CloudWorld

What if you want to move an existing application to the cloud? What are the benefits -- and what are the gotchas? This session will discuss a real-world migration to Amazon EC2, the motivation for the migration, issues confronted and benefits realized. Cloud total cost of ownership as well as system management will be covered as well.

Requirements for cloud computing security appear similar to traditional datacenters where a strong network security perimeter keeps out intruders. However, moving critical applications and sensitive data into public cloud environments challenges security best-practices, and can revoke compliance and breach existing SLAs. Cloud computing evaporates the perimeter, and a line of defense is needed at the VM itself to re-establish control. This session will present a checklist of security concerns involved with extending virtual environments to public computing clouds, detailing techniques that maintain the integrity of compliance and security policy protections as virtual resources move from on-premise to public cloud environments.

In a world of perpetual variety and change, with data and applications being increasingly distributed across clouds and on-premises, integration pain seems to be ever-present. In this environment, changing the speed and economics of application and data integration is a must.

David Inbar, Pervasive Software Director of Worldwide Marketing, Integration Products, gives his perspective on what the new landscape looks like for application and data integration, how the line between on-premises and "in the cloud" fades -- and how the benefits of speed, flexibility and cloud economics bring technology to a whole new level.

David will walk through the four distinct models for delivering integration:
· On-Premises
Traditionally companies have tackled integration with a focus on applications within the firewall. There is a range of such integration scenarios, from the batch/bulk end of spectrum -- for example, data migration and ETL, all the way to real-time, event-driven application integration and B2B data exchange.

· Embedded in ISV/SaaS applications
Increasingly, integration is embedded in on-premises and SaaS applications, necessitating an economic and technology footprint that is lightweight, powerful and capable of being fully embedded into a software vendor’s stack. For a competitive edge, applications providers cite an urgent need for fast, repeatable integration -- whether they are traditional or SaaS vendors.

· Hosted Integration as a Service (IaaS)
With the revolutionary changes in the software industry, integration can now be delivered 24/7, totally self-service, hosted in the sky, making the concept of cloud-based "agile integration for everyone" a reality.

· "Blended" Agent Integration
Leveraging the power and economics of the cloud, along with sophisticated on-premises “agent” technology, organizations have the ability to deploy an integration “fabric” that blurs the lines between on-premises and in the cloud.

The convergence of the cloud, open source and specialized analytic databases has brought a new world of possibilities to businesses. No longer are dedicated hardware and software required to meet ad hoc or unpredictable BI requirements. The combination of these technologies running in the cloud will enable organizations to:

--Create analytical sandboxes on demand to optimize response to sudden market changes
--Offload expensive processing from overburdened data warehouses and avoid costly upgrades
--Prototype new proof-of-concept BI applications without purchasing and implementing new data center infrastructure

Join Michael Crandell, RightScale CEO and Founder and Brian Gentile, Jaspersoft President and Chief Executive Officer and understand how you can solve your BI challenges in the cloud.

As social computing platforms enable collaborative workplace networks for communicating and sharing information, organizations must ensure content is accessible everywhere and is in context to activity. Increasingly, enterprises are seeking architectures that allow them to integrate this Content-as-a-Service (CaaS) paradigm into their existing infrastructure. Innovative cloud computing architectures enable the delivery of these content services, both for private or public content. However, for this to be open and enable customers to easily extract their content from one cloud to another it is essential that content management standards are service-oriented and cloud friendly. The advent of the Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) will result in an imminent ECM industry standard. CMIS has momentum and companies are already testing and adopting it. This session will describe how cloud computing can be used to deliver cost-effective, enterprise-scale, CaaS solutions and how organizations are leveraging the latest innovations in CMIS and cloud computing today.

Genius.com VP of Engineering and Operations, Shirley Foster, will share the insight gained over her 20+ years as an engineering and operations executive, and explain the advantages that cloud computing applications bring to Genius.com. Using Genius.com as a case study, she’ll provide an overview of the cloud solutions that are being used at the company and outline the benefits that these applications are providing for both the IT end-user and the company as a whole. In this instructive session, she’ll also detail the challenges and trade offs that are made including vendor viability, product reliability, security concerns, vendor lock in and pricing considerations. Finally, she’ll give her hit list of items to look for and pitfalls to avoid.

