Grazed from BrightLine. Author: PR Announcement.

BrightLine CPAs & Associates, Inc., a leading provider of compliance and attestation reporting services, is pleased to announce that it has joined the Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) as a Corporate Member. The CSA is a not-for-profit organization with a mission to promote the use of best practices for providing security assurance within cloud computing, and to provide education on the use of cloud computing to help secure all other forms of computing.

While multiple BrightLine professionals have already assisted in research efforts with the CSA, the corporate membership allows BrightLine to join the steering committee for Security, Trust & Assurance Registry (STAR) certification and attestation. The CSA STAR certification is a rigorous third party independent assessment of the security of a cloud service provider (CSP). The technology-neutral certification leverages the management system requirements of the ISO/IEC 27001 standard with the CSA CCM, a specified set of criteria across multiple control domains specific to issues that are critical to cloud security. Additionally, the STAR attestation program leverages the AICPA SOC 2 framework, under attestation standard AT 101…

Grazed from Forbes. Author: Joe McKendrick.

Companies are less concerned about measuring return on investment (ROI) for cloud computing engagements. Is that a good thing? A new survey of 350 senior IT executives finds 16 percent see measuring ROI as a hurdle to their cloud computing implementations, down from 34 percent in a similar survey from a year ago.

The survey, released by Unisys and conducted by IDG Research, finds more than 50 percent of IT leaders at organizations with more than 1,000 employees indicated that they have at least one application or a portion of their organization’s IT infrastructure in the cloud. Overall, about 26 percent of their enterprise information currently resides in a private cloud environment and that they expect that percentage to grow to about 32 percent in the next 18 months…

Grazed from MarketWire. Author: PR Announcement.

RightScale® Inc., a demonstrated leader in enterprise cloud portfolio management, today announced the results of its 2014 State of the Cloud Survey. The survey found that cloud adoption is reaching ubiquity as enterprises increase both public and private cloud adoption, but enterprise governance is lagging. In addition, the survey found as enterprise cloud maturity progresses, cloud security concerns abate and attention increasingly shifts to managing ongoing challenges of compliance, cost management, and performance.

The survey also identified significant interest in infrastructure-as-a-service offerings from Microsoft and Google, and a looming face-off between VMware and OpenStack in the private cloud market. The full results of the survey are available in the RightScale 2014 State of the Cloud Report at www.rightscale.com/2014-cloud-report…

Grazed from Neusoft. Author: PR Announcement.

Neusoft Corporation ("Neusoft", SSE: 600718) , a leading IT solution & service provider in China, recently announced that it has signed a strategic partnership agreement with Alibaba Cloud Computing Co., Ltd. ("AliCloud") to together develop the global cloud service market. This cooperation will cover cloud-based products, technologies, solutions, services, and joint marketing catering for government & utility sectors, businesses and IT operators.

According to this agreement, Neusoft and AliCloud will jointly promote the development of cloud computing services. Neusoft’s SaCa and UniEAP series of products will support the deployment and maintenance of AliCloud platform, and provide services for AliCloud’s cloud applications. Meanwhile, AliCloud will become a strategic partner of Neusoft in cloud computing business to serve customers with more flexible, controllable information systems…

Grazed from MarketWire. Author: PR Announcement.

ProfitBricks, the price/performance leader in Cloud Computing IaaS, is now helping big data systems integrators like Altoros bring the power of the cloud to the high demand of its customers. Thanks to second generation technologies like software-defined networking (SDN) and InfiniBand that are at the heart of the ProfitBricks cloud, Altoros customers can easily deploy Hadoop clusters for both temporary projects and continuous big data analysis programs.

