Category: Cloud

The in-depth interviews discovered that cloud computing, though in its early stages, is already benefiting companies.

Almost half of executives interviewed said that cloud solutions help them reach business goals with greater flexibility and innovation.

Among those, 22 interviews were done with CIOSs, VPs, and technology directors at small, medium, and large companies across a variety of industries.

There are gaps between the technology itself and the products being offered by vendors as well as cultural and organizational challenges with IT.

http://it.tmcnet.com/topics/it/articles/86228-another-study-sees-value-cloud-computing.htm

Let’s face it, it’s an ongoing battle to get security, performance, reliability, auditing, and availability all right. Even when the benefits are undeniable, it’s still a good idea to go slow, a lesson that should have been relearned with server virtualization.

Boosting server utilization by a factor of 10 and consolidating lots of underused systems is a great thing, but the virtual server sprawl that quickly followed is a management nightmare.

Moving fully to cloud computing implies virtualizing storage and networking and putting a healthy bet on the capabilities of those not-so-mature management tools.

The main business reasons for moving to private clouds are lowering ongoing costs, reducing capital investment, and accelerating delivery of services.

http://www.informationweek.com/news/software/hosted/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=224900576

Cloud computing is the term for a new form of distributed computing which allows consumers, enterprises and governments to store their data and their applications on networked servers rather than on local computers and data centers and to tap into computer applications and other software via the cloud, freeing themselves from building and managing their own technology infrastructure In addition to reducing operational costs, analysts say the shift to cloud technologies allows radical business innovation and new business models.

Some industry experts in Europe believe only giants like Google and Amazon can achieve the necessary economies of scale in building the massive data centers that underpin the cloud. They fear that national projects will be white elephants and question whether big enterprise customers like Danone and Carrefour will be willing to pay the price of French sovereignty. “Interconnection of hybrid clouds is not a simple problem and the risk is that the benefits come slowly and that local champions cannot grow and reach critical mass fast enough,” say Pierre Liautaud, a Frenchman who has worked in the tech industry for 25 years, holding executive positions at both IBM and Microsoft and heading up start-ups. He is currently organizing a November conference for the European Tech Tour Association to highlight European start-up companies in cloud computing.

Most start-ups in Europe are concentrating on creating applications that run on top of infrastructure built and run by American companies like Google, Amazon and Microsoft. Trouble is, some say that it will be impossible for European companies to be competitive if they don’t control the underlying cloud computing infrastructure and infrastructure software. They argue that Europe can not afford to allow American companies to control a technology that may underpin every consumer, business and government service of the future.

“Europe can not stay away from owning its own cloud infrastructure,” says Francois Bourdoncle, CEO of Exalead, a Paris-based software provider which is positioning itself as a provider of infrastructure software for the cloud. “It is a critical element of competitiveness, not even considering the sovereignty part of it, to control where your data is hosted, how it is being used and how you access it.”

Bourdoncle and others say the industry is at an inflection point. Some liken it the moment in time to when Europe realized that computer chips would be key to the future and needed to have its own global champion. The French and Italian governments set about fusing two national semiconductor companies to create STMicroelectronics, today one of the top ten global chip companies.

At stake is a market that tech consultancy IDC projects will grow from $17.4 billion in 2009 o $44 billion in 2013.

But in order for cloud computing to reach that kind of market size, the industry has to address important issues that are alarming consumers, businesses and governments. Challenges include keeping data and systems secure, maintaining the privacy of people and organizations, avoiding being locked into one cloud provider and creating the right regulatory balance between customer protection and business efficiency, according to a report prepared by Accenture and the World Economic Forum.

Distributing the storage of data is supposed to make it safer but many European companies, particularly those in Germany, are reluctant to allow American companies to transport their data outside of a country’s national borders.

European companies can and should build infrastructure software because that is where companies can make the most margins and it will bring more choice and competition to the market, he says.

http://www.informilo.com/20100518/cloud-computing-borders-may-be-horizon-europe-276

At the EMC World 2010 show here May 10, EMC officials announced a converged networking strategy aimed at data centers. The strategy includes expanded networking services, analysis tools for assessing converged networking efforts, and extended reseller agreements with Brocade and Cisco Systems.

In a question-and-answer session with reporters and analysts after his keynote address at the show, EMC CEO Joe Tucci said that as enterprises grow the use of data center virtualization technologies and start their migration to private cloud computing environments, demand for converged networks will increase. In a federated environment, Tucci said, multiple data centers will be viewed as a single pool of resources, and IT administrators will be looking to move workloads and stored data around that pool.

Those services include network assessment, planning and implementation, with support for a number of protocols, from FCoE (Fibre Channel over Ethernet), CEE (Converged Enhanced Ethernet), iSCSI and NAS (network-attached storage).

In the third quarter, EMC also will start selling 10 Gigabit Ethernet switches from Brocade and Cisco, among other networking vendors.

In a report issued May 10, Charles King, an analyst with Pund-IT Research, said EMC’s SAN (storage-area network) experience and its partnerships with the likes of Cisco and Brocade puts it in a good position to help enterprises in their push for more converged networking environments.

http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Enterprise-Networking/EMC-Networking-Strategy-Includes-Cisco-Brocade-Partnerships-147031/

When you convert to SaaS, your data will be transported across the Internet to the SaaS vendor site. If their application is not secure, your critical business information will potentially be exposed to anyone who can take advantage of such a vulnerability.

– Review the vendor’s service history
– Application and infrastructure security requirements
– Solid Service Level Agreements
– No silent fixing
– Data recovery
– Encryption standards and key management
– No weak links in the security access chain
– Ownership

Finally, you need to remember that software is secure only when it’s built that way, so when choosing a sound SaaS solution, be sure that the security has been checked for all vulnerabilities so that it’s secure for all of today’s distributed software portfolios.

http://www.ctoedge.com/content/security-checklist-deploying-software-service