THE CLOUD - Networks Asia

TRENDS & ANALYSIS • CASE STUDIES • VIEWPOINTS • TECHNOLOGY TIPS 

ASIA’S SOURCE FOR ENTERPRISE NETWORK KNOWLEDGE 

social media 

in the enterprise 

gadgets 

tablet wars 

Volume 8 • Issue 2 • June/July 2011 

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Taking the plunge into 

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CONTENTS 

trends&analysis 

4 Tablets drive up enterprise IT spending 

5 High-speed port market to hit $52 billion in 2015 

6 ‘Cloud sourcing’ revolution – risks and costs 

6 Indonesia tops mobile Internet use in S E Asia 

8 TE Connectivity upbeat on fiber prospects 

techtips 

16 Five tips for secure cloud computing 

casefiles 

24 RightScale helps Zynga keep up with growth 

2 6 Salvatore Ferragamo rolls out new IT infrastructure in Asia 

communicasia2011preview 

30 Broadband and mobile NGNs to take center stage 

gadgets 

38 Tablet wars 

regulars 

upfront 

2 The cloudy descent 

viewpoint 

28 The firewall – grown up or grown old? 

biteback 

40 Virtualization – a solution for the tablet 

security conundrum 

coverstory 

Taking the plunge 

into the cloud 

Some say it has descended. 

Others say it has 

condensed. The recent 

Amazon Web Services EC2 

outage brought the cloud 

back into focus. What are 

its real-world pros and 

cons? 

Page 10-15 

update 

Social media in the enterprise: how to make friends and 

safeguard people Page 18-20 Volume 8 • Issue 2 • June/July 2011 

Jonathan Bigelow Managing Director Email: jbigelow@questexasia.com 

SE Asia Bureau Chief 

Victor Ng 

vng@questexasia.com 

Senior Editor 

Khoo Boo Leong 

blkhoo@questexasia.com 

Online Content Editor 

Ken Wong 

kenw@questexasia.com 

Contributing Editor 

Emily Chia 

echia@questexasia.com 

Contributing Editor 

Joseph Rebeiro 

jrebeiro@questexasia.com 

Editorial Director 

Chee Sing Chan 

cchan@questexasia.com 

Art Director 

Eric Lam 

elam@questexasia.com 

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HR & Admin Manager 

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Circulation Director 

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Allie Mok 

amok@questexasia.com 

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www.networksasia.net 2011 june/july • network world asia 1

2 

upfront 

The cloudy descent 

The Amazon Web Services (AWS) EC2 outage in April 

made the front page of many newspapers, leading to 

critics of the cloud saying, “We told you so!” 

Over the last two years, the most common arguments I 

hear against cloud adoption center around trust and governance 

issues, data security, resource availability, and 

bandwidth. 

While considered the worst in the brief history of cloud 

computing, the impact of the EC2 outage underlines the 

pervasiveness of the cloud today. 

With IT infrastructure trending over the last few years 

toward consolidation, simplification and cost reduction, 

virtualization has invariably established a foothold in data 

centers and IT departments. 

And virtualization is the foundation of – and the catalyst 

for – cloud adoption. 

As businesses experience the benefits of cloud infrastructure 

– be it storage as a service, software as a service, 

security as a service, and all manner of Web services – we 

can see the clear evolution of business computing heading 

to the cloud. By now, cloud services have developed to a 

point where most, if not all, software vendors have developed 

and released their applications as a service. 

In Asia, I believe that the cloud’s descent is inevitable, 

so long as we: 

By Victor Ng 

• Get more used to service level agreements (SLAs) 

• Seriously establish standards in policies and processes 

• Proactively secure our virtual and cloud assets (read 

Tech Tips on page 16 and Clear Choice Test on pages 

33-37) 

But the evolution won’t stop there. With managed services 

and cloud sourcing combining to permanently alter 

the IT adoption and procurement landscape in the near future, 

there’s much to look forward to (see page 6). 

In this issue, we offer a sneak peek into this year’s CommunicAsia2011 

event (pages 30-32). Join us as we take the 

plunge into the descending cloud (pages 10-15) and provide 

an update on the security issues associated with social 

media (pages 18-23). 

See how big names like soon-to-IPO Zynga and worldrenowned 

leather fashion leader Ferragamo leverage on IT 

(pages 24-26). 

Then check out six of the hottest 

tablets you’ll be itching to get your 

hands on (page 38) and find out how 

to make them secure for your organization 

(pages 28 and 39). NWA 

Victor Ng vng@questexasia.com 

network world asia • june/july 2011 www.networksasia.net 

D

The data that drives our world is evolving. Innovations in 

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Because when there’s no centre, 

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© Hitachi Data Systems Corporation 2011. All Rights Reserved. 


4 


Gartner: Apple iPad to lead tablet 

market in driving up IT spending 

Gartner has forecast worldwide 

IT spending to total $3.6 trillion 

in 2011 – a 5.6% increase 

from $3.4 trillion in 2010. The research 

firm has slightly raised its outlook 

for 2011 from its previous forecast 

of 5.1% growth. 

Gartner has added media tablets, 

such as the iPad, to its computing 

hardware spending estimates beginning 

the first quarter of 2011, which 

has increased its computing hardware 

growth outlook from 7.5% to 9.5% for 

2011. 

Worldwide media tablet spending 

is projected to reach $29.4 billion in 

2011, up from $9.6 billion in 2010. 

Global spending on media tablets is 

forecast to increase at an annual average 

rate of 52% through 2015. 

Despite mounting competition from 

other operating systems (OSs), Apple’s 

iOS will continue to own the majority 

of the worldwide media tablet through 

2015, according to Gartner, Inc. Due 

to the success of Apple’s iPad, iOS will 

account for 69% of media tablet OSs in 

2011, and represent 47% of the media 

tablet market in 2015. 

Gartner analysts say the Apple iPad 

did to the tablet PC market what the 

iPhone did to the smartphone market: 

re-invented it. A media tablet is not 

just a different form factor to perform 

the same tasks that can be done on a 

PC. Tablets deliver a richer experience 

around content consumption, thanks 

to the ecosystem they 

support. The richer the 

ecosystem, the stronger 

the pull for consumers. 

