Welcome!

Top Stories

The Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP) is a government-wide program established in December 2011 to speed the adoption of cloud computing. FedRAMP includes a set of requirements for federal cloud computing and universal procedures for approving services and providers to work with the government. When contractors feel that they have met FedRAMP requirements, they must have their security control implementations independently verified and validated by a FedRAMP accredited Third Party Assessment Organization for compliance which then submits  a security assessment package for review by the cross-agency Joint Authorization Board (JAB) . FedRAMP is expected to be operational by June and will be mandatory for all government cloud deployments of low to moderate risk levels except for single agency private clouds. Agencies can also add additional ... (more)

Yahoo Co-Founder Jerry Yang Decides "To Pursue Other Interests"

After the market closed Tuesday, Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang, who's been generally considered a pimple on the ass of progress since turning down Microsoft's handsome $44.6 billion offer for Yahoo four years ago, resigned from the Yahoo board and "all other positions with the company." That includes his board seats at Yahoo Japan and Alibaba Group Holding Ltd, Yahoo's prized Asian assets, as well as his quixotic title of "chief Yahoo." Yahoo owns 40% of Alibaba, a position valued at around $14 billion, the bulk of its current $19 billion market cap. It's unclear what provoked the ... (more)

Building GovCloud Services, Part 1 – Product Model

One of our primary focus and service areas is ‘GovCloud’ – Government Cloud Computing. In a nutshell this means building new Cloud services in line with the best practice models from NIST, the primary source of defining Cloud Computing reference architectures, comprised of the following main parts: Business Use Cases Product Model Cloud Identity Apps Store Business Use Cases As highlighted in the first introductory blog for this series the NIST solutioning process is based on the ‘Business Use Cases‘ they are developing. This includes scenarios such as Email hosting, E-Discovery an... (more)

An Inconvenient Truth of the NIST Definition of Cloud Computing

Amid the many benefits of having the NIST SP 800-145 as a tool to facilitate the understanding of cloud computing, the classification and some definitions of the four deployment models are redundant and inconsistent. Particularly, the definition of "community cloud" is a redundancy of that of a private cloud, the deployment models are defined with two sets of criteria, and "hybrid cloud" is a confusing, ambiguous, and extraneous term. SP 800-145 is the de facto standard in the IT industry of describing what cloud computing is with five essential characteristics, three delivery m... (more)

Big Data Trends in 2012

Big Data has caught the fancy of each and everyone. Consumer and enterprise world is looking to adopt the Big Data. Analysts are talking about it, proclaiming it to the next big thing! This is my take on how the Big Data market space will evolve in 2012 and years to come. Data Analytics Service – We will start seeing SaaS vendors that will start offering data analytics as a service (e.g., 1010data). These vendors will be able to pull in your unstructured data and provide you standardized reports and data services. This is very similar to the Web analytics (like Omniture) but acc... (more)

