Cloud computing offers almost limitless possibilities for innovation and growth. It also provides fodder for endless debates about the pros and cons of hosted and on-premise software deployments.
In one corner, you have the advocates of hosting software in the public cloud who argue that it offers better flexibility and scalability. In the other corner, you have proponents of private, on-premise deployments who counter that this approach is more secure and offers greater control.
The growing popularity of cloud service marketplaces – application stores that offer a range of cloud-based software and services – is adding a new dimension to these familiar arguments. Which type of deployment, public or private cloud, is best for marketplaces like these?
It’s an important question, since deciding where to host an application store can impact the entire ecosystem for cloud-based solutions, from the big-name brands that operate marketplaces, to developers who create applications to sell in them, to the end-user customers who come to rely on these solutions.
Cloud Encryption Best Practices
Cloud encryption keeps coming up as one of the hottest topics for enterprises migrating to the cloud. IT departments are constantly pushed to cut costs and utilize compute resources more efficiently, hence cloud computing is the natural evolution, yet at the same enterprises cannot compromise on cloud security, and cloud encryption should be considered high on the list as it segregates and “hides” your data from other virtual entities hosted on the same physical cloud infrastructure.
What’s my cloud provider’s encryption approach?
Cloud data security and cloud encryption comes in many forms and shapes. While some cloud providers will provide the encryption service, some will provide a “shopping list” of cloud encryption companies, and others will provide both. But which one is best for your needs?
The Value of an End-to-End Cloud Computing Operating System
“The productization of Big Data will be an interesting trend to track, and I think we’ll start to see some significant investment in this area over the coming months,” noted Scott Sneddon, Vyatta’s Director of Cloud Solutions, in this exclusive Q&A with Cloud Expo Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan. “We at Vyatta think this trend is exciting,” Sneddon continued, “because these kinds of new ventures will always need powerful and creative networking and security solutions.”
Cloud Computing Journal: Agree or disagree? – «While the IT savings aspect is compelling, the strongest benefit of cloud computing is how it enhances business agility.»
Scott Sneddon: Whether you’re a mature company or an emerging business, time-to-market is critical to success. Rapid deployment of network infrastructure or a new product line always requires capital. The companies that win always optimize their cash flow and keep plenty of it on hand to seize opportunities. That opportunity could be a critical executive hire, an undervalued target acquisition or a necessary engineering build-out. Either way, cloud computing when executed correctly can directly impact how nimble companies can react to market opportunities.
Cloud Computing: Panzura Raises $15 Million C Round
Panzura and its global cloud storage solutions have gotten a $15 million C round led by Opus Capital.
Existing investors Matrix Ventures, Khosla Ventures and Chevron Technology Ventures, the investment arm of the world’s third-largest oil conglomerate, also kicked in. Opus general partner Carl Showalter will get a board seat.
The new round of funding brings the company’s total backing to $33 million.
Panzura says it will use the new money to establish an international sales presence and scale its US-based marketing, sales and engineering. The company also plans to expand its channel ecosystem and explore joint development projects with its strategic partners, which currently include HP, Google, Rackspace and EMC.
OpenNebula for Large-Scale Cloud Deployments
One of the main design principles in OpenNebula focuses on enabling large scale deployments. In this type of deployment it is usually the case that we have to deal with large number of physical hosts, with the intention of running a large number of virtual machines. This is important since many of the OpenNebula users run large scale deployments with tens of thousands of virtual machines.
The scalability of the virtual infrastructure manager is, without a doubt, a keystone when a large-scale cloud deployment is at stake. The ability to handle a large number of resources, keeping track of them and staying responsive is essential, for that very reason the OpenNebula project has put a lot of effort to make the central component of OpenNebula, the core daemon, as stable and robust a possible.
ShoreTels Cloud Division Announces Unified Communications for iOS, Android, Blackberry
ShoreTel today announced the release of ShoreTel Mobility for customers of ShoreTel’s M5 cloud division. The solution extends the voice and unified communications (UC) applications businesses love to the smartphone. The initial launch will support iPhones and subsequent releases over the summer will add support for other smartphone and tablet devices including Android and Blackberry. Users are able to leverage a single converged device for both business and personal communications, and access deskphone and UC capabilities on their iPhone without having to learn a new interface.
In addition to offering users a dual persona, ensuring easy separation of personal and business identities on a single mobile device, ShoreTel Mobility automatically and securely selects the best available network – Wi-Fi or cellular – without any action by the user. The solution is available to ShoreTel’s Cloud Division clients for a monthly fee per user.
