“You need two groups when dealing with cloud compliance,” explained Rob LaMear IV, CEO and Founder of Fpweb.net, in this exclusive Q&A with Cloud Expo Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan. “First,” LaMear continued, “you need a provider that is willing to operate transparently and work with you and your auditors. Most seasoned providers are well aware of this symbiotic relationship and are open to getting it out in the open early.”
Cloud Computing Journal: The move to cloud isn’t about saving money, it is about saving time. – Agree or disagree?
Rob LaMear: Agree. Time is money. Focusing your team on strategic initiatives gives you a competitive advantage. You get to market faster and can deliver something truly special before your competitors. First one to market typically owns 70–80% of the market share. Think Apple.
Public Cloud’s Got a Silver Lining: Gartner
The worldwide public cloud market is projected to grow 18.5% this year to $131 billion, up from $111 billion last year, according to Gartner.
That number includes a 47.3% jump in Infrastructure-as-a-Service to $9 billion. IaaS was up 42.4% to $6.1 billion last year.
Gartner expects $677 billion to be spent on cloud services between 2013 and 2016 and estimates that $310 billion of that will go for cloud-based advertising. Cloud advertising was 48% of the total market last year.
Gartner found that business process services was the second-largest segment last year, accounting for 28% of the cloud market, followed by Software-as-a-Service at 14.7%, cloud system infrastructure at 5.5%, cloud management and security services at 2.8% and Platform-as-a-Service at 1%.
Public Cloud’s a Cheat, SolidFire Says
SolidFire, the company that makes all-Flash solid-state storage for the cloud,
figures the shared multi-tenant cloud is basically ripping users off.
It’s because of the so-called “Noisy Neighbor” phenomenon.
Since the public cloud lets in just anybody with the price of admission,
there’s no telling whether a noisy neighbor will drain the resources needed
to run one’s application especially since applications are designed to
consume as many resources as are available for a task.
Public Cloud’s a Cheat, SolidFire Says
SolidFire, the company that makes all-Flash solid-state storage for the cloud,
figures the shared multi-tenant cloud is basically ripping users off.
It’s because of the so-called “Noisy Neighbor” phenomenon.
Since the public cloud lets in just anybody with the price of admission,
there’s no telling whether a noisy neighbor will drain the resources needed
to run one’s application especially since applications are designed to
consume as many resources as are available for a task.
CSA: What are 2013’s top cloud security threats?
The Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) has released a new report designed to examine the most pervasive security threats still threatening cloud in 2013.
Called “The Notorious Nine” – presumably using the same nomenclature that Enid Blyton employed for the protagonists of her fabled children’s books – the CSA enlisted the help of industry experts, and is designed to be used in conjunction with other CSA best practice guides; “Security Guidance for Critical Areas in Cloud Computing V.3” and “Security as a Service Implementation Guidance”.
According to the CSA the nine security challenges cloud players face, ranked in order, are:
- Data breaches
- Data loss
- Account hijacking
- Insecure APIs
- Denial of service
- Malicious insiders
- Abuse and nefarious use
- Insufficient due diligence
- Shared technology issues
Most of these seem relatively self-explanatory, with the vast majority making headlines in the cloud computing space.
The dreaded data breach was, perhaps unsurprisingly, the top threat. Calling …
Tau Institute Focuses on Global IT Research
The roles of information technology in economic and societal development are clear. Better use of IT (or ICT as it’s called in much of the world) increases productivity, which increases economic growth. This holds true whether in manufacturing, along supply chains, throughout research & development, or in office environments.
Additionally, the increased presence and usage of social media transform IT into a disruptive force, whether playing a role in the Arab Spring or simply showing the peoples of the world how people in other countries live.
IT is also a key ractor in measuring a country’s competitiveness. In fact, at the Tau Institute we believe that IT underlies competitiveness, as it aids gains in education, social services, and innovation.
But we’ve found that most measurements of IT and competitiveness, in the end, simply show wealthy nations on top and developing nations on the bottom. How can we level the playing field and conduct research on a relative basis that provides a more realistic picture of how all the nations of the world are coming along with technology and its benefits?
Our Tau Index is our answer. We announced our initial, rough results in late 2010. More than two years later, we now have a more nuanced overall ranking that integrates technology and social factors, along with a “raw” raking that focuses solely on technology. Our main ingredients are bandwidth, access to the Internet, and the presence of data servers. We feel these key factors drive other technology measures. We balance them with social factors such as income disparity, corruption, and human development.
Our final tweak adjusts the numbers for local cost-of-living, reflecting the reality that technology costs about the same in absolute costs everywhere.
Our original insights for this research came from a career of business travel to all regions of the world, then living for three years in Southeast Asia. I personally like to roam the streets of the world, perhaps because I’m cheap, seeking local foods and experiences. I’ve had a few shiny toys stolen over the years, primarily because of my stupidity, and more than my share of close calls in traffic – but nothing worse than that.
This travel has not only broadened horizons, but led to a quest for translating the contrasts in energy and dynamism I’ve seen. There’s a palpable electricity in some places, a dispiriting torpor in others. There’s the maddening, slack mediocrity that seems to have taken over much of my beloved United States. There’s a sense I’ve gotten in the BRIC nations, unique in each case, that they’re not all they may be cracked up to be.
Where are the world’s true treasures? Its diamonds in the rough? Is the US really floundering? How do we go beyond the BRICs?
We feel the answer to these and innumerable other questions lie in the guts of our research. We’ve now engaged clients in more than two dozen countries with our research, and are preparing to expand further.