“Seeing the response 

from both consumers 

and enterprises to the 

iPad, many vendors are 

trying to compete by 

first delivering on hardware 

and then trying to 

leverage the platform 

ecosystem,” said Caro- 

lina Milanesi, research vice president 

at Gartner. “Many, however, are making 

the same mistake that was made in 

the first response wave to the iPhone: 

they are prioritizing hardware features 

over applications, services and 

overall user experience. Tablets will 

be much more dependent on the latter 

than smartphones have been, and the 

sooner vendors realize that, the better 

chance they have to compete head-tohead 

with Apple.” 

Google’s Android OS is forecast to 

increase its worldwide share of the 

media tablet market from 20% in 2011 

to 39% in 2015. Analysts say Google’s 

decision not to open up the Honeycomb 

– its first OS version dedicated 

to tablets – to third parties will prevent 

fragmentation, but it will also slow the 

price decline and ultimately cap market 

share. 

“Volume will be driven by support 

from many players, the ecosystem of 

Worldwide IT Spending Forecast (Billions of US Dollars) 

2010 

Spending 

2010 

Growth (%) 

2011 

Spending 

Computing Hardware 374 12.3 409 9.5 

Enterprise Software 237 6.7 255 7.6 

IT Services 785 2.9 824 5.0 

Telecom 2,011 5.5 2,110 4.9 

All IT 3,406 5.7 3,598 5.6 

Source: Gartner (March 2011) 

Asia Pacific: End-User Spending on IT 

by Technology Segment (Millions of US 

dollars) 

Segment 2010 2011 

Computing Hardware 86,266 95,512 

Software 22,194 25,032 

IT Services 63,208 70,607 

Telecom 415,905 456,084 

Asia Pacific Total 587,573 647,234 

Source: Gartner (March 2011) 

2011 

Growth (%) 

applications for tablets getting more 

competitive and some platform flexibility 

allowing lower price points,” 

said Roberta Cozza, principal analyst 

at Gartner. “The new licensing model 

Google has introduced with Honeycomb 

enables Google to drive more 

control, allowing only optimal tablet 

implementations that don’t compromise 

quality of experience. This might 

mean that prices will drop at a slower 

pace than what we have seen in the 

smartphone market.” 

With the migration of Blackberry 

devices to QNX – the OS used on the 

Blackberry PlayBook – in 2012, RIM 

will be able to offer users a consistent 

experience across its whole product 

portfolio and create a single developer 

community. While QNX is a strong 

platform that delivers on performance, 

graphics and multitasking features, 

Gartner analysts said success in the 

media tablet market will be driven by 

richness of ecosystem. 

“It will take time and significant effort 

for RIM to attract developers and 

deliver a compelling ecosystem of applications 

and services around QNX 

to position it as a viable alternative to 

Apple or Android. This will limit RIM’s 

market share growth over the forecast 

period,” Ms. Milanesi said. “It will be 

mainly organizations that will be interested 

in RIM’s tablets because they either 

already have RIM’s infrastructure 

network world asia • june/july 2011 www.networksasia.net

deployed or have stringent security requirements.” 

MeeGo and WebOS, which currently 

have a weak presence in the smartphone 

market, will have a limited appeal 

unless they can grow that business. 

“Smartphone users will want to buy 

a tablet that runs the same operating 

system as their smartphone. This is 

so that they can share applications 

across devices as well as for the sense 

of familiarity the user interfaces will 

bring,” Milanesi said. “Vendors developing 

on Android should be prepared 

to see more cross-brand ownership as 

some users might put OS over brand 

when it comes to the purchasing decision. 

Improvements on usability and 

brand recognition are the strongest 

differentiators they can focus on.” 

NWA 

High speed port (1G, 10G, 40G, 100G) market to hit $52 billion in 2015 

INFONETICS RESEARCH’S latest Networking Ports market 

size and forecast report – which tracks 1 Gigabit, 10 Giga- 

bit, 40 Gigabit, and 100 Gigabit optical and Ethernet ports 

on enterprise and service provider equipment – highlights 

these findings: 

• The number of 1G, 10G, 40G, and 100G network ports 

shipped on service provider and enterprise equipment 

in 2010 jumped 43% over the previous year, to 184 

million, and manufacturers’ revenue grew 26%, to over 

$33 billion 

• Equipment manufacturers’ revenue from 1G, 10G, 

40G, and 100G networking ports is forecast to grow to 

almost $52 billion in 2015, as enterprises and service 

providers continue to build out their network infrastructure 

to respond to growing levels of traffic 

• In 2010, high-speed ports (10G, 40G, 100G) represented 

only 3% of all ports sold by manufacturers, but 

made up 43% of the revenue 

• Higher-speed port technology is not only important for 

carrying the world’s network traffic, but a critical source 

of revenue for equipment manufacturers 

“There is a lot of excitement these days around 100G and 

100GE, and whether or how soon 100G prices will cause 40G 

sales to decline,” notes Michael Howard, principal analyst for 

carrier and data center networks, and co-founder of Infonetics 

Research. “The truth is that we are at the start of a very long 

period where 100G and 100GE will be the major port player 

from 2015 through 2030, with bare beginnings of just several 

hundreds of 100GE ports on service provider routers shipped to 

Worldwide Sales of Media Tablets to End Users by OS 

(Thousands of Units) 

OS 2010 2011 2012 2015 

iOS 14,766 47,964 68,670 138,497 

Market Share (%) 83.9 68.7 63.5 47.1 

Android 2,502 13,898 26,382 113,457 

Market Share (%) 14.2 19.9 24.4 38.6 

MeeGo 107 788 1,271 3,057 

Market Share (%) 0.6 1.1 1.2 1.0 

WebOS 0 2,796 4,245 8,886 

Market Share (%) 0.0 4.0 3.9 3.0 

QNX 0 3,901 7,134 29,496 

Market Share (%) 0.0 5.6 6.6 10.0 

Other Operating 

Systems 

234 432 510 700 

Market Share (%) 1.3 0.6 0.5 0.2 

Total Market 17,610 69,780 108,211 294,093 

Source: Gartner (April 2011) 

date, and a few inter-city 100G WDM routes deployed. 

Howard adds that street pricing already looks very competitive, 

and with a lot of 100G technology development in motion 

– more focused than 40G – “we expect 100G pricing to get to 2X 

40G pricing in the 2013 timeframe, which should be the turning 

point for 100G versus 40G in the service provider market.” 

