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You already know that there are three major types of clouds: Public, Private and Hybrid. Now, there’s a newer player in the game: Virtual Private Clouds. What makes these different from public and private clouds, and what is the benefit? Is it just a fancy name for public cloud, or is it a private one? Virtual Private Clouds (VPC) are related to the public cloud, but they are not the same. Instead of sharing resources and space in a public infrastructure, you get a changeable allotment of resources to configure. There is a certain level of isolation between you and other users, via a private IP subnet and virtual communication construct (such as a VLAN) on a per user basis. This ensures a secure method of remotely accessing your cloud resources. This isolation within a public cloud lends the name “virtual private” because you are essentially operating a private cloud within a public cloud. That also doesn’t mean Virtual Private Clouds and private clouds are the same. Private clouds are entirely dedicated to your organization, and that includes the hardware. Virtual Private clouds do not have the same hardware dedication; it just creates a more secure environment on public infrastructure. Think…
Despite the phenomenal growth of cloud computing and the increase of knowledge that comes with it, there are still many myths about the cloud that persist even to this day. If you’re thinking about moving to the cloud or are already there, there are some beliefs you should know that might cause you to rethink your cloud strategy. Here are 5 common cloud computing myths: Moving to the cloud is a one-man or one-team decision. Contrary to what you might think, adopting cloud strategy is not a one-man show. It takes a team to determine the best move for your business. And just because cloud technology is an IT-related concept does not mean that it’s solely up to the IT team to make the decision. There are financial and executive management decisions to be considered, too. If a cloud strategy is embraced by the top level of management as well as the IT team, the adoption process is much more likely to go smoothly, and employees are more likely to receive the training they need. Putting as much as you can in the cloud will make your life easier. Not every solution is a cloud-fits-all. There are some parts of your production…
With the growing popularity of the cloud, more and more companies are turning to it for their production sites. But what about cloud-based disaster recovery? Does it offer the same kind of benefits? As disaster recovery can be complex, time-consuming and very expensive, it pays to plan ahead to figure out just what your business needs. Putting your disaster recovery plan in the cloud can help alleviate some of the fears that come with setting it up. Here are four big benefits to cloud-based disaster recovery: Faster recovery The big difference between cloud-based disaster recovery and traditional recovery practices is the difference in RPO and RTO. With cloud-based DR, your site has the capability to recover from a warm site right away, drastically reducing your RPO and RTO times from days, or even weeks, to hours. Whereas traditional disaster recovery involved booting up from a cold site, cloud recovery is different. Thanks to virtualization, the entire server, including the operating system, applications, patches and data are encapsulated into a single software bundle or virtual server. This virtual server can be copied or backed up to an offsite data center and spun up on a virtual host in a matter of minutes in…
To address the question of whether or not to use data encryption when it comes to meeting HIPAA compliance and keeping patient health information (PHI) protected, let’s revisit the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA): A covered entity must, in accordance with §164.306… Implement a mechanism to encrypt and decrypt electronic protected health information.” (45 CFR § 164.312(a)(2)(iv)) If you choose not to encrypt data, the HIPAA Security Rule states you must implement an equivalent solution to meet the regulatory requirement. The law leaves encryption open to interpretation since covered entities vary when it comes to network and network usage, depending on the type and size of business. While HIPAA and HITECH address the security and privacy of PHI with more of a policy and procedures-oriented approach with no strict parameters for what type of technology to use, encryption is typically considered a best practice when it comes to protecting sensitive data. A few recommendations when it comes to data encryption: Don’t use public FTP (File Transfer Protocol) if you need to transfer patient data to and from payers or other business associates. To err on the safe side would be to combine two methods of encryption –…
Way back in 2011 — when Prince William was getting married and Jennifer Lawrence was just getting cast as Katniss in the Hunger Games — Gartner predicted that 30 percent of midsize companies would have adopted recovery-as-a-service (RaaS) to support IT operations recovery by today. That projection was a 29-percent increase based on 2011 numbers. So what has your business been doing since 2011? If you’ve managed to get your data offsite — and ensure its security in the backup environment — you’ve accomplished a key part of protecting your business in case of a disaster. The tricky part comes when the disaster actually occurs, and you are forced to recover the data. Depending on your choice of backup, your odds for recovery can vary widely. Where do you fall on the spectrum of recovery confidence? Are you the picture of confidence, or the grim realization that you’ve just stepped into an uncertain, unfriendly challenge? A few key choices can improve your odds of recovering systems under duress of having your production environment down. 1. Do the hard planning work … Now If you haven’t already assessed the critical systems of the business and prioritized which must be recovered first,…
