CLOUD COMPUTING — 1st Quarter 2014

TransCertain Sure About Secure Data

There are thousands of security vendors, but none quite like TransCertain. The company’s flagship product is CertainSafe, now on version 2. CertainSafe is really a vault for your data in the cloud, offering secure Web access. Details on this tool can be found in Tom Keating’s review which follows. The PCI Level 1 DSS certified compliant tool is particularly suited for those industries that fall under compliance regulations such as the financial and health care sectors. Read More >>>

Exploring Cloud-based Automation for Ordering Over-the-Top IP Services
Using a cloud-based supply chain integration solution, ITSPs and wholesale aggregators can bypass large, traditional, and holistic OSS deployments and overcome home-grown system constraints. The inherently available simultaneous workflows and common APIs of a cloud-based solution can handle all necessary orchestration, activation and service fulfillment, bonding selected services and features to a number, hosted seat, or OTT application in a centralized location. As a result, these new OTT players can improve the integrity of their products and present best-of-breed apps and services out across their channels far more seamlessly.

Simplifying Private Cloud Delivery: IP VPNs and Private Cloud Connect In the last issue of Cloud Computing magazine, we talked about Private Cloud Connect, which provides a standardized Layer 2 connection using Carrier Ethernet EVPL to connect an Enterprise to a Cloud Provider. With this basic connection in place there is another aspect that needs standardization: the IP layer. A successful model must account for the fact that while the Private Cloud service is being delivered over Carrier Ethernet at Layer 2, the cloud service transport is IP at Layer 3. As a result, IP routes or subnets need to be coordinated between the Enterprise and the Cloud Provider. The candidate approaches for coordination of routing information include:

Encryption as a Service - Removing Barriers to Cloud Adoption
Whether your cloud strategy involves simply backing-up enterprise data to an offsite service provider or is as elaborate as building a multi-tenant hybrid cloud that includes a mix of private data center and multiple public clouds to support a heterogeneous group of internal departments, data encryption designed specifically for virtualized environments offers a simple and effective approach to securing sensitive data.

Are You Ready for the Question?
We see carriers like Netwolves and EarthLink packaging up compliance like PCI and HIPAA. Soon vendors will need to package up privacy. For those selling globally, Europe has more stringent data privacy concerns and laws than the US. Be aware of them. Ask your vendors for documentation about these (very real) concerns.

A Vision of the Cloud, from a Visionary CEO
The cloud will provide access to an increasing amount of intelligent and predictive information. Companies can use this information and other "intuitive new tools from the cloud to create a customer service experience that today they can only dream of."

CLOUD SDN
SDN can fit quite well into such environments. Most enterprise-class network elements already provide a programmatic interface (API) through which they can be managed and controlled. This API enables integration with cloud management frameworks like OpenStack either directly or via a more localized controller (the SDN controller, if so enabled). It is the cloud management platform that pulls together the various data center components - from storage to compute, from application services to network services - and provides the means to manage them all holistically via software.