Matthias Machowinski, directing analyst for enterprise networks 

and video at Infonetics Research and co-author of the report, 

adds: “The market for 1G-and-higher enterprise ports took 

a bit of a breather in 2009 during the recession, but came back 

in full force in 2010. The enterprise 40G Ethernet port segment 

will be one of the most interesting to watch going forward, with 

the first shipments expected in 2011, followed by rapid growth 

driven by data center deployments.” 


6 


Risk and unexpected costs in 

the ‘cloud sourcing’ revolution 

The $820 billion IT services market 

is changing quickly and dramatically, 

as cloud computing 

and offshoring become mainstream, 

and CIOs should take steps to manage 

inherent risks and unexpected costs 

during the cloud services revolution, 

according to Gartner. 

During the next few years, market 

dynamics will determine whether 

cloud-enabled outsourcing will be the 

demise of traditional outsourcing, if it 

will lead to the convergence of services 

and products currently marketed “as a 

service”, or if it will result in next-generation 

outsourcing. 

Cloud-driven business and IT services 

include all types of solution that are developed, 

bundled and packaged as outsourcing 

service offerings for which the 

business or IT service provider uses one 

or more cloud computing technologies. 

These services can be delivered directly 

by a cloud provider or via a service 

aggregator for the delivery of preengineered 

and configurable business 

solutions in a timely and cost-effective 

manner. 

“Cloud service sourcing is immature 

and fraught with potential hazards. 

The hype around cloud computing services 

has increased interest, as well as 

caution, for CIOs trying to determine 

where, when and if cloud services can 

provide valuable outcomes for their 

businesses,” says Frank Ridder, research 

vice president at Gartner. “Organizations 

need to develop realistic cloud 

sourcing strategies and contracts that 

can reduce risk.” 

Indonesia tops mobile Internet use in South-east Asia 

AN OVERWHELMING 63% of 

Indonesian Internet users have 

adopted mobile Internet in April 

2011 – placing Indonesia at the 

top in South-east Asia (SEA) for 

mobile Internet use. Compared to 

March 2011, mobile Internet use 

among Indonesians increased by 

over 158% in April 2011. 

Effective Measure’s regional director 

for SEA, Russell Conrad, credits this 

growth to the increasing popularity 

of smartphones: “Along with the 

boom of Smartphones throughout the 

region, a growing number of consumers, 

including over five million Indonesian 

Internet users, are adopting 

mobile Internet to access infotainment, 

conduct business and engage 

in e-commerce while on the go. 

The following details the browsing 

patterns of Indonesian mobile 

Internet users in April 2011: 

• Mobile Internet users stayed on a 

webpage at an average of 1.07 minutes, 

13 seconds less than PC users 

• Each session on mobile Internet lasted 

for at an average of 19 minutes, 

4.30 minutes more than a PC session 

• Mobile internet users viewed an 

average of 17 pages per session, 7 

pages more than PC users 

“The Indonesian market is currently 

very exciting. The increased 

activity seen on mobile Internet provides 

an opportunity for businesses 

to target the Indonesian market and 

establish mobile-friendly interfaces 

to strengthen an online presence,” 

says Conrad. NWA 

Traditional IT services often find organizations 

locked in, fighting with rigid 

delivery or hesitation to change when 

engaged in traditional IT services deals. 

Innovation seldom materializes and solutions 

fail to scale, and service providers 

often struggle with their profits. 

In the new cloud services scenario, 

however, flexibility, agility and innovation 

are design principles and, over 

time, service providers will succeed in 

delivering on these principles. The market 

also expects scalability, cost-efficiency 

and pay-per-use pricing models 

from cloud services solutions. 

Although cloud services already provide 

these, service providers manage 

their risks through terms and conditions 

that are still immature. However, 

Gartner believes that solutions and 

their commercial terms are maturing 

quickly. 

To avoid the potential pitfalls and 

hidden costs of cloud sourcing, Ridder 

advises organizations to ensure they 

understand the short- and long-term 

implications of cloud services, on the 

demand and supply side, as well as on 

the sourcing life cycle itself. The services 

sourcing life cycle includes four crucial 

elements: sourcing strategy, vendor 

selection, contracting, and management 

and governance. 

“The life cycle is a critical area to plan 

and manage, regardless of whether 

organizations source their IT services 

through internal or external resources. 

Our forecasts indicate that organizations 

spend 53% of their IT services budget 

on external services, and that spending 

is growing 3.9% per year, while new 

categories of services are experiencing 

double-digit growth,” said Ridder. “Organizations 

can use Gartner’s extensive 

analysis of changes in delivery, pricing, 

investment and cost to more effectively 

develop their cloud sourcing strategies, 

negotiate their cloud services contracts 

and manage the performance of their 

providers.” NWA 



8 


TE Connectivity upbeat on fiber prospects 

Anticipating an exponential increase in broadband connectivity, the Enterprise Networks 

Group of TE Connectivity Ltd – formerly known as Tyco Electronics Ltd – is now gearing its 

products to reduce the cost of cabling installation while serving greater cabling densities and 

speed requirements, especially at the exchange and data centers. Khoo Boo Leong reports 

Fiber is key to the future. “Fiber 

is definitely coming – fiber to 

the home, fiber to the antenna, 

and fiber to the node,” says Alan 

Clarke, president of Network Solutions 

at TE Connectivity. 

“When you get to LTE and 4G, it’s 

got to be fiber to the antenna,” says 

Clarke. “There’s not a lot of capacity 

on copper twisted pair. People will be 

building out fiber networks, and it’s 

just as cheap to run fiber as it is to run 

copper.” 

While horizontal wiring or plenum 

cabling will probably not require fiber, 

fiber is proliferating in riser cabling 

and in data centers, and “we see special 

requests for fiber in enterprise networks, 

in the military, certain parts of 

government, and campus networks. So 

it will come,” Clarke adds. 

High-density connectivity 

Even as fiber standards evolve, TE 

has developed the MPOptimate system 

– a factory pre-terminated and tested 

TE Connectivity’s Thomas Poh (left) and Alan Clarke. 

solution – that boasts a high-density 

multi-fiber push-on (MPO) connector. 

“Products [like the MPOptimate] 

allow you to get more connectors in 

a run with better performance,” says 

Clarke. “We’re also developing highdensity 

fiber optic racks and special fiber 

optic cables with small diameters. 

Those will get incorporated into specifications 

but there aren’t any standards 

there yet.” 

