Microsoft’s own code should prevent an Azure SSL fail: So what went wrong?
Sysadmin blog Server 2012 is the Microsoft operating system that, in my opinion, makes cloud computing a reality. As far as I am concerned it is as big a leap over Server 2008 R2 as that OS was over Server 2003. With it you can build anything from a small cluster to a service as big as Microsoft's own Azure platform.
Which is why I am completely baffled as to how it is possible that Azure was knocked offline by last week's SSL cock-up.
Let me start out by saying that I have the utmost sympathy – and respect – for the poor bastards working behind the scenes to fix this particular embarrassing incident. I'm not too proud to admit that I have done the exact same thing; like Microsoft, I've accidentally let a HTTPS certificate lapse more than once. Read more...
Windows Server 2012′s release candidate is now available
Hot on the heels of the big Windows 8 news, the Windows Server team was not to be outdone, and today put out the release candidate of Windows Server 2012. According to Microsoft, the beta of the product attracted nearly 300,000 downloads.
You can snag the code here. Known before as Windows Server 8, Windows Server 2012 has quite a bit to it. From our previous coverage, here’s what’s in the product: Read more...
Microsoft signs up Aus eco geeks
Australian cloud computing eco-warrior Carbon Systems has scored its most significant deal to date with a global Microsoft agreement.
Carbon Systems’ Australian developed cloud app, Enterprise Sustainability Platform (ESP), will be implemented across Microsoft’s 600 global facilities across 110 countries.
Microsoft has selected CarbonSystems as its vendor of choice ahead of more than 30 software vendors following an extensive, rigorous tender process.
The energy management solution provider secured the international contract due to its ability to use cloud computing to simplify and streamline Microsoft’s global greenhouse gas management in addition to providing a stakeholder reporting solution. Read more...
Cloud Computing Interoperability Forum looks for new life
The founder of the Cloud Computing Interoperability Forum is working to revive the organization, which fizzled in 2010.
Even though the group has been defunct for a couple of years, it still counts 1,300 people on its mailing list and 3,000 in its LinkedIn group, said Reuven Cohen, who first kicked off the forum in 2008. Cohen's company Enomaly, which offered software for building public clouds and the SpotCloud marketplace for on-demand computing, was purchased by Virtustream late last year.
Since he proposed reviving the organization on his blog and on Google+ Monday morning, he's gotten "dozens" of emails from people supporting the idea, Cohen said. Read more...
TechAmerica Foundation: Governments need to get into the cloud
Cloud computing presents opportunities for governments to modernize and improve cost efficiency, public officials stressed Thursday at the introduction of a report advising state and local governments on cloud adoption. But one California official cited government tendencies making the modernization process a slow one.
The TechAmerica Foundation's State and Local Government Cloud Commission released its report entitled "The Cloud Imperative," offering best practices for cloud computing for state and local governments. In an introduction of the report at Microsoft's Silicon Valley offices in Mountain View, Calif., government officials including California lieutenant governor Gavin Newsom and San Jose mayor Chuck Reed emphasized potential benefits of cloud computing.
"San Jose's approach is very simple. We're trying to do more with less," Reed said in explaining San Jose's perspective on the cloud. Newsom, however, stressed how governments need to wake up to technological change. "You're seeing with this rapid and extraordinary change with the cloud in the private sector how it is dramatically changing the way people are doing business," bringing down costs and boosting collaboration, he said. "But government has been slow to pick up on this." Read more...
Smarter hypervisor use can lead to a ‘big, big change’ in security
To gain insight on the months ahead as they relate to IT attacks, malware, cloud security, and the impact of virtualization on security, we recently chatted with Simon Crosby, former CTO of Citrix Systems' data center and cloud business. Crosby recently founded a cloud security startup, Bromium, with Guarav Banga, former CTO and senior vice president at Phoenix Technologies, and Ian Pratt, chairman of Xen.org and co-founder of XenSource.
CSO Online: What do you think 2012 may bring in terms of malware?
