and business value from the Converged Cloud, the major focus of discussion at HP Discover 2013.
What’s happening in the market today, is that on one end, you have startups that are rushing to the cloud very quickly, that use cloud and don’t use anything else, because they don’t want to spend a penny on building up an IT department.
On the other extreme, you have very large corporations that look at all the things that are unknown around cloud and are sticking their toe in the water.
And you have everything possible and every possible scenario in the middle. That’s where things are getting interesting. You have forward-looking CIOs who are embracing clouds, and understand how cloud can help them add value to the business and, as such, are an important part of the business.
You have other CIOs who are very reluctant and that prefer to stay managing the traditional boat, if I can put it that way, in keeping and providing that support to our customers. It’s a interesting market right now.
Is RaaS a Fancy Term for Disaster Recovery?
Recovery-as-a-Service, or “RaaS”, is the latest disaster recovery solution. Cloud-based RaaS allows organizations to recover their IT resources efficiently and effectively when an adverse situation strikes.
When compared to traditional disaster recovery solutions, RaaS is more easily tested, and offers more flexibility. Thanks to the economics of cloud computing, RaaS can offer comparable RTO and RPOs to warm-site DR solutions at nearly half the relative cost; while it matches cold-site costs but bests comparable RTO and RPOs by almost a full day.
The key difference between RaaS and other legacy solutions isn’t in the price or recovery time, rather it’s in the way the technology functions. RaaS focuses on recovering the whole application, not just data. This allows companies to recover faster and more effectively after a declaration.
Moving to the Hybrid Cloud
Despite the great interest in SaaS and cloud, many large enterprises are still grappling with the right mixture of on-premises, hosted and various cloud deployment models for their applications, infrastructure and data. And the formula for picking which apps and assets should run where will be a changing one, as business goals, economic pressures and technology advances all conspire to make last year’s IT model obsolete. Ongoing.applications, infrastructure and data. And the formula for picking which apps and assets should run where will be a changing one, as business goals, economic pressures and technology advances all conspire to make last year’s IT model obsolete. Ongoing.
Spot Buying Improves Procurement Process
Blue Marble Media in Atlanta has been using so-called spot-buying capabilities on the Ariba Network and Ariba Discovery to find new sales channels and new clients in the cloud.
Tell us a little bit about your company — your size, what services and products you provide. And why is the cloud not intimidating to you as a smaller firm for selling and finding new customers?
Even though we’re very, very small, less than $2 million in revenue, we have clients like Georgia-Pacific, Verizon, Ariba, and the CDC. We work with a lot of medium-sized companies and even startups, very small ones. So the whole planet is our opportunity, if you will. We develop video, motion graphics, and animation for sales support, marketing, corporate communications, and just about any type of visual presentation that you might need.
‘MegaWiped’ – Kim Dotcom’s Megaupload data cleared
The now almost household name, Kim Dotcom, has been in consistent battle against the U.S government over his Megaupload business – in case you’ve been under a rock for over a year.
Now the case has taken a new turn as his old Dutch hosting provider LeaseWeb has wiped 600 servers containing “petabytes” of his company’s data; including legal evidence.
Kim has expressed his outrage via social networking site Twitter, including suspicions of the U.S government putting pressure on LeaseWeb to wipe the servers. The first notification he had about the deletion was Wednesday morning; yet servers had been wiped without notice on February 1.
In one of his tweets he’s quoted as saying “This is the largest data massacre in the history of the Internet caused by the US government, the Department of Justice & LeaseWeb.”
Whilst directly taking aim at the three mentioned, he compares …
Cloud Skills Shortage: Does It Matter?
More and more companies around the world are embracing the cloud – and that’s a good thing.
But this massive IT shift also presents a problem: With so many businesses moving to cloud, is there enough quality IT technicians available to help businesses manage the switch?
Don Reisinger from CIO Insight, among many others in the space, has identified the IT skills shortage as a real issue facing the cloud industry. With so much of the technology creating a rift between the old school IT managers of the mainframe to pure virtualization eras and the newer DevOps and Cloud engineer roles, it’s hard to see the simple path towards ample expertise.
But then again, according to Reisinger, perhaps it’s not such a problem as so many fret over. Companies are still purchasing cloud tools and services at incredible volumes, causing projections of the overall revenues of the industry to balloon to many billions of dollars over the next 10 years.