Fitting more fiber terminations into 

a rack – and developing simplified and 

reduced fiber diameters, including fiber 

pigtails with 1.2mm diameter as opposed 

to a 2.2mm or 3mm diameter – 

reduces congestion in the system, frees 

up more channels for air to flow around 

the racks and improves cooling. 

“If you get good airflow in a reduced 

space, then you can reduce the cost of 

operating a data center,” says Clarke. 

Ease of installation 

Making fiber as easy to install as 

copper will lead to its growth. One way 

is to factory pre-install fiber connectivity, 

eliminating the need for installation 

in the field. 

“Much of the costs now is not in the 

material but in the installation,” says 

Clarke. “Pre-termination in the factory 

not only increases the speed and reliability 

of installation but also the overall 

installation cost.” 

“The use of pre-terminated fiber 

solutions speeds up installation by almost 

70%, compared to the traditional 

way, and the process increases mobility,” 

says Thomas Poh, director of marketing 

management for TE Connectivity’s 

Enterprise Networks Group in 

Asia. “You can add, move and change, 

or swing the fiber from one rack to 

another easily because it is plug-andplay, 

modular and scalable.” 

Managing the physical layer 

As the merits of fiber extend beyond 

cabling density to speed, data center 

managers are now paying more attention 

to cabling decisions. 

“[As speeds go up], if you lay the 

wrong infrastructure, it may not support 

your future hardware,” Poh says. 

“The hardware may be changed every 

five years but the infrastructure may 

be used up to 15 years. 

“[In addition], data centers operating 

24/7 that are planning for 40G and 

100G connectivity need a reliable supplier 

that knows the technology and 

has the resources to invest in product 

development.” 

Ultimately, the data center demands 

security, size, and simple access or 

identification. “In security, we have 

the managed infrastructure; in size, 

we’re looking for density of installation; 

and in identification, it comes 

back to simple cable management,” 

Clarke says. 

Meanwhile, TE Connectivity’s recent 

$400 million contract win to supply 

the 100%-fiber Australian National 

Broadband Network (NBN) underlines 

the trend towards fiber cabling. NWA 


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10 

coverstory 

Taking the plunge 

into the cloud 

The Amazon Web Service EC2 outage earlier this year has a 

silver lining – it has cast off the halo that had been wrapped 

around cloud-based strategies. 

By Khoo Boo Leong and Sandra Gittlen 

Several corporate executives 

whom NetworkWorld Asia spoke 

to maintain that cloud services 

offer cost advantages that are just unattainable 

through on-site data centers, 

but say they now realize they didn’t invest 

enough in risk mitigation. For instance, 

one CEO said he plans to host 

his main database with two different 

cloud services, just in case one goes 

down. 

Such disaster recovery planning is 

not unlike the traditional enterprise 

where companies run multiple connectivity 

lines from different service 

providers into the data center, in case 

one suffers a backhoe cut or some other 

failure. Several executives said this 

same logic applies to the most critical 

applications being hosted in the cloud. 

Not-so-risky business 

Placed in a larger context, cloud 

computing still poses less risk than 

outsourcing of finance and accounting 

processes to overseas companies. 

In a recent Ovum survey of CFOs and 

senior financial executives at UK and 

US enterprises with a turnover of more 

than $500 million, 29% of respondents 

said they viewed cloud computing as 

posing an unacceptable risk, compared 

to 38.5% for offshoring to India and 

44.2% for offshoring to South & Central 

America. India is the most popular offshoring 

destination but it is also ranked 

lowest on satisfaction rates. 

“Offshoring to low-cost locations 

was deemed to be very high-risk, and 

the companies we spoke to expressed 

a strong desire to keep these functions 

with their current employees,” says Peter 

Ryan, Ovum lead analyst. 

It is no surprise then that the inaugural 

data center industry survey of 

Uptime Institute found that 74% of its 

respondents had deployed or were considering 

some form of cloud computing, 

primarily private cloud. 

“Enterprises that are considering 

deployment of a private-public cloud 

infrastructure model must ensure that 

the security for the existing enterprise 

is at, or better than, industry standard,” 

says Steve Hassell, president of Emerson 

Network Power’s Avocent business. 

“If there is any question as to whether 

the existing enterprise infrastructure is 

secure, then it probably means that improvements 

should be made. There are 

a host of security consulting firms that 

can provide the audits to determine if 

gaps exist. The point is that before connecting 

to a public cloud vendor, the 

enterprise must have its own house in 

order.” 

Before embarking on any cloud initiative, 

enterprises have to know the 

problems they are trying to solve. Amid 

the hype surrounding the benefits of 

the cloud, “engagement in a strategic 

direction without a thorough understanding 

of the problem to be solved or 

the requirements, is folly,” says Hassell. 

MNC uptake 

Corroborating the Uptime Institute’s 

findings are the recently released results 

of a survey by Ovum for Cable & 

Wireless. The survey of more than 100 

global MNCs reveals that adoption of 

cloud services is up 61% from a year ago 

with 45% of MNCs already using cloud 

sourcing for at least some elements of 

key IT services. 

Asia-Pacific MNCs show the greatest 

cloud interest, with 63% uptake across 

all cloud services categories, including 

networking, communications, applications, 

corporate IT systems, as well as 

data management, security and backup. 

Fifty one percent of respondents have 

deployed data backup and storage, with 

an additional 33% planning to procure 

cloud data backup and storage services 

in the next 24 months. 

Breaking the results down by industry 

sectors, 56% of finance and insur- 


ance companies have adopted cloud 

services for some elements of corporate 

IT systems while 63% and 59% of respondents 

in the manufacturing sector 

are implementing cloud components 

for networking and data management, 

respectively. 

From an applications perspective, 

half of the professional services sector 

respondents focus on customer relationship 

management (CRM), while 

half of finance and insurance respondents 

place strong emphasis on document 

management. Messaging and 

CRM are the most important applications 

for the manufacturing sector. 

“We believe the majority of MNCs 

are currently between ‘early’ and ‘adolescent’ 

adoption phases of cloud-based 

services, with broader and deeper 

adoption being contemplated,” says 

Evan Kirchheimer, practice leader for 

enterprise services at Ovum. 

