IT
Cloud Computing Red Hat Webinar Coming April 8th, 2010
Mar 12th
Cloud computing is transforming business and IT at a rapid pace, and the Telecom industry is uniquely positioned to make it the center of their future compute initiatives and new customer offerings. Companies can rely on Red Hat to provide an extensive ecosystem of cloud technologies and services in order to enable large scale deployments for either private or public clouds.
Cloud computing is more than just technology — it touches all aspects of a business. Only by marrying the technical, business and legal dynamics of cloud computing across a robust ecosystem will Telcos be able to achieve the reduced cost, operational efficiencies and new service offerings at the scale that can be delivered by open source technologies and cloud.
Key issues reviewed in the presentation:
- existing and emerging technologies
- business challenges involved in implementing a cloud
- the importance of bridging the interoperability challenges to integrate on-premise and external clouds
- seamless application orchestration across public and private clouds
- requirements and strategies for building a robust and scalable open cloud ecosystem
- addressing security concerns
Last, we will introduce core Red Hat technologies and projects:
- Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization
- Red Hat Cloud Ecosystem and Projects
- Cloud Reference Architecture Initiative
At the end of the session Red Hat cloud experts and architects will be available for Q&A.
Speaker: Jan Mark Holzer
Jan Mark Holzer is a Senior Consulting Engineer and member of Red Hat’s CTO office. In his role as lead for Emerging Technologies he tracks new technologies for Red Hat and their applicability for customers and partners. His team is driving the integration of new capabilities/technologies across the various Red Hat product groups. He is also working with key customers and partners in adapting these new technologies into their IT infrastructure and product offerings.
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How safe is cloud computing?
Mar 12th
Stormy weather could be on the horizon for cloud computing as security experts warn not enough is being done to make sure one of the hottest IT trends is safe.
“There are many motivations for why an individual or a company would want to engage in cloud computing,” said Thomas Parenty, managing director of Parenty Consulting, a Hong Kong-based information security consulting firm. “None of them have to do with enhanced security.”
The reasons why more businesses and individuals are tapping into cloud power boil down to economics and convenience.
Broadly speaking cloud computing refers to outsourcing data once stored on privately owned computers. If you have an email account or are on a social networking site, like Facebook, you are using a cloud platform. The date is stored on servers operated by someone else, which means that data is subsequently available to use anywhere there is an Internet connection.
On an enterprise level, this allows companies to cut IT costs by reducing the amount of hardware and software they need to purchase and maintain or store information.
For individuals, photos or documents uploaded to the cloud (using services like Flickr or Google Docs) are accessible from home, from cyber cafes, or via mobile devices.
Yet the problem according to Parenty is that “you have no idea who is managing the computers with your information. You have no idea where they are. You have no idea what protections may or may not be in place to make sure your information is not stolen or disclosed or that it does not accidentally disappear.”
A recent study from CIO Magazine found that despite the increasing popularity of outsourced computing, 50 percent of CEOs surveyed said safety was one of their biggest worries.
Potential security threats to virtualized computing environments are complex.
–Jim Reavis, Cloud Security Alliance
One concern stems from the issue of security itself. Companies have in place their own firewalls and anti-virus software to protect data stored on the premises. When computing is outsourced, control of security measures is also relinquished.
“There is no Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval that says this vendor does good, secure cloud computing,” Parenty told CNN. “A company or an individual looking to move to the cloud is going to have to make a huge leap of faith that their data is being protected.”
Then there is the worry that if remote servers crash or are compromised, data, ranging from family photos to financial records from a Fortune 500 company, could simply vanish into thin air, forever.
In January 2009, for example, Ma.gnolia, a bookmark storage service (similar to Yahoo’s Delicious.com), went offline after its databases crashed. As a result, users permanently lost records of links to all of the Web pages they had stored. Now relaunched membership is now by invitation only.
“You have to have a plan B,” said Craig Balding, founder of the blog cloudsecurity.org. “If I am going to trust any online photo provider with my family photos, I need to make sure I have a local back-up or pay for a second provider, which makes it less attractive because it is going to double the cost.”
Within the data centers of cloud providers, the situation is murkier. Servers often use special virtualized software allowing data from multiple companies can be stored on one server or processor (an analogy would be instead of a cabinet containing files from a single customer, it holds files from numerous clients).
While the virtual machines cut costs and save energy, they also raise questions about data leakage as well as whether a customer would ever find out files have been breached, said Jim Reavis, executive director of Cloud Security Alliance, a non-profit advocated for cloud security standards.
Such high concentrations of information also create the perfect storm for hacking.
