Stretching The Cloud LiiiiiiiiMiiiiiiiTS!

Recently, evangelizing virtualization and cloud infrastructure saw me speaking to an organization IT head who seemed to have the most insidious idea that by moving to the cloud, companies won’t ever have to worry about IT issues ever again. Various other chats reveal that people have somehow gotten into their minds that since their data or their servers or their applications are somewhere else, all their conventional technology issues are magically solved: cloud providers will back up the data, update software, deal with security issues, and so on. I hate to break it to you bud; nothing could be further from the truth.

For every layer of the cloud (Infrastructure-as-a-Service, Platform-as-a-Service or Software-as-a-Service), the limits of the responsibility of the provider are clearly defined. In the case of infrastructure (IaaS), this limit is the hardware environment: the provider will guarantee network and hardware availability, and nothing else. Any other functionality is the sole responsibility of the user. You must set up backup for your servers, define and enforce any security policies, keep the systems updated, and do any other conventional server management task.

On the platform layer (PaaS), their responsibility is expanded: vendors offer a computing platform, roughly equivalent to an operating system, on the cloud. Their responsibility, therefore, goes as far as the functionality they make available. If you’re using a platform’s storage services, they will take responsibility for the availability of the data, replicating it as necessary, as well as for the performance of storage operations, and so on.

Finally, on the software-as-a-service layer (SaaS), vendors will take full responsibility for the entire application environment. This means not only the availability of the application and the underlying data, but also all the necessary infrastructure to make sure that they don’t lose your data, are hacked, or suffer any other issues that compromise your ability to access and operate the software.

Be that as it may, recent data breach incidents have proven that no datacenter is out of reach. Hence,organisations should get serious about their backup and restore process.Assuming someone else is backing up for you is a sure recipe for disaster.Some of the most notable incidents of 2012 were:

• Global Payments (credit card processing), had hackers gain access to 1.5 million credit card numbers

• LinkedIn had 6.5 million hashed passwords stolen and published online

• eHarmony had 1.5 million passwords swiped

• Yahoo had nearly half a million usernames and passwords compromised

• New York State Electric and Gas had 1.8 million customer records hacked

• Zappos had upwards of 24 million shoe-buyers impacted by a data breach

• U.S. Army records for 36,000 military personnel were hacked

While the security implications of data breaches are clear, and tremendous damage was done, we also know that most compromised records were not lost. Hackers don’t generally destroy data. For the most part, they copy and keep the data they’re interested in exploiting for future gain.

But that’s not always the case, as we learned when Wired writer Mat Honan had his accounts, which had been backed up to the cloud, hacked and deleted. As a result, Honan lost all of the data on his smartphone, tablet, and laptop – all of his e-mails,contacts, documents, and most unfortunately, the photos that recorded the first year in the life of his daughter.

What made the Honan case particularly compelling is that Mat, just like many of  us, assumed that he was covered by having multiple copies of his data. Between his smartphone, tablet, and laptop, he had layers of data storage duplication. On top of this he assumed that by backing up to the cloud he was safe. Who would think to ask if the cloud itself is backed up?

MY ADVICE

A wise college professor once told me; "To get new ideas, read old books",  thinking of a solution to this tech quagmire takes me back to my college Sophomore year; organizations shouldn't break from the classic Father-Grandfather- Son backup strategy even whilst enlisted in a cloud service. the surefire way to protect your organization's data(whether you adopt a public cloud, private cloud or hybrid infrastructure) is to take responsibility for your own backup.

Whether you do it yourself or use a backup as a service (BaaS) strategy, the time to implement your backup strategy is now!

For the love of Technology

As a friend of mine cared to remind me;The content above is simply "my opinion" to be weight alongside varying opinions and the facts therein.

The place of WAN optimization in "d cloud"

In The IT industry, the word “Cloud” is a buzz word, and like all other computer industry buzzwords since the Inception of the X86 architecture, it has taken a myriad of meanings and coinages.

