Tuesday 22 May 2012

SWiFT 10: New Irish cloud computing standard launched

THE Irish Government has launched new standards to provide guidance to businesses on moving to cloud computing. The Department of Enterprise and Jobs said yesterday that "cloud services were reshaping the future of computing but one of the primary concerns with the emerging cloud paradigm is the lack of standards to guide its adoption and implementation.”


The National Standards Authority of Ireland in partnership with the Irish Internet Association, yesterday launched the new standards, entitled, SWiFT 10: Adopting the Cloud – Decision Support for Cloud Computing which is designed to provide guidance to organisations of all sizes on the issues that need to be addressed when thinking about moving to the cloud.

Ken Thompson (aka The BumbleBee) blogs about bioteams, virtual collaboration and business simulation at www.bioteams.com.

Sunday 20 May 2012

UK Government may miss cloud targets

The UK government may miss its cloud computing targets because of a lack of enthusiasm from public sector IT staff, a new report has found. The G-Cloud plan calls for 50% of new government IT spending to move to cloud computing services by 2015. A government "app store" called CloudStore was launched in February to offer such services to the public sector. G-Cloud aims to reduce government IT costs by £200m per year.

Ken Thompson (aka The BumbleBee) blogs about bioteams, virtual collaboration and business simulation at www.bioteams.com.

Friday 11 May 2012

Manage your Cloud Risks - don't go out on a LIMB!

For each Risk you identify you need to establish 4 critical things:

  1. Likelihood - the probability of it happening - typically high, medium or low
  2. Impact - the consequences of it happening - also high, medium or low
  3. Mitigation - what you are doing to ensure it does not happen
  4. Backup plan - what you will do if it does happen

You can easily remember these 4 using the simple acronym - LIMB!

Ken Thompson (aka The BumbleBee) blogs about bioteams, virtual collaboration and business simulation at www.bioteams.com.


Tuesday 8 May 2012

Whisple Cloud Myths Debunked - No1: Its not secure

Security is always an issue in IT and Cloud is no different.  We should start by acknowledging that the Cloud is already trusted by large numbers of major financial institutions and government  bodies globally who demand very high standards of security. However like any other new technology deployment we should understand what the key security issues are.

In the excellent US Government paper The Basics of Cloud Computing the authors offer this wise advice on cloud security:

"The first thing you must look into is the security measures that your cloud provider already has in place. These vary from provider to provider and among the various types of clouds. What encryption methods do the providers have in place? What methods of protection do they have in place for the actual hardware that your data will be stored on? Will they have backups of my data? Do they have firewalls set up? If you have a community cloud, what barriers are in place to keep your information separate from other companies?"

"There are many questions that you can ask, but it is important to choose a cloud provider that considers the security of your data as a major concern."

Ken Thompson (aka The BumbleBee) blogs about bioteams, virtual collaboration and business simulation at www.bioteams.com.