Interesting article on InformationWeek today in which the GSA is backing away from a recent appointment of Patrick Stingley as Federal Cloud CTO. Less than a month and a half after the announcement as federal cloud CTO position, Stingley has returned to his role as CTO of the Bureau of Land Management, with the General Services Administration saying the creation of the new role came too early. According to the statement by GSA CIO Casey Coleman "It just wasn't the right time to have any formalized roles and responsibilities because this is still kind of in the analysis stage, Once it becomes an ongoing initiative, it might be a suitable time to look at roles such as a federal cloud CTO, but it's just a little premature." To be honest, I was a little puzzled by the appointment of Stingley to the post of Federal Cloud CTO someone with no direct "cloud" experience. I can... (more)

Fired up our monitoring servers using HQE

We have started to monitor cloud services at various providers by firing up our first HQE server.  More to come. ... (more)

Business Scenarios for the Cloud

The Open Group recently announced the formation of the Cloud Work Group. According to the Open Group, this new group “exists to create a common understanding among buyers and suppliers of how enterprises of all sizes and scales of operation can include Cloud Computing technology in a safe and secure way in their architectures to realize its significant cost, scalability and agility benefits.” I think we can all get behind that goal, but how exactly do they plan on accomplishing such lofty aims? The Open Group is tackling this by first publishing a Business Scenarios for Enterprise Cloud Computing document. According to the group this document will focus on aligning business needs with cloud computing in hopes of allowing companies that produce cloud computing technology to better understand the needs of potential consumers. More information about the document, inc... (more)

FederalNewsRadio Highlights Government Cloud Computing

Last week's Apps.gov announcement was the latest steps in the government's "at the quick step" march into cloud computing. FederalNewsRadio, a Washington metro area media fixture, highlighted the event with an interview with GSA CIO Casey Coleman and the Associate Administrator for the GSA Office of Citizen Services, Dave McClure. "This is just the beginning of a long, multi-year process for the federal government to realize the promise of cloud computing," said Coleman. "The Cloud will help to operate at a lower cost, to operate in a more sustainable, more green fashion and be able to implement solutions more quickly and get to mission values more rapidly which will help to serve the tax payers better." McClure also explained that agencies will now have the option of buying a service. "It comes at a metered price based on usage, demand and capacity that you are shoo... (more)

Strategy Considerations for Collaboration in the Cloud

What challenges should organizations anticipate when shifting to the cloud? What are the current best practices for implementing a secure on-premise and cloud deployment mix? These and other questions will be answered in a breakout session to be given at SYS-CON's 1st Annual Government IT Conference & Expo (GovITExpo), by Ross Chevalier, President of Novell Canada and also CTO for Novell Americas. 1st Annual Government IT Conference & Expo is taking place on October 6, 2009, at the Hyatt Regency on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC. and you can attend both Chevalier's session and the entire event FREE by use of the guest code VIPguest here [case sensitive] FREE COUPON CODE FOR VIP PASS REGISTRATION: VIPguest (case sensitive) Attendees will take away from Chevalier's GovIT Expo session key tips for designing a next-generation collaboration deployment model that connects b... (more)

Cloud Computing By Industry

Welcome to a podcast discussion on how to make the most of cloud computing for innovative solving of industry-level problems. As enterprises seek to exploit cloud computing, business leaders are focused on new productivity benefits. Yet, the IT folks need to focus on the technology in order to propel those business solutions forward. As enterprises confront cloud computing, they want to know what's going to enable new and potentially revolutionary business outcomes. How will business process innovation -- necessitated by the reset economy -- gain from using cloud-based services, models, and solutions? Early examples of applying cloud to industry challenges, such as the recent GS1 Canada Food Recall Initiative, show that doing things in new ways can have huge payoffs. We'll learn about the HP Cloud Product Recall Platform that provides the underlying infrastructure fo... (more)

Top Five Mistakes People Make When Moving to the Cloud

Cloud is now mature enough that we can begin to identify anti-patterns associated with using these services. Keith Shaw from Network World and I spoke about worst practices in the cloud last week, and our conversation is now available as a podcast. Come and learn how to avoid making critical mistakes as you move into the cloud.   ... (more)

Gladinet Cloud Enterprise for Service Providers

Managed service providers are pretty familiar with selling storage products such as Windows File Server or NAS storage. They are also looking for ways to sell more value-add products around the storage products. In this sense, having an online access solution that customers can use around those storage products makes a lot of sense. Especially the online access solution can add browser base file manager, mobile apps, desktop clients and file server clients, which cover backup, access, synchronization and sharing, and team collaborations. Gladinet Cloud Enterprise was released back in October 2012. It can already provide online access solutions to a business, as an on-premise private cloud solution. Now Gladinet Cloud Enterprise was enhanced to have a service provider edition. In this edition, service provider can create multiple tenants and connect to multiple acti... (more)

Backup and Restore Porticor-Protected Disks

You can use any kind of backup software to backup/restore the unencrypted disk (on top of Porticor). However you probably prefer your backup to be encrypted, and we certainly recommend this practice. To backup an entire encrypted disk, you can use any full-disk solution, such as SAN snapshots or the snapshot capabilities available in Amazon. Porticor associates the disk encryption key with the disk UUID, i.e. a value that’s written on the disk. So even after a snapshot is restored into a volume we will recognize and decrypt it correctly. Please note the following points: The snapshot must be restored into the same project it was created in. In AWS, you might want to tag the snapshot so that you remember which project it was created in. You cannot attach a volume and its restored snapshot onto the same instance. So either create another Porticor instance in the same ... (more)

HIPAA and the Cloud: Securing Patient Data

The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) has been around for many years with the main purpose of governing the use and disclosure of individuals’ health information. The recent dramatic trend of healthcare-driven companies to migrate to cloud computing requires a cloud-specific security approach for HIPAA and the cloud. In this article, I will touch on some of the major HIPAA requirements as they relate to the cloud, and will highlight points to consider when securing patient data in the cloud.   HIPAA cloud requirement #1: Access control According to HIPAA, a covered entity must implement technical policies and procedures that allow only authorized persons to access electronic protected health information – this is highly relevant for HIPAA and the cloud. Once operating within the cloud, healthcare data can be potentially accessed from with... (more)

ServiceNow Tech Tuesdays: Form Printing With Multiple Views

Recently, I have received several questions about the ability to print a form with a different view than what is displayed on the browser when the form is printed. For example, one customer wanted the printed view of purchase order forms to differ depending on which vendor is selected. It turns out that printing multiple views of forms is quite easy to do in ServiceNow. In fact, there are two possible options available, both of which I will outline below. 1. Set a printURL parameter ServiceNow looks for an element with id = ‘printURL’ when the print icon is clicked. If found, the value on the element is assumed to be a URL that is then used to produce the form that will be printed. 2. Observe the “print” event When the print icon is clicked, the first thing ServiceNow does is check to see if someone is observing the “print” event. If someone is and the function call... (more)