Seemingly every tech vendor seems to have a cloud strategy, with new products and services dubbed “cloud” coming out every week. But who are the real market leaders in this business? Gartner’s IaaS Magic Quadrant: a who’s who of cloud market article shows Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for IaaS. Research firm Gartner’s answer lies in its Magic Quadrant report for the infrastructure as a service (IaaS) market.
It is interesting that missing from this quadrant figure are big-name companies that have invested a lot in the cloud, including Microsoft, HP, IBM and Google. The reason is that report only includes providers that had IaaS clouds in general availability as of June 2012 (Microsoft, HP and Google had clouds in beta at the time).
Gartner reinforces what many in the cloud industry believe: Amazon Web Services is the 800-pound gorilla. Gartner has also found one big minus on Amazon Web Services: AWS has a “weak, narrowly defined” service-level agreement (SLA), which requires customers to spread workloads across multiple availability zones. AWS was not the only provider where there was something negative to say on the service-level agreement (SLA) details.
Read the whole Gartner’s IaaS Magic Quadrant: a who’s who of cloud market article to see the Gartner’s view on clould market today.
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Tomi Engdahl says:
Proof the Net needs to move to IPv6 IP addresses: Microsoft runs out of U.S. address space
http://www.pcworld.com/article/2363580/need-to-move-to-ipv6-highlighted-as-microsoft-runs-out-of-us-address-space.html
Microsoft has been forced to start using its global stock of IPv4 addresses to keep its Azure cloud service afloat in the U.S., highlighting the growing importance of making the shift to IP version 6.
Microsoft doesn’t mention IPv6 in the blog post, but the use of the protocol would make its address problems disappear.
The IPv4 address space has been fully assigned in the U.S., meaning there are no additional addresses available, Microsoft said in a blog post earlier this week. This requires the company to use the IPv4 address space available to it globally for new services, it said.
Microsoft makes it clear that the IP address registration origin does not equate to the physical location. For example, you can have an address registered in Brazil but allocated to a device or service physically located in Virginia.
The adoption of foreign IP addresses gives some breathing room, but there are also drawbacks.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Google Cloud Platform Gets SSD Persistent Disks And HTTP Load Balancing
http://techcrunch.com/2014/06/16/google-cloud-platform-gets-ssd-persistent-disks-and-http-load-balancing/
Google’s I/O developer conference may just be a few days away, but that hasn’t stopped the company from launching a couple of new features for its Cloud Platform ahead of the event. As Google announced today, the Cloud Platform is getting two features that have long been on developers’ wish lists: HTTP load balancing and SSD-based persistent storage. Both of these features are now in limited preview
Developers whose applications need the high number of input/output operations per second SSDs make possible can now get this feature for a flat fee of $0.325 per gigabyte per month. It’s worth noting that this is significantly more expensive than the $0.04 Google charges for regular persistent storage. Unlike Amazon Web Services, Google does not any extra fees for the actual input/output requests.
Amazon also offers SSD-based EC2 instances, but those do not feature any persistent storage.
While the standard persistent disks feature speeds of about 0.3 read and 1.5 write IOPS/GB, the SSD-based service gets up to 30 read and write IOPS/GB.
As for the HTTP load balancing feature, Google says it can scale p to more than 1 million requests per second without any warm-up time. It supports content-based routing and Google especially notes that users can load balance across different regions
As of now, however, HTTP load balancing does not support the SSL protocol. Developers who want to use this feature will have to use Google’s existing protocol-based network load balancing system.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Microsoft readies public preview of cloud-based machine-learning service
http://www.zdnet.com/microsoft-readies-public-preview-of-cloud-based-machine-learning-service-7000030579/
Summary: Microsoft’s new Azure ML cloud-based machine-learning service will be available as a public preview in July. The service is a key piece of Microsoft’s evolving big data strategy.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Microsoft Supercharges Bing Search With Programmable Chips
http://www.wired.com/2014/06/microsoft-fpga/
Doug Burger called it Project Catapult.
Like Google and every other web giant, Microsoft runs its web services atop thousands of computer servers packed into warehouse-sized data centers, and most of these machines are equipped with ordinary processors from Intel, the world’s largest chip maker. But when he sat down with Lu, Burger said he wanted millions of dollars to build rack after rack of computer servers that used what are called field-programmable arrays, or FPGAs, processors that Microsoft could modify specifically for use with its own software. He said that these chips–built by a company called Altera–could not only speed up Bing searches, but also change the way Microsoft run all sorts of other online services.
The move is part of a larger effort to fix what is an increasingly worrisome problem for big web companies like Microsoft, Google, and Facebook.
After decades of regular performance boosts, chips are no longer improving at the same rate they once were. As their web services continue to grow, these companies are looking for new ways of improving the speed and efficiency of their already massive operations. Facebook is exploring the use of low-power ARM processors. According to reports, Google is too. And now Microsoft is about to roll out FPGAs.
Using FPGAs, Microsoft engineers are building a kind of super-search machine network they call Catapult. It’s comprised of 1,632 servers, each one with an Intel Xeon processor and a daughter card that contains the Altera FPGA chip, linked to the Catapault network.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Do data centers dream of electric sheep? Microsoft announces machine learning cloud
New Azure service sees Redmond open up a bit of its brain to developers
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/06/16/microsoft_machine_learning_service/
Microsoft is flinging some of its internal machine learning tech up into the cloud, putting its Azure service ahead of rival products from Google and Amazon.
The company’s new “Azure ML” service was announced on Monday and means developers can access machine learning systems hosted in the Azure cloud and even link their applications directly to them.
Recently, Google announced that one of its engineers had built a system that used a neural network to calibrate the relationship between 19 different inputs and a single output – data center power usage effectiveness.
