The Sundance Film Festival kicked off this week in Park City, Utah and the buzz is palpable. Long considered a critical launch pad for independent filmmakers, the Festival has gained massive mainstream exposure in recent years thanks to a host of new promotional vehicles at filmmakers’ disposal—from the growing popularity of television’s Sundance Channel to the ability to view Sundance-related content on the web, and, of course, the indescribable influence of social media.

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The market for on-demand, pay-as-you-go infrastructure services that turn IT into a utility for businesses continues to expand rapidly. While initial use cases for such cloud services have been for application development and testing environments, the success of that model over the past few years is leading many companies to broaden their usage of outsourced cloud services. In fact, in its most recent Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure as a Service and Web Hosting, Gartner forecasted that by the end of 2011 these services will account for almost 25% of the overall hosting market.

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What Really Happened in Vegas at CES?

The saying goes that ‘what happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas’ – but what happened at the recent Consumer Electronics Show (CES) is no secret and will soon show up as devices and services in places ranging from our hands to our kitchen cupboards.

How Has CES Evolved Over the Years?

As an annual event, CES has evolved from highlighting the latest consumer entertainment products to becoming an industry blockbuster event where major new products are introduced and technology trends are set for the coming year.

What Stood Out at CES 2011?

And CES 2011 did not disappoint with everything on the show floor from cereal boxes that light up like mini billboards to showcasing the increasing connectivity of cars. Want to tweet from your TV? Make local dinner reservations from your car’s navigation system? Back-up all your photos, music and other media to the cloud? Check, check and check. You can see a good sampling of some of the best products from CES in cnet’s Best of CES Award coverage, including their winner – Motorola’s Xoom tablet.

What Was the Key Trend Highlighted at CES?

While some may think CES is just about entertainment products for consumers, a key trend that was underscored at the show was the consumerization of IT. As people get used to using web services, tablets and smartphones at home, they expect similar access and devices at work. In fact, they expect their devices to seamlessly support both their personal and professional lives, such as using a tablet to review some sales figures one minute and the next to catch up on some Modern Family episodes.

What Does This Mean for the Future of Connectivity?

This trend has been continuing for a while but CES brought it into sharp focus for 2011 – there is great content on the Web and a wide variety of devices and applications to access it. The key in the coming months is optimizing and accelerating the connection between the two of them for the ultimate online experience.

Saying that I had a great time presenting at the Drupal 7 Release Party is an understatement. This event was sponsored by skyshi.com and inkuiri.com, and it’s great to see so many Indonesian people, like myself, excited about the bright future of Drupal with it’s formidable release, “Version 7”.  There were more than 120 enthusiastic people there for the event, and many topics were covered, including some of the great features of Drupal 7:

• Integrated Admin interface
• Much Faster Performance than Drupal 6
• Ability to define custom content structure and more…

During my presentation I showed the newly redesigned Voxel website, all built using Drupal 7.  There was a lot of interest on how to deploy Drupal on a cloud computing platform like Voxel’s VoxCLOUD.   So I took the opportunity to show some of the features we are using to power Voxel’s site, including:

• Load Balancing with VoxCLOUD between our New York and Singapore cloud centers
• Leveraging a global MySQL Master/Slave replication setup using Drupal’s database abstraction layer
• How offloading content to the VoxCAST CDN helps improve performance for global users.  We covered several approaches to handling CDN with Apache, including Voxel’s own mod_cdn
• Team Development guidelines with Drupal Development (Voxel’s web team is split between New York, Singapore and Indonesia!).

In the coming weeks, we’ll be diving deep into these specifics topics in order to highlight techniques for supercharging your Drupal site using Voxel hosting services — we’ve been working with Drupal 7 since the early alpha days and we’re really happy with Drupal’s full release and have plenty of tricks that we’re ready to share.   We’re also excited to see that the Drupal folks considered Voxel’s site design to be the best yet for Drupal 7 and featured us on the Drupal 7 homepage, so hats off to our designer, Felix Widjaja and Whiteboard Media, for making the site really easy on the eyes.

Also I want to sent a few props out to some people like Viking Karwur, who represents Mozilla Indonesia, and claimed that he’d never seen such enthusiasm in his company’s events like we had at the Drupal 7 Indonesia launch. Also, the CEOs of two non-affiliated websites, Filmoo.com and Komikoo.com, both of which have started to gain attention in Indonesia. Nokia Indonesia rep Erick also showed some support at the gathering organized by our local Drupal expert, Rizqinofa.  Thanks guys for making such an awesome event!

