Eucalyptus Systems, Amazon’s private cloud partner, was expected to
announce a new 3.3 release of its open source cloud platform Monday that
promises its greatest compatibility with AWS yet.
Its new capabilities are also supposed to make Eucalyptus the solution for
developing and testing applications built for AWS. Users get new levels
of availability, speed, resource utilization and cost savings across the
application development lifecycle.
Who said government is stodgy and wasteful?
When it comes to cloud computing, government’s on the forefront—particularly when it comes to cloud-based email. The US Army, EPA, GSA, Interior, Labor, the USDA… they are all among the government organizations moving email to the cloud under Obama’s “cloud first” policy.
The US Department of Veterans Affairs is showing particular prudence by starting out with a relatively small, 15,000-mailbox pilot to make sure it’s properly addressing all the security, compliance, governance and cost-savings concerns that are all part and parcel of the email-in-the-cloud package.
Then, the VA will up the roll-out to 600,000 mailboxes to save what it hopes will amount to about $85 million in maintenance fees, support staff and aging hardware it will no longer need.
I hope other organizations regardless of sector are paying close attention.
Everyone wants to save a buck, of …
Matthew Smith, UK director of business solutions, Software AG
Analyst houses IDC and Gartner are of the same mind: the age of the Digital Enterprise is upon us.
In IDC’s view: “For the past several years, the IT industry’s transition to the Third Platform, built on mobile computing, cloud services, social networking and big data analytics technologies, has dominated the annual Predictions…for 2013, IDC predicts the transition to the Third Platform will shift into high gear, as the industry accelerates past the exploration phase and into full-blown, high stakes competition.”
Gartner VP and Fellow, David W Clearley, puts it this way: “These strategic technologies are emerging amidst a nexus of converging forces – social, mobile, cloud and information. Although these forces are innovative and disruptive on their own, together they are revolutionising business and society, disrupting old business models and creating new leaders.
“As such, the Nexus of …
Everyone is virtualizing, but are they realizing any of the promised savings? This overview of IBM’s new virtualization optimization solutions will show you how integrated Cloud Solutions like SmartCloud Provisioning and SmartCloud Monitoring can deliver the savings virtualization promises.
Organizations are using intelligent management and analytics to provide the insight needed to optimize their virtualized infrastructure and dramatically improve availability, reduce data storage footprints and streamline patch management.
In his session at the 12th International Cloud Expo, Dan Carr, an Executive IT Architect at IBM, will review lessons learned from real-world experience.
In his session at 12th Cloud Expo | Cloud Expo New York [June 10-13, 2013], Intel’s Chris Black will review the background of Apache Hadoop, its application, and methods to accelerate data system clusters with Intel SSD technology. The session will overview the genius of Hadoop and provide an overview of the ecosystem landscape.
Cloud Expo/Big Data Expo delegates will learn how the Hadoop framework and SSD technology augment cloud data systems ranging from analytics to on-line transaction processing (OLTP) to data warehousing. Best known applications of SSD technology to development, real-time query, and main Hadoop clusters will be presented. The resulting balance of processing, networking, SSD storage, and Hadoop optimization results in improving big data sort responsiveness from hours to minuets.
Analyzing Hadoop jobs and speeding them up is often a tedious and time consuming effort that requires experts. In his upcoming session at 12th Cloud Expo | Cloud Expo New York [10-13 June, 2013], Michael Kopp will be showing how proven APM techniques can be used to speed up Hadoop jobs at the core, without going through tons of log files, beyond just adding more hardware and within minutes instead of hours or days.
Guest Post by Pontus Noren, director and co-founder, Cloudreach.
The good news for cloud providers is that forward-thinking CIOs are rushing to embrace all things ‘cloud’, realising that it provides a flexible and cost-effective option for IT infrastructure, data storage and software applications. The bad news is that the most significant obstacle to implementation could be internal: coming from other parts of the organisation where enduring myths about legal implications, security and privacy issues remain. The reality is that today such fears are largely unfounded. CIOs need help in communicating this to their more reluctant colleagues if they want to make the move to the cloud a success.
Myth No 1: The Security Scare
In many cases, moving to the cloud can in fact represent a security upgrade for the organisation. Since the introduction of cloud-based computing and data storage around ten years ago, the issue of security has been so high profile that reputable cloud providers have made vast investments in their security set-ups – one that an individual organisation would be unable to cost-effectively match due to the far different scale on which it operates.
