We’re all hungry for best practices and tips for securing data in the cloud and also how shared computer resources can and should work to ensure privacy and protection. The focus is on data security, especially data at rest.
Cloud computing is all about increased scalability and productivity. However, new cloud security threats such as “snapshotting” a virtual disk are emerging. These create new threats to private data, compared to when data was stored and secured between the four walls of a datacenter.
With cloud computing, multiple customers may share a single physical disk, although logically separated from each other. In theory, one can share the same physical disk with a competitor – without data crossing over. The same is true for physical servers. Equally, within a single cloud account, different projects may be sharing the same physical disks or physical servers. This virtualized approach is at the heart of cloud computing; it provides many of its benefits.

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«It was my first time at a Cloud Expo show, so I wasn’t sure what to expect. But man, what a blast it turned out to be. Great exhibits, great audience, great floor traffic, great conversations with IT leaders and folks in the channel.» With those words, Tom Laydos – Director, Marketing & Sales Operations at Evolve IP – begins a blog post on the «Cloud IQ» blog in which he reports on Evolve IP’s experiences at the 10th International Cloud Expo, which was held in New York’s Javits Center June 11-14, 2012.

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Cisco deal maker and chief strategy officer Ned Hooper, who brought Tandberg, WebEx, Scientific-Atlantic, Starent and NDS into the fold and administered Cisco’s $2 billion venture fund, is leaving.

According to a blog posting Tuesday by CEO John Chambers and COO Gary Moore, Hooper’s going to start “an independent investment partnership company and pursue his goal to be a principal investor.”

Apparently “Ned has been working on his plan with us over a number of months, and we look forward to partnering with him in his new endeavor.”

That removes Chambers’ heir-presumptive since Chambers has no intention of retiring. Chambers has been deconstructing the un-agile bureaucratic management edifice he built.

With Hooper out, Cisco is going to give CTO Padmasree Warrior his job and simply expand her CTO role, making her responsible for determining Cisco’s strategy, investments and acquisitions.

Business Insider says “she’s not been considered CEO material. She’s mostly worked as part of a team, and it’s hard to pinpoint any big Cisco successes directly on her.”

The company has also put Pankaj Patel, who developed Cisco’s service provider business, which now accounts for ~35% of the company’s direct product revenue, in charge of engineering.

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Talking about his new book, «That Used to Be Us,» at a recent speech at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, best selling author Thomas Friedman said, «Average is over. Everyone must define and develop their extra, that unique value add that justifies, in this world of rising curves why they should be hired or promoted.» Friedman goes on to make a case that to win in the global market, American education must nurture students to become more creative and unique.
Friedman goes on to discuss the emergence of the «hyper-connected world» one where you cannot only outsource labor, but you can outsource «genius». This is clearly one of the driving forces that create the glut of solution providers in every imaginable niche in the market today. While Friedman deals with macro nation level competitiveness issues, every day, the battle against average determines the micro level winners and losers in competitive markets.

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We already posted the main features of OpenNebula 3.6 Beta, which are of course fully supported by Sunstone. But we have been working also on the Sunstone visual appeal, and we will keep polishing the interface for the final release. Here are some preview screenshots.

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CloudBerry Lab has released CloudBerry Backup version 2.9, an application that allows users to backup their data online to their cloud storage accounts such as Amazon S3, Windows Azure and Google Storage.
Disaster recovery planning is often times an afterthought that comes to light when disaster strikes. Very seldom do companies fully recover from loss of critical data which could lead to loss of business. CloudBerry Backup provides a powerful online Backup and Restore software designed to leverage Amazon S3 reliable and secure online storage to make your disaster recovery plan simple, reliable, and affordable.
The latest version of CloudBerry Backup comes with an option to estimate cloud storage costs. The users can set up cost estimates per storage account and specify a limit in GB or in dollar equivalent. When the limit is reached the backup will stop. The software will automatically calculate the costs based on the current storage price offered by the storage provider. Currently Amazon S3 charge 0.125/GB per month. The software will also send an alert to the users when the storage is about to reach the limit.

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Eight years ago, I made my first visit to Istanbul. I was the guest of a successful American businessman who was born and raised in Turkey, so I was able to visit a lot of places that most tourists or businesspeople wouldn’t see.

In addition to making the rounds of the major historical sites, I traipsed around Bosphorus University, well known as Turkey’s Harvard. I had tea in several neighborhoods, became acquainted with all three major football (soccer) teams, took a ferry to Istanbul’s Asian side, visited a friend of my friend’s home, and was welcomed one day into a circle of friends and their lively conversation about the past, present, and future of the country.

At that time in 2004, Turkey’s economy was not good and the country’s spirits were down. Although a new government had recently taken over and was moving the country away from 80 years of Europe-facing, wholly secular politics, there weren’t many changes evident at the time.

Turkey’s petition to join the European Union was being shunned, notably by Germany, a country with millions of Turkish “guest workers.”