“Machine learning is an incredibly underutilized capability – every app around us could be becoming intelligent,” Sirosh said. “I would love to have the excitement around machine learning be unleashed. It’s just like the birth of the cloud.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Dropbox Has Quietly Acquired Parastructure, A Big Data Startup In Stealth
http://techcrunch.com/2014/06/16/dropbox-has-quietly-acquired-parastructure-a-big-data-startup-in-stealth/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Amazon looks at Google’s cheap SSDs, slashes its own prices
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/06/17/amazon_ebs_price_cut/
Sometimes Amazon’s entire purpose as a company seems to be to act as a deflationary force on the economy, and this is especially apparent in its cloud services.
As is traditional with the cloud computing market, Amazon has taken a look at Google’s just-announced flash-backed persistent disks, then dipped its chip-encrusted hands into its own tech warchest and attached SSDs to one of its most widely used technologies, all while cutting prices.
The new “General Purpose (SSD)” class of Elastic Block Storage was announced by Amazon Web Services on Tuesday, and gives developers a speedy and relatively low-cost block of persistent SSD-based storage to attach to their Amazon servers. It will sit alongside HDD-based standard EBS tech (now termed “Magnetic EBS”), and a more-expensive, SSD-based “provisioned IOPS” service that guarantees predictable access rates.
These new SSD volumes come with a 3,000-IOPS allocation for their first thirty minutes. “This initial allocation provides for a speedy boot experience for both Linux and Windows, and is more than sufficient for multiple boot cycles, regardless of the operating system that you use on EC2,” Amazon said in their blog post.
Tomi Engdahl says:
CIO Discovers the ‘Terrifying’ Reality of Cloud Apps Running Wild
http://www.cio.com/article/752676/CIO_Discovers_the_Terrifying_Reality_of_Cloud_Apps_Running_Wild
Rogue cloud services are ripping gaping holes in the security fabric of most companies, putting the CIO in a tough spot. But as the fallout from the Target attack shows, IT and business leaders will go down together if the breach hits the fan.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Saving old software from extinction in the age of cloud computing
Will cloud-dependent software leave anything behind for future historians?
http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2014/06/saving-old-software-from-extinction-in-the-age-of-cloud-computing/
We live in the golden age of cloud computing. Storing user data and preferences on the Internet makes our multi-device lives easier than ever before. Data input on one device is often seamlessly available on every other device, making it a snap to jump from desktop to laptop to smartphone. Some software has come to depend so completely on these cloud servers, though, that we are starting to create a software ecosystem that will be historically untraceable.
Tomi Engdahl says:
AWS console breach leads to demise of service with “proven” backup plan
Code Spaces closes shop after attackers destroy Amazon-hosted customer data.
http://arstechnica.com/security/2014/06/aws-console-breach-leads-to-demise-of-service-with-proven-backup-plan/
A code-hosting service that boasted having a full recovery plan has abruptly closed after someone gained unauthorized access to its Amazon Web Service account and deleted most of the customer data there.
Wednesday’s demise of Code Spaces is a cautionary tale, not just for services in the business of storing sensitive data, but also for end users who entrust their most valuable assets to such services. Within the span of 12 hours, the service experienced the permanent destruction of most Apache Subversion repositories and Elastic Block Store volumes and all of the service’s virtual machines. With no way to restore the data, Code Spaces officials said they were winding down the operation and helping customers migrate any remaining data to other services.
“Code Spaces will not be able to operate beyond this point,” a note left on the front page of codespaces.com said. “The cost of resolving this issue to date and the expected cost of refunding customers who have been left without the service they paid for will put Code Spaces in a[n] irreversible position both financially and in terms of on going credibility. As such at this point in time we have no alternative but to cease trading and concentrate on supporting our affected customers in exporting any remaining data they have left with us.”
“In summary, most of our data, backups, machine configurations and offsite backups were either partially or completely deleted.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Rackspace Intros Dedicated Servers That Behave Just Like Cloud VMs
http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2014/06/19/rackspace-intros-dedicated-servers-behave-just-like-cloud-vms/
Seeking to make cloud infrastructure performance more predictable for its customers, Rackspace is launching a new “bare-metal” server offering, giving users the ability to spin up and down dedicated servers just like they spin up and down virtual machines in its OpenStack cloud.
Rackspace will charge for the service by the minute, meaning anybody will be able to rent a powerful dedicated server sitting in a Rackspace data center for 20 or 30 minutes at a time. They can request it online and have it up and running in a matter of minutes, using the same OpenStack API and tools used to provision and manage cloud VMs.
Currently, companies that start on cloud infrastructure, move into colocation data centers when they start growing and need to scale to avoid this problem. As they move, howver, they lose the elasticity of cloud.
This is certainly not the first bare-metal cloud service ever launched. SoftLayer, the company IBM bought last year, was founded around this concept, and Rackspace itself has offered bare-metal servers before.
Using reference designs for Open Compute servers, Rackspace has developed three custom designs specifically for OnMetal.
Cheaper than VMs for large workloads
Tomi Engdahl says:
Rackspace: AWS is Clouding the Picture on Dedicated Servers
http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2013/07/16/rackspace-responds-to-aws-price-cuts-the-real-conflict-lies-in-the-way-aws-defines-dedicated/
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All dedicated servers are not created equal. That’s the message today from Rackspace Chief Technology Officer John Engates, who says recent price cuts on dedicated virtual machine instances from rival Amazon Web Services have led to confusion about “dedicated” products.
“The real conflict lies in the way that AWS defines dedicated computing, which is at odds with the view of the rest of the industry, including Rackspace,” writes Engates.