However, VMware, whose vSphere™ 4 is positioned as the industry’s first operating

system for building the internal cloud, uses this definition:

“Cloud computing is the use of networked infrastructure software and capacity to provide

resources to users in an on-demand environment. Sometimes known as utility computing,

clouds provide a set of typically virtualized computers which can provide users with the

ability to start and stop servers or use compute cycles only when needed, often paying only upon usage.”

This article is not meant for a freshman course in cloud computing(for that,you can read my other article here) but is meant to critically analyze the issues that trail the use of Cloud computing. Nonetheless, it is worthwhile to say that IT decision makers in organizations have taken to (or are considering being taken to) migrating their data and applications to “the cloud” due to the mouthwatering reduction in CAPEX (capital expenditure) and OPEX(Operating Expenditure) that it yields.

Enterprises don't shift overnight, and many C-level executives remain hesitant to adopt cloud too quickly or wholly. Commonly used to gauge the adoption of technology is Rogers' bell curve, which describes the acceptance of a new product or innovation over time. The model indicates that the first group of people to use a new product is called "innovators," followed by "early adopters." Next come the early and late majority, and the last group to eventually adopt a product are called "laggards."

According to Hitachi data systems, if the industry were to use Rogers' bell curve to examine the adoption of cloud computing, it might reveal that the early majority of the industry is waiting for early adopters to demonstrate the real value of cloud computing in business.  

 A viable reason why this is taking so much time to happen is possibly the fact that the cloud is largely dependent on the internet, needless to say… WAN AVAILABILITY.

The instinctive approach to this problem is for IT managers to get more bandwidth, but really how much bandwidth is enough? the truth is BANDWIDTH IS NEVER ENOUGH not to mention the cost implications of WAN upgrades.

Here comes WAN optimization to the rescue.  WAN optimization technologies working together to quickly and easily restore application performance, improve response time and recover WAN bandwidth, all without continuing the cycle of expensive WAN upgrades. These technologies include :

PROTOCOL OPTIMIZATION

 The underlying protocol used to transfer files between clients and servers in an enterprise is known as CIFS(Common Internet File System). The protocol can be optimized by efficiently and transparently converting its serial nature of transfer into a parallel one. Also handshaking/chattiness is eliminated because parallelizing communications sends both request and acknowledgments all at the same time. This greatly reduces response times.

BYTE CACHING

This works by observing repetitive content in client/server communications and application traffic, it then uses tokens that are lighter in weight to represent those data that are repetitive, significantly reducing file transfers.

OBJECT CACHING

Object caching stores re-usable application objects in a local cache so they can be immediately accessed by any user downstream from the appliance. This greatly reduces

bandwidth consumption and the latency(wait times between transfers) associated with file services. The only transactions that cross the WAN are a permissions and a freshness

check to ensure that the copy in the cache is still current.   

BANDWIDTH MANAGEMENT

Due to the cost of bandwidth, it has to be efficiently constrained and managed. A good way of doing this is by application of business processes and policies .

ILLUSTRATION:

Web developers in the head office in Victoria Island Lagos office must be given a guaranteed amount of bandwidth and top traffic priority to upload html files and css sheets of websites designed in the last week of each month to the “Cloud provider” in Port Harcourt.

COMPRESSION

Common industry compression algorithms used at wirespeed can further remove extraneous and predictable information from the traffic before it is transmitted. This

is especially helpful before byte and object caches have been fully populated.

Work is still being done in the industry to hardwire these techniques and better techniques into intelligent optimization appliances (Notably the Blue Coat proxySG appliance from Blue Coat Systems Inc.) to be plugged into the cloud infrastructure for optimized cloud performances.

Microsoft's travails in 2010

One company i'm very passionate about when it comes to releasing products that the computer users and tech savvy consumers need is Microsoft.
Quoting Sharon Chan  of newsfactor;  "As Microsoft looks back on 2010, one thing is clear: The company has more product in it than Justin Bieber's hair."


