Patrick Kerpan

Cloud computing is so alluring. The public cloud economizes infrastructure resources and creates a scalable, on-demand source for compute capacity. Additionally, the cloud can be a strategic asset for enterprises that know how to migrate, integrate and govern deployments securely. Apple co-founder, Steve Wozniak recently said, "A lot of people feel 'Oh, everything is really on my computer,' but I say the more we transfer everything onto the web, onto the cloud, the less we're going to have control over it." In fact, over 70% of IT professionals worry about security according to an IDG Enterprise Cloud Computing Study. Boiled down, security, access and connectivity are really issues of control. As any prudent cloud user, the application has its own unique security features, such as disk encryption and port filtering. But do these layers of security features overlap o... (more)

VMware ESX August 12 Surprise: Implications for Cloud Computing

Patruck Kerpan's Blog How should enterprises or Cloud Providers react to the VMware "August 12th surprise"? To those who may not have heard - the latest versions of VMware's ESX hypervisor started shutting down as the hypervisor clock hit the date of August 12th. This was due to what amounts to a hardcoded shutdown being left in the server from its evaluation days. Clearly if you are an enterprise dutifully "up to patch" this would have put a big hurt on your operation, IF virtualization was more ubiquitous in the production data center. The fact is enterprise data centers don't ha... (more)