Shoppers, whether purchasing from the bricks and mortar stores or online will have expectations that are set by high profile retail brands. The last thing any retailer operating online needs is to fail to meet these expectations because of a poor performing website, let alone the thought that customers would leave the site to go to a competitor site.

For the 3rd installment of our webinar recap series, we dive into what the future holds for cloud computing. In particular, will look at the role of platform-as-a-service in the broader cloud ecosystem. In particular, will 2010 be “the year of PaaS?” Read on for more about why platform-level services will be hot in 2010, and who we felt would be the big winners this year as the focus shifts from the infrastructure to the platform

2010: The Year of Platform as a Service

Michael: 2010 is going to be the year of the platform layer. If we look back at the predictions in 2008 going into 2009, people were getting excited about cloud. People were talking very much about virtualization. People were talking very much about renting resources and tying them all together.

That was great, and we saw that come together in 2009, a lot of excitement out of Amazon and VMware with their various solutions for public and private clouds. A lot of users are coming. When we talk to our customers and various users around the country, I hear a lot of application developers come and say, “But wait how do I tie all of this together? What tools are there for me to take advantage of this new paradigm?” That’s really the core of this prediction.

The platform tools are there. We have our platform tools that assist developers to put together these large applications so they can focus on their value add. There are frameworks such as Hadoop where with just writing a couple of functions of code, you get this massive platform for churning through terabytes or petabytes of data across your infrastructure.
These are the tools. This is the next tier up on the cloud technology stack. This is what people are going to be looking for. I think it’s interesting that if you look back in 2009, you see this come. I see two big points that really drive this.

First of all, there was the VMware acquisition of SpringSource. VMware is still all about the private clouds for tying together your resources and being able to control them dynamically, but you could tell they saw that, to them, the VM is still just a black box that they manage.

They really don’t have the insight into what the application is doing, and they needed those tools to go one tier up. So, here they look at SpringSource. They have more control on runtimes. They have the Hyperic monitoring system to see what’s going on inside the VM, and they can control it at a tighter level.
We talked about standards for 2009. Here at the end of 2009, I’ve seen the first talk about not standards at the infrastructure layer, but standards at the platform layer, about how to try to keep these tools together. So it’s time. People need to move up that stack.

The masses of developers don’t want to be distributed computing experts. They want a tool set to assist them on top of this tremendous infrastructure we’ve built, and I really see it all coming together with another round of great tools for application developers to build upon.

Sam: So, this is almost a standard question that I’m starting to ask. Winners, losers who benefits from this shift? Who’s put out from this shift? What about the big guys?

Michael: Yeah. I get this question a lot. There are people who lock into just one technology stack, and those are going to be the losers here. There are those that have batch tools. There are those that think that cloud is just about virtualization. There are those that look at pure Scylla. Anybody who locks into just that single tier is going to be a loser here because it is the unification, and thereby extension, of a lot of these efforts that are really going to allow the winners to evolve.

I’ve been talking I was at a cloud camp just recently and developers were starting to ask me about, “I’m an expert in ESB; I’m an expert in operations management. What is this next tier? What is the paradigm shift? Because I don’t want to get left behind.” So that’s where the winners will separate themselves.

Those that are willing to take that slight shift and realize that building an app for the cloud is very much like building an old app, but not exactly like building an old app. Those are going to be the winners as we come forward here, through this shift.

—

Register for a free download of the full webinar here. After registering you will be able to watch the full event online, view the slides, download the audio, or even grab an iPhone-compatible version for your next flight.

Stay tuned for our next installment, “Data in the Cloud”. See you then!

New Relic RPM is an on-demand performance management solution for web applications developed in Ruby. New Relic recently introduced an updated agent. Some of the highlights include support for Sinatra and rack apps, as well as background workers.

They also added a great Heroku feature; you can now view your backlog depth history. When a request comes in to Heroku it’s passed to your dynos to process the request. If more requests are coming in than your dynos can handle, the requests queue up. Our docs provide a more detailed overview of performance. The queue is often a sign that you need to increase your dynos or speed up your app. New Relic can now show you the peak and average queue for your app.

This screencast provides an overview of the new feature in New Relic, and some guidance on how to tell when it’s time to crank your dynos.

Don’t miss Cloud Connect Event 2010, the first event to bring together executives, IT professionals and developers to explore and define the cloud. See the latest cloud technologies and learn from thought leaders in Cloud Connect’s comprehensive conference and expo . March 15-18, 2010 http://cloudconnectevent.com/

GoGrid is a sponsor of this premier Cloud Computing event and will have a booth there. We hope that you will come and visit us to discuss your Cloud Computing plans. Our staff there will be available for infrastructure consultations, demos and general discussion about the Cloud.

Also, Justin Kitagawa, Senior Technical Lead at GoGrid, will be part of a panel called: “Writing Code for Many Clouds” which is on Tuesday, March 16 (1:30-2:30PM). The panel details are as follows:

Writing Code for Many Clouds

Tuesday, March 16 1:30 PM–2:30 PM

You may be developing an application that runs on a single cloud today, but you’ll want to keep your options open in case things change. Switching clouds isn’t always easy: cloud providers have differing resource models, constraints, and gotchas. All of these pose potential risks of lock-in, presenting challenges for developers who need to consider how their code can work with more than just one cloud provider.
This panel brings together developers who’ve dealt with some of these challenges and built to specific cloud APIs with the people who built those APIs. It’s a rare glimpse into the design decisions behind some of today’s most prominent cloud computing platforms — and perhaps even a glimpse into the future API feature plans of various cloud providers.