Rackspace is famous for removing itself from the hosting pricing wars several years ago and focusing on providing a premium product with its Fanatical Support.
Tomi Engdahl says:
How Microsoft’s cloud aims to cover the world
A three-pronged strategy
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/06/22/microsoft_cloud/
Microsoft has a vision for the cloud.
Microsoft’s plan, dubbed the Cloud OS platform, rests on three pillars. These create a unified strategy that is changing the game and positioning the platform as the most complete cloud service available.
Hybrid solutions
When most vendors talk about hybrid cloud they talk about it as an all-or-nothing option.
You either pick all-in private cloud, all-in public cloud, or a static level of both and call it hybrid cloud. It can also be difficult, extremely time consuming and in some cases nearly impossible to alter the state or level of your dependence on private and public cloud once you have implemented it.
We can also do this because Microsoft decided not just to build a single component or pillar, but to go the whole way and build a platform. Its One Cloud OS vision has allowed us to offer services to our clients that other multinational cloud providers could never hope to offer.
The One Cloud OS platform means that everything Microsoft does is inter-linked. Everything that Microsoft learns from its Azure team feeds through to the Windows Server team.
By using a single shared code base for all three offerings, Microsoft has at last moved to a virtuous cycle of developmen
Tomi Engdahl says:
Rackspace launches Onmetal Cloud Servers based on Openstack
Bare-metal servers offer dedicated hardware performance with the convenience of the cloud
http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/2351347/rackspace-launches-onmetal-cloud-servers-based-on-openstack
HOSTING OUTFIT Rackspace has launched Onmetal Cloud Servers, a service that combines the on-demand nature and scalability of cloud servers with the performance and total control of bare-metal servers.
HOSTING OUTFIT Rackspace has launched Onmetal Cloud Servers, a service that combines the on-demand nature and scalability of cloud servers with the performance and total control of bare-metal servers.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Good god, where will the new storage experts come from?
When a burgeoning cloud means a skills drought
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/06/19/where_will_the_new_storage_experts_come_from/
As we enter the middle of the 2010 decade, new IT projects are increasingly being designed for the public cloud instead of local IT systems.
Gartner figures that by the end of 2016 we’ll be through the looking glass, with more money spent on “cloud” applications and services than traditional delivery mechanisms. Soon thereafter, it seems, “cloud” applications are set to become “public cloud” applications and down the rabbit hole we go.
New businesses and greenfield departments within existing organisations are the obvious candidates for such a shift. New ventures are already risky enough; it’s understandable that folks in charge wouldn’t want to invest in the upfront capital costs of owning your own equipment.
From a risk management perspective – especially early on – renting your IT as you go makes a sort of sense, even if the total cost if well above that of owning the gear yourself. How many businesses start off by buying the building they’ll use as an office outright? It’s never quite so straightforward.
In our brave new cloudy world, the rental economy for private housing is a good educational tool.
The simple answer is that when the economy goes titsup.com, those folks that own their IT won’t suddenly find themselves without the equipment necessary to run their business.
For those folks who rent their IT, as soon as there’s a hiccup in revenue, they’re screwed. If you can’t pay the bills, “your” IT no longer works. If “your” IT no longer works, you can’t serve your customers. If you can’t serve your customers you stop getting income. You then have two choices: bust out the credit card and pray you don’t end up in a corporate debt spiral; or go out of business.
The skills base for running internal IT is going to collapse. “Systems administrators” will, in a very real sense, soon be obsolete.
Today’s sysadmins will “reskill” for this cloudy future. Many will simply retire.
Once that happens, we are collectively screwed. Only the richest corporations will be able to afford the nerds required to maintain their own IT and thus only the richest corporations* will own IT. They’ll rent it out as they see fit, insulating themselves from economic risk and downturn by turning the knobs on the rest of us.
The ability to “burst” workloads up to the public cloud allows us flexibility while having a minimum of equipment locally allows us to mitigate risk. For those interested in this there are three basic options.
The first option is Microsoft from top to bottom. While it’s got a reasonably mature hybrid offering that you can buy off the shelf today, I have to admit to being less than enthused about the idea of getting into bed with it for another decade or two.
Next up is VMware; like Microsoft, it offers an off-the-shelf hybrid option.
Like Microsoft, VMware seeks to be the vertically integrated stack that owns your future. I am leery of lock-in.
The last viable alternative is Openstack. Openstack has gone from utterly irrelevant also-ran to “proper infrastructure” in the past 18 months. Redhat, IBM, HP and Rackspace
Tomi Engdahl says:
Net Neutrality Retreat Threatens Cloud Growth
http://www.networkcomputing.com/cloud-infrastructure/net-neutrality-retreat-threatens-cloud-growth/a/d-id/1278756
A proposal to undermine net neutrality by allowing ISPs to charge for “fast lane” traffic would create competitive barriers for businesses and stymie cloud adoption.
When artificial competitive advantages and barriers to entry are created, they often have unintended consequences. Cloud computing is largely popular because it’s allowed even the smallest companies to compete against the big players. Massive amounts of capital are no longer needed to build an online presence. Small businesses can leverage a fraction of a larger infrastructure and expand/contract as needed. But with a proposed (and likely expensive) added cost to match larger competitors, small companies and startups would either wither and die — or not even try to compete in the first place.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Linode busts up Digital Ocean with price-matching speedy server
Penguin vs Penguin as prices plunge in Linux clouds
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/06/16/linode_price_cut/
The “Linode 1G” costs $10 a month ($0.015 per hour) and comes with 1GB of RAM, a 24GB SSD, a 1-core CPU, 125Mbps of outbound bandwidth, and 2TB of free data transfer per month.