“I’m really looking forward to getting my hands on the ShoreTel Mobility application. I’ve been wanting this for 4 years now and I’m glad that M5, as part of ShoreTel, will be one of the first in the market. I have no doubt that true corporate mobility will improve productivity for our remote and traveling employees,” said Derek Stewart, Finance and Operations manager at Foursquare.
“The way people work has changed. Instead of fighting the trends of mobility and bring-your- own-device, we are empowering our clients to embrace them by extending our cloud phone system capabilities to the device that users love the most – their own,” said Dan Hoffman, ShoreTel Cloud Division President. “The solution represents a win-win, giving our customers the ease of using the device that is already in their pocket and giving the enterprise a way to reduce costs, while maintaining a consistent corporate identity and caller experience.”
Users enjoy the following benefits:
- Identity – Business calls to and from any ShoreTel Mobility
user are made using their business phone number, not their personal
mobile number. This means corporate identity is maintained and the
company, not the employee, owns the contact relationship. Employees no
longer need to reveal personal mobile phone numbers and can instantly
tell if an incoming call to the mobile device is personal or work
related. - Convenience – Users can leverage all of the benefits of the M5
cloud business-phone system that they enjoy when using a deskphone
including: transferring calls to other employees and utilizing
four-digit dialing. Coaching tools such as barge and whisper are
available to management. - Metrics – Mobile calls are no longer omitted from the phone
system’s business intelligence. Records for business calls made to and
from the mobile device are included along with deskphone calls, giving
management true visibility into employee performance and the health of
the business. - Network Flexibility – ShoreTel Mobility can significantly
reduce direct dial and international roaming charges on the smartphone
by utilizing software that switches networks automatically,
intelligently and securely between wireless and cellular for the best
available coverage at any given moment.
For more information about ShoreTel Mobility in the cloud, the M5 Unified Communications Suite, or other products, please visit www.m5.net.
Orange Business Services Releases Cloud Trading Solution
Orange Business Services – Trading Solutions today announced the launch of its Flexible Trading service. This fully managed cloud-based offering is targeted at small to midsized financial institutions and is being rolled out this year allowing firms to work with the latest and affordable technology solutions.
“Financial institutions are increasingly looking to reduce costs from the front to back office and are turning to cloud-based models to achieve this. A fully managed service means financial institutions can take advantage of utility pricing and also a potential reduction in their IT infrastructure costs. The added benefit of scalability in this fast paced market allows them to broaden their investment portfolio across different asset classes,” said Peter Redshaw, managing vice president, Gartner.
The cloud-based Flexible Trading service is provided on a ‘pay as you grow’ model and is designed for hedge funds, asset managers, and niche players who require up to 20 positions on a pre-fixed pricing basis. The all-in-one package contains the award winning Open Trade smart turret, optional voice recording and voice lines through native access to the TCSnet network and fully managed services. Flexible Trading customers can also benefit from access to over 2000 TCSnet community members and more than 50 liquidity pools across the globe.
“Flexible Trading in the cloud will provide our users with an advantage over the competition. It will allow them to efficiently align their service costs to business needs and gives them greater choice. Five year contracts are usually the minimum requirement and Flexible Trading presents an adaptable solution requiring just a one year commitment responding to today’s market conditions and demand for efficient business change,” said Lionel Grosclaude, CEO of Orange Business Services – Trading Solutions. He added, “Flexible Trading’s ‘pay as you grow’ model is a very attractive alternative for small to mid-sized financial institutions, which can now benefit from and afford the most advanced trading solutions. It is a full end-to-end service so there is no need for in-house IT experts, allowing users to enjoy all the benefits and functionality the service delivers.”
The service also offers a fast response to business changes allowing upscale and downscale of trading operations. Users of the Flexible Trading service will benefit from better oversight of their technology and in-house expenditure, with no need for additional technical space. It is also easy to deploy and set up in a short timeframe. The service is designed to improve financial efficiency as users will be able to allocate valuable IT infrastructure budgets to other areas of the business giving them a greater degree of flexibility and allowing improved business agility.
“Flexible Trading is the latest addition to our rich portfolio of cloud-based solutions, encompassing infrastructure, collaboration, video, security and back-up available ‘as a service’,” said Didier Jaubert, senior vice president, Global Services and Global Communications Solutions, Orange Business Services. “To answer our customers’ increasing needs for more flexible infrastructures and reduced capital expenditure, we have positioned cloud computing services at the heart of our strategy, thanks to the strengths of our global network and IT infrastructure. With Flexible Trading, we also show our ambition to address specific markets with cloud services within the financial community.”
