OpSource Cloud Named 'Champion' by Info-Tech Research

OpSource was recently recognized as a top Cloud Infrastructure-as-a-Service vendor in an independent research study conducted by Info-Tech Research Group.OpSource was ranked among the ‘Champions’ in a quadrant landscape and rated ‘Best Value’ against other vendors and products.

Info-Tech's research evaluated each vendor's product offerings, including important features such as granular control of privacy, geographical scope of data centers, SLA service tiers, ability to back-up to cloud storage, and ease of control for the user.

Specifically, the report highlighted as OpSource's key strengths:

Security
Guaranteed latency SLA
Ease of set-up and user maintenance
24x7 phone and email support
Support for SaaS developers

Key findings of the report include the fact that one's use case is a very important factor when selecting IaaS providers. Info-Tech recommends the OpSource Cloud as an excellent place for organizations to host their SaaS and web applications. If you would like to gain a better understanding of the Info-Tech research, please view this morning's press release or refer to a summary of the report:

Dimension Data Scoops Up OpSource

Systems integrator Dimension Data plans to enhance its cloud computing offerings by acquiring OpSource, a Santa Clara, California, provider of hosted cloud services.

Dimension Data, an NTT Group subsidiary based in Johannesburg, South Africa, traditionally has focused on offering communication services, such as building and managing networks, delivering unified communications services and offering security services. But with an increasing number of customers asking for help with building private clouds and using public clouds, the company has been boosting its cloud expertise, said Brett Dawson, CEO of Dimension Data.

It was attracted to OpSource's automation and orchestration capabilities and particularly how those tools can be used across hybrid public and private cloud systems.

When companies add new servers to their private clouds, they must provision a whole set of capabilities, including memory, software licenses, networking and all of their business processes, said Ettienne Reinecke, CTO of Dimension Data. OpSource has automation and orchestration technology that makes that process easy, he said. In addition, OpSource's tools allow users to extend this automation and orchestration over multiple data centers. Dimension Data plans to offer those tools as a managed service, and its customers will be able to use them in their private or public cloud environments.

Dimension Data also envisions building new kinds of services, such as unified communications offerings, that it can run off of OpSource's platform and deliver to customers.

OpSource will become part of Dimension Data's new Cloud Solutions Business Unit.

With so many companies entering the cloud computing business, analysts have been anticipating consolidation. Just a few companies have been bought so far. One of the largest acquisitions was Verizon's (VZ) purchase of Terremark for US$1.4 billion earlier this year.

The companies did not disclose the value of the OpSource acquisition.

Nancy Gohring covers mobile phones and cloud computing for The IDG News Service. Follow Nancy on Twitter at @idgnancy. Nancy's e-mail address is Nancy_Gohring@idg.com

Gartner Positions OpSource as a 'Challenger'

Gartner Positions OpSource as a 'Challenger'Jan 13, 2011 (Close-Up Media via COMTEX) -- OpSource, Inc., a provider of enterprise cloud and managed hosting solutions, announced it has been positioned by Gartner, Inc. in the Challengers quadrant of the "Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure as a Service and Web Hosting" 2010 report.

According to Gartner analysts and report authors Lydia Leong and Ted Chamberlin, "For the past five years, the Web hosting market has been evolving toward on-demand infrastructure provisioned on a flexible, pay-as-you-go basis; the majority of hosting customers now obtain at least some of their infrastructure on demand, and most new hosting contracts include on-demand services. The market for traditional Web hosting services, especially for Internet and intranet Web content and applications, continues to grow." "We believe our placement in the Challengers quadrant is a confirmation of our rapid growth over the past year as IT organizations have consistently selected OpSource's enterprise-ready hosting and cloud IaaS solutions for cost-effectively scaling mission-critical applications in the cloud," said Treb Ryan, CEO for OpSource. "By leveraging our deep expertise in managing complex hosted environments, we are able to customize our offerings to meet the needs of businesses of any size. With the recent launch of OpSource's Managed Services for the Cloud offering, we continue to break down the barriers to adoption for enterprise companies and smaller businesses migrating applications to the cloud." According to a release, OpSource is a public cloud provider offering both application and system management services in the cloud. With the company's continued product innovation and positioning in Garter's Magic Quadrant, OpSource demonstrates its growth in the cloud Infrastructure-as-a-Service market.

Overcoming Cloud Security Issues

A number of recent surveys on cloud computing have shown that security in the cloud is the number one concern among organizations considering cloud adoption.

Large enterprises are still cautious about moving their applications and data to the cloud environment as many of them view it as a complete loss of control over security and data. There are many arguments within the IT community about whether the shortcomings of the cloud, with security being the most stated one, will outweigh the benefits or not. The obvious reality is that the cloud is still evolving, and solution providers battling for customer attention are developing and deploying more sophisticated security measures to ensure best security and privacy practices.

Some experts in the cloud domain even claim that the expertise of established giants of the cloud industry, such as Google, can provide higher security considering that they can afford to employ the best specialists in the field vs. a customer’s in-house security team. Wherever the truth lies, cloud customers, both SMBs and enterprises, should always demand transparency from a cloud vendor and receive detailed instructions on the security measures that they have established. They should also ensure that the cloud provider lists the guaranteed security controls in a SLA agreement.

Gartner has listed the following 7 as the top security risks that are a potential threat to companies moving to a cloud environment:

user access to data and information
compliance with regulations
location of the data
the encryption used at every level
recovery measures in the event of a security breach
investigative support
long-term viability of the agreement between the provider and the user.

