Posted by amcanty on February 9, 2010
Posted Monday, February 8th, 2010
“(The Hosting News) – Mimecast® today announced the results of its Cloud Computing Adoption Survey, which examined the perception and adoption of cloud computing solutions among 565 respondents responsible for managing their organization’s IT operations and budget across the U.S. and Canada in the Fall of 2009.
Data from the recently completed online survey highlights the complex, often contrasting, thought process of IT decision makers regarding cloud computing. While security and integration issues are clearly users’ biggest fears about cloud computing, these concerns have not dissuaded companies from implementing cloud-based applications within their corporate infrastructure. The well-known fears with cloud computing appear to be at odds with reality, as the survey findings suggest strong satisfaction with cloud computing once it is installed. 70 percent of IT decision makers already using cloud computing are planning to move additional solutions to the cloud—most within the next 12 months—indicating that those respondents have come to quickly recognize the inherent ease of implementation, robust security features and cost-savings of cloud computing.
Survey Results
Those That Have Used Cloud-Based Services are Coming Back for More
• 70 percent of companies already using cloud computing solutions are planning on moving additional applications to the cloud—and a majority of them are looking to do so in the next 12 months. This shows that respondents that have used cloud-based solutions have seen their business and operational value and want to expand that success to other application areas.
Companies’ Cloud Fears are Waning…
• 62 percent of all respondents have considered or are considering cloud computing.
• When asked what would change their minds about cloud computing, respondents ranked more mature solutions and better integration with existing systems as their top two needs (33 percent for maturity, 32 percent for integration).
… but Security Concerns and Existing Investments Remain Biggest Roadblocks to Further Adoption
• Companies remain hesitant because of perceived security issues. The findings show that security concerns were the leading reason given by respondents in all categories for not moving forward with cloud-based applications. 46 percent of respondents that had considered cloud-based applications chose security as the main reason for not moving forward. This was also true across a majority of industries, including financial services (76 percent), energy (75 percent), government (67 percent), retail (61 percent) and technology (40 percent).
• The investments made in current IT infrastructure and worries about integration also prevented companies from taking the next step toward cloud computing. 32 percent of respondents that had considered cloud-based applications named existing infrastructure investments as the reason for not moving to the cloud; while 26 percent said that legacy/integration worries had stopped them from going any further. Between the time and effort spent building their current infrastructure and fears around integrating existing systems into the cloud, respondents and their companies have been afraid to abandon what they know for what they don’t.
• Cost also continued to be a concern for those considering cloud computing, especially among government (67 percent), healthcare (52 percent) and legal (40 percent) respondents. This may have more to do with this year’s decreased IT budgets than the expense of cloud services.
• However, of those that have already implemented the cloud, 81 percent of legal, 77 percent of retail, 75 percent of government, 74 percent of technology, 72 percent of healthcare and 68 percent of financial services respondents were planning on moving additional applications to it in the future—showing that these fears can be overcome.
Certain Industries are Moving Faster than Others
• The top three industries adopting cloud computing solutions…”
For the full article, click here!
Posted in Cloud Architecture, Cloud Availability, Cloud Computing, Cloud Providers, Cloud Recovery | Tagged: Cloud Computing, cloud platform, cloud services, What is the Cloud? | Leave a Comment »
Posted by brennels on February 8, 2010
When the term cloud computing first generated a buzz it was typically referring to utilizing software as a service or otherwise known in the industry as (SaaS). Google is probably most known software as a service but then others in the social media industry rapidly shot up like Facebook, Twitter and My Space as well as other hosted applications that were more business critical. Although SaaS was one of the first technical adoptions of the cloud in the last few years, Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) have also become viable solutions and maybe more beneficial to companies than just software.
Software as a Service (SaaS)
Other than the search engines like Google, Bing or Yahoo what can these (SaaS) models do to help a company. The Social Media applications are quickly replacing traditional marketing like print advertising so this is one area but there are many other SaaS available that can help improve efficiency and productivity. Anything from website hosting, content management and or just a dependable database for backend infrastructure are all available for a quick deployment.
Platform as a Service (PaaS)
Platform as a Service is more popular and mostly utilized by the developer community and was likely started with the introduction and popularity of Linux open source code. This cloud computing model provides a platform for developers to code, test and experiment new software without the complexity of setting up and maintaining test, development and production servers.
Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)
Infrastructure as a service is probably where many large companies like HP, IBM, Amazon and Rackspace are focusing their attention. This service model provides both companies as well as consumers the ability to utilize already optimized and maintained virtualized resources at a data center via a web service or VPN connection. Many will use this to backup, recover data files and or full servers in the event of a loss and that resource needs to be recovered. It can also serve as the primary server and actually run the application workload from this location alleviating the company IT staff of having to procure and or maintain the server infrastructure and or application expertise to provide that service. This is typically billed on a per use basis so only the resources, processing and or storage used is billed at the end of each month.
These are the big three but is there a forth that is already in progress. It is already being adopted by some companies as well as being discussed and that is Recovery as a Service (RaaS). Stay tuned for the next blog post Cloud 101 – Recovery as a Service: How it works
Posted in Backup and Recovery, Cloud Architecture, Cloud Computing, Cloud Recovery, IaaS, PaaS (Platform as a Service), RaaS, SaaS, Server Recovery | Tagged: Cloud Computing, Cloud Recovery, IaaS, PaaS, Platform as a Service, Infrastructure as a Service, software as a service, Recovery as a service, RaaS, SaaS | 1 Comment »
Posted by amcanty on February 4, 2010
Auditability must be a goal
By Robert Grapes
February 3, 2010 03:00 PM EST
“The drive toward cloud computing continues to be a dominant infrastructure deployment theme for organizations looking to reduce costs, increase storage and optimize mobility. What many fail to realize is the trend towards cloud computing is continually forcing IT managers to rethink fundamental security issues as a barrage of new attacks and exploits continue to assault the cloud every day.
Compelling for any business model, cloud computing delivers a scalable, accessible and high-performing computing infrastructure that comes at an appealing price for organizations.
Similarly, operating in the cloud allows for the convergence of new and emerging technologies. Providing appeal to both the provider and the consumer, cloud computing enables new application deployment and recovery options, as well as new application business models. However, cloud computing may not be the panacea that the press and many organizations make it out to be. We must have trust and confidence in the platform on which we are deploying our applications and data. We must be able to maintain control of the information that drives our business. Ultimately, we must be able to prove that trust to our auditors. The solution, having not yet been defined, could be deemed “auditability.”
Cloud computing is made possible and viable through its use of new and emerging technologies. These same technologies also introduce new security threats that if left unaddressed could prove to be the Achilles’ heel of cloud computing. Auditability stems from an understanding of the threats and risks that face an application and its associated data. It is deployed to any system or platform and makes certain the commensurate security measures are taken to mitigate risks and monitor and address the threats. Traditional security risks and more sophisticated attacks are all threats that plague the deployment of applications and data in the cloud. It’s of the utmost importance that organizations understand and increase the auditability of their cloud computing deployments to ensure the best security solutions are in place to protect their systems.
Threat and Risk Assessment
Threat and risk assessments provide insight to the potential weaknesses of systems and applications that could be exploited by an attacker for malicious purposes. Often these assessments identify weaknesses that could provide opportunities for damage through simple negligence. An attack analysis, as part of these assessments, places one in the mindset of an attacker for the purposes of identifying all the possible ways a system could be breached. One should not be afraid of performing an attack analysis on existing systems and applications as it is better to find potential areas to exploit prior to deployment than by a malicious attacker once in production. To make an attack analysis more thorough, one should include external and internal attacks, static and dynamic analysis attacks, and manual and automated attack types. The more tests that are run, the more resilient the auditability reports will be to auditor scrutiny and the more confident an organization will be placing applications and data into the cloud.
Virtualization
Virtualization is the cornerstone technology upon which the cloud computing infrastructure is built. Without it, the capital and operating costs of the cloud would simply outweigh the return. With it, providers are able to deliver near-instant recovery options and portability, using snapshots and elastic computing capabilities. This offers cloud consumers the benefit of on-demand utilization of resources to meet peak computing needs without requiring the overhead and cost of standby and latent computing power, all at very reasonable costs.”
For the rest of the article, click here!