Through the year 2010, the software company reeled out a stream of new offerings, from the early success of Kinect to the flaming failure of Kin.
It however aches my heart to say that despite all the effort, Microsoft's stock hasn't done as well as i would have envisaged. Microsoft started the year at $30.48 a share but closed at $28.01 Tuesday -- down 8.1 percent.

The company also lost leaders and brains of the software business: Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie, Entertainment and Devices division President Robbie Bach and Business division President Stephen Elop.

Below is an enumeration of the products that kept Microsoft on the lips of every tech savvy consumer,on the display screens of every information technology and communications forum, and on the products-to-purchase list of every enterprise seeking to maximise their profit by using cost-effective,service delivering, software and hardware.

WINDOWS AZURE: Microsoft began the year with the launch of Azure, its platform for cloud computing.

As Chief Executive Steve Ballmer first said at a University of Washington speech in March, "We're all in" the cloud, a platform where software and data are stored in remote Microsoft data centers instead of corporate servers and are accessed with Internet-connected devices, such as laptops, mobile phones, tablets and televisions. Cloud computing is a bet-the-company move for Microsoft. In the next 10 years, the company believes delivering software via the cloud could make up half of the company's revenue.

The progress has been slow, however. Success of Azure depends on how many developers build software for it. It now has 20,000 customers. The company, meanwhile, continues to release new features and products for the cloud. In July, Microsoft announced plans to sell an Azure appliance that would reside on a corporate campus rather than in a data center run by Microsoft. The product is aimed at companies that don't trust their business data to an outside company.


Windows 7
: To me, he best Client operating system to be released by Microsoft in terms of and bringing  together ease of use and ease of deployment ,the latest version of Microsoft's operating system Windows 7 launched last year, it continued to see strong sales in 2010, selling 240 million copies since it hit the market in October 2009.

Kin: Microsoft launched the Kin mobile phone in April, calling it the phone for the socially networked generation. The phone's software was designed for life-casters who want to update their status and upload photos to Facebook. It began selling in May with Verizon Wireless, and by the end of June, Microsoft had pulled it from the market. Sales were reportedly disappointing. CEO Ballmer said the Kin distracted attention from Windows Phone 7, which started selling in the fall.


Office 2010: This ultimate product for the workplace makes $18.6 billion a year in revenue for Microsoft, came out with its latest version in May. For the first time, Microsoft also made a free lightweight Web-based version, called Office Web Apps, to compete with Google Docs. Microsoft reports Office 2010 has sold 6 million copies.In October, in the quest for further pushing its software-as-a-service campaign, the company also launched Office 365, Office software offered as an online service hosted by Microsoft in the cloud.

SharePoint 2010: Microsoft's collaboration software, which unifies into a single box, file sharing, Web site design and internal corporate searching(both document and people search). The latest version that came out in May added social-media features for businesses.

Bing: While Microsoft launched Bing in 2009, the search-engine development team has since continually rolled out new features. Microsoft also sewed up its massive partnership with Yahoo in October. Bing now runs all of Yahoo's searches and Microsoft's AdCenter now serves as the advertising platform for both sites. With the addition of Yahoo's search traffic, Bing now conducts 28 percent of all searches online in the U.S., according to November numbers from comScore. Google's dominant position remains strong at 66 percent.

Internet Explorer 9: In September, Microsoft released the beta version of its new Web browser, which has since been downloaded 15 million times. The software promises a new generation of richer, more animated and more application-like Web sites. The new browser supports the HTML5 Web standard, the foundation of new Web design. Unfortunately, Internet Explorer 9 works only on Windows 7 and Vista, which will limit how quickly it will be downloaded and how many developers will build HTML5 sites.

