Eucalyptus, the open source private cloud platform partnered with Amazon to give people hybrid clouds, has found selling support and professional services, the usual way an open source company makes money, isn’t working as a business because would-be customers are too tight-fisted.
As a result it didn’t grow as much as expected last year.
So it’s regrouping. It’s open sourcing its services and training, CEO Marten Mickos said, to focus on its product business, where it’s seeing early indications of large cloud implementations and the potential for a big business thanks in part to its alliance with Amazon, whose APIs are the recognized cloud standard.
The Mounting Case for Cloud Access Brokers
Unifying identity and access management has been a stretch goal for IT for nearly a decade. At first it was merely the need to have a single, authoritative source of corporate identity such that risks like orphaned or unauthorized accounts could be addressed within the enterprise.
But with a growing number of applications – business applications – being deployed “in the cloud”, it’s practically a foregone conclusion that organizations are going to need similar capabilities for those applications, as well.
It’s not easy, there are myriad reasons why unifying identity and access control is a stretch goal and not something easily addressed by simply deploying a solution. Federation of identity and access control requires integration. It may require modification of applications. It may require architectural changes.
Microsoft JV Buys Start-Up’s AzureOps Widgetry
Avanade, the global enterprise IT services company started by Accenture and Microsoft in 2000 to focus on Microsoft widgetry, has acquired the software written by a young 15-month-old SaaS operations start-up by the name of Opstera that helps manage cloud solutions, the underlying platform and dependent cloud services.
The price it paid is unknown.
The pair has reportedly been working together on a public cloud management service for Azure. The technology provides application monitoring and management of Windows Azure apps.
The start-up said in a FAQ that “There is a strong need in the enterprise for comprehensive managed services that can guarantee a high level of availability and operational efficiency of the infrastructure similar to what they are used for on-premises solutions. Opstera software will be an addition to an already strong portfolio focused on cloud managed services.”
Cloud Migration Software Adds Support for SoftLayer CloudLayer
Racemi, the moving company for the cloud, announced on Thursday updates to its cloud migration software that add support for the SoftLayer CloudLayer platform. As part of the launch, Racemi has also announced special pricing of $99 per migration to CloudLayer for the next 30 days.
SoftLayer is the largest, privately held, cloud infrastructure provider in the world, with 13 data centers and 17 points-of-presence spanning the U.S., Asia and Europe.
The updates to Racemi’s Cloud Path software as a service (SaaS) and DynaCenter on-premises software now support physical and virtual server migrations to CloudLayer cloud servers built on SoftLayer’s automated infrastructure and Citrix XenServer. It’s also possible to automatically migrate cloud instances from other cloud providers to CloudLayer. This provides customers with additional flexibility and choice when it comes to migrating existing workloads to public cloud computing resources. Additional information is available at www.racemi.com/index.php/softlayer.
How "policy as a service" is critical for cloud deployments
The financial ROI of cloud security and compliance is judged by decision makers in end-user organisations by the same measures as is done for Cloud computing in general, i.e. by how much it cuts up-front capital expenditure and in-house manual maintenance cost. However, manually translating security policy into technical implementation is difficult, expensive, and error-prone (esp. for the application layer).
In order to reduce security related manual maintenance cost at the end-user organisation, security tools need to become more automated. With the emergence of cloud PaaS, it is therefore logical to move all or parts of the model-driven security architecture into the cloud to protect and audit cloud applications and mashups with maximal automation.
In particular, policies are provided as a cloud service to application development and deployment tools (i.e. “Policy as a Service”), and policy automation is embedded into cloud application deployment and runtime platforms (i.e …
“Policy as a Service” – Critical for Cloud Deployments
The financial ROI of Cloud security and compliance is judged by decision makers in end-user organizations by the same measures as is done for Cloud computing in general, i.e. by how much it cuts up-front capital expenditure and in-house manual maintenance cost. However, manually translating security policy into technical implementation is difficult, expensive, and error-prone […]
“Policy as a Service” – Critical for Cloud Deployments
The financial ROI of Cloud security and compliance is judged by decision makers in end-user organizations by the same measures as is done for Cloud computing in general, i.e. by how much it cuts up-front capital expenditure and in-house manual maintenance cost. However, manually translating security policy into technical implementation is difficult, expensive, and error-prone […]
Windows Azure? What’s in It for IT Professionals
While enterprise IT is transitioning form on-premise deployment to an emerging architecture of hybrid cloud, IT professionals are facing unprecedented challenges to change from managing servers deployed on premise to managing services in hybrid cloud, at the same time extraordinary opportunities to upgrade and expand an individual’s skill profile and become a leader in cloud initiatives and a contributor in IT communities.
Windows Azure relevant to Microsoft private cloud solutions is, in my view, as critical as what Active Directory means to Windows infrastructure. In a Windows domain, Active Directory holds the one version of truth and is the ultimate authority of all resources defined. Similarly when it comes to Microsoft cloud computing, there is no question that Windows Azure is the de facto platform as an extension of Active Directory in the cloud. While enterprise IT is transitioning form on-premise deployment to an emerging architecture of hybrid cloud, IT professionals are facing unprecedented challenges to change from managing servers deployed on premise to managing services delivered with hybrid cloud, and at the same time extraordinary opportunities to upgrade and expand an individual’s skill profile and become a leader in cloud initiatives and a contributor in IT communities.
The Evolution of Single Sign-on
The concept of single sign-on (SSO) is not a new one, and over the years it has successfully bridged the gap between security and productivity for organizations all over the globe.
Allowing users to authenticate once to gain access to enterprise applications improves access security and user productivity by reducing the need for passwords.
In the days of mainframes, SSO was used to help maintain productivity and security from inside the protection of firewalls. As organizations moved to custom-built authentication systems in the 1990’s, it became recognized as enterprise SSO (ESSO) and later evolved into browser-based plugin or web-proxy methods known as web access management (WAM). IT’s focus was on integrating applications exclusively within the network perimeter.
The Evolution of Single Sign-on
The concept of single sign-on (SSO) is not a new one, and over the years it has successfully bridged the gap between security and productivity for organizations all over the globe.
Allowing users to authenticate once to gain access to enterprise applications improves access security and user productivity by reducing the need for passwords.
In the days of mainframes, SSO was used to help maintain productivity and security from inside the protection of firewalls. As organizations moved to custom-built authentication systems in the 1990’s, it became recognized as enterprise SSO (ESSO) and later evolved into browser-based plugin or web-proxy methods known as web access management (WAM). IT’s focus was on integrating applications exclusively within the network perimeter.