Overcoming institutional fears of cloud computing
Grazed from ThoughtsOnCloud. Author: Allan Tate.
In my previous post, I addressed some of the inherent fears that some organizations have regarding cloud computing. Today, I’d like to take a look at why these institutions, and the people who lead them, might fear the cloud. I propose that it comes down to four basic concerns:
Fear of the Unknown: What is cloud computing? Is it just a place to store music files? If you asked a room full of ten IT specialists, you’d get ten different answers. Further, if you searched the web, you’d find answers, but many of them would be wrong. Cloud is a concept that is quickly evolving, and behind this concept are hardened data centers that follow best practices for security and regulatory compliance. Both shared and dedicated machines are available to be provisioned at a moment’s notice. You can decide where your data resides, how it is protected and how it is accessed. Like electric power, the cloud provides access to compute power on demand. Unlike electric power, the source can be specified down to the exact physical machine dedicated to running your workloads…
The big incumbents in enterprise computing are doing a lot of keeping up with the times this month. In the latest example, SAP AG of Germany, the world’s second-largest maker of business software, announced Tuesday that it was teaming with VMware, a maker of virtualization software, to offer both SAP software and its fast data analysis tool, Hana, as a cloud-based service.
RapidScale, a leader in cloud computing solutions, has established one of the most expansive and comprehensive cloud solution sets in the market today. Aqua Connect is one of the most forward thinking and innovative development companies in the world having developed Mac Remote Desktop Services for Mac OS X.
Cloud services provider (CSP) Virtustream is now Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act-compliant (HIPAA-compliant), and its cloud infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) meets the federal standards for breach notification, privacy and security in healthcare records management.
As Microsoft prepares for its upcoming Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC) in July, the company has commissioned a study that shows that partners that have implemented cloud computing into their offering perform better than those who have not. The study, commissioned by Microsoft and conducted by IDC, showed that cloud partners – those with more than 50 percent of their revenue from cloud — have 1.5 times the gross profit percentage versus other partners.
In an effort to make it easier to test and deploy applications to one or multiple clouds, open data services providers GoGrid is releasing the blueprints for its 1-Button Deploy solutions on OpenOrchestration.org. According to the company, the release of the blueprint will provide enterprises with the ability to quickly and easily evaluate and run best-of-breed open source Big Data solutions.
The concept of cloud computing, or running multiple computational systems on a network, is not a new one, of course. But it’s often fascinating to note the history of computing, from IBM’s 50th anniversary of the mainframe earlier this year to time-sharing on a CPU mainframe.
Leading file sharing service Hightail today announced that it has joined the Cloud Security Alliance (CSA), a not-for-profit organization with a mission to promote the use of best practices for providing security assurance within Cloud Computing, and to provide education on the uses of Cloud Computing to help secure all other forms of computing. In addition to joining the CSA, Hightail was invited to join the Skyhigh CloudTrust™ Program and awarded the Enterprise-Readiness rating for fully satisfying the most stringent requirements for data protection, identity verification, service security, business practices, legal protection, and enterprise-readiness, developed in conjunction with the CSA.
I can’t make this stuff up: Oracle is going to provide you some cloud options. That seems like a major shift for a company that has long derided the cloud and then tried to redefine "cloud" to mean, basically, hosting. But there’s a catch: Oracle is not exactly offering cloud services but instead, in a bid to block defections to competitors such as Workday and Salesforce.com, is letting customers convert their existing annual support purchases into software subscriptions for its SaaS applications.