Trend Micro is blazing a new trail with a service called SecureCloud intended to give enterprises a way to encrypt data in cloud-computing environments.

SecureCloud allows you to maintain control over the encryption key used to secure data stored in the Amazon EC2, Eucalyptus or VMware vCloud cloud infrastructures.

Other cloud-computing variants could be added in the future.

“IT operations may be firing up [a remote virtual machine] image but we have security validating the integrity, and it’s encrypted until it hits the cloud, and it’s encrypting data at rest,” according to Todd Thiemann, senior director of data center security and marketing at Trend Micro.

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Seems like most customers don’t really understand or appreciate the full benefits of Cloud Computing.

It was pretty funny to read and I fully recommend:

In a research note posted today, Gartner distinguished analyst John Pescatore said many corporate customers he’s talked to recently who are evaluating cloud computing for the first time are not interested in “true” cloud benefits — that is, the offloading of compute and storage to infrastructure as a service — but rather they are looking at the technology as a means to secure the virtual data center.

“A lot of those client calls are around dealing with the issues of business unit desire to use the cloud or IT wanting to use cloud, Pescatore wrote in his blog.

“But when you dig a bit deeper, the current business issues (not the hype) are really about (in order of currency and importance):

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Best known for sales of PCs to enterprises and consumers, Dell has been muscling its way into IT services since it acquired Perot Systems for $3.9 billion last year.

The 3PAR deal follows Dell’s 2007 $1.4 billion acquisition of EqualLogic, which gave Dell a solid storage base, but on a lower end than 3PAR’s.

Dell is betting that 3PAR’s thin provisioning approach, which treats storage as a utility, will result in a big payoff for the firm and its customers. The combination of thin provisioning and virtualization, Dell indicated, can overcome the limitations of traditional modular and monolithic arrays.

“3PAR addresses the problem of costly, complex, and rigid IT environments and enables organizations to treat storage as a utility,” said Dell in a release, adding that customers need to pay only for “the capacity and performance they need, and only when they use it.”

3PAR’s technology utilizes a multi-tenant clustered storage architecture, which helps IT organizations build virtualized infrastructures. 3PAR has long maintained that its thin provisioning approach enables customers to better predict performance as they face storage capacity requirements that always seem to be increasing.

It was not immediately clear what impact, if any, the deal with 3PAR will have on Dell’s longtime partnership with EMC on storage, which represents about 25% of Dell’s total storage business, according to industry research estimates. Dell said it plans to integrate 3PAR into its storage portfolio including its Dell/EMC products.

Dell added: “With 3PAR. Dell will offer innovative systems and customer choice at every storage tier, from direct-attach to highly-virtualized clustered SANS.”

Source: InformationWeek

On August 15, Microsoft made available the final version of one of the building blocks for its latter option. That product — System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2 Self Service Portal 2.0 — is the customer-focused version of what was formerly known as the Dynamic Datacenter Toolkit. It is available from the Microsoft Download Center.

The VMMSSP self-service portal is a collection of tools and guidance for building cloud services on top of the Windows Server (rather than the Windows Azure) platform. As Microsoft explains it, VMMSSP is a partner-extensible offering that can be used to “pool, allocate, and manage resources to offer infrastructure as a service and to deliver the foundation for a private cloud platform inside your datacenter.”

The portal features a dynamic-provisioning engine, as well as a pre-built web-based user interface that “has sectionsfor both the datacenter managers and the business unit IT consumers, with role-based access control,” according to a new post on TechNet blogs.

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The company earned federal certification last week for its cloud-based e-mail, calendar and other collaboration applications after the General Services Administration determined they met moderate-level federal security requirements.

It’s the first cloud-based suite to earn such accreditation and serves as an impetus for the Mountain View, Calif.-based giant to ramp up its sales efforts in Washington, said David Mihalchik, Google’s federal business development executive.

“We hear them tell us that federal employees are clamoring for the same technology [at work that] they have at home,” Mihalchik said. “What we’ve done is to certify Google Apps so that government has an apples-to-apples comparison of their existing system and Google Apps.”

Once largely absent from Washington, Google has expanded its reach here in recent years, mainly to lobby on Internet and antitrust policies. Its offices in Reston and north of Metro Center currently contain about 30 employees each.

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At the time, it was probably difficult to foresee the shift spawned by advancements in cloud computing.

Many organizations have opted to embrace a hybrid cloud model where some services remain in-house while others are moved to the cloud.

Hosted email security solutions like anti-spam are a popular option.
Let’s examine some of the benefits:

• Costs – Some might argue this is the most compelling benefit. In-house anti-spam solutions may require dedicated hardware, software licensing and support staff. Moving this service to the cloud will not eliminate, but significantly reduce these costs.
• Network complexity – Spam detection and eradication is a complex task. Removing yet another task from corporate networks enables an organization to focus on their core business. This may also eliminate potential software or hardware conflicts.
• Network Bandwidth – Precious network bandwidth that might be clogged with incoming spam is now filtered at the cloud service provider, freeing up space for valid data transactions.
• Flexibility – Part of the hesitation in moving to a cloud based service is loss of control. In actuality, if a vendor is not performing well, the customer can easily switch to another provider. With an in-house solution, software is already purchased, making it more difficult and costly to make a switch.
• Scalability – This ties in with cost savings. With cloud providers, you are able to pay by the user, so you have the ability to scale up or down as needed. Any costs associated with scaling are handled by the service provider.

