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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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?

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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.

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Big Data is a big catch phrase. Suddenly the world is focused on the massive amounts of data being created by social networks – interesting stuff. But the Internet of Things (IoT) will create at least an order of magnitude more data than social networks currently do. What will we do with this data? Maybe we’ll use it to help arrest the energy crisis. The IoT is first taking off in the Electric Grid and in appliances, thermostats, electric car chargers and solar panels that connect to it.
In his session at the 11th International Cloud Expo, Kent Dickson, CTO at Tendril, will discuss how these devices and the Big Data they produce can massively reduce the amount of energy required to keep us happy and comfortable for years to come.

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I recently participated in a panel discussion, titled: “Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) endgame – commoditizing the data center” at the GigaOM Structure 2012 Conference. While software is definitely defining the use of IaaS through Platform as a Service (PaaS), the underlying need for IaaS does not go away. In my opinion, the current pace of infrastructure and data center build out cannot be maintained, leading to a future need of resource sharing in this space.
Resource sharing includes everything that contributes to a data center, especially the physical infrastructure. Several Software as a Service (SaaS) providers, especially in the collaboration space, innovatively optimize their infrastructure to serve their specialized purpose. Facebook, for example, has open sourced their hardware design through Open Compute. Skype, as you know, routes calls and video through their users’ bandwidth, reducing the need for back-end infrastructure.

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We have to face facts: cloud uptake is on the rise.

Indeed, deployments are set to double by 2015, and up to 200,000 UK jobs will be created by cloud computing technologies between 2011 and 2015.

CIOs therefore have to accept that cloud is here, and here to stay. So what considerations must a CIO make when moving to the cloud, even if he is entirely unwilling to do so?!

Below, I have outlined some tips for any CIO who is either looking to move to the cloud, or indeed, is being pushed into making the move by his CFO or CEO…

Do I understand what cloud is and what it can do for my business?

As cloud computing adoption grows, so does the hype surrounding it. Everyone’s talking about the benefits that can be achieved by moving to the cloud, but does the CIO truly understand what …