Category Archives: Cloud & IT Management

Le Nouvel Observateur Digital Uses Openmix Hybrid CDN Strategy for News Cycle Load Balancing

Sudden traffic load bursts following the news is business as usual for an online news provider. When the news is hot, interruptions and heavy slow-downs are common things on various websites; which can mean loss of audience and consequently loss of revenues, forcing technical teams to constantly anticipate any possible incident.

The third most read news & politics media in France, as per a September 2012 Nielsen study, with almost 8 million unique visitors every month, Le Nouvel Observateur recently chose the Cedexis “Openmix” load balancing solution to roll out and manage its own hybrid CDN — a mix of their infrastructure at origin and their own cache servers spread among various webhosting providers with third parties CDNs.

Rolled out during the second quarter of 2012, Le Nouvel Observateur’s hybrid CDN strategy now includes two content origins, backed by Varnish cache servers, located at two French hosting providers whose performance had been previously measured with Cedexis Radar as being optimum for serving their French audience. A global CDN is also used, mostly to deliver content to their international audience.

Details can be found in a case study published by Cedexis.

Quest Software Adds Monitoring for Windows Azure Apps

Quest Software, Inc., now part of Dell today announced the general availability of Foglight for Windows Azure Applications, as well as beta availability of Foglight for Cloud Cost Management. Both are available immediately via the new Foglight On-Demand platform. This enhanced product offering, together with a new, currently free, cost management tool, enables developers to easily optimize the performance of applications built on the Windows Azure platform.

“The enhanced functionality in Foglight for Windows Azure Applications and the accompanying new and free tools open the door for Quest to provide valuable services at a nominal price to small- and mid-sized organizations that are leveraging Azure today. For large enterprises, these new solutions provide the assurance that when they are ready to leverage cloud platforms, or look to use SaaS-based application performance monitoring (APM), Quest will be there to support them.”


AppNeta Offers Cloud-delivered Insight To Path, Packet, Flow and Device

AppNeta today announced the addition of device monitoring to its suite of Network Performance Management (NPM) capabilities. This addition augments the end-to-end service visibility of AppNeta’s PathView Cloud service, which now brings network engineers and IT leaders the only solution in the market that integrates diagnostic monitoring and troubleshooting across all four elements of the network performance stack: path, packet, flow and device.

Traditional network performance management and Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) solutions have historically shown just the status of network devices and the volume of data transmitted up to the edge of the network that is owned, which only provides limited visibility. The cloud-delivered PathView Cloud service offers an unprecedented 360º view into known, owned networks and beyond to the WAN, Internet, cloud services and third-party networks. As the only network performance management service to provide complete insight from every element of the network performance stack – path, packet, flow and device – PathView Cloud ensures the experience of application end users by providing visibility and analysis of network performance and application traffic.

“We are excited to offer a new approach to network performance management designed to monitor and evaluate today’s modern networks from one, integrated solution that looks across network paths, packet captures, flow data and device status,” said Jim Melvin, CEO, AppNeta. “We are taking network performance management to a new level where it can actually be easy, affordable, and provide visibility we know that you cannot get from traditional SNMP solutions today.”

With today’s launch of PathView Cloud with on-demand SNMP, the solution now offers extremely lightweight and intelligent device monitoring capabilities, continuously monitoring the performance across the network, and when an issue is detected, gathering the relevant data across network paths, packet captures, flow data and device status, so the problem can be located and resolved as quickly and efficiently as possible.

“I am very excited at the addition of device monitoring to AppNeta’s suite of network monitoring solutions,” said Michael Paynter, CEO, Tier3 Technologies. “We’re always looking for cost-effective and unique solutions to meet our managed service needs for clients, and until now, I’ve been unable to find a solution that offers total visibility into all four elements of the performance stack. This service provides just what I have been looking for to help me meet client needs and our MSP offering objectives. I anticipate that the industry-first, on-demand SNMP capability will completely change our network monitoring approach.”

All existing PathView Cloud customers automatically receive the new on-demand SNMP monitoring capabilities. For more information or a free trial, visit www.appneta.com.


ServiceNow Takes Software Asset Management to the Cloud

ServiceNow today announced a new release of its IT service automation software. By embedding new IT Asset Management application, ServiceNow enables companies to more efficiently utilize software and help achieve compliance with license terms and requirements. At the same time, companies can avoid over-purchasing of software licenses and maintenance or support contracts. The release also includes new capabilities for agile software development that ultimately lead to an improved user experience.

