“We just announced version 2 of AppStack this week and we added another capability – application marketplace,” noted John Yung, CEO of Appcara, in this SYS-CON.TV interview with Cloud Expo Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan at the 10th International Cloud Expo, held June 11–14, 2011, at the Javits Center in New York City.
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.
Cloud Resource Meter for VMware vSphere available for download From 6fusion.
Cloud Resource Meter for VMware vSphere allows users to meter resource consumption in any VMware vSphere 4.1 or 5.0 environment providing insight into resource consumption – for free right from the VMware console. In addition, new functionality was added to the latest version of Cloud Resource Meter for VMware vSphere based on feedback from beta customers, including:
- Enhanced reporting capabilities such as viewing individual and summary
VM profile reports - Usability and navigation enhancements such as sorting and managing
profiles by Name, Free and Pro - The ability to upgrade from the Free to the Pro version of Cloud
Resource Meter directly within the tool
Cloud Resource Meter for VMware vSphere joins the existing family of 6fusion Cloud Resource Meter products, including Cloud Resource Meter for Linux and Cloud Resource Meter for Windows. You can see a demo of Cloud Resource Meter for VMware vSphere at 1PM ET on Wednesday, August 1st – register here.
“Cloud Resource Meter provides us a powerful and simple way to centralize and aggregate our customers usage information for billing and reporting of our Cloud Continuity services,” said Omar Torres, Director of Virtualization & Cloud Solutions at Veristor. “Through the secure, web-based console we are able to accurately track our customers usage without having to invest in and run our own metering infrastructure. This brings us a number of valuable efficiencies to how we operate and service our cloud customers.”
“6fusion believes metering IT consumption across heterogeneous environments is fundamental to optimizing any IT infrastructure,” said John Cowan, Co-Founder and CEO of 6fusion. “Cloud Resource Meter for VMware vSphere gives organizations unprecedented insights into how their IT resources are actually being used, who is using those resources, and they can improve the business value they are delivering.”
Cloud Resource Meter is available in two models – Free and Pro. Cloud Resource Meter Free provides the ability to meter and view the last 28 days of data directly in the vSphere interface or in the 6fusion UC6 Console. The Pro version provides the full capabilities of the tool, including unlimited metering, expanded reporting capabilities, technical support as well as the ability to access 6fusion’s enhanced analytics tools.
How do you calculate the ROI on cloud security costs?
What is it they say…you get what you pay for, right? In most cases, that is a spot on assessment but in terms of the cloud-based security, the numbers tend to add up towards the benefit of the user. But let’s get the whole idea of numbers down straight. It’s all relative.
What is pricy for one organization is downright affordable to another, so in terms of costs let’s look squarely at the moving target of return on investment. What makes cloud security compelling is how the costs break down in terms of hard and soft cost savings.
First let’s compare apples to apples. I am not talking about just applying a single sign on solution or identity management, or even SIEM, but rather analyzing cloud security holistically. Each of these components are a growing necessity for any company who deals with proprietary data, responsibly …
Compliant Cloud includes all products, services required to keep cloud infrastructures compliant with PCI DSS, HIPAA, ISO 27001/2
Image via CrunchBase
Compliant Cloud includes all the necessary products and services required to keep cloud infrastructures secure and compliant with PCI DSS, HIPAA, ISO 27001/2 and other regulations and standards.
US companies remain concerned over lingering data security risks with new cloud-based applications – and as a result, they lag behind Asia-Pacific and Latin American companies in the adoption of cloud computing by nearly two to one, according to a recent report in Forbes magazine. ControlCase has developed a solution to alleviate these security issues and allow US companies to confidently leverage the latest cloud-based systems.
ControlCase has partnered with leading cloud-based technology providers to make this elegant package of solutions complete and comprehensive; Skydera provides an easy-to-use management interface, while Amazon hosts the service securely and reliably.
The Compliant Cloud service is incorporated into ControlCase’s unique Compliance as a Service (CaaS) platform, the industry-changing solution that provides one convenient source for a complete and continuous suite of compliance and security services, including internal and external security testing, 24/7/365 data log monitoring and alerting, policy management, training and certification.
ControlCase’s development of the Compliant Cloud service represents the strength of the company’s broader vision to help organizations achieve compliance more quickly, more consistently. “With the proliferation of cloud usage, it is only natural that our clients worry about the security and compliance of their current or intended use of cloud-based applications,” explained CEO Kishor Vaswani. “ControlCase has made it easier for our clients to adopt these new technologies by solving the security and compliance needs of their cloud infrastructures.”