• Moderator – Shlomo Swidler, Founder, Orchestratus
• Speaker – Shashi Mysore, Product Specialist, Eucalyptus Systems
• Speaker – Adrian Cole, Founder, jClouds
• Speaker – George Reese, CTO, enStratus
• Speaker – Michael Mayo, Rackspace
• Speaker – Mitch Garnaat, President, CloudRight
• Speaker – Justin Kitagawa, GoGrid
• Speaker – Sam Ramji, Vice President of Strategy, Sonoa Systems

Special Offer

You can now register for a FREE EXPO PASS or save 40% on the price of Conference Passes by using the priority code: CNJPCC01 . Simply go to the Registration Page and enter in the priority code at checkout.

More about the Cloud Connect Event

The event is from Monday, March 15 through Thursday, March 18th at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Silicon Valley, CA.

Topics for the Conference include:

Cloud Futures and Roadmaps
The Impact of Clouds on Society – Thursday, March 18 8:15 AM–9:15 AM
What IT Couldn’t Do Before – Thursday, March 18 9:30 AM–10:30 AM
Ubicomp is Here: Pervasive Connections, Cloud Computing, and Universal Interfaces – Thursday, March 18 10:45 AM–11:45 AM

Cloud Risks, Challenges, and Governance
What to Worry About: Risks, Regulations, and Unknowns – Wednesday, March 17 1:30 PM–2:30 PM
Cloud Providers: Leveraging Risk and Compliance in Today’s Cloud Environments as a Competitive Advantage – Wednesday, March 17 2:45 PM–3:45 PM
Cloud Users: Compliance and Mitigating Risks to Hedge Against Uncertainty – Wednesday, March 17 4:00 PM–5:00 PM

Dealing with Big Data
Introduction to Big Data and Storage at Scale – Thursday, March 18 8:15 AM–9:15 AM
Processing Big Data – Thursday, March 18 9:30 AM–10:30 AM
Learning from Big Data with Scaleable Analytics – Thursday, March 18 10:45 AM–11:45 AM

Developing for the Cloud
Writing Code for Many Clouds – Tuesday, March 16 1:30 PM–2:30 PM
Design Patterns for Cloud Computing Applications – Tuesday, March 16 2:45 PM–3:45 PM
Deploying to the Cloud: The Care and Feeding of a Cloud Application – Tuesday, March 16 4:00 PM–5:00 PM
Orchestration: The Next Frontier for Cloud Applications – Wednesday, March 17 8:30 AM–9:30 AM

Migration Strategies
Moving to Clouds: It’s Not All or Nothing – Tuesday, March 16 1:30 PM–2:30 PM
Practical Migration to On-Demand Clouds – Tuesday, March 16 2:45 PM–3:45 PM
Building Infrastructure as a Service – Tuesday, March 16 4:00 PM–5:00 PM

New Infrastructure
Private and Hybrid Clouds – Wednesday, March 17 1:30 PM–5:00 PM
The New Role of Networks – Thursday, March 18 8:15 AM–9:15 AM
Infrastructure Interoperability in a Cloudy World – Thursday, March 18 9:30 AM–10:30 AM
Standardizing Infrastructure Interoperability: An Introduction to IF-MAP – Thursday, March 18 10:45 AM–11:45 AM

ROI, Cost and Economics
Cloudonomics: The Surprising Economics of the Cloud – Tuesday, March 16 1:30 PM–2:30 PM
Tools and Rules: How to Calculate ROI from the Cloud – Tuesday, March 16 2:45 PM–3:45 PM
New Pricing Models: How Will They Impact ROI? – Tuesday, March 16 4:00 PM–5:00 PM
Public, Private, or Hybrid: Where’s the Value Today and Where’s It Going? – Wednesday, March 17 8:30 AM–9:30 AM

Standards, Governments and Industry
Where We Are Today: State of the Standards – Wednesday, March 17 8:30 AM–9:30 AM
The Standards Real Users Need Now – Wednesday, March 17 1:30 PM–2:30 PM
Standardization from a Provider Perspective – Wednesday, March 17 2:45 PM–3:45 PM
Where Are Standards Going? – Wednesday, March 17 4:00 PM–5:00 PM

Case Studies and Lessons Learned
Startups Built on Clouds – Wednesday, March 17 1:30 PM–2:30 PM
Enterprise Cloud Adoption – Wednesday, March 17 2:45 PM–3:45 PM
Government and Open Clouds - Wednesday, March 17 4:00 PM–5:00 PM

We hope to see you at this event!

In preparation for our new joint venture in Japan – Cloud Testing Japan (www.cloudtesting.jp), we have updated all of our agents (servers that run your tests for you) with Japanese.

Heroku Apps run on a fully curated stack with everything from the front end caching to the base libraries selected and managed. Today, we’re making available an additional curated stack, with updated libraries and Ruby VMs. You now have the choice of running on the original “Aspen” stack, or using the new “Bamboo” stack. Both are first class citizens and the choice on which to use is yours to make.

