Grazed from BusinessWire. Author: PR Announcement.

Embotics®, a leading provider of enterprise-class Cloud Management Software, today announced it is releasing a set of new multi-cloud cost management and financial analytics capabilities within its latest release of the Embotics vCommander™ software. The new vCommander 5.1 release is generally available this month, April 2014, and will expand on the company’s mission of helping enterprises and service providers to better analyze, orchestrate, govern and broker across multi-hypervisor and multi-cloud environments.

Support for IBM SoftLayer®, Microsoft® Azure, Google Cloud Platform, and Rackspace® Public Cloud has been added to vCommander 5.1, allowing Embotics’ users to model and compare the economics of running their workloads across one or more hypervisor and cloud platforms. These new platforms are in addition to the support within vCommander for VMware® vSphere®, Microsoft Hyper-V, Amazon Web Services (AWS), and the OpenStack® based HP Cloud…

Grazed from BizTechMagazine. Author: Matt McLaughlin.

A move to cloud computing is a marathon, not a sprint, so any organization considering the cloud should take a slow approach, says Shane Zide, CDW’s sales leader for cloud and managed solutions. Businesses considering the cloud should take care to determine what they need and the best way to get it. “The cloud isn’t one size fits all,” Zide says. “It is very customizable, actually, in terms of what you want and what your comfort level is.”

The different flavors of cloud — private, public and hybrid — offer different benefits. For example, a business may want to keep its most sensitive data and applications in a private cloud while moving enterprise functions such as email to a public-cloud provider. A key benefit to cloud computing is that outsourcing IT operations to a service provider allows an organization to focus on its core mission…

Grazed from ComputerWeekly. Author: Warwick Ashford.

Cyber attacks on cloud environments have almost reached the same level as attacks on traditional IT, with increased adoption of cloud-based services by the enterprise, a study shows. The 2014 Cloud Security Report by security-as-a-service provider Alert Logic is based on an analysis of data from cloud and on-premise infrastructures of 2,200 customers.

In the past year, brute force attacks on cloud environments climbed from 30% to 44% of customers, and vulnerability scans increased from 27% to 44%, the study found. Brute force attacks typically involve a large number of attempts testing multiple common credential failings to find a way in, while vulnerability scans are automated attempts to find a security weakness in applications, services or protocol implementations that can be exploited…

Grazed from MarketWire. Author: PR Announcement.

CliQr Technologies, the leader in cloud migration and full application lifecycle management, today announced it has been recognized as one of the "Cool Vendors in Cloud Management, 2014(1)" for its CloudCenter(TM) technology by the world’s leading information technology research and advisory company, Gartner, Inc. Each year, Gartner publishes a series of research reports in key technology areas that highlight interesting, new and innovative vendors, products and services.

"We’re honored to be recognized as a ‘Cool Vendor’ by Gartner. We believe this inclusion validates our application-centric approach to cloud migration and management — an approach that is already resonating with the market," said Gaurav Manglik, co-founder and CEO of CliQr. "Businesses today have come to realize that the ultimate benefit of cloud computing involves the ability to fluidly move and manage applications and data to and across a variety of users, and private and public clouds depending on workload criteria. This is the true promise of the cloud — and to accomplish this in any scalable fashion organizations require the ability to liberate applications from being bound to diverse cloud infrastructures and services. And this is exactly what CliQr delivers."…

Grazed from EnterpriseStorageForum. Author: Drew Robb.

The follow-up article to our hybrid cloud storage buying guide provides tips, advice and cautions for those seeking to implement a hybrid cloud storage environment. Some companies are already well on their way to building a sophisticated internal cloud. Others have gotten their feet wet in the public cloud and know the ropes there fairly well. So there is no one-size-fits-all way to go about implementing a hybrid cloud. It all depends on where you are right now.

Hybrid Cloud Storage: Starting Points

Building a hybrid cloud storage deployment could just as easily start from a public or private cloud focus. “Because a hybrid cloud combines public cloud and private data center principles, it’s possible to plan a hybrid cloud deployment from either of these starting points. Picking the better starting point, however, will make it easier to address business goals,” said Molly Rector, Chief Marketing Officer, at Data Direct Networks (DDN)…

Grazed from NPR. Author: Steve Henn.

You hear the term "the cloud" or "cloud computing," and you picture something puffy, white, clean and quiet. Cloud computing is anything but. Even from a distance you can hear the hum of a modern data center. Last week, I visited one of the largest in Santa Clara, Calif., in the heart of Silicon Valley. It’s called SC1, is owned by DuPont Fabros Technology and is about a quarter-mile long.

"It’s about the same size and length as a Nimitz aircraft carrier," says Paul Hopkins, a regional vice president for the company, shortly after buzzing me through the door. The entrance is guarded, and employees need fingerprint scans to get in and out. Hopkins has agreed to show me around…

Grazed from MSPAlliance. Author: Editorial Staff.

Cloud security company Total Defense has gone through a rebranding and will now go by the name of iSheriff. The name change goes along with the company’s sale of its consumer division to Untangle. As a result, iSheriff, will now be dedicated to creating cloud security solutions for Managed Service Providers (MSPs) and small-to-medium enterprises (SMEs).

“Over the last few years, the Total Defense brand has become synonymous with comprehensive protection of the digital assets that we’ve all come to rely upon, in both corporate and consumer settings,” said Paul Lipman, CEO, iSheriff. “This transaction is a win-win for both our consumer and corporate partners and customers…

Grazed from ChannelPartnersOnline. Author: TC Doyle.

A new study of SMB customers by Techaisle suggests that cloud computing has become a strategic platform for small and midsize (SMBs) customers, not just a tactical tool used for saving a few bucks. The new report, which is entitled “SMB & Mid-Market Cloud Computing Adoption Trends," highlights seven distinct developments underway in this important customer segment.

Among them: SMB customers who once turned to cloud computing as a means to save money now do so with the expectation that it will increase their agility and competitiveness. In addition to why the cloud is being adopted, the study also zeroed in on other trends, including who inside SMB companies drives adoption, what kinds of clouds they use, why cloud usage patterns change and how, who is responsible for security, what are the attributes of successful cloud implementations and what are the inhibitors to broader adoption…

Grazed from eWeek. Author: Todd R. Weiss.

The Google Cloud Platform is expanding its capabilities with Hadoop through new connectors that can be used with Google BigQuery and Google Cloud Datastore to run Hadoop queries. Also bolstering the cloud platform is a new version of Google App Engine that includes scalability and performance improvements. The new Hadoop connectors were announced by Pratul Dublish, a cloud platform product manager, in an April 16 post on the Google Cloud Platform Blog.

"Today, we are making it easier for you to run Hadoop jobs directly against your data in Google BigQuery and Google Cloud Datastore with the Preview release of Google BigQuery connector and Google Cloud Datastore connector for Hadoop," wrote Dublish. "The Google BigQuery and Google Cloud Datastore connectors implement Hadoop’s InputFormat and OutputFormat interfaces for accessing data…

Grazed from CloudTweaks. Author: Editorial Staff.

For some time now, genomics or the study of genes has been branded as the possible playing field for the next medical revolution. Indeed, some believe that genomics can have as much an impact on human civilization this century as computers did in the previous one, with possible applications from the frivolous (specifying eye color in an unborn child) to momentous (developing designer medicine to target specific symptoms in specific patients).

Gene sequencing produces an enormous amount of data, and processing this data requires an enormous amount of computing power. While the price of gene sequencers has reduced drastically over the years, the same is not true for computing resources. Unless, cloud computing is the resource being used…