Grazed from Genetec. Author: PR Announcement.

Genetec™, a pioneer in the physical security industry and a leading provider of world-class unified IP security solutions, today unveiled its plans for bringing physical security software to the cloud. In conjunction with a strategic multi-year alliance with Microsoft Corp., Genetec is developing true, reliable, hosted security solutions including Video Surveillance, Access Control and License Plate Recognition (LPR) as a Service that will be built on Microsoft’s Windows Azure cloud-computing platform. The new cloud-based security solutions will combine the strength of Genetec’s unified security platform with the global reach, scalability, and reliability of Windows Azure. Following an aggressive development schedule, Genetec is planning on delivering its first cloud-based service offering in the first half of 2013.

"Just as we pioneered IP video 15 years ago, we are now breaking new ground by using advanced cloud technology to make video and security applications even more accessible and meaningful for companies of all sizes," says Pierre Racz, Genetec’s CEO. "By working closely with Microsoft we are able to take advantage of its robust cloud-based development platform, Windows Azure, as a central part of our strategy to bring market-leading video surveillance, access control and license plate recognition to a broader user-base. As the leader in the world’s largest security surveillance market, we are uniquely positioned to bring a true ‘built for the cloud’ solution to both our existing integrators and users and to a whole new market that is looking for simple, ubiquitous, and powerful security tools."…

Grazed from NetworkWorld. Author: Brandon Butler.

Security remains a chief inhibitor to enterprise adoption of cloud computing resources and one Gartner analyst says the biggest concern should not be that data could be compromised in the cloud, but rather that there may be a cloud outage that could lead to data loss.

There’s a perception, says Gartner cloud security analyst Jay Heiser, that the most significant risk in using the cloud is that sensitive data can be leaked. But there’s been little evidence of that, he says. Sony suffered a compromise of potentially tens of millions of customers in 2011 related to its cloud, and there have been a handful of other breaches of personally identifiable information being leaked from the cloud…

Grazed from Adaptive Computing. Author: PR Announcement.

Adaptive Computing, the largest provider of private cloud management and High-Performance Computing (HPC) workload management software, today announced the release of two new editions of its Moab HPC Suite: Application Portal Edition and Remote Visualization Edition. These two new solutions are designed to leverage next-generation access models to simplify the collection and interpretation of data, improving the time it takes to achieve meaningful results.

Moab HPC Suite – Application Portal Edition

With an integrated NICE EnginFrame application portal, Moab streamlines the process of accessing job information by making it all available from a single point – applications, data, resources and job submissions – thus keeping costs to a minimum throughout the design and research processes. It supports the most common ISV and open-source applications used in a variety of disciplines, including manufacturing, energy, life science, government and education, without requiring users to undergo specialized HPC training. Data is also stored efficiently to minimize the need for file transfers…

Grazed from TopHosts. Author: Cliff Boodoosingh.

Datapipe, a global provider of managed services and infrastructure for outsourced IT and cloud computing, today announced the company has been named a “2012 Cloud Computing Excellence Award” winner by Cloud Computing Magazine. Nominated for the company’s Stratosphere(R) managed cloud computing platform, Datapipe is being recognized by award sponsor TMC — a global, integrated media company.

“Datapipe continues to prove its leadership by bringing innovation and excellence to the market and leveraging the latest technology trends,” said Erik Linask, Group Editorial Director, TMC. “The company’s Stratosphere platform is cloud computing at its best — making their designation as a ‘Cloud Computing Excellence Award’ winner a natural choice.”…

Grazed from PRNewsWire. Author: PR Announcement.

Cloud computing, mobility, social tools and other technologies that put more power in the hands of individual users pose new challenges for organizations seeking to secure data, devices and networks, new research released today by CompTIA, the non-profit association for the information technology (IT) industry, reveals.

The majority of companies in CompTIA’s 10th Annual Information Security Trends study attribute human error as a contributing cause of security breaches, just as they have in the previous nine years of the study. What’s changing, however, is that the human element is no longer confined to malware, phishing and viruses…

Grazed from ZDNet. Author: Jack Clark.