With a single simple command, you can migrate existing apps back and forth between stacks, or deploy new apps to this updated stack. Best of all, as part of the new stack, you also have a choice of Ruby VM between Ruby REE 1.8.7 and Ruby MRI 1.9.1. And yes, you can run Rails 3 too!

$ heroku stack
  aspen-mri-1.8.6
* bamboo-ree-1.8.7
  bamboo-mri-1.9.1

We’re excited about expanding the options and programs developers can deploy to Heroku. The existing Aspen stack & Ruby 1.8.6 remains fully supported; you can deploy new apps to either stack, and migrate back and forth. To get started today check out the docs.

We’re releasing the new stack as a public beta to solicit feedback from a larger audience. As a public beta, all accounts are already enabled for this feature. We look forward to hearing from you.

We've been busy adding new customers, both for our BPMS product family as well as our recently-added Webtide family of products, including Jetty and Comet D. We have a range of case studies that highlight our successes in the field, both with our customers directly as well as with our strategic deployment partners around the world. You can download these case studies (plus white papers and datasheets) by visiting the Intalio Resource Center. Some of the customers include:

City of Oulu - a collaboration between Intalio and partner Ixonos to automate processes for an E-government solution for a municipality of 120,000 residents.

Tyredating - a collaboration between Intalio and partner Altendis for this major retailer to build a reliable, orchestrated data flow between all participants of data transactions.

Zimbra - an insider view of Jetty Server scalability with Comet.

Polar Rose - using Hightide and Intalio's consulting to fuel growth and indexing capacities.

Photacular - using Jetty and Intalio's developer advice to accelerate development time.

Appistry added another impressive milestone to an already strong year by being named as a finalist in the GeoTec Innovator Awards.

Appistry has a longstanding history of supporting the GEOINT community. Our partnership with the United States Geospatial Intelligence Foundation (USGIF) has helped us contribute to the promotion of the geospatial intelligence tradecraft and building a stronger GEOINT Community across industry, academia, government, professional organizations and individual stakeholders.

Appistry customers like GeoEye, the NGA, and FedEx who rely on geographic data in their applications each day, have helped shape our company and allowed us to bring the benefits of cloud computing to the Federal sector.

About GeoTec

GeoTec Event 2010 is Canada’s premier geospatial technology conference. Now in its 24th year, the 2010 event continues the tradition of offering an exceptional program focusing on the latest trends in technology and applications.

The event takes place in mid-April in Toronto and Appistry is excited to be counted among the many worthy companies that will be attending and the few companies selected as a finalist for the Geo Tec Innovator Award.

Appistry’s Involvement

For GEOINT, Appistry has provided cloud computing long before it reached hot topic status. This includes work for the NGA, with industry solution providers AGI and GEOEYE, and systems integrators NJVC and Northrop Grumman. As a result, these organizations can deliver high quality imagery in less time and at lower cost utilizing Appistry CloudIQ platform.

We only hope to sustain this incredible momentum through 2010 and beyond and to spread the benefits of cloud computing in the enterprise community.

Vote for Appistry

To vote for Appistry and learn more about the GeoTec Innovators Award, visit the website here.

Just a quick note to let everyone know about the latest ECP 3.1 release. Among the various improvements is the addition of sparse disk support. In a nutshell sparse disk support allows you to over-commit your storage environment offering more storage than you actually have available. The advantage of sparse files is that storage is only allocated when actually needed: disk space is saved, and large files can be created even if there is insufficient free space on the file system. For example you can give a customer a 2tb storage quota, but let's say your customer only uses 3mb of actual data, than only 3mb of files are written to the disk. This means you can offer (and potentially charge for) storage you don't physically have available. It also means that sparse root images can be provisioned significantly faster, because, well you probably already guested it, less physical storage is required even for VM's that appear to have larger boot/root volumes. Yet another way we help cloud service providers make money.

Here is the release overview.

Enomaly is proud to announce the latest release of ECP Service Provider Edition. This version brings the following improvements and changes:

• VMCreator (CLI and GUI) has been updated to allow selection of Sparse or Raw disk images. This allows a choice between higher performance Raw images vs. smaller on-disk and faster provision time Sparse images.
• Increased performance and stability of disk I/O back end.
• Reduced timeouts on SSL front end.
• Many improvements to REST API calls.
• Security enhancement to GUI VMCreator. ISO Images will now need to be uploaded to server, before provisioning.
• Additional real/virtual disk usage tracking in Admin UI graphs to accommodate sparse images.
• Various security improvements to ECP application repo and core.
  
• Billing delegates can now be created to allow non-admin users to access metering information.

If you're an exisiting ECP customer, just run the typical YUM update.

Announcing The Enomaly Cloud Service Provider Edition | Twitter Me | Get Linkedin | Contact Reuven | Disclosure Policy

We are entering the last month of the first quarter of 2010 and all of our training sessions are almost sold out. If you wish to train your team in March, please register immediately for our training in Kuala Lumpur on March 22nd.

After the successful opening of our training center in Bangkok in February, we have decided to extend our footprint in Asia by conducting our first training in Hong Kong on April 19th and first training in Jakarta on June 14th.

