April 15, 2013
Volume XLIII, Issue 6
One Month Countdown to CLOUD COMPUTING EAST 2013
The Cloud Computing Association (CCA) and the Distributed Computing Industry Association (DCIA) proudly announce the next wave of speakers for Monday sessions of CLOUD COMPUTING EAST 2013 (CCE:2013) taking place from Sunday May 19th through Tuesday May 21st at the Marriott Boston Copley Place in Boston, MA.
CCE:2013 will focus on the use of cloud-based technologies by government, healthcare, and financial services to revolutionize business processes, increase efficiency, and streamline costs.
An opening workshop on Sunday afternoon will orient delegates and provide a fundamental grounding in cloud models, deployment methods, and technology definitions. Then a welcome reception will offer networking opportunities for speakers, exhibitors, and audience members.
On Monday morning, Stefan Bewley, Director, Altman Vilandrie; Fabian Gordon, CTO, Ignite Technologies; and Cameron Jahn, Product Marketing Manager, ShareFile, will provide attendees with an overview of cloud computing adoption in the healthcare, government, and financial services sectors.
Brad Maltz, Chief Cloud Architect, Lumenate; Michelle Munson, President & CEO, Aspera; Matt Stevens, CTO, AppNeta; and Omar Torres, Director, Cloud Services Architecture and Operations, VeriStor, will then explore the latest trends and newest cloud offerings being introduced in these markets.
Next, Brian Benfer, Director, Healthcare, ShareFile; Joe Foxton, VP, Business Development, MediaSilo; Larry Freedman, Partner, Edwards Wildman Palmer; and Larry Veino, Director, Solutions Architecture, Presidio, will candidly assess current obstacles to adoption.
After a pace-changing workshop entitled Take the Bore out of Boardroom by Wes and Amy Peper, and conference luncheon, attendees will have the opportunity to choose from among three event tracks offering half-a-dozen panel discussions and some two-dozen case studies.
Arwin Holmes, Senior Project Manager, NorthPoint, and Chris Christy, Healthcare Principal, SAP America, for example, will offer platform-as-a-service (PaaS) and business-process-as-a-service (BPaaS) case studies from the healthcare services sector.
Grant Kirkwood, Founder & CEO, Unitas Global, and Adam Firestone, Director, Defense and Government Solutions, WSO2, among others, will present software-as-a-service (SaaS) and infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) case studies from the public sector.
Tom Gonser, Founder & Chief Strategy Officer, Docusign; Amit Khanna, Vice President, Technology, Virtusa; Jamie Brenzel, Chief Executive Officer, KineticD; and Keith Hartley, Director of North America Sales Strategy, Oracle, will discuss deployment model case studies from the financial services sector.
Then a group of experts including David Cerf, EVP, Corporate and Business Development, Crossroads Systems; Doug Natal, Public Sector North America Director, Oracle; and Yung Chou, Platform Technology Evangelist, Microsoft, will offer several case studies on the various types of cloud models from each of the three verticals.
At day's end, there will be an evening networking reception in the Exhibit Hall. Check out the April 25th edition of DCINFO for announcements of new speakers for Tuesday sessions.
CLOUD COMPUTING CONFERENCE at the 2013 NAB Show
The DCIA thanks all who participated in the record-setting CLOUD COMPUTING CONFERENCE at the 2013 NAB Show last week.
An electronic version of the conference brochure for this third annual DCIA event within the NAB Show is now online here, and keynote speaker and case-study presentations along with panel session slides are now available here.
Check next week's DCINFO for show photos and information about audio recordings from each session of CCC at NAB.
Once again, we thank the sponsors for this year's CLOUD COMPUTING CONFERENCE — Amazon Web Services, Aspera, DAX, Equinix, and YouSendIt.
Report from CEO Marty Lafferty
 The DCIA this week joined with Adobe, Google, Microsoft, Rackspace, and many additional cloud-computing industry leaders in signing on to the following letter to Chairman Patrick Leahy, Ranking Member Charles Grassley, and other leaders of the US Senate Judiciary Committee.
We are very grateful for Jim Dempsey, Vice President of Public Policy at the Center for Democracy & Technology (CDT), and all participating members of Digital Due Process (DDP) for their perseverance and excellent work on this matter:
"We, the undersigned companies, organizations, and individuals, are writing to express our support for Chairman Leahy's and Senator Lee's ECPA Amendments Act, S. 607, which the Committee will consider shortly.
The bill would update the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA) to provide protection to sensitive personal and proprietary communications stored in "the cloud." We urge all Members of the Committee to support the bill.
ECPA, which sets standards for government access to private communications, is critically important to businesses, government investigators and ordinary citizens.
Though the law was forward-looking when enacted in 1986, technology has advanced dramatically and ECPA has been outpaced.
