TECHNOLOGY, Uh Oh: The Cloud is the New 'Bring Your Own' Tech for Users

A new study by cloud monitoring provider Opsview finds that more than two thirds of U.K. organizations are worried about something called "cloud sprawl." Cloud sprawl happens when employees deploy cloud computing-based applications without the involvement of their IT department. In the U.S., we call these "rogue clouds," but it looks like this situation is becoming an international issue -- and reflects the same "consumerized IT" trend reflected by the invasion of personal mobile devices into the enterprise in the last 18 months.
Here's my take on this phenomenon: If IT does its job, then those at the department levels won't have to engage cloud providers to solve business problems. I think that most in IT disagree with this, if my speaking engagements are any indication. However, if I were in IT and somebody told me they had to use a cloud-based product to solve a problem because they could no longer wait for IT, I would be more likely to apologize than to tell them they broke some rule. Moreover, I would follow up with guidance and learn how to use the cloud myself more effectively.
[ In the data center today, the action is in the private cloud. InfoWorld's experts take you through what you need to know to do it right in our "Private Cloud Deep Dive" PDF special report. | Also check out our "Cloud Security Deep Dive," our "Cloud Storage Deep Dive," and our "Cloud Services Deep Dive." ]
In the rogue cloud arena, most uses of cloud computing are very tactical in nature. They might include building applications within Google App Engine to automate a commission-processing system, using a cloud-based shared-calendar system for project staffers, or using a database-as-a-service provider to drive direct marketing projects. You name it.
The threat to those in IT is more than the security issues they point to when they push back on rouge clouds. Their reaction is more likely related to the fact that they are made to look bad when those they should be serving have to go outside of the company for their solutions. Perhaps driven by embarrassment or prioritizing the assertion of control higher than helping business units succeed, the reaction of most in IT is to create or republish policies prohibiting the use of unauthorized platforms -- and perhaps knock a few heads together to make that "thou shall not" policy clear to all.
I believe a different approach is required. Those in IT should interpret cloud sprawl as an indication that they could be doing a better job in setting the path forward into the cloud. Instead of fighting the users, figure out how to leverage the cloud as a way to help employees do their jobs better, and even help the business units do so directly. It's a new concept for many of us.
This article, "Uh oh: The cloud is the new 'bring your own' tech for users," originally appeared atInfoWorld.com. Read more of David Linthicum's Cloud Computing blog and track the latest developments in cloud computing at InfoWorld.com. For the latest business technology news, follow InfoWorld.com on Twitter.

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TECHNOLOGY, NASA cloud architect forms company for private cloud