This compares with an equivalent 1GB memory, a 1-core processor, and 30GB of SSD disk and 2TB of transfer server from cut-priced rival Digital Ocean.
Either way, the competition is a great thing for developers keen on either company as, just as Microsoft, Amazon, and Google are caught in a vicious pricing competition for infrastructure-as-a-service clouds, traditional hosters are coming under the same kind of pressure.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Microsoft eyes Google Drive with increase in free Onedrive storage offering
Also announced price cuts to cloud storage service
http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/2351599/microsoft-eyes-google-drive-with-increase-in-free-onedrive-storage-offering
MICROSOFT ANNOUNCED plans to overhaul its Onedrive cloud storage service to compete with Google Drive on Monday.
In a blog post, Microsoft announced that as of this week it will give users 15GB of free Onedrive storage, more than doubling its previous 7GB offering and matching the amount offered by Google Drive.
“Our data tells us that [three] out of [four] people have less than 15GB of files stored on their PC,” Microsoft said.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Should you entrust your systems management to the cloud?
Balancing the risks
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/06/24/cloud_security/
Cloud-based security and systems management (CSSM) applications have been going through my lab for testing lately and I find myself seriously weighing their use in production.
The basic reasoning behind using a CSSM is that the on-premises offerings are pretty universally miserable to work with. They are old, creaky beasts with layers upon layers of features and nerd knobs. They are a pig to set up, a pig to maintain and they take crazy amounts of resources.
Worse, the on-premises offerings either flat-out cost too much or the licensing was created by consulting the ghosts of Microsoft licensing specialists past.
The cloudy stuff is new; as such, it doesn’t have the cruft of the old. Yay for that, but the cloudy offerings also don’t have the flexibility of the battered on-premises warhorses. I find myself able to argue on either side of this one.
At scale, CSSM applications are amazing tools. You put a few hours of work into a change and hey presto, you can control tens of thousands of systems.
At the SMB end, those several hours spent on configuring, testing and deploying a change could see someone manually make the change on every one of a small company’s 100 PCs.
The border between where exactly a full-bore on-premises CSSM setup pays for itself is hazy and company specific. CSSM applications make the financial maths even more difficult to judge.
If you combine it with stuff you already own, such as Active Directory, or alternative deployment technologies, such as Puppet, do you get something that meets all your needs in a simpler and cheaper fashion.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Where’s that Cloud We’ve Been Promised?
http://www.ozy.com/c-notes/unlocking-the-full-power-of-cloud-computing/4423.article
The cloud is coming, and you’re gonna love it. All you have to do is wait for the big guys to get out of the way — or wait for the little guys to beat them up.
Let’s be honest. We hear about the cloud all the time, but unless you’re a serious tech geek, you probably have no clue what it really means. In short: It’s software (email, sales programs, music downloads) that we can borrow or buy from a big computer library in the sky instead of buying it to live on our hard drives.
When you borrow or buy cloud software, you pay lower prices because you pay for what you use, à la carte or à la cheap Netflix subscription. That could signal the end to mouthwatering licensing contracts for software companies, which right now bring the big guys hundreds of millions per client.
For consumers like you and me, the cloud’s our great “revenge of the customer,” saving individuals as much as 90 percent annually.
Industry research by the big guys already shows that businesses are saving nearly 25 percent and watching profits rise thanks to the cloud. And if you wanted to start, say, a digital publishing house today, you could save between $2,000 and $8,000 a year – probably more as you grew in size – by using cheaper cloud software from WordPress, Google, Amazon, Dropbox, and Adobe, instead of paying for their bigger cousins.
Look, there’s just no stopping it: The market will jump to nearly $100 billion in 2014.
We still pay more than we should for productivity suites, word processing, file sharing, hosting, backups and physical servers.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Hosting with OpenShift Online
https://www.openshift.com/promotions/try-openshift?sc_cid=70160000000UJArAAO&gclid=CK-L3-y8mr8CFWEDcwodlIkAxg
OpenShift Online is Red Hat’s next-generation application hosting platform that makes it easy to run your web applications in the cloud for free.
A choice of programming languages including Java, Ruby, PHP, Node.js, Python and Perl and a complete set of developer tools.
OpenShift allows remote access to your application via the Secure Shell protocol (SSH). Use the command line to directly manage the server, check logs and test quick changes.
OpenShift leverages an open source platform and standards-based components to ensure application portability and eliminate lock-in.
Getting started with OpenShift Online is completely free. For high traffic websites or resource intensive web applications the OpenShift Online Silver plan
Tomi Engdahl says:
IBM to open London data centre for Softlayer cloud expansion
Will have space to host more than 15,000 servers
http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/2352685/ibm-to-open-london-data-centre-for-softlayer-cloud-expansion
BIG BLUE’S Softlayer cloud division will open a data centre in London as part of a $1.2bn global expansion that will also see IBM add data centres in Paris and Frankfurt later this year.
The firm also said that its Bluemix development platform is now out of beta and generally available from Softlayer.
The opening of the new data centre is part of an expansion programme that IBM announced at the start of 2014, which will see the enterprise IT giant deliver cloud services from 40 data centres worldwide in 15 countries across the globe by the end of the year.
Bluemix has reached general availability today, having been available as an open beta before.
“The enterprises that are really getting cloud computing, the ones that are leading the pace, they are seeing twice the revenue performance compared to the rest of the pack, so they are disappearing off into the sunset. They’re getting a competitive advantage and they are reducing TCO from it,”
Tomi Engdahl says:
NSA, GCHQ spies have hurt us more than they know – cloud biz
Security is ‘major concern’, say half of potential customers
http://www.channelregister.co.uk/2014/07/02/cloud_industry_survey_2014_gov_spying_harming_takeup/
The PRISM revelations – a real shocker for anyone that didn’t already realise governments monitor their own and other countries’ citizens – have undermined business confidence in moving to the cloud.