Posted in Cloud Computing, Security | Tagged: Barriers of Cloud Computing, Cloud Architecture, Cloud Security, coud, coud computing, Private Cloud | Leave a Comment »
Posted by brennels on February 3, 2010
Posted from http://www.pronetworks.org/ By Emil Protalinski February 1, 2010 3:24 PM
“As expected, Microsoft has announced the general availability of the Azure platform (Windows Azure, SQL Azure, and AppFabric) in 21 countries.applications and services with the support of the full Service Level Agreements (SLAs). The Windows Azure platform AppFabric Service Bus and Access Control will continue to be free until April 2010 for those that sign up for a commercial subscription.Technology Preview (CTP) to the production code (Microsoft did not charge for Windows Azure platform usage incurred during January).solutions to their customers. Billing and SLAs for all commercial accounts technically begins today. If you choose not to upgrade to the production code, you should know that CTP accounts are being disabled today and any Windows Azure Storage is being made read-only. “
Starting today, Microsoft customers and partners in those regions will be able to launch their Azure production
The final release was available last month, and since then Redmond says thousands of customers have moved from the Community
This month though, Microsoft’s partners will be able to begin selling paid commercial subscriptions based on their own
Posted in Azure, PaaS (Platform as a Service) | Tagged: Cloud Computing, Microsoft Azure, Microsoft Partners, SharePoint, SQL Server | Leave a Comment »
Posted by amcanty on February 2, 2010
Posted by Michael Vizard Jan 29, 2010 10:06:23 AM
There’s a lot of debate these days about when to use cloud computing and for what types of applications. Given the relatively early days of the concept, that’s understandable. But some people fail to appreciate some of the subtleties of cloud computing. It’s not an all-or-nothing proposition for applications. Rather than considering which applications to run in the cloud, IT organizations need think about application workloads.
To get to that level of thinking, however, IT organizations need to start “decomposing” their applications to determine the characteristics of those workloads. With that issue in mind, Unisys has comes up with a few guidelines as part of its Cloud IT Management Advisory Service to determine what type of application workloads to run in the cloud:
- Numerical processing intensive — Applications that process large data sets (dozens of sources, millions of records, gigabytes of data), involving iterative calculations, data transformations and data-driven matching. These applications typically run for many hours and must complete in tight operational timeframes (statement generation and rendering, risk calculators, general ledger, etc.).
- Request/response — Applications that provide a large population of users’ business intelligence by making access to disparate data sources transparent.
- Event-driven — Users are presented with data changes every second that affect models they are running. Users must make decisions frequently based on those models (trading environments).
- High concurrency/high throughput — Typified by Internet-facing applications that must respond to massive fluctuations in demand while providing rich media content to users.
- Ubiquitous user — Typified by the need to allow a user multiple presences through different media (webcasts, telepresence, etc.).
- I/O-intensive – Workloads that have a lot of back-and-forth for data requests and use over the network.
According to Brian Ott, Unisys vice president of global services, other utilitarian types of applications that are natural for the cloud include anything to do with security and backup and recovery. In the not-too-distant future, he says desktop virtualization as a cloud computing server also will make a lot of sense. But it might not make sense to rewrite a 20-year-old application that includes the company’s core business logic just to run it in the cloud.
At the end of the day, it’s all about what type of data needs to be where. Cloud computing is definitely a way to get more IT bang for the dollar and change the relationship between the business and IT. But like all IT tools, it needs to be applied with care.
For the full article, click here!
Posted in Cloud Computing | Tagged: Barriers of Cloud Computing, Cloud Computing, Cloud Infrastructure, Cloud Storage | Leave a Comment »
Posted by brennels on February 1, 2010
I have been receiving many questions recently regarding what is the cloud so I decided that I would start my own Cloud 101 series to help answer this often confusing question. I was working on an upcoming article and had a few questions of my own regarding cloud computing and decided to do a little research myself. What I discovered was everyone has their own opinion and definition of the cloud depending on what they are trying to sell. The Wikipedia definition of cloud computing is somewhat confusing, but probably more due to it being written by engineers that for the layman. If you have seen any of the IBM television commercials they describe the “Cloud” as “workload optimized service management platform” but what does that mean? Basically, how I explain it to the average person is that it is a “Virtualized Data Center” and that is it in the most simplistic form. Now that data center can be used for many purposes which I will describe in future articles. In the mean time here is a great video that is very effective at explaining cloud computing in under 3 minutes.
Stay tuned! For the next Cloud 101 blog post or subscribe to the left above and receive e-mails when new articles on Cloud Computing and Cloud Recovery are updated.
Posted in Cloud Architecture, Server Recovery | Tagged: Cloud Computing 101, Cloud Recovery, What is the Cloud? | 1 Comment »
Posted by brennels on January 28, 2010
Orginally Posted by ZDNet January 21st.
