“Despite efforts to improve, FedRAMP remains cracked at the foundation,” said MeriTalk founder Steve O’Keeffe. “We need a FedRAMP fix – the PMO must improve guidance, simplify the process, and increase transparency.”

The Authority to Operate (ATO) system, in which an agency completes a security assessment of a system, and authorizes its use, is supposed to allow services to be authorized once and used often. However, MeriTalk found 41 percent of Feds have not used another agency’s ATO, and 35 percent of those with an ATO have not allowed others to use it.

As a result, 17 percent said FedRAMP compliance is not a factor in their cloud decisions, and 59 percent would consider a non-FedRAMP cloud.

READ MORE: CenturyLink Launches New FedRAMP-Compliant IaaS Cloud for Government Agencies

Top suggestions for improvement are accelerating the Cloud Service Provider certification process to increase the number of secure cloud options (49 percent), and creating an ATO clearing house which forces sharing 47 percent. Additionally, 37 percent at civilian agencies, and 27 percent overall suggested a leadership change at the Program Management Office of the GSA.

The report recommends improved guidance and expanded training to reduce confusion, adopting the ATO clearinghouse idea to promote sharing and reduce duplication of efforts, and increased transparency.

Industry advocacy group FedRAMP Fast Forward called for improvement to the program in January.

Source: TheWHIR

SEE ALSO: Five Security Features That Your Next-Gen Cloud Must Have

At a recent conference in Toronto, Tiffani Bova, former Vice President & Sales Strategies analyst at Gartner said the cloud market is transforming and it is up to companies to use this to advantage. She went on to point out that by 2017, 75 percent of IT organizations will have a bimodal capability — and half will make a mess trying to maintain this balance. As companies adopt cloud computing, they will face an issue — how to maintain operations and “keep the lights on while trying to innovate.”

Here’s the big point Bova made: Digital business incompetence will cause a quarter of organizations to lose their market position by 2017. The former Gartner analyst believes every company in the world is in “some way” an IT company – but while firms work on expanding cloud products and services, they need to remember the focus is on business. However, Bova thinks many within the enterprise are destined to make a mess of this, and will lose their market positions in the next few years as a result.

With all of this in mind, it’s critical to see that the emergence of the cloud has helped many organizations expand beyond their current physical data center. New types of cloud-based technologies allow IT environments to truly consolidate and grow their infrastructure quickly, and, more importantly affordably.

Before the cloud, many companies looking to expand upon their current environment would have to buy new space, new hardware and deploy workloads based on a set infrastructure. Now that WAN connectivity has greatly improved, cloud-based offerings are much more attractive.

Consider these cloud computing points:

• Creating next-generation data distribution and scale. Massive data centers can be distributed both locally and around cloud-based environments which administrators can access and manage at any time. These environments are scalable, agile and can meet the needs of a small or very large enterprise.
• Cloud comes in many flavors – pick what your business needs and consume. Cloud technologies come in three major offerings: Private, Pubic and Hybrid. The beauty of the cloud is that an organization can deploy any one of these solutions depending directly on their business goals.
  • Private clouds are great solutions for organizations looking to keep their hardware locally managed. A good example here would be application virtualization technologies such as Citrix XenApp. Users have access to these applications both internally and externally from any device, anytime and anywhere. Still, these workloads are privately managed by the organization and delivered over the WAN down to the end-user.
  • Public clouds are perfect for organizations looking to expand their testing or development environment. Many companies simply don’t want to pay for equipment that will only be used temporarily. This is where the “pay-as-you-go” model really works out well. IT administrators are able to provision cloud-ready resources as they need them to deploy test servers or even create a DR site directly in the cloud.
  • In a hybrid cloud, a company can still leverage third party cloud providers in either a full or partial manner. This increases the flexibility of computing. The hybrid cloud environment is also capable of providing on-demand, externally-provisioned scalability. Augmenting a traditional private cloud with the resources of a public cloud can be used to manage any unexpected surges in workload.

Remember, even though “cloud” isn’t anything new – the many cloud services being deployed today might be. Cold storage, big data, BI and data analytics are all different kinds of services which can now be cloud-born.

