Verizon is calling on the expertise of one of its recent acquisitions to offer a cloud computing service to its customers.
Verizon has announced details about a new cloud computing service for business, Verizon Cloud, an IaaS offering the company claims will offer better end-user control over performance than any other cloud solution.
Currently in limited beta, Verizon Cloud features an IaaS elastic computing system, Verizon Cloud Compute, and an object storage system, Verizon Cloud Storage. But where Verizon Cloud differs, according to Verizon, is that it delivers the performance you specify, not just the performance you end up with, according to an article on InfoWorld.com.
Cloud Expo Silicon Valley: The Agnostic Cloud
In their session at the 13th International Cloud Expo®, Luke Malpass, Software Architect & Co-founder of Fasetto, and Coy Christmas, CTO & Co-Founder of Fasetto, will discuss their PDQ Offline application, which is an application that allows sharing of files, pictures, videos and any other information instantly between any device, without internet, Wi-Fi or cell data, at no cost. Next they will discuss a new concept – “Cloud Life” – and how they are going about it – bringing all aspects of your life together in a single, accessible-anywhere platform, where all your information on the cloud can access one another, opening up opportunities never thought of before.
Moving Email to the Cloud Part 2
By Chris Chesley, Solutions Architect
My last blog post was part 1 of moving your Email to the Cloud with Office 365. Here’s the next installment in the series in which I will be covering the 3 methods of authenticating your users for Office 365. This is a very important consideration and will have a large impact on your end users and their day to day activities.
The first method of authenticating your users into Office 365 is to do so directly. This has no ties to your Active Directory. The benefits here are that your users get mail, messages and SharePoint access regardless of your site’s online status. The downside is that your users may have a different password than they use to get into their desktop/laptops and this can get very messy if you have a large number of users.
The second way of authenticating your users is full Active Directory integration. I will refer to this as the “Single Sign On” method. In this method, your Active Directory is the authoritative source of authentication for your users. Users log into their desktop/laptop and can access all of the Office 365 applications without typing their password again, which is convenient. You DO need a few servers running locally to make this happen. You need an Active Directory Federation Server (ADFS) and an Azure Active Directory Sync Sever. Both of these services are needed to sync your AD and user information to Office 365. The con of this method is that you need a redundant AD setup because if it’s down your users are not going to be able to access mail or anything else in the cloud. You can do this by hosting a Domain Controller, and the other 2 systems I mentioned, in a cloud or at one of your other locations, if you have one.
The third option is what I will refer to as “Single Password.” In this setup, you install an Azure Active Directory Sync server in your environment but do not need an ADFS server. The Sync tool will hash your user’s passwords and send them to Office 365. When a user tries to access any of the Office 365 services, they are asked to type in their password. The password is then hashed and compared to the stored hash and they are let in if they match. This does require the users to type their password again, but it allows them to use their existing Active Directory password and anytime this password changes, it is synced to the cloud.
The choice of which method you use has a big impact on your users as well as how you manage them. Knowing these choices and choosing one that meets your business goals will set you on the path of successfully moving your services to the cloud.
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Why Salesforce is winning the cloud platform war
The future of any enterprise software vendor is being decided today in their developer community.
Alex William’s insightful thoughts on Salesforce Is A Platform Company. Period. underscores how rapidly Salesforce is maturing as a cloud platform. And the best measure of that progress can be seen in their developer community.
(To be clear, Salesforce and the other companies mentioned in this post are not clients and never have been. I track this area out of personal interest.)