Courts have issued inconsistent interpretations of the law, creating uncertainty for service providers, for law enforcement agencies, and for the hundreds of millions of Americans who use the Internet in their personal and professional lives.
Moreover, the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals has held that a provision of ECPA allowing the government to obtain a person's email without a warrant is unconstitutional.
The ECPA Amendments Act would update ECPA in one key respect, making it clear that, except in emergencies, or under other existing exceptions, the government must obtain a warrant in order to compel a service provider to disclose the content of emails, texts or other private material stored by the service provider on behalf of its users.
This standard would create a more level playing field for technology. It would cure the constitutional defect identified by the Sixth Circuit. It would allow law enforcement officials to obtain electronic communications in all appropriate cases while protecting Americans' constitutional rights.
It would provide clarity and certainty to law enforcement agencies at all levels and to American businesses developing innovative new services and competing in a global marketplace. It would implement a core principle supported by Digital Due Process, www.digitaldueprocess.org, a broad coalition of companies, privacy groups, think tanks, and academics.
For all these reasons, we strongly urge all members of the Senate Judiciary Committee to support the ECPA Amendments Act, S. 607."
We also urge DCINFO readers to pay close attention to this issue, which is now active in the US Senate, and weigh-in with phone-calls and faxes now to your Senators.
Allowing the government to access e-mail without a warrant if it's more than 180 days old is simply an unacceptable practice.
Senator Grassley (R-IA) indicated at a hearing Tuesday that the Department of Justice (DoJ) is already implementing a policy similar to the one we support.
FBI Agents Association President Konrad Motyka subsequently confirmed that such practice is being put in place, adding additional momentum to this needed measure.
"It's a standard practice now for agents working with United States attorneys' offices to use search warrants to obtain the contents of e-mails," Motyka said.
In addition, a DoJ representative testified in the US House of Representatives in March that "there's no principled basis" to treat e-mails that are older than 180 days differently from newer messages.
The Warshak standard, which stems from a 6th Circuit Court of Appeals ruling that a warrant should be required for such content, would codify this practice.
Google noted that 68 percent of law-enforcement requests it received for user data during the second half of 2012 came without a warrant.
The company requires a search warrant before disclosing e-mail and other forms of content.
The DCIA believes that ECPA reform is one of those issues that is of critical importance to all citizens — regardless of whether your political preferences are conservative, moderate, or liberal — and strongly urges your support for S607. Share wisely, and take care.
Cloud Eases Collaboration, Workflow, and Distribution
Excerpted from NAB Show Daily Report by Jay Ankeney
Cloud-based solutions have accomplished better reliability and security for content workflow and distribution. From collaboration and post production to storage, delivery and analytics, decision makers responsible for accomplishing their content-related missions will find solutions and cutting-edge sessions and technology at NAB Show.
The CLOUD COMPUTING CONFERENCE, which runs Monday and Tuesday, will help attendees understand this technology trend by presenting a two-day track of sessions discussing the way cloud-based solutions can benefit not only media companies, but also military and government applications.
The conference is sponsored by Amazon Web Services, Aspera, DAX, Equinix, and YouSendIt.
NAB Show attendees can consider this conference a guide through the cloudscape that will enhance their appreciation of the variety of cloud-enabled systems and products on display all through the exhibit halls.
On the production side Adobe will be demonstrating their Adobe Anywhere collaborative workflow platform as well as Adobe Creative Cloud. Autodesk M&E will be exploring customer interest for content creation in the cloud with projects like Project Pinocchio on Autodesk Lab.
At the Avid booth convention-goers can see the Interplay Sphere, a cloud-enabled system allowing a real-time connected workflow regardless of platform or location. Digital Vision will have their Vintage Cloud experts on hand to discuss archive restoration needs. Harmonic will be launching a cloud-based transcoding service for professional applications available on the Amazon Web Services Marketplace. Signiant will be showing off Media Shuttle, the newest addition to their portfolio of accelerated file-transfer systems.
"This year we have divided the two-day CLOUD COMPUTING CONFERENCE into thematic schedules, each including a keynote address from an industry specialist," said Marty Lafferty, CEO of the Distributed Computing Industry Association (DCIA). "These include A-Z steps explaining what cloud solutions are now available, how they are being deployed, and the way producers and rights holders who use them can become more competitive against those who decide not to implement the cloud."
Lafferty is convinced that file-based cloud computing products and services are now impacting every stage of the audio/ video ecosystem.
"During this conference, we'll be going through the whole process from concept inception to creation to post production and through interim storage to delivery," he said. "With these insights you will be able to step into cloud technology based on the experiences of those who have faced these challenges before."
