There’s no disputing that cloud computing is transforming how IT infrastructure can be delivered, managed and consumed. Equally, cloud computing– whether delivered as infrastructure as a service, software as a service applications or email as a service – compels organizations to rethink their security model the further they advance up the cloud adoption curve.

While Rackspace customers hardly need to be convinced of the appeal and value of cloud computing, it does bear repeating: the cloud delivers operational flexibility, enhanced user experience and financial benefits. But for many risk-conscious organizations, there’s still a hurdle they need to traverse to embrace the cloud. The primary concern that these organizations wrestle with is a structural one: how to control, secure and protect data that is processed by a third-party service. Whether the need is driven by concerns about safeguarding intellectual property, meeting compliance requirements for encrypting data at rest, maintaining data residency or increasingly navigating the ambiguity of legal protections for data in the cloud, these organizations see the need to independently retain ownership and control of their data.

These concerns about data control and ownership are bubbling up more frequently both because cloud computing has become mainstream and because cloud service providers can credibly argue that they deliver more safeguards for the cloud environment than an individual customer could within their own on-premise environments. These investments address the uncertainty about the security of the cloud provider’s service and operations. But, as the not-for-profit Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) notes: it’s the customer and not the cloud service provider that should be responsible for the security and encryption protection controls necessary to retain data ownership and control.

We at Vaultive certainly encourage end users to refer to the Cloud Control Matrix issued by the CSA to evaluate the security and compliance of the cloud service provider environment – and applaud the transparent way in which Rackspace has made this information available to its customers (http://www.rackspace.com/security/). The next step in the process is ensuring ownership and control of the data that is processed on third-party services.

Encryption of data-in-transit and data-at-rest has long been recognized as a best practice to enforce the security and privacy of data, regardless of where it resides. However, these two states of encryption are no longer sufficient as they do not protect data while it is being processed in the cloud.

The CSA now recommends that organizations also implement encryption of data-in-use to ensure that data is secured for the entire duration of its lifecycle (at-rest, in-transit and in-use). To prevent unauthorized access and maintain the state of encryption even when processed in a third-party environment, the organization’s IT department should retain ownership of the encryption keys. As a result, the cloud provider never has access to customer data in an unencrypted form, and an organization’s cloud data remains unreadable if an unauthorized third-party attempts access — or even if the data is disclosed in response to a government request.

At Vaultive, we have developed technology specifically to address the need for the organization to retain full ownership of data moving and processed outside of the trusted network – as well as retain the encryption keys. Vaultive’s transparent proxy provides a patent-pending form of 256-bit AES encryption that enables encrypted data to be dynamically processed, searched and sorted in the cloud, while ensuring preservation of application functionality and a seamless user experience.

With the integration of data ownership and control technology, customers now have a greater set of options for deploying cloud-based services from Rackspace – including email as a service.

Lessons Learned In Big Physics…
In a recent past life, I attacked petabyte-per-second big data problems as a particle physicist at the Large Hadron Collider together with my colleagues and Cloudant co-founders, Alan Hoffman and Adam Kocoloski. We faced a lot of the problems that developers of large-scale web and mobile apps face today. Here are some lessons we learned the hard way:

Scaling a database yourself is brutally hard (both application level sharding and the master-slave model). It is harder with SQL than it is with NoSQL databases, but either way, the “scale it yourself” approach is loaded with unknowns, complications and operational expense.

Horizontal scaling on commodity hardware is a must. We got very good at this and ended up embedding Apache CouchDB behind a horizontal scaling framework to scale arbitrarily and stay running 24×7 with a minimal operational load. The data layer must scale. It should be something that applications grow into, not out of. That last point inspired Alan, Adam and me to co-found Cloudant.

