I recently posited a question on Twitter to feel out the attitudes toward technology related to cloud bridges. As you might recall, IPSec VPN connectivity was cited by attendees (real people) as a major requirement for cloud bridges at Gartner DC. For some time now, SSL VPNs have been an effective alternative to IPSec VPN so I wondered why it was that IPSec remains the top choice.
Two answers (one from Steve Shah, the other from Hoff) in particular elicited an abstracted thought regarding standards in general.
As Hoff and Steve point out, there’s value in standards, particularly with respect to interoperability and the ability to leverage existing skills and infrastructure.
Six Degrees Group Achieves PCI DSS Compliance
Six Degrees Group, a provider of integrated managed data services, today announces that following an official audit its datacentres and security systems are now fully compliant with the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS).
The confirmation of PCI DSS compliance complements Six Degrees Group’s ISO27001: 2005 certification for information security, which emphasises the Group’s commitment to protecting and securing clients’ data.
PCI DSS is a set of comprehensive standards for ensuring the security of financial payment data that was developed by the founding payment brands of the PCI Security Standards Council including Visa Inc., American Express and MasterCard Worldwide. As a result of this certification, Six Degrees is now on the approved global Visa Merchant register.
Mike Ing, group business operations director of Six Degrees Group, stated: “These standards globally govern all organisations that store, process or transmit cardholder data. Achieving this compliance provides our customers and prospects with the reassurance that Six Degrees Group is committed to the security and confidentiality of sensitive data by meeting the physical security requirements of the PCI standard.”
NetDocuments 13.1 Release Includes Secure Document Delivery
NetDocuments today announced their 13.1 release. This latest release contains more than 20 new and updated features, including document delivery via a secure link and a new search engine.
Available for the first time with this release, Secure Document Delivery enables public sharing of documents without loss of content control. Users select the documents they wish to deliver, and NetDocuments generates a secure URL for each document to be sent to multiple email addresses. This feature offers users a number of security and control options, including the ability to:
- Password-protect the viewing of documents
- Set document permissions, including the ability to download documents
- Set a predetermined expiration date, after which the URL will no
longer be active - Lock the original version of the document in NetDocuments, thereby
prohibiting any changes to be made to the delivered document
Previously, third parties could only gain access to documents stored in NetDocuments by obtaining a username and password through a client portal. The Secure Document Delivery feature also improves collaboration and adds increased functionality to the suite of SEC-, FINRA- and HIPAA-compliant content management features.
As part of the 13.1 release, the NetDocuments’ NDSearch, an enterprise-class search platform embedded in NetDocuments and available to all users, now relies on the SolrTM search engine to power its functionality across 750 million documents for its global customer base in 140 countries.
Solr’s open source enterprise platform provides NetDocuments with the flexibility to adjust search functionality to meet customer needs. All previous search features remain available, including search analysis filters, find similar, dynamic filters and saved search. With Solr, users will enjoy quicker display of items in workspaces and other search result lists, an improvement in productivity made possible by Solr’s ability to index metadata for documents significantly faster.
“Collaboration has always been a main pillar of our company, and the new document delivery tool, which was highly requested by our customers, provides the easiest way for our customers to work with someone outside their organization while maintaining complete control of their documents,” said Leonard Johnson, vice president of marketing and product management at NetDocuments. “Our users have always valued our powerful search tool, and switching to Solr not only provides them with a superior search experience, but gives us greater customization and scalability as we near the billion document mark.”
Seven Modeling Tools to Help Assess Cloud ROI
Gone are the days when the cloud meant simply a hosted virtual instance or resource on some provider’s network. We’re seeing all sorts of new variants and twists emerge. I’m not just referring to the use of storage or compute resources or those that allow for elastic computing, such as Amazon’s Reserved Instances.
We’re likely to see industry-specific community clouds emerge. These clouds are built to address the security and compliance needs within specific industries. Examples of community clouds may well be Verizon’s Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) cloud service, which targets the healthcare community; and Metal Lynx, a cloud community targeting buyers and sellers of precious metals.
