Why are APIs so important in clouds? Do APIs have to be open? How fast or slow will standardization in the cloud be? Why is ensuring high availability for the cloud service critical?
In his session at the 10th International Cloud Expo, Mårten Mickos, CEO of Eucalyptus Systems, will answer these questions and address cloud standards, APIs and the critical question: Will we end up with one, two or more competing cloud standards? And, how will this affect the evolution and adoption of cloud comput...| By Cloud Ventures | Article Rating: |
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| July 30, 2010 01:15 PM EDT | Reads: |
4,601 |
Advances in Identity Management technologies will provide foundations for an "Identity Metasystem", providing the tools for securing information in a manner that greatly accelerates adoption of Cloud computing.
Secure Cloud Services
Typically conversations about Cloud Computing quickly lead to the perceived big roadblock holding back its adoption, data privacy and security.
Ask yourself how you would feel about having sensitive information, like your bank account or credit card details, stored "in the Cloud"? What does that even mean? Who owns and controls it? If the data resides on servers in the USA, can they be seized by the authorities?
As Eric Openshaw, U.S. Technology Leader at Deloittes highlights in his article 'Keeping Data Safe in the Cloud', these are the serious challenges that Cloud must answer before corporates and governments will leap on board, and it will require a combination of IT and services.
This means it is also a very fertile area for venture development. New technologies and processes that address these concerns will likely be very successful in the Cloud market.
For example the Esotera 'Cloud File System' that we profiled previously provides one essential ingredient, distributed encryption. What difference does it make if someone seizes a server if the data on it is only a useless fragment of the information, and it's encrypted?
Consultants firms provide audit services like SaS70, to ensure data-centre operations are suitably robust so that they can assure one aspect of information security, but technology is needed to guarantee its privacy through greater levels of granularity of features like this encryption.
Cloud Identity Metasystem
Although Cloud mainly refers to a type of software, it's also referred to in the context of the overall Internet, as "in the Cloud".
This means hosting applications with service providers like Amazon but this will also come to mean better data sharing between them by doing so. Plugging your app into the Cloud will mean engineering it to be better integrated with the Cloud, as well as using it for utility infrastructure.
A simple example is the hassles of having multiple usernames and passwords for each web site that you use, and how this can be addressed by using a single Internet username identity. The most popular standard that has emerged for this is OpenID, now used by millions.
This enables you to have a single username that works consistently across multiple web sites, eliminating this friction and is thus a great boon, but it's only the tip of the iceberg.
Kim Cameron, Microsoft's Identity guru, explains in his work how this technology trend will build out an "Identity Metasystem". In his proposal for a common identity framework (30 page PDF) he talks about how their new technologies like Cardspaces will utilize OpenID to better connect theirs and other vendor applications, streamlining user access across all of them.
By doing this this will provide the technical features required to achieve the Information Assurance processes needed to certify Cloud services as being secure enough.
Matching these developments to government policy for their adoption will be the key to unlocking the floodgates. Kim writes in this paper how compliance with EU privacy laws can be achieved, and with the USA recently beginning their procedures to formalize recognition of them this is likely to act as a catalyst in accelerating levels of Cloud adoption.
Vendor profile: Cloud Identity
Insightfully named Cloud Identity is one vendor that offers this type of technology, and they highlight the key venture strategy to employ, namely that of identifying how corporate IT can leverage these advances to solve practical problems.
Cloud Identity provides software for automating user processes across multiple SaaS systems. Organizations employing temporary workers may have them use Salesforce and Webex for example, so they need to be automatically set up and removed from these accordingly.
With this software enterprises can leverage OpenID as a single identifier but control it according to corporate policies and integrate it with on-site Identity Management systems like Active Directory, providing for a secure 'bridge' from on-site to hosted applications.
Published July 30, 2010 Reads 4,601
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Why are APIs so important in clouds? Do APIs have to be open? How fast or slow will standardization in the cloud be? Why is ensuring high availability for the cloud service critical?
In his session at the 10th International Cloud Expo, Mårten Mickos, CEO of Eucalyptus Systems, will answer these questions and address cloud standards, APIs and the critical question: Will we end up with one, two or more competing cloud standards? And, how will this affect the evolution and adoption of cloud comput...Feb. 13, 2012 02:42 PM EST Reads: 408 |
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Very few trends in IT have generated as much buzz as cloud computing. In his session at the 10th International Cloud Expo, Mark Hinkle, Director, Cloud Computing Community at Citrix, will cut through the hype and quickly clarify the ontology for cloud computing. The bulk of the conversation will focus on the open source software that can be used to build compute clouds (infrastructure-as-a-service) and the complementary open source management tools that can be combined to automate the management...
