Grazed from InfosecurityMag. Author: Harold Byun.

Cybercriminals are clever and know how to evolve – you’ve got to give them that. They’ve proven this once again with their latest cyber-attack strategy, the Watering Hole Attack, which leverages cloud services to help gain access to even the most secure and sophisticated enterprises and government agencies.

Attacks Used to be Humorously Simple

In earlier days, attackers operated more simply using emails entitled “ILOVEYOU” or poorly worded messages from Nigerian generals promising untold fortunes of wealth. Over the years, the attacks have evolved into complex spear phishing operations that target specific individuals who can help navigate an organization’s personnel hierarchy or identify digital certificate compromises that lead to command and control over the enterprise infrastructure. In either scenario, the success of the attacks has always been predicated on the fact that users are humans who will occasionally click on or open something that is suspect or compromised…

Grazed from TMCNet. Author: Laura Stotler.

A new cloud server provider has entered the fray, moving out of beta and making its infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) offerings available to the public. Charlotte, N.C.-based CloudServers.com, which specializes in both Windows and Linux hosting, has made its debut. The IaaS provider is offering a number of features to distinguish itself from competitors.

These include instant provisioning, on-demand scalability, auto-healing technology and secured monthly billing so the pricing remains consistent. The market for IaaS services is currently on fire. There is no question that IaaS comprises the fastest growing segment of the overall cloud computing market, with Gartner (News – Alert) projecting 47.3 percent growth this year…

Grazed from BusinessCloudNews. Author: Jonathan Brandon.

The Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) and the British Standards Institute (BSI) Wednesday announced the launch of a certification programme for cloud service providers designed to improve confidence in cloud computing among consumers and enterprises.

The STAR certification programme includes an assessment of the security of cloud service providers, measuring how well these companies measure up to the ISO/IEC 27001:2005 information management system standard, and the CSA Cloud Control Matrix, a set of 11 criteria developed by the organisation which measures the capability levels of the cloud service providers including compliance, data governance, facility security, human resources, information security, legal, operations management, risk management, release management, resiliency and security architecture…

Grazed from Forbes. Author: Josh Manchester.

Cloud computing, simply stated, is the ability to use files and applications over the Internet instead of hosting, storing, or processing them on locally managed hardware. Thanks to a series of advances in data storage, security, and transmission, individuals and enterprises can now store their data remotely in a third party facility. Because the data and software in use is not physically stored, it’s as though it were floating in a cloud.

You can easily understand cloud computing from the history of personal computer software over the past decade. Ten years ago, a consumer purchasing a new computer would be extremely conscious of the machine’s processing power as well as the size of its random access memory (RAM) and its hard drive…

Grazed from Global Times. Author: Zhang Ye.

Chinese e-commerce firm Alibaba Group announced it would acquire leading domestic cloud storage service provider Kanbox on Wednesday, in an effort to further develop its business in the cloud computing sector and improve user experiences on the mobile front.

With Kanbox’s technology, Alibaba aims to forge an efficient and secure personal cloud storage platform, a PR representative told the Global Times Wednesday, though refusing to reveal the financial details. After the acquisition, Alibaba plans to directly connect its user accounts with Kanbox’s accounts system, enabling online shoppers and sellers to save their trading data in virtual facilities hosted by Kanbox, according to a statement sent to the Global Times by Alibaba…

Grazed from V3.co.uk. Author: Daniel Robinson.

Linux developer Suse has released a new build of its cloud computing platform based on the OpenStack framework, adding new capabilities to make deployment easier. It is also the first OpenStack distribution to add full support for Microsoft’s Hyper-V, the firm claimed.

Available now, Suse Cloud 2.0 is an updated version of the firm’s enterprise-ready OpenStack distribution for building private infrastructure as a service (IaaS) cloud computing environments. Among the chief enhancements is a more robust installation process. This has been delivered through integration with the open source Crowbar project for bare-metal deployment. Used in conjunction with a set of Chef recipes, predefined scripts, and autoYAST, this can be used to rapidly provision and configure a complete private cloud, according to Suse…

Grazed from SiliconAngle. Author: Maria Deutscher.

Red Hat is moving beyond the realm of containerized PaaS with new OpenShift services for plugging cloud-based applications into back-office systems. Based on the company’s JBoss application server, the upcoming “xPaaS” solutions aim to make it easier for OpenShift users to integrate cloud apps into their IT environments.

Red Hat’s xPaas lineup includes a business process management service that offers activity monitoring, process simulation and modeling, and the ability to “configure automation and data” on the fly without having to modify existing code. These capabilities will be made available in the coming months, along with a mobile push notification app and an integration-as-a-service solution which are currently in developer preview. Paul Cormier, the head of products and technologies at Red Hat, explained that his company is unifying its lineup to better address enterprise needs…

Grazed from ComputerWorld. Author: Cliff Saran.

The recent outage of Google’s Gmail service shows that even class-leading cloud services can and will fail. How can IT departments build in resilience to cloud computing failures? Google has been winning business over Microsoft by targeting the huge costs associated with running on-premise Microsoft Exchange servers. Analyst Forrester’s Forrsights Hardware Survey; North American and Europe showed that cloud adoption between 2009 to 2012 increased from 9% to 46%.

The growth in cloud adoption is set to rise as CIOs move more of their traditional IT spending away from capital expenditure to software as a service in the cloud, paid per-user as an annual or monthly subscription. As cloud adoption increases more IT departments will need to have a battle plan in place for a cloud service outages…

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Charles Babcock.

"I can’t tell you how excited I was to get the call to come speak here," said Brad Anderson, Microsoft’s corporate VP for cloud and enterprise engineering, Tuesday as he faced the Oracle OpenWorld audience filled with several thousand potential Windows Azure cloud users. No Microsoft executive had ever made an OpenWorld keynote before.

Oracle and Microsoft, for the last decade, have bitterly vied to see which would be the dominant database on Windows: Oracle or SQL Server. The stakes grew higher as Windows Server became more strongly entrenched in the enterprise data center. At some point, both decided neither was ever going to own the market outright. At the same time, the rise of Amazon Web Services showed what had been brewing while they grappled with each other…

Grazed from CloudTweaks. Author: Editorial Staff.

CloudTweaks has covered a number of emerging startups over the years, such as our “Top 25 European Cloud Computing Rising Stars” lists. The question many startups have is: What does it cost to run a startup? We have an infographic provided courtesy of staff.com which outlines some of these costs in a few of the main technological hotspots of the world. We believe as cloud adoption rates increase, and telecommuting is more prevalent worldwide, many of these costs can be reduced in some capacity.

To read more from the source and to view the infographic, visit: http://www.cloudtweaks.com/2013/09/costs-running-startup/