Windows Phone 7: Two years after Apple launched the iPhone, Microsoft introduced its redesigned mobile-phone operating system, dubbed Windows Phone 7, in October. The company says it will spend $100 million to market the phones, which are designed to make it faster to get contact updates and other information from your phone.In the absence of Microsoft's figure of how many phones customers have bought,phone-makers have sold 1.5 million to wireless carriers.

Kinect for Xbox 360: The motion sensor for Microsoft's video-game system allows people to play games without using a handheld controller. While the sensor has only a limited array of Xbox games that take advantage of the technology, it has sold 2.5 million units since launching in November. Microsoft sees potential in motion sensors beyond riding imaginary river rafts. The company believes that voice and gesture, not the mouse and keyboard, will define the desktop and office of the future.

Microsoft store in Bellevue: While it was not a global product that will sell in 40 countries, the Microsoft store that opened at Bellevue Square in November, the first retail store Microsoft opened in its home base. Ballmer himself showed up for the ribbon cutting.

Lync: This unified communications system simply named Lync, released in November, totally outshined Microsoft's other unified communications softwares such as Office communicator,... Lync can replace a traditional office phone system, and it brings together phone calling, instant messaging, video conferencing and presence, software that senses whether you're at your desk, on the phone or in a meeting.


As we begin 2011, i'm excited just thinking about what Microsoft has in store for us.Certainly the cloud computing technology named windows Azure is expected to be made less Microsoft hosted, i'm also thinking virtualization technology will not end with Virtual pc, what with VMware conquering the virtualization market in 2010.Also, i dont think Microsoft is done unleaashing the Office software tricks on us. Lets wait and see ...

THE TWELVE DAYS OF CHRISTMAS

on the first day of christmas,computing gave to me, a root node in a B-Tree

On the second day of christmas, computing gave to me,
2 SATA drives
and a root node in a B-tree.

On the third day of christmas, computing gave to me,
3 French programmers
2 SATA drives
and a root node in a B-tree

On the forth day of christmas, computing gave to me,
4 primary keys
3 French programmers
2 SATA drives
and a root node in a B-tree

On the fifth day of christmas, computing gave to me,
5 constructors
4 primary keys
3 French programmers
2 SATA drives
and a root node in a B-tree

On the sixth day of christmas, computing gave to me,
6 codes compiling
5 constructors
4 primary keys
3 French programmers
2 SATA drives
and a root node in a B-tree


On the seventh day of christmas, computing gave to me,
7 hackers attacking
6 codes compiling
5 constructors
4 primary keys
3 French programmers
2 SATA drives
and a root node in a B-tree

On the eighth day of christmas, computing gave to me,
8 drives formatting
7 hackers attacking
6 codes compiling
5 constructors
4 primary keys
3 French programmers
2 SATA drives
and a root node in a B-tree

On the ninth day of christmas, computing gave to me,
9 backups restoring
8 drives formatting
7 hackers attacking
6 codes compiling
5 constructors
4 primary keys
3 French programmers
2 SATA drives
and a root node in a B-tree

On the tenth day of christmas, computing gave to me,
10 files uploading
9 backups restoring
8 drives formatting
7 hackers attacking
6 codes compiling
5 constructors
4 primary keys
3 French programmers
2 SATA drives
and a root node in a B-tree



On the eleventh day of christmas, computing gave to me,
11 crackers cracking
10 files uploading
9 backups restoring
8 drives formatting
7 hackers attacking
6 codes compiling
5 constructors
4 primary keys
3 French programmers
2 SATA drives
and a root node in a B-tree

On the twelfth day of christmas, computing gave to me,
12 calling functions
11 crackers cracking
10 files uploading
9 backups restoring
8 drives formatting
7 hackers attacking
6 codes compiling
5 constructors
4 primary keys
3 French programmers
2 SATA drives
and a root node in a B-tree

CHINA'S 18 MIN INTERNET "HIJACK";HOW?,WHY? WHAT DOES IT MEAN

Recent proofs have been uncovered that shows that Sometime in April, a government owned telecoms company(China Telecoms)  for 18 minutes successfully routed 15% of the world's internet traffic via their routers and servers. These included communications to and from Government agencies(especially U.S), internet shopping traffic,  ...
The alleged "theft" of internet traffic was discovered by a communications company outside Washington, D.C. where computer network engineers monitor Internet traffic.

