Author: David

Grazed from ZDNet. Author: Jack Clark.

All around us the Googles, Facebooks, Microsofts and Amazons are building datacentres so they can store companies’ information, allowing organisations to spend less on their on-premise IT equipment.

According to the digital cognoscenti, this breed of cloud computing is the way of the future. But what if there was another way to create a global cloud, one that didn’t involve cementing the dominance of global technology companies like Microsoft, Google and their ilk? Would you use it?…

Grazed from AOL Government. Author: Vic Berger.

With the government’s Shared First initiative, the emergence of the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP) and ongoing budget pressures, migrating to the cloud has moved from an ideal to reality for many government agencies. However, along with the efficiencies and cost savings associated with cloud computing comes a number of information security risks that must be overcome.

Cyber security guidelines are continually evolving for the cloud computing environments that agencies are currently, or will soon be, operating. While the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), issued its first draft Guidelines on Security and Privacy in Public Cloud Computing nearly a year ago, a widely accepted IT service management framework like Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL v3), for instance, has yet to be updated for managing a cloud computing infrastructure. Simply put, a standard, industry-wide set of best practices for securing the cloud is still taking shape…

Grazed from Channel EMEA. Author: Editorial Staff.

A new survey of 300 senior IT professionals highlights a worrying lack of awareness of the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) guidance and recommendations on cloud computing, with over 40 per cent of professionals admitting they are unaware of them. Of those IT decision makers that are of aware of the ICO guidelines, less than 27 per cent admit their organisations are compliant.

CipherCloud, the leader in cloud information protection, commissioned the independent survey of 300 IT professionals across key industries including financial services, healthcare, and government between 15/11/2012 and 23/11/2012 by Opinion Matters. The survey was targeted at leading enterprise organisations in the UK…

Grazed from ComputerWorld. Author: Thomas J. Trappler.

One of the biggest stumbling blocks for companies contemplating entrusting a cloud-computing vendor with their data is the risk of unintended data exposure. A lot of data is sensitive. It might contain employees’ financial information, patients’ statutorily protected health information, other regulated information or proprietary intellectual property. Quite often, companies feel more control when they keep that sort of data in-house. But the risk that a cloud vendor might not handle your information as securely as you’d like can be mitigated.

One good way to do that is with encryption. An encryption algorithm encodes data, rendering it unreadable to those who don’t possess the decoding key. The idea is that, if encrypted data falls into the wrong hands, it will be of little or no use without the encryption key…

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: Chris Talbot.

Following the launch of its open hybrid cloud management platform, dubbed CloudForms, in June, open source company Red Hat (NYSE: RHT) has made an incremental update to the platform while also announcing two new cloud solutions bundles and a cloud services offering.

CloudForms was designed as a cloud management platform that enables enterprises to create and manage IaaS hybrid clouds while also making self-service computing resources available to their end users in a managed, governed and secure way. The CloudForms 1.1 release expands on that summer product launch with additional language support to push deployments out to Asia-Pacific and Europe regions. Specifically, Red Hat has added support for Korean, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese and Portuguese…

Grazed from ZDNet. Author: Jack Clark.

Big data is the latest trend to obsess the technology industry, but companies need to be careful about where they deploy its tools or they could find themselves at the sharp end of a stinging bill. Many cloud computing vendors offer big-data tools that, paired with the ability to rent scalable on-demand compute and storage resources, can provide a potent on-paper justification for analysing data in the cloud.

However, the costs and time it takes to upload large quantities of data into and out of a cloud could mean that businesses that crunch datasets could be hit by unforeseen costs. "Data has a lot of inertia," Charles Zedlewski, Hadoop-vendor Cloudera’s vice president of products, says. "If you run [Hadoop] in the public cloud, that application is going to spit off data. If your data is generated in the [cloud] datacentre, your Hadoop [cluster] is going to be in that datacentre."…

Grazed from CIOZone. Author: Editorial Staff.

For IT security, Gartner analysts are predicting that 2013 is going to be about expansion of cloud computing and the struggle by the enterprise to achieve appropriate security for it. According to Gartner, by 2015, 10% of overall IT security enterprise capabilities will be delivered in the cloud. Is BYOD part of the problem or part of the Plan? What forces will shape and drive embedded cloud security managed services?

IT managers are balancing security and support concerns with the very real potential to reap significant cost and productivity benefits from trends such as BYOD. Research has shown that BYOD is just the gateway to greater business benefits…

Grazed from NetworkComputing. Author: Sreedhar Kajeepeta.

Cloud computing gives us a lot of choices of where to run workloads: our own data centers, a private cloud within a premises data center, a public cloud or a hybrid. But where workloads and services reside isn’t the conversation we need to have. Instead, we must ensure that all workloads are reliable, and that all services meet their SLAs.

For that to happen, IT and business leaders must embrace IT Service Management (ITSM). A service orientation and smart use of clouds can help with operational reliability and improved IT accountability if, as part of that transformation, you adopt some ITSM best practices. Yes, OK, I’m talking about ITIL and other frameworks, but keep reading. My message is that ITSM can’t become an end in itself; in fact, that kind of thinking gives frameworks a bad name. Frameworks are a means to an end…

Grazed from NetworkWorld. Author: Jay Alabaster.

Google has ended a free version of its Google Apps online application suite for small businesses, saying it wants to provide a stronger and more uniform experience to users. The Internet giant said Thursday in a blog post that now even small businesses with 10 or fewer users will have to pay to use its online app platform, a group that up until now has been free. All businesses will now be charged $50 per user, per year, for the service.

Google Apps will remain free for individual users, as well as existing business customers that currently use the free version. "Google Apps for Business," the company’s paid offering, provides its email, calendar and online office suite as an all-in-one service, allowing them to be used on private domain names and adding features such as 24-hour phone support. It also offers features such as an archiving service and additional storage for extra fees…

Grazed from NetworkWorld. Author: Brandon Butler.

Amazon Web Services, which Gartner recently named a market-leader in infrastructure as a service cloud computing, has the "dubious status of ‘worst SLA (service level agreement) of any major cloud provider’" analyst Lydia Leong blogged today, but HP’s newly available public cloud service could be even worse..

HP launched the general availability of its HP Compute Cloud on Wednesday along with an SLA. Both AWS and HP impose strict guidelines in how users must architect their cloud systems for the SLAs to apply in the case of service disruptions, leading to increased costs for users…