Customers have several concerns about the cloud. To my mind, data security, data protection, and uptime are probably the top three. We've recently seen outages from Amazon, VMware (this was a beta service that went down) and Microsoft's online version of Exchange. Clearly, we have a ways to go with uptime.
Security might be the biggest bugaboo of all -- that is, if we believe the Ponemon Institute. The company surveyed 127 cloud providers about the security of their services. The results are mind-boggling, to say the least. Some 75 percent of those polled admit their services don't protect confidential customer data. And 69 percent of providers pass the buck, claiming security is not up to them but to the customer.
I am more than appalled. The lesson here is customers must get service providers to detail exactly how they secure data. It looks like 25 percent of providers may be worthy of your business. Avoid the rest like the plague!
Do you trust cloud security? Let us know how you feel at [email protected].
Posted by Doug Barney on 05/24/2011 at 12:47 PM2 comments
A few months ago, I asked readers to talk about their cloud plans and how cloud adoption will change the nature of IT work. I talked to over a dozen of you, and the results were mixed. Many old schoolers -- and old school isn't always bad -- believe the cloud will kill off a good many IT jobs, particularly admins who run our servers.
Cloud believers believe new jobs will be created. And as applications move to the cloud and admin jobs retreat, IT can and should become more strategic and less tactical.
About a third of the IT pros I interviewed are waiting on the sidelines until pricing, security and uptime are all proven solid.
Where are you with your cloud plans? Spill the beans at [email protected].
Posted by Doug Barney on 05/24/2011 at 12:47 PM5 comments
Author, instructor and all around smart guy Don Jones is taking an interest in the cloud and, with his years of IT experience, wonders just how new all this cloud stuff is. In a recent column, he questioned the term cloud in general.
Now Don is taking on the notion of private clouds. It may be that many call a private cloud what is really just a plain, old datacenter. To Jones, a private cloud has the same characteristics of an external cloud -- capacity and services are provided as they are demanded, the resources are virtualized so they serve as a pool, and charge-backs are based on actual use.
Don sees value in this approach to datacenters, being more flexible and taking a lot of mundane tasks out of the IT equation.
How do you define a private cloud? Are you moving in this direction? Share your thoughts [email protected].
Posted by Doug Barney on 05/24/2011 at 12:47 PM1 comments
Software as a Service (SaaS) and cloud computing will be some of the key drivers in open source software development in the next year.
Software as a Service (SaaS) and cloud computing will be some of the key drivers in open source software development in the next year. Those are two findings buried in a study by North Bridge Venture Partners and IT analyst company The 451 Group that was released at the Open Source Business Conference in San Francisco today.
The report, "Future of Open Source Survey," compiles answers from 450 respondents from private and public companies who were asked a wide array of questions around open source computing, such as adoption rates and economic impact.
Among all respondents, there are already 470 projects underway that will be cloud-based. (The report doesn't offer that number by percentage.) Mobile is another hot area, with nearly 94 percent of respondents writing apps for Apple iOS and Android.
Doug is out today. This entry was written by Michael Domingo, executive editor of New Media, Redmond Media Group.
Posted by Michael Domingo on 05/17/2011 at 12:47 PM5 comments
Wow. Here I am busting Amazon's chops over its huge three-day outage, and then Microsoft goes ahead and has a critical online e-mail outage.
I'm not talking about Hotmail, which is really for casual use, but Exchange, for gosh sake. The Web version of Exchange, part of BPOS, fell apart a few times, and most of the damage consisted of e-mails that took forever to send or arrive. So far, there are no reports of data loss.
This is getting scary. Amazon, VMware and now Redmond have had serious outages. Are we all to move to a cloud we can't trust? Have you had cloud/Internet catastrophes? Spill the beans at [email protected].
Posted by Doug Barney on 05/16/2011 at 12:47 PM6 comments
Red Hat wants to be a big player -- not just in Linux and not just in development through JBoss, but now in the cloud. The company recently announced two new tools. OpenShift is a Platform as a Service (PaaS) offering that to me sounds a lot like VMware's Cloud Foundry, which is also PaaS.