What Do the Numbers Say About Cloud Adoption?

When it comes to the adoption of cloud services, the research numbers are piling up. A recent Connected Planet article outlined data from three organizations that combine to support the general trend of enterprises moving – quickly – to the cloud:

• 72% of U.S. IT decision makers plan to expand their cloud services in the next 12 months (CompTIA)

• 32% of large enterprise respondents in the U.S. and Europe rated cloud computing as a 3 or 4 on a scale where 4 means high importance (Ovum)

• The rate of growth of server purchases has decreased for small and medium businesses in 12 countries as they are increasingly relying on outsourced cloud services (AMI)

Why Is Security the Top Cloud Concern?

As enterprises make this move, the issue of security in the cloud is at the top of the list for many decision makers contemplating consumption of cloud services – especially as they consider moving more business-critical applications, services and data into the cloud.

While some in IT may feel as if their data is safer on-premises, there is a fundamental debate regarding whether the risks in the cloud are actually greater or less than the risks seen in a traditional on-premise deployment.

Are Cloud Security Risks Really Different From On-Premises?

The reality is that most enterprises already trust (either implicitly or explicitly) service providers, their customers and employees with the safeguarding of significant pieces of their corporate data and other intelligence assets, whether in transit on networks or at rest in systems distributed across the Internet.

In addition, the complexity, types and layers of security in the cloud look very similar to what the enterprise employs on their own premises, including:

• Perimeter security

• Layered security

• Encryption of data at rest

• Encryption of data in transit

• Authentication

• Identity management

• IPS/IDS/Firewall

• Virtualization security

• Forensics

• Compliance

• Auditability

• Multi-tenant implications

Can the Cloud Be as Secure as On-Premises?

From this perspective, an enterprise’s cloud services can be locked down as much as their own on-site systems so IT decision makers can view the cloud as an opportunity to consolidate, centralize and out-source some pieces of the security puzzle to a trusted provider.

In recent months, there has been a groundswell of urgency around IPv6 as IPv4 addresses fall to critically low levels – below the 5% mark, according to the Number Resource Organization.

Is IPv6 Finally Becoming a Reality?

So, after years of discussion and a lot of hype, it looks like IPv6 is finally arriving … and fast! At this point, the only question is “when”, and I think we’re going to see carriers, enterprises and device manufacturers alike dramatically accelerate their support efforts.

How Are Carriers Approaching IPv6 Adoption?

Carriers specifically are at different stages in the adoption cycle and taking various approaches to the challenge, ranging from full, native IPv6 support to dual-stack traffic sharing and IP tunneling, among others. Some are rolling out IPv6 incrementally in regional markets, while others are deploying IPv6-only networks for mobile and IoT traffic to reduce complexity and conserve remaining IPv4 space.

What Makes IPv6 So Important for the Future of the Internet?

The global supply of IPv4 addresses has been exhausted for years, forcing providers to rely on network address translation (NAT) to keep new users online. IPv6 solves this by offering a vastly larger address space—enough to give every device on the planet a unique public IP. Beyond addressing, IPv6 improves routing efficiency, supports more streamlined packet headers, and enables end-to-end encryption by default, making it more secure and better suited for high-growth use cases like IoT, 5G, and cloud-native applications.

How Is HorizonIQ Preparing for the IPv6 Era?

At HorizonIQ, our global network is already fully prepared for IPv6 traffic, with support built into our private network access points (P-NAPs) around the world. This means customers can seamlessly deliver applications, websites, and services over IPv6 without worrying about complex transitional gateways or degraded performance. As more carriers and enterprises enable IPv6, HorizonIQ’s backbone and edge infrastructure will ensure a smooth transition—while continuing to deliver the speed, reliability, and low latency that today’s digital businesses demand.

Are You Ready to Embrace IPv6?

Has the recent urgency about IPv6 caused you to step up your preparation for IPv6? Or, do you think there is still plenty of time? Either way, now is the perfect time to evaluate your network strategy. HorizonIQ can help you test and deploy IPv6-ready environments so your business stays ahead of the curve as the internet shifts to its next generation.