News

Cloud Spending to Reach 100 Billion by 2016

Worldwide spending on public IT cloud services will be more than US$ 40 billion in 2012 and is expected to approach US$ 100 billion in 2016, according to a report from International Data Corporation (IDC).

The IDC study, "Worldwide and Regional Public IT Cloud Services 2012-2016 Forecast" (IDC #236552), forecasts that public IT cloud services will see an annual growth rate of 26.4 percent – five times that of the IT industry overall – from 2012 to 2016.

"The IT industry is in the midst of an important transformative period as companies invest in the technologies that will drive growth and innovation over the next two to three decades," said Frank Gens, senior vice president and chief analyst at IDC.

According to the report, by 2016, public IT cloud services will account for 16 percent of IT revenue in the following technology categories: applications, system infrastructure software, platform as a service (PaaS), servers, and basic storage. Additionally, cloud services will generate 41 percent of all growth in these categories by 2016.

Software as a service (SaaS) will claim the largest share of public IT cloud services spending over the next five years. However, the report states that basic storage and platform as a service will show faster growth. You can read more: http://www.idc.com.

Half of Companies Suffered Security Breaches

Coverity Inc. has released results of a study showing that web application security incidents have become increasingly common and expensive. More than half of the companies surveyed experienced at least one breach in the past 18 months. And, among those reporting incidents, 18 percent put their losses at more than US$ 500,000 while another 8 percent saw losses in excess of US$1 million.

Of the respondents who experienced a breach, 71 percent said they lacked the right security technologies suitable for development. Additionally, 79 percent said that security processes cannot scale with the volume of code they produce, and 71 percent said they lack the funding to invest in security.

The study, based on a survey of 240 North American and European software developers who influence the development of their companies' web applications, also found that only 42 percent of respondents follow secure coding guidelines and 26 percent utilize threat modeling. Additionally, only 17 percent test during the development cycle, and more than half do not audit their code before integration testing.

"The Software Security Risk Report" is a commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of Coverity to examine application security and testing practices. Read more at: http://www.coverity.com.

Amazon Launches Reserved Instance Marketplace

Amazon Web Services has launched its Reserved Instance Marketplace – an online marketplace allowing AWS customers to sell their Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) Reserved Instances to other businesses and organizations.

According to the announcement, customers can browse the Reserved Instance Marketplace to find varying Reserved Instance term lengths and pricing options sold by other AWS customers. Through the Reserved Instance Marketplace, customers can make a one-time payment to reserve compute capacity for a specified term and receive a significant discount on the hourly charge for that instance.

The Reserved Instance Marketplace lets customers sell Reserved Instances as their needs change (e.g., moving instances to a new AWS Region, changing to a new instance type, or selling capacity for projects that end before the term expires). Thus, the Marketplace allows customers to purchase Reserved Instances outside the standard one-year and three-year term lengths. Amazon EC2 Instances purchased on the Reserved Instance Marketplace offer the same capacity reservations as Reserved Instances purchased directly from AWS.

To learn more about the Reserved Instance Marketplace, please visit: http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/reserved-instance-marketplace.

Shuttleworth Funds Inktank and Ceph

Inktank, which provides enterprise-level support for the Ceph Distributed Storage System, announced that Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth has invested US$ 1 million to help fund Inktank and support the Ceph community.

"Ceph redefines storage as an open source service, meeting one of the key challenges for enterprises and cloud providers who need scalable and cost-effective storage," said Shuttleworth. He also said, "The distinctive architecture of Ceph gives it natural advantages over both proprietary and open source competitors. We found Ceph to be mature enough to warrant its inclusion in Ubuntu 12.10 as a storage option for our OpenStack reference architecture … ."

The Ceph open source distributed storage system combines object storage, block storage, and a Posix-compatible filesystem into one unified platform that runs on commodity hardware, freeing users from restrictive and proprietary storage solutions. Ceph was integrated into the mainline Linux kernel in 2010 and into Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, which was released in May 2012. For more information about Ceph, please see: http://www.ceph.com.

Only 31 Percent of Businesses Test Mobile Apps

Capgemini and Sogeti recently released the findings of the fourth annual World Quality Report. The report, published in conjunction with HP, shows that only 31 percent of organizations surveyed currently formally test their mobile applications. When organizations do conduct mobile Quality Assurance (QA), they focus on performance (64 percent) and functionality (48 percent), more than security (18 percent).

The report showed that 51 percent of businesses surveyed run testing as an in-house function; only 13 percent have moved to a service fully managed by an external provider. However, the report also indicated a lack of confidence in internal software QA capabilities – 59 percent characterized their internal QA team's knowledge of the latest testing tools and technologies as "average." Two-thirds of respondents said they do not have the right tools to test mobile applications, and one-third lack the appropriate testing methodologies, processes, and expertise.

The report also highlights the impact of cloud computing on testing and QA. Almost a quarter of the applications (22 percent) of the firms surveyed are currently hosted in the cloud. Additionally, 28 percent of testing now occurs in a cloud environment, and the report forecasts this to increase to 39 percent by 2015.

You can download a copy of the World Quality Report at: http://www.capgemini.com/insights-and-resources/by-publication/world-quality-report-2012--2013/.

DreamHost Announces DreamObjects Storage Service

DreamHost, a global web and cloud hosting company, announced DreamObjects, an inexpensive, scalable object storage service.

According to the announcement, DreamObjects is fully compatible with APIs of other popular object storage services, making it ideal for application developers looking for faster performance and better reliability. Individuals and businesses looking to back up or store their files, media, and data online can do so simply and quickly, paying for the storage they use. The company states that the price per GB of storage is just 7 cents per month for usage-based billing, and monthly prepaid plans go below 5 cents per GB to store 50TB or more of data.

DreamObjects is powered by Ceph, the open source, massively scalable, distributed storage system. And, DreamHost uses the Opscode Private Chef framework to automate the provisioning and configuration of the technology powering DreamObjects. For more information, please visit: http://dreamhost.com/cloud/dreamobjects/.

OEIS to Focus on Security of Energy Facilities

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) has created a new office to help the Commission focus on potential cyber and physical security risks to energy facilities.

The announcement states that the new Office of Energy Infrastructure Security (OEIS) will "provide leadership, expertise and assistance to the Commission to identify, communicate, and seek comprehensive solutions to potential risks to FERC-jurisdictional facilities from cyber attacks and such physical threats as electromagnetic pulses."

"Creating this office allows FERC to leverage its existing resources with those of other government agencies and private industry in a coordinated, focused manner," said FERC Chairman Jon Wellinghoff. He also stated that, "Effective mitigation of cyber and other physical attacks requires rapid interactions among regulators, industry, and federal and state agencies." You can find more information at: http://www.ferc.gov.