Experts are debating whether the Democratic National Committee’s (DNC) email system was hacked by the Russian military intelligence service (G.R.U.) or Guccifer 2.0, a lone wolf Romanian hacker. While this is a very important question, the answer will not change the results: over 20,000 DNC emails ended up on WikiLeaks. How did this happen? How likely is it to happen to you or your company? What can you do to protect your email system from a similar fate?

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Conjecture, an opinion or conclusion formed on the basis of incomplete information.
All digital transformation initiatives introduce new problems, software bugs, guaranteed network vulnerabilities, new competitors; new business challenges and new stresses. The elimination of all negative consequences and vulnerabilities are impossible, so our focus should be on limiting and containing it, not eliminating it.

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The South Florida Business Journal honored Chetu Inc. with an inclusion on South Florida’s Top 100 Private Companies List. Chetu ranked at number 80 amongst other private businesses who showed tremendous revenues for 2015, are native to South Florida and have verifiable revenue figures. Chetu showed $31.51 million in revenues for 2015. That figure is a 10% increase from the $29.05 million in revenue earned in 2014.

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Deploying applications in hybrid cloud environments is hard work. Your team spends most of the time maintaining your infrastructure, configuring dev/test and production environments, and deploying applications across environments – which can be both time consuming and error prone. But what if you could automate provisioning and deployment to deliver error free environments faster? What could you do with your free time?

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While public cloud implementations are steadily increasing, private clouds in customers’ own data centres continue to be deployed because of the perceived higher levels of security and control they offer.

But the management of a private cloud can be complex and many organisations underestimate the scale of the challenge. Security and management in particular continues to be pain points. Many go in with the assumption that in a private cloud, IT departments have more control so the environment will either inherently be more secure, or will be easier to implement and maintain security controls.  Unfortunately, many organisations subsequently find the management challenge is greater than anticipated and adoption is difficult, which often has more to do with organisational and IT transformation issues rather than the technology itself. This puts a whole new dimension on the scale of the challenge, and raises the question of whether the internal IT team is up to it.

In order to secure your private cloud, you will need to manage your cloud footprint – including key performance metrics, network and virtual machine configuration, disaster recovery and backup, intrusion detection, access management, patching, antivirus – and many more security considerations.  

The sheer volume of security controls needed can be overwhelming and not many IT departments have the people power or expertise to be able to manage diverse security solutions from multiple vendors. But, the real kicker is often not just the security technology itself, it’s the internal processes required to implement private cloud security. 

The IT team needs to work with the security department and procurement to define responsibility for who looks after what when it comes to maintaining infrastructure. Internal departments also won’t necessarily prioritise your request and complex negotiations and acts of diplomacy often ensue. Evaluation processes alone can take six months or more and it’s a dance that needs to be done for not one security solution but for multiple solutions.

Add to this the fact that the threat landscape continues to grow and become ever more complex. Some cloud initiatives are increasingly stalling or getting cancelled altogether because the security risks are deemed to be too high. This results in an uncomfortable situation for IT leaders as lines of business in their organisations are still demanding the agility, scalability and cost savings that cloud computing can deliver. IT leaders know they can’t abandon cloud altogether, the benefits are too great – and yet they also know whose head will be on the line if an outage, data loss or hacking incident was traced to a cloud workload. It is not surprising that some IT leaders look back with nostalgia on the simple outsourcing models of the past.

A secure hosted private cloud from a provider like iland can provide an answer for companies with workloads that require isolated infrastructure. A hosted private cloud can deliver all the integrated security, management, support and availability levels you would get in a traditional data centre environment, but with all the convenience and benefits of cloud.

Instead of buying, installing, integrating and maintaining separate security solutions, secure hosted private cloud solutions like iland’s also offer a purpose built management console that integrates the management and reporting of security and compliance settings, smoothing the path to completing audits.  Embedded security features in a hosted cloud platform include role-based access control, two-factor authentication, VM encryption, vulnerability scanning, anti-virus/anti-malware, integrity monitoring, intrusion detection, detailed firewall and log events,. Additionally, all private cloud resources can be managed from a single place, with access to performance metrics, granular billing data, VM management capabilities and DR management. Hosted private cloud customers also benefit from flexible pricing models that deliver predictable and controllable operational expenses in reservation or burst options while avoiding the capital expenses of on-premise private clouds.

