Ellen Rubin is the Founder & VP of Products at CloudSwitch. She's an experienced entrepreneur with a proven track record in founding innovative technology companies and leading strategy, market positioning and go-to-market. Prior to founding CloudSwitch, Ellen was a member of the early management team at Netezza (NYSE: NZ), the pioneer and market leader in data warehouse appliances, where she helped grow the company to over 125M in revenues and a successful IPO in 2007. Prior to Netezza, she founded Manna, an Israeli and Boston-based developer of real-time personalization software. Rubin began her career as a marketing strategy consultant at Booz, Allen & Hamilton, and holds an MBA from Harvard Business School and an undergraduate degree from Harvard College.
Concerns about security and loss of control in public clouds have led to an alternative model—the internal cloud—that replicates the cloud environment inside the corporate firewall.
With servers, applications and data within the enterprise walls, internal clouds can provide many of the benefits of cloud computing without the potential risks when the computing environment is provided by a third party. Unfortunately, the economics of internal clouds makes them inherently less efficient than the public cloud, especially as new technology makes the public cloud safer and more reliable.
Security issues associated with third-party cloud environments continue to prevent organizations from taking advantage of the cost savings and flexibility that the cloud can offer. Today, using a public cloud means moving from an internal environment where a company has complete control of data and processes to an environment where that control belongs to someone else, and is often opaque. Within the cloud, applications run in a multi-tenant environment sharing virtual machines with other customers. Companies considering moving an application to a cloud have legitimate concerns about data being compromised or stolen, including unauthorized access by cloud administrators, exposure in the Internet or rogue employees using the cloud to corrupt or leak sensitive information.
The first post in this two part series, Now Everybody Wants a Cloud Gateway, explored why more and more enterprises and technology vendors are making the adoption of a cloud gateway a top priority. This post focuses on the capabilities that all stakeholders should look for.
In our discussions with industry insiders, we're hearing more and more about the need for a cloud gateway - technology that provides a bridge between an organization's internal environment and one or more public clouds. It's a message we're also hearing with growing frequency from enterprise customers and potential partners alike as their cloud architectures mature. In the first post of this series, focuses on what's behind this trend, and why different stakeholders are making the cloud gateway a top priority.
The way you know you're in the midst of a technology shift and market disruption is when organizations don't behave the way you expect them to based on past track records. Cloud Computing has been filled with surprises and unexpected behaviors from the get-go. First, Amazon, a retailer, turns out to be a technology powerhouse in disguise and changes the rules of IT infrastructure. Then real technology leaders like IBM, Dell, EMC, HP and others make lots of announcements about cloud but essentially do little and re-brand existing offerings as cloud-enabled. Next Verizon, the phone company, buys Terremark in a bid to become a global cloud leader. And of course, there's always the fact that the federal government has embraced cloud widely and is spending large amounts of money to build private clouds and leverage public clouds. How surprising is it really that the F500, and in particular, the corporate IT groups within these huge organizations, have often turned out to be the early adopters and drivers of cloud, private, public and hybrid.
In discussion with our customers, we've seen an interesting trend emerge in the recent months. A surprising number of customers are telling us that their goal is to never build another data center again, or even to do away with their data centers completely. They see the cloud as central to this goal. We're seeing this trend from customers of many different sizes, from mid-size to large and very large companies. This new mindset seems to reflect a major shift in direction as enterprises rethink their IT strategies.
Security concerns (real and imagined) have long dominated much of the cloud conversation and caused many companies to deliberate about getting started in the cloud. Slowly, the security issue is being addressed-through the adoption of corporate policies for cloud usage, maturing cloud provider offerings, and by technologies such as CloudSwitch which isolate and encrypt all cloud resources to meet the requirements of the CSO. But while the focus has been on cloud security, another potential bottleneck is on the horizon as companies start using the cloud in more substantial ways.
Telcos in many ways seem like the most likely players to lead and ultimately win in the land-grab of cloud computing. They've got huge scale, geographica coverage, existing enterprise relationships and experience in service delivery that would appear to give them the advantage. The networking infrastructure and ability to offer dedicated and secure access is one of the telcos' greatest strengths since it addresses some of the key concerns about cloud security and bandwidth.
As IT organizations move forward with their virtualization initiatives, consolidating operations and shrinking provisioning times, the cloud has come along as an even more compelling option. As companies review their application portfolios, they've started to realize that many of their not-yet-virtualized apps could easily be run in the cloud. In particular, applications that are characterized by spikey, cyclical, or seasonal usage could benefit from the cloud's economics and scalability.
Corporate computing is going through a fundamental shift — moving to a world that’s largely cloud-based, self-service, and highly virtual with shared resources. Rather than go through their IT departments like they have for decades, users will simply specify how many cloud servers they need and for how long, and provision their own resources with a few mouse clicks. I recently read an interesting post by Rodrigo Flores, observing that the growing acceptance of public clouds is also changing the role of corporate IT departments, and they’ll have to either adapt or die. I’d like to make a few suggestions about how they can adapt.
With endless flexibility, on-demand scaling and great pricing, the cloud meets the business and technical needs of many web based applications for e-commerce, collaboration, marketing, CRM and dozens of other functions. There seems to be three major use cases emerging in the cloud market, reflecting the ways in which specific web apps are architected, and the comfort levels of the customer in exposing some or all of their app stack outside the corporate firewall.
