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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The legal battle comes as Microsoft strives to adapt to a trend toward programs being offered as services in the internet “cloud” instead of being installed and maintained on people’s computers.

Microsoft built its fortune selling software such as Office, Outlook, and Windows while San Francisco-based Salesforce has become a prospering poster child for cloud computing.

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Microsoft has introduced Azure, a cloud computing platform, offered on the internet.

Salesforce on Thursday filed a patent-infringement lawsuit against Microsoft in apparent retaliation for similar litigation that the US technology colossus filed against Salesforce in May.

“It’s a normal response,” said analyst Rob Enderle of Enderle Group in Silicon Valley. “Salesforce is trying to create some balance so there is reason for Microsoft to come to the table and negotiate.”

Microsoft’s legal filing accuses Salesforce of infringing on nine patents.

“Defendant’s infringement of the Microsoft patents-in-suit is willful and deliberate, entitling Microsoft to enhanced damages and reasonable attorney fees and costs,” the company said in court documents.

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Chatter takes the best features of Facebook and Twitter and integrates them into the enterprise. According to Salesforce.com Chatter will enable customers to better track documents, internal expertise and real-time data.

Meanwhile, Chatter is designed to bring in more customers to Salesforce.com’s ecosystem. Salesforce.com has 77,300 customers—5,000 of them that played with Chatter in beta—but executives see the platform as a way to bring in new users.

Salesforce.com will walk customers through Chatter partnerships and features at its CloudForce 2010 powwow.

Al Falcione, senior director product marketing at Salesforce.com, said the company is hoping to expand Chatter usage within an enterprise. When Chatter gains more users it will likely be more beneficial to companies.

Source

Here are a few screenshots of Chatter in action.

My quest at the time led to an interview during London’s InfoSec show with Gerhard Eschelbeck, CTO of anti-malware vendor Webroot, and previously one of the founding members of Qualys.

Webroot provides web and email security as a cloud service, delivered from the company’s own network of data centers, supplemented by Amazon capacity at times of peak load.

Its use of the cloud goes further than that of McAfee.com, Symantec Norton and others, for whom the cloud is solely a distribution mechanism to keep subscribers’ software up-to-date.

In common with other SaaS anti-malware providers, Webroot uses what Eschelbeck calls a “multi-tier” model, in which the protection is provided primarily by software running in the cloud, in addition to having a component that runs on the client machine.

“There’s always a need for a last layer of protection on the desktop,” he explained. But there are two reasons why it’s no longer practical to run the whole protection layer from the desktop, as older anti-malware architectures do.

First of all, there’s the sheer scale of the threat. Malware are being computer generated around the clock all over the world, he explained, which leads to huge numbers of new examples appearing — currently 40,000 a day, and rising to a projected 100,000 per day next year.

In the face of that onslaught, “There’s no way the signature file approach can scale,” he said. “We’re reaching physical limits on the desktop — and on servers as well — to protect [those devices].”

The escalation in numbers means that occasional false positives will continue to be a fact of life in the anti-malware industry, whatever methods are used. But a methodology that requires product teams to push a single downloadable signature file every few days inevitably increases the risk, he said.

“The more signatures you add, the more chance you have of an error.” Once a problem file has gone out to the desktop, you then have to produce and download a new signature file to eliminate the error, whereas a cloud-based application can be corrected much more quickly.

“If a false positive takes place in the cloud, it can be fixed instantly. The cloud will have false positives, but the ability to fix it is different.”

The second reason for running the protection software mainly in the cloud is simply because that’s where the threat is coming from today. Signature files date back to an era when most devices were standalone or running on local area networks with no connections to the outside world apart from the occasional dial-up modem.

“Ten, fifteen years ago, the main infection vectors were through the floppy disk, the USB stick. Today the main vector is through the Web.”

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By many accounts, cloud computing has become the next big wave in Information Technology. Driven by concerns in costs and increasing network complexity, the IT news industry has painted a picture that suggests cloud computing usage is nearly pervasive – at least in one form or another. In fact, Gartner Research Group predicted that by 2012, one fifth of all businesses will own no IT assets.

