Saurabh Sharma, Senior Analyst, IT Solutions

Many organisations are struggling with integration issues created by the rapid rise of social, mobile, and cloud platforms, and given the persistent time and budget constraints, are not inclined to use traditional integration approaches for hybrid integration scenarios.

IT has no other option but to combine traditional and cloud-based integration approaches to deliver the desired integration capabilities on time and within the allocated budget.

The growing adoption of integration PaaS (iPaaS) solutions signifies the increasing importance of “middleware-as-a-service” and marks the transition of integration from being a “one-to-one” to a “many-to-one” function. An increasing number of integration processes are moving to the cloud, and “hybrid integration middleware” paradigms are no longer uncommon, with this trend expected to become steadily more pervasive.

The rise of hybrid IT calls for a hybrid integration strategy

The rapid rise of cloud services is driving the proliferation of hybrid …

For more than half a century, cloud computing has changed names more often than a Hollywood starlet.
Utility computing. Time share. Thin client. SaaS. PaaS. IaaS. While concepts have been added and capabilities grown, cloud computing was no more invented by Amazon or other modern vendors in the last seven years reality invented by reality shows. It’s simply been advance, repackaged and repurposed for as long as computer connectivity has existed.
In honor of Father’s Day, NJVC looks up the family tree of cloud computing to say thank you to six of the fathers of cloud computing. (And if you’re wondering about a gift, a single tie will suffice. Certainly, these guys understand how to share.)

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In Part 1 I talked about how there’s nothing new about subscription services since they’ve been around for generations.
Now I’ll relent a little and admit that there is something new about many of the subscription services out there. What’s new is what is no longer there. Traditionally, the whole point of subscription services was to create a two-way commitment in which both the service provider and the customer benefits.
The commitment benefits the customer by providing discounts, rewards, exclusive products, price stability and service guaranteed in return for a promise to pay money regularly for a period of time.
The commitment benefits the service provider by establishing a more predictable and reliable forecast of revenues for some time into the future, which facilitates both resource planning and financial planning.

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As with everything else, the best way to get a view of a new technology area is by asking for independent opinions. The old adage of the 6 blind men and the elephant comes to mind. Coincidentally, there were six “blind men” on the panel, including our very engaging host, Mr. Geelan. And there were views that converged in a common theme – Cloud Connects.
The discussion was very entertaining, as all panels mediated by Jeremy are. Interestingly, the analogy went into elephants and other sorts of fauna. To me the Cloud elephant is the right animal to summarize this discussion around – my mind went to the old Indian fable of six blind men and the elephant (I did drop the word “blind” because the panel is obviously not blind and was made of very experienced leaders in this industry J). But it was six men with different views, yet converging on the same theme of how cloud computing fits into this world and the future.

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Precautions to safeguard client data & infrastructure is an MSPs responsibility-this extends beyond client’s sphere of access to MSP employees & consultants. MSPs must employ some degree of security to cover their own access, not just that of their clients.
A man walks into the doctor’s office. He hasn’t been feeling well. A virus has been floating around the office and the man feels he’s caught it.
Doctor walks in, smiles and picks up the chart. He starts examining the man and as he writes a prescription advises he keeps sanitary and wash his hands several times a day.
Do you trust this doctor.especially after he prescribes vigorous hand-washing, but forgot to wash his own before poking and prodding during the exam.
Obviously this doctor loses credibility. This moral is a lesson that MSPs (managed service providers) must heed. MSPs frequently tell their clients to treat data in a secure fashion lest it compromised-by hack, by carelessness or by lax standards. It is only natural to expect your MSP to abide by certain security practices to prevent client data from becoming exposed.

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Metacloud plays hardball.
It has no patience with pilots or proofs-of-concept. It’ll only do production Infrastructure-as-a-Service installations, which is kind of uppity for a start-up that only hit the radar last October – even if it did come out of the closet with an unidentified Fortune 100 reportedly under contract.
It didn’t even have a name for its OpenStack distribution until now. It’s calling the private cloud it’s built on the latest Grizzly version of OpenStack Carbon|OS.
See, Metacloud’s founders are pretty sure of themselves because they figure they’ve done this kind of thing before. When CEO Steve Curry was at Yahoo for over a decade he managed its global storage operations that handled hundreds of petabytes of content and user data. And when CTO Sean Lynch was at Ticketmaster, the third-largest e-commerce system in the world, he ran its technical operations.
The company claims its operational experience is “a unique asset, found nowhere else in the private cloud services sector today.”

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In the course of IT history, many schemes have been devised and deployed to protect data against storage system failure, especially disk drive hardware. These protection mechanisms have nearly always been variants on two themes: duplication of files or objects (backup, archiving, synchronization, remote replication come to mind); or parity-based schemes at disk level (RAID) or at object level (erasure coding, often also referred to as Reed-Solomon coding). Regardless of implementation details, the latter always consists of the computation and storage of “parity” information over a number of data entities (whether disks, blocks or objects). Many different parity schemes exist, offering a wide range of protection trade-offs between capacity overhead and protection level – hence their interest.

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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.

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