Crosby: I think you will see, obviously, a growth. By the way, the growth path in malware is currently exponential per year. That will continue. That's obvious. I think you'll see, in the U.S. large enterprise and maybe even in the federal infrastructure, another major compromise next year. It will be incredibly bad and incredibly embarrassing. That is, to say, very succinctly, we are now in a state of ongoing national cyber espionage. It's not cyber war, but it's cyber espionage on a grand scale. That's absolutely going to carry on. However, I do think the year ahead heralds a fantastic opportunity. It will be the first time when virtualization hardware and its uses within computer systems, generally, dramatically change the odds in favor of security. Read more...
Tech giants back standard for cloud portability
Among the allures of cloud computing is the promise of easily and seamlessly moving services from one cloud to another. Realizing that kind of portability, however, is difficult. Every cloud service has its own distinct requirements, such as security, governance, and compliance, as well its constituent parts, including Web server, database, storage, and networking requirements.
In an effort to make cloud service more portable, a group of tech giants that includes IBM, Cisco, EMC, CA, SAP, and Red Hat today unveiled the first draft of open interoperability specification called TOSCA (Topology and Orchestration Specification for Cloud Applications). Capgemini, Citrix, NetApp, PwC, Software AG, Virtunomic, and WSO2, among others, are also contributors.
TOSCA aims to let companies create interoperable descriptions -- in a sense, templates -- of their application and infrastructure services, the relationships between the parts of the service, and the operational behavior of the services. The open nature of the standard is intended to ensure service interoperability, regardless of supplier, provider, or host technology. Read more...
Cloud adviser: Where’s your data?
With cloud computing, technology has advanced more quickly than the law's ability to effectively address its implications.
Consider the U.S. Patriot Act. It was recently revealed that U.S.-based cloud providers may have to comply with Patriot Act requests for data that's located in a provider's European data centers, even though this conflicts with the European Union's 1995 Data Protection Directive.
In response to that conflict, the European Commission recently announced that it plans to propose reforms to the EU directive by the end of January 2012.
Of course, cloud computing was not even a buzzword when the directive was first formulated in 1995. But all of this serves as a good reminder to ensure that your cloud-computing contract effectively addresses issues associated with data location and legal requests for data access. Read more...
Beware the software security scare silly season
The software risk silly season is upon us again. Every so often a big trend washes over the industry, and soon afterwards well-intentioned people start telling us why we should be afraid to dip our toes into the water. Or perhaps they are not so well-intentioned...
Even as cloud computing takes off in the enterprise and Android takes top spot in mobile computing, we're now being told that both trends are hugely scary ... unless we can afford to pay to have someone fix the problems. Perhaps not surprisingly, those warning us in both situations have something to sell.
In the case of Android, which is apparently a malware-maker's dream, Google's open-source programs manager Chris DiBona has already gone on the defensive, arguing: "Virus companies are playing on your fears to try to sell you BS protection software for Android, RIM, and, iOS."
DiBona goes on to call virus companies like McAfee "charlatans and scammers," declaring mobile phones essentially safe territory for enterprises and consumers. Read more...
Why cloud computing will kill programming – and make us all developers
We've been promised all sorts of benefits from cloud computing: faster development, cheaper applications - and even a recession-friendly switch from capex to opex for IT projects.
All of this is marvellous news for the CIO, but could it be that the cloud is anything but good news for the humble techie?
Certainly those IT workers who spend their time taking care of rickety, homegrown enterprise applications will find their jobs automated when the business moves to cloud applications instead. But as cloud computing matures over the next few years, could the impact on tech workers be even greater? Could the cloud really kill off programming altogether?
In this new cloud computing world, so the argument goes, any element needed to build an application will already exist on the web somewhere, so all that will be needed is for someone to connect up this series of ready-made modules and APIs in order to create a new application. Read more...
Cloud’s new rules promise old-school satisfaction
Cloud computing is big business, in part because companies are happy to shell out lots of cash to buy themselves time and development flexibility.
