SHANGHAI & ATLANTA, July 2010 (BUSINESS WIRE) — CDC Global Services, a business unit of CDC Corporation and a provider of consulting, IT and IT-enabled services, announced today it has entered into an agreement to provide design, implementation and operations services for the Foshan Municipal Cloud Computing Center. This Center provides cloud-based computing resources to the public sector users and businesses in the city of Foshan and the neighboring regions.

The City of Foshan is less than 50 kilometers from Guangzhou, the provincial capital of Guangdong. Foshan is one of the top-10 cities in China, with the highest GDP per capita. It also has a number of highly successful industries in the design and manufacturing of electrical appliances, textiles, garments and ceramics products.

To accelerate the adoption of cloud-based services, the City of Foshan is engaging CDC Global Services to design, implement and operate this government-funded Cloud Computing Center. Based on the IaaS layer (Infrastructure as a Service) that the government has invested to build, CDC Global Services has been engaged to design and implement the PaaS layer (Platform as a Service). This PaaS layer will support a set of open standards upon which SaaS-ready (Software as a Services) products from different suppliers will be selected and implemented to meet the needs of the user community that the Center is designed to serve. This is expected to include the provision of ERP services to the large number of businesses in the electrical appliances, ceramics products, textiles, garments and food processing industries. CDC Global Services also expects to provide on-going management and operations services in the Center and advise the government in the adoption of various SaaS solutions to meet the needs of the public sectors users and its business community.

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InformationWeek – The Defense Information Systems Agency, an agency that’s already among the government leaders in cloud computing, is considering offering platform-as-a-service to other military agencies to complement the infrastructure-as-a-service that it already offers via its Rapid Access Computing Environment (RACE) private cloud.

Today, the PaaS offering is an early-stage pilot designed to meet a request from the Air Force, but a broader pilot is forthcoming. “The Air Force came to us and said, we not only want you to manage the infrastructure, but also the middleware,” Alfred Rivera, DISA’s director of computing services, said in a speech Wednesday at DISA’s Customer and Industry Forum in Washington, D.C.

As part of the PaaS offering, DISA would not just provide the servers themselves, but also the operating system stack and all support services below the application layer, including patching and managing the IT infrastructure.

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Stamp of Approval

Las Vegas, NV (CSA Press Release) July, 2010 — The Cloud Security Alliance today unveiled the industry’s first user certification program for secure cloud computing. The Certificate of Cloud Security Knowledge (CCSK) is designed to ensure that a broad range of professionals with a responsibility related to cloud computing have a demonstrated awareness of the security threats and best practices for securing the cloud.

Cloud computing is being aggressively adopted on a global basis as businesses seek to reduce costs and improve their agility. Among the critical needs of the industry is to provide training and certification of professionals to assure that cloud computing is implemented responsibly with the appropriate security controls. The Cloud Security Alliance has developed a widely adopted catalogue of security best practices, the Security Guidance for Critical Areas of Focus in Cloud Computing, V2.1. In addition, the European Network and Information Security Agency (ENISA) whitepaper “Cloud Computing: Benefits, Risks and Recommendations for Information Security” is an important contribution to the cloud security body of knowledge. The Certificate of Cloud Security Knowledge (CCSK) provides evidence that an individual has successfully completed an examination covering the key concepts of the CSA guidance and ENISA whitepaper. More information is available at www.cloudsecurityalliance.org/certifyme.

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