Grazed from ZDNet. Author: Charles McLellan.

Organisations seeking to exploit today’s highly virtualised, flexible and scalable ‘cloud’ IT infrastructure have a number of deployment options, depending on the level of ownership and control they wish to retain over the server, storage and networking resources involved, and the data processed by these IT resources.

The most conservative approach is to house and manage the IT infrastructure in your organisation’s own data centre, running whatever workloads are currently suitable for deployment on a private cloud platform. Established organisations will probably run such ‘cloud-ready’ workloads alongside existing enterprise applications during a period of experimentation and transition, as they dip their toes into the world of private cloud computing…

Grazed from SecurityInfoWatch. Author: Hormazd Romer.

The cloud computing evolution is well entrenched, and has made significant changes to how organizations share, sync, edit, create and collaborate-on content. However, this computing revolution is a double-edged sword. There are benefits—increased computing power, ease-of-use, and new flexibility in the case of cloud computing. However, these new features and benefits also bring new difficulties and risks. The security risks alone are enough to make any government agency cringe.

For IT departments, these new risks typically emerge as security vulnerabilities. Attackers are quick to exploit design flaws or architectural weaknesses that can be used to steal data, sabotage networks, or siphon funds. Over time, vendors and customers discover these flaws and weaknesses—usually the hard way, by discovering that they have been exploited—and fix them…

Grazed from Computing. Author: Richard Moulds.

Encryption is not new – in fact, systems for ensuring message secrecy have been around for millennia. What is new is the unprecedented variety of options that enterprises now have at their disposal to encrypt data and the potential complexity that brings. The rise of cloud computing means there’s now another chair at the table – the cloud service provider – which requires a new examination of trust models.

Of course, effective cryptography depends not only on the ability to encrypt data, but also the management and control of the keys to decrypt and make sense of the information. While the cloud presents significant economic and operational benefits for enterprises, it also poses a substantial security risk. Organisations must decide how much control they are willing to relinquish to their cloud provider – where should data be encrypted, and crucially, who should hold the keys…

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: Chris Talbot.

En Pointe is spinning off its Cisco Systems-powered hosted solutions practice into its own company, in part to continue to build out its channel strategy. The previously-named En Pointe Collaboration Solutions is now known as collab9. Even with the name change, though, the newly renamed collab9 will continue to focus on cloud solutions based on Cisco (CSCO) technology.

This follows on to last year’s announcement regarding En Pointe Collaboration Solutions earning the Cisco Cloud Provider Certification designation in its growth of its cloud networking practice. At the time, En Pointe earned the right to carry the Cisco Powered Cloud Hosted Collaboration System (HCS) Service designation that was attached to its infrastructure and Cisco HCS solution…

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Charles Babcock.

If log file management is a big data problem, Loggly wants to be the answer. So far, however, it’s found the ranks of its competitors swelling. The most recent entrant was VMware, which entered the list July 11 with general availability of vCenter Log Insight.

In its latest round of financing, Loggly found a new backer: Cisco Systems. If VMware believes log file management is one of the keys to the virtualized network and data center, Cisco apparently does too. Loggly, a 23-employee company, recently raised $10.5 million, for a total of $20.9 million so far, from a group of backers that included Cisco and Data Collective Venture Capital, Loggly said Tuesday. Data Collective was an early backer of Couchbase and MemSQL…

Grazed from Marketwire. Author: PR Announcement.

Datapipe, a global provider of managed services and infrastructure for outsourced IT and cloud computing, today announced that Presidiohealth has selected Datapipe’s HIPAA Compliance package as part of a custom solution to provide real-time, web-based revenue workflow applications for physician practice management and billing. Deployed on Datapipe’s Stratosphere® Private Cloud, the solution includes both HIPAA and PCI Compliance Services as well as a Business Associate Agreement (BAA) to meet the upcoming Omnibus rule enforcement on September 23 for covered entities who leverage cloud services to maintain protected healthcare information. To access the full Presidio case study, please visit www.datapipe.com/insights/case_studies/.

Founded in 2004, Presidio is guided by a single goal — helping physicians simplify their work day. Using innovative web technologies, Presidio consolidates and leverages critical business information so that busy physicians can streamline all of their clinical documentation required for practice management into coding and billing…

Grazed from NetworkComputing. Author: Brian Prince.

VMware’s official unveiling of its NSX network virtualization platform touched off conversations about how the company’s partners would fit into its future plans. While much of the focus has been on the impact the announcement will have on VMware’s relationship with Cisco Systems, what’s been overlooked in the Cisco-VMware brouhaha is how NSX may affect VMware’s security partners. Industry analysts have mixed opinions.

"I think the NSX push at VMworld was actually great for vendors," said Forrester Research analyst Dave Bartoletti, adding that security vendors at last week’s conference were happy about the renewed focus on networking and security. "VMware’s not going to be able to do it all in software better than everyone else — switching, routing, firewall, load balancing, etc.," he said…

Grazed from I.T. Business Edge. Author: Arthor Cole.

The latest research into cloud computing confirms what most of us already knew: The cloud is quickly becoming the new normal in enterprise computing, portending dramatic changes in hardware, software and service markets in the coming decade. But even as cloud adoption kicks into high gear, it should be noted that not every application is suited for full cloud deployment and that in some cases the cloud could end up costing more than traditional data center infrastructure.

First, the numbers. Verizon reported this week that cloud utilization grew by 90 percent over the past year, a reflection of the technology’s transition from a largely test and development platform to a full production environment, even for mission-critical apps. The result is that organizations are on average increasing their cloud budgets by 45 percent per month…

Grazed from Midsize Insider. Author: Joe Hewitson.

Cloud insurance recently received a boost in momentum when Liberty International Underwriters and CloundInsure announced a partnership to help mitigate the risks associated with the cloud. It is no secret that cloud computing has been a revelation to modern midsize IT with promises of increased scalability, performance and cost savings. Along with great promise comes great risk, however, and in the case of the cloud, the chief risks include decreased security and loss of control over data. Enter cloud insurance, a service that aims to protect businesses that entrust critical assets to the still maturing cloud.

Help with Risk Management

Cloud insurance is still very much in its infancy, but with new partnerships beginning to spring up, the market is clearly gaining steam. This is good news indeed for midsize IT. One of the greatest benefits midsize IT professionals stand to gain from the emergence of this insurance is third party risk assessment. The joint venture of Liberty International Underwriters and CloudInsure, as described by Insurance Journal, allows policyholders to utilize risk consultants with the ability to analyze existing cloud environments and provide midsize IT professionals with targeted pre-loss support services…

Grazed from Midsize Insider. Author: Marissa Tejada.

Cloud computing is on the list of top IT spending priorities for the next year. According to Forrester Research, software spending worldwide will continue to grow with a big focus on the cloud. These worldwide trends reflect the focus of midsize firms.

Popular Software

The research featured recently in the CloudTimes found that, in the past year, companies and governments spent more than $2 trillion on hardware, software and services. In the most popular segment, software firms allocated budgets for improving mobile apps, analytics, security and collaboration software. Software spending increased last year by more than $540 billion; it is expected to grow 3.3 percent this year and 6.2 percent in 2014, the largest projection for technology categories…