Horses for Courses: Betting on the Right Cloud Environment

by Simon Aspinall

A horse race is a complex environment, with many factorsthat contribute to performance. The term “horses for courses” stems from thefact that a racehorse performs best on a racecourse to which it is specificallysuited. While this phrase is transferable to various situations, it serves as acritical starting point for enterprises that are trying to determine their ITand cloud computing strategies. Just as some horses perform better on certaincourses, some applications run better in certain clouds.

All enterprises have complex ITenvironments consisting of many applications, and a majority of theseorganizations are increasingly accepting cloud as a new IT operations model. CIOsmust then decide which applications are appropriate to run in the cloud, andwhich cloud will enable them to perform as efficiently and effectively aspossible. Private, hybrid and public clouds all come with pros and cons, and eachare suited best for different applications when it comes to performance.

Availability, cost, security, compliance, flexibility,scalability, and multi-tenancy play a crucial role when determining deploymentoptions. Enterprises need to consider these criteria, and check the boxes thatbest apply to them and their workloads.

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The Cost of Doing Nothing

by Mark Haynie

Senior IT executiveswith a lifetime of experience managing datacenters are facingcareer-threatening choices

Here's the scenario: You're an IT senior manager withmillions of lines of valuable and proprietary legacy code running yourworldwide business via expensive and powerful mainframes. Your internalcustomers rely on this mission-critical software every day, and your businesswould be dead without it, but the cost is becoming increasingly hard tojustify.

The CEO is now demanding that you cut computing costs, andthe users are demanding easier access via mobile devices - what should you do?

This scenario is playing out every day, as senior managersof global companies struggle to understand how their organizations should reactto the challenges and opportunities of Web 2.0 and cloud-based SaaS computing.

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SMB Disaster Recovery: Plan Now or Pay Later

by Michael Krutikov

SMBs havebeen hearing for years about the need to have a disaster recovery(DR) plan. But this advice largely falls on deaf ears. An alarming number ofSMBs, 74 percent, have no plan in place to deal with a disaster that couldpotentially cost them their livelihoods. But where to start? Many SMBs areunaware as to what precisely goes into their disaster recovery plan.Essentially, it’s a matter of understanding where your company is now, whereyou need to be, and what steps are required to bridge the gap. If that seemsoverwhelming, creating a plan can be broken down into a few simple steps.

Understanding What You Have and What YouNeed
First,consider the current state of your business. Take an inventory of your currentresources, beginning with hardware – not just desktop computers, but servers,printers, mobile devices and other devices. Next, assess all the software youare using, especially business-critical applications and databases that allowbasic operations for the business to continue uninterrupted. It’s especiallyimportant to note any systems or programs that would be difficult or impossibleto replace, such as custom-built applications. You should also consider theminimal staff necessary to keep things running until you’re back up and runningbusiness as usual.

With thislist, you can begin to determine what must be restored first in case of a disaster,and continue in order of importance. It is also helpful to specify what risksare likely for your business, considering factors such as geographic locationand what natural disasters are most likely to occur, as well as your industryand risks of attack by cyber criminals. One additional advantage to thisassessment is that you may find ways to improve your current operationalefficiency.

Create a Specific Plan
Once you’veassessed your company’s current status, you are ready to determine what has tobe done, and when it needs to be done, to complete your plan. Within the first threemonths, you should solicit support from each area of your company, andestablish a budget for specific action items creating a well-defined disasterrecovery plan. This phase will include steps such as providing for immediatefile restoration and dealing with compromised devices. The following threemonths will see you meeting goals for recovery times, such as how soon certainapplications need to be made available again. The last six months should bespent preparing for longer-term disasters, such as the physical destruction ofyour facility in the event of a fire or earthquake, allowing completerestoration of business processes from a secondary site for as long as necessary.

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Data Governance Based on Roles and Responsibilities is Key to Avoiding Regulatory Risk

by Jonathan Sander

Data governance is critical to managing the availability,integrity and security of all data across the enterprise. Every organizationmust comply with today’s copious amounts of external regulations for handlingdata, and data governance is the discipline that helps the enterprise remaincompliant and avoid regulatory risk. A data governance plan defines who is accountable for your unstructureddata held in files, folders and shares across NTFS, NAS devices andSharePoint. It also establishes aset of controls and audit procedures that ensure compliance is continuous.

Along withestablishing who is accountable for the data, a data governance plan definesthe level of access for each of those data stewards. Ideally, this should bebased on each employee’s role and responsibilities, and determined by thebusiness stakeholders who have insight into who should have access to differentsensitive data, and what kind of risk is posed by that access. The criticalneed to maintain regulatory compliance has changed the landscape for businessestoday. In the past, business needed IT to perform a task, and, as long as thetask was executed, nobody really cared howit was done. With today’s transparency and interconnectedness, businesses want governance and oversight to avoidpotentially costly compliance breaches.