This is according to the Cloud Industry Forum, which conducted an annual survey of 250 private and public sector organisations and noted a reverse in patterns seen in recent years.
More than half of those questioned (52 per cent) voiced security as a major concern when asked about moving data to the cloud, up from 37 per cent a year ago.
“In the previous two surveys, people [in the UK] were less sensitive about moving to the cloud,”
Some 59 per cent said security was higher up the agenda in light of Snowden, but only 32 per cent of those had actually changed the way they secure data in the cloud, the majority of which were operating in the public sector.
Tomi Engdahl says:
The data’s physical location no longer matters
Previously, it was thought that the physical location of the data and control information security ensured. According to Gartner, this line of thinking is no longer valid in “after Snowden period”.
The physical location of the data will not be soon no longer relevant..
Instead of the physical location relevancy increases in the legal position, the political position and the logical location. This change will take place by 2020.
According to Gartner, IT professionals are not familiar with the concept of the legal position. It refers to the legal organization, which controls the data. Political position has grown in importance in recent times a lot. Edward Snowden’s revelations after a major security and privacy question was how organizations deliver data to the authorities. This applies particularly to the American authorities, but also in other countries.
Source: http://etn.fi/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=1555:datan-fyysinen-sijainti-ei-enaa-ratkaise&catid=13&Itemid=101
Tomi Engdahl says:
Cloud Security Cup: USA vs. Europe (Spoiler – It’s Not a 0-0 Draw)
http://blog.skyhighnetworks.com/cloud-security-cup-usa-vs-europe-spoiler-its-not-a-0-0-draw/
Privacy: Europe 1 – US 0
Security: US 1 – Europe 0
WWJKD (What Would Jürgen Klinsmann Do)?
So, if using US providers isn’t the answer, what is? Encryption is one effective solution that is gaining traction for many cloud consumers. It’s important that your cloud provider provide encryption for data not just in transit, but at rest as well. Equally important, especially for European customers concerned with the privacy of their data hosted by US cloud providers, is encryption key management.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Cloud strategy, a number of dimensions
According to Gartner and IDC, the Finnish companies in approximately 54 percent of the use of cloud services and service-related business value is a globally more than 150 billion dollars. The figures, however, are relative, because the definition of cloud computing is very much open. Traditionally, they are divided from the beginning (PaaS), infrastructure (IaaS) and application services (Saas).
Cloud services are also consumer-oriented services, such as Dropbox, iCloud and Google+
The above-mentioned research reports, data also shows that more than 60 per cent of Finnish companies have a valid cloud strategy. I suspect that this is a study in which the defendant did not quite understand the question or question set in the target group has gone a bit wrong: Up to date strategies are not faced by organizations not very common
Some of the strategies was more of a cloud security strategies. They identified the nature and the manner in which different types of end-user within the meaning of cloud services are used in the employer’s equipment.
The majority of cloud strategies (about 70 percent) were working on ways to deal with your organization’s information and control capacity.
There is no way a surprise, the most comprehensive strategies for your plan, and were found in the information technology services companies. These take into account the above factors, but also the services available on the market cross’ recovery and the continuation of their own resources.
Source: http://www.tivi.fi/cio/blogit/ict_standard_forum/pilvistrategian+useat+ulottuvuudet/a997769
Tomi Engdahl says:
Virtual desktop bones thrown: Gartner mages see Microsoft rising
What a shock, VMware in the lead
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/07/15/gartner_vdi_mq_shows_microsoft_gaining_and_citrix_fading/
Gartner’s server virtualisation magic quadrant shows virtualisation juggernaut VMware sitting at the top of the VDI pack for the fifth year running, with Citrix down in the niche player dumps along with Red Hat.
There are just two suppliers in the leader’s quadrant: VMware and Microsoft. Oracle is the only challenger and that by a narrow margin separating it from the niche player’s box. The nichers are Parallels, Citrix, Red Hat and Huawei. There are no “visionaries”, VDI is now a startup-free zone.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Apple and IBM Team Up to Push iOS in the Enterprise
http://recode.net/2014/07/15/apple-and-ibm-team-up-to-push-ios-in-the-enterprise/
Apple and IBM today announced a broad partnership to help companies deploy wireless devices and business-specific applications to run on them.
The combination brings together two historical competitors — who decades ago struggled to dominate the nascent market for personal computers — on the next wave of computing in business: Mobile devices with access to complex data running in the cloud.
In an interview with Re/code at Apple’s headquarters in Cupertino, Calif., Apple CEO Tim Cook and IBM CEO Ginni Rometty described the tie-up as one that only the two companies could deliver.
“If you were building a puzzle, they would fit nicely together with no overlap,” Cook said of the relationship. “We do not compete on anything. And when you do that you end up with something better than either of you could produce yourself.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Apple and IBM Announce Partnership To Bring iOS + Cloud Services To Enterprises
http://apple.slashdot.org/story/14/07/15/2321236/apple-and-ibm-announce-partnership-to-bring-ios–cloud-services-to-enterprises
IBM will also begin to sell iPhones and iPads to its corporate customers and will devote more than 100,000 people, including consultants and software developers, to the effort. Enterprise applications will in many cases run on IBM’s cloud infrastructure or on private clouds that it has built for its customers.
Tomi Engdahl says:
IBM and California open $400m cloud network
http://www.v3.co.uk/v3-uk/news/2357200/ibm-and-california-open-usd400m-cloud-network
IBM and the California Department of Technology have launched the CalCloud, a $400m technology system that unites local agencies while saving spend and minimising risk through a subscription service.