Cloud Expo Breaking News
What are the differences between dedicated servers and cloud computing? Are dedicated servers a thing of the past? Or has dedicated hosting evolved alongside of cloud hosting? In his general session at the 9th International Cloud Expo, Duke Skarda, CTO of SoftLayer, explored the flexibility in the cloud environment. Duke Skarda joined SoftLayer in November 2010. As the CTO, he holds responsibilities for implementing, designing andenhancing the proprietary SoftLayer Infrastructure Management S...
The first generation of cloud computing focused primarily on low-cost personal cloud services along with some capability for application developers and non-mission–critical applications. The latest generation of cloud computing is now capable of addressing the needs of enterprise mission-crucial applications. Mission-critical applications of the enterprise require computing infrastructure that is secure, optimizes performance and is highly resilient. In his general session at the 9th Internati...
Red Hat technology powers the world’s largest and most successful clouds. We have seen firsthand how to make cloud work for businesses and government organizations, both large and small. Companies are looking to cloud computing as a way to fundamentally change the economics of information technology and the agility of their enterprise. In his general session at the 9th International Cloud Expo, Vijay Sarathy, Director of the Cloud Business Unit at Red Hat, discussed how Red Hat helps transform...
SYS-CON Events announced today that Rackspace Hosting, the service leader in cloud computing, has been named “Platinum Plus Sponsor” of SYS-CON's 10th International Cloud Expo, which will take place on June 11–14, 2012, at the Javits Center in New York City, New York, and the 11th International Cloud Expo, which will take place on November 5–8, 2012, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA Rackspace Hosting is the service leader in cloud computing, and a founder of OpenStack, an...
Now that SSL has been compromised, fake certificates abound, and very sophisticated attacks are targeting private and public sector alike, enterprise adoption of cloud computing is coming under more scrutiny than ever. Nobody wants to be the next high-profile name in the news. In his general session at the 9th International Cloud Expo, Terry Woloszyn, Founder/CTO of PerspecSys Inc., introduced some of the key privacy, residency, and security areas to consider when adopting public cloud applica...
Security is moving to Trust Management and the Cloud is going to make it happen. In a connected world security is morphing quickly and we are no longer focused on disconnected servers, objects and things. In his general session at the 9th International Cloud Expo, Scott Chasin, CTO McAfee Content & Cloud Security, discussed how it's a relationship-driven world where security is now largely about the identity of everything and how we manage security is going to come down to identifying trusted ...
The world is getting smarter – more instrumented, interconnected and intelligent. At the same time, IT leaders are faced with the challenge to do more and support aggressive business growth, while reducing costs. Business leaders feel pressure to initiate new revenue streams, drive faster time-to-market for new services and meet changing customer expectations. With cloud computing, business and IT can create and deliver value in fundamentally new ways by removing IT boundaries, improving speed-t...
2011 was a year of rapid adoption for public and private cloud services. Instant and on-demand server provisioning was the driving force behind the massive growth. On top, cloud server templates and script automation simplified application installation for simple and pre-defined application stacks, but have not targeted more complex enterprise application environments. In his session at the 10th International Cloud Expo, John Yung, CEO of Appcara, will discuss how 2012 will be the year for app...
SYS-CON Events announced today that MomentumSI, a leading boutique IT consultancy, will exhibit at SYS-CON's 10th International Cloud Expo, which will take place on June 11–14, 2012, at the Javits Center in New York City, New York. MomentumSI is a leading boutique IT consultancy that helps large enterprises transform IT processes and infrastructures into strategic advantage. MomentumSI helps clients align business needs with IT processes so they can more rapidly deploy new business innovations....
How do organizations maximize the investment in their existing IT infrastructure while simultaneously evolving to the cloud? To get maximum benefits of agility and re-use of all resources, organizations must pool their resources, and allow automated provisioning and decommissioning of template-based service profiles that cover computing, networking, and storage resources, both physical and virtual. In her general session at the 9th International Cloud Expo, Garima Thockchom, VP Marketing at Gal...
Conference News & Updates