Here is the complete schedule for our training classes in Asia Pacific for Q2 2010:

• April 19th-22nd: Hong Kong
• April 26th-29th: Singapore
• May 24th-27th: Brisbane
• June 14th-17th: Jakarta
• June 28th-July1st: Singapore

If you are still not sure about joining one of our training sessions, make sure to register to one of the following webinars:

• April 9th, 2-3pm GMT+8
• May 7th, 2-3pm GMT+8
• June 11th, 2-3pm GMT+8

Late last week I met Jim Kaskade of SIOS at a Seattle-area Starbucks for a meeting and a product demo. With the very cool (and appropriate) title "Chief of Cloud", Jim was the right person to demonstrate his company's new cloud-powered high availability and disaster recovery solution.

Jim's Mac laptop was running Centos. He used Xen and Red Hat's Virtual Machine Manager to host a couple of virtual machines representing the web, application, and database tiers of a SugarCRM installation. Each of the guest operating systems was running a copy of the new SIOS CloudStation product. Each copy of CloudStation was configured (using a web-based GUI) to replicate the state of the virtual machine to an Amazon EC2 instance running in a user-selected Region.

Once everything was up and running, Jim showed me how he could selectively kill the local virtual machines while keeping the application running. The demo was designed to feature a very short RPO (Recovery Point Objective) so that changes made locally just seconds before the database was killed were available from the cloud-based virtual mirror. Jim walked me through a number of different failure and recovery scenarios.

It was quite impressive and makes a great demo of the cloud-based DR (Disaster Recovery) and HA (High Availability) that I've been telling my audiences about for the last couple of years. Once configured, CloudStation can fail over from local processing to the cloud, from one cloud region to another, or even from one cloud provider to another. It can also be used as a migration tool, or what is sometimes calls P2V (Physical to Virtual) or P2C (Physical to Cloud).

Read more in the Solution Brief (PDF) or sign up for the March 24th webinar.

-- Jeff;

Last week we introduced a new series of blog posts in which we look back on our Appistry Predicts 2010 webinar and pull some of our most insightful conversations to share with our readers. For the 2nd installment of this series we will dive into the conversation of 2010 growing pains, a specific challenge that many cloud professionals expect to experience in the coming year and the how these challenges will pave a new road for cloud computing.

Cloud Growing Pains in 2010

Sam: I think that’s a great segue to the next prediction, which is yours, Bob. There’s certainly a lot of great things going on here, but, I get the sense you don’t think it’s going to be 100-percent rosy.

Bob: Well, I don’t think it can. I think there’s kind of three inevitabilities that we’ll see this year in a more apparent way. First, of course, is that the adoption is continuing and spreading out. And that’s not such an enormous insight, but I think it’s happening at a couple levels, right?

One is, with the enterprise adoptions we’ve been talking about, that, we’re seeing real guys, and that’s going to up the ante for the part that we’re talking about here, where we’re seeing lots of customers starting to actually put this into day to day practice, one way or another. And of course, at the personal lives, everybody’s impacted. But what does that mean? It means that when things fail which, itself, is inevitable it’s my second of the inevitabilities, it really hurts.

Now, that’s exacerbated by the fact that with the interest, with the hype, and just culturally, people who watch are a lot more inclined to be critics, right? So when there’s a failure, then everybody just goes crazy and just jumps up and down and almost celebrates it. Which, it’s unfortunate, but it isn’t necessarily all that meaningful, in a way.

Beyond the press, beyond the discussion, the pain and the failures will occur. The fact that everybody talks about it, so what? So there’s going to be things like the botnet, the much publicized. I mean, there’s going to be this constant litany of things. I mean, at one point, I had an interest, and probably took it up again every once in a while, of a blog post just highlighting some of the more crucial mistakes. Not to celebrate them, but to lead to, I think, the third inevitability, which is the adaptation to get better at it.

And it’s interesting because, when I think back to let’s pick kind of two different examples real quickly here the series of Twitter failures early on, and in fact they became so chronic that we were just kidding about it earlier, how these features come and go. And they’re better at it now, but the point is a lot of that was architectural. It wasn’t so much cloud; it was the application. And so that was a point where criticism really was helpful because people could look at it, adapt, and be better at it.

The underlying ones, where somebody breaks in through security or, like in the case of the Amazon EC2 outages last week, where there was a power failure in a data center and people who had instances only there were gone, well, I mean, that’s going to happen for the next 100 years. If your architecture doesn’t adapt, if you’re susceptible to failure in one place, well, that’s just the way it goes.

So I think those are the three things that we can see. The adoption continues hard. But when things fail, if we just ignore all the commotion and look at what’s underneath it, we can do better. And that will happen this year.

Sam: So, Bob, you’ve been a very strong proponent of taking different approaches at the software layer and not counting on the infrastructure existing. Do you think that cloud supports those ideas? Do you think that that catches on more? What’s the interplay between these two ideas?

Bob: That’s a great point. I think that for a lot of folks, when they first think about cloud, they think that anything out there, that’s fine, we don’t have to worry about it. But the reality is that, as you mentioned, if we don’t assume failure, then we will be vulnerable to things like the EC2 outage last week.
But the applications use that one as a specific example the applications that assume that things would break at the infrastructure layer, and it had a strong platform, or perhaps handcrafted it into their application to survive that in an elegant, reliable way, well, I mean, they’re the ones that are going to be, I think, the mainstream of cloud computing. If not this year, it’s certainly possible this year, but I think expectations will be set between this year, next year, and maybe the year after that, where it’s not OK to fail anymore.

