Last week Juniper was Silver Sponsor at Telecom Cloud Services Summit (#telcocloud). The audience numbers were significantly higher this year and the topics broader.

Here are my Top 5 Tech-Free takeaways...

Last week Juniper was the lead sponsor at Cloud Net, London, co-hosted by the Open Network Foundation. When it came to the role of SDN and OpenFlow, there was some lively debate. Here are my takeways, what were yours?

http://www.juniper.net/cloudsecurityJoin me, Nigel Stephenson, on Feb 28^th for a 30 minute webinar where I will outline some major steps you can take to secure the networks that power the cloud.

Juniper Networks is pleased to be Silver sponsor of the Telecom Cloud Summit taking place in Berlin on April 24/25 (pre conference workshop on April 23) . Free delegate passes available,

For the 2^nd year running Juniper are Silver sponsors of the Telecom Cloud Services Summit taking place in Berlin on April 24/25th 2012

Complimentary delegate pass worth up to £1300 for qualifying Juniper customers and partners...

In my last post I announce that Juniper Networks will be the Platinum Sponsors of Cloud Net 2012 on March 12/13/14^th at Centre Point, London. I can now share some more information about the content that Juniper will be delivering.

All in all this is shaping up really nicely...

Two things really excite me about this event...

 Security is oft touted as the number one inhibitor to cloud adoption, but is there grounding for this in technology terms?

The answer lies within us, not the technology...

Ever struggled to explain your IT strategy to non-technical business functions within your organisation? Successful communication of complex IT challenges at a senior level can be make or break for the CIO.

Colin Constable, Juniper Strategic Alliance Group CTO, former Chief Network Architect of Credit Suisse and a founding member of Jericho delivered a keynote presentation at the IBM Forum facility last week that may help you in your next board meeting. This blog summarises his presentation.

This week I attended the Intellect Cloud Computing Conference in London. Among the keynote speakers was Chris Chant, Director of DirectGov and Digital Engagement. Among the topics was G-Cloud – a significant part of the UK Government ICT Strategy.

I've listened to a few government IT/CIO speakers but Chris is different. Very different...

I had a simple question from a Juniper partner recently - where can I find out about how Juniper secures 'the cloud'?

A quick browse of our juniper.net website and I found lots of great information about our security capabilities; in the data center, the mobile access and all in-between. But nothing that put it all under one roof.

So I’m pleased to say we have taken a small step to make your life a lot easier. I had a word with those who know and we have built a new cloud security area on the site.

The consumerisation of IT has led to the proliferation of smart devices and the advent of cloud services fuels this proliferation by enabling applications to run in a dynamic and elastic fashion; independent of the storage and processing power of the end device.

The ‘prosumer¹’– a social/business individual - now expects to access both personal and business applications with equal ease and from the same, often privately owned, device. The so-called ‘Bring Your Own Device⁶ (BOYD) conundrum’.

This combination of increased mobility of the user, non-managed devices and the virtualised/multi-tenant data centre, leads to a number of security challenges not previously experienced by the enterprise or service provider.

Attachments:

The Evolving Threat Landscape.pdf 503 KB

Could the specific and different drivers for cloud within the various sectors of the financial community ultimately lead to five phases of cloud adoption?

In business, agility means being flexibility, acting with speed and embracing innovation. Agile companies can react to new market opportunities more adeptly than their less agile competitors.

But agility goes beyond an ability to react. IT organisations are increasingly looking to lead the business. So what does agility-based buying look like and how can you spot it?

Agility is the carrot but will cost savings be the stick that shapes the UK Public Sector’s use of cloud services?

The UK government’s ICT Strategy¹ and The Open Services White Paper² lay out both cost saving and better services as key deliverables from a range of activities that include data centre virtualization and consolidation, distributed accountability and ownership, and  more open service procurement models.

All this should be good news for cloud service providers.

What a difference a year makes! If the Cloud World Forum¹in London earlier this summer was anything to go by, CIOs have completed their first phase of cloud deployment and now looking to expand and enhance  their services to deliver a greater contribution to the business. In effect, transforming  the IT department as we know it today into a business innovation center. Indeed, some would argue that the IT department will dissapear as a result of cloud adoption².

So how should cloud providers align with the evolving needs of the CIO as the very role of IT departments changes?