The first question that comes to every cloud customer’s mind is—”Where dose my data reside?” This is a very legitimate question, as the location of the data center can greatly affect data security. Some cloud vendors have data centers offshore in countries with different privacy and security laws, meaning that the control over the user data may be exposed to third party, such as cloud administrators. Cloud customers should ask the solution provider about the location of their data centers and also about the security measures they execute in case of a security breach.

When considering a cloud vendor, companies have to make sure that the provider is aware of its duty to assist the customer in being compliant with governmental data security and privacy standards.
Another important thing to be sure of is that the cloud vendor uses encryption for securing data at rest and in transit. The cloud service provider should encrypt data on storage devices at all times in order to prevent data breaches. Companies have to make sure that their data is protected when transmitted over the Internet by always being encrypted and authenticated by the cloud provider.

BizCloud is dedicated to helping companies mitigate potential risks involved with cloud migration. Partnering with the leading cloud providers, BizCloud identifies the best providers or solutions for our clients. The right choice of cloud vendor depends on a thorough assessment of their offerings which is exactly what BizCloud’s cloud experts do for our clients.

Since the security of data is one of the most important considerations when choosing a cloud vendor, we decided to highlight OpSource and their “defense-in-depth” security strategy that makes them a leader in Enterprise-Class Security. Here is the short overview of security measures provided by OpSource Cloud Hosting.

OpSource Cloud Hosting provides the security and control that enterprises demand. Unlike other commodity cloud services, OpSource provides an environment to configure and lock-down your compute and storage environments. With Opsource Cloud Networks, customers are able to configure VLANs between servers, configure ACL-based firewalls, and control and track administrative usage. Data is encrypted while being transferred as well as at rest.

Rather than implementing their network security on top of their virtualized servers, OpSource Cloud Networks is a truly network-based implementation running within their Cisco switching fabric. Customers manage and configure OpSource Cloud Networks via the web-based OpSourceCloud.net user interface or Open API.

Role-based Administrative Control
VPN administration of all servers
Unique username and password for multiple administrators
Role-based permissions allow an administrator to limit to manage only certain resources, such as servers, storage or networks.
Reporting
Audit logs of all environmental changes
Compliance

OpSource maintains SAS-70 attestation in conjunction with their auditor SAS 70 Solutions. Their SAS-70 attestation is based on an in-depth series of documented controls covering the operational management of the OpSource Cloud Hosting infrastructure.

24/7 Incident Response
OpSource Security Incident Response Team to handle reports of security incidents. The OSIRT will escalate the incident to law enforcement and/or executive management as prescribed in security policies.


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OpSource Announces Enterprise-Class IaaS Managed Services for the Cloud

Infrastructure as a Service is set for rapid growth in 2011 as businesses and developers transition from running their own capital intensive IT hardware and systems to “pay-as-you-go” Cloud-based IT infrastructures. OpSource have recently announced their Enterprise Class Managed Services for the Cloud, a full suite of application and system management services businesses demand to migrate and scale mission-critical applications in the public cloud.

This offering enables organizations to experience the cost benefits of the public cloud while mitigating the security, control and integration issues that have inhibited the adoption of cloud services in the past. OpSource is one of the first public cloud providers to offer this combination of application and system management services in the cloud, which can be customized by choosing from two different levels:
OpSource Tech Ops™: provides smaller organizations with the system monitoring, server administration, and OS support required to get up and running with cloud computing while minimizing operational risk.
OpSource App Ops™: offers the application deployment, change management, data management, performance management, optimization management and compliance services that organizations need to scale cloud operations while minimizing operating expense and risk.

OpSource is making it easy and affordable for organizations to get up and running with cloud services by offering a pricing structure that scales with cloud computing usage. Managed Services for the Cloud are priced between $0.05 and $0.60 per CPU hour, based on volume and term commitments. OpSource’s “pay-as-you-go” pricing structure is a system that allows an organization to pay for enterprise-quality computing capability when they need it, paying for it only when it is being used. This flexible, frictionless sales model reduces the pricing barriers for many organizations, enabling companies to more seriously consider cloud-based managed services.

Gartner estimates the market for cloud computing services will grow over the next few years, reaching $150 billion by 2013(1). Research VP for Gartner, Lydia Leong commented on the migration to cloud-based services: “Adoption of cloud infrastructure services is accelerating across businesses of all sizes. However, many organizations do not want to self-manage their infrastructure and cannot fully realize either the cost or agility benefits of the cloud without managed services. Some businesses lack the in-house expertise to manage their cloud servers, while others seek to free their IT organization of the need to do systems administration tasks that add no business value. A ‘menu’ of managed services on top of cloud infrastructure allows businesses to select the solutions that best fit their needs.”

In a move to further ease the transition to cloud services, OpSource also announced the availability of Hybrid Connect™, a secure Ethernet VLAN connection that links OpSource’s Managed Hosting and Cloud Hosting environments. With Hybrid Connect, organizations can leverage the flexibility of the public cloud and the performance of dedicated physical servers in the OpSource Managed Hosting environment.

“With Managed Service for the Cloud, we now have the ability to align our customers’ unique application requirements with the right combination of managed services and hosting resources,” said Treb Ryan, CEO for OpSource. “This enables us to provide companies with a customized solution that can help them to more confidently deliver their web-based services from the cloud without the complexity, operational issues and expense associated with supporting these applications on their own infrastructure. When you combine our managed services with our flexible pricing models and ability to scale service on demand, OpSource has removed any remaining barriers to enterprise adoption of cloud services today.”

For more information or to find out how to purchase OpSource Managed Services for the Cloud or Hybrid Connect, please visit www.opsource.net.

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