Posts Tagged ‘Microsoft’
Windows 8 has made a real splash and given a birth to a number of talks among the people who are close to IT. Gossips and some information about its possible development have already appeared in April 2009. On January, 6th at CES 2011 the first test Windows 8 release has been demonstrated. “I should admit that the new OS is something mind-blowing in the field of modern IT”, – said Director of Consumer Affairs EMEA John Mangelaars. It can distinguish users’ voices and faces with the help of web camera. Also, it has become more virtual and deeper integrated with mobile OS version, which supports gesture recognition.
At the same time there was one demonstration aspect which has seriously perturbed the developers all over the world. The point is that in the new Windows version, in Metro UI, any of the modern user programs cannot be used. The reason is cored in the new view that presupposes its work on the basis of Immersive applications. Let’s add here developers’ striving for making the OS applicable for multitouch screens, and in the end we get a new program platform, where only new API applications created specially for Windows 8 will work. Certainly, the applications will function in the old interface, but different program versions will have to be written for Metro UI.
All the time and efforts developers have contributed to adapting existing software to the modern program platform will be practically crossed out. Decades have been spent on learning to work with such technologies as COM, Win32, MFC, ATL, Visual Basic 6, WinForms, .NET, Silverlight, WPF. Not one of them can fully replace the other one.
Now the main program platform for the new OS will be HTML5 together with JavaScript.
Also, developers will have to give up on the modern visual development of integrated IDE Visual Studio that is wildly popular at the moment.
At the same time all these changes can turn out to be both: minuses and pluses – to develop for the new OS will become much easier.
And what do you think about all these innovations? Especially I am eager to know your opinion about JS and HTML5.
Thank you,
Nadya Klim
Altabel Group – Professional Software Development
- In: Cloud
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It seems most companies understand opportunities that cloud computing solutions and services open up for them, especially for SMBs. So now the question sounds like: how to choose a good provider and the right one for your company and to what extend cloud computing services should be used. The complexities are numerous – issues such as security management, attack response and recovery, system availability and performance, the vendor’s financial stability and its ability to comply with the law, all need to be considered. There may be a number of advice and tips formulated with this regards (some are taken from CIO article):
1) Choose trusted providers. Today it exists a number of cloud tech companies to choose from and new ones go live each month. Despite this for cloud services it’s better to stick with trusted and solid companies. To name a few: Microsoft, Google, Intuit, Dropbox, Apple, Amazon, Salesforce. These are companies with deep pockets and dealing with security, and your data is an important part of their business.
2) Distribute between free and paid accounts. For storing financial or alike information paid accounts are preferable. For less critical data and applications free accounts of big trusted cloud service providers may work well. For instance, Google can afford to offer decent free accounts because their business is well-established and their free services just act as bait aimed at attracting new users and then gently pushing them towards paid services and premium accounts.
3) Select the right apps and data for the public cloud. Some businesses, mainly start-up companies, begin using the public cloud for all applications, including mission-critical apps and their data. However, public clouds are neither for every organization nor for every application: what can be subject to the default security provided by most cloud service providers are websites, application development, testing, online product catalogs and product documentation.
4) Evaluate and add security if it makes sense. CSPs can provide significantly different levels of public cloud security. The ISO/IEC 27000 series of standards provides guidelines for evaluating this. If necessary security measures that are used in an organization’s internal private cloud may need to be extended to their public cloud instances, and some cloud products like CloudSpan allow doing this.
5) Get use of the third-party auditing services. When comes to security compliance, organizations need not simply take the CSP’s word for it. Third-party auditing services can be used to audit and then compare to the promised ones.
6) Add authentication layers. Most CSPs provide good authentication services for public cloud instances. Some products like Halo NetSec can help add an additional layer of authentication. Before doing this you need to weigh the benefits of better public cloud security against the costs of increased network latency, possible performance degradation and additional points of failure.
7) Weigh additional security effect on integration. Adding on top of default security by CSP may affect overall application performance and identity and access management. It’s especially important to consider if you work with mission-critical application that need to integrate with other business applications.
