As web applications and cloud services continue to proliferate, identity theft, cyber fraud, cyber bullying, and simple misuse of confidential information online expand to chronic levels. Yet cloud providers are expected to ensure high security while maintaining a convenient user experience. MasterCard and Visa spend over $1 billion each year to fight identity theft and web companies are increasingly the subject of class action lawsuits due to online security breaches. Still, hundreds of cloud applications and portals are being hacked monthly leaving millions of passwords and confidential records in the hands of cyber fraudsters.
Recently, many cloud users have started to realize that security in the cloud is, indeed, a serious issue. This trend led ASPs, cloud providers, and enterprises to actively search for more convenient methods of securing the identity of their cloud users with strong authentication. While there are a number of such solutions in the market today, not all “strong” authentication methods are strong enough to stop hackers.
Red Hat Releases OpenShift Enterprise 2
Red Hat, Inc., on Tuesday announced the general availability of OpenShift Enterprise 2, the latest version of its on-premise private Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offering. With OpenShift Enterprise 2, customers can increase the velocity, efficiency and scalability of their IT service delivery, drive faster development of new applications and business services and reduce time-to-market. With new features – including datacenter infrastructure integration, an advanced administration console, support for even more programming languages, and new collaboration capabilities – and expanded global availability, a wider range of developers can achieve the benefits of private PaaS technology for their cloud deployments.
OpenNebula 4.4 Retina Bringing Simplicity to Enterprise Cloud Computing
The OpenNebula Project has just announced the nineteenth stable release of its widely deployed OpenNebula cloud management platform, a fully open-source solution for data center management and enterprise cloud computing. With a sysadmin-centric approach, OpenNebula is the open operating system of choice in the converged data centre, combining a powerful virtualization manager that supports traditional IT features such as fault tolerance and failover, with the dynamic provisioning, elasticity and multi-tenancy of the enterprise cloud.
OpenNebula 4.4 Retina includes support for multiple system datastores, which enables the definition of scheduling policies for storage load balancing. The monitoring subsystem has switched from a pulling mechanism to a massively scalable pushing model, being now able to monitor hundreds of thousands of VMs in a few minutes. An important effort has been also made in enhancing the support for cloud bursting to Amazon, enabling a transparent offload of computing power whenever the local infrastructure cannot cope with the demand. Moreover, the Amazon EC2 and EBS interfaces implemented by OpenNebula have been revisited and extended to support new functionality.
SOA Software API Management Solution Attains PCI DSS 2.0 Compliance
«Validation of our PCI DSS compliance ensures that our API Management customers can leverage our enterprise-class cloud platform to ensure the security and availability of their applications and data, as well as help meet their own requirements for PCI compliance in their API Programs», said Alistair Farquharson, CTO of SOA Software. «The successful completion of these audits is part of our continued commitment to maintaining a well-governed, high-quality IT service environment.»
SOA Software on Monday announced that its API Management solution and cloud offering have been validated for compliance with version 2.0 of the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS). SOA Software recently underwent a series of rigorous audits by an independent Quality Security Assessor (QSA) to ensure that it met best practices and security controls needed to keep sensitive data secure during transit, processing and storage. This makes SOA Software one of the few API Management solutions able to offer a full end-to-end PCI DSS service based on pre-certified components.
Cloud Marketplaces: SaaS or Pseudo-SaaS?
There is a lot of confusion and hype about the cloud and SaaS (Software as a Service), and at Corent we experience it on a regular basis. One of the things I’ve been seeing and hearing about is the concept of a marketplace of cloud applications. I’ve observed that applications sold this way are often described as SaaS even though the key criteria of SaaS aren’t being provided to either the application vendor, or the application customer.
While it’s true that the cloud is a SaaS product, often the business applications provided on the cloud marketplaces are not.
Load Aware Fabrics
One of the «rules» of application delivery (and infrastructure in general) has been that when scaling out such technologies, all components must be equal. That started with basic redundancy (deploying two of everything to avoid a single point of failure in the data path) and has remained true until recently.
Today, fabrics can be comprised of heterogeneous components. Beefy, physical hardware can be easily paired with virtualized or cloud-hosted components. This is good news for organizations seeking the means to periodically scale out infrastructure without oversubscribing the rest of the year, leaving resources idle.
Except when it’s not so good, when something goes wrong and there’s suddenly not enough capacity to handle the load because of the disparity in component capacity.
Load Aware Fabrics
One of the «rules» of application delivery (and infrastructure in general) has been that when scaling out such technologies, all components must be equal. That started with basic redundancy (deploying two of everything to avoid a single point of failure in the data path) and has remained true until recently.
Today, fabrics can be comprised of heterogeneous components. Beefy, physical hardware can be easily paired with virtualized or cloud-hosted components. This is good news for organizations seeking the means to periodically scale out infrastructure without oversubscribing the rest of the year, leaving resources idle.
