Top 10 Government IT Innovators Of 2013 (click image for larger view) In December 2012, Cary Landis and that i made 10 predictions about how cloud computing was prone to evolve this year and the way those changes were more likely to impact enterprise computing. But things are moving fast on the earth of cloud computing, reaffirming a few of those predictions and altering others. Here is a recap of what I predicted then and an update of the way I see those trends unfolding now. Webcasts More >> White Papers More >> Reports More >> 1. Cloud technologies will converge. The cloud will continue to forge an enormous convergence of technologies — almost like the evolution of the cellphone to the smartphone. The lines between platform-as-a-service (PaaS) and cloud services brokerages will blur right into a conceptual operating system for the “Web as a platform” — providing tools to permit users to milk multiple cloud solutions instantaneously, and bringing the cloud toward the tip... Read More »

One of the definitions of the area “cloud” in Merriam-Webster’s dictionary is “something that obscures or blemishes”. This definition often seems fitting for today’s computing cloud. I actually have seen quite a few universities move services to the cloud only to reverse course and move them back to campus as a consequence of “blemishes” in security, reliability, service, cost, integration issues and/or compliance concerns. In general, at Southern Illinois University (SIU) we’re currently moving faculty and staff email back to campus. And it’s not just higher education. A Gartner analyst recently predicted that by 2014, 30% of enterprises using software as a service will move back to on premises systems. Webcasts More >> White Papers More >> Reports More >> [ How do you get more robust online services? Read 7 Habits Of Successful DevOps. ] Personally, i’ve been evaluating cloud services for higher education for the previous couple of years and feature rarely found them a fit for my organization, even though yearly cloud... Read More »

In the past few months, we have seen progressively more coverage of the way existing laws were used to realize access to cloud-based data without the information owner’s knowledge or consent. What’s different with the newest revelation, as highlighted within the Manhattan Times recently, are reports of the National Security Agency actively attempting to undermine encryption technology and standards, including those adopted by National Institute of Standards and Technology, similar to the twin EC DRBG standard. Does this mean that the NSA’s reach into electronic communications is so profound, and its abilities to dig into our communications so extensive, that companies must come to terms with two equally unattractive options: accept that there’s no method to control their very own data even if they encrypt it, or avoid using cloud services? Webcasts More >> White Papers More >> Reports More >> In brief, no. Peeling back the layers, the location is absolutely not as dire as heated coverage suggests. Actually, security experts say that the... Read More »

Netscape co-founder and prominent tech investor Marc Andreessen famously noted that “software is eating the realm.” Unfortunately, it also includes eating the lunch of most enterprises, including federal agencies. For the entire discuss wasteful government IT spending, little is asserted in regards to the costs agencies pay to patch buggy software, a consequence of the industry’s predisposition to release their wares now and connect them later. For Robert Jack, CIO of the U.S. Marine Corps, those costs aren’t incidental. Webcasts More >> White Papers More >> Reports More >> “We now have roughly 300,000 people, of which a 3rd have day-to-day access to the enterprise network,” Jack said at a contemporary forum on cybersecurity. “i need to defend the network on the desktop or end-user device. i’ve got over 450 registered systems which are regressed to ten significant versions. After we get a patch from a vendor, we need to exit and test that against all that.” He continued, “Consider the labor hours where i... Read More »

I believe that some style of PaaS is the long run. But I’m also coming to believe that pure-play public PaaS — which is, the Herokus and Google App Engines of the realm — are doomed so far as serious deployments go. They’ll be the DreamHosts of tomorrow, great for folk spending $10 a month or less on a small website, but essentially ignored by people with serious business needs. The exception: Microsoft’s Azure, which, as a “full stack” provider, can meet the danger- and regulatory-driven patching requirements of these serious businesses. The downfall of pure public PaaS is that, from a cloud security and risk perspective, it is a far more challenging model than either software-as-a-service or infrastructure-as-a-service. With both SaaS and IaaS, you delegate security, availability and compliance concerns to a single vendor, which ordinarily will make contractual commitments about the way it will meet those needs. With non-Azure pure public PaaS, however, you’re using a stack (Web server, Web framework, database server,... Read More »