Blog - JAK Tec Software Solutions and Services

NSA's open source Nifi a boon for Cloud Interoperability ?

posted Dec 18, 2014, 6:53 AM by Karuna Joshi [ updated Dec 18, 2014, 6:54 AM ]

The National Security Agency (NSA) has recently released its Nifi tool under the Apache license. This open source software product will automate data flows among multiple computer networks, even when data formats and protocols differ.

Niagarafiles (Nifi) is a dataflow system based on the concepts of flow-based programming and was designed to manage dataflow in massive distributed computing systems operated by numerous teams and organizations.

This program could facilitate cloud platform interoperability.

For details check this link - http://gcn.com/articles/2014/12/01/nsa-nifi.aspx

Cloud Data Management Policies: Security and Privacy Checklist

posted May 9, 2014, 10:38 AM by Karuna Joshi [ updated May 9, 2014, 11:18 AM ]

Are you struggling with migrating to a cloud platform ?

Are you concerned about the security and privacy of your data on the Cloud ?

Have you defined all the policies necessary to ensure data security ?

We recently published a cloud security checklist that can be used as a reference by CIOs and Chief Information Security Officers (CISO) to ensure they have their enterprise security policies are clearly defined.

Abstract of our paper

Organizations have complex enterprise data policies, as well as legal and statutory constraints, that require compliance. Such policies are today enforced on internal resources that are completely controlled by the organization. On moving to a cloud based solution, the organization has to often hand over this control to the service provider. Hence, acquiring cloud services requires significant human intervention and negotiation -- people have to check whether a provider’s service attributes ensure compliance with their organization’s constraints. It is critical to ensure security and privacy of data on the cloud. In fact security concerns are one of the key adoption barriers of cloud services, especially for public or hybrid cloud deployments. Multi-tenancy related security/isolation issues and cross domain cloud access/authorization are some of the important privacy issues that organizations are concerned about. In this paper we define the critical security and privacy policies that an organization adopting cloud computing must formulate to ensure their enterprise data policies and constraints are addressed by the cloud provider. These policies are part of an essential check list that should be referred to by every organization migrating to the cloud.

Dr. Karuna Joshi part of the EDUCAUSE working group for Total Cost of Ownership for Cloud Services

posted May 7, 2014, 8:12 AM by Karuna Joshi [ updated May 7, 2014, 8:18 AM ]

Dr. Karuna P Joshi has been invited to be part of the EDUCAUSE working group on Total Cost of Ownership for Cloud Services (ECAR-TCO). The purpose of this group is to develop a flexible methodology for calculating a total cost of ownership for cloud-based services. This methodology can then be used to inform institutional strategies to offer, improve, or outsource IT services.

Project Description

Higher education has an increasingly rich set of cloud-based alternatives to campus-based IT services. Some of the most compelling reasons to move to the cloud are the promise of lower cost for like or better service levels, faster time to deployment, a greater business focus, and immediate scalability. Despite the vast promise of cloud technology, we lack a methodology to accurately and fully benchmark costs of today's campus-based services against cloud alternatives. Without this, institutions risk making potentially costly decisions that are difficult to undo, and either continue with a status quo approach or take a leap of faith into the cloud hoping the decision was the right one. ECAR-TCO builds on earlier efforts with the goal of developing a flexible methodology that can be applied by a variety of higher education institutions and customized to fit local environments.

What is a Cloud Broker ?

posted May 7, 2014, 7:41 AM by Karuna Joshi [ updated May 9, 2014, 11:51 AM ]

Cloud Broker is a much used term in cloud computing that doesn't appear to have a standard definition. Consumers desire a broad spectrum of services from potential Cloud Brokers. They want a cloud broker to -

Enable them traverse through the myraid of service offerings and be able to compare and contrast them.
Help the organization search and acquire the cloud service that best meets their needs.
Estimate their cloud needs, specially for storage, computing and hosting services.
Plan their cloud capacity and predict the future usage based on their current datacenter usage.
Negotiate for the services - get the best price and service level agreements
Help them continuously monitor the Service Level Agreements (SLAs)
Manage the relationship with the Cloud service Provider
Manage the Cloud Service.
Plan and ensure a smooth transition to the Cloud.

Needless to add, no single Cloud Broker will be able to meet all these requirements. Many consulting companies and large federal contractors have begun foraying into Cloud Brokerage, but a large number of organizations are still finding migrating to the Cloud a frustrating endeavour.

What are your expectations from a Cloud Broker ? Let us know and we will add it to this ever growing list.