Time to think about cloud governance
Very few enterprises that are adopting cloud applications and infrastructure are giving enough thought to governance. The result is a mish-mash of SaaS silos and cloud islands, with very little attention paid to data consistency and integration, and even less to policy management and oversight. This is bad enough in organisations that run all their operations in the cloud, but most enterprises are not in that happy space. The vast majority have to manage a hybrid infrastructure that encompasses large swathes of existing on-premise IT assets along with a swelling population of SaaS applications and a handful of cloud infrastructure initiatives…
I’ve been advising enterprises to put a strategy in place that looks something like the schematic above, which comes from a webinar I presented on Focus.com back in April (unfortunately the webinar is now offline). Developing a strategy along these lines at least forces you to start thinking about the issues — such as how to extend access policies from the existing enterprise infrastructure out to cloud applications; how to automate other aspects of policy management; and how to manage connections between applications, data and other resources…


CumuLogic is releasing a beta version of software that lets enterprises build a private platform-as-a-service cloud for running Java applications.
EnergyHub is making smart thermostats smarter by hitching them to a large database.