The session will discuss considerations for selecting cloud storage for enterprise backup storage and disaster recovery. It will cover our experience in developing backup applications for the cloud and compare the cloud with other backup mediums in terms of performance, security, manageability, recovery time objectives, service level requirements, regulatory compliance as well as financial considerations. Attendees will learn how to design and develop cloud infrastructure services for backup and disaster recovery. Users will learn how to effectively leverage storage and compute clouds for enterprise backup and recovery.

In today’s on demand world, organizations face new challenges when trying to manage user access, security and audit to cloud delivered applications. Unlike the past, when user identities and access control could be managed within the enterprise network, enterprises that deploy SaaS must manage user access to applications that reside outside the firewall. Access management has always been a difficult problem to solve; with the disappearing perimeter it has become even more complicated. This session will cover the technical and organizational challenges that must be addressed to manage access, authentication, single sign-on, auditing and regulatory compliance for cloud-based applications.

There's a lot of talk about the cloud but what is it, what can it do and are enterprises ready to adopt cloud computing? Learn how the cloud works and why enterprises can reap the benefits of the cloud. Hear how Canonical's Ubuntu on Amazon EC2 and Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud solutions can provide greater efficiency and flexibility to help businesses conduct their core business activities.

This session will cover the evolution of the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) development model from rigid multi-tenant based software running in a Network Operating Center (NOC) into a flexible system running in a utility-based cloud computing grid. Traditionally, software OEMs have faced a high barrier of entry into the SaaS domain primarily due to the upfront capital investment needed to establish a NOC as well as retrofitting legacy application software into a multi-tenant architecture. Today, the SaaS development model has benefited greatly from cloud computing’s flexibility, lowered costs and higher efficiency by decoupling SaaS and the need for multi-tenancy, enabling more OEMs to enter the SaaS market.

Now more than ever, companies are realizing that they must look beyond the boardroom to generate innovative ideas and concepts and ultimately remain competitive in today’s marketplace. Cisco is leading this trend by leveraging the wisdom of crowds with its recently announced Cisco I-Prize, a global competition open to anyone around the world to discover new business opportunities and ideas for Cisco. Thousands of ideas have already been submitted and the winner(s) may have the opportunity to join Cisco as founders of a new emerging technology business unit. Please join Matt Greeley, CEO of Brightidea.com, for an interactive discussion on the Cisco I-Prize and the ways that mass-scale collaboration can help your company tap into the collective wisdom of a global community on innovators.

The fuzziness of recent discourse concerning the cloud computing and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) phenomenon’s has obscured the emerging ecosystem forming around these disruptive technology waves. Is this merely another Internet “gold rush” or do they represent a major transformation of the technology industry landscape? How will enterprises, large and small, take advantage of these technology waves? How will PaaS and cloud adoption differ by customer segment? Who are the leading and emerging cloud and PaaS providers – and what are their strategies? What services will cloud and PaaS vendors offer? How will vendors and users successfully mix-and-match PaaS and cloud services? Saugatuck’s Four Waves and its Cloud Ecosystem Model will offer the answers to these and other puzzling questions, clearing the air on cloud computing and PaaS.

Today, cloud architectures are being adopted by a number of public vendors, providing customers with new opportunities and complexities in choosing a cloud computing infrastructure. While organizations must consider many factors when choosing among cloud offerings from vendors such as Amazon, Google and Salesforce.com, the lock-in issue is real and must be a primary concern for anyone planning to move mission critical applications to the cloud. Lock-in is widely considered the major roadblock to cloud computing adoption today -- but this risk can be avoided or dramatically reduced.

RightScale CEO Michael Crandell will discuss how each cloud offering varies widely when it comes to lock-in, and how customers can assess the differences before committing -- and perhaps getting locked in -- by applying the basic lock-in rule-of-thumb: The higher the cloud layer you operate in, the greater the lock-in. Lock-in can actually occur at many levels in the stack, and that's why the cloud layers differ in their effective lock-in risk. In the end, a zero lock-in option may not exist, but it's important to consider the issue when choosing among different cloud computing alternatives.