What Is Cloudant?
Cloudant is a scalable data layer (as a service) for Big Data apps. Built on CouchDB, JSON and MapReduce, it lets developers focus on new features instead of the drudgery of growing or migrating databases. The Cloudant Data Layer is already big: it collects, stores, analyzes and distributes application data across a global network of secure, high-performance Rackspace open cloud data centers, delivering low-latency and non-stop data access to users no matter where they’re located. You get to focus on your code; we’ve got data scalability and availability covered for you.

Scaling Your App On Cloudant
Cloudant is designed to support fast app iteration by developers. Data is encapsulated and transferred as JSON documents. You don’t need to design and redesign SQL data models or migrate databases in order to create new app features. You don’t need to write object-relational mapping code either. The database resides behind an HTTP layer and provides a rich permission model, so you can access, secure and share your data via a RESTful API.

Your app is a tenant within a multi-tenant data layer that is already big and scalable. You get a URL end point for your data layer, get data in and out of it via HTTP, and we scale and secure it around the globe. Global data distribution and intelligent routing minimizes latency between your users and the data, which can add hundreds of milliseconds per request (we’ve measured!). Additionally, Cloudant has an advanced system for prioritizing requests so that apps aren’t affected by ”noisy neighbors” in a multi-tenant system. We also offer a single-tenant data layer to companies that want it — your very own white-labeled data cloud. As your data volume and IO requests rise (or fall), Cloudant scales automatically, and because your data is replicated to multiple locations, it’s always available. Start small and grow to epic proportions? Check.

Other Data Management Gymnastics
The Cloudant Data Layer also makes it easy to add advanced functionality to your apps:

• Replicate data (all of it or sub-sets) to data centers or mobile devices for local processing (great for analytics) or off-line access (great for mobile users). Re-synching is automatic.
• Perform advanced analytics with built-in MapReduce and Apache Lucene-powered full-text indexing and search.
• Distribute your code with data — Cloudant can distribute and serve any kind of document, even HTML5 and other browser-based code, which makes it easy to scale your app and move processing from your back-end to the browser.

Why We Run On Rackspace
Given the nature of our service, people always ask us where we have our infrastructure, and we’re quick to tell them we run on the Rackspace open cloud because of the quality of platform performance, security and Fanatical Support that they provide. With their fast provisioning and great support, it took us just three days to get a multi-tenant (freemium) Cloudant cluster and several customer clusters up and running in production on Rackspace.

Get Started With Cloudant On Rackspace For Free
If you’re interested to see what the Cloudant Data Layer could do for your app, sign up at cloudant.com/rackspace to get your FREE global data presence created in an instant.

There is a dichotomy in business today.

On one hand, companies today have never had greater access to the tools and resources needed to enhance worker productivity. On the other hand, however, employees have never had more diverse and disparate sources of information as they do now.

Modern workers may be required to spend up to 50 percent of their work time in non-productive activities like learning new processes, searching for archived data or reviewing the latest methods for accomplishing a standard job task. This is the inefficient side of rapid business change.

But what if they had access to all of these information sources from a single place? And what if they could streamline how they consume this information? In fact, what if they had a stake in just how the system presented the information needed? Well, then they would likely be using a social learning management system (LMS).

In order to demonstrate the value that a social LMS can deliver to companies, we need to breakdown a typical worker’s day in an information-driven workplace. According to the U.S. Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics, fewer than four hours of each day is spent by the average worker doing their primary duties (3.6 hours to be exact). Of the remainder, nearly a full two hours is spent looking up or researching procedures in support of the primary job duty.

More information about the value of social learning can be found in the following blog post: http://interactyx.com/social-learning-blog/social-learning-value-explained/

With a properly implemented social learning management system, much of that time can be reclaimed.

Let’s look at it this way: if a worker can log into a single portal and quickly search categories for the exact information needed to perform a task, we save a certain amount of time. But in addition, we avoid the frustration that accompanies the inability to effectively accomplish a task. Or, let’s say a worker is in need of specific expertise on a product or process. By doing a quick search, a list of experts is presented – along with their current availability status.

