2016 set to be a defining year for the cloud

The results are in and it seems at its half way point, 2016 has been a defining year for cloud.

According to the 2016 Cloud Adoption Survey by Extreme Networks, private cloud is giving way to hybrid cloud - nearly half of large enterprises will go hybrid by the end of next year.

​Firewalling the OpenStack cloud

Securing the cloud is not easy. Now, Mirantis, the pure-play OpenStack business, and Palo Alto Networks, an important network security company, have joined forces to add firewalls via virtual network function (VNF) to Mirantis OpenStack. The partners claim this combination will protect "applications from cyber threats while taking advantage of the agility, cost savings, and innovation of the OpenStack cloud ecosystem."

Oh, and by the way, it will make securing OpenStack clouds much easier.

They're on to something. It's not enough to simply virtualize a legacy security appliance on clouds. Businesses need an integrated security solution that can deal with virturalized environments.

The two companies are doing this by integrating and validating Palo Alto Networks' VMSeries virtualized next-generation firewall with Mirantis OpenStack. The VM security system is deployed on OpenStack as a Glance image. It is integrated with Mirantis's default software defined networking (SDN) , Juniper Networks' Contrail Networking.

Put all together the companies make the following claims for their security solution:

Easy to deploy and provision: Palo Alto Networks' VM-series firewall is quickly deployed on a VM, and run within the OpenStack cloud.

Seamless traffic steering to the VM-Series firewall: Traffic is steered by the SDN controller to VM-series firewall without requiring manual configuration changes to virtual networking attributes.

Next-generation security for virtualized applications and data: The joint solution offers visibility and control at a user, application and content level with complete carrier-grade network address translation (CGNAT) capability for service providers.

Advanced threat protection: VM-Series advanced threat protection addresses the complete attack life-cycle, with protection against exploits, viruses, spyware, malware and known and unknown threats, such as advanced persistent threats (APT).

Read More: http://www.zdnet.com/article/firewalling-the-cloud/

The speed of cloud adoption is accelerating – faster than industry expectations

I recently read with interest the latest research from the Cloud Industry Forum (CIF) which shows the overall cloud adoption rate in the UK now stands at 84%, with almost four in five (78%) of cloud users having adopted two or more cloud services.  It might surprise you to know that this statistic has shifted from 48% in 2010 to 84% in 2015.

The conclusion is that cloud is certainly helping organisations meet their business objectives, with a significant proportion of cloud adopters managing to reduce their capital expenditure, improve the reliability of their IT and reduce the risk of data loss.

What’s even more telling and thought provoking than the overall cloud adoption rate, however, is that the speed of cloud adoption is also increasing at a much faster rate than many in the hi-tech industry anticipated.  That the migration to cloud would be vast and all-encompassing has long been accepted as inevitable, but the pace of this adoption has still been a bit of an open question.

That question, it seems, has now been answered.

According to a recently published report by Dell’Oro Group, a research group focused on telecommunications, networks, and data centre IT industries, starting in 2015, cloud data centres will emerge as the sole growth driver for server shipments, as unit shipments into enterprise data centres decline. Server unit shipments are expected to continue to grow overall during the forecast period.

“Our recent interviews with end-users, component vendors and system integrators, indicate that Cloud adoption is occurring faster than industry expectations,” said Sameh Boujelbene, Director at Dell’Oro Group. “The substantial increase in cloud uptake stems from both a declining scepticism of the Cloud among enterprise accounts, and the willingness of Cloud vendors to hear their customers’ concerns, mainly related to security and resiliency, and to provide platforms to meet their needs. We currently expect Cloud servers to reach 50 percent of total server shipments by 2017; a year earlier than previously projected,” stated Boujelbene.

To read more : http://www.cloudcomputing-news.net/news/2015/oct/15/speed-cloud-adoption-accelerating-faster-industry-expectations/