Looking beyond HIPAA, SOX or PCI-DSS compliance claims

The scary part about shopping for a cloud solution is that even if the managed services provider claims compliance, this doesn’t mean that they actually are compliant. In fact, the provider may not even realise they are being misleading. Because regulatory compliance is too often left open to interpretation, your definition of HIPAA, SOX or PCI-DSS compliance might be different...

At the beginning of 2013, we sent out invites to our IT infrastructure monitoring community with regards to their adoption or consideration of...

Roy Illsley, Principal Analyst, Ovum SoftwareIBM recently made three significant announcements about its vision for how cloud computing will be adopted by enterprise customers. First, IBM believes that open standards are needed to drive increased customer demand for workload portability in a hybrid cloud environment. Second, IBM has segmented the adoption of cloud computing as two different strategies serving two different reasons to adopt cloud computing, namely a cloud-enabled approach and a cloud-centric approach. A...

Laurent Lachal, Senior Analyst, Software – IT SolutionsIn February 2013, Amazon Web Services (AWS) launched the beta version of AWS OpsWorks, a configuration and deployment service for AWS public cloud-based applications and their related resources. While AWS usually creates its services from scratch, OpsWorks is based on third-party technology, namely the open source Chef-based SaaS offering, Scalarium, developed by Peritor, a small Germany-based IT service provider that AWS acquired in 2012.

OpsWorks reflects the...

Abstract – MaaSTM (Model as a Service) sets a new concept to order and classify data modeling design and deployment to the Cloud. MaaS changes the way to move data to the Cloud because allows to define data taxonomy, size and contents. Starting from data model design, MaaS might guide the DaaS (Database as a Service) lifecycle, providing data granularity and duty rules: as a consequence, MaaS implements the new concept of Small Data. In fact, Small Data answers to the need of controlling...

Gartner’s been gazing at its crystal ball again, and has forecast that service-led solutions – software as a service (SaaS), infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS) and so forth – will displace more traditional sourcing methods by 2015.

The analyst house stresses that IT companies need to “bridge legacy offerings and new services”, again pointing a future to the cloud for service providers.

And cloud services appear to be growing at a much quicker rate...

I watched with interest recently an interview with NetSuite CEO, Zach Nelson on Bloomberg TV. During the interview Nelson stated his belief that retail wasn’t dead and that Apple had shown the way to all retailers with regards customer experience. Nelson also stated that in his mind, retail would be the next industry to be “disrupted by the cloud”.

In this blog I will examine some of the...

Firewalls will always be required as they are the sole devices that analyse and control communication of data and applications.

Firewall technology ensures networks are running the way we want them to.  As a result I came to the conclusion that the question is not ‘will on-premise firewalls disappear’, but ‘how will firewalls be influenced by cloud technologies?’.

In order to address this we have to look at some of the history.

Enter Unified Threat Management

10 years ago the...

By Sharon Florentine

Sharon Florentine is a freelance writer who covers everything from data center technology to holistic veterinary care and occasionally blogs for Rackspace Hosting.

Welcome to Generation Now. Today’s users want information in an instant. Make them wait more than a second or two for your webpage to load and they’ll surf over to the first competitor who feeds their demand for instant gratification.

Using a Content Delivery Network or Content Distribution...