Ellen Rubin

5th International Cloud Expo New York Last week's post explored federation in the cloud, allowing enterprises to move workloads seamlessly across internal and external clouds according to business and application requirements. Advances in federation are good news for companies considering a move to the cloud since deployments no longer need to be custom projects and applications no longer have to be tightly coupled to a particular cloud. To follow up, there's been lots of discussion recently about the concept of the "Intercloud," a direction for cloud computing that is closely related to federation and ties in with much of our work at CloudSwitch. A term introduced by Cisco, the Intercloud refers to a mesh of clouds that are interconnected based on open standards to provide a universal environment for cloud computing. Like the name suggests, it's similar to the Inter... (more)

Amazon’s VPC Opens the Door for Innovation and Enterprise Cloud Adoption

The recent announcement from Amazon of the Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) represents the next big advance in the evolution chain for cloud computing. Enterprises can now integrate their IT infrastructure with Amazon's vast computing and storage resources, using a VPN connection from their data center to their own virtual private cloud which then looks like part of their internal network. Until the release of VPC, companies were left to build applications and utilize the cloud as a separate and somewhat siloed portion of their computing environment. In addition to the VPN connection... (more)

Holiday Presents from the Cloud

Cloud Expo New York As the year winds down, there are a few things I have come to expect: holiday parties, snow, and new features from cloud providers.  This year exceeded all of my expectations, starting with a note in early December from our friends at Terremark letting us know that they have fixed their Windows pricing for cloud servers.  Until this upgrade, if you started a Windows server in their cloud, you had to pay for a whole month of Windows licensing ($30-$100 depending on the version) no matter how much you used the server. This was rather un-cloudlike, where we want ... (more)

2010 is the Year of the Federated Cloud Computing

In this first post of 2010, I’d like to look at one of the most important cloud issues that enterprises want to tackle: federation in the cloud — across clouds and between the cloud and the data center. Also known as hybrid clouds, the notion of federation has been around since cloud computing began, but as a long-term vision rather than a working solution. This year that gap is going to close. What Is Cloud Federation? Federation brings together different cloud flavors and internal resources so companies can select a computing environment on demand that makes sense for a partic... (more)

New CloudSwitch Blog for Enterprise Cloud Computing

Welcome to our enterprise cloud computing blog where we'll share our perspectives on cloud computing trends and best practices for the enterprise. We're a team with extensive experience in IT software and systems (learn more about us), and we're passionate about the opportunity that cloud computing offers for fundamentally improving enterprise IT. However, we believe that before the cloud can reach its potential, some innovation needs to take place within the enterprise data center to make cloud computing simple, secure and tightly integrated with existing IT infrastructure. Our ... (more)