What is Fault Tolerance in a virtual world? Sometimes I wonder, what does this ‘fault tolerance’ or a ‘zero-downtime’ means to people at large? How does it make a difference in our lives? Do we really need to know all the technology jargon?  How things function? Probably not. Folks! We don’t need to know all of it. But, we can definitely cherish the benefits coming over to us with the magic words ‘Abracadabra’, what this technology is providing us with ‘a glitch free’ access to our everyday applications that we use. Whether, it is a ‘Facebook’ or a ‘Twitter’ application we are working on or trying to access our email messages, or a mobile applications running on a server hosted far off in a data center or a banking application across the globe. It doesn’t matter, even, if we are digging deep into ‘Big Data’ – performing data mining task or using analytics for businesses, social media marketing, political campaigns, philanthropic activities, astronomical data crunching explori...

Cloud Security ensures encryption and key management software that helps organizations lock down virtual machines and their data so they remain secure throughout their life-cycle in the private, public or hybrid cloud. Broadly speaking, it does. But, there is more to it. We need to see a holistic picture of the cloud pointing to the security check points. There are numerous of end points to be considered to get a feeler that how exhaustive this intangible monster could be? Let’s look at the various aspects of the cloud that we must discuss and take a deep dive to get a thorough understanding to build a security, we can    trust! Let’s step back a little before we take a long jump. The advent of Internet, as we know, it started as a public sector project that quickly transformed, into what it is today - a large, interconnected network that never turns off and connects an unimaginable number of different devices in the public and private sectors. Moreover it...

Company leaders need to think about incorporating key technologies into their IT environments to set a foundation for the private cloud.  Well, the question arise what are those key enabling technologies? Broadly speaking, we need fast wide-area networks, powerful, inexpensive server computers, and high-performance virtualization for commodity hardware. Once we have these three thing in place. One may start with virtualization, to get your hands dirty, before moving on to an internal private cloud deployment. Then, you may decide to move to a managed service model. Well, one of the best places to start with a private cloud build is to make sure you have some form of virtualization already in place. It serves as a great foundation for the private cloud, which requires virtualized servers, mass storage solutions, and more.  Why do we need a cloud deployment model? The point is let’s not make the users worry about managing the cloud services. We must decide a cloud dep...

As cloud providers and enterprises broaden their service portfolios, many providers are adopting DaaS. These services offer the benefits of VDI, without enterprise customers needing to build and operate their own VDI infrastructures. With DaaS on demand, you can manage your virtual desktops (user profiles, operating system and applications) with a self-service portal. And, the service provider manages the rest as a monthly subscription service, including data center hardware and facilities, VDI software and security. Users can connect to full-featured virtual desktops from anywhere, at any time, using PCoIP or RDP devices — and those virtual desktop resources never leave the secure cloud. VMTurbo offers a fully multi-tenant and cloud platform-aware solution (VMware vCloud  Director, Citrix CloudStack). With it, cloud providers deliver DaaS services—meeting  service levels while efficiently using compute, storage and cloud resources and,  thereby, increasing operati...

Many organizations are now looking for new ways to perform compute intensive tasks at a lower cost. Fast provisioning, minimal administration, and flexible instance sizing and capacity, along with innovative third party support for grid coordination and data management through cloud based platforms that support high performance grid computing. One can allocate compute capacity on demand without upfront planning of data center, network, and server infrastructure. You have access to a broad range of instance types to meet your demands for CPU, memory, local disk, and network connectivity. Infrastructure can be run in any of a large number of global regions, without long lead times of contract negotiation and a local presence, enabling faster delivery especially in emerging markets. One can define a virtual network topology that closely resembles a traditional network that you might operate in your own data center. One can build grids and infrastructure as required for isolation ...

This will be determined by the nature of the cloud service offering one select. A cloud service provider will almost certainly have access to the hardware on which data is stored, but one effect of virtualized storage is that access to hardware generally does not by itself provide logical access to stored data. It is the contracts with your preferred cloud service providers limit access to authorized personnel and provide for specific procedures to be followed (and strict limitations governing)  when preferred cloud service provider personnel or contractors access your data. No matter where your data is stored or accessible, it is always possible that a regulator or court of competent jurisdiction might attempt to access data (a) maintained on a service provided by a cloud service provider that is within its jurisdiction, (b) accessible by a cloud service provider or third party within its jurisdiction or (c) maintained on computing equipment within its jurisdiction. In appro...

This is more to do with the approach to the security responsibility issue. Because many standard security controls are applied at the application layer or in the data store, both of which are typically owned by whoever controls the software application, often the customers retain control of and responsibility for many specific security functions. In the IaaS and PaaS models, many standard security controls, such as backups, encryption, access management, logging attributes and IDS , must be provisioned and executed by the customer. If you see the responsibility for cloud security is generally allocated with the preferred cloud service providers, and you. The manner in which this responsibility is delegated will depend on the specific solution designed provide the cloud service. Specific categories of requirements correlate to which party controls which portion of the computing infrastructure customer or the cloud service provider. For instance, the preferred cloud service ...