Security, over the years, has evolved from an absolute concept of a binary decision: is it secure or is it not? As we move forward, I believe very strongly that what we’re evolving into is, as we’ve heard people talk about, risk management.
Risk management starts to include things that are beyond the security borders. As I talked to customers out here, I was having an “aha” moment. A little while ago, at one of our converged cloud chats, we were talking about how things fail. Everything fails at some point, and chaos takes over.
So rather than talking about security, which is a set of absolutes or a concrete topic, and boxing ourselves into threats from a security perspective, the evolution of that goes into enterprise resiliency. What that means is that it’s a combination of recoverability, security, performance, and all the other things that bring together a well-oiled business that can let you take a shot to the gut, get back up, and keep going.

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Amazon has brought out a new cloud service called Glacier to freeze out the competition.
It wants companies to archive and back up their data, all the stuff they have to hang on to for years and years to comply with all the rules, but don’t have to access very often.
Storing all this pack rat data is expensive. Amazon is offering to do it for a penny a gigabyte a month, a “significant savings” it figures is “disruptive.”
As is typical with Amazon there’s no up-front fee and it’s pay-as-you-go. Archives are apparently saved in “vaults” in Amazon’s data center in Virginia via a Glacier API although the FAQ says the “service redundantly stores data in multiple facilities and on multiple devices within each facility.”

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Piston Cloud is about to release Airframe, a cut-down version of its Piston Enterprise OpenStack platform built so business users have a free way to evaluate and get comfortable with OpenStack in a pre-production environment.
It’s supposed to be ideal in pilot deployments, proof of concept and lab environments.
The bare-metal cloud management platform is said to install in less than 10 minutes – which, if true, is probably remarkable – and deliver all the core OpenStack services including compute, storage, networking and cloud management.

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A big thank-you to all the R users out there who voted for Revolution R Enterprise in DataWeek Awards. We’re so pleased to be recognized by the voters and the DataWeek judging panel with the Top Innovator Award for Data Science Technology. We’re looking forward to the awards ceremony next week at DataWeek SF (in San Francisco, September 24-27). If you’d like to come along and join us and 1000 of the other most innovative data-centric companies who are attending, speaking, and participating in this first annual event, you can register here with the code DataWeek25 for a 25% discount….

David Smith

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We are now in process of launching our flagship best practices publication, the Cloud CIO guide @ CloudCIO.info. While the technology aspects of Cloud Computing are important, what is actually most noteworthy about the trend is the transformation of the role of the CIO, to become a board-level change agent specializing in innovation. A headline […]

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The landscape of IT innovation is changing.

“Back in the day” (said in my gravelly old-man voice from my Barcalounger wearing my Netware red t-shirt) companies who were developing new technology solutions brought them to the enterprise and marketed them to the IT management stack.

CIOs, CTOs and IT directors were the injection point for technology acceptance into the business. Now, that injection point has been turned into a fire hose.

Think about many of the technologies we have to consider as we develop our enterprise architectures: tablets, smartphones, cloud computing, application stores, and file synchronisation.

Because our users and clients are consuming these technologies today outside of IT, we need to be aware of what they are using, how they are using it, and what bunker-buster is likely to be dropped into our lap next.

Sure, you can argue that “tablets” had been around for a number of years …

Now that we are a couple of years into the great cloud journey is it pretty clear that the big bang theory of cloud conversion is ain’t happening.

Yes, ISVs are moving rapidly to the SaaS model and it would be hard to find a software startup who is *not* starting in the cloud, but enterprise adoption of the public cloud is happening at a more stately pace.

In large part this is due to the simplification required to make public clouds efficient and the complexity that characterizes most enterprise IT environments.  To put it differently, the public cloud makes app deployment simple by pruning app deployment options to the point that few enterprise applications can fit.

Moving forward, I see two paths for cloud adoption: evolutionary and revolutionary.

• Revolutionary cloud: Public clouds like Amazon EC2 and CloudFoundry.com represents a revolutionary leap forward for companies that are willing/able to abandon their current platforms. The revolutionary cloud offers a high degree of operational productivity at the expense of service choice (e.g., you can have any color you want as long as its black).
• Evolutionary cloud: public/private clouds like VMware’s vCloud Director enable enterprises to get cloud benefits (public/private deployment, low upfront cost, elastic scaling, self-healing) without having to make major changes to their application architecture. The evolutionary cloud offers a lower level of productivity with a greater range of choice (e.g., you trade of productivity for flexibility).

Over time, the revolutionary cloud will offer more choice and flexibility while the evolutionary cloud will offer higher automation. Some questions for enterprise developers to answer as they move along this path include:

1. How much control do I have over the deployed application environment? The more flexible the deployment environment, the easier it is to move that application to the public cloud.
2. How do I move applications between different clouds? Having a way to move applications between evolutionary and revolutionary cloud architectures is just as important as being able to move apps between different flavors of public clouds

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What is the “Cloud”? What is “Cloud” computing? These are questions I get all the time. For the vast majority of people, the “Cloud” is a lofty term having to do something with computing or, let’s be honest, puffy cumulus wisps of moisture floating around in the sky. The truth is the “Cloud” is a marketing term made up to sell a service (note: the quotation marks around “Cloud” were to delineate that marketing term. From here on out, “Cloud” will be written sans quotation). That service, the Cloud, is computing and storage capacity as a service. In human terms, it is a system of delivering computing and storage needs via three types of computing services: Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS). Although this is true, for most people Cloud can be broken down into two categories, Public or Private.

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