Cloud Computing: Eucalyptus to Open Source Everything It’s Got
Eucalyptus Systems, which is supposed to have the most widely deployed on-premise cloud computing platform, will be pushing out the 3.1 rev of its widgetry next week.
The company will open source all of the system’s accumulated features up to this point, including the high availability of Eucalyptus 3, so the community and supported enterprises are aligned on the same platform.
Eucalyptus figures the move will accelerate on-premise cloud innovation by making it easy for the open source community to develop enterprise-grade on-premise IaaS clouds.
Moxie Software Unveils Free Desktop Sync Functionality for Its Spaces by Moxie Suite
Moxie Software, Inc. provider of customer-centric enterprise social software, today announced its Desktop Sync functionality for the Spaces by Moxie suite, which brings the power of collaboration to the user’s desktop. Desktop Sync is an integral component of Moxie’s Collaboration Spaces, and it is available for users at no additional cost.
“At Moxie we are obsessed with making our collaboration software second nature to the way people work by seamlessly embedding it to the desktop,” said Tom Kelly, CEO of Moxie Software. “Moxie Software is the first company to bring this powerful functionality to market, adding file sharing and cloud storage to our comprehensive enterprise social software, while maintaining all security norms. And the best part is that this functionality is absolutely free for our users.”
Moxie’s Desktop Sync includes the following functionality:
- File Sync – Users can add and update files on a Windows desktop
and File Sync automatically adds them to the right location in
Collaboration Spaces to easily share with colleagues. Updates
are synchronized on both at the desktop and in Collaboration Spaces,
ensuring users and their colleagues always have the latest file
version. Users have the ability to:
- Synchronize folders and files from Collaboration Spaces to the
desktop - Add new folders and files to Collaboration Spaces to the desktop
- Maintain complete version history of documents in Collaboration
Spaces - Seamlessly share information with multiple users who might be part
of a Group or Project and even have peer-to-peer sharing - Outlook Sync – Outlook Sync is another component of Desktop
Sync that transforms traditional email threads into social discussions
in Collaboration Spaces. Users can create new discussion topics
directly from Outlook, or start with an existing email and create a
discussion around it. When sending or reading emails, users can also
view any recent activities inside Collaboration Spaces of the email
recipients, providing up-to-date social context. Users can:- Transform emails in Outlook into dynamic social discussions
- Create new discussion topics directly from Outlook
- View social activity of email recipients
- Post status updates directly from Outlook
- Synchronize folders and files from Collaboration Spaces to the
desktop - Add new folders and files to Collaboration Spaces to the desktop
- Maintain complete version history of documents in Collaboration
Spaces - Seamlessly share information with multiple users who might be part
of a Group or Project and even have peer-to-peer sharing
- Transform emails in Outlook into dynamic social discussions
- Create new discussion topics directly from Outlook
- View social activity of email recipients
- Post status updates directly from Outlook
“One of the challenges of enterprise collaboration software is addressing the need to integrate it with other business applications to avoid being perceived as another thing for users to do,” said Esteban Kolsky, principal and founder of ThinkJar. “2012 will be about integrating social into the business moving beyond the early adoption phase and into mainstream use of social platforms. Collaborative enterprises will implement technology that combines E2.0 (external) and SCRM (external) into a platform where employees, customers and partners meet to collaborate and purposefully co-create value.”
Desktop Sync will be available by August 15, 2012 with additional desktop functionality available later this year.
Google bigs the green cloud up, but is it attainable?
A recent post on the Google Green Blog has revealed that the US General Services Administration saved $285,000 in energy consumption after switching to cloud based apps.
Even though most IT decision makers would freely want to admit they’re doing their bit for the environment by migrating to the cloud, the most prominent reason companies migrate would be convenience and, above all, money.
But Google claims the cloud is more energy efficient than people think, and Urs Hoelzle, Google senior vice president for technical infrastructure, explains why.
The reason moving to the cloud would be both cost and energy efficient, Hoelzle notes, is that servers’ energy is vastly reduced. As the cloud-based solution has fewer servers at better optimisation, the energy levels are decreased.
Google found that, using Google Apps, organisations could decrease their energy costs by anything from 65% to 85% on average.
But what energy sources …