CyberSecurity Institute – Page 155 – Security News Curated from across the world

Cloud Market Share: 2 Percent, But Growing

Posted on June 4, 2010December 30, 2021 by admini

Clouds Are Customers, Not Competitors
Tier 1 Research tracks the market for third-party data center providers, a universe that includes hosting companies as well as data center developers who lease turn-key “wholesale” space. Although cloud computing is seen as a potential replacement for in-house server rooms and company-owned data centers, many cloud services require their own data center space, and lease it from colocation providers and data center operators. Piraino said cloud services are creating customers for data centers, not competition. Antonio Piraino”I believe the cloud computing growth helps the entire data center and Internet infrastructure market,” said Piraino (pictured at left).

Sean Hackett, the Research Director of CloudScape for The 451 Group, agreed that for most data center providers, cloud computing represents an opportunity, not a threat. “This will translate into increased demand for the stuff you sell,” Hackett told the audience of more than 200 data center professionals.”

Small businesses’ enthusiasm for cloud services may translate into lost customers for some providers offering shared hosting and dedicated servers.

Enterprise Adoption Growing Slowly
Hackett said enterprise use of cloud services shows a similar pattern to corporate adoption of other outsourced services.

The report predicts that enterprise adoption of “private cloud” services will accelerate over the next five years, and will boost business for third party data center outsourcing. While many cloud computing providers will occupy leased colocation or third-party data center space, some will shift their business to huge public clouds served out of massive data centers.

http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2010/06/04/cloud-market-share-2-percent-but-growing/

Keeping Cloud Costs Grounded

Posted on June 4, 2010December 30, 2021 by admini

As Andy Mulholland, global CTO at Capgemini has said, “Relatively speaking, [cloud computing] is unstoppable… The question is whether you’ll crash into it or migrate into it.”

Similar to implementing any new technology, understanding the key business needs and the technology’s role in supporting it are critical before leveraging the cloud. Unexpected high costs due to poor planning can negatively impact take-up of further cloud initiatives, so companies need to put in the appropriate upfront time conducting research. Without across-the-board involvement, the cloud could end up costing more than you think.

Identify The Right Type Of Cloud
Every cloud service and cloud architecture has different capabilities, so it’s important to determine which ones best meet your business objectives. An organization with a large internal IT estate may wish to repurpose some of this to create a private infrastructure cloud–a sound way to increase utilization of existing assets and consider the internal economics of providing IT as a service. At the other end of the spectrum, an organization with a mobile workforce that makes heavy use of business applications may find that selecting public SaaS over in-house services offers improved productivity, as well as cost savings. Each business, no matter its size, will need to determine which cloud technologies will serve them best.

Pricing Models And Vendor Lock-In
The current lack of maturity in cloud standards and the rush to innovate and differentiate means that businesses will see a similar degree of lock-in with cloud platforms comparable to competing hardware vendors 20 years ago. Not that this is a bad thing–with fewer investments in physical IT assets, the cost of switching from one platform to another is much lower, but still significant. These considerations should be factored first into decisions about the type of cloud, then into decisions about the vendors (including internal resource) that will provide the cloud assets.

Cloud purists proclaim a gospel of “pay-by-use” or “utility pricing,” but the reality is that only the largest cloud providers can operate a service with fine-grained hourly billing at a realistic rate. Cloud providers must invest in IT resources, so they prefer the financial certainty of monthly or longer subscription terms. Even if a cloud project has a known duration, the resources needed by the project may be uncertain over that time and may vary on a daily or hourly basis. Where this degree of flexibility to scale resources is required, the price plan should support this or the promise of cloud scalability cannot be realized.

Varying charges for compute, storage, bandwidth and related services such as load balancing, make comparing competing offerings almost impossible. Idle hosting, where your application is deployed in the cloud but not running, and not accurately estimating bandwidth are two of the most prevalent unexpected costs.

http://www.forbes.com/2010/06/02/internet-software-zeus-technology-cloud-computing-10-garrett.html?boxes=Homepagechannels

Windows 2000 PCs being targeted by hackers

Posted on June 3, 2010December 30, 2021 by admini

Symantec’s detection network picked up just a handful of attempts, but the code used in the attacks is new and gives hackers a way to take over a system.

