Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: Juan Carlos Perez.

Box, the Silicon Valley darling that has disrupted enterprise cloud storage and file sharing, will broaden its scope into the content-creation space with a new online note-taking application. Box Notes, to be unveiled on Monday at the company’s BoxWorks conference in San Francisco, will provide a word processor-like interface where colleagues can add content to the document and co-edit it in real time.

The application, which will be a standard component of the Box product, is in a limited test release. Interested testers need to request access by signing up at Box.com/notes. The company is looking at next year for releasing it in final form. "This is our first step into content creation and productivity [software]," said Chris Yeh, Box’s senior vice president of product and platform…

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Charles Babcock.

Amazon Web Services has altered its Reserved Instance (RI) terms to enable customers to make certain changes after the contract is signed. Even with new powers to modify a contract, setting initial terms is not as simple as it sounds. Cloudability is stepping in to try to make it easier.

AWS Reserved Instance customers may now change the availability zone in which a RI runs or the network attributes assigned to it, but they can’t vary the lifespan set forth in the contract. RIs come with one-year or three-year subscriptions. In the past, customers were stuck with whatever RI attributes they signed up for, over the duration of the contract. But the RIs also come with a significant discount over Amazon’s on-demand server prices…

Grazed from PRNewsWire. Author: PR Announcement.

inContact (SAAS), the leading provider of cloud contact center software and contact center agent optimization tools, today announced the market availability of the second major release of its award-winning cloud contact center platform in 2013. The new cloud software release is designed to enhance personalized service experiences, delivering more 1-to-1 connections with customers while providing game-changing contact center effectiveness.

“As the cloud contact center leader, we are excited to deliver our second major software release in 2013, enabling our customers to stay on the cutting edge of customer service technology,” said Paul Jarman, inContact CEO. “Unlike legacy premise solutions that lock customers into an 18 month cadence of waiting for new features, inContact gives our customers the continuous innovation they need to address their most pressing contact center challenges.”…

Grazed from eWeek. Author: Nathan Eddy.

Federal agencies plan to fully deploy data center consolidation, mobility, security, big data, and cloud computing (the Big Five) efforts in the next two years, but their networks aren’t prepared for the additional capacity or complexity, which will result in network bottlenecks, according to a study released by MeriTalk, a public-private partnership focused on improving the outcomes of government IT, and underwritten by Brocade.

While agencies have a long way to go in preparing their networks for the Big Five, the report indicated some agencies are laying the groundwork for the Big Five now. Forty-three percent of network managers report that they have taken steps to improve security measures and 46 percent plan to do so. In addition, agencies have taken steps or plan to take steps to improve network policies, add bandwidth, increase openness and adherence to open standards, as well as reduce network latency…

Grazed from Reuters. Author: Lee Cheyan Lee.

ZTE, the No.2 telecom gear player in China ranking behind Huawei Technologies Co Ltd, provides cloud solutions to China’s telecom carriers, such as China Telecom, major Internet firms, oil and energy companies, a senior executive said. Zhu said he was targeting a 10 percent contribution from cloud and enterprise business to ZTE’s overall revenues in 2013, up from around 7-8 percent last year.

He declined to break down the revenue figure for cloud computing, which allows organisations to tap a network of servers on the Internet to store, manage and process data and applications. The Shenzhen-based company, which has been profitable in the first half of the year after posting its first-ever loss for the whole 2012, took in revenues of 37.6 billion yuan ($6 billion) in the January-June period, down 11.9 percent from last year…

Grazed from Cloud Computing Path. Author: Aditi Tyagi.

The application hosting providers need to deal with numerous types of responsibilities in order to deliver the type of service that is expected of them. Unfortunately, the hosting system is not perfect. Therefore, some system related difficulties are expected to lie ahead. In this article, you will discover five of the most daunting security challenges that the application hosting providers are bound to face in the near future.

Internet Connectivity Concerns

For any type of business, the pieces of vital information are considered as the cornerstones for the industry. The internet connection and the mediums can allow most types of online businesses to utilize the pieces of information more efficiently. This is possible by permitting the clients and other members of the market to gain access to the types of business information that they need at the moment. This capability is currently offset by numerous challenges that the providers receive. This is as far as the connection security is concerned. The security concerns are highly related to the disintermediation for the data access capabilities of the system…

Grazed from GeoNexus.  Author: David Crankshaw.

If you are building a SaaS startup, you know exactly how well you are doing on your key metrics.  But then you wonder (and get asked), how well am I doing compared to other SaaS companies? And more importantly, if I knew the metrics of other SaaS companies, would I adjust my strategy?

Each year Pacific Crest, an investment banking firm that specializes in SaaS firms, conducts a survey of key operational and financial metrics.  The survey participants included 155 companies from around the world (but mostly from the U.S.). About a third (58) of the companies were small with under $2M in revenue.  David Skok, at his For Entrepreneurs blog, published the results of the 2013 Pacific Crest SaaS Survey. It’s a long post with fascinating detail. Here are eight graphs from the survey. See Skok’s article for the rest…

Grazed from Business2Community.  Author: Robert Cordray.

As more and more of our digital lives are being stored on clouds, the security of these networks has come under more serious scrutiny. A recent study conducted by the Ponemon Institute revealed that of 4,000 businesses and IT managers worldwide that were surveyed, 80% plan to move or are already moving confidential information to cloud networks within the next two years. In fact, about half of respondents said they already do store such information on a cloud.

Even the federal government has implemented major efforts and funds to move its gigantic information systems to the cloud. In fact, with a $2 billion annual budget for cloud computing, the feds are perhaps becoming the largest cloud user in the world. However, with a recent report revealing major vulnerabilities in the NASA cloud network, it is evident that this shift needs to be done with great caution. Fortunately, other recent news shows a significant slowing in the federal government’s cloud computing initiative, which hopefully means agencies are taking great care to protect the sensitive information which is and will be stored in the cloud…

Grazed from InformationWeek.  Author: Elan Yorad.

In the past few months, we’ve seen more and more coverage of how existing laws have been used to gain access to cloud-based data without the data owner’s knowledge or consent. What’s different with the latest revelation, as highlighted in The New York Times recently, are reports of the National Security Agency actively trying to undermine encryption technology and standards, including those adopted by National Institute of Standards and Technology, such as the Dual EC DRBG standard.

Does this mean that the NSA’s reach into electronic communications is so profound, and its abilities to dig into our communications so extensive, that businesses must come to terms with two equally unattractive options: accept that there is no way to control their own data even when they encrypt it, or avoid using cloud services?…

Grazed from CloudPro.  Author: Rene Millman.

Scientists in Bristol and Denmark have made a cryptography breakthrough that may boost the security of cloud computing environments.  Multi-party computation (MPC) is a subset of cryptography that enables two or more people to compute any function choosing secret inputs, without actually revealing the contents of those inputs to either party.  The idea was developed by a team of researchers from the Department of Computer Science at University of Bristol and Aarhus University in Denmark.

The teams are working on developing a practical implementation protocol for MPC called SPDZ (pronounced “speeds”).  Using the SPDZ protocol, the team can now compute complex functions in a secure manner, enabling possible applications in the finance, drugs and chemical industries where computation often needs to be performed on secret data…