Except when it’s not so good, when something goes wrong and there’s suddenly not enough capacity to handle the load because of the disparity in component capacity.
Cloud Storage Adoption Gaining Among Businesses
Cloud computing is helping businesses combat a growing problem: Too much information and not enough storage capacity.
With businesses increasingly facing the prospect of running out of storage capacity, adoption of cloud storage technologies continues to grow, according to a report from cloud-integrated storage solutions specialist TwinStrata.
The survey found that 37 percent of respondents have been using cloud computing for three or more years, more than a one-third increase over last year’s 27 percent number. When compared with last year’s survey, overall adoption of cloud services has steadily increased across all categories, with use of Software as a Service (SaaS) reaching as high as 62 percent and both cloud storage and infrastructure as a service (IaaS) edging closer to 50 percent adoption rates. Platform as a Service (PaaS) experienced the greatest increase in adoption as more organizations become increasingly comfortable with the cloud, the report indicated.
My 2013 Holiday Gift List for the Solutions Architects
By Chris Reily, Director of Solutions Architecture
Well, with the holidays upon us, I find myself in the position of having to figure out what to buy for the solutions architects this year to thank them for another great year in 2013. If you think buying gifts for Aunt Emily, Cousin Jimmy or dear old Dad is hard – try picking out gifts for one of the most exacting, technical, opinionated and outstanding group of guys you’ll ever get to know. I missed black Friday and Cyber Monday so here goes nothing…
Nick P – Practice Manager, Networking
A 48oz. bottle of Bluebeard’s Beard Wash AND some SDN (software defined networking) with Cisco Open Network Environment Platform Kit (onePK) so he can finally have comprehensive Cisco network intelligence.
Randy B – Enterprise Architect
A relaxing massage chair AND a smart phone that is truly smart, does email, contacts and a calendaring that works as well as a vintage BlackBerry. It need to hold a decent charge to last a full work day AND reminds Randy of important appointments not to be missed. Or maybe he just needs a copy of VMware View!
Harris H – Solutions Architect, Data Center
An industrial size vacuum sealer for packing homemade jerky AND a quality Cloud as a Service offering to distribute to all those in need of new technology. And it would be just wrong not to provide a great way to manage it all with CMaaS!
Randy W – Practice Manager, Data Management
A case (okay, maybe just a bottle) of 1989 Chateau Petrus Bordeaux AND some super-fast hybrid flash storage like Nimble’s C250G (oh how Randy loves 10 gig networking).
Mark H – Solutions Architect, Data Management
A St. Croix Legend Bass fishing rod AND an EMC VNX5400 array. Plenty of fast disc to store and access plenty of hi-resolution photos of all the fish he can catch.
Francis C – End User Computing, Practice Manager
A Max Brooks signed copy of The Zombie Survival Guide AND a high quality technical manual for Citrix Xen Desktop 7!
John D – XaaS Consulting Architect
Cross country saddle bags for a BMW R-1200GS motor bike AND a ticket to London to meet Sharon Taylor,ITIL Chief Examiner, for lunch.
Chris C – Solutions Architect, Data Center
A Gillette Mach-3 Razor AND a converged data center (virtual computing platform) courtesy of Nutanix. Chris is keeping it simple in 2014 by combining storage, compute and networking in a single platform.
Joel G – Solutions Architect, Microsoft Solutions
An Air Force Academy sweatshirt AND an Azure environment managed by System Center 2012 R2. Who doesn’t want infrastructure provisioning, infrastructure monitoring, application performance monitoring, automation and self-service in the New Year?
Ralph K – Practice Manager, Unified Communications
A Harley Davidson leather jacket AND a Cisco Jabber Client. So when Ralph is ready to hit the open road, he can unchain himself from the office but stay in touch by video and voice.
Chris W – Our CTO
Front row tickets to see Metallica in Germany next summer AND a guest appearance on TLC’s NY Ink, on which a talented artist Megan Massacre will create and complete an original tattoo design incorporating the logos of VMware, Cisco and EMC on Chris chest. He’s one dedicated dude.
As an IT professional, what’s on your holiday wish list this year? My gift to you? Here’s a free ebook on how organizations can take advantage of behavior emerging in the market for IT services.
Akamai to Acquire Prolexic
Akamai Technologies, Inc. and Prolexic Technologies, Inc. announced on Monday that the two companies have signed a definitive agreement for Akamai to acquire Prolexic, a provider of cloud-based security solutions for protecting data centers and enterprise IP applications from distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks.
Faced with an ever-changing threat landscape, organizations require comprehensive security solutions that address many different protection scenarios. These include securing mission-critical Web properties and applications from attack, as well as protecting the full suite of enterprise IP applications – including email, file transfers, and VPN – across a data center.