Analysis and insight on the famous four buzzwords in the IT world… Enterprise Mobility, Cloud Computing, BYOD and Unified Communication; how they complement, assist and disrupt each other; and the potential impact of the underlying forces in action on their future….
Cloud computing is providing organizations with low-cost applications and storage, making it easier to manage the growing amount of information. Increased adoption of cloud-based systems (IaaS, SaaS, PaaS and everything else) in the enterprise will pave a way for a faster pace of adoption and acceptance of the cloud-based back end for mobile devices. With increased use of smartphones, tablets in enterprise (BlackBerry, Nexus, Surface, etc.), increased acceptance of BYOD, more and more business information and data will be moved outside the firewall. The trend will fuel the use of cloud infrastructure for mobile applications, and platform and infrastructure including storage. It’s a no-brainer. Private mobile cloud, private mobile app stores, standalone enterprise class mobile app stores, etc., will start taking shape. The mobile app and platform ecosystem will evolve.The growth will, however, also depend on the ability of SaaS and PaaS vendors to facelift their applications and platforms for the mobile devices.
AlienVault Unified Security Provides Security Visibility for Amazon EC2
AlienVault today announced its latest 4.1 release, which aims to resolve the biggest challenges associated with traditional SIEM solutions including cost, complexity and difficult deployments. AlienVault Unified Security Management (AV-USM) platform 4.1 simplifies and speeds SIEM deployments and provides intelligent security incident response guidance. AV-USM 4.1 also extends AlienVault’s best-of-breed security monitoring capabilities to Amazon EC2 to enable greater control over hybrid environments.
“Lack of security visibility and control is a primary concern when businesses move workloads to the cloud,” said Russ Spitler, VP of Product Management at AlienVault. “Traditional SIEM solutions are extremely limited in their ability to monitor cloud environments, leaving companies with siloed assets and glaring holes in their security risk posture. By enabling the AV-USM platform to monitor Amazon EC2, AlienVault customers can lower their costs, optimize their IT environments and get security wherever they need it to be, without sacrificing visibility in their own private datacenters or the public cloud.”
New features in the AlienVault Unified Security Management platform 4.1 include:
- Support for Amazon EC2: “Instant-on” essential security
capabilities match the elasticity of the EC2 cloud environment and
enable unified security monitoring whether assets are in the cloud or
data center. - Auto-Deploy: Automatically identifies potential data sources
upon deployment with integrated discovery capabilities and removes the
“guesswork” common with traditional SIEM deployments. - Dynamic Incident Response Templates: Extends SIEM functionality
past the alert by providing customized, contextually relevant
workflow-driven response procedures so that analysts know exactly what
to do next. - Suricata IDS Profile: Provides an alternative to the SNORT IDS
engine with enhanced threat detection, analysis and performance.
Based on the open source project OSSIM, the AV-USM platform combines more than 30 of the best security technologies and provides security analysts with five essential security capabilities including asset detection, vulnerability assessment, threat detection, behavioral monitoring and security intelligence capabilities in a single, unified solution and management console. The AlienVault Open Threat Exchange™ is the largest community-sourced threat database and intelligence feed, and is built into the AV-USM platform and OSSIM to provide security analysts with real-time collaborative defense.
“Since our business is completely built on IaaS providers, we need to find a way to get reliable security visibility in this environment,” said Fredrick Lee, Lead Security Engineer for Twilio. “A lot of traditional security solutions fall short when facing the challenges of deploying in the cloud. AlienVault USM provides a great way to deploy the security capabilities I find essential – IDS, vulnerability assessment, SIEM – quickly and completely.”
AlienVault has also launched a new documentation portal, the AlienVault Repository of Knowledge (ARK), which complements the support forum and provides access to interactive assets, product documents and how-to videos for the larger OSSIM community.
The latest version of the AlienVault Unified Security Management platform 4.1 is available now.
How location is crucial to cloud data security
Anyone who has ever dealt in real estate—either buying a house, renting, or just living with someone in the industry—has heard the mantra «location, location, location.» As it turns out, location matters in the cloud, too. In particular, if you work for a regional or global company, you’ll find that certain governments, regional political entities (eg. the EU), and industries impose restrictions on where specific types of data can physically reside.
These jurisdictions apply regulations that protect individual and corporate data privacy pertaining to their citizens, public entities, or private sector firms. The most sensitive data of which, Personally Identifiable Information (PII), can be used to identify, locate, or contact specific individuals. Typically, the governance and compliance requirements that they specify require one or more of the following:
- PII and other data must remain physically resident within the jurisdiction.