Bold claims aside, there are many variables that factor into this equation. Company size, geographic location and size of the IT department all play a role in measuring adoption. In order to gain a more definitive assessment of the extent of cloud implementations, GFI Software decided to enlist the help of Redshift Research.

Turning to the UK, the survey polled 250 small businesses spanning multiple business sectors with fewer than 250 employees. The breakdown is as follows: 46% had less than 10 employees, 29% with 10-99, and 25% with 100-249. Participants were high level decision makers including owners, manager/directors, and IT professionals.

So how did Garner’s forecast fare? The research indicates they, and other industry pundits may have significantly overestimated not only adoption, but basic understanding of cloud computing. Let’s take a look at some of the highlights:

• Only 10% of respondents fully understand what cloud computing means. 62% have never heard of cloud computing. A further 13% have heard of it but don’t know what it means.
• Conversely, 24% of IT professionals have either never heard of cloud computing or don’t know what the term means.
• Security is touted as a primary inhibitor to cloud adoption. Yet security was not the primary concern for respondents, with only 12% citing it as a main reason for not pursuing cloud computing.
• Satisfaction with current in-house arrangements accounted for 56% of respondents indicating they would not pursue cloud computing.
• A surprise finding revealed that 44% of respondents felt cloud computing was too expensive.
• The top three perceived benefits of cloud computing are: expertise of service provider, lower costs and accountability.
• A hybrid model, where some services are cloud-based while others remain in-house, seems to be the arrangement that most SME’s prefer.

What is clear from the results of the survey is that there is a disconnection in terms of basic understanding of this technology.

As an example, 41% of these companies were in fact already using some form of managed service. In this hybrid model includes services like antivirus, spam filtering, and backups are cloud-based, while other services remain in-house.

So what should cloud computing vendors take away from this survey? Decision makers consistently expressed a desire to be able to mix and match services as needed and assurance that their data was safe.

Issues of support availability, inflexible contract terms and pricing were key inhibitors and addressing them will pave the way for more widespread cloud adoption.

The final and perhaps most critical message is one of communications. If decision makers are unclear about the technology and its benefits, the likelihood of adoption plummets.

For a copy of the survey results, please visit: http://www.gfi.com/documents/SME_Technology_Report_web.pdf.

About GFI
GFI Software provides the single best source of web and mail security, archiving and fax, networking and security software and hosted IT solutions for small to medium-sized businesses (SMB) via an extensive global partner community. GFI products are available either as on-premise solutions, in the cloud or as a hybrid of both delivery models. With award-winning technology, a competitive pricing strategy, and a strong focus on the unique requirements of SMBs. For more information about GFI solutions visit: www.gfi.com

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

Cloud computing is expanding at rates and directions barely imaginable a few years ago and CIOs will have to adapt quickly to keep if they want to keep up, according to keynote speakers who kicked off the Enterprise 2.0 conference. The event runs June 14 – 17 in Boston.

Among the dramatic changes underway, according to J. P. Rangaswami, CIO and chief scientist at BT Design, is the looming demise of the corporate desktop. “The age of the lockdown desktop is coming to an end,” Rangaswami told a packed audience. He added that CIOs are “now seeing the age of the ‘You can bring your own desktop to work.’”

The phenomenon is beginning to dawn because younger people — many just now entering the enterprise workplace — often possess better technologies than are offered at work. The younger technologists still don’t occupy positions of power, but as they rise in enterprise computing environments they can be expected to promote many new approaches to cloud computing.

Another keynoter, Murali Sitaram, VP/GM of Cisco’s Enterprise Collaboration Platform, said the rapidly changing cloud computing environment needs platforms to develop. He and a colleague, Jim Grubb, demonstrated the value of Cisco’s My View dashboard, which enables users to access a myriad of applications useful in cloud computing.

Another keynoter, Murali Sitaram, VP/GM of Cisco’s Enterprise Collaboration Platform, said the rapidly changing cloud computing environment needs platforms to develop. He and a colleague, Jim Grubb, demonstrated the value of Cisco’s My View dashboard, which enables users to access a myriad of applications useful in cloud computing.

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