Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Charles Babcock.

Jason Hoffman, who co-founded the only cloud that runs SmartOS, an open source version of Solaris, is stepping down at Joyent after 10 years as CTO. In a blog posted Monday evening entitled "The Next Chapter", he wrote: "I’ve loved the process of building Joyent into what it is today, as any respectable founder wishes, you look for people better than yourself who can go execute and you let them do that. The company is in great shape, with a brilliant management team and a change-the-world technology vision in very capable hands with Bryan Cantrill."

Cantrill is senior VP of engineering at Joyent and a former Sun Microsystems engineer. He authored the Dtrace analytics probe for Sun Microsystem storage appliances, which was later adapted for use in Solaris. SmartOS at Joyent also uses Dtrace to insure reliable uptime and performance in its cloud servers. Cantrill was a winner of the Wall Street Journal’s top Technology Innovation award in 2006…

Grazed from The Register. Author: Richard Chirgwin.

It’s more likely that the NSA has devoted its efforts to key capture and side-channel attacks rather than brute-forcing its way through ciphertext en masse – but it’s also true that our crypto maths won’t last foreverm which draws attention to projects like this one (PDF), which is looking at protection of multi-party computation (MPC) activities.

According to Phys.org: “The idea behind Multi-Party Computation is that it should enable two or more people to compute any function of their choosing on their secret inputs, without revealing their inputs to either party. One example is an election; voters want their vote to be counted but they do not want their vote made public.”…

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: David Linthicum.

According to the Washington Post, "Google is racing to encrypt the torrents of information that flow among its data centers around the world in a bid to thwart snooping by the NSA and the intelligence agencies of foreign governments." A series of revelations by former CIA contractor Edward Snowden shows that the United States, the United Kingdom, and perhaps other governments routinely spy on a broad range of Internet services, not in the targeted ways most people were led to believe.

With this response, Google sends the message that it won’t make it easy for governments to quietly conduct mass-spying efforts, but instead will force the government to explicitly acknowledge its spying, such as through court orders. This also indicates that Google, like other cloud computing providers, views the NSA scandal as a potential market killer. They are all in damage control mode, pushing out new privacy technology aimed at protecting data…

Grazed from PRWeb. Author: PR Announcement.

Cetrom Information Technology, Inc. (Cetrom), a cloud computing pioneer and leader in custom cloud management for global SMBs, today announced it has been recognized for the third successive year as a member of the 2013 CRN Next-Gen 250. The annual list highlights up-and-coming solution providers that are new to the market, and take a smart and different approach to solution selling and integration.

Cetrom’s custom cloud management and support services offer comprehensive technology solutions for accounting and CPA firms, associations and nonprofits, law offices, and travel management agencies. Because of the technology company’s unique white-glove approach to each customer’s needs, every deployed cloud solution directly supports the business initiatives and structure of the organization, from a fully outsourced IT department to a complementary technology partner that extends expert in-house teams. Supported by year-over-year investments in leading technologies, Cetrom’s custom Cloud Computing Solutions deliver a reliable, cost-effective, and secure solution for global organizations…

Grazed from ZDNet. Author: Chris Dukett.

Chargeback and proper pay-per-use computing, long touted as one of the benefits of as-a-service models, has failed to revolutionise the way IT departments engage with their fellow business units thus far. Despite an ability to use the chargeback process that has existed for some time, companies have failed to take advantage of it, and, according to one study, it looks set to be left on the back burner for some time yet.

That study, a piece of research conducted by Forrester Consulting and commissioned by datacentre provider Equinix, entitled Enabling The Virtual Data Center in Asia, revealed that the financial benefits of as-a-service computing were rated the lowest in a survey of 112 IT decision makers conducted across four countries…

Grazed from PRWeb. Author: PR Announcement.

IEEE, the world’s largest professional organization advancing technology for humanity, today announced that the IEEE Standards Association (IEEE-SA) has formed the Cloud Computing Innovation Council for India through its Industry Connections program. The new council will serve as a “think tank” for propelling technological innovations across the cloud-computing ecosystem in India and other emerging markets.

“The council is very important to the adoption and deployment of cloud computing as India’s IT (information technology) infrastructure of choice,” said Srikanth Chandrasekaran, standards senior manager for IEEE India. “The government of India is already driving several cloud-computing projects under the guidance and leadership of the Department of Electronics & Information Technology (DeitY). To help further direct these programs, the council will provide proposals for standards, research, education initiatives and regulatory, legislation and policy recommendations to promote innovation that’s vital to the framework of this technology.”…

Grazed from TMCNet.  Author: Event Announcement.

The way the world communicates is constantly evolving. ITEXPO is the only place you’ll get the broad picture, as well as the in depth-details.  The world’s largest communications and technology event returns to the Miami Beach Convention Center, to be held on January 28 – 31, 2014.   At ITEXPO you will discover more new insights, new products and networking to keep you and your company ahead of the curve.

ITEXPO brings together the entire communications and technology community for a week of business-building and researching today’s most powerful communications solutions. Enterprise, government and SMB end users, resellers, service providers, manufacturers, developers, media and analysts gather to examine solutions in conference sessions, demo products and services live on the expo floor, and forge beneficial relationships…

Grazed from UBMTech.  Author: Event Announcement.

Interop Las Vegas 2014, to be held on March 31 – April 04, 2014, is an independently organized conference and exhibition designed to empower information technology professionals to make smart business decisions.

Interop offers a strong combination of educational content, a dynamic exhibition of technology providers, and peer networking to IT professionals across all industries, so that they can investigate and discover transformative technologies and ideas to put to work across their enterprise.  Interop has a 26 year history in the US – and has expanded beyond its beginnings in network infrastructure to encompass a broad range of technologies including Cloud, Virtualization, Data Centers, Wireless & Mobility, and Information Security.

Interop provides an easy way for IT professionals to "Discover IT."   As the only large-scale independent IT event brand, Interop offers live and online events that uniquely bring together IT decision makers, IT vendors, systems integrators, and IT press and analysts in an interactive forum. Interop presents and distills the wide variety of new and existing technologies – including Big Data, mobility, cloud, and advanced networking products and solutions – into actionable learnings….

Grazed from CRN. Author: Robert Westervelt.

Centrify is building out its channel program to fuel sales of its SaaS-based single sign-on platform and hopes that a renewed investment in the channel could help partners capitalize on a growing interest in bridging authentication to cloud-based services. Centrify’s business has been mainly focused on direct sales, but the company is investing in transforming its program to embrace channel sales. The vendor is working on building brand recognition, enabling partners through marketing initiatives and providing support through the sales process, said Nathan Adams, the company’s new North America channel chief.

"We spend a lot of time focusing on business planning, enablement, executive and engineering alignment," Adams said. "This is such a hot technology, and I believe that we can take our current strategy and bring it into the channel and create and mature a program to put in front of these customers."…

Grazed from TechNet. Author: Adrienne Hall.

Regulatory compliance and managing security risks are two important challenges facing IT professionals today. From the Chief Information Security Officers (CISOs) we talk to, there’s steady interest in hearing more on these topics. Perhaps not surprisingly, security executives often turn to their peers for information and insights on the challenges they face.

Who could be a better source of perspectives and best practices than others working through the same issues? At Trustworthy Computing, we’re fortunate to have access to some of the best and brightest security minds – including security executives from around the world as well as our own internal experts…