Grazed from ThinkStrategies. Author: PR Announcement.

THINKstrategies, Inc., the leading strategic consulting company focused on the business implications of the Cloud Computing services market, announced today that FrontRange, the only provider of Hybrid IT Service Management solutions, has been named a winner of the Best of SaaS Showplace (BoSS) Award. This program promotes the measurable business benefits delivered by today’s Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solutions.

The BoSS Awards is an ongoing program administered by THINKstrategies’ Cloud Computing Showplace to recognize SaaS companies that are delivering measurable business benefits to specific user organizations. These benefits can include increased sales, lower costs, higher customer satisfaction, faster operations and greater profitability…

Grazed from CloudPro. Author: James Stirling.

A new Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offering from Progress Software will make it easier for organisations to build and manage ‘connected apps’ on any cloud, mobile or social platform, the company has claimed. Dubbed Progress Pacific, the offering is built on technology the company gained through its recent acquisition of independent software vendor Rollbase.

It is, Progress claims, the foundation of a major PaaS transformation for the software vendor and will address customer and partner demand in the fast growing cloud market. Progress Pacific is designed to give users the freedom to choose the data sources, deployment environments and business logic tools that best fit their needs and allows them to avoid vendor lock-in…

Grazed from CloudPro. Author: Jane McCallion.

Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) company Memset is to partner with professional services firm CoreStream to make it easier for customers to manage SharePoint services. The deal has ramped up Memset’s support for SharePoint, the company claims, as users can now benefit from CoreStream’s pre-configured, production grade SharePoint farms, which they can test in the cloud before moving into production.

Memset’s end-to-end product for SharePoint includes full support of enterprise class infrastructure, which the organisation claims allows customers to focus on using SharePoint, rather than maintaining the underlying environment. Memset will also provide application level and administrative support, while CoreStream will be responsible for delivering professional services around customisation, administration and training…

Grazed from Bank Security Info. Author: Jeffrey Roman.

Operating in a cloud exposes organizations to a new dimension of insider threat problems, says Alex Nicoll of Carnegie Mellon University’s CERT Insider Threat Center. Cloud computing providers must step up and develop approaches to prevent their employees from stealing or harming customer data they host, says Nicoll, a senior cybersecurity analyst, and Dawn Cappelli, CERT technical manager, in a joint interview with Information Security Media Group.

"We’re hoping that the cloud service providers understand insider threat," Cappelli says. "We have recommendations that we provide for organizations for what they should do to protect themselves against rogue administrators and to protect themselves against theft of intellectual property. Our hope is that cloud service providers understand that as well."…

Grazed from CloudTweaks. Author: Ali Raza.

By 2018, Gartner predicts that 70 per cent of professionals will conduct their work on personal mobile devices, enabled by the revolutionary concept of cloud computing. Cloud computing essentially separates software from the logical functionality of local hardware. In other words, instead of needing computing power to be housed locally, major computing functions will instead be accessible from afar, usually via the Internet. The obvious benefit here is that risk of ownership of software is eliminated, as well as the need to hire in-house resources to service them.

What will this do to the market?

In the case of hardware, cloud computing is likely to open the market up by lowering barriers to entry for manufacturing. The recent emergence of Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) in the workplace presents renewed scope and opportunity for the hardware market, as by 2016, 38 per cent of businesses expect to stop providing devices to staff, allowing them instead to select their own…

Grazed from MIT. Author: Larry Hardesty.

Homomorphic encryption is one of the most exciting new research topics in cryptography, which promises to make cloud computing perfectly secure. With it, a Web user would send encrypted data to a server in the cloud, which would process it without decrypting it and send back a still-encrypted result.

Sometimes, however, the server needs to know something about the data it’s handling. Otherwise, some computational tasks become prohibitively time consuming — if not outright impossible. Suppose, for instance, that the task you’ve outsourced to the cloud is to search a huge encrypted database for the handful of records that match an encrypted search term…

Grazed from CloudSpectator. Author: Editorial Staff.

As the market quickly saturates with IaaS providers, the decision-making complexity of choosing the right provider evolves as well. Cloud Spectator monitors IaaS performance of over 20 of the world’s most well-known cloud providers to guide businesses in the selection process to maximize performance efficiency and minimize cost.

This report highlights and analyzes the performance of 5 of the largest cloud providers in the market today: Amazon EC2, Rackspace OpenStack Cloud, HP Cloud, SoftLayer CloudLayer Compute, and Windows Azure. Results from the 5-day experiment prominently display the performance differences in providers, with Windows Azure, the highest-performing provider, scoring 3 times better than Amazon EC2, the lowest-performing provider, on average…

Grazed from Virtualization Review. Author: Ben Cherian.

Network virtualization delivers network services in a more scalable, manageable, and fault-tolerant manner than traditional networking can deliver. For this reason it is gaining traction among cloud architects, rapidly becoming a “must have” component of IaaS clouds. So, what is network virtualization? When cloud architects speak of network virtualization they are typically referring to overlay-based network virtualization. With OBNV, network functionality is abstracted away from the underlying physical network and into the software.

What this means is that network services like virtual switching, routing, and firewalling can happen in software at the “edge” of the network rather than relying on the physical core of the network to have this functionality available. What this means in practice is that a cloud architect can design the network with basic low-cost hardware, while providing higher layer functions in the software, where advanced switching, routing and firewalling can be be managed with greater ease and precision. Why wouldn’t I just use traditional networking in the cloud? When building an IaaS cloud, traditional networking faces two serious limitations: scalability, and management and automation…

Grazed from CloudTweaks.  Author: Stacey Carter.

As their market matures, many companies are contemplating about using a private cloud for their operation, keeping in mind the convenience, better security and control that they can exercise with their internal technology platforms. The use of a private cloud allows a company’s IT department to exercise more flexibility in terms of controlling the internal environment of their servers. However, there are some skeptical views regarding the use of private cloud by companies and whether it is indeed a viable technology that will deliver the results they expect from using the same in their business.

Private cloud overview

A cloud storage service is a viable tool that companies can use in storing data in their system and making it accessible within their network. Using a private cloud storage will help companies to actively use the data that they need some degree of control from. The data is stored within an infrastructure in their data center which optimizes the company’s employees to access and exchange information with enhanced performance and security. This works like an in-house private cloud that is available within a company’s IT data system. A private cloud computing service is one that deploys an on-premises cloud service through a virtual data center within the company’s IT infrastructure that works with a self service portal…

Grazed from RightScale.  Author: Lee Schlesinger.

"IaaS is the most appropriate infrastructure solution for social games, web-based games, mobile applications — any applications or products that can have a short lifespan — because you don’t need to worry about the upfront infrastructure costs of hosting applications or back-end infrastructure. You’re able to use what’s appropriate for you at the time, iterate quickly, and if your game isn’t a success, you can easily scrap what’s been done."

So says Ronnie Regev, an enterprise product manager at RightScale. Before he joined RightScale, Regev spent nine years at Ubisoft, where he was senior manager of online game operations and architecture at the prominent gaming company. He shared some of the lessons he learned about using the cloud for mobile, social, and games at the recent RightScale Compute conference…