- PII and other data must be protected from …
SOASTA Patents Cross-Cloud Grid Provisioning
SOASTA, Inc. today announced that the United States Patent and Trademark Office has issued SOASTA a patent for Cross-Cloud Grid Provisioning, U.S. Patent No. 8,341,462. The technology, which SOASTA invented in 2008, enables SOASTA and its customers to realistically simulate mobile and web traffic by deploying thousands of servers across different cloud providers simultaneously. Cross-Cloud Grid Provisioning is part of SOASTA’s platform to ensure the performance and reliability of mobile apps and websites for companies and organizations like NASA, the London 2012 Olympics, Microsoft, Netflix, Intuit, and American Girl.
“SOASTA was one of the first companies in 2008 to deliver cloud computing as a service,” said Tom Lounibos, SOASTA CEO. “We knew it was critical for our customer to quickly simulate mobile and web traffic anywhere in the world to reliably test their online properties. SOASTA’s engineering team responded by developing and designing innovative technology to automate the difficult task of manually provisioning across different clouds. Now our customers and employees can easily set up and tear down huge cloud grids on-demand, deploying thousands of servers in minutes.”
Before Cross-Cloud Grid Provisioning, a lack of servers constrained performance testing. Even today, setting up servers in the cloud can take many hours. However, with Cross-Cloud Grid Provisioning, SOASTA’s Global Test Cloud is now able to leverage more than 500,000 servers in 60 global locations running on 20 providers, including Amazon, Rackspace, IBM, Microsoft, and GoGrid. Setup takes minutes – even for the largest tests.
“Cloud computing depends on rapid deployment and on-demand access,” said Melinda Ballou, Program Director for IDC’s Application Life-Cycle Management research. “Workloads like load and performance testing that can depend on a large number of variegated servers driving traffic from different locations are a logical application for cloud computing. Grid provisioning technology like SOASTA’s can provide immediate access to these load servers across environments to help with the problems users face when trying to utilize different cloud platforms for testing.”
“As the largest born-on-the-Internet apparel eCommerce company in the US, it is critical for our web applications to perform to our customer expectations, no matter where they are located,” said Michael Hart, Chief Technology Officer at Bonobos. “This latest SOASTA patent is unique in the cloud computing industry, allowing fast, scalable access to over 20 major public cloud providers to ensure that web applications like ours perform to their maximum capacity.”
Just providing best- of – breed is no longer good enough
By John Zanni, Vice President, Marketing and Alliances, Parallels
In this ever changing cloud environment, service providers are telling us that whenever they think they have a handle on what SMBs want, SMBs indicate their “wants” are expanding. What this means is that service providers cannot linger on what was a key service last year. SMBs are constantly trying to grow their business and furthering their understanding of their customers, so as their customers branch out into new territories whether accounting, health care, entertainment, retail (you get the picture), SMBs will look to service providers to be nimble enough to accommodate those developments with cloud offerings they can use – and use with ease. In fact, best-of-breed is no longer as relevant or as meaningful as are specificity and ease of use.
Luckily for everyone, need generates innovation and development. There is a burgeoning of cloud services applications for a world of vertical markets, and many SMBs are looking for the application that specifically serves their needs rather than the most well-known or most often used applications.
From open source applications to complex solutions, through Application Packaging Standards, ISVs can create any applications that are needed or can be invented. (You can learn more about APS at appstandards.org.) Of note, this is an open standard, and Parallels does not need to approve an application for it to become available through APS.
There are a number of examples of such offerings in the Parallels APS catalogue, including:
- · MoySklad – a Russian business that produces a contact resource management and accounting service
- · SpamExperts – an Anti-virus/anti-spam/archiving solution very popular throughout Europe
- · BackupAgent – produces backup services for hosters and service providers and is popular in Europe and Asia.
Service Providers have access to these cloud services and applications and can easily enable them on Parallels Plesk Panel or Parallels Automation service providers; it then simply becomes a matter of marketing those applications to their customers with those particular requirements.
For service providers looking for more information on how to grow their business through the bundling of new applications that live in the cloud, Parallels Summit 2013, Feb 4-6, at Caesars Palace, Las Vegas is the place to be. Hundreds of ISVs with be demonstrating their services. There will be technical, developer, and business tracks on how to enable and promote applications in the cloud along with best practices on working with Parallels products that push your business up the ladder. Be there to experience and assess what you could use for your customers.
AppExtremes’ Conga Composer Adds HTML Email Capabilities, Cloud Storage to AppExchange
AppExtremes, Inc., developers of the Conga Suite, today announced availability of their Conga Composer Winter ’13 release which includes HTML email capabilities, tight integration with SpringCM™ content cloud services platform, and support for the PerspecSys™ cloud data security solution and the CipherCloud™ cloud information protection solution.