For more information about ControlCase and the Compliant Cloud service, visit www.controlcase.com or call 703.483.6383.
Fun with Neologism in the Cloud Era
Having spent the last several blog posts on more serious considerations about cloud computing and the new IT era, I decided to lighten things up a bit. The term “cloud” has bothered me from the first time I heard it uttered, as the concept and definition are as nebulous as, well a cloud. In the intervening years, when thoroughly boring my wife and friends with shop talk about the “cloud,” I came to realize that in order for cloud computing to become mainstream, “it” needs to have some way to translate to the masses.
Neologism is the process of creating new words using existing or combinations of existing words to form a more descriptive term. In our industry neologisms have been used extensively, although many of us do not realize how these terms got coined. For example, the word “blog” is a combination of web and log. “Blog” was formed over time as the lexicon was adopted. It began with a new form of communicating across the Internet, known as a web log. “Web log” become “we blog” simply by moving the space between words one to the left. Now, regardless of who you talk to, the term “blog” is pretty much a fully formed concept. Similarly, the term “Internet” is a combination of “inter” (between) and “network”, hence meaning between networks.
Today, the term “cloud” has become so overused that confusion reigns (get it?) over everyone.
Cloudable – meaning something that is conducive to leveraging cloud. As in: “My CRM application is cloudable “ or “We want to leverage data protection that includes cloudable capabilities”
Cloudiac – someone who is a huge proponent of cloud services. A combination of “Cloud” and “Maniac”, as in: “There were cloudiacs everywhere at Interop. “ In the not too distant future, we very well may see parallels to the “Trekkie” phenomena. Imagine a bunch of middle-aged IT professionals running around in costumes made of giant cotton-balls and cardboard lightning bolts.
Cloudologist – an expert in cloud solutions. Different from a Cloudiac, the Cloudologist actually has experience in developing and utilizing cloud based services. This will lead to master’s degree programs in Cloudology.
Cloutonomous – maintaining your autonomy over your systems and data in the cloud. “I may be in the Cloud but I make sure I’m cloutonomous.” Could refer to the consumer of the cloud services not being tied into long term services commitments that may inhibit their ability to move services in the event of a vendor failing to hit SLAs.
Cloud crawl – actions related to monitoring or reviewing your various cloud services. “I went cloud crawling today and everything was sweet.” Off-take of the common “pub crawl,” just not as fun and with no lingering after-effects.
Counter-cloud – a reference to the concept of “counter culture,” which dates back to hippie days of the 60s and 70s. In this application, it would describe a person or business that is against utilizing cloud services mainly because it is the new trend, or because they feel that it’s the latest government conspiracy to control the world.
Global Clouding – IT’s version of Global Warming, except in this case the world isn’t becoming uninhabitable, IT is just becoming a bit fuzzy around the edges. What will IT be like with the advent of Global Clouding?
Clackers – Cloud and Hacker. Clackers are those nefarious, shadowy figures that focus on disruption of cloud services. This “new” form of hacker will concentrate on capturing data in transit, traffic disruption/re-direction (i.e. DNS Changer anyone?), and platform incursion.
Because IT is so lexicon heavy, building up a stable of Cloud-based terminology is inevitable, and potentially beneficial in focusing the terminology further. Besides, as Cloudiacs will be fond of saying… “resistance is futile.”
Do you have any Neologisms of your own? I’d love to hear some!
Rightscale, Google, EMC/VMware Keep Things Exciting
A few months ago, I reckoned that 2012 was Year One for the cloud. My logic was that most writers, analysts, and marketers get over-excited early on by technology developments and trends, so that when said development or trend truly arrives it seems to disappoint.
I guess my thought was similar to that wretched Gartner hypecycle, except without the fine analytics and other big science involved.
Mostly, I didn’t want people to think we’re in a lull, now that the original excitement has worn off, when in fact we’re in the midst of a very exciting year for cloud computing. These past few days have shown this to be true.
First, let’s not overlook Rightscale’s latest development, a new integration with Google’s new Compute Engine. Santa Barbara’s “Cloud Blue” is running this program in beta for now, an expected tactic given that “GCE” is only a few days old. Rightscale has emerged as one of the top two (and perhaps the top) company in the field of cloud management, and is a key driver to what it calls multi-cloud development. To me, multi-cloud means real-world cloud.
