Posts tagged Government
Five cloud computing startups to watch
May 28th
The May BizSpark event in Paris, Microsoft and technology venture capitalists had the chance to assess the upcoming wares from Europe’s brightest young hopefuls in the software development world.
With cloud computing dominating the IT news headlines, surveys and analysts’ attentions, the bulk of the development houses were presenting cloud computing technology and business models. The following companies had to present to a panel of experts from Microsoft and the European venture capital community. They were all impressive and will no doubt begin to shape the marketplace.
Money Dashboard
Based in Scotland, Money Dashboard proves that no matter what goes wrong, a strong business sector will get back up and win. Banking and financial services in the UK have taken a battering in the credit crisis, especially in Scotland where Royal Bank of Scotland required emergency government funding in order to survive. But the Scottish cloud-based financial services model looks to have real potential.
The ultimate aim is to provide a cloud-based service that enables users to use the internet for more than the budget management that they currently do and instead harness the power of the internet to manage and generate their own wealth. Money Dashboard provides the user with a single interface for all their financial services, no matter the provider, easing the management of personal funds and ending the nightmare of having to remember half a dozen registration details. Money Dashboard’s business model is to act as a trusted middleman between the consumer and financial service providers, guiding the financial service provider towards targeted users in a lead-generation business model. Views of the Azure-based interface were impressive and the business model makes sense, in fact it has been tried before by an Asia Pacific banking group, but it was too early to market.
No Excuse Accounting
This Spanish smartphone application is pitched at the vital contractors market, which is a valuable marketplace in Spain and the UK. The company claims that contractors such as builders, plumbers; electricians and plasterers spend an extra working day of the week doing their essential administration such as sending out invoices. This application allows pre-prepared accounting documents and invoices to be created, sent and managed from a smartphone. There are already a wide number of PC-based applications, but this could be the first smartphone application; and contractors are major users of smartphones.
The business model is that once a user registers for and downloads the application they are charged on a transactional basis every time a document is sent via the application. It has been designed for Microsoft and Apple smartphones and can already be downloaded from the iPhone Apstore and Microsoft Windows Marketplace.
http://porfapaga.me
Continue reading… Credit to CIO.co.uk
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Cloud Computing – NASA Nebula’s Role in Open Government
Apr 8th
In January, the White House announced the Open Government Directive, instructing all Federal agencies to break down barriers to enable transparency, participation, and collaboration between the federal government and the American public.
Today marks 120 days since the Open Government Directive was announced and is the deadline for federal agencies to publish an Open Government Plan laying out how they intend to be more open and integrate Open Government principles into their activities.
I am honored to have been peripherally involved in developing some parts of NASA’s Open Government Plan. One of the most gratifying parts of the experience was discovering that a large number of NASA’s activities already embody Open Government principles. The Open Government Plan simply continues to build upon NASA’s long heritage of forging new ground and sharing its results with the American public.
NASA’s Open Government Framework postulates that agencies must focus on policy, tools, and culture to successfully implement Open Government principles within their organization.
I am thrilled to report that Nebula was identified as one of the primary tools that will enable NASA to more easily engage with the public in addition to providing a more efficient method for NASA to deliver IT services to its Scientists and Researchers.
Nebula Infrastructure-as-a-Service allows groups inside NASA to provision resources within minutes, avoiding the lengthy procurement, certification, and security processes required for new computing infrastructure and allowing NASA to realize tremendous savings through it’s pooled resource model.
When completed, Nebula Platform-as-a-Service will provide NASA software engineers with a robust development environment and sophisticated set of tools that make it faster, easier, and much less expensive to deliver data-driven and scalable Web sites that encourage public participation and collaboration.
Nebula will open the doors to transparency, participation and collaboration with powerful, economical computing resources built for government. By releasing the Nebula software stack as Open Source and publishing our entire operating model, Nebula will enable other government Agencies to benefit from NASA’s experience.
Providing a way for the public to more easily participate in its activities will allow NASA to tap into the incredible power of American innovation. When citizens can give feedback, contribute ideas, and engage in an open dialog with the Government on issues that matter to them, everybody benefits. The Nebula team is honored to be part of this journey toward a new type of Government, one that is more open, efficient and responsive to the needs of American citizens. Source NASA Blog
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International Politics Slow Cloud Computing In Europe and Asia
Apr 7th
This post is part of our ReadWriteCloud channel, which is dedicated to covering virtualization and cloud computing. The channel is sponsored by Intel and VMware. As you’re planning your Cloud Architecture, check out this helpful resource from our sponsors: Using a Data Center Relocation To Create A Virtual Infrastructure.