We still, in many ways, give cloud apps a pass. It might be historical because of the early roots in search; if search didn’t work, you tried it again. But there’s no reason to allow that pass anymore. Infrastructure will fail, cloud or internal. Just deal with it at the platform, the application level.

Michael: Yeah, if I could piggyback on that. It is still early in understanding, from the technical point of view, the cloud architectures and how we as application developers need to put things together.

The accomplishments over the last few years are extreme. We have much to be excited about. But again, we’re learning. The building blocks are coming together. We’re running through the whole crucible of ideas of what fits and what doesn’t. We may stumble and trip from time to time, but each time, we come back better and better.

Twitter still has its problems, but it’s miles ahead of where it was originally. We see things happening, EC2 and Amazon Responds. Our customers, we see them learning about building cloud applications, and it doesn’t take them long to get those early concepts and build upon them. So I think…

Bob: Hey, you know, Michael, that reminds me of one of my favorite books, “To Err Is Human: The Role of Failure in Engineering Design.” It’s about that adaptation process. I think this year, that kicks in overtime in cloud world.

Michael: Yeah, it’s going to happen. We hear the stories, but it improves. It gets better, and by the end of 2010, we should see just absolutely stellar applications running with all of the cloud attributes that we’re looking for, the reliability, the scalability. You’re not going to know what really is running behind there with all of the pieces that we, as application developers, designers and such, are putting together for you.

Sam: So, quick, for anyone who wants to take it one of our audience members here asks if 2010 is going to be the trough of disillusionment in the Gartner Hype Cycle.

Michael: I just saw the Gartner Hype Cycle the other day. It caught cloud computing right at that top point, right before the trough.

Sam: Right before the trough.

Michael: I think, to a degree, that’s…

Bob: I don’t know. There’ll be people that get disillusioned, but those are people who don’t actually understand how to fix it, I guess. If you’re living off the fluff of the hype, and not seeing the substance of reality, then I think you fall in the trough. I think it’s also easy just to blow past it and move on.

Kevin: I think 2011 will be the…

[laughter]

Michael: Again, people might over-hype things too much, but there is so much value in this effort.

—

Register for a free download of the full webinar here. After registering you will be able to watch the full event online, view the slides, download the audio, or even grab an iPhone-compatible version for your next flight.

Stay tuned for our next installment, “The Role of the Platform Layer”. See you then!

Today art of defence and GoGrid announced the availability of the Industry’s first Distributed Web Application Firewall running within the GoGrid cloud. This is a cloud-based SaaS (Software as a Service) solution called hyperguard™ and can be easily and quickly deployed using a GoGrid Partner Server Image (GSI). By using a GoGrid Server Image running art of defence’s hyperguard SaaS, customers can be assured that they are receiving robust application-level protection beyond simply the network layer within their cloud environment.

By deploying the hyperguard-enabled GoGrid Server Image, GoGrid users simply have to configure their applications and their respective protection levels through hyperguard’s web-base GUI which allows for comprehensive attack detection and protection at the Web Application layer. hyperguard SaaS basic (which is currently available on GoGrid for $39/mo/server plus associated GoGrid RAM/Bandwidth costs) offers web application security monitoring, detection-only and protection modes.

Hyperguard SaaS Standard dWAF provides the following key capabilities:

• Security monitoring at the application layer of attacks like SQL-injection, cross site scripting and OWASP Top10 for all applications delivered on the hyperguard web server GSI
• Comprehensive baseline protection against known attacks at the application layer – only if rule sets are run in protection mode
• Automated updates of baseline protection rule sets by art of defence – with testing capability for these new rule sets via detect-only mode

The GoGrid Server Image is available now through GoGrid:

More information about art of defence within the GoGrid Exchange is available here.

The full press release is available online as well as below:

art of defence Expands Availability of Industry’s First Distributed WAF (dWAF) as a SaaS With GoGrid Partnership Company Focused on Making Real Web Application Security Available for All Cloud Computing Needs

SAN FRANCISCO, CA–(Marketwire – March 2, 2010) – Today, art of defence, the leading distributed web application firewall (dWAF) provider, announced the industry’s first cloud-based SaaS solution, hyperguard™ SaaS, is now available through the GoGrid Cloud. GoGrid customers can access hyperguard SaaS by simply deploying a GoGrid Partner Server Image (GSI) with hyperguard SaaS installed.

This announcement marks another step closer to reaching art of defence’s goal of providing universally accessible web application security to companies using cloud computing. By integrating a dWAF right into a virtual image and hosted as a SaaS, customers overcome the false sense of security created by traditional network perimeter security strategies which fail at the application level.

The first of several service levels to be rolled out, hyperguard SaaS Standard, offers users web application security monitoring, detection-only and protection modes. hyperguard’s SaaS delivery model allows customers the freedom to pay on a use-case basis and avoid having to invest in owning and maintaining a solution themselves. For a limited time, art of defence and GoGrid will offer a $100 GoGrid credit to test the service. Full details for the solution and the promotion can be found http://gogrid.artofdefence.com.