Highly successful tech venture capitalist Fred Wilson created some waves last week when he predicted Apple wouldn’t be among the top three most important tech companies in the world by 2020. Speaking at a conference in New York City, he said he envisions Google, Facebook and “one that we’ve never heard of” making up that triumvirate. Why would his dismiss the current largest tech company in the world (Apple’s first quarter revenues of $43.7 billion was more than Google, Facebook and <insert name of any company you’ve never heard of here> combined). According to a TechCrunch article, he said Apple is “too rooted in hardware” and not sufficiently tied into the cloud. “I think hardware is increasingly becoming a commodity,” he said. “Their stuff in the cloud is largely not good. I don’t think they think about data and the cloud.” Of course, Wilson – who has backed huge success stories like Twitter and Tumblr – has been wrong about Apple before. As CNN Money points out, he dumped all of his Apple stock at $91.36 per share in January 2009. The day of his comments at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference, Apple closed at $600.96. (Note: Wilson said he sold…
Remember years ago when the prevailing thought was that the proliferation of cloud computing would decimate professional IT jobs? As the folks at VMware point out in a recent blog post, just the opposite appears to have happened: Never before have opportunities for IT professionals been greater. IDC, for one, predicts cloud spending will reach $100 billion over the coming year. Add to that the fact that employers have been on an unstoppable IT hiring binge over the past three years – Career Builder, an employment firm, says software developer jobs alone have increased 12% since 2010. In the course of compiling press releases and client profiles, numerous organizations have told Online Tech that moving to our encrypted, enterprise-class cloud has freed up their own IT staff to spend more time on projects with a greater direct impact on the success of the business. Back to the post from VMware (Online Tech uses their fault tolerant hosts in its next-generation cloud architecture), they claim “the rise of the cloud-powered enterprise not only means greater opportunities for IT professionals, but for their bosses and business colleagues as well.” They say cloud computing has elevated the role of IT leaders to full-fledged…
Before there was Twitter and LinkedIn, companies felt that it was better to hide bad news from customers. Airlines wouldn’t tell passengers why there was a delay. Hosting companies wouldn’t tell you about an outage or when dial up lines wouldn’t work. Now with the adoption of social media, companies are becoming more transparent and sharing all types of company news or information – good or bad. The cloud computing and data center industry is no different. In this video, Yan Ness discusses how social media has impacted cloud computing providers. With the introduction of social media, customers were allowed to speak with one another without the company’s permission. It put companies on the defensive. Once someone had a bad experience, he or she told everyone. So companies had a choice to make. Be more transparent and less secretive or remain quiet and let their customers do the talking. In the beginning, the data center industry was scared of being more open. They thought it would cause a lot of problems. But what it did was tighten the trust level between customers and companies. For those companies that decided to jump in the “social media sandbox” and started to use…
The following is a guest blog from Ann Arbor-based Duo Security‘s Security Evangelist, Mark Stanislav: A recent article from Forbes titled, “Is Your Investment In Security Really Worth It?”, called into question whether or not the money spent for information security was having impactful returns for the investments being made. Kindly enough, the author reached out to various information security vendors for their rebuttals to this unflattering portrayal of security vendors as taking more than they were contributing back to their clients. One of the responses was from the CTO of Qualys who aptly noted, “Perimeter defenses (“hard shell, soft center”) and signature-based malware programs have lost much of their effectiveness over the last few years.” This thought of course isn’t revolutionary for anyone who’s invested time and resources into cloud computing or mobile devices during the past decade. With a changing threat landscape that no longer has single-vendor networking stacks or applications from a handful of software companies, the effort to provide adequate security is becoming increasingly challenging. The question then becomes, where should you spend your money for a high return on security investment? It was determined through a survey by IDG that, “42% of cloud-based projects are eventually…
AmericanBanker.com reports that a recent survey conducted by PricewaterhouseCoopers indicates that 71 percent of financial service executives intend to invest more in cloud computing this year, an increase of 18 percent from 2012. Another 50 percent intend to invest in private cloud infrastructure, including virtualized storage and network equipment. The reason for the increase is greater security and reliability of the cloud environment by cloud vendors. With encryption of data at rest and in transit, the enterprise cloud is secure enough to support confidential financial data and mission-critical applications, vital to the health of a financial company. For those outsourcing their IT, 64 percent responded that they viewed data security as an extremely serious risk to their organization. When it came to the three most important reasons for choosing an external private cloud service provider for their IT infrastructure, financial executives responded: Access superior technical skills to satisfy new requirement Faster delivery of IT solutions for business requirement Reduce total cost of IT department With an outsourced cloud service provider, their investment is in their people, critical infrastructure and up-to-date technology to provide enterprise-class, fast-performing clouds. The financial industry is not in the IT industry – by outsourcing their IT,…
