I think every IT Pro I’ve ever met hates tape backups … but having an offsite component in your backup strategy is absolutely necessary for effective disaster recovery. One of the new features provided in SQL Server 2012 Service Pack 1 Cumulative Update 2 is the ability to now backup SQL databases and logs to Windows Azure cloud storage using native SQL Server Backup via both Transact-SQL (T-SQL) and SQL Server Management Objects (SMO).
Backup to cloud storage is a natural fit for disaster recovery, as our backups are instantly located offsite when completed. And, the pay-as-you-go model of cloud storage economics makes it really cost effective – Windows Azure storage costs are less than $100/TB per month for geo-redundant storage based on current published costs as of this article’s date. That’s less than the cost of a couple SDLT tapes! You can check out our current pricing model for Windows Azure Storage on our Price Calculator page.

In this article, I’ll step through the process of using SQL Server 2012 SP1 CU2 native backup capabilities to create database backups on Windows Azure cloud storage…

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Log analysis is a unique use case that is being leveraged in multiple ways to gain deep insight into activities generated by multiple sources.
A common theme heard in the IT marketplace is that innovative technologies are enabling new insights to be harvested from data. Cloud computing provides the necessary infrastructure that allows smaller organizations to enjoy the value from these insights. As cloud computing becomes mainstream, analytics driven by new sources are leveraged by formation of new partnerships. GE and Google recently announced a partnership for the utility business that integrates Google map functions with GE’s geospatial analytical tools to improve visualization. Any way you look at it, integrating consumer and industrial assets with speed and ease is game changing.

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Amazon has dropped more crumbs in the forest to entice the enterprise to ultimately abandon its own infrastructure for its doubtlessly cheaper public cloud.
It’s making its Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), which used to be separate service, a free default.
It said in a blog that the announcement was so important “If you use or plan to use Amazon EC2, you need to read this post!”
Undoubtedly VMware and other cloud merchants won’t care much for this turn of events.
Amazon is starting what it called its EC2-VPC roll-out in its regions in Sydney (Asia-Pacific) and São Paulo (South America). It’ll branch out elsewhere in the next few weeks.

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EMC and VMware (who is majority owned by EMC) have announced a new joint initiative called Pivotal (read more here and here) as part of their software defined data center strategies and architecture.
Is this a pivotal moment for both EMC and VMware signaling that they will be going head to head (via their new initiative based company) with Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, HP Cloud services, Rackspace and a long list of others?
Part of the answer to that question would be based on what is meant by going head to head, and which aspects of those services. For Cloud Platform as a Service (PaaS) along with big data analytics related I would say yes. In terms of other Cloud AaaS or SaaS or IaaS probably not as much so at this time.

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CloudTech speaks with Juan Carlos Soto, Informatica senior vice president, cloud evangelist and member of the TechAmerica Foundation’s US Deployment of the Cloud, about iPaaS, SLAs and keeping secure in the cloud.

The difficulties around cloud security may be improving, but users don’t help themselves if they’re not street smart about their IT usage.

That’s according to Informatica senior vice president Juan Carlos Soto, who said that cloud computing shouldn’t “absolve anyone from common sense IT”.

“Cloud has tremendous benefits around cost savings and agility, and typically it’s not the absolute short term cost – it’s all the other benefits that go along with it,” Soto told CloudTech, adding: “Despite all those benefits, cloud does not absolve anyone from common sense IT good practices.

“For example, even as an individual user, we should back up our data. As an individual user, we should put …

Across the globe, organisations in all industries are facing the increasingly complex job to control the security and privacy of their data – wherever, however and whenever it is accessed. In one way or another, this has always been a challenge for enterprises.

However, as big data, cloud services, mobile tech and social networks converge in the enterprise space, organisations today are under greater pressure than ever before to keep up with the impact this is having on security.

Staying on top of changing security needs

There has never been a more challenging time for business to stay on top of the security agenda. Meeting new information security challenges, whilst keeping employees happy and making the most of the latest tech innovation is a fine balance.

Gartner recently brought this into focus, predicting that by 2017, 40% of enterprise contact information will have leaked into Facebook via employees’ increasing use of …

The rise of cloud computing has exposed hard drive-based storage as the new data center bottleneck. Combating this, data center managers have deployed SSDs to gain the performance needed to provide real-time access to data. However, due to budget constraints, many have turned to consumer-grade SSDs without understanding that they wear out quickly when processing enterprise workloads
In her session at the 12th International Cloud Expo, Esther Spanjer, Director of SSD Technical Marketing at SMART Storage Systems, will discuss recent endurance advancements in SSD technology that enable usage of low cost, enterprise-class SSDs, and how this helps organizations lower their storage TCO by avoiding frequent replacements.

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Home is where the cloud is.
The work-at-home movement has given some momentum recently to cloud computing, as well as finding itself in the middle of the debate on whether companies should allow their employees to work from home.
It’s understood that a public cloud platform are typically better at providing IT services over the open Internet than enterprise IT is capable of doing. The public cloud can better serve a workforce that’s as likely to work at the local Starbucks as the corner conference room because they can push processing, storage and enterprise applications to a middle tier between the company and the user. In other words, connectivity, security, capacity management and resiliency become somebody else’s problem, according to an article on Infoworld.com.
The more distributed your workforce, the more public cloud computing can benefit the support of that workforce.
While a remote workforce issue is typically not the only benefit that drives business to the cloud, it’s often on the radar. Companies innovative enough to create a strong remote workforce are typically the organizations that accept cloud computing. If they trust people to work poolside, writes Infoworld’s David Linthicum, then trusting public clouds is not much of a stretch.

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