Key hyperguard SaaS Standard Facts

• Web application security monitoring enables customers to understand the risk and exposure of their cloud applications to known attacks at the application layer without hyperguard SaaS Standard interfering with web traffic.
• ‘Detection only mode’ allows rule-sets to be tested but not enforced, alongside with rule-sets in ‘protection mode’ that enforce already proven security policies.
• hyperguard SaaS Standard is ideally suited for GoGrid customers who want application-level protection beyond the network layer for their cloud offerings.
• For companies relying on the GoGrid Cloud for application overflow resources, hyperguard SaaS Standard defends users’ custom applications on the cloud.

Resources

• art of defence will be exhibiting at the RSA Conference, taking place March 1-5 in San Francisco, California
• For details and a free trial of hyperguard’s SaaS offerings, visit http://gogrid.artofdefence.com
• More information about hyperguard for the Cloud, read our white paper at http://www.artofdefence.com/dokumente/Cloud_AppSec_Whitepaper.pdf
• Read art of defence’s blog http://artofdefence.wordpress.com/
• Follow art of defence on Twitter at http://twitter.com/hyperguard
• GoGrid Exchange, visit http://exchange.gogrid.com

Supporting Quotes

• “Use of cloud computing is on the rise as companies shift from testing services to beginning to rely on them for critical business applications and we’re excited to work with GoGrid who is at the forefront of providing these services,” said Georg Hess, founder and CEO, art of defence. “As the migration continues, web application security gets put under the microscope and traditional WAFs just don’t hold up to the rigors of fully virtualized environments. When we launched the world’s first distributed WAF, we targeted these challenges specifically and the uptake we’ve experienced in this approach shows we made the right decision.”

Tags
GoGrid, cloud, art of defence, hyperguard, WAF, web application, security

About art of defence
Founded in 2005, art of defence established its San Francisco-based North American headquarters in 2009. Focused exclusively on providing comprehensive web application security technology on any scale, art of defence’s distributed web application firewall (dWAF) technology, hyperguard™, is the industry’s first WAF SaaS offering. Available in many forms, hyperguard is the most flexible solution on the market today. Customers have access to the solution as a software plug-in, virtual appliance, hardware appliance or as a standalone software solution.

The company serves the financial services, eCommerce, technology, telecommunication and public sector markets exclusively through OEM/technology and reseller channel partners. art of defence partners with leading technology providers like GoGrid, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, Zeus, GeNUA, and Armorize. Regensburg, Germany, remains the global headquarters for the European and Asian markets in addition to North America.

For more information about art of defence, visit: www.artofdefence.com/en.

About GoGrid
GoGrid is the Global LEADER in Hybrid Cloud Infrastructure that delivers true “Control in the Cloud™.” GoGrid enables sysadmins, developers, IT professionals and SaaS vendors to create, deploy, and control free f5 load balanced cloud & dedicated servers and complex hosted virtual server networks with full root access/administrative server control which includes personal server images (known as MyGSIs). GoGrid server instances maintain industry standard specifications with no requirement to learn and adapt to proprietary standards. Deploying GoGrid infrastructure takes minutes via a unique, award winning web control panel or GoGrid’s API. GoGrid delivers portal controlled servers for Windows Server 2003/2008, SQL Server, and ASP.NET, as well as multiple Linux server operating systems like RHEL and CentOS. GoGrid gives users the control of a familiar datacenter environment with the flexibility and immediate scalability of the cloud, a “cloudcenter.”

To learn more, visit www.gogrid.com.

To view other GoGrid Partners, we recommend that you visit the GoGrid Exchange for a variety of Software & Application, Development & Test, Disaster Recovery & Backup, Cloud Management, and Security, Monitoring & Reporting solutions now available within the GoGrid Cloud.

We are excited to announce a new event for GoGrid and WebsiteSpark which will be taking place on Tuesday, March 30 from 10am to 6pm Pacific Time in the San Francisco Bay Area. For those of you who are new to WebsiteSpark, it is a powerful program designed to help Web Designers and Developers drive new business opportunities through connections and customers around the world. I posted some detailed information about the WebsiteSpark program and how GoGrid can be your preferred hosting partner in this program.

In order to help educate you on this outstanding business opportunity that can save your startup or small business literally thousands of dollars in licensing & hosting costs, Microsoft and GoGrid have teamed up with an event called “WIN with GoGrid & Microsoft WebsiteSpark” that will be taking place on the Microsoft Silicon Valley Campus. Wondering if you should attend? Please take a look at the bullet points below to help determine if this is a good event for you:

Are you a Web Professional…

• Interested in free software and support to grow your web development business?
• Who needs help getting your customers’ websites to the top of the search rankings?
• Looking for tips and tricks to design and develop next generation web experiences?
• Looking to make your web development business more profitable?
• Looking to streamline the way you design, build and deploy websites?
• Looking to mix the best of Open Source with the best of Microsoft in your customer’s websites?
• Questions on how to deploy Microsoft infrastructure in the Cloud?
• Learn about Windows Azure Application Lifecycle Management on GoGrid!

But wait! There’s more! All attendees of this event are entered into a drawing to win one of the following:

• HP Netbook with Windows 7
• Xbox 360 Elite
• ZuneHD
• 8GB Zune

More About GoGrid & WebsiteSpark

By selecting GoGrid as your Hosting Partner, you can get nominated for the WebsiteSpark program, and also get the most flexible and easy to use cloud hosting infrastructure to run your client web sites and applications on. Get servers in just minutes, with no commitment and easy self-service through GoGrid’s web portal or our API, plus you can add physical dedicated servers on the same network for higher SQL Server performance from a hybrid architecture.

