Grazed from BizTech Magazine. Author: Ricky Riberio.

It’s true: Moving operations to a public cloud requires organizations to become comfortable with letting go of complete control of their data. While handing over control of organizational data to a third party inevitably creates a vulnerability, data stored in the cloud isn’t inherently less secure than non-cloud data.

We reached out to Kurt Roemer, Citrix Systems’ chief security strategist, to get a better understanding of how companies can secure their data in cloud environments that they own or don’t own.

QUESTION When it comes to the cloud, how much security can an organization really expect from infrastructure that they don’t own?…

Grazed from Investors.com. Author: Reihardt Krause.

Amazon.com’s widening push into cloud-computing services has the traditional IT industry bracing for more competition. Amazon Web Services, the cloud unit of the e-commerce leader, this month showcased its fast-growing cloud wares for large enterprises at its own developers conference. Amazon’s shift in focus from smaller companies to big enterprises is having an impact on many information technology companies.

Shares of data center technology firmsCitrix Systems (CTXS) and VMware (VMW) fell last week after AWS announced new services. IBM (IBM) has launched an ad campaign vs. Amazon (AMZN) on their respective cloud prowess. Rackspace Hosting (RAX) and others, meanwhile, are struggling to make the investments needed to challenge AWS…

Grazed from Forbes. Author: Ben Kepes.

Platform as a Service (PaaS) has long been heralded as the next big wave for cloud computing (disclosure, I’m an adviser to ActiveState, a PaaS vendor). Distinct from the more readily understood (and more broadly adopted) Infrastructure as a Service, PaaS provides higher value to organizations by abstracting more non-core technological requirements away from the business.

PaaS offerings further facilitate the deployment of applications when compared to IaaS since they not only take care of the infrastructure-level requirement but also offer further integrated services and the application development platform. It’s fair to say though that PaaS brings with it some broader concerns than the more simple IaaS – concerns have long been raised about the amount of lock-in that PaaS vendors create for their customers – one of the earlier PaaS offerings, Force.com is often complemented in one breath for the way it democratizes development, but criticized in the other breath for the lock-in that it creates…

Grazed from BusinessWire. Author: PR Announcement.

Penguin Computing, a provider of high performance and enterprise computing solutions, today announced future availability of the new Arctica 3200xl open network switch based on the Broadcom StrataXGS® Trident II chipset. Introduction of Arctica 3200xl adds 32-port 40 Gigabit Ethernet capability to the Arctica family. Arctica 3200xl also enables up to 96 servers and storage systems to be connected over 10 Gigabit Ethernet to a single Top-of-Rack switch while supporting 40 Gigabit Ethernet uplinks for aggregation. With existing Arctica 4804i, 4804x and new 3200xl models Penguin has a full suite of open switches for High Performance Computing and Internet Data Center applications.

40 Gigabit Ethernet (40GigE) ports available in Arctica 3200xl alleviate I/O bottlenecks in congested storage servers. Used as Inter-Switch Links (ISLs), 40GigE connections aggregate traffic from multiple 10/40GigE Top-of-Rack switches. Arctica 3200xl also offers new high port count 10 Gigabit Ethernet options to support ultra high density rack form factors, such as Penguin OpenHPC™. Multiple Arctica 3200xl and 4804x units can be used to span large non-blocking fabric topologies (Clos networks) to support High Performance Computing clusters. For data center and virtualization workloads, Arctica 3200xl provides wire speed VXLAN functionality to address the management and security concerns in large multi-tenant cloud deployments…

Grazed from PR NewsWire. Author: PR Announcement.

SendGrid, the cloud-based email delivery service, today announced its partnership with ProfitBricks, the Cloud Computing – Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) company. The partnership is a strategic milestone for both companies with SendGrid continuing expansion efforts with a leading IaaS provider and ProfitBricks referring customers with transactional email to SendGrid to solve their customers’ email deliverability challenges.