READ MORE: Why Moving to Cloud Makes Sense for Mid-Market and SMB Organizations

With that in mind, there are a couple of key considerations to take in while working with your own cloud environment:

1. It will always be very important to monitor resources both at the local and cloud-based data center. Remember, resources are finite so managing how much storage is allocated to a VM, or how much RAM is given to a host will always be important.
2. Also, make sure to monitor WAN links between sites. Simple connectivity issues can have very bad results on workload delivery. Plan for usage spikes and always try to have a DR component built into a heavily used production environment.
3. Cloud is a powerful tool capable of creating great ROI. This will be the case as long as your IT strategy always aligns with your business. Remember, the most successful cloud deployments are those that break down any business barrier and silos and integrate the entire organization.

Embracing the cloud

As you take in this article ask yourself a key question: “How am I using cloud today and is it effective for me?” If you haven’t looked at some kind of cloud service this far into the game – I highly suggest that you do. Whether it’s cold storage or some kind of cloud backup service – there are amazing ways you can further enable your business.

Remember, cloud allows you to innovate at the pace of software and enables the business to stay ever-agile. “We have only touched the surface of what the ecosystem will deliver in the future,” Gartner analyst Tiffani Bova says. “It is up to business leaders to understand the impact market forces will have on sales strategies in the future ecosystem.”

Don’t fall behind the curve. The best piece of advice a cloud champion can give you is to at least test or try out a cloud service. There are great ways to demo these environments which can have little-to-no impact on your production environment. From there, you can seamlessly integrate core data center components with a variety of cloud services. As the digital revolution continues to unfold – cloud can be your vehicle to navigate the cloud landscape.

Source: TheWHIR

In terms of overall growth, almost one-third of cloud providers say they experienced “amazing growth,” while none shrank. Roughly half of hosting providers experienced “moderate growth.”

OnApp found itself the most popular platform, with 65 percent of service providers as customers. VMware has 35 percent, followed by Virtuozzo and OpenStack at 13 percent each, and CloudStack at 6 percent. A further 24 percent run one or two platforms.

A strong majority of both service providers (79 percent) and customers (86 percent) say support is a main reason for provider choice, while price was selected by just over half on each side. Ease-of-use, however, is an important reason for choosing their service provider according to 91 percent, and the same portion of service providers agree. The survey shows that service providers generally have a good understanding of what their customers care about.

SEE ALSO: Is Hybrid Cloud the Future of Enterprise IT?

When asked what has stopped customers from buying their services, 18 percent say a lack of cloud functionality was a big problem, ahead of price and “cloud fear/uncertainty/doubt” (15 percent). Vendor tie-in is sometimes a problem for half of service providers surveyed, while legislation is considered easily the least problem among the 11 choices provided.

While AWS is commonly seen as a major threat, local competitors are considered the top threat by a quarter of service providers, and Digital Ocean (22 percent) is named just as often as AWS.

Overall, service providers are optimistic, with 70 percent feeling positive about the future, and more feeling neutral (18 percent) than worried (13 percent).

Source: TheWHIR

SEE ALSO: Yahoo Nixes Alibaba Spin Off, Plans Reverse Spin of Core Business

Yahoo — under the leadership of Chief Executive Officer Marissa Mayer — started a review of the company’s options in February after pressure from investors and a failed turnaround. Bidders have included TPG, Verizon Communications Inc., YP Holdings LLC, and a consortium led by Bain Capital LP and Vista Equity Partners LLC, people familiar with the matter have said. Berkshire Hathaway Inc. Chairman Warren Buffett is also backing a group bidding for Yahoo’s Internet assets, people familiar with the matter have said.

While Goldman said the process is robust, he declined to give details on what “inning” the effort is in during the presentation.

SEE ALSO: Yahoo Data Center Team Staying “Heads-Down” Amid Business Turmoil

“We are taking it extremely seriously,” Goldman said, noting the process is accounting for the majority of executives’ time. “It’s our collective goal that we find a way that — wherever this ends up — that ultimately Yahoo will do better with the benefit of however it goes than staying independent.”

Goldman said Yahoo is making progress in efforts to streamline the company as well. Yahoo now has about 9,000 employees down from 10,400 at the end of last year.

Source: TheWHIR

Related Web Hosting Talk Thread: Can I get your quick opinion? Looking for new host for WordPress blog

WP Engine cites surveys by Akamai and Gomez showing that a one second increase in page load time results in significantly fewer page views, lower customer satisfaction, and a reduced conversion rate. Bob Buck, VP of Technology for Deep Information Sciences explained some of the causes and risks associated with slow page load times for the WHIR in January, and specifically mentioned the potential performance challenges of running a demanding enterprise load on WordPress. Enterprises are finding way to deal with the limitations of the open-source content management system through third parties like WP Engine that enable enterprise-grade performance, founder Jason Cohen told the WHIR in March.