Today's track will be highlighted by an opening keynote featuring Mark Ramberg, Amazon Web Services head of Global Digital Media Business Strategy, and a marquee keynote from Disney's Chris Launey.
Tuesday's keynote speaker during the session "Unique Cloud Based Solutions" will be Saul J. Berman, partner and vice president Global Service Srea Leader Strategy and Transformation, IBM Global Business Services.
"During my Tuesday keynote I'll be presenting the ideas included in my IBM paper 'Power of Cloud' including the importance of what cloud can enable," said Berman. "I'll be discussing the future adoption of cloud technology and the six associated game-changing business enablers. A lot of people think about cloud from the IT perspective, but my concerns include scalability, market adaptability, masking complexity, context-driven variability and ecosystem connectivity. People attending the session will learn how each of these enablers can provide real-world benefits to industry."
Between sessions of the CLOUD COMPUTING CONFERENCE, attendees will also want to visit the Cloud Pavilion where companies dedicated to cloud technology will be demonstrating their latest innovations for implementation.
Among the exhibitors in the pavilion visitors will find Aframe's new Aframe 2.0 whose Edit Flow feature allows users to export their metadata into Avid Media Composer, Apple Final Cut Pro and Adobe Premiere; Scalar's servers-on-demand Studio Cloud service; the CloudMediaHub media ecosystem by Strategic Blue; a cloud-based software platform from Levels Beyond for managing archived video content called Reach Engine Stage; Media Excel's HERO VS cloud-based distributed transcoding service; and Nvidia will be showcasing their latest solutions for virtualization and public and private cloud-based systems.
These cloud-based technologies will provide practical examples of how cloud implementation will be affecting the industry in the near and far future, and the principles behind them will be the focus of discussion at the CLOUD COMPUTING CONFERENCE.
"If NAB Show visitors invest their time in these CLOUD COMPUTING CONFERENCE sessions, they will be not only ahead of the curve, but will be able to peek around the corner toward the newest offerings that are coming up in cloud technology," Lafferty said. "We think this will be one of the most valuable events during the NAB Show 2013 where people can learn practical information that will advance their business and careers."
IPTV or Not IPTV?
Excerpted from Multichannel News Report by Gary Arlen
Is Internet protocol the salvation or ruination of broadcast TV?
The double-edged sword of IP video will swing over this week's National Association of Broadcasters' annual convention in Las Vegas. If IPTV — including over-the-top (OTT) video — is a threat to broadcast as well as to cable TV, then NAB is again attracting a lot of that competition into its arena.
At the same time, if IP distribution continues to provide cost-effective delivery for production, post-production and transport of content (including multiscreen material) among producers, networks and group owners — and to other broadband-service providers — then it deserves the larger role it has on the NAB agenda.
The NAB show long ago ceased to be a broadcasters-only convention, as it exposed TV networks and local licensees of one-way, one-channel ad-supported television to a vast array of digital products and services.
Hollywood and cable techies have been on hand for more than a decade, observing and making deals in the converging media ecosystem.
IP has escalated the interchange. At press time, the halls figured to be dotted with IPTV set-top boxes, and conference sessions expected to dwell on cloud distribution and Internet-fueled two-screen experiences.
"It's like what cable did to broadcast TV, but exponentially larger," said Marty Lafferty, CEO of the Distributed Computing Industry Association (DCIA), which is running a two-day CLOUD COMPUTING CONFERENCE during the NAB Show. He was expecting a larger audience at the DCIA event than last year's 440 attendees.
IPTV is also on the agenda at other NAB events, including the "Disruptive Media Conference," a one-day affair that will cover TV Everywhere, on-demand video and over-the-top services, as well as competitive content-related issues, such as program discovery and recommendations, and content curation across distribution channels. Boxee CEO and co-founder Avner Ronen will be among the speakers.
Policy issues associated with IPTV, highlighted by last week's 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruling about Aereo's IP distribution of local TV channels, will be examined — including, perhaps, during Wednesday's swan song appearance by Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski. He will be interviewed by NAB joint board chair Paul Karpowicz, president of Meredith's Local Media Group.
Elsewhere around the Las Vegas Convention Center and hotel suites, IP and IPTV will play out in myriad ways.
Mainstay broadcast-technology companies will show off devices and services that can be used throughout the digital distribution environment.
TVU Networks is unveiling its TVU Grid, an IP-based video distribution, routing and switching platform that directs live video streams among multiple remote locations.
Virtz will unveil its Viz Engine real-time 3D compositing system, which now features simultaneous IP-streaming of multiple formats.
Accelerated Media will focus on its "Companion Ad Network," which stitches together second-screen, companion apps and connected TV widgets from programmers, networks and advertisers. The company will also privately show a new IPTV set-top box optimized for cable and broadband service providers. Although details have not been disclosed, the company is believed to be in advanced negotiations with large MSOs and some smaller cable organizations to customize the IPTV boxes for video-on-demand, Skype and home-security services.
