With RSA’s conference going on this week, there is a lot of focus on new cloud services and how enterprises must start to adopt these new business models. But what they don’t emphasize is that cloud isn’t a silver bullet fix. You don’t simply overnight your entire business to cloud infrastructures. In fact, if you see it as a way to consolidate your services through staged approaches, you’ll see that it makes more sense in many cases. Continue reading
Month: February 2012
I’m a leaf on the wind…watch how I soar!
I recently met with a Canadian cloud innovator, DataGardens, to provide some input on how their solutions would benefit different market segments, and be used for different key continuity and security functions. If you haven’t heard of DataGardens (I have to admit, I wasn’t familiar with them either) or their flagship solution, DataGardens WAVE, you might want to take a look at them again. Especially if you have need for virtualization or cloud business continuity services. Continue reading
Well, all the jokes can’t be good. You’ve got to expect that once in a while.
Organizations are busy working on creating cloud migration paths for their current applications and data stores, assuming that these systems can easily be ported. What is often overlooked is that most applications weren’t created with the cloud in mind, so expecting them to scale to cloud environments isn’t realistic. Unless you have the team to rewrite these applications for running in virtualized or cloud environments, the movement to a cloud model will need to be done in several steps up a steep learning curve. Continue reading
Other than that Mrs. Lincoln, how did you enjoy the play?
Do you feel like no matter how much you invest in IT security, you are losing the battle? There has been a lot of talk that security specialists are facing an uphill battle for the foreseeable future thanks to the speed of mobile device evolution and cloud development. Personally, I feel the pain of security folks. Virtualization has made things more complicated, and now with tablets and smartphones, it’s never going to return back to the network security days. But there is something that cloud is bringing to security that will make it easier for security folks, and that is Big Data. Continue reading
I find your lack of faith disturbing.
I stumbled upon a post via Twitter the other day from Scott Lowe of Tech Republic on IDV (yes, I thought at first I was getting a mild case of dyslexia, but no, it is IDV) and the difference between VDI and IDV. IDV stands for Intelligent Desktop Virtualization and although it essentially delivers the same idea as Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) it’s actually not just more efficient, it’s really quite brilliant. Continue reading
Michael, I did nothing. I did absolutely nothing, and it was everything that I thought it could be.
It seems like the in the last few years, every single service provider has been scratching their head and thinking “how do we sell to the SMBs?”. I’m not talking just cloud providers, but most businesses in general. Part of it is that in Canada, while there are some significantly large enterprises, the majority of organizations fit into the traditional SMB definition. But the question is, will cloud help us finally get enterprise-class solutions to those customers? Continue reading
I’m going to give you a little advice. There’s a force in the universe that makes things happen. And all you have to do is get in touch with it, stop thinking, let things happen, and be the ball.
It’s Technology Tuesday yet again, and I wanted to cover the latest news around EMC’s security arm, RSA. RSA had a lot of attention in 2011, mostly around their SecureID breach, but it gave them an opportunity to step back and focus on where the next move would take them. Last month, RSA Security executives announced that that move would focus on three key areas, anti-threat, mobility and cloud security. We’ve seen RSA partner with hardware manufacturers before (anyone look at their Wii? There’s a nice RSA logo on the console), so partnering with one of the most dynamic hardware industries is a very smart move for the EMC folks. Continue reading
Come on, you scuzzy data, be in there. Come on.
I wrote a few weeks back about the theme of Big Data and organizations such as EMC’s GreenPlum and Apache’s Hadoop ushering the way for the application of large data in cloud environments. It reminds me about the debate years ago on whether we would ever see a paperless society, which we realized sadly isn’t going to happen. Data just seems to compound and we cannot begin to imagine how the rates of data usage and creation will increase.
But in order to embrace big data, we need to figure out the barriers to adoption. David Asprey, a regular on the cloud expo circuit, notes that there are 2 key elements missing in the log management space right now: real scalability and security. Continue reading
If you had paid attention to me in school, you’d understand it’s not all about car chases and excitement.
SonicWALL is a company that really has a sweet spot for addressing mid-market organizations (especially in Canada where mid-market tends to fall to the smaller end of the employee spectrum), but also doesn’t compromise in quality. In fact, their smallest appliances contain the same functionality and management capabilities as their largest, (and well named) SuperMassive devices. But a lot of enterprises simply write-off SonicWALL because they’ve done a good job at playing in the mid-market and so there is a natural bias to think that they don’t have enterprise-worthy security solutions. The problem is, SonicWALL doesn’t just HAVE enterprise-class security solutions, but they’re built into every single box they sell, from the smallest to the largest. Oh, and they also have some pretty sweet virtualized appliances. Continue reading
Do you know of the Klingon proverb that tells us revenge is a dish that is best served cold? It is very cold in space.
I don’t want to say that Juniper has slipped under people’s radar over the last year, but there have been some really cool releases, especially their latest Virtual Gateway that I was shocked didn’t garner more attention than it did. For example, VGW 5 released some updates back in late summer to extend their portfolio of security solutions for virtual environments. The previous versions already had great support for monitoring, firewall, IDS and compliance, but now we are looking at the addition of endpoint antivirus, hypervisor compliance monitoring and large-scale security management capabilities, essentially making it a UTM solution for cloud and virtualization. This is great news for organizations who already use Juniper for their networking and security environments. Continue reading
Tinder Stratus 