Everybody’s talking about cloud computing. Flexibility, short term contracts, no cap-ex—what’s not to like? But the truth is, issues like shared environments, monopolized resources, and application development security make many companies leery of moving all or even just part of their operations to the cloud. Does tapping into cloud-like efficiency and agility mean giving up the security and performance of your own physical server, or can you have both? How do you make the best infrastructure decision for your business? In this session, StrataScale presents several customer use cases from start-ups to enterprise companies that showcase the criteria they used to create the ideal infrastructure environment for their business.

The Cloud Computing phenomenon is happening NOW - it's a reality and can provide more flexibility for your web hosting – faster, easier and at a lower cost. Companies do not need to own their own server hardware or network infrastructure anymore. The ease of scaling up or out when the need arises, the speed which new web applications can be designed, prototyped, tested, and deployed, and the inherent cost savings (CapEx to OpEx) are truly attractive. Cloud Computing is not just a buzz term we are hearing more and more, but the next wave of hosting infrastructure. As the Cloud continues to gain acceptance, developers, designers, sysadmins and IT professionals need to understand the advantages, best practices and how to get started using Cloud Computing.

In this session, John Keagy, founder and CEO of GoGrid will discuss:

· What is Cloud Computing – The Cloud Pyramid
· The Benefits of Cloud Computing & Hybrid Hosting
· What can Cloud Computing do for me and my business
· The Competitive Landscape & Key Differentiators
· Cost Savings of Cloud Computing – pay only for what you need
· How to determine when to utilize Cloud Computing
· How should you get started using the Cloud?
· How to identify what to put in the cloud first

The emerging Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) arena presents significant opportunity for business and IT to focus on quickly innovating integrated applications that solve diverse business problems. With PaaS, enterprise IT can build more applications across one platform, and economies of scale take effect to dramatically lower the costs of subsequent application initiatives. The speaker will further explore the emerging trend of a "private cloud," which supports companies that want the advantages of a PaaS solution, but with the extended flexibility to manage the platform internally within the company’s own servers or another preferred environment, whether that is Amazon EC3 or another. For ISVs who do not have the bandwidth to create their own full-blown, multi-tenant platform, a private cloud enables them to create their own applications, quicker and with reduced development costs, and then resell those applications to existing customers or attract new ones.

Analysts like Gartner are defining cloud computing as one of 2009 most strategic yet disruptive technologies. Organizations interested in leveraging the potential value of cloud computing are also concerned about the associated risks and are looking to minimize those. Among the common concerns are:
1. Security
2. Lock-in
3. SLAs
4. Reliability
5. Cost

This session will provide best practices for addressing these concerns as well as practical guidelines for achieving immediate ROI using the cloud. Attendees of this session will learn how GigaSpaces enterprise customers addressed their own concerns when using the cloud. Mr. Giubileo will also share GigaSpaces experiences as a cloud user and how it has been using the cloud to reduce the cost of sale of its software.

The recent surge of cloud companies and companies utilizing cloud services has led to an inevitable discussion of security and transactional integrity within the cloud as more data and financial transactions than ever before are traveling the seemingly un-policed roads of the Internet highway. The issue of security and loss of control had, until recently, been the main barrier to mass adoption of cloud computing by businesses and new industries. But with the economy on the decline, CEOs, CIOs and other IT decision makers have begun to turn to cloud based solutions to streamline costs and free up personnel for more revenue producing opportunities. Nonetheless, issues of security and transactional integrity remain some of the biggest concerns for customers who choose to work with cloud companies – especially ones that process and manage financial data. As such, providers of cloud-based solutions are hearing the call for more stringent security measures and greater transactional integrity and are devising solutions to these problems while still delivering on the fundamental economic benefits of the cloud.

Attendees will learn how to not compromise security and transactional integrity even when operating within the cloud by receiving very specific guidelines to what safety and security measures are available.

