Grazed from CloudTech. Author: James Bourne.

Cloud security is once again on the agenda after a report from Lieberman Research showed that nearly half of IT professionals were wary of keeping sensitive data in the cloud due to government intervention.

The survey was conducted at November’s Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) Congress and found that the majority of respondents prefer to keep their most sensitive data on private networks rather than on the cloud. Other top-line findings were:

• Nearly nine in 10 (88%) of IT professionals believe some cloudy data could be lost, stolen or corrupted
• Less than half of respondents (46%) believe that moving to the cloud has increased their IT security
• Yet 56% think migrating to the cloud has saved money, and 86% think their move to the cloud has been successful overall
• “There are a number of reasons why so many IT professionals are apprehensive about storing corporate data in the cloud,” writes Philip Lieberman in a blog post, adding: “In my opinion, the key factor is data security…

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: Mikael Ricknäs.

Amazon Web Services has made available to all users its cloud-based data warehouse Redshift, which it pitches as a lower-cost alternative to on-premise deployments. Amazon Redshift was first announced as a limited preview at the AWS re:Invent conference, but has now been made generally available from its US East (North Virginia) data center and will be rolled out to other centers in the coming months.

Just like with its other cloud-based offerings, Amazon hopes to attract enterprises to Redshift with the speed and cost of setting up a data warehouse in its cloud. Traditional data warehouse solutions are really expensive and complicated to manage, Amazon Web Services’ Andy Jassy said when the product was launched. Redshift, on the other hand, is about a tenth of the cost, and also automates the deployment and administration, according to Jassy…

Grazed from Sys Con Media. Author: Maureen O’Gara.

VMware said last month that it was still into acquisitions although business had turned rocky and it was going to trim 7% of its workforce in a rightsizing exercise, an announcement that carved 20% off its share price. So, on Monday in that spirit of M&A it said it’s buying Virsto Software, a Valley neighbor that writes storage performance software and since late 2007, when it was founded, has raised $24 million in venture money from such firms as August Capital, Canaan Partners and Interwest Partners to do it.

VMware didn’t say what it’s paying, but evidently it’s a strategic as well as tactical move to help it compete with Microsoft with its Windows Server 2012, Hyper-V virtualization and Virsto-like Storage Spaces. VMware’s parent company, storage giant EMC, is also going to license Virsto’s widgetry in the name of the almighty software-defined data center. The deal should close this quarter and the Register suggests Virsto may get knocked down for $100 million…

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: CJ Arlotta.

Cloud infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) provider ProfitBricks has announced the availability of the ProfitBricks Foundation Program — an incentive program for startups. Qualifying startups are eligible receive ProfitBricks’ virtual data centers at a reduced cost for one year. ProfitBricks originally launched its startup program to New England-area startups in December and is now offering the same incentives to startups across the United States.

Startups with at least one U.S. office and revenue of less than $1 million per year are eligible for the program. Companies will receive 20 percent reduction in price on their IaaS services from ProfitBricks for one year and gain access to a cloud server from ProfitBricks for one year without cost to the startup. According to the company, ProfitBricks’ simple pricing model provides startups with the freedom to avoid long-term contracts and complex traditional cloud computing pricing models…

Grazed from Investment Underground. Author: Susan Wright.

Cloud computing has made its way onto Wall Street. Firms on Wall Street are now adopting cloud computing practices. This new development follows the recent trends surrounding cloud computing as an increasing number of businesses, educational institutions and individuals are looking to the cloud for their data storage requirements. There are currently over 600 million cloud subscribers around the globe. The cloud computing market is expected to become a billion dollar industry within the next four years.

Hundreds of new firms have entered the cloud computing marketplace, and the competition has led to innovative ideas for storing data. One of these innovative new cloud computing firms is Navatar Group, which was founded in 2004 by Deloitte Consulting veterans, including Alok Misra. Navatar Group has geared its cloud solutions toward the financial sector. The company focuses on debt or equity capital markets, mutual funds, private equity, asset management and banking. Navatar Group works with leading financial institutions worldwide…

Grazed from TWST.com. Author: Editorial Staff.

