Category: News

Grazed from ChannelNomics. Author: Larry Walsh.

Amazon.com became the fourth major site and/or Internet service to go dark in the past week. The sudden outage that lasted 15 minutes meant millions of online consumers couldn’t order “50 Shades of Gray” or the latest John Mayer CD.

More importantly, though, this string over service outages is drawing attention to the fragility of the Internet and cloud-based services. While cloud computing is still evolving, it has become an indispensable part of our daily work and personal life. Consider what’s happened in the past week.

• Microsoft’s Outlook.com – the recently rebranded cloud email service – was dark for many users for days. Microsoft has issued an apology to users and has restored service. However, the outage comes as Microsoft is touting the high uptime for Office 365 and other cloud services.
• The New York Times – the gray old lady and bastion of traditional journalism – was offline for several hours last Wednesday due to technical difficulties. The Washington Post described the scene as people “surging out of their offices in a blind panic” because they couldn’t catch up on the latest news trends…

Grazed from VMTurbo. Author: PR Announcement.

One of the top priorities of one of our IaaS provider customers is the ability to right-size their subscribers’ virtual machines as part of the migration process from legacy VMware managed service platforms to its IaaS platform. In the legacy environments, the service provider currently has hundreds of bespoke configurations of virtual machines. In the IaaS environment, there are a total of 13 standard virtual configurations that are offered to subscribers.

As part of their initiative, the service provider wanted to determine how to transform subscribers’ legacy virtual machine configurations to the most appropriate configuration of the 13 standard options on offer for IaaS—based on the actual workload demand. Their subscribers commonly under- or over-provision virtual machine resource capacity because they have limited insight into the true workload demands of newly-deployed virtual machines. Through this capability the service provider believes it can help its subscribers maximize the ROI from the ongoing investment in their IaaS offering, while also reducing its internal costs through standardization of the service it provides to subscribers…

For private consumers and companies investing in Cloud solutions, study after study has revealed their number one concern of moving to the Cloud is security. The vast majority of concerns take shape in the form of data security, i.e. how secure is data stored in a server housed in a data center the world away and data accessibility, i.e. strong data encryption matched with even stronger access keys.

But, if you drill into the Cloud security issues data more, you begin to see one pattern emerge time and time again. That pattern: internal security leaks vs. external security hacks. Time and time again, studies reveal the largest concerns of IT professionals and COO’s moving their company to the Cloud isn’t external data hacks; it’s actually internal data leaks.

But why is this? Why are more and more security professionals and CEO’s concerned with internal Cloud security issues over external Cloud security risks? The answer is found in the corporate Internal Cloud infrastructure.

Grazed from ADTMagazine.  Author: John K. Waters.

Java-based Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) provider Jelastic last week announced another update of its rapidly-evolving Java-and-PHP cloud hosting platform. Version 1.9.2 comes with a number of enhancements, including auto-deployment capabilities for users of GIT and SVN repositories, FTP/FTPS access to database servers, and support for PHP 5.5.

Jelastic is a Java- and PHP-based cloud hosting platform designed to run any Java application in the cloud without code or language changes, and without the need to write for specific APIs. It supports any JVM-based app, including apps developed with Java 6, Java 7, JRuby, Scala and Groovy…

HotLink Corporation, the market leader in transformation solutions for hybrid virtualization management, today announced its latest product, HotLink DR Express, the industry’s first disaster recovery (DR) and business continuity (BC) solution that leverages Amazon Web Services (AWS) to economically protect all types of VMware vSphere virtual machines, and not just mission-critical ones. HotLink DR Express provides a dramatically simple plug-in solution for VMware vCenter users to integrate robust data protection with day-to-day operational management of VMware Windows and Linux workloads. Within minutes of a failure, IT administrators can automatically recover to a DR/BC site within AWS for the cost of basic backup.

HotLink DR Express addresses the market need for a cost-effective business recovery solution for workloads that could never sustain the exorbitant cost of a replica DR site, a luxury only justified for a handful of critical applications. Until now, basic backup and/or replication have been the only affordable options, but those recovery processes require standby, available hardware and a time-intensive effort to restore the VMs.

Grazed from Wired. Author: Theo Priestley.

The IT industry moves in cycles. Much like the fashion industry, trends come and go then return with a bang. It seems that cloud Computing is about to hit that cycle now and go out of fashion faster than it came in. The NSA and PRISM break out has exposed data security at a global scale that nobody was, but really should have been, prepared for. But it’s also raised eyebrows across the C-level in the enterprise as to whether they want to invest in a cloud strategy now.

An exchange one morning with an industry analyst revealed that 100+ clients think that the US Govt has screwed over every cloud vendor with what’s happening and that on-premise software is back on the menu. What’s more, 50 of those clients have put their plans on hold. It’s hardly surprising, you could tell that the writing was on the wall when Snowden hit the headlines but the turnaround is proving a lot faster…

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Mark Eisenberg.

There is a tendency in the technology world to assume we should use the latest innovation to solve all problems. We often express this by paraphrasing the law of Maslow’s Hammer: "If you are holding a hammer, every problem looks like a nail." Cloud computing is no exception; everything is going to the cloud — or so we are told.

To follow the metaphor, whichever piece of the cloud the vendor has provided becomes the hammer, and all of a company’s workloads and applications become the nails. The question is which distribution model — IaaS, PaaS or SaaS — is right for your needs…

Grazed from CloudComputing. Author: Sam Johnston.

Today it is generally accepted that businesses large and small are actively embracing cloud computing. Speculation is over and today companies are getting down to the real business of incorporating cloud services and platforms into formal IT portfolios. Cloud is no longer seen as just a nice to have; it’s considered an enabler of business transformation – with even Gartner predicting most enterprises will have adopted cloud by the end of 2013.

Tasked with looking beyond IT that will simply get the job done, the CIO is the person driving this transformation and making decisions with the wider business context in mind. In fact, by 2015, IDC estimates that 90% of IT investments will be evaluated based on the strategic goals of a business, which means that the role of the CIO is set to become not only very challenging but much more strategically important than it is already…

Grazed from FierceCIO. Author: Derek Slater.

Cloud computing can save money–no question about it. But as more companies gain more experience in various cloud setups, a more nuanced understanding of the cost structure emerges. On ITBusinessEdge, Arthur Cole points out a couple such lessons, particularly with an eye toward public, private and hybrid differences.

One lesson is the simple observation that overprovisioning is expensive and wasteful. Okay–this has always been true in data centers and in IT generally. The naive view of the cloud was that its flexibility means you can scale your spending up or down so quickly that an overprovisioned situation would never last long. The realities of contracts, monitoring and unpredictable loads mean that it’s not always so simple…

Grazed from PRWeb. Author: PR Announcement.

Against a background where companies are coerced into recalibrating their communication applications and network infrastructure into cost-effectively supporting distributed information, cloud computing is growing in importance. Tough economic conditions have additionally reinforced the need to upgrade network infrastructure in a cost-effective, yet compelling way. While there remains an overwhelming tendency to resort to cuts in capital expenditure during periods of economic and financial crunch, companies are fast waking up to the fact that arbitrary scaling back of IT spending is not necessarily the most rewarding in the medium to long term, thus inspiring more thoughtful, and complete plans.

Against this process of re-evaluating platform strategies, devising innovative ways of creating competitive advantages, and strict monitoring of IT expenditure (both capital and operational), poised to benefit are technologies that reduce expenditures and step up competitiveness…