Cloud Computing

Intermedia Becomes a Member of CSA to Enhance their Cloud Security Services

June 1, 2012 By DCT User

Intermedia, Microsoft specialist and hosted service provider recently announced that it has joined the cloud security alliance (CSA) as a corporate member. Intermedia responded by stating that this allegiance will help ease all customer concerns regarding the security of its cloud computing services.

The CSA is nonprofit organization which aims to promote the use of best practices to provide security within cloud computing. It also strives to create awareness regarding the safe usage of cloud computing

The alliance is led by a broad coalition of industry practitioners, corporations, associations and other key stakeholders.

“As our customers move to the cloud and as end users access corporate and private data from a range of mobile and desktop devices, ensuring data privacy and security is of paramount importance,” said Michael Gold, president of Intermedia. “Intermedia has been providing secure, business-grade cloud-based services for over a decade. We look forward to working with the CSA to contribute deep knowledge in cloud security, while also learning from the many other experts in this fast growing space.”

Intermedia provides comprehensive cloud services suite of various SMEs which includes secure cloud, encryption and intrusion and malware detection systems to address all concerns of customer’s safety and privacy.

The company develops and delivers many proprietary security services including Outlook Backup, Message Mirror, SpamStopper, VirusStopper and Mobile Device Management.

Intermedia says it has a strong privacy policy governing the protection of customer data, having passed Safe Harbor compliance standards set forth by the US Department of Commerce.

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“SMBs Get the Maximum Benefits by Opting for Cloud Based Services”-Survey

May 28, 2012 By DCT User

The main goal of Small & Medium Businesses (SMBs) is to always improve their business operation in the most cost effective way possible. But the newer technologies are usually out of reach for these companies due to financial and staff constraints. Cloud based solutions has changed this notion dramatically. Cloud has made the various applications cost effective and reliable

Recent studies have shown that could technologies are helping small businesses not only in making servers more dependable but helping them to prepare for disaster.

According to 2012 SMB Disaster Preparedness Survey by Symantec Corp, the adoption of technologies like cloud computing, virtualization and mobility is assisting companies to improve their ability to recover from a disaster.

The survey found that more than 40 percent of SMBs are deploying public cloud in their operation while 43 percent using private clouds. Also these businesses are using mobiles and tablets for official purposes.

“Today’s SMBs are in a unique position to embrace new technologies that not only provide a competitive edge, but also allow them to improve their ability to recover from a disaster while protecting the information that their businesses depend on,” said Steve of worldwide marketing for SMB and Cloud at Symantec Corp. “SMBs cannot afford lengthy downtime so the ability to quickly recover from a disaster is critical. Technologies such as virtualization, cloud computing, and mobility, combined with a sound plan and comprehensive security and data protection solutions, enable SMBs to better prepare for and quickly recover from potential disasters such as floods or fires, as well as lost or stolen mobile devices and laptops.”

Mobile processing has made various business processes a breeze. This technology saves business costs in case of disasters or if there is a break in the application as well.

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Arsalon Technologies Plans to Expand Their Data Center to Meet Demands

May 24, 2012 By DCT User

Arsalon Technologies recently announced opening of Phase two of their Lenexa data center because of the increasing demand of cloud hosting solutions and IT outsourcing. The Arsalon hosting facility expansion will be made available for clients and will create up to 25 new positions.

Data centers for the companies have become a way to avoid high costs which occur due of managing own hosting facilities. Arsalon’s services are giving the clients the ability to do a smooth transition from their current infrastructure to cloud computing.

Arsalon’s expansion plan involves the installation of two-1.5MW Cummins generators with paralleling switch gears and redundant chillers, A/C units and UPS units. The project planning and construction is headed by Rand Construction, a national expert in critical facilities. Also on the team are Burns & McDonnell and Heartland Electric.

“The demand for high quality data center infrastructure and enterprise class hosting services has continued to be strong,” said Arsalon CEO, Gary Hall. “Our clients require scalable power and bandwidth. They need a reliable solution for their IT operations and we help them do it in a capital-efficient way. Our track record of continual growth over the past ten years reflects our ability to problem solve and consistently provide innovative, secure hosting solutions for our new and current client base.”

The new data center is conveniently situated in Kansas City, has an abundant supply of power and internet connectivity and is looking forward to attract regional companies to create high skilled job opportunities over the next 24 months.

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Introducing the Newest Cloud Computing Platform on the Block- eCloud2.0

May 21, 2012 By DCT User

As per industry reports, eGroup recently announced its newest public cloud computing platform – eCloud v2.0. This platform delivers efficient, flexible and cost-effective ways for IT departments to meet escalating business needs. This way, the information can be accessed by the customers anytime, anywhere.Cloud computing is a high demand market where flexibility, service, security, performance and availability are key. eCloud performs in every category.