“However, greater adoption is dependent 

on the resolution of security, 

governance and reliability and once 

these concerns are addressed through 

standardized, tested offers from service 

providers, more large enterprises will 

feel comfortable positioning cloud as a 

preferred procurement option,” Kirchheimer 

adds. 

Three quarters of MNCs surveyed 

rate scalability of capacity and matching 

of capacity to fluctuating demand as 

the main benefits from the use of cloud 

services, with increased speed of provisioning 

coming in a close third. 

While retail respondents rely on scalability 

and matching capacity to demand 

as major benefits, finance and 

insurance companies see improved 

employee productivity as a major attraction. 

The manufacturing sector 

views cost transparency as far more important 

than other verticals. 

One relevant finding from the research 

is that telecommunication providers 

are emerging as trusted partners 

and credible suppliers for cloud services. 

“Telecommunications providers’ 

control of the network over which cloud 

services are delivered is becoming a 

compelling advantage, as it allows them 

to offer end-to-end service level agree- 

ments,” explains Kirchheimer. “This allays 

many of the security concerns enterprises 

have expressed over use of the 

public internet to access cloud services 

and general security, data governance 

and loss of control.” 

“We are seeing a massive build out of 

new data center space all dedicated to 

cloud initiatives,” says Avocent’s Hassell. 

“This is the largest build out of 

new space since the entry of [virtualization] 

and the data center consolidation 

movement that followed.” 

SMB boom 

Another positive statistic – one that 

will cheer managed service providers 

in particular – comes from Microsoft’s 

global SMB Cloud Adoption Study 

2011. Within the next three years, the 

study reported, 39% of SMBs expect to 

pay for one or more cloud services, an 

increase of 34% from the current 29%. 

Even the number of cloud services 

SMBs will pay for will nearly double in 

most countries within this period. 

Among services such as collaboration, 

data storage and backup, or 

business-class email, Microsoft’s study 

finds that SMBs paying for cloud services 

will be using 3.3 services, up from 

fewer than two services today. The 

SMB’s choice of service provider will be 

determined by past experience with its 

support. Related to that, 82% of SMBs 

consider a provider’s local presence a 

critical or important factor in cloud service 

buying decisions. 

“As SMBs continue to transition to 

cloud services, hosting service providers, 

VARs and SIs will have a major 

role to play as advisors and providers 

of IT services in hybrid environments,” 

said Andy Burton, CEO of Fasthosts 

Internet Ltd. “Hosting providers have 

expertise in selling cloud services while 

VARs and SIs have experience selling 

to SMBs. Fasthosts is helping to bridge 

this gap by helping VARs and SIs whitelabel 

cloud services and deliver them as 

if they were their own.” 

It is obvious that cloud adoption will 

be gradual. The Microsoft study forecasts 

that 28% of workloads will still 

remain on-premise within three years 

while 43% of workloads will become 

paid cloud services and 29% will be free 

or bundled with other services. 

One tip for managed service providers 

is that SMBs that are adopting both 

SaaS and IaaS services are larger, more 

growth-oriented and more interested 

in additional services, such as unified 

communications and remote desktop 

support. Yet another is that affordable 

pay-as-you-go pricing cloud services 

are attractive for businesses, particularly 

SMBs that want to maintain their 

size, but want to become more profitable 

without high overhead costs. 

Amazon Web Services’ EC2 outage 

may affect the attractive cost model of 

cloud-based services a little. A multiday 

outage would most likely have a 

more negative impact than a slight rise 

in operational expenses. This is where 

the CFO has to couple an IT staff plan 

with plans for what-if scenarios that fit 

the enterprise’s risk tolerance profile. 

For some businesses, the multi-day 

outage that some Amazon customers 

suffered would not be a hardship; for 

others, an hour of downtime would be 

too much. This has to be considered 

even with a well-established service 

provider. 

The Amazon name would still be synonymous 

with uptime and the brand 

is established, but cloud services are 

new and nothing should be taken for 

granted. 

Wise SMBs should be cautious. 

Bryan Sartin, director of Investigative 

Response at Verizon Business, which 

recently released its 2011 Data Breach 

Investigations Report, says: “In 2010, 

70% of the companies victimized by 

data breaches were in the 11-to-100 

employee range.” 

Sartin acknowledges that while cloud 

computing has obvious advantages, 

“there is no question we do see a lot of 

breaches in the cloud.” 

Judging the host 

But all is not doom and gloom. “Although 

we see a lot of breaches in 

cloud-managed or externally managed 

continued on page 12 


12 

coverstory 

continued from page 11 

or hosted environments, we see almost 

no evidence of breaches on virtualized 

platforms,” says Sartin. “That suggests 

some kind of advantages with that concept.” 

Security-wise, however, not all cloudbased 

services are built alike. There are 

world-class hosting facilities and then, 

there is everybody else. Sartin cited 

a case that his colleague investigated 

where the big established player in the 

hosting space that a company thought 

they employed turned out to be a facility 

hosted on the back of trailer “and 

the only HVACs are fans blowing at the 

servers”. 

“The admin was standing in the 

trailer with no shoes on and there is a 

bedroom back there,” Sartin says. “Our 

investigator asks this guy, ‘There is no 

antivirus in here. What are you doing 

about malcode?’ The guy looked at him 

like he was a complete idiot and says, 

‘Antivirus? I live here. I am the antivirus!’ 

I’m sure all cloud services are not 

like that but it just shows that companies 

have to do their homework.” 

Some basic questions that enterprises 

should ask their cloud service 

providers include: Who is in charge of 

security when data is out in the cloud? 

Where is the data located? Who is the 

service provider that’s holding the data 

and where are the lines 

of responsibilities in the 

event of a security investigation? 

Does the company 

have the ability to 

even audit or investigate 

a problem on its own systems? 

A useful tool for businesses 

selecting a cloud 

provider is the Uptime 

Institute’s data center tier systems for 

ranking data center reliability – the 

Operational Sustainability Standard 

(OSS) and the Tier Classification System 

(TCS). 

“The TCS ensures a data center facility 

is designed and built to deliver 

uptime in accordance with its business 

requirements [while the] OSS ensures 

the site is managed to sustain that level 

of availability over the long-term,” said 

Julian Kudritzki, vice president of Uptime 

Institute, LLC. 

The TCS classifies data centers into 

four tier levels, I to IV. Tier IV sites are 

sites “capable of the highest level of uptime 

by providing both maintenance 

opportunities and fault response”. 