GoGrid has some exclusive offers specific to WebsiteSpark customers. For more info, please visit the WebsiteSpark page on GoGrid.

How to Register for the Event

First, this is a FREE event with food and beverages included. The registration page is located here. And you can sign up via the embedded form below:

We will be publishing a schedule & agenda for this meeting in the coming week so be sure to check back shortly. Space is limited so we encourage you to sign up early!

I recently did a very long podcast and interview with Chip Ramsey, CEO of Intellum, on cloud computing.  Intellum is an up and comer in the e-learning space and are doing a new series of interviews with thought leaders in different spaces.  They started with Karl Kapp on e-learning and I’m honored that they tapped me to discuss cloud computing.

There is a lot of great cloud information in here that I don’t get a chance to talk about in venues where time is short like panels or blog entries.  Definitely recommended listening, but it’s a long interview so it might be easier to consume in small chunks.  To make this a bit easier for you, I’ve chopped it into five smaller and more consumable MP3s (below) OR go directly to the Intellum page to listen.

• Part 1. Introduction (6:35)
• Part 2. Cloud Computing Defined (13:11)
• Part 3. Leveraging the Cloud for Startups, SMBs, and Enterprise (14:54)
• Part 4. Fears and Concerns (13:09)
• Part 5. Future of Cloud in 2010 and Beyond (7:13)

During this interview series I also refer to four layers in cloud.  Most folks like to talk about infrastructure (Infrastructure-as-a-Service), platforms (Platform-as-a-Service), and applications (Software-as-a-Service).  There is a fourth layer that rides on top that I haven’t had a chance to blog on yet, but Part 2 goes into some detail.  To make it a little more clear what I mean, see the diagram below.

Today Skytap announced breakthrough network automation capabilities that simplify and accelerate the creation, migration and deployment of multi-tier enterprise applications in the cloud. These features empower IT organizations to create virtual data centers with advanced network topologies and enable functional users to deploy them with an easy-to-use, self-service interface. New capabilities include: Support for advanced, multi-tier [...]

A couple of weeks ago I mentioned that Bob and Eric had reached a major milestone for Executive’s Guide to Cloud Computing, having turned in their final edits. Well we just learned that the book’s cover is off to the printer, and well, I’ll take pretty much any opportunity to congratulate them on this herculean effort.

They’ve also received some great back-cover accolades from a nice cross-section of clouderati and industry, which I’ve included below. (You can also click on the images to enlarge.)

Congrats again, guys!

“A very timely and invaluable resource for CIOs, CTOs, and enterprise architects . . . extremely relevant information that will serve readers well now and far into the future.”
—Bob Flores, President and CEO Applicology Inc.; former CTO, Central Intelligence Agency

“The authors have done a great job in explaining the cloud concepts. They give historical and technical background to show that cloud computing is really an evolution of numerous technologies and business strategies. It is the combination of these that enables cloud and these new business strategies to happen. This makes the fuzziness of the concept come into focus. The ‘technical’ chapters show the CIO and technical architect a model for building your own strategy within the business and a path from concept to deploy- ment with governance and business models thrown in. Darn, I keep hoping for ‘the answer.’ Now my questions can dig into the real value for our enterprise and a strategy for moving forward. Great book!”
—Dave Ploch, CIO, Novus International

“‘Executive’s Guide’ is not a code-phrase for an introductory text, but a comprehensive guide for the CIO, IT decision-maker, or project leader. The authors, both entrepreneurs and pioneers in the field, speak from substantial real-world project experience. They introduce the topic and related technologies, highlight cloud drivers and strategy, address relationships to existing initiatives such as Service-Oriented Architectures, detail project phases in the implementation of and evolution to cloud-based enterprise architectures, and offer many reasoned insights along the way.”
—Joe Weinman, Strategy and Business Development, AT&T Business Solutions

“Executive’s Guide to Cloud Computing is a crystal ball into the future of business.Not a technical treatise but an insightful explanation of how cloud computing can quickly deliver real business value. This book is an instruction manual on how to win business in this ‘born on the Web’ world.”
—Kevin L. Jackson, Engineering Fellow, NJVC, and author of Cloud Musings (kevinljackson.blogspot.com)

“There’s cloud computing for dummies and cloud computing for rocket scientists. This book is for the rest of us. Great book!”
—John Willis, VP of Services Opscode, Inc. JohnMWillis.com, co-host Redmonk’s IT Management Guys podcast

On Wednesday February 24, 2010, GoGrid hosted a webinar for new and existing GoGrid users designed to discuss the recent February 2010 Feature updates to GoGrid. There is a blog post that details all of the new features included in the release as well as a screencast which walks through these features and important changes. The webinar covered the following information:

• What is our view of Cloud Computing
• What is GoGrid
• New feature: GoGrid Dedicated Servers
• What is Hybrid Infrastructure
• A GoGrid Portal Demo
• Deploying a GoGrid Dedicated Server
• The new GoGrid List View
• Walk-through of other Interface Enhancements & Links
• Question & Answer Session

The entire Webinar is below and is broken into two parts:

• Part One – Overview presentation, discussion of Cloud & GoGrid, demonstration of the GoGrid Portal & GoGrid Dedicated Server Deployments (30 minutes in length)
• Part Two – Question & Answer session from the audience and Additional Information (19 minutes in length)

Also included later on in this post is the stand-alone presentation (without audio, demo walk-through or question and answers).

