The champagne has been flowing over at MapR since Google announced the integration of its Distribution for Hadoop with Google Compute Engine, the start-up’s second big win in a row.
Amazon Web Services’ has extended its Elastic MapReduce (EMR) service to include MapR as the only Hadoop distribution Amazon is offering, selling and supporting as a service.
Coupled with the Google win, a clear slight to Cloudera, the original Hadoop commercializer, MapR figures it’s the de facto standard for Hadoop in the cloud.
The combination of the new Google Compute Engine and MapR enables users to quickly provision large MapR clusters for Big Data analytics on-demand in the cloud.
Establish secure remote access with limited staff and budgets
With some of the recent breaches of restaurant chains, I’ve got to think that many of them were related to poor remote access practices. I say this because in all of my years of consulting, I have found that very weak controls around the remote access is a lot more common than one would think.
Even today you will commonly find things like POS Servers directly accessible on the Internet via VNC, RDP, or pcAnywhere. I have even seen SQL databases that contain credit card data made directly accessible over the Internet.
Sometimes the organization itself is to blame. Usually because they just don’t know any better. For many, this has been the standard way to connect with their restaurants or stores remotely. They may lack the skills needed to setup secure remote access. Other times, and this is also very common, a vendor or service provider is …
Windows Server Painted Azure
Microsoft has colored Windows Server 2012 Azure and white-boxed it for service providers and hosting outfits disenfranchised by Amazon, creating in the process a cloud operating system that it can rattle under the nose of the vCloud-pushing VMware.
What it’s done exactly is add Azure-y features to Windows Server so service providers can build Azure-like infrastructure clouds out of their Windows Server data centers and offer turnkey cloud services. They don’t have to use Microsoft’s infrastructure. They can have their own branded IaaS clouds.
A newfangled Service Management Portal built into Windows 8’s new Metro user interface can deliver Azure-like services like automated web site hosting, high-scale web sites and Windows or Linux virtual machine hosting. The widgetry’s extensible APIs let developers connect their hosted applications to other people’s specialized services, their own on-premise resources and Windows Azure if they want.
Removing Cloud Barriers in Europe
The European Commission acknowledges that Europe must become more ‘cloud active’ to stay competitive in the global economy. And while public cloud adoption in the EU is increasing, it is fragmented in some areas and lags the US by some 3- 5 years. IDC’s recent study “Cloud in Europe: Uptake, Benefits, Barriers, and Market Estimates” assesses the European cloud market, identifies key cloud barriers, and makes straightforward recommendations on how to remove them.
The Pentagon’s Cloud Strategy
Here is today’s federal cybersecurity and information technology news:
The Department of Homeland Security Inspector General reported that some Customs and Border Protection critical information technology systems are prone to periodic outages. More here.
The Department of Defense released a four step cloud strategy that appoints the Defense Information Systems Agencyto oversee all cloud purchases. More here.
Researchers deployed a new Office of Naval Research sponsored sensor and software suite in a recent African Maritime Law Enforcement Partnership operation where it tracked over 600 suspect vessels every day. More here.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Homeland Security Investigations busted a $2.7 million online loan-fraud scheme. More here.
Plans from government agencies sent to the Office of Management and Budget don’t have any provisions for shutting off legacy systems when they implement cloud services. More here.
Appcara to Exhibit at Cloud Expo Silicon Valley
SYS-CON Events announced today that Appcara, maker of cloud application lifecycle solutions, will exhibit at SYS-CON’s 11th International Cloud Expo, which will take place on November 5–8, 2012, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
Appcara simplifies application lifecycle agility and portability for corporations with advanced data-model driven technology to capture, assemble and deploy multi-tiered business applications into any cloud. The company was created by a group of cloud computing industry veterans in 2010 in Santa Clara, CA, who previously built industry leading Infrastructure-‐as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud computing services such as the Savvis Virtual Private Data Center (VPDC), the Sun cloud, as well as leading service provider infrastructures at companies such as Equinix. The company provides the AppStack cloud application lifecycle agility and portability platform.
(ISC)² Named “Association Sponsor” of Cloud Expo Silicon Valley
SYS-CON Events announced today that (ISC)² has been named “Association Sponsor” of SYS-CON’s 11th International Cloud Expo, which will take place on November 5–8, 2012, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
(ISC)² is the largest not-for-profit membership body of certified information security professionals worldwide, with over 80,000 members in more than 135 countries.
Cloud Expo 2012 Silicon Valley, November 5–8, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA, will feature technical sessions from a rock star conference faculty and the leading Cloud industry players in the world.
The Rising Tide of Cloud Computing Lifts All Boats
Today’s IT data center is at an interesting crossroads. Faced with typically flat annual budgets and increasing demands from the business, IT organizations have started looking for creative ways to not just meet the needs of the business, but to exceed them – while simultaneously reducing costs and simplifying IT’s overall management required.
A tall order? You bet. Impossible to achieve? It’s certainly a challenge if you plan to use the same legacy infrastructure many data centers have in place today. However, such goals become infinitely achievable as IT organizations begin their migration to private cloud computing. One of the most transformational movements to hit IT in a long time, most organizations will seek guidance for how to best unify servers, storage, and networking infrastructures. Most will also need help with addressing the cultural shifts that are inherent when virtualizing and unifying data center infrastructures and teams that were once disparate. The end result of this migration to private clouds benefits both the enterprises that embark on the transformation as well as the vendors and solution providers best positioned to assist them.
Let’s ‘fess up’, Big Data Is Just Laziness Really
Big Data appears to have made more headlines in the last 12 to 18 months than almost any other technology subject, other than cloud computing and the Bring Your Own Device phenomenon.
Note to self: don’t “phenomena” usually involve oceans parting and/or lightning flashes and frogs falling from the sky? Whatever, let’s move on.
Big Data then (or if you prefer the more informal lower-case version “big data”) as we have come to know and love it is generally agreed to be the mass management of petabytes and exabytes of unstructured and semi-structured data sets. Too large, at this level to be comfortably slotted into a relational database for analysis, a new approach is called for.
The question is, isn’t big data just an excuse to be lazy?
Cloud Computing: The New Enterprise Reference Architecture
Over the last couple of years much has changed in the way enterprises map their enterprise IT architecture and realize their business capabilities. Till 2010 or so, enterprise architecture have been purely built on:
On Premise Packaged Applications (SAP, Oracle, Siebel)
On Premise Custom Applications Frameworks (.NET, Java EE)
Structured Data (Oracle, SQL Server, DB2)
Traditional Access methodologies (Web, Client/Server, CITRIX, other reporting tools)
However, now the enterprises have to rethink their reference architecture to fit all the new avenues opened due to the advances in these areas.
The following diagram outlines the New Enterprise Reference Architecture. The following text provides a detailed explanation of the role of each layer and product mapping to current vendors. The product mapping may not have covered all the products, please write to me if any of the significant products are missed out.