The OSS complements the TCS with a 

universal rating system – Gold, Silver, 

Bronze – for evaluating, comparing and 

promoting a data center’s ongoing operational 

capabilities based on its Tier 

objective. For instance, a data center 

Sartin 

could be rated Tier IV 

Silver. 

“When selecting a 

public cloud vendor, it 

is important to verify the 

vendor’s security capabilities 

are as stringent, 

or preferably better, than 

those within the client 

enterprise,” Hassell suggests. 

“Security concerns 

do not only relate to the logical layer 

but the physical Infrastructure and facilities 

as well.” 

Enterprises must review the vendor’s 

references, and certifications to ensure 

the vendor has the experience and a 

solid service record. It is also important 

to ensure the financial health of 

the vendor, especially if the enterprise 

intends to work with the vendor long 

term. 

Ultimately, the cloud should enable 

the strategic goals of the enterprise. 

There are vendors that provide advisory 

services to help the enterprise 

define cloud requirements but having 

a thorough understanding of the requirements 

prior to evaluating vendors 

or even the cloud advisory service providers, 

for that matter, will expedite the 

vendor selection process and improve 

the quality of the overall outcomes, 

Hassell says. 

Practical reality 

Meanwhile, far from being a byword 

for data security disasters, cloud computing 

remains a promising enterprise 

platform. While enterprises may delay 

cloud adoption due to concerns surrounding 

data security, privacy and 

compliance, practical frameworks exist 

to deliver the trust, security and 

compliance that enterprises demand 

when moving data, applications and 

systems to the cloud. 

Information security company 

SafeNet, for example, offers such a 

framework, which includes a unified 

authentication infrastructure for both 

on-premise and cloud-based services; 

data encryption and isolation in multi- 




14 

coverstory 

continued from page 12 

tenant environments; critical Ethernet 

link encryption for cloud-based or 

internally hosted data center connections. 

“Cloud computing has not only revolutionized 

the way IT is delivered, 

but represents a clear business model 

where true adoption occurs when enterprises 

believe their mission-critical 

data is protected and secure,” says 

Chris Fedde, President and COO of 

SafeNet. 

To help enterprises secure their data 

on cloud storage volumes and comply 

with requirements such as PCI DSS 2.0, 

SafeNet offers pre-launch authentication, 

storage encryption and key management 

for cloud environments. 

SafeNet Inc.’s server- and storagebased 

encryption, for instance, allows 

administrators to encrypt complianceimpacted 

data such as cardholder data 

running on Amazon EC2 and Amazon 

EBS volumes. 

“With cloud computing, security is a 

shared responsibility between the cloud 

provider and customers,” said Russ Dietz, 

CTO of SafeNet, which is working 

with Amazon Web Services (AWS) in 

helping enterprises to manage virtual 

services and control pre-launch authentication 

and authorization running 

in the AWS cloud environments. 

Further addressing concerns about 

data location, data loss and data security 

– barriers to cloud-computing adoption 

– SafeNet teamed up with NetApp last 

year to expand its encryption, authentication 

and standards-based key management 

capabilities to include protection 

for emerging SaaS, public, private, 

and hybrid cloud delivery models. 

At the same time, a slew of appliances 

and chassis-based multi-threat security 

platforms help cloud-hosting providers 

and cloud service providers to protect 

the confidentiality and integrity of subscribers’ 

data and deliver cloud-based 

network security services. They also ensure 

that large enterprises protect the 

data within private and hybrid clouds. 

Fortinet, a network appliance vendor, 

centers its cloud strategy on 

carrier-grade security appliances 

such as its recently 

announced FortiGate-3140B. 

The appliance supports VPN, 

IPS, application control, antispam 

and anti-virus security 

measures concurrently. 

Featuring ten 10Gb Ethernet 

ports, it is powered by three 

ASIC processors: A network 

processor to handle firewall 

functions; a content processor 

to handle anti-virus and 

web content filtering; and a 

security processor to enhance intrusion 

prevention. 

Two of those ports are directly linked 

to the appliance’s security processor 

and they handle flow-based inspection 

for Web filtering and traffic shaping. 

“Proxy-based inspection is more secure 

than flow-based, but flow-based 

is better in performance,” says George 

Chang, the regional director for Southeast 

Asia and Hong Kong at Fortinet. 

“We provide the option to deploy a 

proxy-based or a flow-based solution. 

For a flow-based solution, we’ve added 

[applications such as] anti-virus, IPS 

inspection, application control and 

IPv6 firewall inspection as well as DLP.” 

With these added features, “the security 

appliance [must not] be a bottleneck 

in terms of information coming in 

and information going out. The speed 

at which it [inspects data] has to be 

fast as well,” says Dennis Aloysius Tan, 

Fortinet’s regional channel sales manager. 

“We are not only accelerating the security 

functions and pushing it down to 

our custom-built ASICs but we are also 

accelerating IPv6 traffic,” Bernie Png, 

Fortinet’s system engineer for Singapore, 

Vietnam and Brunei, points out. 

“Most vendors can do IPv4 filtering 

well but when they hit IPv6 traffic, their 

box slows down because they do not 

have a custom ASIC to process IPv6’s 

128-bit addresses, instead of IPv4’s 32bit 

addresses, be it on an appliance or a 

server CPU.” 

“Establishing network security now 

is like securing an airport,” says Chang. 

“Within an airport, you have the pub- 

Protecting data centers and 

enabling cloud services 

lic area and the boarding area which is 

out-of-bounds to visitors. Similarly, we 

don’t just have a firewall purely securing 

the corporate network behind it 

but it secures different areas, different 

groups, and different user profiles or 

usage behaviors.” 

Indeed, networking giant Cisco is 

extending beyond the firewall in helping 

branch offices to leverage cloudbased 

services without compromising 

on performance, security or mobility. 

Its Cisco Flex 7500 Series Cloud Controller 

targets multi-site wireless deployments. 

It can be used to centrally 

manage and control up to 500 branch 

locations, 2,000 access points and over 

20,000 clients from a single data center. 

Also, IT managers can configure 

wireless policies, management and security 

settings remotely. 

Complementing the cloud controller 

is the Cisco ISR Cloud Web Security 

with Cisco ScanSafe solution, which 

extends centralized Web protection 

and malware detection on Cisco ISR 

G2 branch routers to branch offices. 

