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Access Control and Right Management in the Cloud – SaaS Provides a New Capability

With larger numbers of companies migrating to the cloud, users are getting overwhelmed with remembering large numbers of access codes, passwords and URLs. There is also a need to manage user accounts and authentication to ensure that the requirements of rights management and security are followed. This, as any serious IT practitioner will know, is the basic cost of doing business. You have to be able to take access control and user authentication as a given.

This problem is becoming more complex, however, via the proliferation of smart phones and tablet computers.  The days of only connecting through a LAN are over, and any solution has to cater to a very large number of mobile devices as well.

With companies also opting to use hybrid clouds, at times selecting to keep some critical parts of their applications in-house, the problem of authentication and single sign-on is becoming worse. At times companies could even be working with different cloud vendors and still expect to manage access control and user authentication from a single point. Under such circumstances, IT staff can have a difficult time supporting security, access control and user rights management.

New SaaS Offering

A new branch of cloud services is now beginning to be offered that promises to handle these issues. Access control and user authentication services are now being offered by Software as a Service (SaaS) vendors. These services work in the background with the user company’s Active Directory (AD) or Lightweight Directory Access Protocol Service (LDAP) to map the rights and privileges of individual users to cloud-based services and applications that the company uses.  Individual users can now work while leaving access control management to the relevant service provider.

A key issue in being able to offer such a service is capacity to ensure near-perfect availability for the authentication company itself. Most such companies take extreme steps to ensure they have a service availability of greater than 99.99%, because absence from the grid for some time would have a cascading effect on users who would not be able to log in. Even a 99.99% up-time means there are nearly 53 minutes downtime a year, which could still be unacceptable to many users.

The authentication vendor offers much more than mere capability to log in and achieve a single sign-on for several applications. It can create a workflow consisting of several applications and direct the user from one to another – giving him an illusion of a single application while he is actually being transferred between many. A comprehensive audit trail and report is maintained and all user actions are logged. Since this is a third-party service in some regulatory environments, this kind of audit trail could have more value than that of an internal company.

Since the authentication service is aware of the applications users are accessing, it can automatically hire larger numbers of cloud service instances based on pre-defined thresholds, and release these instances back to the cloud vendor when the user logs off. This ensures a ‘just-in-time’ kind of provisioning and de-provisioning and can result in substantial savings while always ensuring that a minimum level of service response is never violated.

Major gains

What does the user-company get from the service that it could not have done itself? The answer is: “time.” Given enough time and manpower, one could shift the active directory to the cloud and integrate with every application running – both in the cloud and off it. But this process takes time, and for a company just moving into the cloud, it is far simpler to outsource access control and rights management to industry experts. This outsourcing task may be taken on by the cloud provider itself, provided that they offer this type of additional service. GMO Cloud offers a wide range of add-on services – from non-traditional security measures to installation of various types of software and applications.

Overall stability of applications and processes in the cloud improve, meaning companies can concentrate on managing the application rather than access control and right management. This also brings down the time it will take you to start generating revenue.

You can think of the access control layer as an overlay on all your (possible different) applications, facilitating coordination through trust being inherently ensured between applications.

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About the Guest Author:

Sanjay Srivastava has been active in computing infrastructure and has participated in major projects on cloud computing, networking, VoIP and in creation of applications running over distributed databases. Due to a military background, his focus has always been on stability and availability of infrastructure. Sanjay was the Director of Information Technology in a major enterprise and managed the transition from legacy software to fully networked operations using private cloud infrastructure. He now writes extensively on cloud computing and networking and is about to move to his farm in Central India where he plans to use cloud computing and modern technology to improve the lives of rural folk in India.

Multiple Cloud Providers for Redundancy – What Vendors Must Provide

The importance of backing up data is something that all people involved in IT learn early, usually from a bad experience. It all comes down to redundancy: having multiple copies of everything and keeping them separated so they do not all fail at once.

When adopting cloud computing for your business, making sure that your data is properly backed up and that not all of your “eggs are in one basket” can save you money, time and risk. Most cloud service providers give options regarding cloud hybridization and avoiding risks with multiple locations. However, these are often all on the same cloud, which may itself pose a risk. Thus, using multiple cloud providers for redundancy is a better way to manage risk, since not all the responsibility for your data lies with a single vendor.