As if providing cloud computing, cloud storage and cloud networking wasn’t enough, Amazon Web Services is now giving customers access to low-cost cloud archiving. The company’s mainstay S3 storage service is now linked to the low-cost Glacier data archival service from within the AWS management console, Amazon said on Tuesday. By chaining the two together, Amazon has got rid of many of the steps that companies previously had to take to back up data from S3 into Glacier.

"Amazon S3 was designed for rapid retrieval. Glacier, in contrast, trades off retrieval time for cost, providing storage for as little at $0.01 per Gigabyte per month while retrieving data within three to five hours," Amazon wrote in a blog post…

Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Barb Darrow.

Jesse Andrews, an OpenStack veteran who’s done stints at NASA, ANSO Labs and Rackspace, will lead Nebula’s plug-and-play OpenStack development effort as it nears launch, the company said. Companies pushing OpenStack love to boast that they have former NASA technologists on staff. After all, NASA, along with Rackspace, incubated the open-source cloud stack. In that vein, Nebula, which is led by former NASA CTO Chris Kemp, is naming Jesse Andrews as VP of product management. In that capacity Andrews will oversee the entire Nebula project as the company prepares it for launch.

Andrews has a great OpenStack pedigree. He was also formerly CEO of ANSO Labs, the NASA spinoff, where he worked with Kemp and the rest of the team behind the Nova compute engine underlying OpenStack. ANSO was acquired by Rackspace in February, 2011 and Andrews worked on that company’s Cloud Builder program while continuing to contribute to OpenStack. In fact, Andrews is not totally new to Nebula: He was one of the half dozen or so former ANSO people at Rackspace who decamped to Nebula last July…

Grazed from NetworkComputing. Author: Jon Gold.

Researchers from the Georgia Tech Information Security Center today released their official 2013 cyberthreats forecast, detailing what they say will be the most serious computer security issues in the coming year.

THE CLOUD

First on the list — the use of cloud computing for malicious purposes. The same flexible provisioning capabilities that let legitimate businesses quickly add or subtract computing power could be used to instantly create a powerful network of zombie machines for a wide array of nefarious purposes. "If I’m a bad guy, and I have a zero-day exploit and the cloud provider is not up on their toes in terms of patching, the ability to exploit such a big capacity means I can do all sorts of things," Microsoft Windows Azure Distinguished Engineer Yousef Khalidi said in the report…

Grazed from Phys.org. Author: Editorial Staff.

Gross domestic product (GDP) can be boosted by cloud computing, the system in which remote computers on the Internet are used to store, manage and process data rather than the users’ local machines. A report to be published in the International Journal of Technology, Policy and Management suggests that governments should collaborate to boost the adoption of cloud computing internationally. Marco Iansiti of Harvard Business School and Gregory Richards of Cambridge-based Keystone Strategy, LLC, have found that cloud computing is likely to extend economic growth by increasing the efficiency of information technology in developed economies and could foster growth in those economies where IT penetration is not yet fully mature.

"Cloud computing is a further evolution and integration of server, internet and personal computing technology. It is a paradigm that pushes the three driving forces of power, accessibility and economy of scale beyond present constraints," the researchers say. They point out that during the coming decade cloud computing will give individuals and enterprises access to a vast processing power at a low cost that has not been possible before. The team has now developed a model to link IT capital investment to economic growth and applied their model to 45 countries…

Grazed from WRALTechWire. Author:  Editorial Staff.

6fusion, a startup focused on “cloud” computing services, has raised $2 million in new financing and hopes to land another $2 million. The Raleigh-based company, which is backed by Intersouth partners, secured the new money a mix of debt and options financing and aims to raise $2 million more, according to an SEC filing on Nov. 13.

The first money was raised Oct. 29. Two investors have committed money, but neither was identified. Cloud computing, virtualization and related services are among the fastest growing segments in information technology. And 6fushion plays in the space…