Steve Hodgkinson, Research Director, Public Sector Technology
The New South Wales state government in Australia is taking visionary but practical steps towards cloud services adoption via a program of pilot projects. The projects recognize the need to treat cloud services as an emerging trend to be investigated and evaluated hands-on. It is a practical organizational learning exercise, not an ideological quest or a whole-of-government “grand plan”.
Cloud services adoption is best driven at an agency-by-agency level with a focus on the promotion of early adoption, the realisation of business benefits, and the rapid propagation of lessons learned and successful solutions across agencies as confidence is gained.
Governments need to get hands-on with cloud services
Government adoption of cloud services is nascent but growing. Cloud services require a change in mindset about how to approach the sourcing and management of ICT capabilities and how to apply them to drive business transformation …
“We are continuously expanding and we recently announced a new data center in Copenhagen, and our eighth data center in Frankfurt, so we now have 34 data centers,” stated Jelle Frank van der Zwet, Global Marketing Manager for Interxion, in this SYS-CON.tv interview with Cloud Expo Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan at the 12th International Cloud Expo, held June 10–13, 2013, at the Javits Center in New York City.
Cloud Expo 2013 Silicon Valley, November 4–7, 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.
In the world of information security, small businesses and the security needs of small businesses are often overlooked, particularly in the realm of application security. When looking at the investment required to build a robust application security program, it really doesn’t make sense financially. For example, an “enterprise” scanning tool, combined with the required hosting infrastructure, salary for a security specialist, and for the sake of argument, tack on static analysis, the total cost will easily exceed $120,000/year, which is decidedly cost prohibitive for a lot of smaller companies. This presents a significant problem due to the fact that as an attacker, well, hacking the little guys is easy. Simply put, when it comes to handling attacks and incidents, small companies are at a significant disadvantage as they frequently lack a dedicated security team, let alone one security specialist. So what’s the best way to maintain a secure infrastructure without breaking the bank?
Technology sure does make strange bedfellows.
The federal government’s newest cloud service provider is one that may elicit surprise. It’s the same agency that oversees farm policy and food safety – the US Department of Agriculture.
The USDA has been certified to provide Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Platforms as a Service (PaaS) under the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program, a rigorous security-approval program overseen by the General Services Administration. The USDA now offers FedRAMP-certified cloud services to other federal agencies, as well as to state and local government, via its National Information Technology Center.
It’s the latest example of an emerging cloud model, called shared clouds, in which one government agency gets the most from its data center resources by making them available to other agencies, according to an article on Forbes.com. The USDA offers virtualized desktops and servers, storage, networking, databases, and content management as cloud services.
Ping Identity, the 11-year-old Denver company that provides secure cloud-ified single sign-on to half of the Fortune 100 and reportedly has its eye on going public next year, has raised a $44 million F round led by private equity house W Capital Partners, brought in to help with the IPO through its new board seat, and DFJ Growth, a Draper Fisher Jurvetson fund.
The money, which is more than Ping’s estimated $43 million in sales last year, is also coming from existing backers General Catalyst Partners, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Avista Partners, Triangle Peak Partners, SAP Ventures and Appian Ventures. Besides the $29 million in equity financing there’s $15 million in debt financing complements of Silicon Valley Bank.
Tableau Software Thursday made its first product announcement since going public in May, wheeling out new cloud-based business intelligence widgetry called Tableau Online, a hosted version of its conventionally distributed Tableau Server.
The company, which trades under the coveted ticker symbol DATA, thinks its new Software-as-a-Service is highly disruptive both technologically and economically since it “drastically” changes both the price point and the delivery scheme usually associated with the kind of complex and sophisticated software it’s peddling. Of course, there’s an increasing number of comers in this space too.
As we begin to study security, healthcare, and the cloud, we’re finding that cloud-based data storage systems are perhaps more secure than traditional on-premise systems. Most in the healthcare space have yet to accept this situation, and perhaps won’t accept it until more deployments occur.
The data is beginning to appear. According to Alert Logic’s Fall 2012 State of the Cloud Security Report, the variations in the threat activity are not as important as where the infrastructure is located. The report finds that anything that can be possibly accessed from outside, whether enterprise or cloud, has equal chances of being attacked because attacks are opportunistic in nature.
Here’s the recap of Day 2 that I filmed down in Orlando at Cisco Live. If you missed it, here is my video from Day 1. I got a ton of great information out of the breakout sessions on Day 2…let me know if there are any questions, and I’d be more than happy to provide additional details.
Andrew Kellett, Principal Analyst, Software – IT Solutions
In a recent report on the impact of cloud computing and identity-as-a-service (IaaS) on the identity and access management (IAM) sector (Cloud: Transforming the IAM Industry,July 2013), Ovum highlights the issues that traditional IAM vendors are being forced to address. The report demonstrates why the cloud will be a game changer for IAM over the next two years.
The report also shows that traditional platform vendors are coming under pressure from a new generation of cloud-based specialists that are changing the way that IAM services are and will be consumed in the future. They are also being pressured to extend their own offerings into the cloud to stay competitive. The report helps organizations to understand the changing dynamics of the IAM market and addresses the challenges of selecting an IAM solution that can deal with current and future identity management requirements.
“SharePoint in the cloud – that is what we do in a nutshell. SharePoint is a complex platform and we try and simplify that by saying we’ll take care of it, we’ll put it out there in the cloud and we’ll manage it for you,”explainde Rob LaMear, CEO & Founder of Fpweb.net, in this SYS-CON.tv interview with Cloud Expo Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan at the 12th International Cloud Expo, held June 10–13, 2013, at the Javits Center in New York City.
Cloud Expo 2013 Silicon Valley, November 4–7, 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.