Creating a Private Cloud

By David Rose on 3 June 2011

Consumer websites and non-critical applications have been taking advantage of the benefits of cloud hosting, but medium-sized and small businesses and organizations have been reluctant, or unable, to follow this trend because of some severe downsides in Cloud hosting web applications.

First, though the up-sides: Low cost of entry, Browser based - access from anywhere, Work or Remote is same experience, Speed of Deployment, Automatic update deployment, Minimized infrastructure and Reduced costs.
Plus, some cloud providers offer value-added packages which let you manage your CRM, basic accounting, run blogs or create websites with shopping carts.

But there are some very nasty downsides:

Security - applications and websites hosted in a public cloud are grossly insecure. It simply impossible to know who is accessing your data from 'behind the scenes'. Just as you would not leave your bank account open for all to see, no more can you have transactional data, personnel records, accounting or other commercially valuable information stored in the public cloud. There is no data privacy. Your 'confidential data' could be stored anywhere in the world and viewed by one of thousands of technicians anywhere from India to Iceland to Idaho.

Continuity & Portability - who is to say that the cloud based service your business might rely on is still going to be trading next year?
What happens if they get taken over or just cease trading? Who is in control and who gets priority? What happens if you outgrow your provider? How do you migrate from one proprietary system to another?

Backup and redundancy - who has control over backing up your data and applications and how and when is it restored?

Unbounded costs - applications hosted in the public cloud can use automatic scaling, but that means your costs can spiral upwards rapidly.

Legal vulnerability - to search your office or in-house server the authorities must get a search warrant. To get to the information you've stored on a third-party's web servers, they only need a subpoena. Type of search can also happen without your knowledge and the Cloud provider may be barred from even telling you. As the data could be anywhere in the world, it is subject to seizure by any local law. And the data is always subject to local data protection and regulation laws.

The clearString Solution
Creating your own Private Cloud allows you to mitigate many of the risks and challenges of cloud computing, while leaving you to enjoy its many benefits.

clearString enables anyone to create and manage their own Private Cloud without specialist technical knowledge. You get upside without the downside of Cloud website and application development.

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Getting data into your site

By Bob North on 14 September 2010

There's little doubt that data makes the difference between a 'me-too' brochureware site, and an active and useful internet presence. However that data isn't always where you need it to be – on the site. What we need is an easy way to import, lookup, or synchronise data from other sources, and make it available to the table/query/view system that powers the data handling in clearString neatComponents.

Today I'm talking about the component that manages that process, to give you a feel for what's possible. The 'External Lookup Data Feed' component can be pointed at an external source – typically an XML file or an RSS or Atom feed – and will pull the data found there into one or more tables within the system.

A simple example would be where you are doing a one-off import, to migrate a blog from a legacy platform like Wordpress: point the component at the Wordpress blog's RSS feed, map the feed fields to the ones in the table, and trigger the lookup. All done in moments.

If it's not a one-off import, but a regular pulling in of data you need, simply add a schedule, and it will repeat the process every so often – you decide the schedule – and it will take care not to duplicate any records already imported, but will update any which need refreshing.

Sometimes the dataset is too big to import, or simply unavailable in complete form. In these cases you need to perform an on-demand lookup, and it will pull in the particular records you need. For example, on a car parts website, you might want to let the user enter their car registration plate, and the lookup asks the national database which make and model it is – and thus present a catalog of the parts suitable for that particular vehicle.

Again, the lookup component can handle this, passing forward the search terms entered by the user in the request to the external database, having first checked to make sure the details aren't already known (to save time, and, if charged per request, money).

Sometimes things go wrong with external databases, so we also gracefully handle request timeouts, allowing for failover to backup feeds, and of course some lookups need to be to secure sites or require authentication to access them.

This has only given a quick sample of what's possible; for more information see: www.neatcomponents.com/external-lookup

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