Cloud Computing

Formtek – Cloud Computing: While Security Remains Biggest Concern, Security Tops List as Reason to Implement Cloud

A new study on cloud computing use by small and medium sized companies from Exact and Pb7 Research finds two surprising results.

The first has to do with security. Typically security is cited as the number one concern for why businesses avoid the cloud; but surprisingly, the Exact report found that security is also the number one reason cited by cloud adopters for choosing the cloud. It seems like some sort of love/hate relationship. The second interesting result is that, in general, businesses using the cloud are better off financially compared to peer businesses that aren’t using the cloud.

More of the Formtek post from Dick Weisinger

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15
Jan 16

TechCrunch – The Cloud’s Biggest Threat Are Data Sovereignty Laws

The beauty of the cloud is the promise of simplification and standardization — without regard to physical or geographic boundaries. It’s this “any time, any place, any device” flexibility that is driving rapid adoption.

However, new government regulations on data sovereignty threaten to complicate the delivery model that has made cloud computing attractive, presenting new concerns for companies with operations in multiple countries.

While the strike down this fall of the United States-European Union “Safe Harbor” agreement made most of the headlines, I see the recent localization law in Russia (which went into effect in September) as a more significant development. The law mandates that personal data on Russian citizens must be stored in databases physically located within the country itself.

With this ruling, companies that capture, use and store data must abide by specific laws or face the consequences of falling out of compliance. Russia is a warning bell. With currently 20+ countries also considering similar privacy laws, the landscape will grow increasingly complex for cloud providers, and more costly for customers, thus chipping away at the beauty of the cloud.

SwitchScribe – Data Center Trends – Data Center Hugging, it’s got to Stop!

SwitchScribe – I admit I pick and choose the things I agree with from Gartner. However, this year I definitely agreed with their statement “Supply rather than ownership should drive strategy in the Data Center”

Supply

Data Center capacity, even in the most modular of designs takes months to bring on line if you’re building your own. In most cases you’re looking at a year or longer from project definition to opening a building. In the parlance of modern IT six months is not agile let alone a year. Data Center capacity needs to be considered in the whole; how much do I need to own vs how much should I contract or lease from suppliers? There are several realities here ; 1) there is no longer a need to “own” a physical data center facility and 2) we must view data center capacity through the same lens that we view manufacturing and business process improvement.

Assumptions about the need to own:

We’re special and have needs that can’t be addressed in either the cloud or a colocation facility.

We can do it more cost effectively than a colocation supplier

Data Center Knowledge – Getting to the True Data Center Cost

Will it be cheaper to run a particular application in the cloud than keeping it in the corporate data center? Would a colo be cheaper? Which servers in the data center are running at low utilization? Are there servers that have been forgotten about by the data center manager? Does it make sense to replace old servers with new ones? If it does, which ones would be best for my specific applications?

Those are examples of the essential questions every data center manager should be asking themselves and their team every day if they aren’t already. Together, they can be distilled down to a single ever-relevant question: How much does it cost to run an application?

Answering it is incredibly complex, which is the reason startups like TSO Logic, Romonet, or Coolan, among others, have sprung up in recent years. If you answer it correctly, the pay-off can be substantial, because almost all data centers are not running as efficiently as they can, and there’s always room for optimization and savings.

VMware – The Business Case for Cloud Automation

Automating private cloud infrastructure management helps improve the efficiency of cloud operations and deliver big CapEx and OpEx savings. The following infographic puts some numbers on the return on investment for cloud automation technology, derived from a wide range of customer case studies.

Check out the Infographic for some eye opening statistics.

More of the CIO Vantage post from VMware

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30
Dec 15

ZDNet – IT managers: we’re hurting for more cloud and DevOps skills

There’s been a lot of talk lately about “two-speed” IT, in which one part of the job is to help with all the cool stuff, such as digital presence and data analytics, while the other part is to deal with the traditional IT maintenance stuff — upgrades, patching, coding, security and so forth.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t look like two-speed IT is a 50-50 split in time and resources. It’s more like 80-20, in favor of the maintenance side.

That’s the conclusion from a survey of 200 IT executives just released by NetEnrich, which surveyed larger organizations with at least $400 million in annual revenues. The survey finds plenty of adoption of newer approaches that could help shift IT’s emphasis to the digital side — particularly cloud and DevOps. Nearly 97 percent of respondents said they’re moving applications and workloads into public, private or hybrid cloud environments, and 68 percent said that DevOps methodologies have been integrated well into their traditional IT and tech operations teams.

More of the ZDNet article from Joe McKendrick

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29
Dec 15

TechRadar – The public cloud is not safe – and it’s your fault

Love the headline. This article shines a light on IT professionals taking responsibility for their own systems security.

What has the cloud ever done to you? General enthusiasm for moving huge tranches of private, sensitive company data onto the public cloud seems to wax and wane. It waxes as prices drop, new pay-as-you-go business plans emerge and new SaaS products go online, and it wanes when the media cover an Ashley Madison or a TalkTalk hack – and there have been plenty of those in 2015.

Security concerns remain the most common reason for businesses avoiding public cloud services, but providers like AWS, Microsoft, Google and IBM insist that their clouds are safe. That only leaves one weak link – the people who work for the businesses that use them. If the cloud isn’t as safe as it should be, it’s your fault.

According to analysts at Gartner, 95% of cloud security failures by 2020 will be the customer’s fault. “Only a small percentage of the security incidents impacting enterprises using the cloud have been due to vulnerabilities that were the provider’s fault,” says Gartner’s report Top Strategic Predictions for 2016 and Beyond: The Future Is a Digital Thing.

More of the TechRadar post from Jamie Carter

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28
Dec 15

The Register – 2015: The year storage was rocked to its foundations

Storage year in review, part 1 The storage market in 2015 went through strategic foundation-shaking turmoil as the external shared disk array storage playbook was torn to shreds.

It was a bewildering year, with rampaging and revolutionary activity at all levels of the industry. It’s best looked at from the ground up, starting with the technology vision, moving on to raw media, and then systems (arrays), applications such as Big Data, and finally suppliers.

We look at technology visions and galloping media development here. Part two of this review of storage events in 2015 will cover systems, applications and suppliers.

Technology visions
There were six technology visions that exercised the industry’s mental sinews in 2015.

First, the all-flash data centre idea has definitely taken off as a vision that could be achieved. Pioneered by troubled Violin Memory it has been expanded on by Kaminario and HDS, and is related to the flash and trash concept.

Primary data is stored in flash with the rest being held in cheap and deep storage. When that cheap and deep is in the cloud you have an all-flash, on-premises data centre. When some/all of it is held in less-expensive flash, think 3D QLC (4 bits/cell or quad level cell), with the rest in the cloud, then you have an all-flash data centre too.

More of The Register article by Chris Mellor

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21
Dec 15

JaxEnter – Finance IT: The future of microservices, DevOps and the cloud in banking systems

JAXenter: What sort of changes are you witnessing in finance IT right now – and do you see buzzwords like cloud, microservices and DevOps playing a large role in this area in future?

Peter Lawrey: The buzz in fintech is still around performance and efficiency. In particular, IT developers are interested in cool new technologies but are looking to find way to justify their use to their managers. Many would like to migrate from Java 6 or 7 to Java 8 and see this as a big enough challenge.

While I don’t see financial institutions using external clouds like AWS as much as other industries, I believe they should be making more use of private clouds. Deploying services to new systems and even downsizing legacy systems is staggeringly harder than it should be. Clouds would be really helpful. A Bank can run their own cloud and still control the machines in use.

More of the JaxEnter post from Coman Hamilton

Doug Theis Leave your comfort zone.