In this quest to displace the operations bottleneck that exists within enterprises, developers are taking on more of the operations role for themselves and to reduce this new burden have started a mad rush to run anything and everything in the cloud.
We've long talked about the need to outsource everything but one's core business, but it's developers who are doing this far more than any other group within the enterprise.
Now we have databases in the cloud, logging in the cloud, and even network monitoring, thanks to Boundary's new service, in the cloud. Read more...
‘Think cloud computing will save you money? Forget it’
Cloud computing is often sold as a way for companies to cut their tech bill by only paying for the IT they use.
Veteran IT chief Ian Cohen has other ideas - telling silicon.com that any company looking at moving to cloud computing purely as a way of saving money should "forget it".
JLT CIO Ian Cohen says any company looking at cloud purely as a way of saving money should "forget it"Photo: Jardine Lloyd Thompson
Cohen is speaking from experience. As group CIO of Jardine Lloyd Thompson (JLT) he is helping the global risk management and insurance broker to make greater use of cloud-based services, such as Salesforce.com's CRM platform.
When businesses shift to cloud services, the oft-talked-about savings won't last, Cohen said, as any reduction in cost or overheads is quickly swallowed up by fresh demand for IT services.
"If you go into cloud thinking you will save money, forget it. What invariably happens is that you create more efficiency and headroom. However, demand that previously could not be met can now be enacted and thus your activities simply increase to fill the available resources - be that time, people or infrastructure," he told silicon.com at Salesforce's recent Cloudforce conference in London.
"People will be using your systems to do more. That's the killer sell as to why people should be looking at cloud: the ability to flex your enterprise into a more extensible model at light speed." Read more...
Red Hat swells sales and profits in fiscal Q2
Commercial Linux distributor and virtualization and cloud computing player Red Hat just continues to grow organically like a batch of yeast. Or an open source collective from outer space (well, North Carolina anyway) that feasts on Unix servers.
In the second quarter of fiscal 2012 ended August 31, Red Hat's revenues embiggened by 28 per cent, to $281.3m, and net income exploded by 69 per cent, to $40m. Support subscription contracts for its Linux, middleware, and other software were up by 28 per cent to $238.3m and training and services revenues kept pace, hitting $43m. Deferred revenue rose by 25 per cent in Q2, to $813m, and the company is sitting on $937.2m in cash and equivalents. That makes Red Hat the biggest and strongest open source company in the world and perhaps the only one that will ever grow to this size because of the difficulty of competing with Red Hat. Read more...
Survey: Value of the cloud, telecommuting overstated
Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and Cisco, take notice: Despite the near-constant hype about cloud computing services, most mid-market companies are still viewing cloud as a complement, not a replacement.
SWC Technology Partners surveyed 210 mid-market IT and business leaders and found that cloud computing, at least for the mid-market and even more so in the enterprise, is still very early in its evolution. The survey also revealed a few surprises about the acceptance of telecommuting in the mid-market.
The disconnect between the hype of cloud computing and the actual implementation of cloud computing reared its head in the SWC survey. Only 3.7 percent of respondents said that their company has adopted a cloud computing solution for the entire company. And, over half (54.2 percent) of the respondents indicate that their company is not pursuing a single cloud computing initiative. Privacy and security (20.9 percent) were listed as the biggest concern when considering the cloud, followed by cost (9.8 percent). Read more...
The race to cloud standards gets crowded
The rise of cloud computing has led to a strong push from IT leaders at many major companies to develop standards that such address issues as security and data portability in the cloud.
But the early push for standards is beginning to resemble a NASCAR race -- everyone is driving on the same track but sitting in different cars.
Multiple organizations are in pursuit of the same checkered flag: a set of standards that will facilitate the adoption of cloud computing technologies.
The latest organization to join the growing list of standards groups is the IBM-backed Cloud Standards Customer Council, which announced its steering committee last month. Read more...