Posts tagged Cloud
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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Obama’s $79 Billion Tech Plan May Favor Web Programs (Update1)
Mar 12th
March 11 (Bloomberg) — Vivek Kundra, the Obama official with $79 billion to spend on technology, said the government can be more efficient by putting programs on the Web, paving the way for companies like Microsoft Corp. and Google Inc. to win business.
The government wants to put data such as health-care pricing information on Internet-based systems as they grow more secure, the U.S. chief information officer said in an interview this week. The U.S. can cut costs by outsourcing that work, said Kundra, who has overseen the federal technology budget since President Barack Obama appointed him last year.
Microsoft, Google and Amazon.com Inc. are all offering more databases and programs online, allowing customers to curb storage costs. Sharing software and data that way would shrink U.S. storage needs, helping to cut expenses after previous governments spent more than $500 billion on data centers and other technology initiatives in the past decade, Kundra said.
“It’s mind-boggling,” said Kundra, a New Delhi native who previously managed information technology for the District of Columbia. “It costs a fortune, it’s duplicative and it’s an energy hog.”
The model Kundra is looking at is known as cloud computing, where users go through the Web to access computers, applications and data instead of through their own servers. He declined to say which companies are best fit to operate government clouds. He noted that Google and Redmond, Washington-based Microsoft have introduced government-focused clouds in the past few months.
‘Darwinian Pressure’
“Let the free markets decide which company is best,” he said. “We want lots of companies with lots of great ideas competing with a Darwinian pressure.”
Global spending on cloud computing may top $44 billion in 2013, according to research firm IDC in Framingham, Massachusetts.
‘“We are excited to see the U.S. federal government embrace the cloud and expect it will further boost confidence among businesses of all sizes to do the same,” Ron Markezich, vice president of Microsoft Online, said in an e-mailed statement.
Cloud computing can give the government “dramatically reduced costs,” said David Mihalchik, who heads federal business development for Mountain View, California-based Google. “All of these things help government employees to collaborate together, be more productive, and the government saves money,” Mihalchik said.
Government Work
Kundra, 35, traveled last week to the West Coast, where he met with companies such as Google and Apple Inc. in California, as well as Microsoft and Amazon.com in Washington, on a 48-hour tour of technology businesses. He said he was impressed by how they created online platforms that allowed third-party software developers to collaborate.
Last year, Kundra created Data.gov, which lets federal agencies post information for the public online and now supports more than 169,000 databases. Other projects, such as those that deal with public safety or health care, also could be put on a cloud, creating a way to share ideas and data at lower costs, he said.
Companies including Microsoft, Google and Seattle-based Amazon.com are seeking federal security certification so they can compete for work within the federal government, he said.
When he managed D.C.’s technology, Kundra moved more than 35,000 municipal employees to Google Enterprise Apps, which provides e-mail, spreadsheet and word-processing programs via the Internet. He said he’s willing to move federal employees to a similar program, if security is proven.
“As long as these companies address security, we’re going to be shifting our resources toward cloud computing,” Kundra said. The government would still own and operate some of its own secure cloud-computing systems. Full Source
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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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Informatica (INFA): The Next Cloud Computing Winner?
Mar 11th
With the Nasdaq poised to resume leadership among U.S. stock indexes, technology looks like a sector with bullish potential. Even so, smart investors know that picking the right stock will still be extremely important.
One niche we like is cloud computing
. We’ve previously highlighted the cloud computing trend. We talked about several cloud computing stocks that may help investors profit from the group’s rapid growth. Today we add one more name to that list: Informatica Corp. (INFA). California-based Informatica boasts some strong fundamentals. In the most recent quarter, Informatica reported its profits rose 29% and revenue surged 21%.
Analysts are forecasting earnings growth of 11% in 2010 and 20% in 2011. Those are impressive statistics. According to Investor’s Business Daily, which features Informatica among its top 100 stocks, the number of mutual funds owning Informatica shares rose to 213 from 188 during the last quarter. That’s another positive sign that the smart money crowd is taking note of the stock.
