Renewable energy has been the hot topic in the cloud industry lately. Data centres for big players like Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft and Google require a lot of power, and I mean a LOT of power. One data centre consumes the equivalent energy of about 25,000 homes per year. Data centres are major sources of energy consumption and there is growing pressure on companies to be more socially responsible and to operate sustainably.
CloudOps has been helping companies leverage the power of cloud services for nearly as long as cloud services have been around. We were early adopters and evangelists of AWS and open source cloud technologies such as OpenStack, CloudStack and Docker. We understood the value of API-driven, self-service scalable infrastructure, and so did our customers. However, as the industry matured, we kept getting the same question: can I do this in Canada?
Image credit: Jessica Borutski
Recent European Union data protection regulation is pushing clouds back to the new world.
10 ms away from the Patriot Act
Many of the early adopters of our Canadian IaaS, cloud.ca, were organizations that write software and want to run it inside Canadian legal jurisdiction because they or their customers prefer Canada's laws for data protection and data privacy.
CloudOps is often asked to provide proposals for organizations migrating to cloud IaaS from their local or self-managed physical servers by people very experienced with virtualization, SANs and dedicated servers. Questions frequently come up about what level of RAID we use in cloud storage and how long it takes to increase the storage amount available to a server. There is also concern with using network storage, as it is perceived to be slower.
cloud.ca is a Citrix Ready verified regional IaaS, meaning that it is trusted to enhance Citrix solutions for cloud infrastructure and end-user compute workloads. As such, we were invited to demo our platform at Citrix Synergy a couple of weeks ago in Orlando, FL.
Earlier this month a CloudOps team attended Citrix Synergy in Orlando, FL. For those of you who aren't familiar with it, it's a three day event for Citrix partners and customers focused on enterprise mobility, not to mention a great place to network and have a bit of fun.
Previously, I blogged about differences between hosting and cloud on cloudops.com. To continue with the theme of contrasting Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) cloud to things that are often confused with cloud, in this post I will compare IaaS cloud to virtualization. First off, SaaS can run on cloud, but is not cloud. I am strictly referring to an IaaS cloud.
Different people have different security needs, but everybody agrees that having more security options is a good thing. Two-factor authentication (2FA), also called two-step verification, is one such option that is becoming more prevalent these days. Its purpose is simple: add an extra layer of security to the login process of your application (in our case, cloud.ca’s web console).
Cloud computing’s roots lie in the evolution of on-demand computing and computer networks. It has benefitted from important developments in virtualization, resource allocation and shared architectures. Now there is a true Canadian (Infrastructure as a Service) IaaS cloud.