This is the promise of social LMS platforms; and they’re already being used by some of today’s most innovative companies. In addition, these LMS platforms are cloud-based and require no hardware or IT expertise to implement.

If you are just considering a system for your company, I would recommend evaluating the options. Tools exist, such as the social learning management system (LMS) TOPYX®, that can deliver best-in-class social learning tools to an organization, and result in huge productivity gains. You can get a personal LMS demo to see how these social learning tools can help your organization.

Here is a short video showing the TOPYX social LMS difference:

Interactyx Limited (interactyx.com) is a global eLearning software company that provides engaging and interactive learning experiences to learners, businesses, academic departments, associations and nonprofit organizations of any size, anywhere in the world.

Unfortunately, most organizations won’t be able to benefit from these promises. They can indeed deploy a new server in minutes, but will then spend hours manually installing and configuring their business applications and their dependencies. These ad-hoc processes are often poorly documented; so that when it is time to re-deploy, no one knows for sure what the configurations should be. With computing resources becoming a commodity, the new bottleneck is now in the manual operations required to move from raw resources to business ready services.

To reap the benefit of the cloud, organizations must put in place operational processes that match the speed of the infrastructure delivery. New tools are required to automate these tasks.  It is therefore not a surprise to see that in its Top Predictions for IT Organizations, Gartner claims that  “By 2015, tools and automation will eliminate 25 percent of labor hours associated with IT services.”

Three challenges of cloud operations

1. Get provisioning under control

The simplest way to create your own server image is to start from an existing one, modify it manually to match your requirements and create a new server image from its snapshot. Besides the manual effort, this process often leads to lack of documentation and potentially a maintenance headache when these images have to be updated to match changes in configuration.

2. Centralize configuration management

One of the most important daily activities of system administrators is the management of server configurations (updating packages, users and access rights management, application configurations, etc.). With a growing number of hosts, it becomes easy to lose track of configuration changes, leading to costly configuration errors and lack of proper documentation.

Centralized configuration management will reduce human errors through automation, improve your documentation and provide auditing of taken actions. In addition, the best tools provide you with compliance features and alert you when a server configuration deviates from its required state.

3. Orchestrate complex workflows

Scaling an infrastructure, deploying a new service and implementing disaster recovery are all examples of tasks that go way beyond the simple provisioning of a new host or a change in configuration. These orchestrations require many actions to be taken at different levels of the infrastructure. They are the hardest processes to automate, but also the ones where human errors can have the most disastrous impacts. Thanks to the API exposed by cloud providers, and using the right tools, it is possible to automate these tasks as well.

ComodIT – IT Automation as a Service

ComodIT is an IT Automation platform that is geared for the cloud and available as a service. It integrates all key automation processes discussed above in a simple to use web interface. It also provides enterprise features such as identity management, access control and auditing.

Using ComodIT, you can get your provisioning under control across many public and private cloud platforms, centralize your configuration management, track compliance and orchestrate complex scenarios using a simple API.

Both the integration within a single tool and this level of automation will reduce your manual effort and eradicate human errors, ensure repeatability, improve your process quality and your flexibility by making it easier to move from one platform to another. In addition, ComodIT offers a growing catalog of application templates through its applications marketplace. This makes it easy to quickly deploy hosts with your choice of applications and manage their configurations from the web, using tested automated processes.

Project Management 2.0 has rendered traditional project management archaic. Under traditional project management, the onus of collecting and collating all of the information rested with the project managers. It was not automated and had the typical top-down planning approach, which resulted in centralization and limited access to information by the project team. This, coupled with nearly zero intelligence in the project management system, pulled the project managers into unnecessary tasks and led to lower developer productivity.

Project Management 2.0, which is more of a cultural change brought about by the social media zeitgeist post Web 2.0, has opened up possibilities for SaaS tools that can integrate automation and intelligence in project management. BootStrapToday meets these possibilities.