8) Make security guarantees from SLA clear for yourself. Public cloud security guarantees with CSPs should be clearly stipulated as service level agreements in the contract, so make sure that transparent monitoring and reporting functions are available to you as a customer as well as security processes, procedures and practices are transparent and verifiable so that you may rely on this information.
9) Streamline logging and monitoring. Comparing one CSP’s logging and monitoring practices with another before you sign a SLA may reveal subtle differences in the security that’s provided so it’s another key to ensuring public cloud security.
10) Add encryption. You may want to employ your own encryption instead of or in addition to the ones provided by the CSP. A number of installable products or SaaS vendors can do this type of encryption on the fly. (VPN-enabled cloud instances fall under this category of augmented public cloud security.) When this happens, only the customer and the third party know the key; the CSP does not.
11) Spread outages risk with multiple even redundant CSPs. Despite cloud provisioning tools these days come already integrated with leading CSPs, it’s possible to spin up additional instances of servers with multiple CSPs automatically on demand: they are turned on if average CPU utilization reaches a certain threshold and turned off once utilization drops. Also when spinning up additional instances, it may make sense to use different CSPs in a round-robin fashion.
Thus, as you may see, experience of using cloud services may be adjusted and improved through following some advice. What’s crucial is finding a balance between cloud security and performance. Naturally there’s always a tradeoff when adding layers of security may be at the expense of application running slower and potentially adding points of failure. Figuring out the right balance between security and performance, though being difficult, is a must-have to run a strong business today.
Kind regards,
Helen Boyarchuk – Business Development Manager (LI page)
Helen.Boyarchuk@altabel.com | Skype ID: helen_boyarchuk
Altabel Group – Professional Software Development
- In: Cloud
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When you say “cloud” somebody’s imagination draws a sky with dozens of funny-shaped airy clouds, IT folks’ mind will recall companies’ names like Microsoft, Google, Dropbox, Amazon. Indeed, cloud computing has contributed to the business world tremendously, still there is much skepticism around such kind of services, reliability and security of remote clouds. Naturally when you store all your data in the cloud you “shift” control over it and rely on a cloud provider – here your fears of data possibly to be lost, damaged, leaked or hacked, services and sites to be kicked offline, come on to the stage. Legally according to the agreement between you and provider the service provider would be responsible should any of the aforementioned occur, but at the end of the day the possible losses endured by the business resorting to the cloud are greater than the cloud service provider’s since such actions could result in the complete destruction of the business. So a decision of moving to the cloud is a serious one.
Interesting that more than a third (36%) named security a main issue holding back uptake for them. This concern is contradictory due to a number of factors:
Firstly, the whole point of cloud computing is that the applications and data being used are sitting on multiple servers at once in data centers located around the world. Thus attacking one part of the infrastructure becomes virtually a waste of time as redundancy will always ensure access to this data. It means attacking data or performance of a targeted company becomes almost “mission impossible”.
Secondly, it makes sense to view security matter from the perspective of the capabilities of the cloud computing systems versus ones of internal software systems. How high are chances that a large cloud provider won’t have far more resources to direct at security than the average enterprise? The infrastructure of cloud computing systems is comprised of machinery and technology on the cutting edge of technological advancements in addition to the far-advanced skills and knowledge of their workers – doubtful that this is accessible to an average business or computer user. Therefore, the business has a greater chance of loss handling the company data and software internally. As more and more organizations make the move into the cloud, it’s certain that safety and security measures only increase.
Experts say a more reasonable concern relates to resilience and outages, not data breach. Outages of Amazon or Microsoft are regularly reported. They can be caused by freak weather like for instance happened to Amazon Web Services resulting in such popular services as Instagram and Netflix being pushed offline for a number of hours. Instagram’s outage hit the headlines due to a short period of downtime, but what if smaller companies using cloud providers face their sites knocked offline – how high up their cloud provider’s list of priorities will it be to get it fixed? Well, in this case for web sites it’s of vital importance to be hosted with multiple cloud providers since this makes sites virtually almost unassailable experiencing close to zero downtime.