It’s worth noting that the cloud certainly has borders. It’s the one reality that proves the cloud computing movement may seem at times abstract and vague but in the end it is the international politics of our world that creates some of the deepest issues for its place in the world markets.
According to InformationWeek, The 451 Group presented a webcast that showed cloud computing adoption trails in Europe and Asia. About 57% op spending is in the United States with 31% in Europe and 12% in Asia. The numbers get even more polarized when you only look at the adoption for infrastructure as a service. A full 93% of spending is in the United States with 6% in Europe and 1% in the United States.
The low numbers almost makes it seem like some artificial effect is in play. And in some ways it really is. A lack of European data centers services by the large providers affects adoption. Rackspace, Terremark and Savvis are the primary companies looking to develop a presence in Europe. But they need to build data centers before they can have any real presence there.
According to the 451 Group, 99 percent of European businesses are either small or mid-sized organizations. And they have plenty of choices from telecommunications providers.
But here is an interesting twist. InformationWeek:
One obstacle to both sides is the U.S. Patriot Act, which gives the U.S. government a right to demand data if it defines conditions as being an emergency or necessary to homeland security, and a measure that contradicts that power when the data is of European origin, the European Union’s Data Protection Directive. In 2006, the European Court of Justice ruled that an agreement negotiated with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security was too broadly construed and violated the EU’s directive. The agreement was about sharing data on European airline passengers headed for the U.S. The data sought by the U.S. was too broadly construed and violated the EU’s directive, the court said.
“Both measures could prevent establishing a cloud without borders,” said 451′s William Fellows. Cloud advocates say services established via an Internet data center should be accessible by people around the world, and they are in the case of Google search or Facebook apps. But when it comes to sensitive data, national borders still prevail because of conflicting laws.”
The issue is apparent now with Google’s issues with the Chinese government. It’s not the technology that is making cloud computing an issue. It’s international politics. Full Source
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Former MySQL CEO talks Eucalyptus and cloud computing
Mar 29th
Marten Mickos presided over the growth of MySQL from an open source project to a $1 billion business that was fundamental to growth of the commercial Web, and he’s now taken the reins at another open source project turned for-profit venture, Eucalyptus Systems. The startup develops software that turns commodity servers into cloud computing environments that act like Amazon Web Services. Eucalyptus powers the NASA Nebula project, one of the largest cloud environments in the federal government today, and some research and data crunching projects at pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly, among others. Mickos explains his return to business and why he chose cloud computing.
What prompted the move to Eucalyptus and what are the immediate plans for the business?
Marten Mickos: It’s a massive opportunity and a great team; I couldn’t resist it. In 2010, we are not changing any plans. We are ramping up the growth rate and investment, but it’s essentially the plan that the management detailed last year. Two key things this year are to get more releases out, to be very diligent with producing more code and release it with high quality, and the other thing is securing some key partnerships and customer relationships.
We already work closely with Canonical on the Ubuntu cloud edition, that’s one obvious thing; we’ll be working with other large manufacturers of hardware and software and even system integrators who are the one’s actually building the private clouds for large enterprises.
Does Eucalyptus have the same potential as MySQL?
MM: This might be an even bigger opportunity, business-wise. It’s so early in cloud computing to estimate how big it will be. It’s something that is needed all over the planet in most data centers, public or private, so I think it will be a massive opportunity. Of course, we don’t know whether we will win. We think we have a great start, we know how to go about it, but of course there are many question marks here. That’s the thrill of it.
This looks like a green field market? A new space for growth based on cloud?
MM: Well, if you listen to Goldman Sachs or Piper Jaffray or those guys, they say that this is the biggest thing in the coming ten years, and the biggest thing really means something massive. To be the biggest thing, it has to be a question of tens of billions of dollars in total. I’m not saying we can capture all of it, but I think Eucalyptus has a unique opportunity to be a very strategic player in that market. Of course, there are big players, vendors who will be strong players in cloud computing, there will be small and large ones. I know and I can sense it’s a huge opportunity compared to anything out there.
Is now the time that cloud is coming to fruition as a market?
MM: Well, I can’t say I’m super analytical about it. I’ve learnt a lot in the last 12 months, that’s obviously clear. I still think its early days, so if somebody joins cloud computing a year from now, it may not be too late. Even two years from now, there will be plenty of big new opportunities. So I’m joining early, but at the same time, I’m also seeing that there is real revenue to be had, right now.
What is so great about the cloud? We have outsourced and services delivered online already, and some say they’ve being doing it all along.