The simple Web security solution requires 

no additional hardware and relies 

on a cloud service delivery model 

with central user account administration. 

“We were looking to centralize the 

management of wireless connections 

in our corporate headquarters, distribution 

facility and our retail stores, 

which each rely on wireless connectivity 

for handheld scanners, phones, and 

printers,” said Steve Marshall, director 

of IT services at Bass Pro Shops, which 

deployed the Cisco Flex 7500 Series 

Cloud Controller. “Now, we will be able 


to reduce costs by eliminating the need 

for a controller at each store to manage 

the wireless networks.” 

Application delivery and 

performance 

Apart from security concerns, one of 

the biggest inhibitors to the widespread 

use of cloud-based services is user 

frustration with poor application performance. 

Businesses supporting customer-facing 

web applications should 

“really focus on what’s most important 

– the impact of anything they do on the 

Web to the end user,” says Jonathan 

Ranger, the director of Benchmarks at 

Compuware Corp, whose Gomez application 

performance management 

(APM) platform integrates web performance 

management, web load testing 

and web performance business analysis 

to gauge the business impact of cloud 

computing. 

Although most cloud providers do offer 

an SLA promising 99.9% uptime or 

other broad guarantees, few cloud providers 

offer performance metrics from 

the end-user perspective, and even 

fewer offer SLAs based on web performance 

– the response time or speed at 

which applications or services are delivered 

to an end user. 

Traditional performance management 

solutions only monitor the databases, 

servers or network – mainly 

“siloed” components in the data center. 

But the application delivery chain links 

a company’s infrastructure to the ISP, 

the Internet, third-party cloud providers, 

content delivery networks (CDNs), 

local ISPs and wireless carriers through 

to the myriad combinations of browsers 

and operating systems that run on 

users’ desktops. 

Problems regularly occur at various 

points in the chain, causing end users 

to experience slow transactions and response 

times; failed transactions and 

time outs; dramatically different response 

times in different locations; and 

pages that don’t work or display properly 

in some browsers or devices. 

The Compuware Gomez performance 

benchmarks measure website 

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benchmarks rank the web and mobile 

performance of companies across three 

key metrics — response time, availability 

and consistency. 

Response time refers to the full render 

time of a page. “We also track transactional 

processes, such as go to a retail 

home page, search for an item, put an 

item in a shopping cart, go to checkout 

all the way to just prior to purchasing,” 

Ranger explains. “With availability, the 

concept of 99.99% is an inside-the-firewall 

concept. When you move outside 

the firewall, it is very difficult to produce 

four 9’s; the numbers are sometimes 

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uptime.” 

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16 

techtips 

Five tips for secure cloud computing 

by Vic Mankotia 

Risks of the cloud have recently become an issue with 

well-publicized failures in popular public cloud services. 

Organizations are thus under more pressure 

than ever to evaluate their management solutions, including 

those focused on security and how they are deployed as 

they get onto the cloud. Here are five general tips for companies 

getting on the cloud: 

#1: Consider the full business case 

Choose carefully as to which of your services should 

and should not go onto the cloud. For example, while Infrastructure-as-a-service 

(IaaS) cloud computing services 

can certainly have a cost advantage for raw computing and 

bandwidth charges, it may not be as cost effective for enterprise 

services with higher availability and reliability needs, 

at least for now. The complexity and cost of building an 

equivalent system within public cloud services often nullifies 

much of the expected savings while offering a more 

opaque operating environment. 

#2: Plan for problems 

Enterprises should decide which services are vital 

to their customers and/or to their own continuity, and 

whether these services should go on the cloud, no matter 

the savings. In addition, there should be contingency 

planning, both for downtime in the traditional infrastructure 

or in the cloud. Many companies still assume that resilience 

is automatically delivered as part of a public cloud 

service, but like anything else, this must also be planned 

for. A basic truism remains if the cloud service provider 

goes down, it is still the business which will take the blame 

from its customers. 

#3: Read the fine print 

Enterprises need to fully understand what the service 

level agreements (SLAs) with their service providers actually 

cover. For example, a performance degradation in the 

provider’s network can hurt a company’s reputation just 

as badly as a complete cloud outage, so service provider 

uptime is not the only criterion to consider in cloud performance. 

SLAs should detail obligations such as what the 

service provider must do when disruptions occur, the penalties 

for failing to deliver, maximum recovery periods, and 

the procedures (and extra costs) if a company should want 

to change cloud providers. 

#4: Track your users and their usage 

Companies need to find solutions to manage their 

user identities and their access to both on-premise and 

cloud-based applications. As organizations migrate 

more business-critical applications to the cloud, robust 

identity and access management that bridges the hybrid 

environment is essential to properly and efficiently 

control the organization’s IT assets. In addition, the 

management of mobile access and authentication which 

supports a mobile environment will also become more 

important. In the age of multiple access devices, many 

of which are not managed by the organization, usage 

must still remain secure and reliable. 

#5: Know where your data is 

Even if a corporation just stores peripheral data in the 

cloud, the organization would need to provide enterprisegrade 

security processes to protect that data both at rest 

and in motion. Storage locations will vary in a cloud environment 

depending on the cloud provider, much more 

so than with a traditional data center environment which 

generally doesn’t change that often. An enterprise-grade 

solution that addresses regulatory compliance, content 

and context should be used. 

In conclusion, an organization interested in using the 

public cloud today needs to make IT more secure across 

the physical and virtual as well as cloud environments, 

have a good understanding of what third-party cloud service 

providers can offer, and ensure it has solutions in 

place that support 

• identity and access management, 

• multiple channels of information access, 

• multiple data storage locations, 

• compliance, 

• improved operational efficiency, 

• reliability, and 

• scalability. NWA 

Vic Mankotia is the Asia Pacific 

vice president for security at CA 

Technologies. 


Advertorial 

Dealing with the social media phenomenon 

CIOs ponder whether or not social media should be allowed in the corporate network. 

The proliferation of social media in our daily 

lives is undeniable. Today, more than ever, 

every aspect of our lives is being dominated 

by Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Quora, Foursquare 

and the likes. 

This inescapable reality has also permeated corporate 

life as companies struggle to deal with the 

phenomenon. This has in turn put a strain on managing 

such software applications on today’s typical 

enterprise IT infrastructure. 

Song Tang-Yih, vice president of Asia Pacific 

sales for Palo Alto Networks, says there are new 

challenges every day in the social network realm 

with regard to the enterprise landscape. 

