Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Robert Malmrose.

Willie Sutton, the famous bank robber, is credited with robbing more than 100 banks between the late 1920s and the early 1950s, when he was arrested, convicted and imprisoned. Sutton stole more than $2 million during his prolific crime wave. In an article published in The Saturday Evening Post in January 1951, a reporter asked Sutton why he robbed banks, to which Sutton allegedly replied, "Because that’s where the money is." In his autobiography, Sutton denied that he actually he used those exact words, but then wrote, "That’s what almost anybody would say… it couldn’t be more obvious."

Modern-day bank robbers aren’t using masks and guns, but rather computers and social engineering. As businesses move their intellectual property and client data into cloud technologies, it’s clear that the new bank robbers are going to be found in the cloud. Why? The worldwide public cloud services market is growing tremendously. And they’re not just targeting banks anymore, but any company where they can find data to resell, disrupt or exploit…

Grazed from Jitscale. Author: PR Announcement.

The sudden closing of enterprise cloud storage provider Nirvanix has left more than 1,000 of their customers scrambling to quickly migrate data to new providers. Cloud infrastructure provider Jitscale today outlined some tips that will help companies keep their cloud-based data safe in the event of an unexpected disruption in service.

"While some skeptics have used the Nirvanix closure to bolster their belief that the cloud is not safe for a company’s data or platforms, Jitscale does not subscribe to this point of view," said Eelco van Beek, chief executive officer at Jitscale. "The benefits of the cloud are numerous and remain relevant, despite the failure of one company."…

Grazed from Diginomica. Author: Phil Wainwright.

Every security breach of third-party data harms public trust in cloud computing. Not only well-publicized mega-breaches like the theft of login data, encrypted credit card data and source code from Adobe, but also the word-of-mouth damage that arises every time an individual has their account hacked.

You’d think that cloud computing providers would go out of their way to minimize vulnerabilities. Of course they invest massive sums in securing their datacenters against direct attack. But most attacks today don’t come at the physical network perimeter. Why try and tear down the walls when you can just steal the keys and walk right in? Most attacks today gain access by stealing or cracking passwords that allow the hacker to assume a trusted user’s identity…

Grazed from CloudPro. Author: Rene Millman.

Unisys has unveiled its latest enterprise computing platform, which is aimed at helping large firms and cloud service providers cut physical server requirements by up to 70 per cent. Dubbed Forward, the platform combines Unisys’ security partitioning technology (S-Par) with Intel’s Xeon virtualisation technology to give organisations a flexible computing fabric to handle mission-critical workloads.

The company said the platform, available in December, would be ideal for organisations looking to move away from expensive Unix environments to Linux and Windows-based ones. Furthermore, the platform is reportedly capable of handling secure cloud and big data workloads, according to Unisys, and can cut down on server sprawl by consolidating datacentre resources…

Grazed from BizTech2. Author: Editorial Staff.

While most business professionals are worried about the security of cloud-based applications, they are not deterred from using them to store their personal and professional data, and they are not losing sleep over their data and information, according to a recent survey from SafeNet Labs, the creator of SafeMonk.

When SafeNet Labs, a technology incubator initiative of SafeNet, Inc., asked hundreds of business professionals worldwide if they were worried about the security of the cloud-based applications or data stored in the cloud, 52 percent checked “Yes”; however, sixty-four percent of respondents said they still frequently use cloud-based apps to store their personal and professional data. Ironically, when asked what keeps them up at night regarding their data and information, more than half answered, “Nothing keeps me up; I sleep like a baby.”…

Grazed from IT Jungle. Author: Jenny Thomas.

Whether you are part of a large enterprise or a small business, it is inconceivable to think your company is not aware of the explosion in cloud computing in recent years. Even if a cloud deployment isn’t in your organization’s immediate future, keeping an eye on the trends can help you make a better decision about going cloud should the time ever come.

The analysts at Gartner make it their business to follow what’s happening in IT, and there has been some movement in the cloud market that has caught their attention. In a recent report, Gartner says nearly half of large enterprises will have hybrid cloud deployments by the end of 2017. Which means there must be some serious cloud action happening when you consider 2017 is really right around the corner at less than four years away…

Grazed from The New York Times. Author: Danny Hakim.

The words “cloud computing” never appeared in a 119-page digital privacy regulation introduced in Europe last year. They do now. Even before revelations this summer by Edward J. Snowden on the extent of spying by the National Security Agency on electronic communications, the European Parliament busied itself attaching amendments to its data privacy regulation. Several would change the rules of cloud computing, the technology that enables the sharing of software and files among computers on the Internet.

And since the news broke of widespread monitoring by the United States spy agency, cloud computing has become one of the regulatory flash points in Brussels as a debate ensued over how to protect data from snooping American eyes…

Grazed from GigaOM.  Author: Barb Darrow.

The new Verizon Cloud,  which entered public beta last week, has some big game in its sights. Verizon CTO  John Considine said the cloud offers the scale of a huge cloud but without the “noisy neighbor” issues associated with other public clouds (read: Amazon Web Services). Noisy neighbor happens when one customer’s cloud workload on shared infrastructure sucks up most of the resources impacting other jobs on the same infrastructure.

Verizon Cloud builds on work by CloudSwitch a company Verizon acquired in 2011 again optimized version of the Xen hypervisor. And Considine said it will run existing VMware workloads  – an important consideration given that VMware virtualization dominates in corporate server rooms. for more on the guts of the system and its prospects check out Gartner cloud guru Lydia Leong’s take…