Local US government agencies will be able to use and access the CalCloud on a subscription basis, and according to IBM this is the first such state-level system in the US.
While before the state would be using a patchwork of different systems, now they will be able to subscribe to a common one with additional availability and backup systems. IBM called it a “common pool of computing resources”, and California welcomed it.
IBM said 20 state departments have requested CalCloud services already.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Business Agility Drives Cloud Adoption
http://www.cio.com/article/2455960/cloud-computing/business-agility-drives-cloud-adoption.html
Companies adopting cloud computing most aggressively say that business agility — not cost — is the primary driver of adoption.
If you’re stuck on using new technologies like cloud just to save money, you’re really losing out
Tomi Engdahl says:
SHOCK and AWS: The fall of Amazon’s deflationary cloud
Just as Jeff Bezos did to books and CDs, Amazon’s rivals are now doing to it
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/07/26/amazon_aws_margin_decline/
It’s tough being a victim of your own business strategy, especially if you’re Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos.
After spending twenty years applying a combination of price cuts, smart logistics, and ruthless efficiency to the publishing and music industries, Bezos’ Amazon has grown into a vast company.
But now the company’s Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud division is coming under attack from competitors who are using Bezos’ own cost-cutting tactics against it, and it’s starting to show in Amazon’s financial results.
Tomi Engdahl says:
AWS hell no: Can Microsoft Azure sales beat Amazon’s cloud?
Bezos behemoth is tottering at the top
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/07/28/azure_catching_up_on_aws/
There’s a prospect coming into view of Microsoft’s Azure cloud offering passing Amazon’s AWS in cloud revenues. Fancy that.
Azure grew its commercial cloud services revenue 147 per cent on an annual basis in the second quarter of 2014, and has an annualised run rate of $4.4bn. So says financial analyst Aaron Rakers, the MD of beancounter haus Stifel Nicolaus.
He adds Redmond “reported a 2x yr/yr increase in storage for Azure and a 3x increase in computing.”
And Amazon’s AWS? Rakers reckons its AWS revenue growth rate slumped, causing Amazon’s Other revenue category to grow only 36.5 per cent in the same quarter.
There was an estimate Google’s cloud business was seeing $200m revenues in the second quarter of 2013. A 53 per cent uplift would make that around $300m in the second quarter of this financial year, which compares poorly to Raker’s reckoning of Azure’s $946m and Amazon’s more than $1.2bn in the quarter.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Report: Cloud providers taking lion’s share of overall server market
http://www.cablinginstall.com/articles/2014/06/delloro-cloud-server-report.html?cmpid=$trackid
In a recently published report from Dell’Oro Group, the networking and telecommunications industry analyst says that its latest data reveals that the major cloud providers comprised a record portion of the server market in the first quarter 2014, due to a significant increase in their consumption of white box servers.
“In North America, 17 percent of server shipments were white box, and we estimate that over a quarter of all server shipments were destined for cloud providers,”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Alibaba Has a Computing Cloud, and It’s Growing, Too
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/08/04/alibaba-has-a-computing-cloud-and-its-growing-too/?_php=true&_type=blogs&_r=0
Alibaba, the Chinese e-commerce giant, has a growing cloud computing business and a hunger for American companies. And soon, it will most likely have a large amount of cash. Will it take on the American cloud giants?
It would be an amazing change from the way cloud computing seems to be developing. Public cloud computing is the rental of infrastructure, like raw computing power and online data storage, and sophisticated applications. It is a multibillion-dollar business, expected to grow much bigger, and is currently led by Amazon Web Services, or AWS; Google; and Microsoft Azure. IBM and others also have designs on the market.
To date, all of the big global players are United States companies. In a recent evaluation of the cloud infrastructure business, analysts at the technology research firm Gartner counted 15 companies. Just two, Dimension Data and Fujitsu, were not American firms.
Tomi Engdahl says:
nCrypted Cloud brings client side integration to Dropbox, Microsoft Onedrive
Puts security at the forefront
http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/2359305/ncrypted-cloud-brings-client-side-integration-to-dropbox-microsoft-onedrive
NCRYPTED CLOUD HAS ANNOUNCED the UK and European launch of its encryption layering software for cloud storage collaboration.
nCrypted Cloud is a client-side encryption application that meshes seamlessly with a range of cloud clients including Dropbox, Box, Egnyte, Google Drive and Microsoft Onedrive.
“What’s so ingenious about nCrypted Cloud is that, as cloud storage providers like Dropbox make enhancements, nCrypted Cloud continues to function as a layer on top of the services, encrypting at the endpoint (it encrypts at rest and in flight), and allowing enhanced control for enterprises, with the ability to audit files and implement data access controls.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
The Quiet Revolution: 12 Must-Know Statistics on Cloud Usage in the Enterprise
http://www.slideshare.net/skyhighnetworks/the-quiet-revolution-36767266/1
Tomi Engdahl says:
Black Hat 2014: How to Hack the Cloud to Mine Crypto Currency
http://spectrum.ieee.org/riskfactor/telecom/security/black-hat-2014-how-to-hack-the-cloud-to-mine-crypto-currency
Using a combination of faked e-mail addresses and free introductory trial offers for cloud computing, a pair of security researchers have devised a shady crypto currency mining scheme that they say could theoretically net hundreds of dollars a day in free money using only guile and some clever scripting.
“We realized that … for about two-thirds of cloud service providers, their free trials only required a user to confirm an e-mail address,”
In other words, they had access to many introductory accounts at sites like Google’s Cloud Platform, Joyent, CloudBees, iKnode, CloudFoundry, CloudControl, ElasticBox and Microsoft Windows Azure.