MM: Our view is that cloud computing is a new challenge and you need new software to solve it. You can’t solve new problems with old software. I think the world has shown that over and over again.
Sure, some vendors will still claim that some old software they have is capable of providing cloud computing services. Let’s be clear, the old guys do have functioning solutions. Oracle and IBM and Microsoft, they have great software stacks that work well and they may produce great computing or they may produce something else, Software as a Service (SaaS), that is getting close to cloud. They do not have Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), where you get complete elasticity with the services, and there are a number of new benefits you get with something like Eucalyptus that you cannot get with the old stuff. The old stuff works, it works very well, so you shouldn’t expect it to completely go away, but it doesn’t provide the same level of benefits.
Technological advances do provide new opportunities, and maybe they are not new under the sun, but they bring some distinctive benefit that wasn’t there before.
Where are the challenges for cloud computing?
MM: Well, there will be inertia among customers. Not all customers will be ready to jump on this bandwagon right away; some will. But I think we talk about the whole notion of elastic clouds and we forget that building elasticity is really, really, really difficult. Getting a cloud that can truly scale up and down seamlessly, that’s hard work. Doing it with low latency is even harder, and then adding on top of that the metering, the awareness of what resources are being used and where the bottlenecks are; in the aggregate, it means it’s a huge technical challenge.
Will cloud computing inevitably turn computing power into a uniform commodity, like corn?
MM: There will definitely be services like that, but we will always continue to have corporations and governments who cannot live in such an environment and need the security and the assurance and the uptime that you can only provide through a dedicated service. That’s what Eucalyptus is targeting, the private cloud where there are heightened requirements on exactly those areas.
But sure, there will probably be computing available from the 7-11 where everybody can buy a little bit of computing where they need it. And Amazon is showing that; it’s amazing what Amazon is doing with their cloud, we must not underestimate their meaning to the market. They’re showing you can run it with low margins, on a massive scale, for consumers and corporations, available for anybody. Cloud computing wouldn’t be in the state it’s in today if Amazon hadn’t shown the way.
And the future looks bright?
MM: I think it’s hard! It’s difficult. This is a difficult area, it’s not for the faint of heart, but there’s just a massive opportunity. The world will need this; there’s just a constant need for cloud computing solutions. It’s not like we’ll suddenly realize it’s just a fad and nobody really needed it. People will need it. The challenge will be in whether we can make it sufficiently efficient and functional and easy to use. Full Source
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Cloud Computing: Will It Be Government’s Venus Fly Trap? Gartner
Mar 4th
The cryptographer’s panel at the RSA conference is always my favorite part. At this year’s conference, Ron Rivest (the R in RSA) made a comment along the lines of “One of my fears for the future is that cloud computing is a ‘dream come true’ for government intelligence agencies.” He actually used a more colorful term for ‘dream come true’ but his basic point was something I point out to Gartner clients all the time: in many countries (the US included) companies are legally (and often illegally) required to cooperate with government requests to surreptitiously monitor communications and content flowing through or stored on their systems.
There is a school of thought that true cloud computing means no care at all about the physical location of the storage. The fact that many governments can compel any company or service provider operating in their country to expose their customer’s data means for real businesses, location does matter.
Does encryption solve the problem? Only if the control of the keys is completely outside of the control of the service provider and if there is complete and guaranteed transparency into all access to the encrypted data. The reason for that and clause: with unlimited local access to encrypted data, government funded brute force attacks are much more likely to eat into the safety margin of long key lengths. And, as Brian Snow pointed on on the cryptographers panel, unlike the commercial/academic crypto community, the government crypto community does not publicize its breakthroughs in cracking algorithms or in developing orders of magnitude faster brute force capabilities.
Does striping or scattering the data across multiple data centers in multiple countries solve the problem? Assuming (a very, very big assumption) that the cloud service provider has not made concessions to a host country that would allow access anyway, this has possibilities – but I think there are a myriad of ways to attack this approach. Encryption has been banged on for years and we know that most proprietary encryption approaches are not secure. Striping/scattering for security has not been banged on and I am positive that many, many implementations will turn out not to be secure.
What about striping/scattering encrypted bits? Well, security in depth is always more expensive but not always more secure. This approach has possibilities, but just adding more “rounds” just as often introduces new vulnerabilities rather than increasing security.
I was on a panel at RSA on tokenization, and the idea of “tokenization as a service” is where I think more promise lies. Use cloud storage for the non-sensitive data (which by volume is usually more than 99% of the storage) and keep the sensitive data at home or at least in-country. Use the cloud for what it is good at and don’t use it for what is not good at.