Compute Engine itself was a huuuge announcement, as it appears it will provide competition of the highest order to Amazon Web Services when it comes to offsite, outsourced, third-party, please-call-it-anything-but-public cloud.
But that’s so last week. The latest news comes out of the Boston area, with news of an executive shuffle and rumored spin-offs at VMware. The shuffle puts Intel veteran Pat Gelsinger – one of the good guys of the industry – in charge of VMware, presumably charged with restoring more of an iron grip on the virtualization market (impossible) and continuing to move the company upstack (more possible). Former VMware CEO Paul Maritz moves onto the EMC mother ship as a maybe, could-be successor to CEO Joe Tucci when he retires 20 years from now.
The bigger news for cloud is the alleged spin-off of the CloudFoundry PaaS platform. The company will be an independent brand, I guess, yet still integrated into EMC.
What’s really happening here is EMC – dissatisfied with being thought of as a mere storage company, yet unwilling to sully its dominant storage brand – building a vertically integrated IT products and services company that wants to compete directly with IBM, HP, and Oracle. The company’s sitting on $6 billion in cash, not a lot when compared to HP ($8b), IBM ($12b), Oracle ($30b), and Microsoft ($52b). Tough to see how it will do so in the short term.
I’ve heard ritual talk of the consolidations to come in cloud computing, but it seems we’re far from that. Companies are being acquired here and there, but the bigger story is what’s being rolled out. Speaking of which, let’s keep our eyes on Redmond and see if any love will be given to Hyper-V and if Windows 8 will revive Microsoft as a mobile player, and by extension, as a cloud-computing leader.
Year One is shaping up to be an exciting year.
Cloud Computing: CiRBA 7.1 Now Available
Console, enabling IT organizations to optimize capacity decisions, VM placements and resource allocations for AIX-based IBM PowerVM environments. This latest version allows customers to leverage the same technology they use to optimize VMware and Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization environments to manage virtualized AIX infrastructure.
According to Andrew Hillier, CiRBA CTO and co-founder, “It becomes an analytics challenge, and the key is to strike the optimal balance of efficiency and risk given the infrastructure capabilities, the requirements of the workloads being hosted, and the policies governing the relationship between the two.”
Cloud Key Management – Addressing Data Encryption in the Public Cloud
Cloud computing is gaining more and more traction across enterprises and SMB organizations. Its many benefits and cost structure provide an attractive alternative to the traditional data center, but at the same time cloud data security, cloud encryption and cloud key management remains top concerns. Thought leaders and analysts agree that cloud data encryption is a fundamental first step. But when looking at the fine print, a more complicated situation is revealed.
We commonly identify 3 approaches to cloud key management; all have their pros and cons. The first approach is to use the encryption as provided by your cloud provider, the pros are obvious – it’s easy to deploy and manage and it transparently integrates with your cloud data layer – but the cost is high – you trust your cloud provider with what should be your best kept secret – your encryption keys. Data security expert Rich Mogul had described it well on his blog. The second approach is to trust a third party with your encryption keys. This approach eliminates some cloud flexibility advantages as encryption is no longer integrated to your cloud, and still carries the same risks as before – you trust a third party with your keys. The third approach involves implementing a key management server back in the physical data center. While this approach is indeed secure, it eliminates many cloud advantages, and forces you back to your data center, when what you wanted is to migrate to the cloud.
Best Practices in Cloud Security
Last week one news item that attracted media attention was the hacking of some nearly 450,000 passwords from Yahoo Service called ‘Yahoo Voice’. The communications on the incident state that, SQL Injection is the primary technique adopted by hackers to get the information out of databases and publish them.
As per further communications, we find the affected company taking more precautions to ensure that security is their highest priority. These events will also generally shake the Cloud Adoption at the enterprise level, where always the Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt in the minds of CIOs may increase due to these incidents.
However the following are the best practices and guidelines that should be adopted by any enterprise when adopting hybrid cloud computing and a one-off incident should not dampen their road map to hybrid computing adoption.
How to Survive in the Cloud (Infographic)
With Microsoft’s announcements at this year’s Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC), it is evident that change is coming to all enterprise software resellers. To better prepare for the inevitable transition to the cloud, here is an infographic that provides an overview of what it was like to sell an on-premise solution compared to what it will be like to sell “in the cloud”.