From Grim to Great
Meanwhile, back in Istanbul, I was struck by the sight of thousands of fashionable, yet unemployed and grim-faced young men taking a Sunday stroll with their wives, girlfriends, and families along the streets surrounding the city’s signature Taksim Square. The air was palpable with tension and resentment, as a new generation of young Turks grappled with the country’s glorious Ottoman past versus its current impoverished reality.

But today, Turkey is a global superstar. Its enthusiasm for the EU has cooled, putting it mildly. Indeed, the country’s current prosperity seems to mock that of the EU, particularly its neighbor and historical antagonist, Greece. The country, still managed by the Erdogan government that came to power almost a decade ago, has been turning its face toward the Middle East, and has become a major influencer of events in the region and the world.

The Technology-Centric View
I’m not a political writer. I prefer to stay away from the passions politics incite, and stay focused on information & communications technology (ICT) and its influence. My theory is that politicians, movements, and even revolutions come and go, but ICT’s influence is an evergreen that grows day by day regardless of local, regional, and global politics.

My research over the past 18 months, which I’ve written extensively about (just google “Tau Index Strukhoff”), has uncovered countries with regimes as varied as Iran, Bangladesh, Ukraine, Vietnam, South Korea, and Sweden as among the world’s most aggressive in deploying ICT.

The disruptive nature of ICT – today’s starlets are Facebook & Twitter – sometimes seems to be in evidence. Egypt and Tunisia, for example, have done well in my rankings. On the other hand, Libya and Syria have not.

But ICT remains, in my opinion, as the major indicator of how well a country will develop economically over time, whether the current leaders are duly elected, Communists, oligarchs, dictators — or any combination of all these things.

Middling Performance
So how well has Turkey done in my research? The best word I can think of would be “middling.” This may surprise some people. But I think my research shows that Turkey needs to do better when it comes to technology if the dreams of its investors and population are to be realized.

These dreams have created a hellacious real-estate boom in Istanbul and selected other places for several years, one that makes witnesses of recent bursting property bubbles in the US and Europe (think Spain) cringe.

To be sure, millions of new tourists have enjoyed Istanbul, seaside resorts, and other interesting areas within Turkey. And the country’s exports are equal to about 13% of its overall economy (compare this to about 10% for the United States).

But Turkey imports almost $100 billion more each year than it exports, and its technology exports are less than 2% of its total exports, according to the World Bank. Compare this to the United States at 10.5%, Mexico at 20%, Malaysia at 34%, and the Philippines at 38%, for example.

My research brings Turkey’s middling ICT performance to light. By integrating the amount the country spends on technology (again according to World Bank figures), with several other economic and societal factors (provided by the United Nations and other organizations), I found that Turkey ranked 40th among the 82 countries I was able to survey.

This places it almost even with France, Spain, Mexico, and Thailand. It finishes well ahead of Italy, Greece, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE.

Less Good News
But there is a lot of less good news here.

My research is a complex mix of factors, and can be adjusted on the fly to focus more heavily on single or multiple datapoints. Broadly speaking, it tends to favor less wealthy countries, as it takes local cost-of-living (a factor known as PPP) heavily into account.

So Turkey’s relatively low per-person income (less than 25% of the US and less than half of Greece) should help its ranking; yet it still trails most of the Western powers, as well as South Korea and Japan.

More important, it badly trails the neighbors who comprise the former Soviet satellites of Central, Eastern, and Southern Europe. Neighboring Bulgaria emerges as one of the superstars, leading its region while finishing second in the world (trailing only South Korea). Romania scores in the world’s top 10 as well, along with Hungary and Ukraine. Within the ICT sphere, Turkey is simply not as dynamic as many of its neighbors and competitors.

I think it’s worthy to note that Turkey’s economic boom is currently accompanied by 10% inflation, and an official unemployment rate of almost 9%. I would urge the country’s political and business leaders to re-focus on ICT, and bring the country’s real future prospects wholly into line with its dreams, because it wouldn’t surprise me if there are still some grim-faced young men walking around Taksim Square.

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Red Hat is planning to commercialize its 13-month-old OpenShift PaaS later this year when it splits the widgetry into two initial tiers: FreeShift and MegaShift. Until then it’ll be available as a developer preview.
FreeShift will offer three small gears, the ability to auto-scale and access to the languages, frameworks and data stores developers like to use. It will leverage community-provided support. Developers using the OpenShift PaaS now will be able to automatically migrate to FreeShift.
MegaShift, the initial paid tier, will offer up to 16 gears, and the ability to add storage past the 1GB-per-gear limit in FreeShift. MegaShift users will get support from Red Hat. The platform fee is supposed to be $42 a month with a per-gear-an-hour fee for gears past the first three. However, Red Hat says the pricing is provisional and subject to change.

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There has been a significant move among data centers and IT departments in the past few years. There was a time when public cloud computing solutions were considered an experiment, at best. Few organizations were using public cloud solutions, even as the experts and pundits praised the new way of providing solutions.
Fast forward a couple of years, and senior IT personnel and data center managers are realizing that public cloud solutions really are a viable option. Perhaps more than that, they’re realizing that internal solutions are increasingly unsustainable. There are situations where using a service provider just makes sense.

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