The ever-evolving world of cloud-computing technology continually revolutionizes IT (information technology) in new and exciting ways. The innovative creativity has clearly transformed how my business works at managing data and confidential information for businesses. Along with its many benefits, it eliminates the need of a physical environment, and instead, uses the virtual world full of virtualized servers to perform all of its duties.

Moving to the Cloud Is Easy

My business quickly realized how easy it was to move to the cloud. With the ability to turn over all work to the cloud, we were able to downsize our IT departments and reduce our workforce, while still producing the same work, more efficiently. When businesses migrate to the cloud, they are sometimes required to change the business’ operating system to accommodate security restrictions. In the end, it provides better flexibility, and improves security.

Grazed from InfoWorld.  Author: David Linthicum.

When I deal with enterprises these days, the prevailing question is no longer if they’ll use public clouds but what to move first.  The answer depends on many aspects of your own enterprise, including systemic problems you may have with data, processes, or complete applications. Moreover, the value you place on specific systems is a major factor. Finally, there are security, governance, and compliance issues enterprises must handle.

To be clear, I’m talking about moving data, processes, or a complete system, not standing up a new system in the cloud. Migrating from existing on-premise platforms to a cloud-based platform is much more difficult and risky, but it can provide the most value. It’s important to wisely pick your first project for migration. Here are my guidelines for doing so:…

Grazed from PCWorld.  Author: John Ribeiro.

Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform faced a worldwide outage in its storage services from Friday afternoon because of an expired SSL (secure sockets layer) certificate.  The company also reported problems with its Xbox Music and Video Store services.  The service problems come on a day the company said it was recently a victim of a cyberattack similar to ones that targeted Apple and Facebook.

"Beginning Friday, February 22 at 12:44 PM PST, Storage experienced a worldwide outage impacting HTTPS operations (SSL traffic) due to an expired certificate," Microsoft said on its Windows Azure service dashboard. HTTP traffic was not impacted, the company said. It said it executed steps to update the SSL certificate and expected HTTPS traffic to notice gradual recovery in many sub-regions…

Grazed from CloudTimes.  Author: Saroj Kar.

The European Agency for Network and Information Security Information Security Agency (ENISA) published a report that argues excessive growth of cloud computing is a double-edged risk. But the agency also recognizes the advantages of using the cloud.

Barely a week after the announcement by the European Commission of its plans for a new directive on security of networks and information, ENISA has published a report on the protection of critical infrastructures. Under the proposed new law, ENISA could play a key role in helping Member States of the European Union to share information on security vulnerabilities…

Grazed from InfoWorld.  Author: Brandon Butler.

Microsoft Azure’s cloud outperformed Amazon Web Services in a series of rigorous tests conducted by Nasuni, a storage vendor that annually benchmarks CSPs (cloud service providers).  Nasuni uses public cloud resources in its enterprise storage offering, so each year the company conducts a series of rigorous tests on the top CSPs’ clouds in an effort to see which companies offer the best performing, most reliable infrastructure. Last year, Amazon Web Services’ cloud came out on top, but this year Microsoft Azure outperformed AWS in performance and reliability measures.

AWS is still better at handling extra-large storage volumes, while Nasuni found that the two OpenStack powered clouds it tested — from HP and Rackspace — were lacking, particularly at larger scales.  Nasuni conducted the tests on five of the largest CSPs: Azure, AWS, HP, Rackspace and Google Cloud. A write/read/delete test determined how effective each provider was at uploading data of various sizes (between 1KB and 1GB) to its cloud, recalling the randomly generated file and deleting it…

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: Chris Talbot.

TraceSecurity and Qualys have combined their technologies to deliver to SME and SMB customers a cloud-based IT governance, risk and compliance (GRC) solution. TraceSecurity is focused on delivering cloud-based IT GRC solutions, whereas Qualys is a cloud security and compliance management solutions vendor. The two companies have teamed up and are relying on their respective technologies for this venture—specifically, TraceCSO and QualysGuard Vulnerability Management. The partnership presents an integration of the two products in a cloud-based IT GRC package.

According to the companies, although TraceCSO is equipped with its own vulnerability management capabilities, the integration with QualysGuard will enable users to manage their vulernability scan results within TraceCSO’s centralized interface. QualysGuard has also been integrated to influence other areas of TraceCSO, including risk, audit and compliance management…

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Mark Mitchell Szynaka.

Many industry projections state that enterprises will review or adopt some sort of hybrid cloud deployment this year. But a vast majority of those enterprises remain unclear on the fundamentals of hybrid cloud computing.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) defines hybrid cloud as a composition of at least one private cloud and at least one public cloud. A hybrid cloud is typically offered in one of two ways: A vendor has a private cloud and forms a partnership with a public cloud provider, or a public cloud provider forms a partnership with a vendor that provides private cloud platforms…