Launched in 2009, SendGrid has quickly emerged as a leader in transactional email, sending over 9 billion emails per month for over 150,000 customers, which include Pinterest, Spotify, Airbnb, and Foursquare. ProfitBricks, founded in 2010, has rapidly expanded its second generation Cloud Computing footprint in Europe and the U.S. It’s recent price drop and continued performance leadership puts ProfitBricks in the enviable position as Cloud Computing’s price/performance leader…

Grazed from Forbes. Author: Joe McKendrick.

A new study suggests that adoption of cloud offerings — particularly Platform as a Service middleware and application development tools — can cut the cost of U.S. government application development costs to the tune of $20.5 billion a year. at least 31%.That’s the takeaway from a new survey of 153 federal IT executives released by MeriTalk, a public-private partnership for advancing government IT. The study, underwritten by Red Hat, Inc., calculates that Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) has the potential to reduce federal IT costs by close to one-third.

The federal government is actually a huge producer of software. More than three-quarters of respondents, 77%, say new application development “is vital to their agency’s ability to meet mission objectives.” However, the report’s authors add that “federal IT is fundamentally broken.”…

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: David Linthicum.

You can’t get through a month without hearing a group of cloud providers tell us how green their clouds are by using alternative energy sources instead of carbon-emitting fossil fuels. Although I’m sure they’re taking steps to reduce the amount of carbon emissions their new data centers put out, just the fact of data centers the size of a large airport seems counterintuitive to the "green" claim.

Last week, for example, the San Francisco Chronicle reported on a panel of cloud providers crowing about how they’ve forced power companies to switch to non-fossil-fuel sources: "By strong-arming power companies — for business, not necessarily altruistic, reasons — name-brand tech giants like Google, Rackspace, and Facebook can claim significant portions of their power comes from renewable sources like wind, hydro, and solar."…

Grazed from MarketWire. Author: PR Announcement.

South River Technologies, Inc. (SRT), an innovator in secure file transfer, has announced the launch of its WebDrive mobile app for iPhone and iPad applications. WebDrive is designed to make accessing files on a multitude of cloud services and corporate web servers more convenient and efficient.

WebDrive for iOS enables users to access all of their files, presentations and videos through one simple app, rather than requiring an application for each storage service. This creates a simple way for users to access, share and view all of their content…

Grazed from MarketWire. Author: PR Announcement.

SolidFire, the leader in all-flash storage systems for the next generation data center, and ShapeBlue, the leading independent global CloudStack integrator, have aligned to build a reference architecture to demonstrate how customers can address the operational challenges encountered when deploying block storage in a multi-tenant cloud infrastructure. The demo will be on display in the ShapeBlue booth at the CloudStack Collaboration Conference this week in Amsterdam. Visitors to the booth will see a demonstration of the performance, scalability and efficiency benefits to be realized from combining CloudStack with SolidFire’s scale-out block storage system.

In addition to collaborating on the CloudStack demo environment, ShapeBlue has joined SolidFire’s Cloud Builders Channel Partner Program. The Cloud Builders Program invests in the success of systems integrators like ShapeBlue that are tackling their customers’ most strategic storage and cloud infrastructure projects…

Grazed from TechVibes. Author: Editorial Staff.

Customer relationship management platform Salesforce and HP this week announced a strategic partnership in cloud computing. Salesforce and HP plan to create what they call a "Salesforce Superpod," a dedicated instance in the Salesforce multi-tenant cloud, running on HP’s Converged Infrastructure. The companies plan to jointly develop and market the Salesforce Superpod to the world’s largest enterprises and HP intends to be the first customer to be deployed on a Salesforce Superpod.

The partnership was announced at Dreamforce in San Francisco. “The Salesforce and HP partnership is a breakthrough in cloud computing,” said Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff. “The Salesforce Superpod will allow individual customers to have a dedicated instance in the Salesforce multi-tenant cloud, powered by HP’s technology and fully managed within salesforce.com’s world-class data centers.”…

Read more from the source @ http://www.techvibes.com/blog/salesforce-and-hp-announce-strategic-cloud-partnership-2013-11-19