Steve Rattacasa, cloud services manager at eGroup says, “Customers from any business and of any size can take advantage of our public cloud offering by running their workloads in our cloud, minimizing their capital and operational costs, and being more agile in meeting the needs of their business.” For businesses that are understaffed, eGroup eases the burden of daily IT management by offering hosting agreements with IT support.

Dan McNannar, president and CEO of Hire Quest, a franchisor of temporary staffing offices with locations in 18 states, needed more control over their web servers and SQL databases. Hire Quest had outgrown its previous hosting vendor’s ability to support their requirements. “We did not have complete access to our hosting environment,” said McNannar. “We had to VPN and remote desktop multiple times to get to specific data.” Utilizing the eCloud, Hire Quest has experienced the required level of control and the VPN and remote access is now clean and simple.

. eGroup has been providing innovative and advanced technological solutions to various businesses since 1999. Along with cloud computing solutions and services, eGroup also provides application services and end-user computing.

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All about Hybrid Clouds

May 5, 2012 By DCT User

A hybrid cloud is one which is a combination of both public and private cloud. It is a cloud computing environment in which an organization offers and manages some resources in-house and has others that are provided externally. The service providers can utilize the 3rd party Cloud Providers in a full or partial manner thereby increasing the flexibility of computing. A hybrid cloud is usually offered in one of two ways; by a vendor that has a private cloud and forms a joint venture with a public cloud provider and the other case where a public cloud supplier forms a partnership with a vendor that offers private cloud platforms.

This model takes advantage of the less expensive public cloud while insuring that highly sensitive information is protected. The hybrid cloud is a great way for businesses to save space and money for businesses. This is the main reason for the large scale usage of hybrid cloud technology, as businesses today have too much information to store on their own servers, but they are not willing to take risk regarding security issues that come with public cloud. So, using the hybrid cloud offers them the opportunity to consider gain of an internal network of storage, as nicely as a public cloud that can be accessed from any spot with net access, while the data is being safeguarded.

Under many circumstances, the hybrid approach permits a business to take advantage of the scalability and cost-effectiveness that a public cloud tenders with no revealing mission-critical applications and data to intermediary vulnerabilities. This type of hybrid cloud is also known as the hybrid IT.

There are three criteria driving the implementation of hybrid IT which are:
• An organization’s need to maintain and control the data.
• The cost efficiency of cloud mechanism such as software-as-a-service and storage-as-a-service
• The desire for an IT section to react as swiftly as possible to rapidly altering business needs.

The hybrid cloud is one of the ideas of cloud computing. It is a dream of picture perfect inters- operability between the private cloud in data center and resources dumped away in one or more public clouds. A greatly promoted work in progress, the hybrid cloud undertakes such vibrant new use cases as “cloud bursting” /”follow the sun” /”follow the moon” computing.

Some of the important aspects of hybrid cloud include compatibility and consistency across private and public clouds. It means that it is able to create assets like virtual equipment, provisioning outlines, mechanization scripts all in one place and use them in another. It also overlays to coordinate the use of private cloud and public cloud resources. One can run an application Web tier in the public cloud for simpler and more flexible scalability. While doing so, one has to keep the back-end database in the private data center.

The hybrid model blends and maximizes the best of a multi-tenant cloud with physical and virtual systems with dedicated environment. Using this, it would be possible to cross-connect existing back-end resources like databases and other supporting applications to the cloud, resulting in greater flexibility.
The hybrid clouds also provide a good foundation for other purposes beyond on-demand scalability, such as disaster recovery. This means that the private cloud is using a public cloud as an on-demand failover platform, to be turned on when needed. This is a very cost effective idea. They also provide application compatibility which means, for a certain applications public clouds could be highly suited, while some other applications might not be suited for the public cloud. Thus having a hybrid approach is very apt in such cases.

However, there are a few challenges with the Hybrid Cloud model, those being:
• The connectivity issues between the in-house data center and the external cloud
• Overheads with respect to Network & Systems monitoring and management can be potentially high, as it continuously needs to be monitored and optimized on both the sides.
• Depending on the estimated workload volumes and peak workloads, Data traffic volume limitations may affect the operation of the system, in cases where a shared leased line is used,
• One another single point of failure increasing the risks in a hybrid cloud model is Network disruptions, but if you go for redundancies, your cost also increases.

Though we encounter some challenges, the Hybrid cloud computing model can still provide significant advantages to (large) organizations.

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OnX Enterprise Solutions Announces $20 Million Data Center

May 2, 2012 By DCT User

Leading global provider of enterprise data center solutions, OnX Enterprise Solutions has announced a brand new $20 million data center for the company’s cloud and data center infrastructure. Clients seeking a high availability solution with multiple facility failover need not look beyond the borders of North America as OnX is expanding rapidly in the region.

