Grazed from Investors.com. Author: Rheinhardt Krause.

Stiffer competition and consolidation is in the air in the cloud. Smaller service providers, such as Rackspace Hosting (RAX) and privately held SoftLayer, loom as takeover targets as more tech giants — including IBM (IBM) and Google (GOOG) — expand in the cloud computing market. Large tech players have the scale — massive data centers packed with servers — that enable them to cut prices. They’re likely to dominate the cloud services market, says James Staten, an analyst at Forrester Research.

"Cloud does favor scale; the top players have it in orders of magnitude that others can’t come close to," Staten said. "To compete with the Amazons of the world, they’re going to need scale and to build out data centers in front of customer demand." Amazon.com’s (AMZN) Amazon Web Services (AWS), the fast-growing cloud computing arm of the online retailer, faces a new challenger in Google. It’s expanding its Google Compute Engine cloud service…

Grazed from PR Newswire. Author: PR Announcement.

Cloud Technology Partners, the leader in transforming businesses with cloud solutions, today announced the appointments of David Linthicum , Lisa Noon and Brian Ott to its executive team. The addition of such well-known and highly respected thought leaders and technologists demonstrates that Cloud Technology Partners is not only universally recognized as a global leader in cloud strategy, design and delivery, but also prides itself on bringing together the industry’s premier cloud experts to work collaboratively towards a common goal: to provide clients with the cloud solutions that position them to be more innovative and competitive in their respective markets.

"The experience and mastery that David, Lisa and Brian bring to the table is nothing short of extraordinary," said Chris Greendale , Founder and CEO, Cloud Technology Partners. "Their proven ability to establish compelling visions, influence and motivate teams, spark progressive thinking and transform enterprise organizations will be critical as we continue to grow." Greendale continued, "Of course, these additions are hugely valuable for our clients as well. David, Lisa and Brian, together with our select group of cloud experts, will provide our clients with an unparalleled wealth of cloud knowledge and ensure we deliver the most advanced and sensible cloud solutions possible."…

Grazed from CloudTech. Author: James Bourne.

Alert Logic’s latest cloud security report has summarised that cloud security providers (CSPs) are “inherently no less secure than enterprise data centres”, and that cloud security threats continue to follow a consistent pattern. In its State of Cloud Security Report, subtitled “Targeted Attacks and Opportunistic Hacks”, the network security provider observed over 45,000 security incidents and found that some things don’t change; Web application attacks are the biggest threat for IT infrastructures.

The top three incident classes, for cloud hosting providers, were Web application attacks (52%), followed by brute force (30%) and vulnerability scans (27%). This compares interestingly with enterprise data centres, which saw malware and brute force as the number one incident class (49%). Perhaps unsurprisingly, brute force accounted for the most frequent type of assault, given brute force hackers try a wide variety of combinations in order to get in…

Grazed from International Business Times. Author: PR Announcement.

Evolve IP, The Cloud Services Company™, today announced it has released its Virtual Data Center service which allows the rapidly growing segment of cloud computing customers to deploy guaranteed reserved resource pools at Evolve IP’s SOC III compliant, geographically redundant data centers. In conjunction with the company’s dedicated, private cloud service, vServer, and its award-winning unified cloud platform, it further elevates Evolve IP’s position as the nation’s leading cloud services provider.

The Virtual Data Center is a next-generation product that provides consumable computing resources with simple unit-based pricing. It is secure, available on-demand and features true customer isolation. IT administrators are enabled to quickly create virtual machines and allocate and provision computing assets via Evolve IP’s proprietary OSSmosis Enterprise Cloud Manager (ECM), a secure Web-based portal with sophisticated end-user management tools…

Grazed from The New York Times. Author: Quentin Hardy.

Whether the move is from mainframes to minicomputers, or from there to personal computers and servers, and now to mobile devices and cloud computing, we are witnessing one grand process of moving machine intelligence closer to the people on the front lines, even as the computing at the center gets more powerful.