We operate on a former college campus a couple hours west of the Chicago area, with an additional office at Computerworld Philippines in Metro Manila. Our advisory board comes from all regions of the world.
You can find a lot of information on our rankings simply googling (or binging) “strukhoff tau.”
Meanwhile, if you’re a company looking for new markets, partners, or locations, contact us. If you’re with a government or NGO looking to allocate scarce resources, contact us. If you simply want a conversation on the topic of global IT and its role in development, then by all means contact us.
Tau Institute Focuses on Global IT Research
The roles of information technology in economic and societal development are clear. Better use of IT (or ICT as it’s called in much of the world) increases productivity, which increases economic growth. This holds true whether in manufacturing, along supply chains, throughout research & development, or in office environments.
Additionally, the increased presence and usage of social media transform IT into a disruptive force, whether playing a role in the Arab Spring or simply showing the peoples of the world how people in other countries live.
IT is also a key ractor in measuring a country’s competitiveness. In fact, at the Tau Institute we believe that IT underlies competitiveness, as it aids gains in education, social services, and innovation.
But we’ve found that most measurements of IT and competitiveness, in the end, simply show wealthy nations on top and developing nations on the bottom. How can we level the playing field and conduct research on a relative basis that provides a more realistic picture of how all the nations of the world are coming along with technology and its benefits?
Our Tau Index is our answer. We announced our initial, rough results in late 2010. More than two years later, we now have a more nuanced overall ranking that integrates technology and social factors, along with a “raw” raking that focuses solely on technology. Our main ingredients are bandwidth, access to the Internet, and the presence of data servers. We feel these key factors drive other technology measures. We balance them with social factors such as income disparity, corruption, and human development.
Our final tweak adjusts the numbers for local cost-of-living, reflecting the reality that technology costs about the same in absolute costs everywhere.
Our original insights for this research came from a career of business travel to all regions of the world, then living for three years in Southeast Asia. I personally like to roam the streets of the world, perhaps because I’m cheap, seeking local foods and experiences. I’ve had a few shiny toys stolen over the years, primarily because of my stupidity, and more than my share of close calls in traffic – but nothing worse than that.
This travel has not only broadened horizons, but led to a quest for translating the contrasts in energy and dynamism I’ve seen. There’s a palpable electricity in some places, a dispiriting torpor in others. There’s the maddening, slack mediocrity that seems to have taken over much of my beloved United States. There’s a sense I’ve gotten in the BRIC nations, unique in each case, that they’re not all they may be cracked up to be.
Where are the world’s true treasures? Its diamonds in the rough? Is the US really floundering? How do we go beyond the BRICs?
We feel the answer to these and innumerable other questions lie in the guts of our research. We’ve now engaged clients in more than two dozen countries with our research, and are preparing to expand further.
We operate on a former college campus a couple hours west of the Chicago area, with an additional office at Computerworld Philippines in Metro Manila. Our advisory board comes from all regions of the world.
You can find a lot of information on our rankings simply googling (or binging) “strukhoff tau.”
Meanwhile, if you’re a company looking for new markets, partners, or locations, contact us. If you’re with a government or NGO looking to allocate scarce resources, contact us. If you simply want a conversation on the topic of global IT and its role in development, then by all means contact us.
Riverbed Tightens Up Its Alliance with VMware
Riverbed Technology, the application performance outfit, has some new solutions developed in collaboration with its buddy VMware that are supposed to provide a reliable and consistent desktop virtualization end-user experience in organizations that deploy VMware’s Horizon View 5.2.
The experience is supposed to be seamless regardless of where the data is.
The partnership between Riverbed and VMware has resulted in the support of several Riverbed performance solutions in Horizon View deployments, including certifying Riverbed’s Granite widgetry for acceleration, control and management in virtualized desktop initiatives.
Personal Cloud Usage Influences Company Adoption: CDW
As you go, so goes your company. At least in terms of which cloud apps you use that find their way into the workplace.
Showing that work imitates life, a CDW report surveyed 1,242 IT professionals and found that a major driver of corporate cloud adoption is users’ experiences of consumer services.
Nearly three quarters of respondents (73%) claimed that, in their company, employees’ use of personal cloud apps has “significantly influenced” the decision to move wholesale to the cloud. Similarly, just over three in five (61%) cloud-using organizations agreed that employee personal devices have culminated in a faster move to the cloud, according to an article on CloudComputingNews.net.
It’s also the case with IT professionals – two-thirds agreed that their personal use of cloud has influenced the company in terms of adoption.
Another aspect of the CDW research was a detailed look at the infrastructure being moved over to cloud on a company-by-company basis. Storage software was the most frequently cited service moved to the cloud by SMBs (40% small businesses, 35% medium businesses), while conferencing and collaboration tools were the most popular for large organizations (40%).
Keynote Videos and Session Presentations from Parallels Summit 2013 Now Available
If you missed Parallels Summit 2013, or if you want to relive the great ideas, the keynote videos and breakout sessions presentations are posted and available for downloading and viewing. Some of the compelling topics from this year’s event include:
- · Next generation solutions for the next generation cloud, Keynote presentation, Birger Steen, CEO, Parallels
- · Top trends you must consider to compete in the cloud, Parallels SMB Insights 2013
- · Introducing Parallels Cloud Server and its advantages
- · Enabling bundles of cloud services with APS 2.0
And, you will find much more rich content from Parallels Summit 2013, all right here.