Steve Hawley, principal analyst at TV Strategies, a Seattle-area consulting firm that focuses on the IP ecosystem, expects "strong interest from operators and content providers" who want higher efficiency to enable them "to distribute more streams to more devices using the same available bandwidth."
The IP-focused attendees at the NAB convention will be particularly interested in providers that can integrate the variety of formats for the multi-platform environment, Hawley said.
"The only companies who are in a position to create a common experience" are the carriers, Hawley said, including Comcast, Time Warner Cable and other cable operators as well as Verizon and AT&T.
Both AT&T and Verizon are exhibiting their services on the NAB Show floor.
Aspera Previews Desktop App at NAB
Excerpted from Streaming Media Report by Troy Dreier
Aspera, the best known company in the high-speed file transfer space, made several announcements at the NAB conference in Las Vegas, NV, including the introduction of Aspera Drive, a desktop product that should be available to customers this summer.
Aspera currently has multiple applications that offer user-to-user easy transfers, explains Fran§ois Quereuil, Aspera's director of marketing, such as Faspex, Shares, and Sync. With Drive, Aspera is combining their features into one unified product. Drive will integrate with a computer's file system. Whey users want to share a file using Aspera Drive, they'll simply right-click on it and indicate the receiver. Drive will also let users sync local files with those on a networked directory. Companies can use it to open their servers to hundreds of contributing partners.
"It's an initiative of pulling everything together, making it easy, making it transparent to the user," Quereuil says. "Think of it as a Dropbox for the media enterprise." While it won't be available for months, booth visitors can get a preview.
Aspera also announced multiple partnerships today. It's working with Avid to offer a plug-in for Avid Interplay, a media asset management tool, that lets scattered workgroups connect their copies of Interplay to better share assets.
"A lot of broadcasters have been asking for it," Quereuil says. "It could be up to hundreds of times faster [than standard transfers]. It depends on how far your trying to send your information and what type of network you're using."
Aspera is also working with EVS, Telestream, and Harmonic to add Aspera transferring to their products.
Aspera sees strong growth ahead thanks to the rise of cloud-based media services, such as the recently launched Sony Media Could Services. With them, companies can get end-to-end video production and distribution services as needed, without having to invest in infrastructure. Aspera technology helps them exchanges large files quickly.
"It makes it possible for smaller companies to do bigger things," Quereuil said. "It completely changes the economics of producing content."
Rackspace Puts Cloud in Telco Data Centers
Excerpted from ZDNet Report by Sam Shead
Cloud and hosting company Rackspace aims to make its migration to OpenStack painless for customers starting on August 1st.
Rackspace has announced plans to integrate its public cloud into the datacenters of service providers and telcos worldwide, allowing them to offer cloud computing services to their existing customers.
Rackspace will build and operate the cloud on behalf of the telcos and service providers.
"That telco will have its own dashboard for its customers and it will be branded as telco x,y,z that they can sell and provide to their customers," Rackspace CTO John Engates told ZDNet.
The cloud will be built on Rackspace's cloud hardware and software infrastructure and powered by OpenStack - the technology that has come out of the open source infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) cloud computing project.
"We will patch it upgrade it and roll out the same features that roll out to our datacenters on the same schedule," said Engates. "We will treat it as an extension of our cloud. It will be another zone or another region of the Rackspace cloud operating inside a telco datacenter."
Engates argues that telcos and service providers that are considering setting up a cloud have previously found it difficult because of the plethora of software vendors and systems integrators that fail to deliver what they really want.
Several telcos are in talks with Rackspace about implementing the Rackspace cloud into their datacenters but none are ready to go public.
Huawei Defends Equipment Security
Excerpted from Bloomberg News Report by Michael Tighe
Huawei Technologies said it doesn't pose a US security threat as China's largest maker of telecommunications equipment defends itself against foreign governments' concerns that it aids intelligence agencies.
The Shenzhen-based company "never sold key equipment into US networks," Deputy Chairman Guo Ping said today after the company released its annual report. Huawei became one "of the world's top three smart-phone makers" in the fourth quarter and expects the proportion of sales from networking equipment, the area that has drawn foreign scrutiny, will decline.
Huawei is fighting concerns over cybersecurity in markets from the US to Australia as American intelligence agencies and security companies traced web attacks to China. Softbank Corp. (9984) and Sprint Nextel told a US lawmaker last month they won't integrate equipment from the Chinese company into Sprint's network after they merge, the legislator said.
"There has never been any incident of our product threatening cyber security or network security," said Guo. Huwaei serves more than 600 telecommunications operators in more than 140 countries, he said.
