Grazed from CompositeCode.  Author: Editorial Staff.

For a quick recap of last years Deploycon & related talks, check out my “Day #3 => DeployCon && Enterprise && Data Gravity” entry from last year.  PaaS Systems aren’t always effectively distributed. Heroku has fallen over every time east-1 has gone down at AWS. Not that I’m saying they’ve done bad, just pointing that out. With Cloud Foundry, there’s several key SPOFs (Single Points of Failure), and with all PaaS Systems the data tier is often the neglected pairing of the system. I’ve been wanting to write about this for a few months now and Deploycon has lit a fire for me to do just that.

Deploycon – “Platform Services and Developer Expectations”

I’m on a panel at Deploycon titled “Platform Services and Developer Expectations” and this leads right back around to that. This SPOF issue is concerning to me as PaaS Providers talk up the offerings more and more with little light actually shone on this issue. In some ways each is moving away form their respective SPOFs, but overall they’re all pretty prevalent throughout. For security, each has a non-distributed database, which technically needs backed up still – no clear replication or other mechanisms setup to ensure data integrity in a failure situation. Of course, the huge saving grace with a PaaS, is that if the overall system goes down or a SPOF blows up, all the existing deployed applications will generally continue to run. Unless of course the routing and networking are also SPOF. This is the largest glaring concern with PaaS Systems that I see today….

Grazed from Sys Con Media.  Author: Patrick Burke.

Gartner has been looking toward the future, and what it sees is a future in the cloud.  Gartner believes that service-led solutions – software as a service (SaaS), infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS) – will usurp more traditional sourcing methods by 2015.

IT companies will need to "bridge legacy offerings and new services" to pave a way to the cloud for service providers, according to an article on CloudComputingNews.net.  Cloud services appear to be growing at a much quicker rate than other segments of the IT services market. Hardware and software support will grow slowly compared to IaaS and BPaaS (business process as a service), which will grow 13.1% and 47.3% in 2013, according to Gartner…

Grazed from TechTarget.  Author: Bridget Botelho.

Any financial adviser will tell you it’s better to own than to lease, but that pragmatism is ignored when it comes to cloud computing.  More and more companies pay cloud providers monthly subscription fees for instant access to the latest and greatest infrastructure, platforms and applications that they can’t afford to buy outright. The market for leased IT platforms, applications and operations is so hot right now that companies can get just about anything as a service (XaaS) — and they seek out those services with the hope of lowering IT expenses.

Nearly three quarters — 73% — of IT pros using public cloud services listed cost savings as the primary reason, according to a 2012 TechTarget survey of 1,500 IT professionals…

Grazed from TechTarget.  Author: Alex Barrett.

Until recently, IT pros responsible for servers, network components, storage infrastructure and applications could be forgiven for not thinking much about the future of desktops that run Windows. What happened on the desktop stayed on the desktop. But like a distant war that is suddenly being fought on native soil, Microsoft’s struggles to revitalize and preserve its venerable desktop business are having an impact in the data center.

The assault on the Windows desktop is intense. Microsoft’s OS business is under fire from Apple and consumer devices. The profitable Office productivity applications are under attack by countless new Software as a Service (SaaS), mobile and Web apps. Even back-end services such as Exchange, SharePoint and Active Directory are no longer safe from incursions by cloud-based products…

Grazed from TechTarget.  Author: James Furbush.

Aside from pricey legacy identity and access management vendors like Oracle, Novell and CA, a new breed of SaaS products has popped up in recent years to help organizations better integrate mobile endpoints and SaaS apps into their environments through single sign-on. This movement is turning "a once-boring enterprise niche into something sexy," said Gregg Kreizman, an identity access management analyst at Gartner, Inc., a Stamford, Conn.-based research firm.

As is often the case with enterprise technology, both types of identity management vendors — which exist to serve distinct market needs — have started offering similar feature sets as one another to provide customers a full range of governance, provisioning and de-provisioning, group policy, and single sign-on access…

Grazed from Business2Community. Author: Lindsey Nelson.

If you’re thinking about switching your business to the cloud, it’s good to know a few pieces of cloud-cabulary so you don’t get lost in the shuffle. Like all IT and most major companies, where there’s a product, there’s an acronym. And cloud has quite a few. This post gives a quick and dirty overview of the what, why, and who of software as a service.

What is Software as a Service?

Before I start, let me say one thing: there’s no such thing as an actual cloud your documents float in and when you need them you make it rain (that’d be pretty cool though, a bunch of corporate executives doing the rain dance to get last quarters financial report?) So what is it? Webopedia defines it as the model where applications are hosted by a vendor or service provider and made available to customers over a network. This network is typically the internet…

Grazed from TheVarGuy. Author: Editorial Staff.

Carbonite (NASDAQ: CARB) alluded to a database backup offering earlier in 2013, and now the company has delivered, offering a database backup solution as an add-on to its BusinessPremier plan for small businesses. For Carbonite’s resellers, the new offering expands the breadth of offerings they can deliver to their end user customers, enabling them to back up databases ranging from MySQL to SQL to Microsoft Exchange, Sharepoint and Oracle, as well as Hyper-V in the virtual environment, said David Hauser, senior director, Channel Development.

“We’re also able to back up local, open and locked files [such as] Outlook PST files, and it also has the capability of a Windows system state,” he said. “These are the databases that the majority of small businesses use and this is where the vast majority of demand has come from, so we think it’s a very good fit.”…

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Dan Sullivan.

Platform as a Service offers advantages over managing your own development infrastructure and allows more time to focus on designing and coding. While PaaS may be the preferred choice for new projects, it may not be a good fit for existing, legacy development efforts. Here are five things to consider before moving your legacy development projects to Platform as a Service (PaaS).

1. How will you use PaaS?

Different companies have different uses for PaaS to suit their IT environments and goals. First you must figure out how to incorporate PaaS into your organization. Some services allow you to move computation easily to the cloud while maintaining other functions on local resources. For example, Pi Cloud provides an application program interface (API) for copying your local Python code to the cloud and running it there, while your development tools and code repositories can stay local…

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Dan Sullivan.

Platform as a Service vendors initially distinguished themselves by the languages they supported, such as Java or .NET, but they have evolved to support multiple languages — and also data stores, messaging services, application services and portability with Infrastructure as a Service. Developers have a wide range of PaaS options from which to choose. While it might appear that PaaS vendors are quite similar, there are many differences.

Consider what types of controls, if any, developers have over infrastructure configuration. Ideally, the PaaS provider manages implementation details, but sometimes developers need more control. It’s also important to consider the supporting services offered, such as relational and NoSQL databases. And if you are concerned about vendor lock-in, assess how difficult it will be to move to another PaaS provider once you have developed your application to use the services your current PaaS offers. To keep up with changes in the market, take a look at these key features to keep in mind when choosing a PaaS for multiple project development…