Cloud has enabled SMBs to leverage enterprise grade tools at affordable price. Rackspace Cloud Tools enable customers to choose some of the best tools for development and deployment of their applications. With BootStrapToday, Rackspace customers can now leverage integration and automation in their software development process. This will help them detect bugs earlier and improve software quality.

The BootStrapToday Benefit…

We at BootStrapToday have built a SaaS based project management platform which has intelligence and automation integrated through its features. One such intelligence is for early detection of bugs.

As per IDC’s white paper Improving Software Quality to Drive Business Agility, 37% of developer time is spent debugging for large organizations that do internal software development.  The cost of fixing bugs increases exponentially with the time taken to detect those bugs; and if the bug is detected by customers, it can also lead to heavy embarrassment.

A survey report from the National Institute of Standards and Technology in US claims that software bugs cost the U.S. economy around $59.5 billion per year, which amounts to 0.6 percent of the US economy. The study also states that more than half the cost is born by software users and the rest is born by software vendors. That’s a huge amount eating the profit margin of a software vendor!

I understand that it’s impossible to have a bug free code, but (just as published in the report the National Institute of Standards and Technology in US), I believe that more than a third of the cost can be eliminated by early detection of bugs and by adopting better processes. And this savings could be in the order of $22 billion, which is huge. As per the report, currently more than half of all the bugs are not found until later stages of development.

In BootStrapToday, when you add a new ticket, the subject and description of this new ticket are analyzed, and based on previous tickets and their components, a component is automatically assigned to this new ticket. Once a component is assigned, the ticket is automatically assigned to a user. BootStrapToday also analyzes existing tickets and finds the similar ones. If there is any ticket very similar to the current one, BootStrapToday adds a ‘comment’ to the current ticket (with a ticket id and the subject of the similar ticket).

You will find the tickets considered similar to the current ticket under the tab SIMILAR.  You can easily find the duplicates and close them. You can also check how tickets similar to the current ticket were fixed.  You can check the COMMITS tab to see which files were modified to fix these tickets.

Got questions? Tweet them @bootstraptoday and we’ll be happy to answer them.

The webinar, set for Wednesday, October 3 at noon central (1 p.m. eastern) and hosted by appzero, will feature spirited discussion between Greg O’Connor, appzero CEO; Sean Wedige, CTO for the Global Enterprise Solutions segment at Rackspace Hosting; and Steve Blake and David McCluskey, Virtessential IT consultancy principals. The discussion will have a practical, business orientation with a strong technical slant.

The webinar will focus on PBR’s choice to move its datacenter to the Rackspace Cloud and how applications quickly took center stage. It will also highlight how PBR overcame the challenge of effectively moving highly modified, but largely undocumented, production apps to the cloud. With guidance from consultant Virtessential, PBR overcame the challenge using appzero’s zapp migration to automate identification, extraction, and migration of its Windows server apps to the cloud.

The webinar will also feature a demo of appzero’s migration capability, which enabled PBR to move apps from the data center to the cloud in minutes.

Register for the webinar now, and learn how PBR moved its apps to the Rackspace Cloud with appzero and Virtessential.

Object storage technology is the unsung hero of cloud storage solutions, including Rackspace Cloud Files.  Cloud storage is widely regarded for massive scalability, reliability and low cost.  That is all true, but it is only the tip of the iceberg.  Object storage metadata capabilities, flat-name space and programmatic interfaces are the real gems that make Cloud Files a must-have for not only storing, but also managing, searching and processing the deluge of unstructured data organizations face.

Directory and file naming conventions used to catalog data on traditional file systems break down at scale.  Even at a personal level, when you’re storing photographs, do you create a folder for specific dates? How about folders for locations or specific events? Valid arguments exist for any of these, but with a traditional file system you have to choose just one.