HTML email output capabilities complement Conga Composer’s extensive output formats (Microsoft Word®, Excel®, PowerPoint® and Adobe Acrobat PDF®) enabling presentation of data from multiple related Salesforce objects and lists in the body of an HTML email message. This key capability may be used alone, or in combination with file-based template options that generate email attachments. This further expands the power of Conga Composer to create and distribute sophisticated documents, reports and presentations to recipients both inside and outside an organization.
“We have leveraged the HTML Email Template functionality to generate weekly, scheduled, comprehensive deal updates for key internal recipients. This functionality lets us present far more detailed content than would otherwise be possible in a simple, easy to assemble manner,” said David Braidman, Senior Manager, Sales Systems & Tools for ServiceSource. “Conga Composer has become a key member of our sales operations team allowing us to generate countless documents across our entire enterprise.”
The Conga Composer Winter ’13 release also adds tight integration with SpringCM empowering Composer customers to distribute final output to SpringCM from within Salesforce. This gives joint customers one-click access to all their content as well as powerful workflow for putting content to work.
AppExtremes’ continued commitment to the highest data security standards has driven the integration with ISV technology partners CipherCloud and PerspecSys. The added support for these leading cloud security and information protection solutions enables Conga Composer to merge sensitive data into documents, while allowing for the data to remain encrypted or tokenized at rest and in flight. Using these gateways empowers organizations to keep control of their sensitive business data in real-time.
“As Conga Composer continues to grow in popularity globally and within organizations we are continually looking for ways to expand its capabilities to meet our clients’ increasing needs,” said Michael Markham, AppExtremes CTO. “The HTML email functionality and ISV technology partner integrations play key roles in extending our position as a leading provider of document generation and reporting solutions on the Salesforce AppExchange.”
Conga Composer is a document generation and reporting solution on the AppExchange. Conga Composer makes it possible for users and administrators to be more productive and serves as the backbone for nearly any operation or process by enabling them to:
- Create sophisticated documents using any data in just a few clicks
- Distribute content to anyone, anywhere, any way they like
- Automate operations with powerful workflow, batch operations and
scheduling.
The IT Talent Shift: Preparing Your Enterprise IT Talent for the Cloud
One of the cloud’s biggest draws is the capability to virtualize computing resources, allowing it to be consumed with the click of a mouse. But behind that simple click is an enormous infrastructure challenge that has recently been cited as a major cause for slower enterprise adoption. Enterprises can better prepare for this shift and take full advantage of future computing benefits. Between architecture design and migration planning, the road can be long, so what do you do with your talent?
In this General Session at Cloud Expo Silicon Valley, Lisa Larson, VP of Enterprise Technical Sales for Rackspace, shows how you can best prepare your IT talent for this seismic shift in computing.
America’s defence department moves towards cloud computing
We are all aware of the United States military, and that it is the largest in the world. It has a budget of over £340 billion and employs in excess of 3 million people. 1.5 million of those people are in active duty, or regular military personnel.
Of course, such a large organisation will have a monumental IT infrastructure as well as some of the tightest data security on the planet. Such an infrastructure also brings with it an inevitable large hardware stack.
Currently, the Department of Defence has some 1500 data centres which it is planning on reducing substantially.
A combination of budget cuts and security concerns has meant that the substitute for hardware has come in the form of Cloud Computing – high security Managed Servers, Cloud Hosting services and so on.
The DoD is moving towards cloud computing, using it to collect data as well as the …
Cloud Management and Code Switching
Code-switching is a linguistics term that refers to the act of switching between two or more languages in a single conversation. It’s like starting off the conversation with a greeting in one language, switching to English for most of it, but using elements of the other language throughout the conversation. When our girls were learning English this happened quite frequently, with a sentence often beginning with «осторожный» (careful) and continuing on with an explanation of why some action was dangerous and ending with «ладно» (okay)?
Code-switching generally occurs in a sentence where it grammatically aligns. Thus the use of interjections and stand-alone phrases in one language to get the attention of a child make perfect sense.
Dell Reported in Buyout Talks with Private Equity
Dell is in buyout talks with “at least” two private equity firms that would take the PC company-in-transition private, according to a story in Bloomberg Monday afternoon that sent Dell’s stock up close to 14% to over $12 a share, roughly what Toni Sacconaghi of Sanford Bernstein thinks Dell’s worth.
The report cites two unidentified people with “knowledge of the matter.”
Dell refused to comment on rumor and speculation.
Bloomberg called the talks “preliminary” and said they “could fall apart” if the financing can’t be arranged or the potential investors can’t figure out how to ultimately exit the investment.