Software-as-a-Service is going mainstream. As hosted applications become more popular, the need for integration between SaaS applications and behind-the-firewall data sources is becoming critical for enterprises of all sizes. Getting data into and out of SaaS applications can be tricky, but some data integration vendors now offer methods for accessing and transforming data in SaaS applications so that it can be easily and securely integrated with internal applications, including data center applications and even desktop applications. In this session, SnapLogic founder Mike Pittaro will discuss competing approaches and best practices in SaaS/on-premise integration.

The proliferation of web-based security threats adds heightened significance for companies to build a platform capable of delivering customized threat-protection services that meet the needs of enterprise companies as well as small/mid-sized businesses and consumers. To achieve this goal, vendors and businesses are increasingly examining the merits of Software-as-a-Service” (SaaS). This approach replaces the traditional model of software via perpetual licenses, and enables vendors to host and businesses to access software applications over the Internet, delivered via service level agreements on a subscription basis. In this presentation, the speaker will examine how SaaS frees IT managers from having to negotiate hardware requirements and software licenses. The speaker will also discuss why SaaS is particularly well suited to security applications.

Generation SaaS represents today’s youth, who are likely to never have handled a CD, let alone installed any software. This generation’s world is online, interactive and “try it, you'll like it.” They are the consumer Internet users of today who will become tomorrow’s CEOs, CIOs and CTOs. They are the reason that enterprise adoption of the cloud model is inevitable. Taking advantage of this opportunity is the challenge cloud companies face today. Cloud computing, everything as a service, data mobility, application integration, going green and just plain running an always-on business all require knowledge, new skills and making critical choices. And today’s economic downturn is accelerating the impact of this SaaS generation by fueling immediate need for cloud services. This session will address how companies can make enterprise clouds a reality, discussing the technology available now and the technology needed to make this the year of the cloud.

Cloud computing has its roots in technologies spanning the past 30 years: in network operating systems, distributed systems, metacomputing, clusters and grids. The promise of clouds--seamless access to computing power and information resources, on-demand--is still emerging. Stripping away all the myth and hype, the reality is that clouds are delivering substantial benefits in real production settings. Cloud technology is at the core of the world’s most powerful and demanding computing environments making computing easy to use and hard to break on all 7 continents. In the early 1990s, NASA built one of the first production clouds for high-performance computing. Since then, advances in cloud technology and virtualization have allowed us to exploit the unique qualities and raw power of modern systems, and leverage recent developments in standards which promise a new wave of interoperable software.

Attendees will receive a realistic view of clouds in High Performance Computing, what’s really new and what’s simply been renamed, why the most futuristic and compelling examples of clouds in HPC only provide point solutions, what actually works for the masses and why standards are so important for the future of clouds in HPC.

Zenith Infotech is the creator of SmartStyle Computing – a combination of hardware, software and networking technology which allows highly reliable clouds to be built out of commodity hardware components. While building this technology, we were forced to create our own software from scratch due to the limitations of commonly used storage technology like SANs, NAS, RAID as well as problems with relational database technology. We’ve decided to open source these two components – one in the area of dispersed storage and the other being a highly available database store as our contribution to the open source community to whom we owe so much because a large portion of our product line is built using open source components.

Big Infrastructure used to come at big cost, so the innovative advances in hosting were always reserved for large enterprise. Freshbooks, an online invoicing company, knew from the early beginnings that they'd need to store tremendous amounts of customer data as they grew. See the cloud strategy they used to get enterprise-scale infrastructure without a Fortune 500 budget.

Still a relatively new technology, cloud computing has evolved rapidly in the past two years. The opportunity to enable a new form of enterprise software licensing is now a reality and this approach boasts promising rewards. The benefits of cloud-based software licensing are relevant to all enterprise IT applications. Such systems continue to grow its complexity in both businesses and in the software they consume. Enterprise software product licensing has been limited to desktop deployments, creating limited flexibility for software vendors. Enterprise cloud computing removes the fundamental limitations to issuing customized licenses for users and harmoniously linking developer-centric cloud platforms with ecosystem-driving cloud infrastructure. Stuart Charlton will outline a blue print for cloud-based software licensing and what that means for public and private clouds in the enterprise.

