by Angela Guess

As we gather together all of the insights from the most recent Enterprise Data World Conference in San Diego, there is still plenty to be learned from the previous year’s sessions. This video presentation by Mukta Bahl of Genentech and Sanjiv Ranjan of Simplify Enterprise discusses Secure Data Management in the Cloud. According to their introduction, the presentation introduces a Secure Data Management framework and defines, analyzes and evaluates its working principles and components. It provides a structure to answer questions like, Where are the data assets? How can these assets be protected and secured? Is accurate and current data being used to make business decisions? Is the right master data used for information integration with business partners? Can compliance with US, European, Canadian and Asia-Pacific data regulatory requirements be assured?

The presentation recommends a path forward for IT departments and walks through actionable data management and governance strategies that can be used to improve business data quality and mitigate security, compliance and privacy risk. Bahl and Ranjan also share the need to partner with key stakeholders like vendors, legal, etc to evaluate “what worked and what did not work,” and provide key takeaways and lessons learned.

James Bourne of Cloud Computing News reports, “A survey of over 800 US-based IT decision makers from Virtustream in conjunction with independent cloud research firm Neovise has revealed that over half of US enterprise are using cloud computing in one form or another. 54% of those surveyed said they were in the cloud, which certainly indicates an uptake in US adoption. Of that number, three quarters said they used public infrastructure as a service (IaaS) clouds, with 70% using private on-premise IaaS and 65% using private off-premise IaaS clouds. The main takeaway from the research however centred on the increasing use of hybrid clouds, combining both private and public functionality.”

Bourne continues, “Most notably, larger organisations are more likely to use hybrid clouds. 86% of those surveyed with more than 1000 employees used hybrid clouds, compared to the 59% with fewer than 1000 workers. In terms of hybrid cloud preferences, there were three scenarios that respondents wanted to see to improve performance: Ability to easily move an entire application from one cloud to another, on either a short or long-term basis; Ability for an application in one cloud to easily access data in another; Ability to use or manage the resources of separate clouds as a single, combined pool of resources. As the report frequently stated, hybrid clouds are currently in a relatively immature state – but as the boundaries of public and on-premise private clouds, continued saturation is the obvious way forward.”

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David Linthicum of Health Data Management recently wrote, “Public cloud-based platforms are not good locations for health care data, correct? While that may sound right, turns out it’s wrong. As we begin to study security issues in general, we’re finding that cloud-based data storage systems are perhaps more secure than traditional on-premise systems. From both my personal experiences, as well as published analysts reports that are beginning to emerge, I believe this to be true. I suspect that many health care CIOs are reconsidering their position on placing data within public clouds, while many others will continue to be respectfully paranoid.”

He continues, “The data is arriving. According to Alert Logic’s Fall 2012 State of the Cloud Security Report, the variations in the threat activity are not as important as where the infrastructure is located. The report finds that anything that can be possibly accessed from outside, whether enterprise or cloud, has equal chances of being attacked because attacks are opportunistic in nature. The report further finds that Web application-based attacks hit both service provider environments (53 percent of organizations) and on-premise environments (44 percent of organizations). However, on-premise environment users or customers actually suffer more incidents than those of service provider environments. On-premise environment users experience an average of 61.4 attacks while service provider environment customers averaged only with 27.8. On-premise environment users also suffered significantly more brute force attacks compared to their counterparts.”

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Arik Hesseldahl of All Things D recently discussed how HP’s focus on the Cloud and Big Data might make a big difference in the hacker wars. He writes, “Hewlett-Packard’s senior VP and head of its Software Enterprise Security Products, Art Gilliland, is speaking today at the RSA Security conference in San Francisco. Security is turning out to be one of those small but bright spots within HP in its long, slow but encouraging turnaround effort. During last week’s earnings conference call, CEO Meg Whitman said that security products within the software unit experienced double-digit revenue growth. Whitman didn’t get more specific, and yes, that growth would have to be off a small base relative to the rest of HP. But I’ve been sort of positive on security as an opportunity for HP for a while. Remember that over the last few years, HP has beefed up its security assets via acquisition: It has TippingPoint by way of its acquisition of the networking company 3Com, and it also bought ArcSight, a security software firm.”

He continues, “So with this in mind, I had a quick chat with Gilliland a few minutes before he was to take the stage at RSA. Gilliland said it’s time for the security industry to start thinking about ways that it can disrupt the steps in the process that attackers follow as they break into corporate systems and steal data. ‘The industry needs to focus on the adversary in a little different way than it has in the past. We spend a lot of time on the actors themselves, and we don’t spend enough time focusing on the marketplace in which they participate. That marketplace behaves in a very specific way.’ Attackers, Gilliland said, are good at sharing and monetizing intelligence, much better, in fact, than the security industry itself. Because of that, he suggests a few things.”

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photo credit: HP

Ravi Shankar recently wrote an article for Cloud Times regarding the importance of MDM to successful cloud computing. He writes, “Without cloud-enabled master data management (MDM), the idea of Data as a Service (DaaS) is a hollow promise. Companies turned successfully to MDM to deal with fragmented data in the past in order to reconcile duplicate data, dump outdated data and create centralized, trustworthy business views across disparate on-premise systems. If anything, MDM is even more important for applications that run in the cloud. With DaaS, it doesn’t matter where the data physically resides, it is simply delivered as a service via the cloud. However, the data has to be trusted to be usable and that is where MDM plays a key role, by bringing data from various sources together in the cloud and ensuring its worthiness for consumption. In that regard, MDM is the lynchpin.”

