Looking beyond HIPAA, SOX or PCI-DSS compliance claims
The scary part about shopping for a cloud solution is that even if the managed services provider claims compliance, this doesn’t mean that they actually are compliant.
In fact, the provider may not even realise they are being misleading. Because regulatory compliance is too often left open to interpretation, your definition of HIPAA, SOX or PCI-DSS compliance might be different than your cloud provider’s.
This gap becomes even more critical as today’s information technology environments are being asked to house an expanding library of personal, private and sensitive data.
Whether you are aware of it or not, new regulations and industry standards are seemingly being created every day, meaning that your cloud provider may play a critical role in your regulatory auditing process.
The trick then becomes finding a provider who does more than offer the mere promise of …
If zettabytes of data exist, why is less than 1% of the world’s data being analyzed today? Seasoned entrepreneur and startup CEO Radhika Subramanian believes that the inability to analyze and gain value from Big Data is that organizations are taking a services-centered approach. As the title of the session implies, Subramanian believes that the data needs to do the talking, not armies of analysts searching and querying databases. Her company has developed high-speed, advanced algorithms to automate pattern detection for rapid, real-time discovery of the “unknown unknows” in structured and unstructured data. Subramanian teams up with internationally renowned High-Performance Computing luminary Dr. David Bader to tackle Big Data’s biggest challenges. Together they ask, ‘What if you didn’t have to analyze data at all?’
By Andi Mann, Vice President, Strategic Solutions at CA
Cloud computing, mobility, and the Internet of Things are leading us towards a more technology-driven world. In my last blog, I wrote about how the Internet of Things will change our everyday lives, but with these new technologies comes new risks to the organization.
To understand how recent trends are shifting security, let’s revisit the golden age of hacking movies from the ‘80s and ‘90s. A recent post by Alexis Madrigal of The Atlantic sums up this era of Hollywood hackers by saying that “the mainframe was unhackable unless [the hackers] were in the room, in which case, it was simple.”
That’s not far off from how IT security was structured in those years. Enterprises secured data by keeping everything inside a corporate firewall and only granting accessed to employees within the perimeter. Typically, the perimeter extended as far …
We have been blogging about the same problems and problem patterns we see while working with our customers over the past few of years. There have always been the classic application performance landmines in the areas of inefficient database access, misconfigured frameworks, excessive memory usage, bloated web pages and not following common web performance best practices among others.
More than two years ago we posted summary blogs of the Top Server-Side Performance Problems and the Top 10 Client-Side Performance Problems to give operations, architects, testers and developers easy-to-consume best practices. We feel that it is time to provide an update to these best practices as new problem patterns have since come into play. We also want to cover more than just problems that happen within your application by broadening the scope across the entire Application Delivery Chain. This includes all components between your end user and your back-end systems, databases and third-party services. The following illustrates which components are involved and what the typical errors are along the delivery chain.
ParElastic Corporation has raised $5.7M in a Series A round financing led by General Catalyst Partners. The company’s existing investors including Point Judith Capital, CommonAngels and LaunchCapital also participated in the round. The Series A brings ParElastic’s total financing to $8.7M. The ParElastic Database Virtualization Engine “dramatically increases the flexibility of your current relational database, improving performance and reliability while reducing storage and processing costs.”
Read more, watch a video, download a white paper here.
Space Monkey, the Google-backed P2P start-up that intends to compete against Box and Dropbox not to mention the likes of Google Drive and SkyDrive, seems to be slowly pumping up publicity for its widget so maybe it’s getting close to its promised public beta if it can get the Kickstarter money to bring the thing to market.
Space Monkey aims to put a cloud in every house and says it’s “building a storage network the likes of which have never been seen.”
It involves a local storage device and a $10-a-month subscription for a terabyte of online storage, which is 10 times the storage you’d get from Dropbox for the same money.
AMAG Pharmaceuticals’ five-person IT team should bottle its secret sauce for a scalable enterprise cloud model. The public company eliminated its data center in 2008 and has since encouraged employees to adopt cloud applications as they see fit and ramped up security to make this possible – resulting in a reduction of over 60% in IT costs and much more productive (and happy) staffers.
In his session at the 12th International Cloud Expo, Nathan McBride, Vice President of IT and Chief Cloud Architect at AMAG Pharmaceuticals, will explain how enterprises can not only move to the cloud, but create a more productive workforce, sharing the security and infrastructure strategies necessary to do so successfully.
Private cloud may be the right choice for you, though it is not without its potential pitfalls.
There are many reasons to trust the private cloud – from reliability, to security and compliance, to predictability, private cloud can often be the best choice for a business.
But just because it’s private doesn’t mean it’s not susceptible to its own range of pitfalls. While the shortcomings of public cloud have been widely discussed, it’s important to note that private clouds, too, are associated with a range of potential pitfalls you ought to be aware of.
A recent survey has shown that security policies and rules set down by IT departments are not just being ignored but having a bus driven through them by staff and senior executives, who wish to bring their own device to work so that they can do more, work smarter and be in touch all of the time.
The survey shows that almost three-quarters of respondents would not bet against their own organization having a data breach within the next 12 months.
This along with other responses shows that the IT Department of 2013 is a long way from the IT Department of just five years ago, where what they said may not have been liked but was generally adhered to and, if it was not, sanctions could come into effect.
