INetU, the industry’s experts in complex hosting and a global provider of business-centric managed cloud and application hosting, has announced that Cloud Architect Rich Hand will be presenting “Private Cloud, Public Cloud – Is There a Third Option?” at the 12th International Cloud Expo taking place June 10-13, 2013 in New York City.
As more enterprise IT departments move into the cloud, many executives are evaluating whether to adopt a Public or Private cloud. The cost benefits of the Public Cloud may be appealing, but is this the appropriate environment for critical data? The performance and security of a Private Cloud infrastructure will create an IT corporate hero, but the costs may be prohibitive. IT team leads are discovering that there are no easy answers found by taking a hardline on a Public or Private solution. Now, CIOs are coming to consider a third option: a Hybrid Cloud.

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Businesses are increasingly opting for a hybrid cloud model, in which they use both their own virtualized private set up as well as systems hosted by other providers. There are a number of clear benefits, but also challenges, to this arrangement.

On the plus side, with a hybrid cloud setup companies have the opportunity to keep particularly sensitive data within their data center’s own four walls, ensuring security, and allowing rapid system customization where required. Those same companies can push less-sensitive data out to a public cloud, allowing a host company to affordably handle spikes in traffic and manage some of the infrastructure.

Mitigating the challenges

There are also a number of issues associated with managing a hybrid cloud setup, and these require specific solutions. Firstly, businesses favoring a hybrid cloud need to be extremely clear how their public and private clouds serve them and what the differences are …

“I’m careful when using terms like Big Data, because it can mean so many things to different people,” explained Eric Hanselman, Chief Analyst at 451 Research, in this exclusive Q&A with Cloud Expo Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan. “There is huge value in analytics that companies can use to pull intelligence from a collection of data sources that are available in their businesses. The inexpensive storage that cloud services can offer make a great environment to pull together siloed data.”
Cloud Computing Journal: The move to cloud isn’t about saving money, it is about saving time – agree or disagree?
Eric Hanselman: Time or money shouldn’t be the driving motivations for a jump to any cloud. Cloudy capabilities offer the opportunity to change the way IT services are delivered to an organization. Improving deployment capabilities, making application designs more resilient, and optimizing access to data are far more important goals. Yes, costs and implementation times can be reduced, with clouds, but simply doing the same things with the same processes and procedures misses the largest advantages.

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In an interesting exercise in sharing that begs to be plumbed, Marc Benioff, founder and CEO of cloud doyen Salesforce.com, has hired himself a president-cum-vice-chairman and where else would the wannabe-Larry Ellison look but among the veterans of Oracle, his alma mater.
His pick is Keith Block, former EVP of North American sales at Oracle, head of a 11,000-man multibillion-dollar operation whose indiscrete Sun-knocking e-mails to a colleague where enshrined, thanks to legal discovery, in the HP v Oracle litigation over Itanium.

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Nearly nine in 10 small to medium businesses have experienced “cost-related challenges” with backing up and recovering virtual servers, according to the latest industry report from virtualisation provider Veeam.

These fiscal frustrations primarily included ongoing management costs, backups requiring too much storage and expensive licensing models, according to the report.

Conducted in November and December 2012 by independent market research specialists Vanson Bourne, the report surveyed C-level executives or higher from the US, UK, Germany and France.

And the underlying theme from the research was that, in spite of how important it is to back up VMs and servers, it’s not a walk in the park.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, as is the way of these things, the research from a virtualisation provider advocates virtualisation as the primary solution, yet the statistics on their own still make interesting reading.

The most eye-opening of the lot was that more than half (55 …

Think back to December 31 1999. Where were you when the countdown to the New Year ended?

One thing I can be certain of is that you weren’t stuck in a lift hurtling 12 storeys to the ground, in the midst of a massive traffic pile-up because all the lights stopped working at once or in a plane plummeting 30,000 feet from the sky as all the onboard systems died.

Yet, if the scaremongers in the IT world were to be believed, you should have been. Fears over the effects of the millennium bug had been blasted all over the IT press and even in the mainstream media for months (years in some cases) beforehand.

Millions of pounds were wasted in a desperate bid to upgrade systems before the end of the century. In the end, absolutely nothing happened. The world didn’t end with a bang or …

State and regional efforts toward economic development and creating innovation are often as important as national initiatives. We’re starting to examine some of these with the same eye we’ve been taking for the past two years with national environments.

This is not to diminish the importance of a healthy national environment for technology and economic development; the best local or regional program will wither on the vine if a nation’s roots have gone bad.

On the other hand, strong local and regional programs can serve as beacons to attract talent and investment to their home countries, even if the national picture is not so pretty.

Three areas in the developing world spring to mind: Gauteng (South Africa), Lagos State (Nigeria) and New Wave Cities (Philippines). All have higher income levels than the countries in which they reside; all are driven in part by governmental commitments.

I’m most familiar with the latter of the three, the New Wave Cities program. This is something developed by the Business Processing Association of the Philippines (BPAP); it lists different cities each year, located in the three major regions of the country (Luzon, Visayas, Mindanao).

But recently I’ve been in touch with some of the folks behind the program in Lagos State to focus on technology and innovation in a massive country that is giving it the good fight to emerge from the middling ranks of developing nations into a global leader this century.

Our research covers the globe – 102 countries so far in every region and economic tier – and we will be examining specific regions and cities of the spectrum of nations that we cover.

But I do enjoy traveling in developing nations to see and feel what’s going on. To paraphrase Tolstoy, wealthy nations are all alike, every unwealthy nation is unwealthy in its own way. Our research aims to uncover the diamonds in the rough among those unwealthy nations, and watch them as they fight to improve their economies and the lives of their people.

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Last month, I went to my engineering school, where I graduated 15 years ago, to attend the Annual Gala. While there, I met a few young engineers who asked about my job. This raised a question: “What would make them join my team?”
In the IT world, the demand for highly skilled software engineers continues to grow as application development becomes an integral part of more and more businesses around the globe. As more and more applications are highly connected and have strong SLAs and are addressing sensitive business issues, the demand for load and performance testers also grows.
Companies have been using creative techniques like using Big Data, Twitter and gamification to find top tech talent, but how do you get talented young engineers to 1) be interested in load testing and 2) want to work at your company in your team?

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The cloud security challenge is about more than new technologies, architectures and business models. It is about change. The organizational process of cloud adoption and migration executed by disparate IT teams and business units delivers point cloud and security solutions that create unnecessary gaps in an organization’s security posture. To reduce risk and maximize return on investment, organizations must take a long-term, integrated view of cloud security. They need a framework that is intelligent, comprehensive, easier to implement and identity-centric.
In his session at the 12th International Cloud Expo, McAfee identity expert Robert Craig from McAfee’s Identity Center of Expertise will discuss these emerging trends and challenges and how a Security Connected approach combined with advanced threat and web protection, single sign-on and authentication can do more than provide secure access to the cloud – it can, and will, improve your user’s experience with it.

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