“The definition of cloud and cloud services continues to evolve,” observed Robert Crespi, VP, CIO at Cervalis, in this exclusive Q&A with Cloud Expo Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan. “As such it is difficult to predict the growth,” Crespi continued, “we see more and more customers migrating to a cloud model with virtualization as it core.”
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.”
Robert Crespi: Agree, the flexibility afforded by cloud computing is the strongest benefit
Recently Gartner has come up with a press release which talks about Five Cloud Computing Trends That Will Affect Cloud Strategy Through 2015. The release talks about 5 points – (1) Formal Decision Frameworks Facilitate Cloud Investment Optimization, (2) Hybrid Cloud Computing Is an Imperative, (3) Cloud Brokerage Will Facilitate Cloud Consumption, (4) Cloud-Centric Design
“Big data represents a sea change of capabilities in IT” notes Matt McLarty, Vice President, Client Solutions at Layer 7, in this exclusive Q&A with Cloud Expo Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan. McLarty continued: “In conjunction with mobile and cloud, I think Big Data will provide a technological makeover to the typical enterprise infrastructure, drawing a hard API border in front of core business services while blurring the line between logic and data services.”
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.”
Matt McLarty: Agree. We have a number of customers who are able to use Layer 7 Gateways to protect their cloud deployments, and leverage the elastic scaling model of the cloud to handle seasonal or sporadic bursts of traffic dynamically. Historically, these companies would have to try and forecast this and risk over-buying infrastructure. So there is a big cost savings, but dynamic scaling is a new capability that only comes with the cloud model.
“Big data represents a sea change of capabilities in IT” notes Matt McLarty, Vice President, Client Solutions at Layer 7, in this exclusive Q&A with Cloud Expo Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan. McLarty continued: “In conjunction with mobile and cloud, I think Big Data will provide a technological makeover to the typical enterprise infrastructure, drawing a hard API border in front of core business services while blurring the line between logic and data services.”
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.”
Matt McLarty: Agree. We have a number of customers who are able to use Layer 7 Gateways to protect their cloud deployments, and leverage the elastic scaling model of the cloud to handle seasonal or sporadic bursts of traffic dynamically. Historically, these companies would have to try and forecast this and risk over-buying infrastructure. So there is a big cost savings, but dynamic scaling is a new capability that only comes with the cloud model.
“Big data represents a sea change of capabilities in IT” notes Matt McLarty, Vice President, Client Solutions at Layer 7, in this exclusive Q&A with Cloud Expo Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan. McLarty continued: “In conjunction with mobile and cloud, I think Big Data will provide a technological makeover to the typical enterprise infrastructure, drawing a hard API border in front of core business services while blurring the line between logic and data services.”
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.”
Matt McLarty: Agree. We have a number of customers who are able to use Layer 7 Gateways to protect their cloud deployments, and leverage the elastic scaling model of the cloud to handle seasonal or sporadic bursts of traffic dynamically. Historically, these companies would have to try and forecast this and risk over-buying infrastructure. So there is a big cost savings, but dynamic scaling is a new capability that only comes with the cloud model.
OpenStack is becoming the most popular open source platform for building private and public clouds. The number of code commits and the engineering velocity of this project is matched by no other technology adoption in history. While OpenStack is merely two years old, there have been six production releases of it. Those who opted to deploy an OpenStack-based cloud a year ago are now likely running production workloads on a version of OpenStack that is three releases behind what they initially deployed.
Just as the evolution of software development methodologies and high-level programming languages has empowered organizations to adopt continuous deployment practices at the application level, increased engineering velocity and innovation in the infrastructure space are now forcing companies to consider the same at the lower levels of the stack. In the modern age of distributed and ever-evolving infrastructure, traditional rip and replace methods of upgrading are no longer optimal. The problem becomes particularly acute when dealing with open source products such as OpenStack that do not offer a clear vendor-dictated upgrade path, tooling, and supporting services.
“One of the greatest challenges to security in the cloud is management,” noted David Meizlik, Vice President of Marketing at Dome9 Security, in this exclusive Q&A with Cloud Expo Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan. “With cloud computing,” Meizlik explained, “the infrastructure is owned and maintained by a third party, so you can’t just walk down the hall to get to your infrastructure.”
Cloud computing represents the advent of a global computing utility that transcends national boundaries. Is that what makes clouds a challenge from a security point of view?
Globalization is more a challenge from a governance and compliance perspective. The greatest challenge to security in the cloud is that traditional security models don’t apply. Take, for example, the firewall. Firewalls were designed to protect the perimeter. The cloud, however, is outside any perimeter, and thus a traditional enterprise IT approach to firewalling is simply not practical. Fundamentally, as we re-architect our infrastructure we need to re-architect our security. It’s an opportunity and not just a challenge.
The Platform as a Service (PaaS) market grew out of the fact that no other cloud solution addressed the ever-increasing complexity of managing and writing modern applications: no frameworks, libraries or APIs alone could tackle the sticky application engineering challenges. Unfortunately, PaaS 1.0 is what people are now seeing as strictly a “tool” to easily deploy apps to the infrastructure in a self-service way with little or no differentiation among offerings. However, in order for PaaS to reach its full potential and become the modern day abstraction layer for software delivery, we must enter the PaaS 2.0 phase.
In his session at the 10th International Cloud Expo, Sinclair Schuller, Co-Founder & CEO of Apprenda, will explain how organizations are currently using PaaS, where PaaS is evolving to, and highlight best practices to maximize the value of existing investments when adopting PaaS today.
With Cloud Expo 2012 New York (10th Cloud Expo) now just seven weeks away, what better time to introduce you in greater detail to the distinguished individuals in our incredible Speaker Faculty for the technical and strategy sessions at the conference…
Today, more enterprises are enabling applications to be deployed on public and private cloud infrastructure. However, to date there have been no PostgreSQL Database-as-a-Service (DBaaS) options available that have the features, functionality and support that are required for enterprise environments.
In her session at the 10th International Cloud Expo, Karen Padir, executive vice president of products and engineering at EnterpriseDB, will discuss what enterprises require from a DBaaS and why DBAs should consider PostgreSQL to move database operations to public and private clouds. She will also provide tips and tricks to using PostgreSQL as the back-end database for your hybrid/private/public cloud environments.