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I’ll state the obvious:  The last five years have seen incredible changes in IT, including the rise of new cloud operating models and the spread of virtualization into production data centers. A new generation of upstarts has captured the imagination of the IT industry by unleashing new software and service-centric solutions, including private and public clouds, new devices and operating systems, all leading to a larger and grander software-defined IT era.

Now the not so obvious: Software-defined IT is only a stepping stone to a much larger, service-defined IT era, enabled by the rise of hybrid cloud automation.

We are not there yet when it comes to hybrid cloud, despite the plethora of hybrid cloud announcements based on, of all things, virtualization lock-in.  Why?  The notion of migrating a virtual app and its critical services from a rack of x86 servers only to be stranded within yet another set of racks in a public cloud is not a hybrid cloud operating model.  It is simply an early form of cloud migration.

Cloud migration will ultimately evolve into hybrid cloud integration within a true hybrid cloud operating environment.  It isn’t the ability to move a virtual app once from one environment to another that is hybrid cloud, but rather the ability to move physical and virtual apps and services on demand, as needed between environments. Hybrid cloud is all about control for both the enterprise and the service provider.

Migrating VMs from cloud to cloud is a tactical payoff; integrating existing and virtual apps with clouds is a strategic game changer: control with agility.

First Gen Cloud Drawbacks

Virtually all of the cloud operating models in use today involve significant tradeoffs, often with control and security or unplanned downtime risks. >>Read more

Source: http://gregness.wordpress.com/

As 2013 begins, it's a natural time to explore where cloud brokering is headed

Hopefully you watched Forrester's Stefan Ried present his webinar on cloud brokering and the many opportunities for different kinds of companies to exploit this technology. Part of Stefan's conversation included an explanation of the evolution to a unified cloud broker. If you missed it, you can catch up with it here. As 2013 begins, it's a natural time to explore where cloud brokering is headed. A cloud broker is the intersection of infrastructure, software and consultancy. Naturally, technology is a key enabler for a service provider adopting the broker role but it also impacts business models and consultancy. This diagram summarizes concept into the high-level architecture discussed above:

In the blue is a proposed "Unified Cloud Broker Platform." This shows how a cloud broker can take existing applications, SaaS and IaaS, and create customer value and a new cloud portfolio from them. This isn't necessarily a single product but shows the elements needed to offer the component parts that a cloud broker would need in their "stack" to offer compelling cloud offerings to ISVs, SMEs, enterprises and cloud ecosystem partners: >>Read more

Source: Cloud Computing Journal

Looking to stay up to date on the latest trends in the cloud computing world, EMC today became an official sponsor of OpenStack.

EMC already had some backhanded involvement in OpenStack; VMware, which it owns a share of, joined OpenStack earlier this year, to the dismay of some in the community.

But EMC Global Marketing CTO Chuck Hollis says the company is looking to make sure it works with various cloud platforms moving forward. He notes that VMware has been the "first and best" cloud stack, but that the market demands choices. EMC has worked closely with Microsoft to integrate compatibility of EMC products in the company's Azure cloud and Hyper-V hypervisor, he notes. But EMC wants to make sure it's in on the open source movement codified by OpenStack too. "Much like Linux has matured into a serious enterprise operating environment, OpenStack is visibly on much the same trajectory," he says. "And the OpenStack Foundation is the key industry nexus point for the evolution of a growing number of different-flavored distributions and editions."

During the early days of Linux, EMC work on technical integrations, contributions to community projects and ensuring that various distributions of the code were qualified to work on EMC products through APIs. Hollis says he expects a similar path will be taken with EMC's work in OpenStack. The first feature he expects EMC to work on is Cinder, the block storage service OpenStack announced as an early-stage project during its last Folsom release. >>Read more

Source: InfoWorld

The first time a client brought intellectual property lawyer Janine Anthony Bowen a cloud computing contract to look over, her reaction was, essentially, "These people must be nuts."

"I read the clause saying the service provider would bear no liability for anything that went wrong with its service, and even if something did go wrong, my client would still be responsible," recounts Bowen, lead partner at Jack Attorneys & Advisors in Atlanta.

To recover any losses, her client would have had to bring suit, and the maximum recovery amount equaled no more than the fees paid for 12 months of service. That amount wouldn't even begin to come close to the value of a data loss. Bowen's assessment of the contract was blunt: "The terms were offensive," she says.

Tanya Forsheit, with whom Bowen shared the dais at a Practising Law Institute seminar on cloud computing in San Francisco last summer, says she has similar concerns. "The cloud providers try to convey a take-it-or-leave-it attitude for their contracts, expecting people to click through the 'I accept' options the way people click through the iTunes website," says Forsheit, a founding partner of InfoLawGroup who works out of the firm's Manhattan Beach, Calif., office.

Because of the take-it-or-leave-it approach of cloud providers, IT professionals are running into problems with the legal professionals charged with mitigating the risks that their organizations face. That's the case at the Port of San Diego, where Deborah Finley just began thinking about using a small vendor's cloud-based email archiving service.

"We're a medium-size organization without the leverage a larger organization might enjoy. The vendor's contract had a limitation of liability for the cost of the contract, while our legal department has standard language about indemnification," says Finley, the Port's director of business information and technology services. "To change that language, we would need board approval." >>Read more

Source: InfoWorld

The rapid adoption of SaaS applications combined with Bring-Your-Own Device (BYOD) programs means that IT organisations increasingly don’t own the endpoint devices or back-end application resources. Centralised management of users’ digital identity that spans on-premise and cloud resources provides the visibility and control required for organisations to achieve compliance, reduce costs and mitigate risks, while also enabling productivity and secure access for user centric, mobile workforces.

Today’s announcement of comprehensive SaaS and Cloud Services support — coupled with Centrify’s support for more than 400 operating systems and dozens of on-premise apps, and rich support for mobile devices — lets Centrify customers take advantage of their existing Microsoft Active Directory investments across the industry’s broadest range of systems, mobile devices and apps deployed both on-premise and in the cloud. Centrify’s new Identity-as-a-Service (IDaaS) offering — Centrify DirectControl for SaaS — will be unveiled and demonstrated for the first time at the Gartner Identity & Access Management Summit in Las Vegas, in Booth No. PL3 this week.

“As organisational boundaries continue to erode under the pressure of federation and outsourcing, and as enterprise control over IT continues to weaken through increased adoption of mobile devices and cloud services, identity is more important than ever, and more problematic,” said Ian Glazer, Research VP at Gartner. “Identity teams must strengthen federation capabilities to properly connect software as a service (SaaS) to the enterprise…Identity teams should also consider an identity bridge to connect to identity as a service (IDaaS) offerings.”

“The Windows Azure cloud platform builds on and utilises Microsoft’s core technologies, including security and identity with Active Directory,” said Karri Alexion-Tiernan, Director, Windows Azure Product Marketing, Microsoft. “As a Windows Azure customer and partner, Centrify extends Windows Azure functionality with an on-demand identity service across the data centre, cloud, and mobile that lets IT take advantage of their existing skills and Active Directory infrastructure.” >>Read more

Source: datacentre