Shankar continues, “MDM is also critical to the cloud because of the diversity of cloud applications and data that are available. For example, with different applications across different functions, even a simple operation such as order-to-cash – taking the order from the customer, tracking the order, shipping the products and invoicing the customer – spans various different applications. Some of these applications may be cloud-based, while others may be on-premise. Regardless, there is going to be considerable data fragmentation and duplication, such as customer data, making it difficult to get a holistic view. MDM can address this diversity while bridging cloud and on-premise environments.”

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photo credit: mnsc

Barb Darrow of GigaOM reports, “If you want a good debate, just ask a group of pundits about the size and profitability of Amazon Web Services then sit back with some popcorn. There are two main schools of thought: One holds that AWS is a business with razor-thin margins that is underwritten by the Amazon retail juggernaut and should that business take a tumble, AWS will fall with it. The other holds that Amazon makes good dough off of AWS, and that it could be a viable standalone business unit.”

Darrow continues, “Count Macquarie Capital in the second camp. In a new research note, Macquarie estimates that the overall cloud market will hit $71 billion in 2015 and pegged AWS’ addressable part of that market at $38 billion. Those numbers are considerably larger than Gartner’s previous estimates of $56 billion for the overall cloud market size and $28 billion for AWS’ piece of the pie. In the note, analyst Ben Schachter said AWS could now be worth $19 billion as a standalone entity, based on a 5X multiple of Macquarie’s 2013 AWS revenue estimate of $3.8 billion, or $30 billion using an 8X multiple.”

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photo credit: AWS

Mark Hachman of Slashdot reports, “Michael Dell, CEO of his eponymous company, used his keynote at this year’s Dell World conference in Austin, Texas to unveil a technical preview of its private cloud. Other announcements included a partnership with FireEye, over secure customer services, and improvements to support structure such as SupportAssist technology for enterprise platforms. On the consumer side of things, Dell revealed an 18-inch all-in-one Windows 8 PC with a pop-out display that transforms it into a portable workstation.”

Hachman adds, “Dell didn’t actually disclose when the company’s private cloud, dubbed Dell Cloud Dedicated Service, would hit its general-release milestone. For those wishing to participate, however, Dell has invited interested parties to email OStechnicalpreview@dell.com for more information.”

He continues, “Dell’s private cloud will be based on the open-source OpenStack, an Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) platform developed by Rackspace and NASA that launched in 2010. Dell released a statement supporting the open nature of OpenStack: ‘While Dell will continue to offer outstanding overall solutions for any type of cloud that customers want to run, the company believes the open and compatible nature of OpenStack allows customers to take advantage of hybrid capabilities to move workloads between private and public clouds’.”

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photo credit: Dell

Barb Darrow of GigaOM reports, “Greg Sands sees a lack of good funding sources for very young enterprise-focused cloud and ‘applied big data’ companies. That why Sands, a former partner with Sutter Hill Ventures, founded Costanoa Venture Capital with $100 million to provide seed and Series A funding for such startups. There weren’t enough VCs that could write ‘relatively good sized checks’ of $500,000 to $3 million and then could continue to be good partners with these startups, Sands told me recently. ‘That means having reserves to help companies over time and being able to help them recruit, do business development and get distribution’.”

Darrow continues, “To date, Costanoa — which has Sutter Hill backing and is just coming out of stealth mode — has funded ten companies including Datalogix, DemandBase, Guardian Analytics, Intacct and Risk I/O. When it comes to ‘big data’ investments, he is looking not so much for platform companies — they don’t seem to have a problem finding funding (Cloudera just netted another $65 million). He’s more interested in those building applications that apply proprietary aggregated data to a problem set.  DemandBase, which captures business identity information from IP addresses to better target marketing pitches, as an example of this category.”

photo credit: Costanoa

Chris Boorman of B2B Marketing recently shared his predictions for what will happen in the world of data next year. Among his predictions: “ Cloud becomes the new black. Salesforce.com seems to do no wrong as they continue to eradicate on-premise CRM and build out the Force.com platform. Workday seems to be on top of the world replacing on-premise HR. The next big thing will be intelligent collaboration across enterprises as old-fashioned technologies like SharePoint come under the gun. Underpinning all of this is the need for cloud data integration and cloud master data management.”

He also predicts: “Hadoop won’t make the tea! Hyperbolic claims that Hadoop will replace databases, or ETL, will be tempered with the reality that Hadoop isn’t a hammer and that all data isn’t a nail. Hadoop is undoubtedly a great innovation in Analytics, but that’s all it is. 2013 will be the year in which enterprises realise that the world of traditional data will continue and Hadoop will simply augment reality with complementary capabilities.” Along those lines Boorman predicts, “Big Data moves beyond data scientists. Big data becomes democratised as tooling evolves to make it more accessible to the masses, instead of being dependent on a scarce group of expensive data scientists. Especially since 80% of the work isn’t the analysis—it’s the basic data integration and data quality.”

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photo credit: Kevin M. Gill

Christine Burns of Network World reports, “The time for dabbling in cloud computing is over, say industry analysts. 2013 is the year that companies need to implement a hybrid cloud strategy that puts select workloads in the public cloud and keeps others in-house. ‘Next year has to be the year that enterprises get serious about having real cloud operations as part and parcel of their IT operations,’ says John Treadway, vice president at Cloud Technology Partners, a consultancy.”

Burns goes on, “Treadway says that in the last year, he and his colleagues have worked with many large enterprise clients who have implemented half-baked, haphazard cloud infrastructure schemes – most of them private and developed in-house. They have some virtualization, explained Treadway. And they may even have some automation. ‘But when you peel back the onion you can’t find the type of cloud infrastructure where you can request a resource and have it provisioned automatically on the fly. There is still a lot of human labor involved in those processes,’ Treadway says.”

Read more here.

photo credit: d.boyd