OpenShift works with Ruby, Python, PHP and Java, and supports JBoss middleware as well as NoSQL and SQL databases. This is similar to Cloud Foundry, which supports "Spring for Java apps, Rails and Sinatra for Ruby apps, Node.js apps and apps for other JVM frameworks including Grails. Cloud Foundry also offers MySQL, Redis, and MongoDB data services," according the Cloud Foundry Web site.
Red Hat also announced CloudForms, an application lifecycle management and automation tool.
Is Red Hat credible in the cloud arena? Answers welcome at [email protected].
Posted by Doug Barney on 05/10/2011 at 12:47 PM2 comments
Nearly every time I see a TV correspondent reporting from a distant land, he or she is using Skype. The cloud-based phone service is also a favorite of teens, who -- when not texting (e-mail is so passé) -- are busy Skyping. And most of the time they use video calls, since just a voice phone is also passé.
Microsoft wants in on this action, and is ready to pony up some $8.5 billion for Skype and its over 600 million customers.
Microsoft isn't always known for inventing the newest, hottest technology (except for the Xbox), but it can spot a winner as it did with Hotmail and now Skype. Is Microsoft just buying its way into new markets? Are you a Skype lover or hater? Answers to either welcome at [email protected].
Posted by Doug Barney on 05/10/2011 at 12:47 PM4 comments
When VMware helped create Cloud Foundry, an open Platform as a Service (PaaS) system, it had high hopes. Some of these hopes may not have been dashed, but were certainly bruised after two recent Cloud Foundry outages.
Cloud Foundry is open source, and VMware has been testing a Foundry service in recent weeks. One outage lasted a bit shorter than half a day and only impacted new customers. A power supply, which cut off access to storage, was the culprit.
The next day, the entire network went down. Amazingly, it took just one inadvertent keystroke to trash the network. The data was fine -- it just couldn't be gotten to!
How can cloud providers prove the integrity of their systems? You tell me at [email protected].
Posted by Doug Barney on 05/10/2011 at 12:47 PM2 comments
Amazon's black eye from its four-day cloud outage just got darker with the news that some customer data was lost forever. It is unclear why the data wasn't backed up in a bullet-proof manner, and that is just plain inexcusable. The bizarre part is how Amazon told some customers. One e-mail starts by saying, "Hello." That lack of formality doesn't fit a note telling you your data is has gone poof.
The outage and data loss are a huge wake-up call, which will hopefully lead customers to demand details on how their data is backed up, and force service providers to, well, provide better service.
Does the Amazon catastrophe make you wary of cloud services? Let me know at [email protected].
Posted by Doug Barney on 05/03/2011 at 12:47 PM2 comments
Savvis, a cloud services provider, will become part of CenturyLink. CenturyLink, a telecom concern, hopes Savvis will give it a shortcut into the world of enterprise cloud services. The Savvis services will run on CenturyLink's extensive network, which reaches from North America to Europe and Asia.
Posted by Doug Barney on 05/03/2011 at 12:47 PM2 comments
Scott Guthrie is known to developers as a savvy and approachable executive. Guthrie, who ran the .NET business at Microsoft, will now take over Azure, Redmond's new cloud platform.
Guthrie clearly has the technical chops, but the fact that developers like and respect him may be even more important. It will be Guthrie's job to get the millions of Microsoft developers excited about building Azure apps.
Posted by Doug Barney on 05/03/2011 at 12:47 PM0 comments
Scribe Software is one of the many cool software outfits based in the Granite State (i.e., New Hampshire). This longtime Microsoft partner focuses on integrating Microsoft apps, especially Dynamics CRM, with a lot of your other apps. The company's latest move is tying Dynamic CRM to other apps, not through an on-premise solution but through the cloud.
The solution is not new. For years Scribe has had Insight, a server-based tool that does the exact same thing. Two things are different: the delivery mechanism and how one creates the connectors.
On the delivery side, the recently announced Scribe Online Services platform runs in the cloud, and is the middleware that connects CRM to other apps. The company also says that with the cloud approach, it is far easier to build connections to new apps.
Posted by Doug Barney on 04/26/2011 at 12:47 PM2 comments