Technology Time Machine 2012: Beware the Physics of the Cloud
On a sunny day here in Dresden, Germany, experts at the IEEE Technology Time Machine symposium forecasted a heavy shower of cloud computing services and products in the months and years ahead.
Cloud computing is dramatically changing the way IT resources are delivered to customers, the symposium panelists agree.
Peter Magnusson, an engineering director at Google, made perhaps one of the boldest predictions about it at the symposium:
“By 2020, most computing and storage will be in the cloud, and we’ll stop calling it the cloud.”
Magnusson, referred to cloud computing as the “fourth wave” of computing following mainframes, client-servers and the Internet, and is definitely a cloud booster. “The more people use the cloud, the more they like it,” he says. In a soft but clever sales pitch, he updated his presentation with pictures, diagrams, and other data of his 5:30 a.m. run through Dresden this morning, compiled, of course, with Google cloud tools…
Cloud Storage Encryption and Healthcare Information Security
Healthcare data security has been around for a long time, but as cloud computing gains more and more traction, healthcare providers as well as healthcare software vendors, would like to use the cloud advantages and migrate healthcare data, or run healthcare software from a cloud infrastructure. In this blog I’ll focus on specific cloud computing healthcare security concerns and how cloud encryption can help meeting regulatory requirements.
The first step to securing healthcare data is to identify the type of healthcare information and the appropriate cloud storage for it. Visual healthcare data is mainly comprised of large media files such as x-ray, radiology, CT scans, and other types of video and imaging. Such files are often stored in distributed storage, such as Amazon Web Services S3 (Simple Storage Service), or Microsoft Azure blobs. Personally Identifiable Information (PII), such as patient records, is often stored in a relational database as structured data…
Spiceworks 6.0 adds cloud computing service detection to IT management toolkit
Spiceworks has launched version 6.0 of its free IT management and helpdesk platform for small-to-medium businesses (SMBs).
Chief among the updates the firm has added is a cloud discovery feature that enables administrators to see which cloud computing services are being operated by users on their network, and take appropriate action if necessary.
Unveiled today at the firm’s SpiceWorld conference in London, Spiceworks 6.0 also adds a number of new features, including the ability to customise the Spiceworks knowledge base, an optional agent to deploy on roaming devices, and a mobile admin user interface for iOS and Android devices…
CIOs Should Know: H-P Investing in Big Data, Cloud
As the Wall Street Journal’s Ben Worthen reported Wednesday, H-P said it will reallocate the $3 billion to $3.5 billion it says it will save each year from the 27,000 job cuts planned between now and 2014 to Big Data analytics, cloud computing and security infrastructure.
CIOs already purchase such technologies from Oracle, IBM, Amazon Web Services, SAP and, of course, H-P. But earmarking billions of dollars more sends a strong signal that it intends to be the CIOs’ top choice. I’m not predicting H-P will best its rivals here. The company must execute, an area where it’s been weak of late after reporting a 31% profit drop and a 3% revenue decline for its fiscal second quarter. But targeting Big Data, cloud computing and security certainly aims for CIOs’ sweet spots…
The evolutionary vs revolutionary approach to cloud computing
There’s no question that the adoption of cloud computing will continue to grow as companies look to increase efficiency and reduce costs. A recent study conducted by Dell and Intel found that an overwhelming majority (78% in Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA) and 60% in North America) of IT and business staff plan to "significantly or moderately increase use of cloud" in the next 12 months.
Furthermore, when asked what the most significant driver for adoption of cloud computing were, 64.1% in North America and 63.5% in EMEA said to "reduce spending on infrastructure (ie CapEx)". Improving the IT organisational agility was a very distant second…
Cloud Computing: Protecting Data at Rest in Public Clouds
Protecting Data at Rest
One of the important concerns on utilizing the public cloud and the SaaS-based service model is about ‘How to protect the data at rest,’ which means organizations are worried about how the data is protected in a public cloud scenario, and when the data centers are physically away from the enterprise.
There are multiple methods organizations can adopt to protect data at rest. Each of the following methods are complimentary in securing the data…
As Computing Changes, Hewlett-Packard Struggles to Follow
Hewlett-Packard, a stalwart of the previous era, finds it hard to keep up.
It is not alone in that struggle. H.P., along with well-established tech companies like Dell and Cisco Systems, is contending with a faster-than-expected move by consumers and businesses from personal computers and small racks of computer servers toward mobile phones and tablets that are connected to millions of servers, all lashed together in remote supercomputing “clouds.”
The new systems are cheaper and more flexible, which businesses found appealing in a slow-growing economy. As for consumers, they have been dazzled by the new devices and abilities of those devices enabled by the cloud…
Interest in Cloud Computing Has Peaked
Recent stats from Google’s Insights service appear to confirm the trend. Using the Google Insights service, which attempts to gauge web search interest, I compared both the terms “cloud computing” and “the cloud”. What I discovered is that interest in both terms is down significantly from its previous highs set back in June 2011. According to Google, the level of web search interest is sitting roughly at July 2010 levels and dropping fast. Although its forecast does show an uptick for the coming months, which to me seems unlikely given the trend over the last year. Keep in mind this particular stat says nothing of revenue or venture funding, it purely shows web search interest. But it’s an interesting metric none the less. I’ve include a screenshot below…
Disaster Management Checklist For Cloud Computing Customers
Last week I covered some aspects of disaster management on the cloud. I will continue where I left off and cover more details on the disaster planning part. Here is a checklist of things you must have for disaster planning and recovery.
- What are the emergency contact number and email addresse(s) of the cloud service provider (CSP)?
- Is there a backup account with another CSP? How soon can the backups be activated to restore services?
- Are the data and applications in the backup regularly updated?
- What is the minimum working subset that should be run until the system is fully restored? If this is an e-commerce website, then a tool to track customers’ existing purchases and a static page that states the website is down for maintenance could form the minimum working subset…
Days of ‘One-Size-Fits-All’ Cloud Contracts Are Numbered
Combined legal and market factors may force online companies to offer more flexible contract terms, suggests new research from Queen Mary, University of London.
The paper examines how and why companies providing IT services over the internet, also known as cloud computing, have begun to negotiate standard contract terms to better meet cloud users’ needs, minimise operating risks and address legal compliance obligations.
The research, by the Cloud Legal Project at the Centre for Commercial Law Studies at QM, is primarily based on in-depth interviews with global and UK cloud providers, cloud users, law firms and other market players…