For example, data stored in the cloud is backed-up, encrypted and replicated across multiple geographically distributed data centres in order to protect it from the impact of natural disasters or physical breaches. All this takes place under the watchful eyes of dedicated data centre security experts. If you compare this to the traditional in-house approach – which all too frequently sees data stored on a single server located somewhere in the basement of an office – it is not difficult to see which is the most secure option. By working with an established and respected cloud provider, such as Google or Amazon Web Services businesses can benefit from such comprehensive security measures without having to make the investment themselves.
Myth No 2: Data in Danger
Security and data privacy are closely related, but different issues. Security is mainly about physical measures taken to mitigate risks, while ‘privacy’ is more of a legal issue about who can access sensitive data, how it is processed, whether or not it is being moved and where it is at any moment in time.
Concerns around compliance with in-country data protection regulations are rife, especially when dealing with other countries. Across Europe, for example, data protection laws vary from country to country with very strict guidelines about where data can be stored. A substantial amount of data cannot be moved across geographical boundaries, so the security practice of replicating data across the globe has far-reaching compliance applications for data protection. However, data protection legislation states that there is always a data processor and data controller and a customer never actually ‘hands over’ its data. This doesn’t change when the cloud is involved – all large and reputable cloud services providers are only ever the data processor. For example, the provider will only ever process data on behalf of its customer, and the customer always maintains its ownership of its data, and role of data controller.
However, much of data protection law predates the cloud and is taking a while to catch up. Change is most definitely on its way. Proposed European legislation aims to make data protection laws consistent across Europe, and with highly data-restricted industries such as financial services now starting to move beyond private clouds into public cloud adoption, further change is likely to follow as organisations start to feel reassured.
So what can CIOs do to change perceptions? It comes down to three simple steps:
The cloud has been around for a while now and is a trusted and secure option for businesses of all sizes and across all sectors. In fact, there are more than 50 million business users alone of Google Apps worldwide. It can hold its own in the face of security and privacy concerns. CIOs have an important role to play in reassuring and informing colleagues so that the firm can harness the many benefits of the cloud; future-proof the business and release IT expertise to add value across the business. Don’t let fear leave your organisation on the side lines.
Pontus Noren is director and co-founder, Cloudreach.
Only a system-level approach to flash memory management can meet the increasing performance demands of the cloud while bringing the price of all solid-state systems to a level that is equal to high-performance HDDs. Innovations are necessary to make the latest generation of 19/20 nm MLC flash memory usable in mainstream enterprise cloud storage. In addition, reducing high costs that keep flash memory from serving as primary storage (as compared to caches or tiers) is very important.
In his session at the 12th International Cloud Expo, Rado Danilak, CEO at Skyera, will highlight flash technology trends for the cloud, and offer system-level solutions that will advance flash memory in the enterprise cloud storage market.
Backup, Recovery, and Archiving (BURA) are critical elements for IT to address. BURA solutions need to address a broad spectrum of needs including data protection, regulatory compliance, and business continuity. Today’s cloud based solutions can enable customers to procure and consume BURA as a service supported by EMC’s latest technologies. At the end of Rich Place’s session at 12th Cloud Expo | Cloud Expo New York [June 10-13, 2013], you will be able to: 1. Gain a full understanding of Backup, Recovery, and Archiving (BURA), also known as Backup as a Service incorporating EMC’s latest technologies. 2. Share the experiences of a cloud service providers BURA implementations and portfolio 3. Have an opportunity to ask questions regarding SHI’s Backup as a Service offering and experiences with partners and customers
Security-as-a-service leader is first to the cloud-based market with a security solution that combines the key capabilities of user credentialing and authentication with single-sign-on for both SaaS and legacy applications.
CloudAccess, a provider of unified security solutions from the cloud, announced the release of the latest version of CloudIDM/AM which features a unique and seamless integration between enterprise identity management and access control (single sign on/access management) from the cloud.
According to CloudAccess, the new version includes several “game-changing” developments including multi-directional password synchronization between the identity management solution, Active Directory and/or LDAP (Lightweight Directory Access Protocol), a federated gateway to control access to any application or website, dynamic self-service portal and centralized GUI-based workflow automation.