In this fast-moving high-level CEO Power Panel held at the 8th International Cloud Expo at the Javits Center in New York City, June 6-9, 2011, Cloud Expo Conference Chair, Jeremy Geelan is joined by Michael Crandell, CEO and a founder of RightScale; Treb Ryan, CEO of OpSource; Cory Isaacson, CEO/CTO of CodeFutures Corporation; Brad Hokamp, President of Layered Technologies; Lawrence Guillory, CEO of Racemi; Andy Burton, CEO of Rise; and Paulo Rosado, Founder & CEO of OutSystems. Some of the main topics discussed include the big issues facing companies in cloud computing, the critical tools and infrastructure required, and the shift in the way IT infrastructure is being deployed and consumed.
In this brand new SYS-CON.TV Power Panel, recorded in Times Square on the eve of Cloud Expo Silicon Valley, which was held in Santa Clara, CA, November 1 -4, 2010, Cloud Expo Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan discusses the State of the Nation with regard to Enterprise Cloud Computing with Unisys' Sam Gross & Jill T. Singer, CIO of the National Reconnaissance Office. Also on the panel is Internet security expert Patrick Hynds, Founder & President of DTS.
SYS-CON Events announced today that Abiquo, the leading Enterprise Cloud Management software provider, has been named “Platinum Plus Sponsor” of SYS-CON's 9th International Cloud Expo, which will take place on November 7–10, 2011, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA. Abiquo is the Enterprise Cloud Management software company. With Abiquo, organizations can use Business Policy to manage an entire, globally deployed, computing infrastructure comprising unlimited physical and Cloud resources including private, public and hybrid Clouds through a “single pane of glass”. As a result, Abiquo customers are able to significantly decrease the cost and complexity of managing their virtual IT environments, while maintaining control of the physical infrastructure and increasing agility to change hypervisors as needed.
Want to make sense of the hottest new concept in Enterprise IT? Want to understand in just hours what experts have spent many hundreds of days deciphering? Cloud computing is a technology that has rapidly evolving peppered with a lot of hype along the way. Customers find it hard to navigate through this and make sense of what aspects of this technology will give them real business benefit. Cloud Computing Bootcamp, led by our 2011 Bootcamp Instructor Larry Carvalho, is a great way to get a practical understanding of this technology. We offer multiple days of actionable insight into what vendor offerings are currently available and help you comprehend their strategy. The ever-popular Bootcamp, which is now held regularly around the world, is being held in conjunction with the 9th Cloud Expo, November 7-10, 2011, at the Santa Clara Convention Center, Santa Clara, CA.
I can't comprehend that any event producer anywhere in the world today would answer this question by picking any one of the five available options presented. "A leading tool?" What do you mean by "a leading tool?" What other tools would you possibly have in this day and age? This question, the survey itself and its participants belong to the last decade. I personally don't use email anymore; I communicate through "Twitter." We don't do press releases unless we have to; we tweet stories to our roughly 12,000 followers in 8 channels. The news gets amplified to hundreds of thousands instantly. Even during Cloud Expo, we reach more people by Twitter than the announcements we make through loudspeakers in the convention centers. I would love to contact the people who are conducting this survey and ask them if any company answered their first question as "don't really consider it." In an age where I personally hail a cab at an airport through Twitter, I can't possibly comprehend which century bubble those people might be living in.
Is there still a distinction between public, private and hybrid cloud? In this fast-moving high-level CTO Power Panel held at the 8th International Cloud Expo at the Javits Center in New York City, June 6-9, 2011, Cloud Expo Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan discusses this and other topics such as cloud security and innovation in the cloud with Rich Wolski, CTO and Co-founder of Eucalyptus Systems; Vineet Tyagi, Head of Impetus Labs at Impetus Technologies; Bill Zack, Architect Evangelist with Microsoft; Scott Chasin, CTO at McAfee Content & Cloud; Mark Hinkle, Vice President of Community at Cloud.com; Logan McLeod, Director of Cloud Strategy at Dell; and Zach Smith, COO at Voxel.
A selection of some of the many themes & topics to be discussed at Cloud Expo Silicon Valley (9th Cloud Expo) - being held November 7-10, 2011, at the Santa Clara Convention Center, CA. The markets may still be melting, but Cloud Expo is definitely coming of age! In his Cloud Expo session, The Basics of Automating a Cloud Storage Service, Abiquo's Azmir Mohamed will be discussiong how the complexity of combining server virtualization with storage virtualization, automation, self-service catalogs and other enabling technologies has become a huge barrier for the IT teams who have to deliver the cloud services. The good news, he will be telling Cloud Expo delegates, is that some cloud vendors have recognized this issue and have partnered to deliver integrated solutions offering the flexibility and cost benefits of cloud on top of familiar infrastructure products. At the 8th International Cloud Computing Expo in New York City in June 2011, Jill Tummler Singer - CIO of the National Reconnaissance Office - answered the question: "Is Enterprise Cloud Computing for real?" In a follow-on session at Cloud Expo Silicon Valley (9th Cloud Expo), called Riding the Enterprise Cloud Computing Wave of Change into the Future, she will be discussing key elements needed for a triumphant enterprise cloud computing migration and highlight strategies (including security advantages found in the cloud) to ensure that no one crashes and gets caught in the riptide of this rapidly emerging technology.