“We are very concerned about the bad guys using the cloud,” said Reavis. “[Hackers] have the ability to move laterally and capture a lot of customer information. When you put more eggs in one basket, the prize is much bigger.”
Bad guys also have the ability to infect clouds with spyware, botnets and other malicious programs, Reavis said.
In January, Google announced its web-based Gmail system had been compromised by a malware attack originating in China. As a result of the breach, Google announced it would stop censoring its Google.cn search engine and possibly end business operations in the country.
“We expect a whole new generation of malware to come out of things that are specifically designed for cloud providers,” said Reavis. “We can imagine some very sophisticated next-generation hyper botnets that are very hard to defend against.”
A final concern surrounds privacy.
In the United States, where many cloud companies are based, legal standards make it much easier for law enforcement to obtain data for criminal or other investigations, said Kevin Bankston, a senior staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a San Francisco-based digital rights group.
“Data stored in the cloud is substantially easier for the government to obtain than the data you store yourself because of lower legal standards,” Bankston said. “And it is easier to do it secretly. We think this is a serious security concern, and the law needs to be updated.”
Despite what seems to be a deluge of fears surrounding computing-in-the-sky, cloud providers say they are working hard to make sure their cloud services safe.
“This obviously is something we have been worrying about,” said Huang Ying, IBM China Research Lab associate director who leads one of the company’s cloud computing projects in China. “We need to remember this is just getting started and the requirements and challenges are just coming out.” Full Source CNN
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Why marketers can’t ignore the cloud computing revolution
Mar 11th
What’s the difference between a television and a movie theater? Are they the same thing? What about a television with broadcast and a television with cable? What about with TiVo? What about watching TV on Hulu? Are they the same thing? I could describe all these experiences at a high enough level and make them sound like the same thing. But they are not.
From a consumer standpoint, you might not care if you’re getting your TV over an IPTV connection or a cable connection as long as the video quality is good — just like you don’t care about DSL verses cable broadband as long as it’s fast enough. But there are definitely business values to these varying technologies that matter a lot.
Recently in a conversation with two of the smartest guys I know in the online ad industry, there were some rather disparaging comments made about cloud computing — essentially calling the whole thing marketing hype. After all, “isn’t the internet defined as many connected servers facing user clients with no single, central server? That makes the cloud simply a whole mess more of them, no?”
Well, actually — no. Think of the internet as infrastructure. You can do lots of different things with that infrastructure, including cloud services. And there are really significant implications for online advertising — and for the evolution of marketing in general.
Let’s say you owned an internet ad startup that was building a new ad serving system.
Approach A: The old-fashioned way — without using cloud services
Write your software and prototype it in a small lab environment “on premise.” Build out a data center with dozens of servers, multiple databases, and massive amounts of storage for the log files. Let’s say the load of the impressions is expected to be around 30 billion a month.
Now let’s say the peak load for delivering those ads requires 200 servers, but the average load is 50 servers, and the lowest load requires five servers. That means you would need to have 200 servers to handle the peak load — but that peak load only represents a small amount of time. That’s quite expensive, and a bit frustrating to only have a tiny bit of utilization of your server infrastructure — and to have the financial obligations and tax implications of the investment. And on top of that, the servers are moving closer to obsolescence every day. Keeping the whole thing up to date on newest versions of hardware, server software, and database software is complex and requires a lot of people to manage the systems.
Approach B: Building out on cloud services
Now let’s say you went down route B, in which you build your technology on a cloud services platform like Windows Azure or the Amazon Elastic Cloud 2.0 (EC2). You build your software so that the cloud platform can dynamically balance the number of servers dedicated to the service based on the load experienced at that moment in time. The overall cost of starting the company is dramatically lower, and the total cost of ownership of software and services is dramatically lower.
Now let’s say you’re an enterprise with a huge internal IT data center that you use for managing your ERP, CRM, and other enterprise capabilities. And now you want to integrate your online marketing data into the marketing business intelligence systems your analysts use to figure out how to spend their budgets. But in this world — as opposed to the volumes of data you deal with offline, where you’re dealing with a gigabyte or two of data a month — you’re dealing with terabytes or even petabytes of data a month. And you’ve never handled anything on that scale with your corporate IT resources. No problem — put the data onto a cloud storage system, then build your analytics capabilities in the cloud. You can operate your business just like before, but without having to suddenly build out a huge new datacenter and develop new capabilities for dealing with massive amounts of data.
Once you have your online marketing data in an environment that enables you to merge it with data from other sources — say, the U.S. Census or health statistics or mapping data or location data — you can start doing analysis in much more valuable ways. The same goes for applications.
