CLOUD COMPUTING — 2nd Quarter 2016

Digital Realty: Delivering Stability Amidst Digital Disruption

In today's age of digital disruption, where organizations need to adapt rapidly changing business and customer needs, the demand for high-performance services and more bandwidth that is needed to access increasingly powerful applications continues to skyrocket. As a result, cloud adoption - more specifically, hybrid cloud adoption - is building momentum... Read More >>>



Feature Articles

Slimming Down the Cloud 'Waste' Line
Spinning up cloud services is almost as easy as grabbing food to go at your favorite burger joint. We've made fast food so convenient, affordable, and packed with calories, it's become a national problem, because our consumption doesn't match our nutritional needs or activity levels. Now imagine how much worse it would be if we had no ingredient lists, no easy way to count calories, and all of our weight gain for the month showed up in a single day. - 08/11/2016

How to Talk Cloud and OpenStack
The advent of public cloud offerings from Amazon, Microsoft and others have changed what it means to adeptly deliver IT infrastructure. With cloud computing, resources can be provided as services and shared to build economies of scale to meet demands in real time and can be tracked with usage metrics, such as showback or chargeback. All of these resources can be delivered without proprietary tools, instead using Internet identifiers, formats and protocols. Companies are looking to realize those benefits inside their own data centers and firewalls and OpenStack is the tool to do it. - 08/11/2016

SuperMicro MicroBlade
Server blades have been around for many years and are available from all major computer companies. Over the years, they have improved considerably in terms of power and flexibility, and one company that has been at the leading edge of blade innovation is Supermicro. - 08/11/2016

Shadow IT: Balancing Efficiency With Security
With great access comes great responsibility, especially with regard to IT security policies. In recent months, discussions around security have evolved to include the growing risks associated with Shadow IT. While the practice of Shadow IT has existed since computing became a staple of the workplace and tech-savvy employees started skirting the rules, the risks of Shadow IT have skyrocketed with the exponential rise of mobile devices and cloud technology. - 08/11/2016

We Need to Talk About Multi-cloud
Over the past several months, there have been whispers and murmurs surrounding hybrid and multi-cloud IT reality. Recently, though, those murmurs have gotten louder. In fact, in IDC's Cloud FutureScape 2016 Predictions report, the analyst firm asserts that more than 80 percent of enterprise IT organizations will commit to hybrid cloud technology by 2017. I, along with my expert team of engineers at Faction, want to embrace this movement. What it means is that businesses will require multi-cloud-friendly solutions that will allow them to take full advantage of the cloud's value proposition, while also benefiting from the best-of-breed features by working with multiple cloud providers. - 08/11/2016

How IDaaS Helps Manage the Risk of Digital Transformation
When it comes to identity management strategies, a cloud transformation is underway: More and more companies and software providers are evolving from the traditional on-premises Identity and Access Management (IAM) solutions to a hybrid cloud model. Say hello to Identity as a Service (IDaaS). - 08/11/2016

Should My Company Migrate to the Cloud?
From email and file sharing to CRM systems and critical infrastructure, businesses are moving their systems to the cloud at a phenomenal rate. But, before diving head first into the cloud, keep in mind that migrations don't happen overnight and that any company considering this move must carefully evaluate both the risks and rewards. - 08/11/2016

Combining HPC With Big Data Analytics
Three important trends keep coming up in conversations with customers in the high performance computing (HPC) and big data markets. The first is that more and more users want to combine HPC workloads with big data analytics workloads on the same infrastructure. The second trend is the demand for flexibility to run workloads on either bare metal, virtual machines, or, most recently, in containerized environments. The third trend, closely related to the second, is the demand for flexibility to run on-premises and in the public cloud. - 08/11/2016

The Shortfalls of Large Service Providers
In the age of the cloud, everything is up for change. The growing demand for cloud services is not only redefining the technology landscape, it's also reshaping channel operations and disrupting traditional structures. While big companies such as Amazon, Microsoft and Google offer brand-name services, they can't compete with local managed services providers (MSPs) in their customer-centricity and the level of attention they are able to deliver to their clients. - 08/11/2016

COLUMNS

View from the Cloud

Cloud Data Security: Enterprises Not Ready for What Lies Ahead
Having recently read this year's The 2016 Global Cloud Data Security Study, by the Ponemon Institute, commissioned by Gemalto, I felt the need to highlight some of the key findings, which clearly demonstrate the lack of security preparedness by the enterprise market, by and large. - 08/11/2016

Cloud Security

Securing Your Applications and Data in the Cloud
When applications and data are placed in cloud environments, it usually means that accessing the information requires connectivity to the public Internet. Further adding to the security concerns, information can be exposed to individuals viewing Internet traffic or acting as a man in the middle (MITM). Hackers can easily attack and attempt to compromise applications and data, since the protections that would have been built into a private IT architecture, specific to a business' IT security requirements, are non-existent or extremely limited. - 08/11/2016

CLOUD Communications

Cloud Growth Isn't Killing the Hardware Business
SDN has made some gear go away; but it also means different hardware has to be purchased and deployed. SD-WAN will change the customer premises equipment as more of it will look like a white box appliance whose functionality is controlled by the service provider. Again, different hardware and functions are being deployed, but it is still hardware. - 08/11/2016

Silver Lining

Pokemon Go a Case Study in Cloud-driven Business
It started, as so often new technology growth does, based on the basic foundation of cost savings and easy to prove ROI. At the same time, there were doubts about what could and should be migrated to the cloud, for security and compliance reasons, or simply for the sake of operational efficiency. And so, the next stage of cloud growth saw an uptick in private cloud adoption. - 08/11/2016

Publisher’s Outlook

Zang to Grow Communications PaaS Offerings at All About the API
At the All About the API 2016 show in Las Vegas, I got a chance to catch up with keynoter Davide Petramela to talk about Zang. The company is a division of Avaya focusing on Platform as a Service - it isn't unlike Nexmo or Twilio, but the difference may be the Avaya tie-in, meaning the company can draw on years of telecom heritage and experience. - 08/11/2016

IN EVERY ISSUE

View From the Cloud
By Peter Bernstein

Publisher's Outlook
By Rich Tehrani

Silver Linings
By Erik Linask