Altoros implements and scales enterprise-level Hadoop solutions for its clients’ data mining, analyses and visualization needs. ProfitBricks’ high-performance InfiniBand-based IaaS enables Altoros’ clients to scale on-demand, no matter the size of the project. Big data cloud project deployments are growing at rapid rates, as businesses of all sizes collect ever-increasing amounts of unstructured data using new NoSQL and MPP databases like MongoDB, Cassandra, Greenplum, and Vertica. Hadoop distributions from MapR and Hortonworks make all of this data available for analytics tools…

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: Chris Talbot.

Sookasa, a newcomer to the as-a-service scene, has entered the market with the launch of Sookasa Compliance as a Service, a solution that "radically simplifies the protection of sensitive files across popular cloud services and mobile devices." Sookasa may have finally solved a problem that has been plaguing end users for some time and could open the possibilities companies that fall under compliance regulations of using some of the more common cloud computing services without concern.

Sookasa’s offering enables end users to natively use cloud services such as Dropbox and Google Gmail, as well as mobile devices, while transparently encrypting sensitive data and addressing compliance regulations, including HIPAA and FERPA. Aimed at small and medium businesses (SMBs), Sookasa is targeting vertical markets where data compliance is a top concern…

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: Chris Talbot.

The CloudEthernet Forum unveiled the Open Cloud Project at Interop this week, and the industry organization is working with the MetroEthernet Forum to make it happen. Together, the two organizations are hoping to create an open test and iterative standards development program for service providers, vendors and over-the-top cloud services providers.

Included in the new project is a dedicated proof of concept test laboratory in Silicon Valley, which will provide ongoing testing and support for the iterative development of CEF’s CloudE 1.0 open cloud environment. According to CEF, the Open Cloud Project will also provide the basis of future compliance and benchmark testing…

Grazed from Arnnet. Author: Nermin Bajric.

The impact of the Cloud, while undoubtedly massive in the long term, remains nebulous and hard to pin down, according to ICT experts. Yes, this ‘Cloud thing’ is making some serious noise, yet there are mixed messages wherever you look. Organisations which have overcome their fear of ‘it’ are looking to deploy, while Cloud services and solutions providers are scrambling to make ends meet in a growingly congested Australian market filled with confusion and, often, a lack of direction.

Add to that the fact that no one strategy has yet been determined as definitively successful (if there is such a thing), and it becomes a tough task. What is certain for now is that the multi-faceted Cloud market, on both the compute and services fronts, is chugging along; some components are ballooning, while others crawl…

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Wyatt Kash.

GSA’s leap to cloud computing began as a billion-dollar real estate problem. As part of its mandate to provide a range of services to other federal agencies, the General Services Administration owns or leases 354 million square feet of office and warehouse space in 9,600 buildings, and it provides workspaces for more than 1 million federal workers. The problem: Half the time, those people are out in the field or working away from their desks. For a government agency that spends roughly $10 billion annually on leasing and construction costs, officials knew there had to be a smarter approach.

They moved toward a hoteling model, whereby employees check in and out of workspaces. However, that move required GSA to overhaul its IT infrastructure, says acting CIO Sonny Hashmi. Enter cloud computing. Beginning in 2010, when cloud computing was still mostly a vision for federal policy-makers, GSA officials, including Casey Coleman, the CIO at the time, crafted a multiyear strategy to migrate core agency systems to the cloud…

Grazed from eWeek. Author: Wayne Rash.

Ask pretty much anybody who is in the process of moving some business operations to the cloud exactly what they think the cloud is, and the chances are you’ll get a different answer from each one. This is, as you might expect, a problem when it comes to moving critical business functions to the cloud. "The cloud doesn’t have to mean the public cloud," Margaret Dawson told eWEEK in an interview at the Interop conference here.

Dawson, who is Hewlett-Packard’s vice president of product marketing and a cloud evangelist" for the company said that the misunderstandings of what the cloud is and how it works play a significant role in slowing cloud adoption for many companies. This is because a surprisingly large number of people assume "the cloud" means the "public cloud." In reality, Dawson said, most companies don’t, and shouldn’t, use the public cloud for their operations…