Cloud services may not sound super sexy — it may sound like a techie kind of discussion for marketers. But you should know that cloud services are powering many of the new technologies in the online advertising space. I haven’t talked to a single startup that was started in the last couple of years that isn’t using cloud services for a big chunk of its infrastructure. And these platforms will become even more powerful and compelling over time.
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Private, not proprietary, cloud computing
Mar 10th
Amid rising costs, a challenging economy and an explosion in Web-based data, IT experts expect continued high growth in cloud computing.
Cloud computing saves energy and operating costs by pooling information-technology (IT) resources, scaling up or down as needed, and putting computer power to use, rather than leaving it idle while it still draws energy.
Over the next decade, cloud computing is expected to transform the way in which IT is purchased, sourced and provisioned.
Companies can use the advanced technologies that cloud computing offers to exchange digital information around the world and across a variety of devices. They can quickly deploy new applications and meet peak workloads without adding to existing infrastructure. The autonomic features of cloud computing can be applied to predict harmful events, such as overheating or unbalanced workloads, and take corrective action. These are all advantages enabling companies under pressure to save time and money and to maintain a complex IT infrastructure while keeping their primary focus on the business.
Public or external cloud-based services, which receive most of the media attention, are available from a third-party service provider, via the Internet. On the other hand, cloud-computing platforms can also be private, and hybrid architectures also integrate both private and public platforms.
For IT users, cloud computing offers fast access to diverse types of information regardless of the type of device they are using, including laptops, smart phones, or PDAs. Technology users, including workers, partners and customers, want access to sophisticated applications that are as simple to use as self-service ATMs.
Where security is concerned, all companies need to maintain the security of their data. Some data may not be permitted to leave an enterprise or a specific geographic location. Therefore, it is essential to evaluate which workloads can be sourced through public clouds and which need to be kept in-house and delivered through private clouds. A strategy working for some companies is to begin with private cloud-computing solutions in order to evaluate the results in a controlled environment.
Private clouds remain behind firewalls in order to maintain privacy and security. Companies are able to establish security protocols, carefully monitoring the levels of access to information that is available for exchange. Access can be limited to internal networks, such as employees, then evaluated before being expanded to other limited networks, for example, business partners. Private clouds can be managed without network-bandwidth restrictions, security exposure and the regulatory-compliance issues of public clouds. Customizing cloud services and determining best practices is a smart way to increase the productivity of sales teams and off-site employees.
No matter whether the clouds are private or public, companies need to begin with trusted; secure foundations in order to build the most secure, efficient, and resilient cloud-services platform. Some companies may be tempted to begin with the user interface. However, beginning with the underlying infrastructure is a better strategy for long-term success, especially if there may be a future need to integrate public and private clouds.
Industry standards are still developing, but they will solidify as the technologies mature and more enterprises use cloud services. Right now, companies may find the best strategy is to opt for cloud services that are interoperable and based on open technologies.
Whether public, private or hybrid, a major driver of cloud computing is the need for companies to get new ideas, products and services to market faster, and continually innovate to meet global competition.
Cloud computing delivers more advanced technology within a simpler, cost-effective infrastructure. It creates a flexible, robust infrastructure to serve the needs of today’s economy, where knowledge flows to countries and regions wherever IT infrastructures are reliable and responsive.
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Google Apps Marketplace Launches as New Cloud Computing Store
Mar 10th
Google March 9 opened its Google Apps Marketplace, an online store selling enterprises business applications that integrate with and extend Google Apps.
The Google Apps Marketplace will let Google Apps users access business apps for project management, billing and accounting, travel management, and other services. This will provide third-party software
developers a larger cloud computing channel into which to sell their applications.
Click here for a tour of Google Apps Marketplace.
| Resource Library: |
The move, announced during a Campfire One event at the company’s Mountain View, Calif., headquarters, is Google’s most aggressive play to drive growth for Google Apps, a suite of SAAS (software as a service) collaboration applications. The play also threatens existing cloud application stores such as Salesforce.com’s AppExchange.
Google Apps, which Google offers in free and paid versions, includes Gmail; Google Docs word processing, spreadsheet and presentation applications; and Google Sites publishing software.
Google Apps has picked up more than 2 million business customers who opt to let Google host their business data so they don’t have to maintain on-premises solutions such as Microsoft SharePoint or IBM Lotus Notes on their own servers.
However, collaboration applications are only a part of the SAAS software ecosystem. As the success of Salesforce.com shows, there is a burgeoning market for enterprise applications based on the cloud.
To wit, the Google Apps Marketplace allows Google Apps administrators to purchase integrated third-party cloud applications and deploy them to their domains.