Chris Pyle, CEO of Champion Solutions Group, spent a bit of time talking about the needs of mid market companies and how cloud computing could be a useful approach to facing their IT requirements while holding the line on spending. The survey data that I’ve seen on cloud computing adoption and the experiences of Champion Solutions in the market seem to align very nicely. I guess that either means we’re both seeing the same things or, we’re both way off base. I guess only time will tell.
Although I don’t have the space to present the topics we discussed point by point, I can offer a summary.
- Small to medium sized organizations as well as local and state (or region) governments are facing serious budgetary challenges. They’d really like to have all of the IT tools that bigger organizations use because they face the same conditions, but they have neither the desire nor the budget to maintain a datacenter or an IT organization made up of developers, administrators, help desk personnel and the like. Outsourcing some or, perhaps, all of these functions could make a great deal of sense.
Read the rest of the article here
Posted in Backup and Recovery, Champion Cloud Services, Cloud Architecture, PaaS (Platform as a Service) | Tagged: Champion Cloud Services, Cloud Recovery, Double-Take Backup | Leave a Comment »
Posted by brennels on January 25, 2010
By Carl Brooks, Technology Writer
14 Jan 2010 | SearchCloudComputing.com
“HP and Microsoft have announced a $250 million partnership to develop integrated data center products that HP will offer as the HP Private Cloud. It will feature Microsoft’s fledgling data center automation suite, which includes virtualization hypervisor Hyper-V, and dashboard tools designed to help Windows-based data centers shift towards private cloud computing environments.
HP is already providing server hardware for Windows Azure, Microsoft’s Platform as a Service business, and the one hundred and fifteen billion-dollar firm said that HP Private Cloud products created under this new agreement will feature built-in integration with Azure services, giving Microsoft a captive audience for its new platform.
“This approach enables customers to integrate private or public cloud computing models as their business requires, and in the future, services built on Microsoft Windows Azure,” said an HP spokesperson.”
Read the full article here on SearchCloudComputing.com
Posted in Azure, Cloud Architecture, Cloud Computing, Cloud Recovery, HP, PaaS (Platform as a Service) | Tagged: Azure, Cloud Computing, Hewlett Packard, kumbaya, Microsoft | 1 Comment »
Posted by amcanty on January 22, 2010
Posted by Alessandro Perilli | Thursday, January 21, 2010
A lot of discussion is going on these days around some performance issues that Amazon customers are suffering with the Elastic Computing Cloud (EC2).
The discussion was triggered by Alan Williamson, a prominent voice in the Java community, who posted an interesting description of his 3-years experience with EC2.
Williamson suggests that Amazon is allowing EC2 over-subscription at the point that the cloud is so crowded to generate some serious latency in the internal network, which impacts on the performance of any multi-tier application that resides on multiple virtual machines.
Another Amazon customer, David Mok, CTO at OleOle.com, suggests instead that the overall performance degradation depends on some differences (the CPU) in the physical hardware that is below the cloud, and that the cloud platform, the Amazon implementation of Xen, is incapable to fully abstract.
Christopher Hoff, former Chief Security Architect at Unisys and now Director of Cloud and Virtualization Solutions at Cisco, jumps in to comment the whole thing.
His very interesting point is that over-subscription is perfectly normal – modern networks are designed around such model – while over-capacity is an issue that we are going to have with cloud computing as much as we already have it with telecom networks.
He goes one highlighting that at today in cloud computing there’s nothing like a throughput SLA because:
…Your virtual interface ultimately is bundled together in aggregate with other tenants colocated on the same physical host and competes for a share of pipe (usually one or more single or trunked 1Gb/s or 10Gb/s Ethernet.) Network traffic in terms of measurement, capacity planning and usage must take into consideration the facts that it is both asymmetric, suffers from variability in bucket size, and is very, very bursty.
This complicates things when you consider that at this point scaling out in CPU is easier to do than scaling out in the network. Add virtualization into the mix which drives big, flat, L2 networks as a design architecture layered with a control plane that is now (in the case of Cloud) mostly software driven, provisioned, orchestrated and implemented, and it’s no wonder that folks like Google, Amazon and Facebook are desparate for hugely dense, multi-terabit, wire speed L2 switching fabrics and could use 40 and 100Gb/s Ethernet today…
For the full article, click here!
Posted in Cloud Architecture, Cloud Availability, Cloud Computing, Cloud Providers | Tagged: Cloud, cloud backup and recovery, Cloud Computing, Cloud Recovery, Cloud Storage, Private Cloud | 1 Comment »