The last four years I’ve made a point at every Salesforce Dreamforce event to spend the majority of my time in the developer area. Watching mini hacks going on in the DevZone, mini workshops, the Salesforce Platform and Developer keynotes over the last few years has been a great learning experience. An added plus: developers are often skeptical and want to see new enhancements help streamline their code, extend its functionality …
Mobility and Real-Time Capability Projection
This weekend I was clever. That is newsworthy because it doesn’t happen very often. Our son is stationed at a military base that did not receive TV coverage of the Boise State football game on Saturday night. It must have been the government shut-down. I can’t think of any other reason they wouldn’t have shown it. The solution was a three hour Google+ Hangout whereby mom and dad got to talk to our officer son while the laptop camera «inadvertently» captured and streamed the Broncos game showing on our big screen TV. It was a nice Hangout – they won! We tried Skype first, but the picture was blurry. Google+ Hangout, however, was picture perfect.
Our son is stationed a great distance away, however, using real-time communication and video we can communicate and share what is going on in our lives. This same kind of technology can be used in the context of «capability projection» for companies. Here is my definition of capability projection, «The ability of a business to apply all or some of its capabilities such as marketing, sales, distribution, etc., over great distances to respond to and take advantage of new market opportunities.»
The Exponential Cloud Growth Visualization
Cloud management vendors recognize the need for transparency and are taking the necessary steps to enhance their solutions to better support active visibility. The natural evolution of a typical management system begins with gathering data and presenting it in report tables. While traditional IT tools have had a similar evolution, the infinite cloud resources and dynamic manner of the environment take the lack of controllability issue to the extreme. This, makes visualization more crucial than in a traditional, finite data center. This week, I met my good old `cloud friends` from Dome9 that released their new cloud security visualization solution, Cloud Clarity.
Cloud Expo Silicon Valley: Platform as a Service & the Software Revolution
The software industry is in the midst of a revolution, driven by incredible advances in Big Data, analytics, mobile devices, developer tools, and infrastructure. Platform as a Service is at the center of this revolution, providing a comprehensive foundation that spans all clouds, private, hybrid or public, and gives developers a unified perspective that is consistent whether deploying apps to a laptop or across data centers.
In his session at the 13th International Cloud Expo®, John Wetherill, Developer Evangelist at ActiveState, will dive into PaaS, showing how it enables rapid delivery of modern enterprise applications, with emphasis on how it simplifies Big Data access, instant elastic scaling, service provisioning, log aggregation, and remote monitoring, while dramatically increasing productivity and decreasing time-to-market. Platform as a Service is expected to be as influential on the software industry as Linux was two decades ago. After attending this session you’ll know why.
Cloud ERP for Manufacturers: Two Sides of the Coin
Cloud computing has been an important trend for several years now and that trend is continuing to gather weight with new and improved ERP software offerings for manufacturers. Like any ERP selection choice, the decision to move to the cloud has pros and cons compared to traditional on-premise ERP systems.
One of the biggest advantages, regardless of the vendor selected, is low cost of ownership. There is little up-front cost for cloud ERP software and often no additional hardware cost. One low subscription gets the software now and includes all aspects of ERP support. You don’t need a help desk and you don’t need people to maintain the servers required for an in-house ERP.
Verizon Named “Gold Sponsor” of Cloud Expo Silicon Valley
SYS-CON Events announced today that Verizon has been named “Gold Sponsor” of SYS-CON’s 13th International Cloud Expo, which will take place on November 4–7, 2013, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
Verizon Enterprise Solutions creates global connections that generate growth, drive business innovation and move society forward. With industry-specific solutions and a full range of global wholesale offerings provided over the company’s secure mobility, cloud, strategic networking and advanced communications platforms, Verizon Enterprise Solutions helps open new opportunities around the world for innovation, investment and business transformation.
Cloud Expo: Cloud Acceleration Techniques for Mission-Critical Apps
The journey to the cloud has created demanding new challenges for IT departments who are tasked to support global users accessing applications from a multitude of devices. As the pace of application development and deployment increases, organizations need ways to provide global scale and optimal performance without sacrificing security.
In his session at the 13th International Cloud Expo®, Tim Bishop, Strategic Engagement Manager at Akamai Technologies, will provide technical details for how dynamic content can be accelerated with a globally distributed platform and how applications can be instantly supported with minimal effort.