The Structure 2010 LaunchPad showcased 11 companies that had four minutes to present their businesses to a panel of judges from the venture capital industry. This presentation by the Founder and VP of Products, Ellen Rubin, won CloudSwitch the Launchpad award and also the audience choice award.
Security is always mentioned as a key factor limiting cloud adoption, but what does "security" really mean in the cloud? To understand the potential risks of cloud computing - and how to address them - we need to be more specific. Once we've accurately defined the problems, we can address them with the right technology and processes. Here is a solution to allow applications to run safely in a public cloud.
There has been lots of discussion about the concept of the "Intercloud", a direction for cloud computing that is closely related to federation. The Intercloud refers to a mesh of clouds that are interconnected based on open standards to provide a universal environment for cloud computing. Like the name suggests, it's similar to the Internet model, where everything is federated in a ubiquitous, multiple-provider infrastructure.
Federation brings together different cloud flavors and internal resources so companies can select a computing environment on demand that makes sense for a particular workload. The notion of federation has been around since cloud computing began, but as a long-term vision rather than a working solution. Soon that gap is going to close.
Before moving an enterprise application to the cloud, you need to be sure that your expectations are realistic and your objectives match what the cloud can deliver. The following steps can help guide the process when considering a cloud deployment, and provide a starting point for moving forward.
As the proliferation of cloud offerings continues to accelerate, IT managers have questions about how to proceed. Getting the most out of the cloud will ultimately require the assistance of a reliable expert: the cloud service broker.
In the most difficult economic climate in decades, CIOs are reevaluating their strategies and looking for new ways to reduce data center costs and overhead while improving responsiveness to business requirements. Cloud Computing has emerged as a much more agile and efficient approach to what companies have done in the past: adding more compute, storage and networking capacity or trying to get more out of what they already own.
Over the past several years, many IT departments have committed to virualization as an antidote to the spiraling costs and inflexible plaguing corporate data centers everywhere. By running applications on virtual servers and consolidating underutilized hardware, data centers can get maximum value from their equipment. Virtualization also makes IT more responsive to the needs of the business: rather than the spending weeks or months to provision a physical server, a virtual server can be launched in minutes.
It's true that a new web application built from scratch for the cloud as a standalone environment can be rolled out quickly and relatively easily. But for existing applications running in a traditional data center and integrating with a set of other systems, tools and processes, it's not nearly as easy. What's really involved when moving an application from your data center to the cloud? You need to consider a range of issues which can potentially turn the migration into a complex engineering project.
By Damon Miller, Director of Technical Field Services
One of the most interesting trends in cloud computing is the emergence of “hybrid” solutions which span environments that were historically isolated from one another. A traditional data center offers finite capacity in support of business applications, but it is ultimately limited by obvious constraints (physical space, power, cooling, etc.). V ... read more >>
By John McEleney
Today we’re extremely excited to announce that we are being acquired by Verizon and joining Terremark, its IT services subsidiary. This is major news for us, and we believe for the cloud industry as well.
We’ve been working together with Terremark for almost two years and have built great relatio ... read more >>
By Dave Armlin, Director of Customer Support
New CloudSwitch customers and prospects are coming up to speed every week and there are a number of questions that show up frequently enough that I thought it would be helpful to cover them in a blog. When we work with customers, our goal is to make their experience getting started in the cloud fast and easy, and to make sure they feel comfortable with the ongoing simplicity a ... read more >>
By Ellen Rubin
Last week, I was on a panel at the CompTIA Breakaway conference in DC, with Scott Crenshaw from RedHat and Ron Culler from Secure Designs. Scott made an interesting comment about the three types of applications out there: (1) new apps that are being architected from scratch for the cloud; (2) legacy apps that ... read more >>
By Guest Blogger Erik Heels, Partner at Clock Tower Law Group, experts in patent law
Wikipedia defines "cloud computing" as "the logical computational resources (data, software) accessible via a computer network (through WAN or Internet etc.), rather than from a local computer. Managing local computers is hard: there are security issues, com ... read more >>
By Pavan Pant, Director of Product Management
As customers continue their march to the cloud we have heard from a large number who want to use SharePoint Server in the cloud. Two major concerns that show up frequently are migration of existing custom deployments and data security.
These organizations have spent years customizing their SharePoint deployments so they work just right in their environment, and moving ... read more >>
By John Considine
Last week I wrote about the Cloud.com acquisition and what it means for Citrix, Rackspace, OpenStack and the industry. Next, I’d like to dig into the VMware announcement about their cloud infrastructure suite. Citrix clearly wanted to announce their news just prior to VMware’s, and for a good reason – C ... read more >>
By John Considine
Here we are on July 12, mid-summer when you think most people are wondering about going to the beach in 90 degree weather, and instead we have big cloud news. Early this morning we were greeted with the announcement that Citrix is buying Cloud.com for more than $200M. After the initial congratulations to Sheng and the team at Cloud.com, the twitter-sphere and blogosphere went wild with thoughts an ... read more >>
By John McEleney
Gotta get-get… the Black Eyed Peas get it, heck they wrote a song about it: "That future boom boom, gotta get it now…"―we gotta get moving to the cloud!
We're officially halfway through 2011 and many senior IT professionals are probably looking at their 2011 objectives and thinking to themselves, "How am I going to get everything done?" I am sure all of the IT professionals have lo ... read more >>
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