"Since our installed base for telecom network equipment in the U.S. in the past and today was and is almost zero, therefore, there is no ability for Huawei to pose a threat to America's cyber security."
A US congressional committee in October said Huawei and ZTE provide opportunities for Chinese intelligence services to tamper with telecommunications networks for spying. Huawei was barred by the US in 2011 from participating in building a nationwide emergency network.
Australia in March 2012 banned Huawei from bidding on a national broadband network citing "national interests."
Huawei network equipment sales will fall to 60 percent of revenue by 2017 from 73 percent in 2012, said Guo, who is one of the company's three rotating chief executive officers. Consumer devices will rise to 25 percent of sales in 2017 from 22 percent last year, driven by a push into high-end products, he said.
"There has been no material impact from this report on Huawei's business" Guo said, referring to the US congressional committee's findings. While it had "difficulties" in the US, he said Huawei is "fully confident" about its growth.
Huawei today said it's targeting 10 percent compound annual revenue growth in the next three to five years by expanding its smart-phone and cloud computing businesses.
Sales last year rose 8 percent to $35 billion, helping boost net income 32 percent to $2.45 billion. The company in January projected revenue will gain as much as 12 percent this year.
"Huawei is the only one that has the capability to enter into high-end market," said Bill Fan, an analyst at Guosen Securities in Hong Kong. "It is the only Chinese brand that can produce a quad-core chipset."
Huawei may also face additional restrictions in Canada, where the government is reviewing whether it needs rules to govern the equipment used by the country's biggest mobile-phone operators, a person familiar with the matter said last month. Huawei, which supplies both Telus and BCE, has been barred from providing gear for Canadian government networks.
Huawei, the world's second-largest maker of equipment for phone networks after Ericsson, was founded by Ren Zhengfei in 1987 after retiring from the Chinese military in 1983.
Ren reduced his role at the company since October 2011, when he split the role of chief executive officer with a panel of three executives who rotate at six-month intervals. Deputy Chairmen Guo, Xu Zhijun, and Hu Houkun are the co-CEOs. Guo took the title in October 2012.
Huawei "will not be the next to fall," Ren said in the annual report today. "We are striding across the Pacific Ocean." He didn't specifically refer to the US probe.
Huawei is employee-owned, with about 74,000 of the total 155,000 workers holding shares, according to its report.
Chief Financial Officer Meng Wanzhou, who is Ren's daughter, in January said her father controls about 1.4 percent of the company. Huawei will keep "an open mind" on whether or not to become a public company through a share sale, she said in January.
Getting Ahead in the Clouds
Excerpted from Public Service Report by Paul Fyfe
With the Cabinet Office due to announce the official providers for the third iteration of the G-Cloud Framework in the coming weeks, now is an opportune time to review the government's push for cloud computing. Cloud computing allows government to leverage utility computing models in its IT systems.
The platform for selection is straightforward; it works as a catalog for IT services and systems that public sector institutions can browse like a traditional online store. As a result, it also allows much greater flexibility for public sector institutions to respond to demand, and to pick up faster on new technologies that help them deliver services.
Moreover, the infrastructure, platforms and range of services and applications have been completely overhauled in what amounts to a major modernization of government IT. It's a huge technological shift. Beyond technology, the framework also heralds a new era for supply-side dynamics.
The Cloudstore, through which public sector organizations can procure services, brings greater transparency and a level playing field. It also opens up public sector IT work to SMEs, who make up three-quarters of the listed suppliers for the framework. It has encouraged changes for larger organizations, too.
IT has become a partner-driven world. Leading organizations are partnering with small, dynamic companies, and both parties are benefiting from the other's strengths. Smaller companies benefit from large organizations taking on the risk and responsibility for a whole project and larger companies benefit from the specialist services and products offered by SMEs. It is a new model for supply chains in the industry.
There's a great deal to be admired in the progress that government has made and, as we near the beginning of the G-Cloud's third framework, there are clear opportunities ahead for helping public services to get the most out of the platform.
One of the biggest challenges for the framework is assisting customers to procure more advanced systems. At the moment, the framework is ideal for public sector organizations to procure discrete services and discrete products: if you know exactly what you want then you can get it.
However, what we're finding is that when organizations are looking to develop complex systems with multiple services there can be a lack of guidance. For discrete, well-defined services, like web hosting, it isn't a problem, but for more complex business changes — the type that help to make significant efficiency savings — the framework offers limited component services that glue together the sequence of services an organization would need.