Even With Distributed or Hybrid Models, There’s a Risk When Using a Single Provider

Depending on a single cloud services provider has advantages. However, the negative effects of a single problem are compounded when this is the case. After all, if all of your data is residing on a single cloud, all it takes is one specific issue to affect the whole negatively. So, even a distributed cloud that attempts to provide ideal regional distribution can have issues. A more fluid operating model can help avoid these problems by adopting multiple cloud platforms. If well-implemented, multiple clouds need not be complicated to manage and actually make your cloud ecosystem richer thanks to the diversity of options and greater geographic distribution. All it takes is better up-front planning of your cloud ecosystem.

Managing Multiple Cloud Platforms

The critical aspect of managing multiple cloud platforms is a strong and well-implemented management platform. Regardless of the applications being used and the various nodes involved, without strong oversight, change management, and governance, moving apps to production can be a nightmare. It is therefore important that all clouds have a strong automation and management platform. This is even more crucial when dealing with multiple clouds. A common mistake is to keep many aspects of management manual, ultimately slowing everything down to a crawl. Learning to adapt to widespread management tools with high degrees of automation is crucial when managing multiple cloud platforms. This is often one of the hurdles that keeps companies from adopting a more effective cloud strategy.

What Your Cloud Services Vendor Needs to Provide

Not all cloud providers have services that are ideal for use with other clouds. A few important features that your cloud services vendor needs to provide include:

1. Low data transfer costs. With multiple clouds, you will be moving high volumes of data from one to the other constantly. Does your cloud service provider give you a cost-effective way of doing this?
2. Data portability. Can this data be moved with a few problems quickly and in a usable format?
3. API. Since management is such an important part of using multiple clouds, making sure that your IT staff have the skills and resources to write effective management scripts is very important. Does the cloud service provider have a well-implemented API that allows your IT professionals to re-write management scripts?

In conclusion, building redundancy with the use of multiple cloud platforms means that you will be more resilient to disasters and outage risks. Depending on a single vendor may mean that all of your services will be halted until that vendor solves the issue. With multiple cloud platforms, issues in a single provider’s cloud become less critical to your operations. This strategy also allows you to take advantage of each provider’s strongest features while minimizing their weaknesses. For example, you can choose the vendor with the best storage facilities to ensure that your database performance is at its best while using a cloud services provider with weaker storage facilities to cover in case of problems with the primary cloud. That’s the beauty of using multiple cloud platforms.

Of course, fact still remains that you need to be vigilant about which cloud provider to choose. Regardless whether you have 2 or 5 providers, individual security measures must be kept in check. One of GMO Cloud’s strengths is its multi-level strategy that involves several security measures. Visit their cloud hosting security page to find out more.

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Our articles are written to provide you with tools and information to meet your IT and cloud solution needs. Join us on Facebook and Twitter.

About the Guest Author:

Nida Rasheed is a freelance writer and owner of an outsourcing company, Nida often finds herself wanting to write about the subjects that are closest to her heart. She lives in Islamabad, Pakistan and can be found on Twitter @nidarasheed.

Applications on Cloud Nine

Why do so many act like cloud computing is all new? It has clearly been on the scene for years, growing healthily through its expansion of technologies aimed at specific needs of targeted consumers. Cloud computing companies know exactly what generates millions of users based on daily activities made easy through various software online.

A new wave of applications has emerged which negate the need to drain your personal savings in purchasing software. Cloud applications (often referred to as Software-as-a-Service) have certainly made an impact on the lives of businessmen, on-the-go professionals and the youth who patronize these applications. Costs have been cut in software application, installation, maintenance and technical support, while computers with higher memory or faster performance need no longer to continually be bought. Meanwhile, owners of small IT companies can reduce overheads with less hardware, fewer employees to monitor hardware, and fewer customer service agents to face irritated consumers that use different versions of the product.

Applications like Google Docs now provide the platform for anyone to create, store and share documents or spreadsheets. No longer confined to your desktop computer at home, you can access any information or file on the cloud by simply bringing your laptop or mobile phone anywhere with a simple Internet connection.

Sharing of these data also requires minimal time and effort – a stark contrast to the slow uploading, sending via email or saving on flash drives. Intended addressees can easily get hold of these files by merely connecting to the internet. Dropbox is also a good example. Pictures often have high resolution and take a longer time to upload or attach. By just sharing a folder in Dropbox, anyone can quickly view and have a copy of their most cherished photos.

