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As we were finalizing our own compliance reports this past period, I watched with interest as many hosting companies and auditors rushed to issue or claim they had SSAE16-SOC2. What’s wrong with a SSAE16-SOC2? Well, for starters, it doesn’t exist. In layman's terms, SSAE16 comes in a couple of flavors, but was designed much like the original SAS70 to show controls in support of financial audits and not designed at all for data center operations.

A couple weeks ago, I had the pleasure of attending the GSA IaaS Education Day. While sitting in a room full of federal agency IT and IT acquisition professionals, Keith Trippie, Executive Director for Enterprise System Development Office at US Department of Homeland Security, reviewed DHS roadmap to the cloud and succinctly illustrated the benefits of adopting cloud services.

At Carpathia, we see a lot of pretty unique customer requirements, and from our vantage point, we also have a good view of trends both in terms of technology and workloads. One of the nice things about not being a one trick pony is that we can deliver the full spectrum of infrastructure services, ranging from colo to cloud. With that said, this may not be a particularly well-received post from the pure play cloud crew. From our perspective, we really see somewhat of a maturity model presenting itself.

I spent this week in Orlando at the Gartner Symposium/ITxpo talking about clouds from two perspectives – IT and weather – as we endured a vigorous tropical storm dumping buckets of rain in the area. It certainly brought a whole new meaning to "cloud bursting" this week! Kudos to the Gartner team for pulling together a very impressive show, a great mix between the emerging technology providers and more established companies. I ended up splitting my time between the show floor, where Carpathia had a booth, and attending the main sessions at the event.

New York has always been a very interesting market for Carpathia with many prospects having rigorous compliance requirements, one of our specialties. As such, I’ve been traveling to the Big Apple quite often over the past couple of months. This year we have doubled down in the NY/NJ area by adding additional sales resources and extending our data center footprint and network reach. Delivering close to 1TB/sec of managed bandwidth really puts Carpathia in the top echelon and makes for some very interesting discussions with prospects and customers.

This time each year, the hosting industry gathers in Las Vegas for 48 hours of events at Tier1's Hosting Transformation Summit. It’s been interesting to watch this event evolve over the past 4 years. The first events were small with a variety of hosters/like minds meeting and included a few panel discussions. This year however, the event attracted over 800 attendees and included a very robust set of panels, keynotes and exhibitors. Last year it was clear the focus of the event had completely switched to cloud. It’s interesting this year to see that the discussions both at the event and in the hallways seemed to shift and soften a little to talk more about cloud in the hybrid form vs. the pure form of last year.

I’d like you all to save the date for our first ever Virtual Solutions Exchange – a free, one-day online conference dedicated solely for the purposes of providing information, best practices and thought leadership on hosting industry topics, ranging from cloud solutions to complex, compliance-oriented hosting solutions to traditional managed hosting services.

As you have heard from me over the past few months, the network is where the innovation needs to occur in the cloud. One of our partners that has been driving this innovation is Citrix -- starting with the VPX load balancers in 2009, one of the first commercially available load balancers optimized for the cloud and delivered as virtual machines.