Fusion-io (FIO) pioneered the flash storage architecture for increased input/output, staying ahead of the pack and tying all the growth drivers of data storage by speeding up performance in a cloud computing environment where Big Data continues growing unabatedly, says Andrew Nowinski, Assistant Vice President and Research Analyst at Piper Jaffray & Co.

“The larger data sets also create the need for better performance. That is where nonvolatile memory technologies such as SSDs, PCIe, NAND flash cards, and all-flash storage arrays come into play. Fusion-io is the pioneer of the space, but nearly every storage vendor, both public and private, is developing products for this market,” Nowinski said…

Grazed from Bloomberg. Author: Aaron Ricadela.

Salesforce.com (CRM), No. 2 in this year’s Bloomberg Businessweek 50 ranking, has been outpacing rivals Oracle (ORCL), Microsoft (MSFT), and SAP (SAP) in the business software market by exploiting companies’ desire to stop managing programs for thousands of their employees and outsource the job instead. The company’s stock has climbed more than 170 percent in the past three years and Chief Executive Officer Marc Benioff is expanding his portfolio of cloud computing software for sales, customer service, and online marketing by branching into new areas like human resources. Benioff spoke with Bloomberg News reporter Aaron Ricadela from his home in San Francisco about the competitive landscape and his plans for the coming year.

Why are competitors like Oracle, Microsoft, and SAP having a hard time catching you in cloud computing?
Well, they’re not really in cloud computing. We’ve defined a market and we’ve executed it. What we have continued to focus on is defining our space within that market. You don’t buy hardware and software and hook it all up—you use our preconfigured services over the Internet. We picked our place in that market for sales force automation, then customer service and support, now marketing. Each of those product lines had been growing very aggressively. We also only do business in eight countries in the world. By focusing on that, we have had our growth trajectory…

Grazed from Tempo. Author: Editorial Staff.

VMware, Inc. has outlined the trends in 2013 that will transform for businesses in the Philippines. “We’ve seen growing adoption of our leading technologies amongst the country’s largest private and public sector organization, and expect to see more companies leverage cloud to significantly lower the total cost of ownershipand speed up their ability to deploy new applications,” said Emmanuel Portugal, country manager, VMware in the Philippines.

“Specifically, we see the adaptability of CIOs, the emergence of the Software-Defined Datacenter, mobility and adoption for greater disaster preparedness to drive cloud adoption at scale and make 2013 a year of transformation for IT and businesses.” The role of the CIO is evolving as companies require them to be IT leaders who drive substantive change throughout the entire organization. This means the latter can no longer operate as cost centers, but must employ service-based IT thinking to positively impact their organization’s productivity, competitiveness, and agility…

Grazed from Forbes. Author: Emma Byrne.

Many organizations are adopting a “wait and see” approach to cloud computing: They’re concerned about the risks of data security. But that means they’re missing out on the benefits of the cloud. Let’s square that circle…

In part one of this series, I outlined some of the fears you might encounter when you talk to cloud naysayers. The truth is that the risks that come with cloud computing are like any other business risk: The more you understand them, the easier they are to control. Thankfully, assessing cloud-based risks has plenty in common with risk assessments of your existing business processes. Analyzing those risks doesn’t require any special magic. Business in the cloud is business as usual…

Grazed from CloudTech. Author: Wieland Alge.

Firewalls will always be required as they are the sole devices that analyse and control communication of data and applications. Firewall technology ensures networks are running the way we want them to. As a result I came to the conclusion that the question is not ‘will on-premise firewalls disappear’, but ‘how will firewalls be influenced by cloud technologies?’. In order to address this we have to look at some of the history.

Enter Unified Threat Management

10 years ago the first perimeter architectures consisted of a fast packet processor (the firewall) and a battery of content scanning servers. Each server was dedicated to a specific task (a duty) such as locating spyware or virus scanning. Each was from a different vendor and each was managed separately – it was genuinely best of breed and from a pure performance perspective it was ideal…