As the security challenge continues for cloud workloads, secure hosted private clouds offer stretched IT departments the best of both worlds. Removing the burden of hardware management, shifting capital expenses to operating costs and benefitting from the latest innovations, this model seamlessly augments on-premise data centres and delivers a robust, enterprise-class secure private cloud with all the features of a public cloud – but without the management overhead.

SYS-CON Events announced today that 910Telecom will exhibit at the 19th International Cloud Expo, which will take place on November 1–3, 2016, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
Housed in the classic Denver Gas & Electric Building, 910 15th St., 910Telecom is a carrier-neutral telecom hotel located in the heart of Denver. Adjacent to CenturyLink, AT&T, and Denver Main, 910Telecom offers connectivity to all major carriers, Internet service providers, Internet backbones and exchanges.

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CIOs cannot blindly trust public cloud services which appear in their organisation – at least according to one recent study – but for the majority of firms, the CIO is spearheading their transition to the cloud.

That’s the latest from a survey conducted by IT services provider Unisys, which found that for almost three quarters (72%) of firms, the CIO is the primary driver of cloud migration. In comparison, the CEO (6%), board of directors (4%) and CFO (3%) were barely recognised.

The report, which took responses from more than 200 IT and business executives earlier this year, also examined the factors which influence cloud adoption. 63% of those polled argue cost reduction is a key motivator, with 42% saying security is the biggest challenge. More than two thirds (67%) of respondents envisage that at least half of their IT resources will be in the cloud by 2018.

Aside from cost reduction, the ability to enable computing capacity on demand was also highly cited as a benefit, by 62% of those polled, while freeing IT staff to perform more high-value work (51%) and changing the perception of IT, from cost centre to competitive advantage (33%), were also key.

“This study shows that far-sighted CIOs have a clear view of the competitive, operational and economic benefits of cloud computing, and are taking energetic action to realise them for their organisations,” said Steve Nunn, vice president of cloud and infrastructure systems at Unisys. “At the same time, those decision makers are clear-eyed about the need to secure both existing IT and new cloud resources in order to protect vital business assets.”

The research gives more credence to the maturing role of cloud in enterprises, as well as the changing role of the CIO as technology matures. Fruition Partners, an IT solutions provider, found last month that for 85% of CIOs, the rise of cloud is reducing their company’s control over IT, while a benchmark study from KMPG and Harvey Nash in May found a similar percentage (84%) of CIOs complaining that they did not fully own their firm’s digital strategy.

Speaking to this publication earlier this week Paul Cash, UK managing director of Fruition Partners, noted the difficulty that CIOs face. “CIOs need to get closer to the rest of the business and build relationships with key stakeholders; ensuring they are supporting staff to use technology that lets them work productively, but safely,” he said.

The full Unisys report can be found here (registration required).

Read more: What does the role of the CIO look like in 2016?

Enterprises and service providers are moving to cloud. Cloud providers are expanding their infrastructure, reach and ease of adoption. Users are becoming mobile, they access their information and services on their personal mobile devices first. We have seen game changers like Netflix and AirBnB become vastly successful by using the power of public cloud as their infrastructure of choice. Service providers like Microsoft, Adobe and Oracle are quickly moving their services to cloud, offering them as a SaaS subscription. So why are we seeing this new «app store» model of development, delivery and consumption gain so much popularity now than ever? and what does it mean for the internet? Is the internet infrastructure equipped to handle this additional load? Lets first look at it from the three main constituents cloud effects: Enterprises or app providers, public cloud vendors and, of course, the consumers of these services.

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Amazon has gradually rolled out parts of its IoT offerings in the last year, but these are just the tip of the iceberg. In addition to optimizing their back-end AWS offerings, Amazon is laying the ground work to be a major force in IoT – especially in the connected home and office.
Amazon is extending its reach by building on its dominant Cloud IoT platform, its Dash Button strategy, recently announced Replenishment Services, the Echo/Alexa voice recognition control platform, the 6-7 strategic investments of its Venture group, strategic partnerships with 50+ major consumer package goods companies and the 50-70 million current Prime customers to become a dominant force in IoT.

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