The idea of yielding control of internal business processes is a difficult one. For organizations large and small though, the benefits of cloud-based anti-spam solutions are clear. In this challenging economy, cost savings and the ability to focus on core business services make this service not only more cost-effective, but simpler to manage.

Additional helpful links

• 9 Benefits of Hosted Antispam Services
• The Future of Enterprise Messaging

This guest post was provided by Veronica Henry on behalf of GFI Software Ltd. More information about their hosted services can be found at http://www.gfi.com/max-family

All product and company names herein may be trademarks of their respective owners.

The move will likely generate new competitors for the Rackspace Cloud. One small provider, cloud.com, is already committed to adopt the project’s output.

The project also includes participation by Intel and AMD as well as the NASA space agency.

Rackspace’s move, as the second largest provider of cloud services, is an effort to compete more effectively with Amazon Web Services EC2, which so far has run away with the majority of the cloud market.

Jim Curry, VP of corporate development, said the number of cloud users is growing rapidly, but the actual amount of money spent on cloud computing this year will only be about $1 billion.

“It’s hard to say it’s a large market yet. The game needs to change. Customers hesitate to participate because of fear of lock in. We believe this stack removes that fear.”

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The effort aims to overcome one of the largest obstacles to broad adoption of cloud computing—complex and expensive integration work.

“Up until now, organizations have had to invest significant time and money in conventional, mostly manual blending and customizing efforts to enable their e-business service operations to communicate and work collaboratively,” said Fabiana Fournier, a scientist with IBM Research.

Coke’s tech chief talks about turning IT into a partner with the business side.
IBM’s research lab in Haifa, Israel will lead the project, which has been dubbed Artifact-Centric Service Interoperation (ACSI).

IBM computer experts will collaborate with counterparts at numerous European academic and government organizations, including the UK’s Imperial College of Science, Technology, and Medicine, Technische Universiteit Eindhoven in the Netherlands, Estonia’s University of Tartu, and the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, Italy.

The central goal of the effort is to employ open-source software to build what IBM is calling “the fundamentally new notion” of an interoperation hub. As envisioned, the hub would be an automated integration point for incoming cloud services. ACSI also relies on so-called dynamic artifacts that represent specific business processes.

“We are pushing the frontiers of e-services by providing a highly data-centered approach to combine them, and we are pushing the frontiers of cloud computing by incorporating a semantically rich enabler of e-service blending into the cloud,” said IBM Research manager Richard Hull.

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The public cloud is more and more a fact of life. Indeed, public cloud computing snuck in the back door of both the consumer public and the enterprise: millions of consumers were using public e-mail services before they’d heard of the term cloud computing, and software-as-a-service was embraced by business unit managers before CIOs became comfortable with the idea.

Private clouds are now the hot-button point of debate in the cloud computing community. Some question whether there is anything truly new about private clouds, while the exact definition of how they work seems to be a moving target. (Here’s a good explanation of private cloud computing, with plenty of informative links).

Revolutionary or not, private clouds make sense to potential users. Research firm IDC, at its Tech Outlook event in Seattle this week, discussed its data on the trend: “In a recent survey, IDC asked IT executives about their preference for using a private versus a public cloud. Fifty-five percent said that a private cloud was more appealing than a public cloud, and 22 percent said they were equally appealing, said Frank Gens, an IDC chief analyst.”

Hybrid clouds, however, are something of the holy grail of cloud computing. At the Structure 2010 conference, a group of industry experts talked about the potential for hybrid clouds as well as their current incarnations, which mostly seem to involve concurrent cloud computing strategies, a combination of private and public, rather than truly integrated ones.

The real potential of hybrid clouds will be realized when organizations are able to swap processing between internal and external resources and spread applications across those boundaries. But how far off is that? One conference panelist expressed the hope that, “[T]he industry will begin to develop common APIs that work across both public and private clouds and allow applications developers to make use of both seamlessly…”

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Cloud computing allows companies to use services, softwares and applications on a pay-per-use model without actually owning any hardware infrastructure or licence. This helps companies save on setting up IT infrastructure or purchasing licences.

“A lot of chief information officers (CIOs) express concern over data security in a non-cloud environment. This concern is only heightened when their data is hosted on a server elsewhere,” Deloitte senior director Sundeep Nehra said.

However, he declined to comment on the investments being made for cloud computing, or the potential opportunities for security solution providers in this regard. Citing an example, he said that in a 500-bed hospital, hundreds of medical images and medical records may be stored. Any data loss could hamper the diagnosis of patients.

The situation gets complicated in the case of banking and financial services, where data on millions of transactions has to be stored everyday. “Information is critical, and, as companies would invest in securing data on their own premises, they also need to ensure that their data on the cloud is secure,” he said.

Companies like Amazon.com, Microsoft and Google offer cloud computing services globally. Analysts peg the Indian cloud computing market to be worth more than $200 million. While small and medium-sized enterprises seem to be adopting cloud-computing faster, large companies are also keen on moving in that direction for optimising costs.
These companies have the option of moving to either a private cloud or a public cloud (where solutions and data of more than one company are stored).

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