Platform-as-a-service is becoming a common solution to build out an agile, Web-oriented business, but watch out for risks. Editor’s note: The writer suggests PaaS started looking something like Force.com, as offered by Salesforce.com. It worked with Salesforce applications and will be used to provide new ones, provided you lived within its limits. But open-source PaaS, akin to Red Hat’s OpenShift, is way more general-purpose than that. The writer is a Red Hat employee. As platform-as-a-service enters the mainstream with increased enterprise adoption, it’s vital for IT managers to have a transparent, five-point strategy. Enterprises were reluctant to embrace PaaS within the early days by reason of vendor restrictions on application architecture and the chance of vendor lock-in. Modern enterprise PaaS offerings, mostly driven by open-source, are designed to attenuate these risks. Still, it is vital for organizations to develop a technique that helps them profit from the immense benefits offered by PaaS while also minimizing the hazards. Listed below are the five pillars of enterprise... Read More »

Federal IT leaders can foster cloud adoption by incorporating automated, repeatable security processes. Top 10 Government IT Innovators Of 2013 (Click image for larger view.) The Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP) has made important contributions to cloud security. However, FedRAMP focuses totally on security compliance for public government cloud services. The approval process requires a variety of time and may hinder innovation and drive up costs. However, FedRAMP leaders have a chance to enable — not simply enforce — faster government IT operations by fostering repeatable, high-quality, automated security operations — briefly, by championing a DevOps approach in government clouds. In the 1980s, US manufacturing faced fierce competition from abroad, which forced a big overhaul of producing processes. That led companies to target new business practices, like Lean, Six Sigma, and Theory of Constraints, to eliminate process constraints and optimize costs. IT operations are undergoing an analogous transformation today. DevOps, automation, and the cloud are on the core of this IT revolution. DevOps... Read More »

IBM’s Platform scheduler uses more efficient resource management to enhance on OpenStack’s own scheduler operations. IBM has launched a proprietary product to work with OpenStack’s resource scheduler, the portion of the cloud software stack that assigns workloads to virtual machine hosts within the cloud. IBM has a history of mapping out resource schedulers, because of its experience in mainframes and with Tivoli Workload Scheduler LoadLeveler. To boot, the corporate acquired 20-year-old Platform Computing two years ago, adding its Load Sharing Facility to IBM’s scheduler product line. In making that acquisition, IBM, a supporter of the OpenStack open source code product, is saying unequivocally that OpenStack’s scheduler remains a rudimentary model of the breed and users might want to buy into IBM’s expertise to get the foremost out in their OpenStack clouds. OpenStack’s scheduler is static, staring at information inside the Nova SQL database before assigning a workload to a server host. (Nova is the provisioning and scheduling element of OpenStack.) However it looks just once,... Read More »

Google’s Compute Engine comes out of preview, with Google touting lower pricing and “transparent maintenance.” 8 Great Cloud Storage Services (click image for larger view and for slideshow) Google has entered the highly competitive cloud services marketplace, where it’s going to face off against major tech vendors like Amazon and Microsoft. Google first unveiled its Compute Engine June 2012 as a beta service and Tuesday announced its infrastructure-as-a-service is now generally available. Google also lowered prices on some compute instances 10% and on disk storage by 60%. Google’s IaaS will entice those that want infrastructure geared to a high level of performance. The company’s emphasis on high-performance infrastructure is obvious from the rate of its famous Google Search engine. Compute Engine public cloud infrastructure relies at the same architecture. Jointly, it’s offering a service level agreement that provides 99.95% uptime. That’s a match for Amazon Web Services, which changed its SLA on June 1 to 99.95% from its previous 99.9% uptime. Google will charge by... Read More »

8 Great Cloud Storage Services (click image for larger view and for slideshow) I was in Frankfurt, Germany, last week speaking on cloud security. In keeping with the attendance on the sessions, the ecu IT community is simply as inquisitive about security as American IT. My talk had two parts: one on securing the storage itself through encryption, especially flash storage, and another on securing the users. Interestingly, user security, notably their use of consumer file syncing and sharing programs, drew the foremost interest. The issue with file syncing and sharing is that users have a taste for it. It solves a true problem they’re suffering from: the right way to make certain all their data is on all their devices and the way to share large files with colleagues with no need to email it to them. In other words, the “cat is out of the bag.” Webcasts More >> White Papers More >> Reports More >> Although the meaning of that phrase got... Read More »