Greater information and guidance available through the framework would be a big step forward in helping the public sector to access the services available. It is a must at a time when everyone has to work in cost-effective ways, and there is a major opportunity to help public sector managers unlock potential IT savings through valuable advisory and architectural services. Customer feedback is also vital for the framework. It gives purchasers greater information when deciding between suppliers and, equally, helps those appointed to the framework to develop their offer. However, without a rating or ranking system, there's little for either side to go on.
There's a big opportunity to introduce this into future frameworks, so that procurement can be based on a greater understanding of the quality of the services and products on offer. It is a feature that has been integral to consumer-based Internet retailing and, if conducted in a secure and balanced way, it would be an important tool for helping public servants navigate the Cloudstore. As the G-Cloud Framework evolves, it continues to take important steps forward for public sector IT and procurement.
The transparency and simplicity of the platform has helped to bring new services to the market and made it easier for public servants. Now, as the framework goes into its third phase, there is much that could be developed to help the public sector to really get under the skin of what's on offer.
Greater understanding is crucial. With guidance for building individual services into sophisticated systems, and by giving organizations the benefit of others' experience, we simplify the procurement process and encourage greater efficiency across the sector.
Military Plans Multi-Exabyte Storage Cloud
Excerpted from Information Week Report by Nicholas Hoover
The Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) plans to award a $45 million cloud computing contract for an intelligence and surveillance information storage cloud that could eventually require four exabytes of storage, according to a procurement document posted online.
The document, a sole source justification, says that DISA will award the contract to systems integrator Alliance Technology Group (ATG), which claims expertise in federal government private cloud computing and has done business with NASA and the Navy, among other federal agencies. According to the document, Alliance will provide DISA's Enterprise Services arm, which provides IT services to the rest of the military, with "state-of-the-art global storage capabilities."
Such storage capabilities would allow the agency to securely store "hundreds of billions of objects" in a way that users could access the data across multiple networks. Data being stored in the cloud would include standard and high-definition video, LIDAR images, infrared and electro-optical images and Wide-Area Motion Imagery.
Many of the details of the contract have been redacted, but storage will come in 10 Pbyte units tied together via an IP network and hosted in a secure data center facility. The service will support "interface standards for ingesting, accessing and managing geospatial data" and the data will be searchable and accessible on mobile devices.
While federal agencies and intelligence agencies in particular are working to deal with a deluge of data, exabyte volumes remain relatively unheard-of. The largest stores of data are still largely measured in the tens of petabytes. However, the need for exabyte storage is far from out of the question. In a call with reporters last week, National Institutes of Health director Francis Collins said that the Obama administration's new brain mapping effort may require the processing of information in the yottabyte range, which would be a million exabytes.
Information blacked out in the DISA procurement document include the location of the data center, part of the description of the need for a data storage cloud, the name of Alliance's service, the names of a number of government officials involved in the contract and what appear to be references to specific agencies.
While DISA already operates its own data centers, the agency says in the procurement document that DISA's Defense Enterprise Computing Centers don't have the necessary capacity and that DISA doesn't have the necessary funding to deliver homegrown versions of the capabilities that the agency needs.
On a website providing an overview of Alliance's cloud services, the company says that it can meet FedRAMP requirements and other security requirements and adds that its private cloud services offer numerous features and benefits, including reduced costs, audited data centers, and the ability to map capacity to demand.
Cloud Storage Options Creating Waves in Government
Excerpted from GovPlace Report
Federal agencies and small businesses understand that maintaining and controlling cloud data is vital to continuity and compliance. Government cloud computing options allow entities of all kinds to safely and efficiently manage their data, creating more unified teams, handling bigger projects and reducing operational costs all at the same time. However, it's important for firms to recognize that these solutions may require additional diversification to make the best use of cloud and solid state assets.
Government cloud computing initiatives in Canada are helping the multiple agencies involved in the management and maintenance of the country handle these tasks in a more effective manner. Hybrid cloud options have been in play for the last year, according to IT World Canada, and IBM and a number of local firms have successfully deployed and operated a major supercomputer project for the last year.
BlueGene/Q, as the massive device is dubbed, has allowed the government to add almost 150 jobs and dramatically expand computing power. Combining the best of solid state assets and cloud storage enterprise IT solutions, increasing collaboration and guaranteeing disaster recovery with physical assets has allowed firms to operate with more confidence and computing power.
To date, there are roughly 20 high profile projects underway within Canadian offices, including everything from healthcare management and records maintenance to urban planning and environmental protection.
BlueGene/Q runs on an 18-core chip PC A2 processor and four-way multi-threading technology. IT staff are responsible for managing 20 petaflops and 20,000 trillion cycles per second, supported by infrastructure that IBM Canada's John Lutz described as nearly one-third faster than other data center tools on the same scale. While this deployment cost the government about $175 million, it has drastically increased the amount of computational power and backup protection the Canadian government can offer its workforce.