The investment is to be utilized to build OnX’s cloud infrastructure and to increase data center capacity levels tremendously. This move is also aimed at building the best of breed technology solutions and solidifying partnerships with leading companies such as Cisco, EMC and VMware. This new investment is a follow up of its Federated Cloud Centers of Excellence (FCCE) where clients can test drive enterprise cloud solutions at data centers using real world applications and scenarios.

“This investment will help us significantly expand our cloud technology solutions and services for clients across the globe,” said OnX President and CEO, Ed Vos. “We are executing on our strategy to be a leader in the cloud, and today’s announcement not only demonstrates our commitment to this vision but also our ability to execute on it. With this capital infusion, we are extending our ability to offer IT services and solutions in the most optimal way our clients want to consume it.”

“This investment in OnX’s cloud infrastructure and data centers puts OnX’s offering on par with any leading cloud and data center provider,” said Bart Foster, OnX chairman and operating partner at Marlin Equity. “With its leading solutions, global clients across various industries, and strong leadership team, OnX is well positioned to accelerate deployments of its Federated Cloud platform.”

OnX’s portfolio of cloud and managed services is designed to simplify and accelerate the design and deployment of cloud-based enterprise computing solutions, either on client premises or in an OnX hosted data center. OnX’s cloud offerings are all-encompassing and are part of the OnX Federated Cloud framework, which builds and manages a cohesive and adaptable mix of private and shared cloud computing platforms.

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MUSA Goes “West”

April 27, 2012 By DCT User

Information technology and compliance services provider MUSA announced that they have entered into a contract with a co location data center in San Jose, California to build a validated cloud site on the west coast.

“We’re delighted to start bicoastal Validated Cloud operations during the summer of 2012 and to bring the same fully qualified hosting and support to the West Coast Life Sciences market,” explained Nicole Moon, Product Manager for MUSA’s Validated Cloud. “The addition of the new data center will bring 21 CFR Part 11 compliant localized hosting, which is deployed and maintained under a formal Quality System, to the West Coast. This will allow our existing East Coast clientele to failover to California in case service delivery is interrupted at the Boston area location and vice versa”

“The addition of our San Jose data center allows our clients to choose the nearest data center for their primary location.” Douglas Lantigua, Principal for MUSA Technology Partners, continued “We’ve found that hybrid cloud solutions are in high demand and that service providers who meet the regulatory challenges of the Life Sciences vertical are emerging. We’re pleased to be among the first to bring compliance-bound West-Coast-based companies a choice for data center locations. Our Integrated GxP services extend our capabilities and scale for a fully compliant service structure that has been designed to meet the needs of our industry. Companies that require secure storage for regulated data, compliance-critical application hosting or a fully qualified platform for validated systems can use our Validated Cloud locations for latency-essential deployments or disaster recovery.”

Cloud data centers that are validated are SSAE 16 audited, 21 CFR Part 11 compliant are deployed and maintained under a formal quality system with high transparency. MUSA provides clients a suite of managed services which can include platform, application and compliance support based on the clients risk threshold. The new data center allows the company to provide completely qualified bidirectional disaster recovery, replication and failover between the East and West coasts.

A fast expanding consulting firm that excels in out of the box solutions and support for firms is probably an apt description of MUSA. Their engineers combine years of work experience in working with huge multinational companies to start-ups in biotechnology, health care and pharmaceutical industries. MUSA differentiates itself from other competitors by providing specialised services in Life Sciences through thorough understanding of its compliance requirements.

Advantages of Cloud Based Network Test System

April 26, 2012 By DCT User

Cloud-based networking solutions are services that establish cost efficiency and scalability benefits to the networking sphere. It is a system where software programs and storage space can be accessed through the Internet. Hence companies use this service to outsource the ownership and management of certain areas of its IT functionality like storage, mail room, web sites, etc within the cloud. Users may not be aware of what software or hardware is being used or what operating system it is running on, but they do not need to. It is similar to software as a service (SaaS) in the market. This is also an enterprise application. Multi-tenant architecture based SaaS applications like SalesforceTM has changed the status quo in the Customer Relationship Management space. Cloud-based networking has brought about the same upheaval in the networking space.

Cloud-based networking has created waves in the internet sphere. It is an innovative way to roll out distributed venture networks that convey enterprise-class network capabilities around the world. The process is carried out via vastly resilient, multi-tenant applications that involve no principal investment in networking equipment. Unlike conventional hardware-based solutions, cloud-based networking is extremely simple, enabling enterprises to install remote locations in less time and operate their distributed networks through a cloud-based application. It also provides unique levels of centralized control and network visibility. Such services are also subscription based which the users can opt.

