AWS primarily and Azure, of late, dominate today’s discussions around storage, backup and compute power. A quick glance at headlines from technology journalists, and a reader can glean a common coverage theme that ties these writers together — the ongoing discussion around the benefits of going all-in on the public cloud. However, in most cases technology journalists are writing about larger corporations, or big name installations, which may or may not reflect the actual trends taking place in the marketplace, especially at mid-size companies and organizations experiencing a growth spurt.

As one who is regularly engaged with the CIOs at mid-size and smaller companies and organizations, I don’t see them going all-in on the cloud right now; rather some are pulling back from it and either opting a hybrid cloud solution, or are going all-in with on-prem backup solutions. In fact, according to a survey published by SMB analyst firm Techaisle LLS, the hybrid cloud is now being used by 32 percent of midmarket (100 to 999 employees) organizations, and that figure is expected to remain relatively flat at 31 percent into next year, in spite of what your read in the press about AWS or Azure penetration.

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At the recent Bio-IT World Conference in Boston, I had the privilege of speaking to an audience made up primarily of life sciences and medical researchers. My main message concerned the cloud, specifically the trend of cloudbursting. This audience is extremely important to me personally, as my daughter was diagnosed with autism at the age of two.

She is now seven years old, stands 3’9” and is in the first grade -- the sweetest kid you could ever meet -- and though she is reading at grade level, her life is not without serious challenges. As a parent, when you see your child hooked up to machines and sensor probes that monitor her brainwaves due to a recent string of epileptic seizures, it is heartbreaking to watch.

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The Paris climate talks just concluded, with at least one mainstream media source hailing the resulting agreement as “the world’s greatest diplomatic success.” Back home, aside from those married to the issue, we hardly noticed, especially those of us in the technology industry. Life continued as normal, we drove to work and back home in our SUVs, spent the evening engaged in some form of electronic entertainment and then went to bed in our climate-controlled homes, while miles away our companies' data centers hummed through the night, powering the Web for millions of night owls.

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Heading into next week’s Supercomputing 2015 conference in Austin, the topic on the tip of every attendee’s tongue is simply, "supercomputing." Researchers, industry leaders and computational users are gathering by the thousands to investigate how many ways can we explore the power of the microchip in a supercomputing environment.

And it can’t happen at a better time. What once was an American stranglehold -- the illustrious title of the country owning the most powerful supercomputer -- has slowly slipped from our grasp following the crash of the Cold War.

Maybe, as Americans, we devalued the supercomputer’s place in the race to capitalize on the PC, and subsequently lost our focus? Some examples of the most famous supercomputers in the American experience -- WOPR and Watson -- have no commercial, government, military or research value. Watson is merely an advertisement for IBM and best known for its Jeopardy appearances, while WOPR was a character in the 1980’s popular Cold War flick, War Games.

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As the director of scientific computing for the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, Dirk Petersen, and industry acquaintance of mine, needs his internal IT organization to store and catalogue large amounts of unstructured and genomic data, all of which is critical to his organization and its many constituents. A data loss caused by server or storage hardware failure would be problematic for his organization and its researchers at best, and catastrophic at worst.

Petersen’s IT team is given a limited budget each year to purchase and maintain its researchers’ storage systems, making it difficult to afford the inherent costs and overhead associated with the classic storage manufacturers. And not just hard costs. These storage platform purchases, in my opinion, can require significant up-front investment, hinder the ability to mix and match solutions along the way and force an organization’s IT team to conduct dreaded forklift upgrades that drain resources.

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Last month we explored the pros and cons of open-source OpenStack, a platform I admittedly love, but which is not meant for everyone (for reasons laid out in that post). Today the topic shifts to OpenStack security. Why security? Because security is not only a hot media topic, but also one that automatically forces the CIO/CTO to analyze his or her own security situation within the organization. Is your open-source OpenStack network secure?

OpenStack is a framework that had a lofty goal of providing infrastructure resources to consumers (developers, end users, business units) in a rapid, self-service manner. This singular, self-serve aspect is what has made the platform so popular. The need for security with OpenStack, however, wasn’t addressed until much later, after it had become a clear problem internally. It was a classic technology afterthought — sacrificing safety for speed and efficiency.

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