Hybrid tools at a much smaller scale are seeing much greater adoption among private firms as well as other government entities. The usability of solid state assets in connection with cloud deployments allows businesses to guarantee their backups and safeguard live data in the cloud at a much more reliable rate than cloud-only implementation.
Should anything happen to a virtual deployment connection, physical hardware can provide an on-premise or remote disaster recovery alternative.
This is largely what's lent to so much budget expansion in this direction, and why this trend isn't expected to slow down in coming years, InformationWeek reported. The rising demands of big data, fueled by social media, cloud computing and mobile deployments, will put ever-increasing strain on business infrastructure as information volumes continue to grow.
Managing all these assets in a digital environment may seem easy, but should anything happen to that outlet or if expansion of data assets is beyond what firms anticipated, they may not be able to effectively house all the files they need in order to remain compliant.
CloudTweaks reported that there are many other reasons why businesses need to consider more hybridization in their government cloud computing environments. The source stated that effective management of corporate data requires a more comprehensive end-to-end solution and facilitates greater levels of communication.
Integrating elements like VoIP and telemetry are essential to many business's operations, for instance, providing a better bridge between physical assets and cloud options. Such enterprise IT solutions show how organizations can benefit most from hybridization.
mHealth-as-a-Service Could Change Mobile Health
Excerpted from Global Healthcare Report by Abigail Phillips
Software-as-a-service (SaaS), when it comes to cloud computing is often talked about, but what about mobile healthcare-as-a-service (mHaaS)?
In a recent article, written by John Sung Kim, CEO of San Francisco, CA based DoctorBase.com and published in PhysBizTech, the case is made that mHealth apps for medical provider organizations will soon evolve into app platforms whose functions can be 'rented' as a cloud-based service instead of building them as 'one-off' IT projects. Sung Kim goes on to say that mHaaS is the only way the mHealth industry will grow.
Sung Kim, who runs a mobile healthcare 2.0 company, believes the benefit of mHaaS is that it significantly decreases the costs and risks for medical provider organizations.
"Singularly built medical apps may suffice for certain tools such as drug reference information, but apps such as patient communications or mobile medical consultations require systems built on a multi-tenant architecture with the capability to scale and become extensible by third parties through application programming interfaces," says Sung Kim, adding that "mHaaS is not only coming - it's the only viable way our industry will grow."
Sung Kim says that mHaaS is an obvious pathway for mHealth provision. All one has to do is look at the cost and pricing structure of mHaaS versus building them internally as standalone apps, he says. He estimates the total first year cost to provider organizations for in-house or outsourced application development for a single app to be $181,000, while the total first year cost with mHaaS falls significantly to $18,000 ($1,500 per month in subscription fees to access and deploy a cloud-based mHealth app as a rented service with 1,000 customers on its mHaaS platform).
"In the current landscape of mHealth applications launched by medical provider organizations, there is much anecdotal evidence that suggests most of these initiatives fail to achieve their originally stated performance and cost objectives," Sung Kim concludes. "Fortunately, the money and math add up quite nicely for those who can execute on the approaching mHaaS future."
Cloud Computing Cuts IT Costs by Half
Excerpted from Kroll Ontrack Report by Polly Button
Businesses can save up to 50 per cent of their expenditure on IT infrastructure by acquiring IT infrastructure, one expert believes.
Speaking at a Private Cloud Immersion session for local media at Microsoft's Karachi office, Zafarul Islam, lead technology strategist at the company, said that infrastructure maintenance for many IT-orientated companies takes up 70 per cent of their budget, reports the Express Tribune.
"Cloud computing is all about building a shared pool of configurable computing resources — network, servers, storage, applications and services — and letting the end user consume these resources, whenever he wants," Mr Islam noted.
Microsoft described cloud computing as a "major paradigm shift" in how IT resources are designed, managed and delivered, adding that it allows automation of work by limiting human interaction.
Although the cloud brings a host of benefits, businesses must be aware that there are risks to using the technology.
By implementing data recovery plans, companies can be rest assured that any information which is lost can be restored, reducing the downtime suffered.
Making Cloud Computing Pay
Excerpted from Forbes Magazine Rport by Louis Columbus
Relying on cloud computing strategies to free up dollars and time that can quickly be re-invested in product and service innovation emerged as the highest priority for respondents in a recent Rackspace survey.
While cost reductions were significant, the greatest contributions were seen in investments in innovation (48%), new product & service development (45%), and boosting sale efforts (38%).
Rackspace recently commissioned a study with market research firm Vanson Bourne, who surveyed 1,300 organizations in the UK and the US, including 1,000 Small & Medium Enterprises (SME) and 300 enterprises with 1,000 employees or more.