The two major features of the cloud computing are:
(i) It is modular and it compartmentalizes software applications ,associated hardware and the infrastructure
(ii) It is uniform and utilizes the same possessions that clients share. A business using cloud computing can keep away from large outlays of capital expense as well as everlasting maintenance costs. This results in the cash flow with total system cost.

Apart from the above mentioned, there are other benefits to cloud computing. The major one being it supporting data centers in slot machines online every aspect. Data centers can at times be too bunched up for comfort. Virtualizing the servers has met with only limited triumph. Over time, there will be a smooth transition to measurable computing, based on the cloud. The future of computing is going to be a blend of service orientation, service management, and cloud computing. Some of the reasons being -

• Customers can access applications and data from anywhere at any time through the internet. Data will be stored offsite rather than being stored on a hard drive of a user’s computer or a corporation’s internal network.

• Another important aspect is that the hardware costs would decline as cloud computing systems would lessen the need for advanced, expensive hardware on the client side. The cost of buying, installing and supporting a system network will dramatically decline.

• The need for expensive memory or even large hard drives is undesirable. Rather, everyone would buy an reasonably priced computer terminal, a monitor, input components such as a keyboard and mouse, and only enough processing power to run the middleware essential to connect to the cloud system. Computer components have to be purchased in large quantities in IT. But buying hardware in large volume, cloud suppliers get better pricing on each purchase.

Cloud computing is a subscription based system. Enterprises would not have to buy software or software licenses for each employee in the company. Instead, the company would pay for what they use. It is more like the way an open source software functions. In a broader sense, cloud computing infrastructures are fabricated from open source components as the cloud providers are uncertain to make huge investments without knowing the outcome.

When cloud computing system’s back end is a grid computing system, customers could make optimum use of the entire network’s processing power. For example, researchers who work with extremely complicated computation can dispatch the computation to the cloud for processing purpose. The cloud system would make use of the processing power of all available computers on the back end and considerably speed up the results. Cloud computing offers a way to outsource non-critical applications to business. It also results in better performance, allowing IT to hub on critical applications.

Another advantage of using Cloud computing is the usage of man power. Cloud providers are more resourceful at IT operations, using fewer man-hours for criterion tasks.

Teradata Forges New Cloud Capabilities to Attain Higher Utilization

April 24, 2012 By DCT User

Teradata recently announced their new private cloud capabilities which will assist companies in realizing higher utilization effectively. Higher utilization of processing power is an important means of implementing private corporate cloud computing which has been in great demand. The purpose is to centralize and share computing resources apart from increasing utilization to around 60 percent or higher. A Gartner analyst recently reported that only around 25 percent of available processing power from virtualized servers is being utilized by companies implementing virtualization.

For many years now, Teradata’s Active Data Warehouses (ADW) has been providing clients with 90 to 100 percent utilization. ADWs also provide important insights to their customers which help them take better decisions and also give them a competitive advantage.
An enormous economic advantage is provided by Teradata ADW to IT organizations by ensuring computing resources are fully optimized and utilized. Capital and operating savings in terms of labor, space, power and cooling is also achieved by the Teradata ADW private cloud.

“Leading companies have consolidated underutilized servers and storage onto a Teradata ADW Private Cloud, reducing costs – while increasing utilization of their IT resources,” said Scott Gnau, president, Teradata Labs. “By eliminating data marts, many with only 10-20 percent utilization, companies can consolidate onto a Teradata ADW Private Cloud running at 90 to 100 percent utilization.”
With Teradata ADW Private Cloud, Business users can also benefit from better control of their computing resources and self-service capabilities. In a span of 5 minutes, business users can meet the requirement of analytic. This is done by creating a highly functioning data lab to condition and manage data required for their required needs.

“Today’s global business environment can be volatile and consumer demands can shift rapidly. Because of this unpredictability, it is sometimes difficult for CIOs to adequately plan for data warehouse capacity needs,” Gnau added.”Teradata can provide instant and elastic resources behind the scenes so businesses can scale up or down as business conditions fluctuate.”

“The combination of on-demand provisioning, an elastic model for adding and removing resources at any time, and pay-for-use pricing bring the key cost and agility benefits of cloud computing to the data warehouse,” said Mark Madsen, president of Third Nature, an IT analyst firm. “The cloud is the future of IT infrastructure but public cloud offerings don’t meet the performance and availability requirements of BI workloads today. For the near future we need private cloud offerings like this.”

“Through our Teradata ADW Private Cloud, we are the only data warehousing company providing CIOs a huge return on investment with fully utilized computing resources, while delivering to business users the flexibility of self-service data warehouse resource provisioning and it’s available to customers today,” Gnau said.

MUSA Goes “West”

Teradata Forges New Cloud Capabilities to Attain Higher Utilization

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