Finding a specific photo as your collection expands becomes increasingly difficult. What if you’ve settled on organizing by dates and you’re trying to find pictures of a specific person for a special occasion? If you’re anything like me, you’ll create a new folder and embark on a painstaking search and copy of the ones you wish to use –  tedious, error-prone and highly inefficient.  Moving from this small-scale example to managing content in an entire business, the amount of waste searching, organizing and replicating data is a world-class problem.

With object storage, you can associate metadata (data about the data) directly with your files allowing you to identify content in multiple ways. For example, pictures may be simultaneously identified by location, date, individuals captured and other information. Applications that leverage this metadata eliminate the time-draining guessing game to find content, increase productivity and reduce data sprawl.

Though Cloud Files can be accessed via a programmatic interface, Maldivica extends these services by providing a NAS interface (NFS and CIFS) into Cloud Files, allowing instant integration with existing systems and applications.

Associating metadata with large volumes of content in Cloud Files is another challenge. Maldivica has developed a powerful metadata engine that can automatically extract, normalize and associate valuable metadata already contained in over 1,000 common content-types, including a wide variety of media and office files.

Maldivica moves your content intact into Rackspace Cloud Files, allowing applications to access it directly through the Cloud Files API, eliminating vendor lock-in. We make Cloud Files accessible for active data archival, rapid content distribution on Akamai’s CDN or big data analysis and processing.

For more information on how Maldivica helps you capture the power of Rackspace Cloud Files, including downloading the Maldivica Storage Connector, please visit www.maldivica.com and check out blog.maldivica.com for the continuation of this post and others on the benefits of object storage.

Online forums have been around for a long time and they remain the best format for people to gather online around a common interest, brand or topic. While sites like Facebook get a lot of media attention, forums are the original social media and continue to grow and still make up significant amount of the Internet’s content and traffic.

When we built out Vanilla Forums’ hosting platform and switched to a SaaS offering, we needed it to be highly available – downtime is unacceptable – and be affordable.

Vanilla Forums was born when Mark O’Sullivan, one of Vanilla’s co-founders, was launching a forum for web designers and couldn’t find any forum software that would not offend a crowd of designers. So, he built his own and open sourced it. Fast forward a few years and Vanilla’s open source product has been downloaded nearly 600,000 times, and the company has transitioned to a SaaS provider of forum communities to hundreds of corporate, news and enthusiast websites.

Vanilla is a modern alternative to the legacy forum platforms that were introduced in the 90s. Vanilla has made forums more user-friendly, more engaging and easier to administer and moderate.

When we launched our SaaS offering, we needed to compete with self-hosted forum software not only on functionality, uptime and speed, but also by offering a better total cost of ownership. Could we use cloud servers to provide a high-availability service while keeping costs low? Keep in mind that when a forum goes down, it’s not just impacting one customer – it’s impacting thousands, sometimes hundreds of thousands of people who rely on the forum for information, support or social interaction. For example, one of our customers delivers a platform on which mobile games are built. When the community goes down, the work of thousands of developers can come to a screeching halt as they depend on the forum for support and feedback from peers.

With some help from Rackspace, we were able to design a hosting platform that met the specific needs of a forum application and that allows us to offer a solution at a lower TCO.

Going forward, as some of our larger customers start pushing the limits of cloud servers, we plan on adding physical servers to our infrastructure, creating a hybrid cloud/physical architecture which will allow us to continue offering a high quality service at a low cost. Pretty cool.

These providers’ solutions are now available in the enhanced Rackspace Cloud Tools Marketplace, a catalog that comprises third-party developed applications built and designed for the open Rackspace Cloud. The marketplace serves as a gateway to an open ecosystem of cloud solutions and will give customers seamless access to a broad range of tools that support the open cloud.