“The managed WordPress platform space has grown significantly over the last few years, with increasing adoption of WordPress among enterprises,” said Liam Eagle, senior analyst at 451 Research. “As WordPress pushes deeper into the enterprise, and consequently more complex sites, the need for services that optimize the performance of those sites has grown. With the launch of Page Performance, WP Engine becomes the first managed WordPress platform to offer a product that addresses this need with a web page speed performance tool integrated into the user dashboard, enabling customers to quickly make adjustments that improve the performance of their sites.”

Media Temple launched a competitor managed WordPress offering for enterprises and agencies earlier this month, as enterprise WordPress demand grows.

Source: TheWHIR

SEE ALSO: IBM’s New Cloud Data Center in India to Serve Its Exploding Developer Population

ST Telemedia has agreed to buy a 74-percent stake in Tata’s data center business in the two countries for $633 million, gaining control of 14 data centers in India and three in Singapore, as well as recurring revenue from contracts with companies using those facilities, which include blue chip Asian enterprises, e-commerce firms, and multinationals, according to the announcement.

“The acquisition of Tata’s data center assets gives STT’s data center portfolio a stake in the two Asia-Pacific markets with the most long-run growth potential,” Jabez Tan, research director at Structure Research, who specializes in Asian data center markets, said.

India: Promising but Hard to Enter

According to 451 Research, Asia Pacific has more operational colocation space than any other region of the world (40 percent of the total). 451 doesn’t break out India in publicly available data, but according to Gartner, total IT infrastructure spending in the country will grow from $1.91 billion in 2015 to $2.14 billion in 2020. That’s total spending on networking, storage, and server hardware that will have to be housed in data centers.

India is unquestionably an attractive long-term growth market, and many data center providers based elsewhere have been eyeing it but shying away because of its operating challenges, Tan said. Power grid infrastructure in the country is relatively unreliable, and it is difficult to build local market presence there from outside.

By acquiring a stake in Tata’s business, ST Telemedia gets a foothold in the market without having to address those hurdles. “In acquiring Tata’s data center assets and partnering, STT has given itself a platform, complete with scale, capabilities and footprint, to jumpstart its presence in this market,” Tan said.

Expanding in Asia’s Key Network Hub

Singapore is another key Asian data center market where ST Telemedia started building presence just last year, when it announced plans to construct a 150,000-square foot data center. It followed the announcement with acquisition of a 70-percent stake in Shine Systems Assets, which is building another major data center in Singapore called MediaHub.

The Singapore data center market was $963 million in 2014, according to Structure. The firm expects it to surpass $1.2 billion this year.

The small island nation is a major interconnection hub for networks carrying traffic throughout Southeast Asia and China and between Asia-Pacific and the rest of the world. Like Hong Kong, it’s considered a network gateway to Asia’s biggest market: mainland China.

Series of Deals Paints Picture of Global Ambition

China was the first pin on the map of ST Telemedia’s current push into the global data center services market. In 2014, it acquired a 40-percent stake in GDS, one of China’s biggest data center providers with 17 facilities in key metros on the mainland and in Hong Kong.

Last year, ST Telemedia also entered the European data center market, buying a 49-percent stake in UK data center provider Virtus Data Centers.

All these recent deals are investments in businesses focused solely on data center services. It’s worth noting that ST Telemedia also holds a stake in Level 3 Communications, one of the world’s biggest network carriers, which operates more than 350 data centers around the world.

This isn’t ST Telemedia’s first foray into the data center services market. In the late 1990s, it provided internet exchange services in Asia, and in 2000 it launched i-STT, a data center provider that later merged with Equinix, which has since grown into the world’s biggest provider of colocation services by revenue, currently holding about 8 percent of market share, according to 451. ST Telemedia became Equinix’s largest shareholder following the merger but later divested its interest in the company.

The series of acquisitions it has made over the last two years is a new push into a market that is very different from what it was in the early 2000s and a much bigger one. Its new ambitions are hefty, and it’s clear that the company is eyeing further expansion. In a statement issued along with the deal’s announcement, its CEO Sio Tat Hiang said entering India “will be a major impetus to advance the company’s ambition to be a significant global data center provider.”

Original article appeared here: Tata Deal Big Boost to ST Telemedia’s Global Data Center Ambitions

Source: TheWHIR