Action for Children, one of Britain’s foremost charities has used a cloud hosting provider to create a hybrid cloud with which to support its website as well as applications, especially during peak surges in visitor numbers.
Action for Children’s Data Scientist, Darren Robertson explained how their data cloud arrangement worked.
Less sensitive data is kept with the cloud provider, whilst sensitive information (accounting for around 60% of total data) is kept separately on hard drives at the Action for Children HQ. The provider’s public cloud is used to host the website itself. This hybrid cloud arrangement also means that migrating the website is made much easier, should the need arise.
Robertson said that before using the cloud arrangement, hosting was done with their “web development agency, which was a shared environment of other charities.” This was problematic as it was expensive to change to a different agency …
A new research report from Symantec has warned against the use of ‘rogue’ clouds for best practice.
The survey, entitled ‘Avoiding the Hidden Costs of Cloud’, spoke to IT execs at 3,236 organisations across nearly 30 countries worldwide and found that there was a link between using rogue clouds and losing confidential information, resulting in hidden costs.
A rogue cloud is one which is unauthorised, or as Symantec put it, “business groups implementing public cloud applications that are not managed by or integrated into the company’s IT infrastructure.”
In a related blog post, Symantec came up with four tips to ensure avoiding these cost traps:
Focus cloud policies on information and people rather than technologies and platforms
Educate, monitor and enforce policies
Embrace platform-agnostic tools
Remove all duplicate data in the cloud
The results of the survey showed that rogue clouds were an issue in three quarters of …
Virtualization is spreading through the enterprise for a variety of mission-critical workloads. According to statistics from an August 2012 blog post on eginnovations.com, 59 percent of workloads are being virtualized. As we move forward into 2013, we need to decide how we will proceed with virtualization in order to remain effective and efficient.
As many organizations ready themselves to make the transition to cloud, they find that they are not prepared to meet the demands of virtualization infrastructure. As a result of this discovery, they will begin assessing the current state of their IT, make firm decisions regarding where their IT plan should be and begin to implement their plans for the year around virtualization.
If you’ve been following our blog series for any length of time, you already know that “the cloud”, in the form of Windows Azure, is becoming an option for IT organizations in which to extend their datacenters. And believe it or not, this includes the ability to create an Active Directory domain controller in the cloud and have it be in just another site in your directory services.
On second thought: Believe it. Today in part 20 of our “31 Days of Servers in the Cloud” series, Keith Mayer (teammate and friend with an awesome blog) gives us the rundown on how to configure this very thing.
What if you could make informed decisions on critical business issues by leveraging insights from the volume, velocity and variety of structured and unstructured data?
Register for January’s TechTalk, and you’ll discover how to combine the big data processing capabilities of IBM InfoSphere® BigInsights™ with the self-service business intelligence reporting of IBM Cognos® to create one powerful analytics solution.
Join us on Tuesday, January 22, 2013 at 11:00 am EST and find out how this combination of business tools gives organizations a powerful solution to translate large amounts of data into valuable, actionable insights and offers benefits.
The article I’m writing for part 13 our “31 Days of Servers in the Cloud” series involves using App Controller to create a virtual machine. But to do this, you first need to connect and associate App Controller (a component of System Center 2012) with your Windows Azure subscription.
So in today’s Part 12, as a preliminary document for part 13, in this article I’m going to show you how to connect App Controller to your Windows Azure account.
To make this happen, you first have to have a management certificate in place. This makes up the bulk of the complexity involved. It must be a management certificate that has a key length of at least 2048 bits and resides in the Personal certificate store.
EMC said Tuesday that it means to offer its cloud-based online file-sharing service Syncplicity, acquired last May, with its Isilon and Atmos widgetry so customers can store files as in the cloud as well as on-premise.
The stuff’s in beta.
It’s supposed to increase productivity, flexibility and ease of management, and reduce compliance risks.
During the last decade, the enterprise war was among the handful of players. Microsoft wanted to be the de facto choice of the IT by pushing .NET application platform, integrated tools through Visual Studio, a set of servers in the form of SQL Server, SharePoint, BizTalk and System Center. Same was the case with IBM who was trying to compete through the Rational, WebSphere, DB2, Tivoli and MQ Series platforms. Sun and Oracle complemented each other and ran an integrated GTM to win the enterprise customers. The goal of every player was the same – Displace competition and own almost every aspect of enterprise IT including the directory services, messaging, databases, business intelligence, systems management, collaboration and enterprise integration.
SYS-CON Events announced today that the Web Host Industry Review has been named “Media Sponsor” of SYS-CON’s 12th International Cloud Expo, which will take place on June 10–13, 2013, at the Javits Center in New York City, New York, and the 13th International Cloud Expo, which will take place on November 4–7, 2013, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
Since 2000, The Web Host Industry Review has made a name for itself as the foremost authority of the Web hosting industry providing reliable, insightful and comprehensive news, reviews and resources to the hosting community. TheWHIR Blogs provides a community of expert industry perspectives. The Web Host Industry Review Magazine also offers a business-minded, issue-driven perspective of interest to executives and decision-makers. WHIR TV offers on demand web hosting video interviews and web hosting video features of the key persons and events of the web hosting industry. WHIR Events brings together like-minded hosting industry professionals and decision-makers in local communities. TheWHIR is an iNET Interactive property.
Intelliverse has launched IntelliBuzz, a social media monitoring service. IntelliBuzz helps organizations listen, engage, measure and optimize interactions across multiple social platforms to develop a better understanding of customers and markets, integrate a social CRM channel and align social strategies with overall business objectives.
“Today’s businesses cannot choose whether or not to engage in social media,” said Frank E. Paterno, VP of Marketing at Intelliverse. “Customers are expressing both joy and frustration socially. Companies that aren’t listening and choose not to participate in these conversations will quickly become obsolete.”
The IntelliBuzz service can help companies in the following areas:
Provides marketers with a single dashboard to publish, engage, manage, analyze and report across multiple social campaigns and platforms. It also helps marketers schedule future posts and trend the social activity about their brand, which can range from protecting the brand during everyday operations to uncovering opportunities for social outreach and meaningful conversations.
Empowers customer service and sales organizations to listen to and respond to customer and prospect conversations originating on the social web. Benefits include quickly responding to questions from prospects to delighting customers with surprise resolutions to socially made complaints. Customer service organizations can easily integrate IntelliBuzz into an overall CRM strategy and have the tools in place to find questions, comments or complaints on the internet, deliver them to the responsible team and track each interaction to ensure a timely response.
Allows a human resource organization to gauge employee happiness, gain insight into potential negative organizational issues and evolve corporate values by monitoring the social media activity of the organization’s employees.
Intellectual Property – Lets an organization know if the organization’s intellectual property (e.g., trademarks and service marks) and confidential information is being used inappropriately so it can respond accordingly.