HOW DID IT HAPPEN
The internet operates on a trust-based system both in infrastuctural architechture and in terms of usage.Electronic routers direct the traffic flow, insuring the shortest path between any two computers anywhere in the world that hope to exchange information.
A little illustration here;lets say i have 3 uncles in the federal  ministry and i want to send a letter directly to the President of Nigeria.i would mentally calculate which of my 3 uncles is closest to the President by the number of people between them and the President,then i "forward" my letter to that uncle.That uncle in turn also calculates his distance to the president by the ranks of those he knows and forwards my letter to the next person he thinks is closer to the president....this continues until my letter is safely in the hands of the president.
Thats how routers "forward" information on the internet, only this happens in microseconds.

so essentially, the 18MIN hijack happened when computer routers in China belonging to China Telecom began signaling to other computer routers on the Internet that they could provide the quickest path between different computers. 
For 18 minutes, the traffic on 35,000 to 50,000 computer networks elsewhere in the world began flowing toward China, before getting routed to their final destinations. China Telecom had created a massive detour.

 Rodney Joffe, Senior Vice-president and Senior technologist at Neustar Inc said "They, all of a sudden, began announcing the fact that they were an optimal path to about 15 percent of the destinations on the Internet, that, in fact, they were a way to get to a large number of destinations on the Internet, when, in fact, they were not. We have never seen that before on this scale ever."

WHY DID IT HAPPEN
 The mere fact that the incident didn't severe all communications during the time it lasted suggests a calculated attempt to intercept, capure and later examine/inspect information.

Security expert Dmitri Alperovitch—VP of threat research at McAfee—says that this happens "accidentally" a few times a year, but this time it was different: The China Telecom network absorbed all the data and returned it without any significant delay. Before, this kind of accident would have resulted in communication problems, which lead experts to believe this wasn't an accident but a deliberated attempt to capture as much data as possible.

WHAT DOES THIS SAY 

A lot can be captured in 18 minutes. When all the communications from tens of thousand of computer networks was routed to China, that included all the Web traffic, e-mail, and instant messages to and from dot.mil -- that's the Department of Defense -- and dot.gov -- those are U.S. governments departments. The U.S. Senate and NASA also had all their traffic diverted.

Companies like Dell, Yahoo!, Microsoft and IBM had their data diverted by China Telecom, too. On that day in April, officers logging into a Pentagon Web site ended up looking at an image that came to their screen via China.


Information could have been gathered, which after much examination could be used to craft a virus to be released in such huge networks.The fact that traffic could be intentionally diverted to where it is "MALICIOUSLY WANTED" opens the eyes to possibilities such as the data actually being altered(man-in-the-middle attack) before being forwarded to its destination,fabricated rogue mails could be concocted to seem as being  sent from someone/somewhere....usernames could be masqueraded... the possibilities are just limitless!!

WHAT CAN BE DONE

Private networks and networks that provide essential services ;from life- essential services such as power grids,water, traffic, product mixing networks.. to those trusted services  such as internal government mail,military, Organizational services should be hosted on servers distant from the internet.worst case scenario;if these servers have to have a connection to the internet whatsoever, DMZ's (De-militarized zones) should be used as a sort of buffer.

Network administrators and security experts have to harden their organizations' networks.
 Wider proliferation of use of network security software, such as Microsoft's Forefront Threat management gateway 

The most efficient solution i see is for stakeholders and computer professionals around the world to;
 Greater Policize the internet trust system or all-together just fashion another network of networks that is just not as trust-based as the present standards.It might be  a longtime coming, but maybe we just go back to the base,how it all began, a revolution might just be underway.