The methodology included coverage of Financial Services, Retail, IT/Technology, Manufacturing, Business and Professional Services, Media, Logistics, and Mobile Telecommunications sectors, with a further small representative group from other sectors. Rackspace also partners often with the Manchester Business School to complete qualitative research, which they also did on this project. You can find an executive summary of the study at Cloud Computing Research.
In February, Joe McKendrick's post titled Cloud Computing Boosts Next Generation of Startups, Survey Shows covered the findings from this survey from a start-up standpoint.
Key take-aways from the research include the following:
In March, Rackspace made a subset of the results available in Microsoft Excel format, titled the Vanson Bourne Cloud Barometer Data — IT Skills. Thank you Rachel Romoff and the Rackspace team for responding so quickly to my request for links to the data set and insights into how the study was completed.
62% of respondents state that cloud computing is enabling their organizations to invest more money back into their businesses. Cloud computing improved profits by an average increase of 22% according to the study.
Marketing benefits most significantly from cloud computing investment, as is shown in the table below. I've asked for clarification from Vanson Bourne with regard to sales being rolled up into the marketing figure and will update this post when I get a response.
Average cost reduction is 23% due to cloud computing savings on infrastructure, based on the combined results of UK and US-based respondent analysis.
62% of firms have invested funds saved due to cloud computing efficiencies back into their businesses, increasing total investment by an average of 23%. The following table from the study shows the prioritization of investments being made based on funds saved from cloud computing:
56% of organizations are using open source technology as part of their cloud strategies and 86% say that using open source cloud technology boosts their business' ability to innovate.
68% say their organizations are increasing their use of open source cloud computing technology due to the lower cost of ownership (58%) and the greater stability and robustness of it as a platform (45%).
Manufacturers are saving $774,000 per using cloud providers according to the study. Presented below is a table from the Vanson Bourne study comparing industries.
The bottom line: Using the cost and time savings from cloud computing to free-up resources for product innovation is giving these companies a long-term competitive advantage in the market.
Survey Shows Cloud a Revenue Winner
Excerpted from the West Australian Report
Small and medium businesses using cloud computing and websites expect to earn more revenue than firms that don't.
Software provider MYOB's March 2013 Business Monitor released on Monday shows the financial gap between firms confident with the online world and those that are wary was expanding, but the adoption of online technologies had changed little in the past nine months.
In a study of more than 1000 small and medium enterprises (SMEs), 16 per cent used cloud computing in business, up from 14 per cent in July 2012. Firms saying they had a website was unchanged at 38 per cent.
Cloud computing allows access to a shared pool of programs and sites, usually via the Internet, as opposed to using individual computer software.
Firms saying they used the cloud were 106 per cent more likely to expect revenue to rise in the past year than those that didn't, up from 53 per cent in July.
Businesses with a website were 60 per cent more likely for revenue to increase, up from 53 per cent.
"It's obvious that as time goes on, Australian business operators using cloud computing are increasingly likely to achieve positive financial results," MYOB chief executive Tim Reed said.
"That said, I'm surprised fewer than one in every six say they use cloud in business."
Reed said MYOB research showed the need for business to embrace online technologies.
SMEs wanted more government involvement in preparing the sector for an online future, with more than half of respondents stating they would vote for the political party that offered free government-funded training to small business, he said.
Accessing data from anywhere was the most popular reason for using the cloud (52 per cent), while 36 per cent said they liked their staff having the ability to work remotely.
The top reason for those not using cloud computing was a lack of knowledge about its functions and concern over making the "right business decisions" (35 per cent).
This was followed by firms saying they were not "very tech-savvy" and lacked confidence in looking at it for their business (22 per cent).
Coming Events of Interest
Digital Hollywood Spring - April 29th-May 2nd in Marina Del Rey, CA. The premier entertainment and technology conference. The conference where everything you do, everything you say, everything you see means business.
CLOUD COMPUTING EAST 2013 - May 19th-21st in Boston, MA. CCE:2013 will focus on three major sectors, GOVERNMENT, HEALTHCARE, and FINANCIAL SERVICES, whose use of cloud-based technologies is revolutionizing business processes, increasing efficiency and streamlining costs.
P2P 2013: IEEE International Conference on Peer-to-Peer Computing - September 9th-11th in Trento, Italy. The IEEE P2P Conference is a forum to present and discuss all aspects of mostly decentralized, large-scale distributed systems and applications. This forum furthers the state-of-the-art in the design and analysis of large-scale distributed applications and systems.
CLOUD COMPUTING WEST 2013 — October 27th-29th in Las Vegas, NV. Three conference tracks will zero in on the latest advances in applying cloud-based solutions to all aspects of high-value entertainment content production, storage, and delivery; the impact of cloud services on broadband network management and economics; and evaluating and investing in cloud computing services providers.
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