Some of these sites, each offering their own enticement of free storage and free computing as a limited introductory offer, could be spoofed, the researchers discovered.
“A lot of the e-mail confirmation and authentication features rely on the old concept that one person has one e-mail address—and that is simply not the case anymore,”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Data Centers to World: Not Dead Yet!
Anticipating the next-gen data center
http://www.networkworld.com/article/2459721/data-center/data-centers-to-world-not-dead-yet.html
Agility and flexibility are two of the most popular words to describe the attributes expected from IT in helping achieve future business objectives. But how do you apply those attributes to what many large enterprises still consider the linchpin of IT infrastructure – the data center?
There are not, yet, many companies like Condé Nast, which recently shuttered its data center to go “all in with the cloud.” Let’s face it, if you’re a content company, albeit one of the select few with a still thriving print business, transforming to an all-cloud strategy makes a lot of sense.
For just about any other industry, cloud may drive new growth and innovation, but the bulk of business is still dependent on heavy-duty data center servers and applications to run the daily operations.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Forget the cloud, now comes the fog calculation
Cloud is a reality, but as soon as we come to know a new term: the fog calculation. This view is from New York University and NYU professor of electronics Wireless Engineering Research Vice President Ted Rappaport. He was involved in the NI Weeks expert panel.
What the fog calculation (fog computing) then? Rappaport that it is thousands of mobile devices to your users. – It is a shared intelligence.
5g wireless technology brings a new era. – It is a wireless renaissance
5g’s goals are hard, because an individual user’s data will increase from a thousand-fold.
Source: http://etn.fi/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=1615:unohda-pilvi-nyt-tulee-sumulaskenta&catid=13&Itemid=101
Tomi Engdahl says:
How to deal with server hogs: Throw them out of the frying pan and into the Solidfire?
Cloud flasher goes on-prem for big biz
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/08/11/solidfire_enterprise_market/
It’s all about enforcing quality of service (QoS): if you are a cloud service provider, you don’t want to irritate customers with intermittent periods of bad service because one or two users are hogging your array hardware.
The multiple tenants of your cloud storage array should get what they pay for in terms of array compute, storage and interface bandwidth. That’s the selling point of Solidfire’s software: it parcels up array resources for tenants and won’t let them overstep the mark by hogging unpaid-for resources.
There are other aspects to this QoS, such as access protection, providing a billing interface, etc, but you get the idea: noisy neighbours are quietened.
Tomi Engdahl says:
AWS adds on-premises Radius MFA to Workspaces DaaS
This might need new jargon – ‘hybrid cloud authentication’ anyone?
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/08/13/aws_radius_for_workspaces/
Amazon Web Services (AWS) has added multi-factor authentication to its Workspaces desktop-as-a-service service, but has done so using on-premises RADIUS servers.
Workspaces offer the chance to run a desktop – actually re-skinned Windows Server – in a player app.
AWS says this ain’t all folks, and that “we expect to add support for additional authentication options such as smart cards and certificates.”
AWS suggests Workspaces is not that interesting to customers and has become a curiosity rather than something AWS or its resellers are being asked about in meetings. Perhaps RADIUS-powered hybrid cloud authentication will change that.
Tomi Engdahl says:
VMware hangs with the cool kids in the Containers gang
We almost invented containers but were too shy to talk about them says CTO
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/08/13/vmware_hangs_with_the_cool_kids_in_the_containers_gang/
If 2014 has a hotter infrastructure software topic than containerisation, your correspondent is yet to find it.
The excitement comes from the fact that containerisation has been proved to work at colossal scale and looks to represent a lightweight and easy-to-manage alternative to virtualisation. Much discussion of containerisation has therefore positioned it either as virtualisation’s heir, or a fork in the road that means the likes of VMware won’t have things all to themselves from now on. That OpenStack will more or less treat containers and virtual machines as equals adds spice to the pot.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Google Opens Classroom, Its Learning Management Tool, To All Teachers
http://techcrunch.com/2014/08/12/google-opens-classroom-its-learning-management-tool-to-all-teachers/
Back in May, Google announced the limited preview of Classroom, a tool that aims to make it easier for teachers to stay in touch with their students and to give them assignments and feedback. Google says more than 100,000 educators from 45 countries signed up to try it since then. Today, it is throwing the doors wide open, and anyone with a Google Apps for Education account can now use the service.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Skyhigh Blog
Only 1 in 100 Cloud Providers Meet Proposed EU Data Protection Requirements
http://blog.skyhighnetworks.com/only-1-in-100-cloud-providers-meet-proposed-eu-data-protection-
requirements/
Whether your organization is based in Europe, has operations in Europe, or handles data pertaining to EU residents, a proposed EU regulation in the works will have a significant impact on which cloud services you use and how you use them. The EU General Data Protection Regulation is expected to be passed this year and take effect beginning in 2015.
The law is meant to replace the EU Data Protection Directive adopted in 1995 and modernize the original directive for the Internet era. Under the proposed law, liability for data breaches and violations of the law will be shared between data controllers (organizations that own the data) and data processors (such as cloud providers that store the data).
One of the most well-publicized and controversial amendments to the proposed regulation is the right for individuals to request deletion of data identifying them. When you consider that the average organization uses 738 cloud services, complying with this requirement presents some unique challenges.
The problem is 63% of cloud providers maintain data indefinitely or have no provisions for data retention in their terms and conditions. Another 23% of cloud providers maintain the right in their terms and conditions to share data with another third party, making it even more difficult to ensure all copies are deleted because of the numerous parties with whom your cloud providers shares data
The General Data Protection Regulation requires that you do not store in or transfer data through countries outside the European Economic Area that do not have equivalently strong data protection standards.