Fortunes change with each shift, as purveyors of tech stress technical knowledge when mainframes are the big thing, or talk about their understanding of business processes in the client-server era. What matters in the cloud and mobile era may be the critical importance of design. With all the data being collected, design and the ability to present information well may be the big strategic weapon. It certainly seems to be the way a lot of people are coming after the incumbents. Recently Infor, a collection of revamped business applications companies, unveiled a good-looking set of charts, graphics and lists that inform much of the output and future options on its mobile applications for manufacturing and sales…

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Charles Babcock.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is adding a single-tenant, secure hardware cloud appliance to its usual software services to give customers an extra-secure method of storing encryption keys, issuing digital signatures and executing digital rights management in compliance with strict regulations.

AWS CloudHSM uses Safenet’s Luna-SA appliances. AWS is making them available in EC2 only to Virtual Private Cloud customers, who access their virtual servers over virtual private networks and use other security precautions. The appliance is given an IP address within the virtual private cloud and is accessible only to the customer contracting for it, even though Amazon monitors it and ensures that it remains up and running…

Grazed from Bloomberg. Author: Jordan Robertson.

Stuart McClure has simple advice for companies that want to put their data in the cloud: Don’t do it. When it comes to security, the former chief technology officer of McAfee said choosing a safe service can be like "picking a dog with the least fleas."

Yet when McClure needed help running his security startup, Cylance Inc., he didn’t heed his own advice. He said he reluctantly hired a company that handles administrative work such as managing employee 401(k)s over the Internet, even though he described the cloud provider’s initial security plan as an "abysmal mess."…

Grazed from HeraldOnline. Author: Editorial Staff.

Scale Computing, industry leading developers of hyperconverged solutions that seamlessly combine servers, storage and virtualization into a single system, today released results of a market survey conducted by ApplicationContinuity.org. The report showcases why midmarket organizations are embracing on-premise virtualization over the cloud, the driving factors behind this decision, and what alternatives companies are choosing for their mission-critical applications and data.

More than 3,000 IT professionals in the US participated in the recent survey, which investigates the prevalence of choosing local infrastructure or the cloud, the types of applications IT teams are choosing to run on local infrastructures, and key concerns among IT professionals as to how and where data is managed. Despite widespread cloud-marketing by vendors, this study showed that 90 percent of participants responded that it was ‘important or very important’ to keep applications and data within their company-owned infrastructure rather than entrusting it to a cloud provider…

Grazed from Forbes. Author: Emma Byrne.

Cloud computing is not as disruptive as many organizations feared. Using a cloud provider has come as naturally to most organizations as using webmail. But for the financial sector, international laws make life—shall we say—challenging. Here’s why.

Behind the scenes, there are heavyweight struggles taking place that center around the “sovereignty” of data. If data are stored across international borders, how can your customers be sure that their sensitive personal information is safe? More importantly—at least from the lawyers’ perspective—who can be sued if it isn’t safe? For organizations in the financial sector, the picture can be murky…

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: Chris Talbot.

TraceSecurity has released a cloud-based tool that simulates social engineering to help protect customers from phishing schemes and other advanced persistent threats. The new TraceSecurity Phishing Simulator was designed to mimic real-world social engineering attacks. The cloud-based tool then tracks results to analyze employee actions and determine if the organization is at risk to social engineering attacks. One of the biggest threats to organizations, as well as people in general, is socially engineered attacks, but with this tool, TraceSecurity aims to help organizations identify their vulnerabilities within minutes.

"Deploying a simulated phishing attack against groups of employees not only tests their willingness to click on an unsolicited email, but also determines if they are apt to download potentially harmful code onto company resources," said Jim Stickley, TraceSecurity CTO, in a prepared statement. "Malicious messages often contain malware that, when activated, can easily infect an entire network, which is why we developed Phishing Simulator. We believe every organization should, at a minimum, test a few employees and see how they do."…