The Cloud Tools Marketplace presents a powerful and comprehensive application storefront and a single web portal. Rackspace Cloud customers can now more easily browse through various categories of technologies, find specific solutions to address their business needs and connect with these applications that improve their cloud experience.  Applications available in the Cloud Tools Marketplace extend innovative capabilities to customers in a host of areas, including:

• Cloud Management Platforms: Enstratus, RightScale, ScaleXtreme
• Monitoring and Reporting: Cloudability, New Relic
• Application Deployment: Standing Cloud
• Security: CloudPassage, Dome9, StillSecure
• Databases: Xeround, MongoLab
• SMTP Email: SendGrid

Working with third-party application developers is an integral part of the open Rackspace Cloud and will enable our customers to use tools that boost their flexibility while also helping them avoid the trap of vendor lock-in.  With the launch of the open Rackspace Cloud, it has become even simpler for application developers to join the Cloud Tools program and leverage the portability of OpenStack.

To learn more about joining the program, visit: https://cloudtools.rackspace.com/landing

For additional information and to check out the Rackspace Cloud Tools Marketplace, head over to: https://cloudtools.rackspace.com/home

Additionally, for an overview of the enhanced features and functionality of the Cloud Tools Marketplace, we invite you to join Rackspace for a webinar Wednesday, Aug. 22, 2012. Register for the webinar at: https://cc.readytalk.com/cc/s/showReg?udc=ayftofjne1j8

A recent survey by Alcatel-Lucent revealed that the No. 1 concern about current cloud offerings is application performance. Therefore, it makes sense for leaders in cloud computing and application performance management (APM) to work together, to help their IT operations and Dev/Ops customers deliver applications that perform in the cloud..

OPNET is delighted to share this vision with Rackspace. APM solutions should make it very easy to monitor end-user experience while also providing rapid analysis of transaction data. Monitoring end-user experience is different than monitoring the performance of elements that support applications. Consider the difference between these questions:

• How are users in Manhattan experiencing the new release of our electronic medical records application?

• How fast does the database process transactions?

The second question may be a good one to explore further if “the database” is the problem. But monitoring any performance metric for a single tier of a modern application without understanding how it impacts users is not as helpful. APM should start with end-user experience monitoring.

User transactions are also a rich source of information for solving tricky problems that impact business. For example, once a problem with end-user experience is identified, such as “the application is so slow we are losing customers,” which investments are required to fix the problem? And which specialists are needed to make those decisions?  DBAs? .NET developers? Network engineers? Web content management systems specialists? Your cloud provider’s support hotline?

The same line of thinking applies in every industry that relies on networked applications for business: avoid fire-fighting parties with lots of different IT specialists whenever possible. Save your specialists for the strategic projects. And, don’t invest in upgrades or new technology unless it will help you fix the real problem you’re trying to address.

OPNET’s approach to APM starts with providing choices for instrumentation so that enterprises can collect transaction data effectively, based on their unique environments. There are situations in which the right instrumentation might be passive, on a private datacenter’s 10 Gbps network. Or from end-user browsers on mobile devices that access your Rackspace-hosted web applications over the Internet. Or with agents that collect code-level transaction traces on each virtualized component of your production application. Or some combination of the three.

OPNET also believes that storing performance information for each individual transaction is essential. So long as there is an easy way to analyze the stored information, this approach results in faster problem-solving. After all, it is very difficult to predict in advance which transaction you will need to examine to answer a question that has not been asked yet. Check out “All Transactions, All the Time” to read more about this subject.

Finally, sophisticated analytics are required to automate interpretation of stored transaction data so IT can rapidly diagnose the root cause of each problem and fix them. The smarter the analytics are about each IT domain (network, system, application …), the easier they will make IT’s workload.

Our clients dramatically reduce the cost of supporting their high-performance applications because of these themes in our APM Xpert suite. OPNET’s AppResponse Xpert SaaS Edition is a new part of the suite that provides a unique, agentless approach to monitoring the end-user experience of web applications — even when they are hosted in the cloud.

You can request a free trial by clicking the ”Get Now” link on our new Rackspace profile page.