D
Informatica is taking steps to enter new business segments, highlighted by the company’s January acquisition of Siperian, a master data management company. This was Informatica’s first foray into that space and the company’s biggest acquisition to date. The Siperian buy was greeted warmly by both investors and customers. It makes sense as master data management is one of the fastest growing sub-sectors in the tech space.
Given all of the news, it isn’t surprising to see analysts enthused about Informatica. Just this week Broadpoint AmTech mentioned Informatica as one of its top cloud computing picks. The stock is up more than 15% in the past month and touched a new 52-week high Tuesday on heavy volume.
Whether you call Informatica a growth stock or a momentum stock, the signs are decidedly bullish at this point. Yet the company still has value relative to other tech stocks. For example, the stock trades for nearly five times book value and over 22 times forward earnings. Compare these numbers to Amazon (AMZN), which is trading around 11 times book value and 34 times forward earnings. Informatica looks cheap in comparison.
Regardless of comparisons, Informatica is a strong stock in a strong sector. This means more gains could lie ahead. To play the cloud computing angle with a strong company, go with INFA. Full Source
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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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Negotiating Cloud Computing Agreements
Mar 11th
Cloud computing has been characterized as a paradigm-shifting phenomenon that will change how we purchase IT resources. Though given different names, cloud computing has been around for some time, and the legal lessons learned from experience with traditional software licensing and outsourcing agreements can and should be applied to cloud agreements, but there are new issues which will need new solutions.
Cloud computing is a loose term that describes a variety of data storage, processing, and application services, normally provided by a third party using equipment not located on the customer’s site. These services include providing raw processing power on demand, special purpose applications on a subscription basis, and remote data storage. An early form of cloud computing was Application Service Provider or ASP services, and another is currently known as software as a service or SaaS. Cloud services are normally provided using internet technology, where the customer uses inexpensive hardware and an internet browser to access the service and/or remotely stored data.
The ease of access and simplicity of using cloud applications are part of its attraction. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for the legal issues related to cloud computing. While traditional software licensing and IT outsourcing agreements can be used as a model for cloud computing, there are new risks and business practices not addressed in those older agreements that must be considered.
OUTSOURCING AGREEMENTS AS A MODEL FOR CLOUD AGREEMENTS
Cloud computing agreements are basically services agreements, as are outsourcing agreements. Many of the provisions included in outsourcing agreements have direct applicability in cloud service agreements. For example, the basic warranty that services will be performed in a good and workmanlike manner is a good starting point for warranty language.
Normally, outsourcing agreements will explicitly provide that a customer’s data belongs to the customer, and that the vendor will give the customer a copy of its data at anytime. The customer is normally only charged for media and the vendor’s time spent in providing those copies. Cloud agreements should contain similar provisions, but frequently don’t. In fact, some agreements allow the vendor to hold the customer’s data hostage if there is a dispute. Similarly, outsourcing agreements will frequently prohibit the vendor from suspending or terminating services abruptly. That prohibition prevents the vendor from exercising undue leverage in a dispute with the customer. Finally, outsourcing agreements normally require the vendor to provide termination assistance to the customer when the contract ends. This is normally provided at an hourly rate negotiated before services commence. Cloud customers will want to avoid agreements without similar protections, especially if the vendor is holding sensitive data or providing mission-critical services.
Similarly, outsourcing agreements frequently contain caps on fee increases. This prevents fees from rapidly escalating after a customer has made a long-term contractual or technological commitments to a vendor. Customers will want to include similar price protection clauses in their cloud agreements.
Outsourcing agreements also frequently contain a “litigation cooperation” clause which requires the vendor to preserve data and cooperate with discovery requests if the customer is involved in litigation. Those clauses allow the customer to fulfill its obligations in the event a litigation hold is required or it is served with discovery requests. The same issue arises under cloud agreements. If those cooperation clauses cannot be included in a cloud agreement, the customer should implement appropriate data backup plans to allow it to comply with its document preservation obligations in the event of litigation. Continue Reading at Law.com
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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.