The proliferation of device connectivity is redefining the functionality requirements and capabilities of many embedded systems as more and more of these devices look to leverage the “Cloud.” While many commercial software and hardware component vendors have begun to realign their value propositions to satisfy growing demand, commercial-off-the-shelf products (COTS) alone cannot meet every OEM’s needs. As a result, the Embedded Cloud has injected a new level of uncertainty and a new competitive ...
Hardware and chemistry improvements will make the $1,000 human genome a reality soon. While the massive amount of genomics data that will be generated represents a huge opportunity to advance personal medicine, it also presents an enormous big data challenge.
In his session at the 10th International Cloud Expo, Dr Andreas Sundquist, CEO of DNAnexus, will discuss how the cloud will address these issues by enabling the management, storage, sharing and analysis of the world’s DNA data and how it ...
With Cloud Expo 2012 New York (10th Cloud Expo) just four months away, what better time to start introducing you in greater detail to the distinguished individuals in our incredible Speaker Faculty for the technical and strategy sessions at the conference...
We have technical and strategy sessions for you every day from June 11 through June 14 dealing with every nook and cranny of Cloud Computing and Big Data, but what of those who are presenting? Who are they, where do they work, what else h...
With Big Data Expo 2012 New York (co-located with 10th Cloud Expo) just four months away, what better time to start introducing you in greater detail to the distinguished individuals in our incredible Speaker Faculty for the technical and strategy sessions at the conference...
In 2011, Apache Hadoop received tremendous attention for helping organizations cost-effectively capitalize on their big data. Hadoop is now disrupting the business of analyzing data.
In his session at the 10th International Cloud Expo, Eric Baldeschwieler, Co-Founder & CEO of Hortonworks, will look at the current state of the Hadoop project, lessons learned by deploying it at scale, and the roadmap for its future.
Big Data Track attendees will learn about the exciting developments that have ...
The focus of Java EE 7 is on the cloud, and specifically it aims to bring Platform-as-a-Service providers and application developers together so that portable applications can be deployed on any cloud infrastructure and reap all its benefits in terms of scalability, elasticity, multitenancy, etc. The existing specifications in the platform such as JPA, Servlets, EJB, and others will be updated to meet these requirements.
Java EE 7 continues the ease of development push that characterized prior ...
With Cloud Expo 2012 New York (10th Cloud Expo) just four months away, what better time to start introducing you in greater detail to the distinguished individuals in our incredible Speaker Faculty for the technical and strategy sessions at the conference...
We have technical and strategy sessions for you every day from June 11 through June 14 dealing with every nook and cranny of Cloud Computing and Big Data, but what of those who are presenting? Who are they, where do they work, what else h...
With Cloud Expo 2012 New York (10th Cloud Expo) just four months away, what better time to start introducing you in greater detail to the distinguished individuals in our incredible Speaker Faculty for the technical and strategy sessions at the conference...
We have technical and strategy sessions for you every day from June 11 through June 14 dealing with every nook and cranny of Cloud Computing and Big Data, but what of those who are presenting? Who are they, where do they work, what else h...
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One of these presentations is from Paul Bellows of Yellow Pencil: 6-page PDF
Specializ...
To quote my friend Stevie Chambers (@stevie_chambers), "I feel like a new room has opened in my memory palace."
That was exactly how I felt after finishing my recent The Cloudcast (.net) podcast with Sam Ramji (@sramji) and Christian Reilly (@reillyusa), where we discussed the role of APIs in the e...
What do these two vulnerabilities have in common?
Apache Killer.
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Right, they’re platform-based vulnerabilities. Meaning they are vulnerabilities peculiar to the web or application server platform upon which applications are deployed. Mitigations for such vulnerabilities generally ...
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Although it can feel like you’re playing an intense game of Buzzword Bingo, the key way to approach new technologies like Cloud Computing is to marry them up with other hot topics, like social media and big data.
Typically these aren’t entirely different domains more so simply different perspective...