Today, offerings such as Amazon Web Services' Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) are providing a new model for on-demand compute resources based on virtual machines. Virtual appliances are a natural deployment vehicle for this type of infrastructure, allowing a clean separation between the memory, compute and storage resources managed by the appliance provider and the complete software stack managed by the end user. Virtual appliances also allow a simple transaction from internal virtualization clusters to outsourced providers, enabling capacity spikes to be handled. This session showcases the tremendous flexibility, scalability, and financial savings that result from leveraging virtual appliances and cloud computing. The speaker will present a real life case study on KnowledgeTree, a document management provider, to examine the implementation of this.

There are many challenges in the minds of enterprise CIO's about the opportunities that cloud presents. On the one hand, the opportunity to flex resources to meet demand, particularly with pay as you go, addresses the challenge of sizing and capital expenditure for occasional events. Another class of challenge is the security and management of key corporate resources, for audit and compliance purposes. So why would the typical CIO be interested in throwing caution to the wind with a third party service provider?

This session will feature discussion of the potential for grid middleware to provide a vehicle for the development of private clouds, leveraging existing resources and infrastructure with the potential for extending services into the cloud using commercial suppliers. Much work has been done in the grid middleware community to demonstrate the viability of grid as an application, an extensible platform and an infrastructure in the cloud, thus providing an effective "on ramp" to the cloud for the existing user base.

Cloud computing and virtualization go hand-in-hand. Virtualization separates the OS/application from the underlying commodity hardware. Yet today’s "clouds" still represent collections of small compute islands; users can choose their "cloud" as some fraction of a size of a standard server, but nothing larger. An enterprise using cloud computing as an IT infrastructure strategy needs true on-demand agility and scalability, where the size of the server provided by the cloud can be easily changed on-the-fly, and should have no limits. This session addresses how networking infrastructure, virtualization and commodity servers are evolving to enable on-demand IT for the cloud, finally enabling the dynamic data center.

Cloud-based computing infrastructures deliver broad-based functionality to end users in far-flung locales but too often the destination device remains a PC. Developments in Linux and virtual desktop technology are creating a new generation of ultra low-cost endpoints such as ultra-thin clients, network monitors, set-top boxes, smartbooks, and kiosks. These devices can deliver a full multimedia experience over the cloud, and enable subscription-based and application-specific computing services. This session will examine how new-generation virtualization technologies have evolved and how companies are utilizing it to create new kinds of computing and services.

In this session we will develop a comprehensive model of a data center as a system. This model will include consideration, focused predominately at cloud computing, for data center construction/modification for both liquid and forced air cooling, low PUE data centers; hot / cold aisle containment; power optimization; and composite control system characteristics that should be considered. Where possible, practical cost considerations and areas of concern will be provided.

The benefits of virtualization are transforming the way we look at IT resourcing for development, testing and production. Existing skills, processes and projects seem to translate naturally to a virtualized environment, and few obstacles seem to impede the adoption of the cloud model for production. Practitioners and the media alike have touted the potential security benefits of virtualization. However, as with any new technology, the cloud brings with it new potential security issues, from hypervisor vulnerabilities to insecure virtual network configurations. This session gives an overview of security considerations that apply specifically to virtualized environment, with a focus on real world, cloud-based production deployments, discussing the issues and solutions.

Five 9s availability in today’s in-house data centers is a proven entity, but with the high frequency of outages in the cloud, such application and data reliability becomes foggy. Thus, cloud computing offers an economically advantageous alternative to expanding in-house datacenters ONLY IF businesses can expect the same level of availability to mission-critical apps and data – which ensures business processes – and the same level of security against hackers or other intrusions. In no market is this clearer, than in the SMB market. This instructional session will reference real-world examples, use case scenarios and industry studies to explore business continuity and security risks associated with cloud computing, and explain how to mitigate that risk through careful selection of cloud platforms and services. Leveraging similar examples as well as feedback from industry experts, it will also provide guidance on how to employ a turnkey approach to disaster recovery in the cloud—outlining both data center-to-cloud replication and intra-cloud replication techniques.