There is one constant in data centers: Application groups always need more. Until recently, apps have been at the mercy of IT operations to feed their need. In his Keynote at the 9th International Cloud Expo, Pete Malcolm will discuss how with the advent of public cloud offerings, apps can bypass ops entirely and get the resources they need with just a few clicks and a credit card. What does this mean for the future of IT ops? Pete Malcolm is CEO of Abiquo, a leading vendor of Cloud infrastructure management solutions. Described by SYS-CON's Jeremy Geelan as "a beacon of light amid the murky fog surrounding Cloud Computing", Malcolm is the inventor of the term "Resource Cloud", a concept which provides complete separation between physical infrastructure providers and virtual enterprise consumers, with substantial benefits to both. Malcolm was previously founder and CTO of Orchestria, Benchmark Capital's first European Entrepreneur-in-Residence, and a Senior Vice President with CA, Inc.
Ulitzer.com announced "the World's 30 most influential Cloud bloggers," who collectively generated more than 24 million Ulitzer page views. Ulitzer's annual "most influential Cloud bloggers" list was announced at Cloud Expo, which drew more delegates than all other Cloud-related events put together worldwide. "The world's 50 most influential Cloud bloggers 2010" list will be announced at the Cloud Expo 2010 East, which will take place April 19-21, 2010, at the Jacob Javitz Convention Center, in New York City, with more than 5,000 expected to attend.
Cloud computing is becoming one of the next industry buzz words. It joins the ranks of terms including: grid computing, utility computing, virtualization, clustering, etc. Cloud computing overlaps some of the concepts of distributed, grid and utility computing, however it does have its own meaning if contextually used correctly. The conceptual overlap is partly due to technology changes, usages and implementations over the years. Trends in usage of the terms from Google searches shows Cloud Computing is a relatively new term introduced in the past year. There has also been a decline in general interest of Grid, Utility and Distributed computing. Likely they will be around in usage for quit a while to come. But Cloud computing has become the new buzz word driven largely by marketing and service offerings from big corporate players like Google, IBM and Amazon.
SYS-CON Events announced today that Cloud Expo 2012 New York, the 10th International Cloud Computing Conference & Expo, will take place June 11-14, 2012, at the Javits Center in New York City. The International Cloud Computing Conference & Expo series is the world's leading Cloud-focused event and is held three times a year, in New York, Silicon Valley and in Europe. Over 400 corporate sponsors and 20,000 industry professionals have participated in Cloud Expo since its inception, more than all other Cloud-related events put together. "10th Cloud Expo is trending to be both the biggest ever and the best-attended event in the international Cloud Expo series to date, so it is only natural that we should be holding it in the biggest and best conference venue anywhere on the East Coast, the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center," stated Carmen Gonzalez, CEO of Cloud Expo. "If you are not at Cloud Expo New York, June 11-14, at the Javits Center, then you risk not getting the relevant parts of your IT infrastructure into the Cloud in time."
"New infrastructure and operations technologies such as cloud services and virtualization ... were selected by CIOs the most often and are the top-two technologies for 2011," said Mark McDonald, group vice president and head of research for Gartner Executive Programs, as the results were announced of the 2011 CIO Agenda survey by Gartner Executive Programs (EXP). The worldwide CIO survey was conducted by Gartner EXP from September to December 2010 and represents CIO budget plans reported at that time. According to the results, CIOs expect to adopt new cloud services much faster than originally expected. Currently, 3% of CIOs have the majority of IT running in the cloud or on SaaS technologies, but over the next four years CIOs expect this number to increase to 43%.
Cloud Expo, Cloud Expo East, Cloud Expo West, Cloud Expo Silicon Valley, Cloud Expo Europe, Cloud Expo Tokyo, Cloud Expo Prague, Cloud Expo Hong Kong, Cloud Expo Sao Paolo are trademarks and /or registered trademarks (USPTO serial number 85009040) of Cloud Expo, Inc.