The storage capability of these cloud applications also comes in handy during computer breakdowns. By having their files on the cloud, users immediately have a back-up drive that will not simply crash at any moment. These applications are quite inexpensive compared to back-up hardware that many big businesses pay for. Scalability is also a strong suit for any of these cloud applications, since user needs are often diverse.

The scope of services offered by cloud applications is also evolving and improving by the hour: customer relationship management, sales databases, and finance applications among others. All these applications are either free or significantly lower than alternatives.

The only hard pill to swallow is the question of security. Since you are basically putting your information out there, confidentiality is put to the test. How safe will your data be on the cloud when control is primarily not in your hands? The guarantee that it won’t be used for advertising campaigns or Youtube uploads should be a key motivation for finding a cloud application that provides a highly secure and safe environment that respects your privacy. For all its immense benefits, cloud applications must first and foremost uphold what they promise, which is the ultimate customer service. And that includes strict user protection. To give you a better illustration of what a fully-featured security service is like, visit the Security section of this site.

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About the Guest Author:

Rodolfo Lentejas, Jr. is a fulltime freelance writer based in Toronto. He is the founder of the PostSckrippt, a growing online writing business dedicated to producing top quality, original and fresh content. To know more about him, please visit www.postsckrippt.ca. Like him on Facebook or follow him on Twitter, Google+ and Pinterest.

The Future of Gaming Is In the Cloud

One of the aspects of this year’s E3 (Electronic Entertainment Expo) that stood out was the absence of new gaming consoles or major hardware on display. While many gamers were disappointed, perhaps this is a sign of the times. After all, many industry experts believe the future of gaming is probably in cloud computing, meaning client-side hardware is irrelevant.

In Japan, Sony’s purchase of Gaikai, a pioneer of cloud gaming infrastructure and technology, means it can soon offer high-quality streaming games to PlayStation owners. Perhaps the PlayStation 4 will no longer require actual game discs and stream all of its games! Device virtualization helps us envision a future where gamers receive games on any device, from tablet PCs and smartphones to many modern TVs. In fact, cloud computing may be used to prolong the lives of current consoles considerably. Client-side processing is not nearly as demanding with cloud gaming – a basic Hardware as a Service (HaaS) operation. We can already see this happening in Japan and other countries with a high average connection speed, although we are still a few years away from gamers being able to stream blockbuster games with high system requirements at ideal speeds and quality.

Cloud Gaming Allows Gaming Companies to Offer Better Backwards Compatibility

One of the most promising uses of cloud computing and streaming for gaming companies lies in bringing backward compatibility to newer systems and consoles. Many factors, such as older games being freely available due to software piracy, make backwards compatibility impractical for many gaming companies. However, not allowing access to these older games means foregoing a credible market. Fortunately, these older games do not have heavy system requirements, making them ideal for streaming. By placing them on the cloud and establishing a payment model per transaction, Sony, Nintendo, and other gaming companies could conceivably make their whole back catalog available for streaming.

Cloud Gaming Solves Many of the Industry’s Most Important Problems

Since its beginnings, the gaming industry has been at the mercy of retailers and distributors. It is very common for developers to have to make numerous concessions, in everything from pricing to content. However, cloud gaming enables a new model that places less power in the hands of the middleman and gives more freedom to developers. Not having to manufacture physical media will also allow for greater profits while giving companies the freedom to reduce the price of their games substantially. However, the most obvious and attractive feature of cloud gaming is in its solving the problems of software piracy and the pre-owned market.

Companies spend millions of dollars every year implementing expensive DRM which ultimately prove ineffective while also alienating loyal customers. Within a couple of weeks, almost all games are pirated and available for free on peer-to-peer file sharing networks, despite the efforts of gaming companies. However, with a streaming gaming model, the actual games’ code cannot be pirated at all, and thanks to actual games not being on the clients’ side, it effectively neuters the second-hand market.

Cloud Gaming’s Availability

Unfortunately, due to bandwidth caps and low connection speeds and availability in many countries,  effective high-end cloud gaming is probably a few years away. However, there is no doubt that countries such as Japan or South Korea, where the infrastructure already exists, are ready to adopt this technology now. And, as seen at E3 and in recent news, major gaming companies are betting on the cloud as the future of PC gaming.

