Voices in Cloud 2.0

INTRODUCTION
Creating application images, using entire virtual machines or otherwise such as container-based, is a convenient way of “snapshotting” applications, allowing them to be able to seamlessly move such images from one infrastructure to another—including virtualized clouds. Today, there are a growing number of various image-based tools available that do, in fact, make it easy to “convert” from one virtualization format to another, offering the efficient portability of images across different infrastructures - including clouds. Regrettably however, most are quickly finding that moving an image is only part of the challenge in enabling an application on a cloud environment. Getting these images to actually work optimally, connect with each other and other resources while maintaining portability once on the target environment/cloud…is a real problem and one that is not addressed by this class of solution.

WHY IMAGES ARE CONSIDERED USEFUL – THEY SEEM TO HELP BYPASS COMPLICATED APPLICATION DISCOVERY
Due to the complicated nature of real-world enterprise applications and their deployments on existing IT environments, it is often considered difficult to discover such an application environment in its entirety for the purposes of cloud migration. While Image-based tools try to make this easier, they take an overly simple approach of “discovering” such existing IT environments. This is especially true for use cases that run legacy workloads, those that may have gone through a series of changes, upgrades and maintenance over their lifetime and, even those that have evolved through a series of changes of IT personnel. It is because of these real-world complexities that discovering such environments along with their custom settings such as dependencies on networking and storage infrastructure and operating environments can be an extremely tedious exercise to “get it right”. It is in fact this challenge that has created the allure of many image-based solutions as a part, or in some cases a replacement for, discovery

The sad truth however, is that even though these solutions have a place, IMAGES ARE NOT SUFFICIENT as, or as a replacement for, discovery. True discovery is needed in order to adequately orchestrate the provisioning, operations and management of applications on clouds and required for enterprise-class cloud computing.

With an increased focus on exploiting a wider variety of business applications on the cloud and a broader choice of available cloud providers, enterprises need to focus on moving applications to the right cloud—not just any cloud or multi-cloud. Such a decision is often driven by factors that include the underlying cloud infrastructure's capabilities, metrics such as availability and API reliability on the cloud, and compliance conditions including geographic location and security standards. 

Check out this contributed piece on WIRED from our CEO…

CliQr would like to extend a very warm welcome to the members of our Board of Advisors! The advisory board brings together six executive leaders in the Silicon Valley to help make CliQr’s vision for the cloud computing industry a reality.

The cloud market is moving fast, starting with huge buzz around a bunch of web apps moving to one or two clouds to where we are today, with companies looking at cloud computing as a means to implement efficient business processes and support a productive work environment. With this maturation in the market, businesses now realize that the early migration vendors and approaches of hardwiring applications to a single cloud did little more than trade the constraints of their physical datacenter to being constrained on one cloud.

As we’ve all been hearing for the last few years, “The Cloud” is going to revolutionize our lives with scalable, on-demand computing and storage resources to suit all our software requirements. Soon we will require only a simple device to access our digital needs from anywhere in the world, and that ugly beige box under our desks can disappear. As the first generation of applications made its way to the cloud, it seemed as if the promise of the technology may already be a reality – witness Netflix hosting their entire video-on-demand service on Amazon’s cloud. However as user demand grows, and the next generation of software that runs mission critical operations in businesses and healthcare begin their cloud deployments, the situation becomes more complex. Each cloud provider is beginning to differentiate themselves to stand out from the crowd, and the choice of which cloud to host your service on is becoming a significant component of both the technical and business decision making process.

The past several years have witnessed rapid adoption of cloud computing and cloud services.  With the potential to significantly lower capital expenses, expedite time-to-market and increase IT agility and scalability, the value proposition for deploying cloud computing solutions is clear for many organizations. 

CliQr's CloudCenter platform completes the security requirements on clouds by using the mechanisms that clouds provide (see Part 1), and well-known standards-approved third-party technologies to secure applications and data on clouds, ultimately taking this hassle away from the enterprise. While this security is turned on by default, an enterprise can optionally disable some of the features and customize the security settings.

As enterprises continue to rely more and more on software applications to run their core businesses, application and data security are critical for any company. At the same time, security is a complex problem touching all seven layers of the software-networking stack, from physical resources up to application and data layer security. With the multitude of vendors and variables to work with, implementing security is both an intimidating and costly exercise.