Enterprises today waste a great deal of money and time through improperly managed software resources. ServiceNow software can help businesses rightsize and monitor a software portfolio through a fully integrated cloud-based service for all types of IT assets, while helping achieve audit-ready license compliance automation and reporting.

“Managing software assets is increasingly complex in the age of virtualization and cloud, and enterprises are wasting millions of dollars annually due to a fundamental lack of visibility and poor management,” said Matt Schvimmer, vice president of product management, ServiceNow. “In this new software release, ServiceNow provides a comprehensive view of all assets – physical, virtual, and cloud-based – and the processes to control the full lifecycle management of those assets.”

The ServiceNow IT Asset Management application helps IT organizations significantly reduce operational costs, identify software portfolio requirements, facilitate planning and simplify compliance efforts. It works across all types of assets, including SaaS applications and subscription services, licensing of virtual resources and the use of consumable assets.

The ServiceNow IT Asset Management application is fully integrated with all of the other ServiceNow applications for automating enterprise IT operations, including asset discovery, service catalog and configuration management database (CMDB), providing a single system of record for IT management.

The new release also adds a new Scrum process pack to the ServiceNow Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC) application. Scrum is a popular development methodology for managing agile software development projects in multi-team, multi-product environments. The new capabilities include planning boards, progress boards, burn-down charts, preferential ranking and the assignment of standard roles associated with this methodology, like product owner and scrum master.

Click here for a detailed webinar on software asset management.


Cloud Data Centers in Rural Locations — Gobbling Electricity, Throwing Their Weight Around

Very interesting in-depth article in the New York Times today on the sprawling, electricity-hungry data centers spawned by cloud computing.

Internet-based industries have honed a reputation for sleek, clean convenience based on the magic they deliver to screens everywhere. At the heart of every Internet enterprise are data centers, which have become more sprawling and ubiquitous as the amount of stored information explodes, sprouting in community after community.

the gee-whiz factor of such a prominent high-tech neighbor wore off quickly. First, a citizens group initiated a legal challenge over pollution from some of nearly 40 giant diesel generators that Microsoft’s facility — near an elementary school — is allowed to use for backup power.

Then came a showdown late last year between the utility and Microsoft, whose hardball tactics shocked some local officials.

These data centers are apparently not always good neighbors, and of course as they are there to serve our cloud needs we’re all complicity to some degree.


Infinitely Virtual Offers Onboarding Service Designed to Get SMBs Up and Running Quickly

Recognizing that some organizations find migrating to the cloud intimidating, Infinitely Virtual, a provider of virtual server cloud computing services for businesses, today announced an innovative Onboarding Service, aimed at eliminating the fear factor from the migration process.

The service, which consists of a free, one-hour tutorial on hosting in the cloud, enables new customers to ask virtually any question of a live company representative and get the relationship off on a sound, secure footing.

“Self-service can be an ideal business model, even in the IT world, but self-serve doesn’t need to be completely hands off,” said Adam Stern, founder and CEO, Infinitely Virtual. “Our goal is to eliminate the fear factor, especially as small and midsize businesses migrate to the cloud, by offering a distinctly high-touch orientation session. As cloud computing grows, it naturally attracts organizations that may not have full-blown technology departments, but it’s especially important that the experience for this population of users is positive and productive from the get-go. With our Onboarding Service, companies can now go from purchase to production in just hours.”

According to Stern, services like Infinitely Virtual’s new user orientation are essential if cloud computing is to achieve true critical mass.

“Building a Virtual Dedicated Server hosting environment requires collaboration among professionals from every discipline,” he said. “What matters is the quality of the total package – the hardware and the software, of course, but also the support and the intangibles that, in the end, define the solution. In the cloud, as on the ground, it’s always buyer beware. Businesses need to know that virtualization/cloud hosting isn’t a commodity business, and that some vendors do emulate the so-called big players both in the quality of the environments they build and the kind of support they provide. It’s entirely possible to provide high function at modest cost, but doing so requires expertise, experience and a genuine understanding of what businesses need.


Cloud Migrator Transfers Files between Amazon S3, Azure, Rackspace

CloudBerry Lab today announced the beta version of its new CloudBerry Cloud Migrator service that allows users to transfer files from one cloud storage to another. The service supports data migration between Amazon S3, Windows Azure Blob Storage, Rackspace Cloud Files and FTP servers.

Cloud Migrator service by CloudBerry Lab is a web application that lets users transfer their files across different cloud storage services without installing any additional software. All copy operations executes inside a cloud and managed through the web interface.

The service allows users to copy files between different locations or accounts within one cloud storage provider as well as between different. It’s a perfect solution to painlessly migrate data from one Amazon S3 bucket to another or from Amazon S3 to Azure Blob Storage or Rackspace Cloud Files and vice versa.