“At a recent conference I attended, one CIO said 

to me, ‘Users today are in control. But at the same 

time, another said, ‘Users are [also] out of control!’ 

This is the dilemma that CIOs face – whether or not 

to let social networking into the enterprise network,” 

Song told an IT roundtable discussion sponsored by 

Palo Alto Networks in May 2011 in Kuala Lumpur. 

Song noted that social network applications have 

both good and bad sides. For instance, Skype may 

be perceived as a good tool to improve productivity. 

Also, employees today are deeply immersed in 

social media and many of them question why they 

can’t use Facebook and Twitter inside the corporate 

network. 

“But not many know that Skype can also be used 

to transfer encrypted files outside the corporate network,” 

he explained. “These may be confidential 

files and the IT department can’t track them as it 

detect read what’s being sent.” 

Attendees’ reactions at the roundtable over the 

use of social media in corporate networks were 

mixed, with views ranging from a strict “no” to “some 

features being allowed.” 

A spokesperson for a regional bank noted that her 

organization only allows wall posting on Facebook 

as its C-level executives realized the importance of 

such features for the purpose of interacting with its 

customers. 

Another financial-related organization noted that 

only its telemarketers were allowed access to an 

otherwise blanket “no to Facebook” policy. 

Song however pointed out that decisions on IT in 

today’s enterprise shouldn’t be binary, noting that 

there should be a choice for enterprises to decide. 

He explained: “Essentially it’s about having the 

architecture and technology that gives a CIO the 

visibility he needs to make decisions. A CIO’s typical 

concern is how to mitigate against risks that he 

can’t see. Without this assessment he can’t protect 

his data center. He must have the technology to ask 

three questions: 

• What are the kinds of applications traversing 

the network? 

• Who are using these applications? 

• What kind of content is actually running within 

these applications? 

Jonathan Tan, managing director for ASEAN sales 

at Palo Alto Networks, noted that CIOs need to have 

this visibility as users today are much more IT-savvy 

than before. 

“Simply put, if you [a CIO] don’t know what’s going 

on in the network, you can’t be in control,” Tan said, 

adding that they must have the ability to be able to 

define policies and to regulate it, and be able to do 

this as quickly as possible. 

In Palo Alto Networks’ latest “Application Usage 

and Risk Report”, Song noted that applications using 

SSL in some way, shape or form represented 

40% of the applications found and 36% of the overall 

bandwidth used. 

Song said the report also noted that this segment 

of applications will continue to grow as more applications 

follow Twitter, Facebook and Gmail, all of 

which have enabled SSL either as a standard setting 

or as a user-selectable option. 

Data from the report, Song noted, was collected 

as part of Palo Alto Networks’ customer evaluation 

methodology, where a Palo Alto Networks next-generation 

firewall was deployed to monitor and analyze 

the network application traffic. 

For more on this report and findings, go to 

http://www.paloaltonetworks.com/news/press_releases/2011-0511-aur-report.html 


18 

update 

How to make friends and safeguard people 

Social networking sites are rapidly 

gaining in user base – Facebook 

alone has recorded half 

a billion active users – and, not surprisingly, 

attracting scammers and 

cybercriminals. Sophos’ latest Social 

Security report highlights the steadily 

growing number and diversity of malware, 

phishing and spam attacks on 

social networks throughout 2010. 

Among the report’s findings, 40% of 

social networking users quizzed have 

been sent malware such as worms via 

social networking sites, a 90% increase 

from a year ago; 67% say they have 

been spammed via social networking 

sites, more than double the proportion 

less than two years ago; and 43% have 

been on the receiving end of phishing 

attacks, more than double the figure 

since 2009. 

“One of the biggest concerns about 

pure-play cloud services such as Hotmail, 

Gmail, Facebook and Twitter is 

that you use a Web browser [to access] 

data [in someone else’s control],” says 

Paul Ducklin, head of Technology for 

Asia Pacific at Sophos. “It is an issue of 

control that goes along with security.” 

The whole goal of social networking 

is sharing and, as Ducklin points out, 

unregulated sharing is the enemy of 

security. 

Cisco, via its Cybercrime Return on 

Investment (CROI) Matrix, predicted 

earlier this year that social networking 

scams will not be a significant area 

for cybercriminals to invest resources 

in. But these scams are declining only 

in relation to the rising prevalence of 

data-theft Trojans such as Zeus, easyto-deploy 

Web exploits, and money 

mules. 

Human factor 

Most cybercrime exploits hinge not 

only on technology but also on the 

all-too-human tendency to misplace 

trust. This year’s Cisco Annual Security 

Report lists seven “deadly weaknesses” 

that cybercriminals exploit 

through social engineering scams 

– whether in the form of e-mails, social 

networking chats or phone calls. 

The seven weaknesses are sex appeal, 

greed, vanity, trust, sloth, compassion 

and urgency. 

Cheri McGuire, vice president of 

Global Government Affairs & Cybersecurity 

Policy at Symantec Corp, points 

out that an attacker armed with a victim’s 

employment details and company 

email address along with the 

victim’s personal profile information, 

can create a convincing ruse or spoof 

a message to other members of the vic- 

On Earth, everyone may be within six 

degrees of separation from one another, 

but in the social networking world, the 

separation feels more like one degree. 

By Khoo Boo Leong 

tim’s social network, especially his or 

her colleagues. 

“While increased privacy settings 

can reduce the likelihood of a profile 

being spoofed, a user can still be exploited 

if an attacker successfully compromises 

one of the user’s friends,” 

says McGuire. “All it takes is a single 

negligent user or unpatched computer 

in the employee’s list of friends to 

give attackers a beachhead into their 

organization from which to mount additional 

attacks on the enterprise from 

within.” 

Since social networking sites are 

built on implied trust, and on the 

premise that people share information 

and experiences with each other, the 

problem lies with people not knowing 

what ‘private’ information is. “Private 

information could be a real name, telephone 

number, address, country club 

membership, school, or even the name 

of their doctor,” McGuire says. “If such 

information falls into the hands of 

fraudsters with malicious intent, they 

can use it to access your bank account, 

or make fraudulent payments online.” 

Unfortunately, occasional lapses like 

the hacking incident on Mark Zuckerberg’s 

page caused by Facebook’s

THE CLOUD - Networks Asia

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