Marketing Overload Has Taken Over

There has been tremendous growth in the cloud computing space, but that growth seems be in the shadows of a much larger marketing machine that is currently pushing the message of the cloud to the masses. Have we gotten to the point where marketing overload has taken over? Does this end up confusing the average non-technical person regarding what the cloud really is and what it really does?

Talking Immutable Infrastructure with Codeship

Yesterday I had a chat with the folks at Codeship, a continuous integration and continuous deployment platform. The topic of immutable infrastructure came up and was intriguing to me, so I thought I would write about it. So what is immutable infrastructure? The concept of immutable infrastructure is to never change your existing production servers. Instead, build new automated servers and destroy the old. This concept falls in line with the “fail forward” belief system of many modern-day DevOps evangelists who believe that tweaking servers or rolling back code from servers in highly distributed systems is too risky and causes more problems than it is worth.

News: HyTrust Acquires HighCloud Security

We have written before about HyTrust and its growing ecosystem of partners, but now HyTrust has acquired HighCloud Security, a provider of encryption and key management for the virtual and IaaS environments. HyTrust provides control and visibility into actions by virtualization administrators within a VMware vSphere or vCloud environment. With the acquisition of HighCloud Security, HyTrust now adds data privacy to its suite of tools. Initially, HighCloud Security’s encryption and key management will be separate products, but there are many ways in which the technologies can be combined. The purchase changes HyTrust’s unique stance in the industry.

Windows Azure Blob Hard Drive Import and Export

Microsoft seems to be in the news lately, not for anything new and groundbreaking, but for something it needed to do to stay competitive with other cloud services. First, as I wrote in a post last week, Microsoft has taken the Windows Azure HDInsight Hadoop service to general availability, and now Microsoft is offering its Azure customers the ability to import to and export from Azure using hard disks offline.

Data Protection: The Future

Data protection of the future: What will it look like? Will we have huge amounts of storage in just one place, or will we have myriad data everywhere? The more copies the better, for example? Or are we moving toward a combination of the two? Can what we are doing today actually be used for data protection in the future? Think about how hybrid clouds are used today: do they grant us new forms of data protection?