The list of countries that satisfy EU privacy requirements today is very short, at only 11 countries. Notably absent from the list is the United States, where 67% of all cloud services are headquartered. However, the current EU Data Protection Directive offers an exception to use the 8.9% of US-based providers that have Safe Harbor Certification
A draft version of the proposed regulation requires you to notify EU regulatory authorities within 24 hours of a data breach, even if the breach occurs in a third party cloud service. How do you know if there is a data breach in a cloud service? The answer is you may not know. Many cloud providers expressly put the responsibility on the customer to detect breaches.
Existing European data privacy laws also require that you take steps to protect personal information.
The challenge is that not all cloud providers offer tools to secure data natively. In fact, only 2.9% of cloud services enforce secure passwords. A higher number (7.2%) support SAML integration with single sign-on providers such as Okta, OneLogin, and Ping Identity.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Peer Pressure! Business Pushing the Cloud on Enterprise IT
How to react when business execs want to jump on this tech trend — and IT isn’t ready
http://www.cio.com/article/2463167/data-center-cloud/peer-pressure-business-pushing-the-cloud-on-enterprise-it.html
When you graduated from high school, you might have thought peer pressure was mostly over.
Thanks to cloud computing, that may not be the case for some IT executives.
IT administrators are increasingly dealing with business executives who are pushing them to move enterprise data and apps into the cloud – whether they are ready or not.
For some IT execs, the still unanswered questions include: Will cloud computing save money and manpower? Is a Service Level Agreement needed?
“The cloud is getting so much attention and chat time that all of a sudden there is an urgency,” said Jeff Kagan, an independent analyst. “Tomorrow the cloud will be tested and trusted. However, today it’s still the wild, wild West. IT executives know this but they get pressure from their chief executives to jump into the cloud because it’s becoming the new code word for success. And no one wants to be last.”
“Absolutely, there is peer pressure,”
“The CEO or business leaders hear that they can get a service that sounds like it’s half the cost with the maximum flexibility. Then they go to the CIO and start pushing.”
“I recommend first that IT not get defensive, as there are some enormous benefits to the cloud,” he said. “Take the time to do a side-by-side analysis of what it would take to move certain applications to the cloud versus keeping it in-house. Explain that it requires a thorough analysis, because there’s business risk in making a bad decision. They can then explain the risks and costs of downtime to revenues, cost, security, and compliance.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Amazon makes an undisclosed investment in cloud services company Acquia
http://www.geekwire.com/2014/amazon-makes-undisclosed-investment-cloud-services-company-acquia/
Amazon has made a rare investment in Acquia, a Burlington, Mass.-based digital marketing company that operates on Amazon’s cloud services.
The company said the money will be used to help deliver an open cloud platform for content, community and commerce.
Acquia is not consumer-facing. It operates on Amazon’s Web Services.
Tomi Engdahl says:
somewhat surprising is that Gartner says the “cloud computing” is not just hype anymore, but becoming a mainstream technology.
Source: http://tech.slashdot.org/story/14/08/14/0236217/gartner-internet-of-things-has-reached-hype-peak
Tomi Engdahl says:
Hybrid Cloud: A New Way of Thinking About Disaster Recovery
http://blogs.vmware.com/vcloud/2014/04/hybrid-cloud-a-new-way-of-thinking-about-disaster-recovery.html
Protecting business applications against outages, failures, disasters and other causes of downtime is a top priority for many organizations
not all companies have the budget, expertise, time or staff to spare to improve their IT resiliency. For organizations that do have DR services in place, the challenge lies in maintaining the solution on an ongoing basis
Customers want DR to be faster, cheaper and simpler. And with only 5% of today’s applications protected by DR, Gartner predicts that mid-size enterprises are the expected growth market for recovery-as-a-service.
With hybrid cloud, organizations can easily extend their on-premise DR solution on- or off-premise, without heavy upfront investment. Hybrid cloud also allows DR to be within reach for more customers, giving them the ability to cost-effectively cover tier 2 applications not included in their existing DR plan.
Tomi Engdahl says:
How farsighted is Microsoft’s Azure RemoteApp?
Preview offers a glimpse
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/06/19/enterprise_mobility/
Microsoft is stepping on more vendor toes. At the TechEd North America 2014 keynote in May, the company announced the preview release of Azure RemoteApp, which appears to be a direct competitor – at least in part – to Citrix’s virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) solution.
Running an application on any device sounds like it should be easy to accomplish, but it requires an all-encompassing solution from a reliable vendor, as well as rapidly deploying ways for all devices to access them.
There have been a few attempts to solve this problem. Many vendors saw dollar signs and created specialist apps for each device: iOS (potentially having both an iPhone and then a more expensive iPad version), then Android and now Windows Phone. Add BlackBerry if you are still clinging to it.
If the applications had no direct cost, you would often instead be slugged for a mobility licence, as well as having to build more servers for remote access.
The other method was VDI. Citrix is a leader in this area and eventually created apps to remotely connect to servers for iOS, Android and Windows Phone to match the original desktop connector.
The VDI method is an easier solution overall for IT departments because users have a similar experience regardless of device and very little device configuration is required.
One of the bigger negatives of this is the requirement to have all the resource power centralised, which means either more servers or beefier ones.
Not all platforms are supported yet. Windows is supported via the Microsoft RemoteApp app, and iOS/Android devices have received an update to the Remote Desktop app. Mac, Windows Phone and Windows RT apps are still to be released.
During this preview time, Azure RemoteApp is free to try (for up to 20 users), with full licensing details still to come from Microsoft.