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Relentless Attacks Demand Continuous Security

by Jason Brvenik

Attackers areusing time and patience to their advantage. Yet traditionalsecurity technologies can only detect an attack at a point in time, which onits own is limiting when dealing with sophisticated threats that can disguisethemselves as safe and become malicious tomorrow, or next week. If you missthat one shot at identifying and blocking a threat, then most IT securityprofessionals have no way to continue to monitor that file once it enters thenetwork and take action if it turns out to be malware.

What’s needed is a new, continuous security model that allowsdefenders to constantly track, analyze and be alerted to files previouslyclassified as ‘safe’ or ‘unknown’ but subsequently identified as malware. Then,they need to be able to take action to quarantine those files, remediate andcreate protections to prevent the risk of reinfection.

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Why are People Getting Tired of Mainstream Social Media?

by M.K.

Alltechnologies run out of their usefulness at some point unless they stay freshand innovative. While mainstream social networks such as Facebook, Twitter,LinkedIn and others have seen an unprecedented growth over the last decade orso, there has not been much innovation to keep users engaged. After all, howmany times can you read information about your friends' visits to burger jointsor drinking coffee at Starbucks? Even updates about their jobs and families cangrow either boring or overwhelming. And sometimes it's just TMI (Too MuchInformation) about their lives.

Accordingto a recent study by Pew Internet and American Life Project, there are clearsigns of Facebook fatigue among teenagers. Other studies have found the sametrend across the board as people are growing increasingly tired of meaninglessposts.

It's notbecause people don't have enough to talk about. After all, when you meet yourfriends in person, they can blabber on for hours. If this is the case, thenwhey are they posting simple and stupid comments? The reason is simple. Peoplejust don't feel comfortable expressing their true feelings on social media dueto negative implications. If you say something negative about your boss orcompany, for example, you may get reprimanded or, worse, get fired. If you talkabout your political affiliation, then you might piss off your colleagues,bosses or even family members. You certainly can't talk about sex, disputeswith your significant others, your thoughts on religion/God, your addictionissues, and many other taboo topics.

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Cloud ghost schools

type="html" xml:lang="en" xml:base="http://blogs.computerworlduk.com/spannermans-edublog/"> In February Prof Sugata Mitra picked up a $1m prize in LA from TED. What exactly this bloke called Ted was doing in La La land is not totally clear but although he himself comes from Cloud Cuckoo land he is clearly a generous sort.

Thus ended my attempt to explain Cloud Schools and the Technology, Entertainment and Design conference to my mum. Why did I bother? Well simply because Prof Mitra is going to staff his Cloud School with grannies so I thought she might be interested.

To be fair the Prof too has had problems communicating his vision to his target demographic who are now convinced he is hiring ghosts to teach their children. Grannies or ghosts, so far so hilarious but this is a seriously important project.

You see Prof Mitra regards it as self-evident that access to the Internet is the key to accessing education for those that cannot access it locally, either because their are no schools, few or no good teachers and even no safe roads. More radically he believes that children can educate themselves if given access to technology ... ok with a little guidance later on, hence the grannies.

He has form. In 1999 he installed hole in the wall computers in a few Indian slums and watched in amazement as the children found their way around them unaided.

This summer at TEDglobal in Edinburgh he explains how his new Cloud Schools will work.

We’ll take futuristic glass kiosks powered by solar cells up mountain with satellite uplinks and other techy paraphernalia for granted. This is all fun stuff and the NSA will no doubt get joy from tracking remote terrorists accessing Wikipedia or posting ‘selfies’ on Facebook but the real genius is as follows.

Most teachers are retired. In the UK there are more qualified teachers not teaching than are practicing the profession. Some of the retirees are still sane, have huge amounts of knowledge about stuff and know how to guide children...better still they are cheap to hire.Children are better at teaching themselves than schools are at teaching children. Prof Mitra knows that his test 300 will spend their days, at first, just playing games. He also knows that they will move onto more and more complicated things, just because that’s what they do. No-one who grew up in the early PC days can gainsay him. From Turing to Torvalds we have a class of self-taught technocrats.

If you remain skeptical just look at our attempts to teach computers, ICT and science in schools. Abject failure. Is there a clue here?

At a certain point in development a student needs access to an expert, a mentor, a guru. Schools cannot guarantee to have one on their books but the Cloud School can. MIT’s EdX project is living proof of their thirst for access to expertise.

This is a project worth watching. I am sure that it will be a roaring success. I am also sure that it will produce results that we cannot anticipate. Good luck to the ghosts and grannies in the clouds say I.

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