The Metasploit open-source hacking toolkit has published code that exploits the flaw, but whoever is behind these attacks isn’t using that software, Symantec Security Intelligence Manager Joshua Talbot, said.

http://www.pcadvisor.co.uk/news/index.cfm?RSS&NewsID=3225545

IT Outsourcing Trends: Slow Growth, Cloud Computing

Posted on June 3, 2010December 30, 2021 by admini

To put it plainly, 2009 was the year of IT outsourcing deal renegotiation.

“One of the dominant features of the outsourcing market over the last 12 to 15 months has been the emphasis on cost above all else,” noted research firm Morrison & Foerster in a report on IT outsourcing trends in January.

The difference is that during the boom years of 2002-2008, cost was often down-played by customers and, instead, emphasis was placed on other business benefits such as transformation, concentrating on core competencies, and speed to market.

The analysts explained that this is why so many outsourcing contracts were renegotiated in 2009, with suppliers asked to share some of the pain of their customers.

Morrison & Foerster noted that economists are now talking about a “LUV” recovery from the recession, with the letters representing the “shape” of the recovery: a very slow L-shaped recovery for Western Europe; a slower U-shaped recovery for North America; and a rapid V-shaped recovery for Brazil, Russia, India, China and other emerging economies… In turn, that means service providers will have to carefully consider how to price new transactions in light of the “twin threats of cloud computing and continuing labor cost arbitrage.”

And, if parts of the world economy move at different speeds over the next 12 months, Morrison & Foerster said service providers will need to consider more varied pricing strategies. Flexibility will be the watchword in outsourcing deals in 2010, according to Morrison & Foerster.

“In 2010, we see a continuation of the trend for shorter deals, shorter procurement processes, and an emphasis on making things work rather than engaging in complex strategies,” the analysts said.

This is likely to lead many firms to take their IT services procurement in-house—so-called DIY sourcing.

“While the DIY approach will often result in short-term transactional cost savings, inexperienced purchasers of outsourcing services usually suffer longer-term losses because they fail to identify many of the key components for long-term success.”

For example, with the increased focus on costs, buyers will try and save on governance costs and overlook necessary governance functions. Particularly when customers engage in multisourcing transactions, heightened attention to governance processes is critical.

As the recovery gets underway, banks and insurance companies — which were among the hardest hit verticals of the recession and which put more deals on hold in 2009 than other sectors — are likely to come back to the fold in 2010, particularly toward the second half, according to Morrison & Foerster.

Cloud computing is likely to take center stage in IT outsourcing in 2010, according to experts. At the very least, the dramatically lowered cost of cloud providers will become a lever for customers to use in negotiations with their traditional sourcing providers.

http://itmanagement.earthweb.com/features/article.php/3885751/IT-Outsourcing-Trends-Slow-Growth-Cloud-Computing

Logicworks Launches “The Compliant Cloud”

Posted on June 3, 2010December 30, 2021 by admini

Logicworks has been a popular choice for demanding infrastructure hosting projects for 17 years, and has a client base that includes Dow Jones, Major League Baseball Advanced Media, NBC Universal, Hearst Corporation, Starwood Hotels, nextEMR, and Wealth Management Systems.

“We looked at how the internal IT departments of Fortune 500 companies were approaching cloud-computing and decided to offer a similar approach for our enterprise clientele, a fully dedicated VMware environment with managed security features designed to meet the most stringent auditing and compliance standards,” said Logicworks President and COO Kenneth Ziegler.

Standard features include dedicated VMware ESX cloud processing and storage equipment, separation of confidential data onto independent networks in a demilitarized zone (DMZ), and advanced monitoring services like Intrusion Detection and Prevention Systems (IDS / IPS).

By keeping a razor sharp focus on our sophisticated group of clients and providing them with world-class facilities, support, and expertise, we can in fact surpass the experience of any in-house server infrastructure.”

http://www.businesswire.com/portal/site/home/permalink/?ndmViewId=news_view&newsId=20100603005236&newsLang=en

Microsoft Opens Cloud Computing Center in Taiwan

Posted on June 3, 2010December 30, 2021 by admini

Taiwan will need such servers for an initiative to build complete containerized data centers that was announced Wednesday at Computex by Taiwan’s biggest publicly funded research group, the Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI). The research organization is working to halve the cost of building containerized data centers by using standardized computing components and a set stack of software.

Microsoft and the two laptop makers plan to have prototypes of the new cloud computing servers available in the fall.

http://www.pcworld.com/article/197873/microsoft_opens_cloud_computing_center_in_taiwan.html