Worries about legal compliance are probably more justifiable. Under the Data Protection Act, organisations have to agree that personal data will not be moved outside a particular group of named European countries, but a cloud provider may be storing data in multiple jurisdictions. This problem isn’t insurmountable (personal data can be anonymised, for example), but it does make the decision to move to the cloud a more complex one.
To conclude, cloud computing service providers treat security, availability, privacy and legal compliance issues very seriously since this is the essence of their very business. СSPs mostly have better machinery, technology and skills and invest more in their further advancement than an average enterprise could afford itself. Loss or damage of any data by a cloud services provider or long downtime does not only implicate a possible demise or huge direct and indirect losses of the business to which the service was provided, but can be partially or completely fatal for the cloud computing service business and its reputation. Cloud services providers are legally implied with massive liability which is very incentive for them to preserve a high quality of their services and treat issues with due diligence.
Or don’t you agree? 
Kind regards,
Helen Boyarchuk – Business Development Manager (LI page)
Helen.Boyarchuk@altabel.com | Skype ID: helen_boyarchuk
Altabel Group – Professional Software Development
- In: Cloud
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Competition exists everywhere whether it is in it politics or business. And Cloud industry is no an exception. Cloud computing has revolutionized the technology industry and since it generates good revenue all cloud service providers are in a race to take the lead. Cloud is a set of technologies and market structures that invite competition, as a result the market is hyper competitive in ways that are new and innovative.
Below you may find main competitors and key players in the Cloud industry:
#1 Amazon
Amazon has emerged as the champion in the cloud computing world. This company is undoubtedly no.1 provider of cloud infrastructure with its Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) which tops the list of cloud platforms for application development and deployment. The reason why the company has made it big is because of the fact that they provide attractive services to the business groups and also because of their customer friendly approach.
Amazon is also the most preferred company for cloud management because of its S3 Simple Storage Service offering. The main attractive feature of this company is that the customers do not need to purchase any hardware for their business, instead they can use Amazon’s cloud infrastructure for a small rent and their data storage.
#2 Microsoft
Microsoft is gearing up in the cloud business with its Windows Azure Platform. Microsoft cloud platform has good position already in the cloud market giving the top players a run for their money. The Windows Azure cloud service gives developers the option to host, develop and run web applications. Azure provides complete set of services including computing environments, scalable storage, database functionality and a content delivery network.
#3 Google
Google is one of the major player in the Internet technology and with its Google App Engine platform as a service company’ve had a chance to be in cloud service providers. Google is one among a few companies that has the potential to invest in core computing firepower to give a tough competition to Amazon web Services. Google’s cloud service is aimed at developing and hosting web applications using Google’s infrastructure and data centers and additional advantage is that the engine supports several languages including Java, Ruby and Python. The main selling point of the company is their scalable service that allows developers to pay for what they use without startup costs or recurring fees.
#4 Salesforce
Salesforce.com has steadily been transitioning from the best breed sales force automation (SFA) software as a service (SaaS) provider to an application development platform as a service (PaaS) company. Salesforce is a software-as-a-service provider that specializes in distributing business applications allows developers to use the Salesforce infrastructure to develop add-on applications that integrate with the Salesforce solution. This company is well known to deliver new product features, and new capabilities, on a continuous basis.
#5 RackSpace
This company takes leading position in cloud based web hosting and encompasses managed services and pure hosting businesses. Comparing Amazon’s EC2 and Rackspace: If one intends to scale on EC2, they need to launch additional instances (which you can do with stored AMI’s). At RSC, you just have to point to a running instance and click a button to say “Make this server bigger” (or smaller if you need to scale down). A few minutes later, it’s all done. There is an option of adding additional instances, too!
These are the main players in Cloud industry, how could you predict who would become a leader in this Cloud technology race? Why do you think so? It would be great to hear from you!
Kind Regards,
Natalia Kononchuk
Business Development Manager
Altabel Group – Professional Software Development