GoGrid Feature Webinar – Part 1

GoGrid Webinar – February 2010 Product Update (PART 1) from GoGrid on Vimeo.

This is a webinar produced by GoGrid which walks through recent updates to GoGrid. The release was in February 2010 and the webinar covers:
- What is cloud computing
- What is GoGrid Hybrid Infrastructure Hosting
- New GoGrid Dedicated Servers
- New GoGrid List View
- Other changes
***This is Part 1 of a two part webinar***

GoGrid Feature Webinar – Part 2

GoGrid Webinar – February 2010 Product Update (PART 2) from GoGrid on Vimeo.

This is a webinar produced by GoGrid which walks through recent updates to GoGrid. The release was in February 2010 and the webinar covers:
- What is cloud computing
- What is GoGrid Hybrid Infrastructure Hosting
- New GoGrid Dedicated Servers
- New GoGrid List View
- Other changes
***This is Part 2 of a two part webinar***

Stand-Alone Presentation from Webinar

The following is the presentation that was used in the Webinar above.

GoGrid February 2010 Webinar on New Features

View more presentations from GoGrid Cloud Hosting.

If you have further questions about the GoGrid February 2010 Feature Update or about GoGrid in general, I recommend that you contact a GoGrid Sales Representative who can help you get started with GoGrid.

We’re happy to announce our latest customer: Market Metrix. They are a SaaS provider of survey, customer satisfaction and loyalty services, focused exclusively on the hotel and hospitality industry, serving many of the big hotel chains around the world. Market Metrix is the trusted expert in customer sat and loyalty for many hotel brands, and have a tremendous amount of valuable data they deliver to their clients.

Here’s a quick example of the power GoodData brings to Market Metrix and their customers. When a hotel sees a low customer satisfaction score, they want to dig in and find out why. Is it a bad room? A bad breakfast? A bad employee? Is it a trend? Are women unhappy with certain services? Do ‘gold’ loyalty card members have higher or lower satisfaction? Or is it a bigger or more systemic issue.

In the example below – in just a few clicks – this hotel figured out that the underlying issue was directly tied to reservation source. People booking through Amadeus were unhappy. This is real actionable information.

For the first time, hotel marketers and property owners have access to this business data, and can use GoodData to slice and dice their customer sat data themselves quickly. They don’t need analytics experts on staff, or to rely on external consultants to sift through the numbers.

Hotels get a deeper sense of customer sat and loyalty, and Market Metrix gets customers that interact with their data on a daily basis.

Click on the image below to see a bigger version

Customer Satisfaction Analytics in GoodData

You can hear more about Market Metrix and how they are using GoodData on an upcoming webinar on March 25, 2010 at 10am PST.

GoodData announced its first ISV customer, Market Metrix, a leading provider of software-as-a-service based customer satisfaction and loyalty data to more than 100 enterprises across lodging, car rental, airlines and allied fields. Market Metrix has licensed GoodData to give its hospitality clients deeper insights into the customer data that drives their businesses. GoodData provides the ability to build custom dashboards and reports, via an easy-to-use interface directly within Market Metrix’s existing customer portal.

“Our hospitality customers have an insatiable desire to better understand data around customer satisfaction and loyalty,” said Robert Honeycutt, CEO of Market Metrix. “GoodData lets us give them a powerful tool to dig deeper, understand trends and capture more of the story behind the metrics.”

With GoodData’s customer analytics solutions, software-as-a-service (SaaS) providers like Market Metrix can easily and affordably enhance their existing services with on-demand dashboards, reporting and analytics. SaaS providers can create highly repeatable analytics applications that provide a low-friction way to address increasing customer requirements for reporting and analytics.

“The economics of BI are broken for SaaS providers: too complex to build, too expensive to buy,” said Roman Stanek, GoodData founder and CEO. “GoodData brings the economic advantages of the cloud to SaaS providers, letting them embed powerful analytics at a fraction of the cost.”

Join Keith Jaeger, Vice President of Product Development at Market Metrix on a webinar on March 25, 2010 at 10am PST as he discusses the challenges of SaaS analytics and the opportunity for SaaS providers to work with GoodData. You can register at https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/816928338.

About GoodData
GoodData is the first business intelligence company born in the cloud. Our Cloud BI Platform encourages companies to take an agile approach to customer analytics by making it easy to access and analyze the data that defines customer relationships across marketing, selling and servicing. It may sound complex, but unlike a lot of business intelligence, Good Data is free to start, simple to use, and costs a lot less than you think. GoodData is headquartered in San Francisco and located in the cloud at www.gooddata.com.

About Market Metrix
Market Metrix has been helping leading hospitality companies turn feedback into performance since 1996. Combining award–winning research with powerful products, Market Metrix gives clients essential information, guidance and tools to make informed business decisions. Software–as–a–Service (SaaS) based products help clients save money, improve guest and employee loyalty and gain control over the new social media wave.