Finally, Cloud Migrator supports FTP so it can also be used to easily copy/move files from an FTP server to any of the supported cloud storage accounts with no need to implement complicated scripts.

In the Cloud Migrator future releases, the new low-cost Glacier storage by Amazon AWS will be added to the list of supported cloud storage accounts.

CloudBerry Cloud Migrator is available at http://sync.cloudberrylab.com/


Four Things You Need to Know About PCI Compliance in the Cloud

By Andrew Hay, Chief Evangelist, CloudPassage

Andrew HayAndrew Hay is the Chief Evangelist at CloudPassage, Inc. where he is lead advocate for its SaaS server security product portfolio. Prior to joining CloudPassage, Andrew was a a Senior Security Analyst for 451 Research, where he provided technology vendors, private equity firms, venture capitalists and end users with strategic advisory services.

Anyone who’s done it will tell you that implementing controls that will pass a PCI audit is challenging enough in a traditional data center where everything is under your complete control. Cloud-based application and server hosting makes this even more complex. Cloud teams often hit a wall when it’s time to select and deploy PCI security controls for cloud server environments. Quite simply, the approaches we’ve come to rely on just don’t work in highly dynamic, less-controlled cloud environments. Things were much easier when all computing resources were behind the firewall with layers of network-deployed security controls between critical internal resources and the bad guys on the outside.

Addressing the challenges of PCI DSS in cloud environments isn’t an insurmountable challenge. Luckily, there are ways to address some of these key challenges when operating a PCI-DSS in-scope server in a cloud environment. The first step towards embracing cloud computing, however, is admitting (or in some cases learning) that your existing tools might be not capable of getting the job done.

Traditional security strategies were created at a time when cloud infrastructures did not exist and the use of public, multi-tenant infrastructure was data communications via the Internet. Multi-tenant (and even some single-tenant) cloud hosting environments introduce many nuances, such as dynamic IP addressing of servers, cloud bursting, rapid deployment and equally rapid server decommissioning, that the vast majority of security tools cannot handle.

First Takeaway: The tools that you have relied upon for addressing PCI related concerns might not be built to handle the nuances of cloud environments.

The technical nature of cloud-hosting environments makes them more difficult to secure. A technique sometimes called “cloud-bursting” can be used to increase available compute power extremely rapidly by cloning virtual servers, typically within seconds to minutes. That’s certainly not enough time for manual security configuration or review.

Second Takeaway: Ensure that your chosen tools can be built into your cloud instance images to ensure security is part of the provisioning process.

While highly beneficial, high-speed scalability also means high-speed growth of vulnerabilities and attackable surface area. Using poorly secured images for cloud-bursting or failing to automate security in the stack means a growing threat of server compromise and nasty compliance problems during audits.

Third Takeaway: Vulnerabilities should be addressed prior to bursting or cloning your cloud servers and changes should be closely monitored to limit the expansion of your attackable surface area.

Traditional firewall technologies present another challenge in cloud environments. Network address assignment is far more dynamic in clouds, especially in public clouds. There is rarely a guarantee that your server will spin up with the same IP address every time. Current host-based firewalls can usually handle changes of this nature but what about firewall policies defined with specific source and destination IP addresses? How will you accurately keep track of cloud server assets or administer network access controls when IP addresses can change to an arbitrary address within a massive IP address space?

Fourth Takeaway: Ensure that your chosen tools can handle the dynamic nature of cloud environments without disrupting operations or administrative access.

The auditing and assessment of deployed servers is an addressable challenge presented by cloud architectures. Deploying tools purpose-built for dynamic public, private and hybrid cloud environments will also ensure that your security scales alongside your cloud server deployments. Also, if you think of cloud servers as semi-static entities deployed on a dynamic architecture, you will be better prepared to help educate internal stakeholders, partners and assessors on the aforementioned cloud nuances – and how your organization has implemented safeguards to ensure adherence to PCI-DSS.

 


Log Insight Acquired by VMware

Image representing Pattern Insight as depicted...Pattern Insight today announced that it has come to an agreement with VMware Inc. to sell its Log Insight product, together with its team and technology.

Log Insight is an analytics and log management platform that has the ability to analyze large amounts of machine-generated data in real time. It is used for operational analytics in traditional data center and cloud environments. It has the ability to discover emerging patterns and guide administrators to the root cause of problems.

For more details, read this post by the founder of Pattern insight.

For one analysis of VMWare’s deeper move into cloud management, read this TechCrunch take on the acquisition.