In the Hybrid Cloud, Your Role Matters, but…

The title of this article is “In the Hybrid Cloud, Your Role Matters, but…,” and there is a big “but” there. How you use your role is what really matters. Whether you are a cloud, virtualization, or container administrator, evangelist, or architect, how you use your role makes or breaks the secure hybrid cloud. We …

IT: The Industry of Change

Nothing quite changes like IT. We have gone from incredibly manual, thought-requiring human processes to handling petabytes of data to make a single decision. In essence, our requirements have changed to meet our real-world needs, whether such change has been to improve performance, capacity, or other needs. Requirements rule the world of IT. Recently, we …

Comparison – Hybrid Cloud Data Protection – Mechanisms

This is the first of many comparisons and commentaries on data protection within the hybrid cloud. We are looking at the mechanisms used to achieve data protection. Mechanisms—how boring—yet from an architectural and data management view, mechanisms become increasingly important. The mechanisms available can impact the costs of your data protection. One example: it is often …

IT Transformation: Architecture Includes Security

I recently had a number of consulting conversations about IT transformation and adding new Security as a Service products to companies’ existing clouds and tenancies. This is the beginning of IT transformation in many cases. A company has realized it needs to provide security to its tenants while using clouds more securely at the same …

Back to Basics II: Secure Hybrid Cloud

I have written many times about hybrid cloud security, but there’s a fundamental security requirement that happens as you access the hybrid cloud. In our previous back to basics article we wrote about the need for situational awareness. We’re going to expand on that topic some more. The real success to hybrid cloud security is …

Which Cloud Do You Use?

We are curious about which cloud or clouds everyone uses, as the market is rather diverse, ranging from Amazon Web Services to clouds based on OpenStack, VMware vCloud, and community clouds that meet specific needs. Are you using multiple clouds, just one cloud, or no clouds? We’d like to hear your answers to these questions. We …