Chief Architect of NASA-cloud platform, spun in the open-source OpenStack cloud operating system, a new company and product launches to help companies more easily build private clouds.
Piston cloud computing sell a OpenStack distribution, which provides automation for ease of deployment, security features, to the needs of the security-conscious organizations and interoperability with public clouds, based also on OpenStack.
"The reasons for the foundation of the society is that the options for deploying private clouds are complicated, difficult to configure, get time-intensive and not necessarily scale particularly well," said Joshua McKenty, CEO of the cloud and cloud earlier piston architect and technical manager at NASA.
While many have begun the contribution to the OpenStack company on public clouds, McKenty wanted to use also OpenStack to ensure that businesses can, so that public and private clouds could be interoperable. He would also, of course, there was the unique challenges that companies facing, security, regulatory compliance, and integration with other enterprise systems products. "It's another animal as a public provider," he said.
PentOS said a private cloud from which the "bare metal", is required on all of the software he. It begins required with a Linux distribution that contains only the components, to run from OpenStack, a OpenStack distribution and a number of automation tools.
It is designed to be used with low-cost servers and hardware components, he said.
Typically, companies, private clouds on the OpenStack distribution professional services group, providing high availability, load balancing node node for storage create, including blade servers for computing and storage performance, he said. "But you're not really take advantage of the elasticity of the cloud", he stressed.
With PentOS, users can purchase requires to run a single class of the server and use the software to automate things such as a database, the high reliability on each server, depending on the capacity and reliability of the hard disk. He said "We the dependence on high availability are hardware process automation".
PentOS automates the installation. PentOS is packaged on a USB stick, the administrator can configure to a laptop.
Administrators have to choose not much if you have to configure their systems however. Entrance area of the Internet Protocol (IP) used, choose groups of users from Active Directory in the cloud permissions have settings to VLANS and configure the switch itself, how such as administrative passwords for this set.
"We have tried the software so opinionated as possible", he said. "There are no options to which database to use, or hypervisor."
PentOS works with the KVM hypervisor and MySQL. "We want people not bound in a number of licensing discussions", he said. "It's always a challenge." "If you give people a ton of options, give them many opportunities to reduce the performance of the system and some of the ways to improve the it."
If an administrator sets the configurations, the USB stick can be inserted in the server rack PentOS detects the hardware and installation and configuration of the operating system.
The installation process can eliminate a major security hole: the insider attack. Because the hardware from a USB stick is configured, a company cannot be only the most reliable administrator password. Additional administrators do not have applications to the hardware, because the Setup is done automatically, he said.
PentOS can add companies also only five servers at the same time.
Companies can buy additional PentOS modules, compliance with certain guidelines, such as for health organizations HIPAA and FISMA for government agencies.
Pistons plans for a limited offer of a preview version of PentOS-Monday, 29 followed by general availability of November.
McKenty claims that company CloudAudit, is PentOS of the first implementation of a set of common interfaces for automation of cloud features such as testing and quality assurance. This means that corporate users can choose to work with a public cloud provider, which is also CloudAudit and be sure that all of their cloud operations required such as HIPAA requirements.
McKenty is not only former developers of NASA cloud to create tools help companies trying to build private clouds. Chris Kemp, the former, CTO of NASA, which also helped build the cloud, it started a company called fog, an appliance, which aimed at easier for companies, private clouds build developed.

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TECHNOLOGY, Mozy Ships Hard Drives to Cloud Backup Customers

In an attempt to spur adoption of its MozyProcloud backup service, Mozy today shipped external hard drives to many of its small- to medium-sized business customers to speed initial system backups.
The new service, called Mozy Data Shuttle , is not dissimilar to what many enterprises do when creating offsite backups: the initial full backup is made to local hard drives, and then those drives are shipped to a disaster recovery site where the data is ingested by a storage array or tape library.
Mozy's Data Shuttle consists of a bright green 2TB Iomega hard drive with both USB 2.0 and eSATA connectivity.
After a customer orders the service, Mozy ships the customer a hard drive. As soon as the hard drive is connected to a system, it prompts the MozyPro customer to perform an encrypted full backup of the system. The customer can then use a pre-printed shipping label to ship the drive back to Mozy where the data is downloaded onto its servers.
As soon as the Data Shuttle drive is unplugged from a customer's system, incremental backups of the system data are automatically sent to Mozy's data center . When the backup drive's data is downloaded, it is automatically joined with the incremental backups to create a full data copy.
"In the last 12 months, more and more people are opening up to backing up data to the cloud. At the same time, the amount of data in organizations has grown. Those two things converging is what prompted us to bring out this service," said Gytis Barzdukas, director of product management at Mozy.
Barzdukas said about two-thirds of Mozy's business comes from SMB customers. When a growing number of those customers reported having at least 100GB of data to store, it became a barrier to backing up online because it was taking weeks in some cases to complete.
"While their data was growing, their network bandwidth wasn't necessarily staying on par," he said.
Mozy is targeting organizations with 100GB to 8TB of data or five to 30 desktop users.
Jamie McKenzie, Mozy's Data Shuttle product manager, said the service can handle up to four 2TB drives for ingestion at a time.
Each drive has two layers of encryption. The first encryption key can be chosen by the customer either through a default key or by creating a unique personal key. Then the Data Shuttle drive generates a second encryption key used for additional security while the drive is in transit. The one-time key is used to unlock the encrypted data so that Mozy can then store a customer's encrypted data at rest.
Mozy never has both keys, so it is unable to see a customer's data.
The retail price for the first Data Shuttle drive is $275, and $100 for each additional drive, according to Barzdukas.
Lucas Mearian covers storage, disaster recovery and business continuity, financial services infrastructure and health care IT for Computerworld. Follow Lucas on Twitter at @lucasmearian or subscribe to Lucas's RSS feed .

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