Is cloud computing ready for prime time?
By John Dixon, Senior Solutions Architect
A few weeks ago, I took part in another engaging tweetchat on cloud computing. The topic: is cloud computing ready for enterprise adoption? You can find the transcript here.
As usual with tweetchats hosted by CloudCommons, five questions are presented a few days in advance of the event. This time around, the questions were:
- Is public cloud mature enough for enterprise adoption?
- Should public cloud be a part of every business’s IT strategy?
- How big of a barrier are legacy applications and hardware to public cloud adoption?
- What’s the best way to deal with cloud security?
- What’s the best way to get started with public cloud?
As far as question #1, the position of most people in the chat session this time was that public cloud is mature enough for certain applications in enterprises today. The technology certainly exists to run …
SYS-CON.tv Interview: SaaS Solutions
“We started in 1997 and launched in 2001 and now we have over 500 ISVs on the platform. We now have an end-to-end solution for ISVs,” stated Jan Aleman, CEO of Servoy, in this SYS-CON.tv interview with Cloud Expo Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan at the 11th International Cloud Expo, held November 5-8, 2012, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
Cloud Expo 2013 New York, June 10–13, at the Javits Center in New York City, New York, will feature technical sessions from a rock star conference faculty and the leading Cloud industry players in the world.
The growth and success of Cloud Computing will be on display at the upcoming Cloud Expo conference and exhibition in New York City, New York, June 10–13, 2013.
Cloud servers: Leading the pack in Linux VPS
Although Microsoft Windows still dominates the desktop operating system popularity, Linux has become a dominant force in cloud servers and virtual private servers (VPS). Linux is not only a cheaper way to host cloud applications, but it also comes in several distribution flavors.
Customers looking at cloud hosting as a solution can choose from CentOS, Fedora, Ubuntu and Debian. Each of these distributions offers the same basic functions, but they have different tweaks that some administrators like over other distributions.
Linux VPS versus Windows solutions
Aside from the more affordable option, what makes Linux better than Windows? First, the Apache hosting environment and the Linux operating system are free, so, no surprise, Linux is a cheaper hosting solution.
Apache hosting usually includes the «cPanel» control panel. cPanel is popular with end-users and is more easily managed than Plesk, the equivalent Windows solution for managing cloud web servers.
Linux hosting naturally …
Why Is the Cloud So Confusing?
Last week I wrote a guest blog post for Washington Technology Industry Association explaining What Applications Benefit the Most from the Cloud. While working on the post I looked around the Web and once again was reminded that, like with other technology the cloud is becoming more and more confusing. Don’t understand me wrong! I do love the technology but there is always one thing that always baffles me – we (the techies) always invent new fancy terms and try to use those to sell the technology (it even happens quite often that we just call an old technology with new name and sell it again). Well, we are pretty good at confusing our customers with our fancy TLAs (TLA stands for three-letter-acronyms if you are wondering :)) hence I decided to start a series of posts explaining the cloud with much simpler terms.
Cloud Computing Pioneer Linthicum Returns to Blue Mountain
David S. Linthicum, a well-known pioneer in the worlds of cloud computing, big data, and Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), and who founded Blue Mountain Labs in 2006, has returned at CEO and founder of the elite consulting and advisory firm. Blue Mountain Labs will continue to focus on making cloud computing work for larger enterprises and government agencies, allowing them to save hundreds of millions of dollars a year by leveraging proven methodologies, procedures, and technology.
An Open Cloud Discussion
There is a vast new movement developing at a breathtaking pace that is changing the way the world utilizes cloud computing. Specifically, open source cloud computing. Rackspace is helping lead the global discussion about the benefits of building a business on an open cloud.
In his Day 2 Keynote at the 11th International Cloud Expo, John Engates, CTO of Rackspace, provided insight on the difference between an open cloud and a closed, proprietary cloud. He also explained the hidden dangers of vendor lock in and where the open cloud is headed into the future.