Be Part of Our Cloud Conversation

Our articles are written to provide you with tools and information to meet your IT and cloud solution needs. Join us on Facebook and Twitter.

About the Guest Author:

Nida Rasheed is a freelance writer and owner of an outsourcing company, Nida often finds herself wanting to write about the subjects that are closest to her heart. She lives in Islamabad, Pakistan and can be found on Twitter @nidarasheed.

Gartner Predicts Significant Increase in Cloud Computing by 2016

Without realizing it, many people have been using the cloud even before the term became widely known to both consumers and businesses.  Applications such as email and other programs which are web based and accessed over the internet are in reality, cloud applications. The concept of web-based applications such as Hotmail and Gmail as well as Instant Messenger, social networking and other apps accessible from any location with an internet connection are early forms of cloud computing.

The increased use of mobile devices which potentially mark the decline of the PC era and the upward trend of cloud computing has prompted demand for being able to access content from anywhere and from any type of device.  Gartner predicts that the demand will only continue to accelerate over the next few years.

What Gartner Says about the Future of Cloud Computing

Gartner, a leading information technology research company since 1979, recently released a report outlining the expected growth of cloud computing storage within the next few years.  The research firm pointed out that the amount of content stored in the cloud during the year 2011 was less than 8 percent.

The amount of cloud computing storage is expected to increase to approximately 36 percent by the year 2016, with more users of cloud computing storage moving at least one-third of their content to the cloud by 2016.

Japan and South Korea to Experience the Highest Growth in Cloud Computing

Based on a pay-as-you-go model and providing a cost-effective way to share technology resources, cloud computing helps organizations to reduce IT costs.  According the International Data Corporation (IDC), a leading global provider of technology market intelligence, organizations worldwide generated revenue of more than $600 billion and created more than 1.2 million jobs during the year 2011 as a result of employing cloud computing services.

The IDC study also showed that more than fifty percent of employment positions created during 2012 will be in the small-to-medium-sized business sectors. A high percentage of this growth will originate from the United States and Western Europe, with Japan and South Korea experiencing the highest growth in the use of cloud computing in the Asia Pacific.

Gartner Forecasts for Cloud Computing Storage

Gartner forecasts an increase in the use of cloud computing as a result of technologically-advanced smartphones, tablet PCs, handheld gadgets and other portable devices which are capable of producing multimedia content which in turn, increases storage demands. This increase is also the result of social media networking sites such as Facebook striving to meet storage demands for the consumer.  However, the amount of storage offered to the consumer is relatively small compared to other cloud storage resources. Regardless, consumers will be able to store and share multimedia on various social media sites which offer storage space free of charge.

• Consumer Digital Storage by 2016: Gartner forecasts that consumer digital storage needs will grow to more than 4 zettabytes worldwide by the year 2016.  This is an increase over 329 exabytes during the year 2011 and also includes content which is stored on computers, tablet PCs, smartphones, external hard-disk drives, and network attached storage (NAS).

• Household Digital Content Storage: Digital content storage needs for the average household is predicted to grow to more than 3 terabytes per household by the year 2016. This is a significant increase over 464 gigabytes per household during 2011.  The increased use of mobile devices equipped with digital cameras will be a major contributor to the increased demand for digital content storage.

• On-Premises Digital Content Storage: Gartner predicts that the use of digital content storage on premises will be greatly reduced to 64 percent by the year 2016, down from 92 percent in 2011. Digital content storage on the premises will still be used but will decrease as cloud storage becomes more common.

All of these studies point to cloud computing storage and services being emphatically on the rise until 2016.

In line with this expected surge of usage and demand, individual and organization consumers need to be prepared. This means that they will need a provider that can sufficiently supply the computing power that they need. One example would be the true scalability of resources. GMO Cloud Hosting offers this kind of service and more, visit the Features page of the site to learn more about these services.

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About the Guest Author:

Aeyne Schriber has more than two decades of accumulated experience in IT security, computer technology, and internet marketing, including technology education and administration field both on the public school and college level. She works worldwide helping companies establish an online presence from small businesses to large enterprises.  Her skills as a published copywriter and marketer also include consulting and training corporate personnel and entrepreneurs.  For more details, visit www.digitalnewmediamarketing.com