Google Engineering David Glazer, who shepherded Google’s OpenSocial movement, said that while many businesses
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Hybrid Clouds Hit Data Centers
Mar 9th
Merging public and private cloud computing infrastructures.
Charlotte Dunlap 
There was much buzz about merging public and private cloud infrastructures at last week’s RSA Security Conference in San Francisco. As enterprises use virtualization to step up the creation of private clouds around their data centers, security vendors are working to steer customers toward merging private and public clouds for a hybrid cloud approach.
Some security and infrastructure providers realize that private clouds are an important first step toward increasingly moving customer workloads to public clouds as the technology and security catches up.
Private cloud infrastructures are necessary for companies that are regulated under compliance mandates, but CIOs see the value of being able to tap public cloud services for obvious reasons: lower total cost of ownership (TCO), simplified management and access to dynamic global threat intelligence, i.e., malware alerts. Of course, enterprises are still very concerned about the security, reliability and governance issues associated with public clouds, but CIOs are going to be hearing a lot more about hybrid or internal/external cloud options in coming months as a way to appease concerns.
An example of a hybrid cloud solution is the merging of an internally built or private cloud infrastructure with a security vendor’s public network of threat intelligence. Examples of global threat intelligence delivered through public cloud services include Trend Micro’s Smart Protection Network and Cisco ( CSCO – news – people ) Ironport SenderBase Security Network.
Over the past year security vendors have focused their cloud messaging primarily around Software-as-a-Service offerings targeting specific pain points, such as secure messaging, namely anti-spam. CIOs should anticipate more vendor messaging focused around hybrid cloud computing, targeting those large enterprises–not to mention European customers–that are required under governance to keep company data within the folds of the private cloud infrastructure. Security service providers are acknowledging customers’ need to keep data in-house, but they’re also providing options to couple private with public infrastructures and allow customers to off-load more of the security burden.
Later this year Trend Micro has plans to expand its private cloud services to include new protocols, such as Web reputation. Trend Micro says it will create a private cloud within the public cloud to let customers store confidential data, a prospect which will likely be most attractive to Internet service providers. Keep Reading at Forbes
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SaaS a big winner in health stimulus
Mar 8th
One conclusion I was able to draw from last week’s HIMSS show is that Software as a Service (SaaS) is the only way clinics and small medical practices are going to get health IT in time to collect that sweet, sweet stimulus cash.
From big SaaS companies like AllScripts to smaller ones like Practice Fusion, the buzz was electric and the lesson obvious.
(Practice Fusion CEO Ryan Howard is shown at his HIMSS reception last week. He’s expecting a better year than the Phillies slugger of the same name. Which is saying something. (Then again, I’m a Braves fan.))
Most large hospitals have their solutions in place, or are in the process of implementation. This vendor relationship may be the most important thing on a hospital CEO’s plate right now.
From what I gathered on the HIMSS show floor, most of these vendors are lining their customers up to collect cash on investments made long ago.
Collecting on the 2011 meaningful use guidelines, watered down as they’re expected to be, will be fairly simple, and lobbying by both hospitals and vendors could water down the 2013 and 2015 guidelines so they don’t have to spend anything above current plans to collect on them.
Many small practices have been assuming that the hospitals will bring them their health IT. Admitting privileges are a powerful weapon. If the hospital mandates you go with McKesson, you may have no choice.
But small practices may well ask, what’s in it for me? Going with the hospital’s IT solution only ties you closer to the hospital. You have your clinic because you want to stay independent. And many hospital systems were not really designed to scale down.
Thus, SaaS. There is little up-front expense, no server in the closet. You can back up records overnight with Carbonite or a USB-linked hard drive — you can backup 2 terabytes at Costco now for under $300, including software.
SaaS vendors can scale quickly thanks to cloud computing. The biggest problem may be assuring clinics that their broadband connection won’t go down mid-day. But a lightweight version of the software, again on a nurse’s station, can handle that eventuality.
Services like SharEHR claim to require no training while others like Practice Fusion cost nothing thanks to ads. If the hospital demands your records, you can talk to them about that later.
Contrast that with the cost of putting in servers, wiring your office, training your staff, and learning it yourself, which is what many EHR vendors were offering clinics just a few years ago. The horror stories from that are many.
Personally I am still waiting for the glorious tech revolution to strike the doctors I use most often. My pediatrician has a PC on his desk to help with billing, but the kids’ records are still on paper. My internist is also paper driven. My dentist is a computer hobbyist but still brings out a file folder each time I visit. Last time I got new prescriptions I still drove them to the pharmacist.
This tells me there is still an enormous opportunity to automate small practices, but 2011 will be here before you know it and the only way I can see them going is to buy it as a service, stimulus cash or no stimulus cash.
