Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Barb Darrow.

Now that it’s brought its OpenStack implementations to market, Rackspace is rebranding itself as “the open cloud company.”

The company’s name, Rackspace Hosting, remains unchanged, but a new logo and the rebranding acknowledges how the IT market — or at least the perception of the IT market — has changed in the era of cloud computing.

This may be a cosmetic move, but it’s important nonetheless and comes the day Rackspace is slated to announce its second quarter earnings. The company, with OpenStack in its quiver, now faces off with Amazon in the public cloud sector and with its own partners, Microsoft and VMware, that have cloud aspirations of their own, not to mention a fleet of other OpenStack purveyors including Hewlett-Packard and Internap. (OpenStack, which proponents are pushing as “the Linux of the cloud” is getting some traction. Ebay is working with Nicira on an OpenStack cloud, for example.)…

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: David Linthicum.

In a recent interview, Steve Wozniak, who co-founded Apple with the late Steve Jobs, predicted "horrible problems" with the use of cloud computing over the next five years.

"I really worry about everything going to the cloud," he said. "I think it’s going to be horrendous." He added: "With the cloud, you don’t own anything. You already signed it away."

I was taken back by this statement, especially since most provider agreements state that you do own your data in their cloud. Perhaps he was referring to consumer clouds and social networking sites that may present different terms…

Grazed from PRWeb. Author: PR Announcement.

Intradyn, archiving and eDiscovery experts, today announced the virtual version of its leading email archiving products: the ORCA Virtual Appliance, which provides virtual appliances for email archiving to government entities, large enterprises, educational facilities, and service providers..

Virtual excellence has now become more prominent than ever with the advent of Cloud Computing and will continue to grow, eventually becoming an industry norm. The high level of performance that is achieved with minimal resources makes it an extremely efficient and robust market practice…

Grazed from CloudTweaks. Author: Rick Blaisdell.

Cloud computing is continually changing the way IT services are provided. The initial promise of cloud computing was the ease of Internet service delivery and of simplified service management. A current challenge a company can face is related to how to incorporate cloud computing into their integrated business and IT strategy. It is necessary to develop an enterprise cloud adoption strategy in order to grow and stay competitive.

According to an IDC survey, Availability, Performance and Security are the three main problems when it comes to cloud adoption. The risk of data loss and legal issues because of security breaches is very high and most users and IT administrators are very well aware of it…

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: Chris Talbot.

Dell is looking to the channel to continue growing its vCloud offering. The company officially announced on its blog the formation of the Dell Cloud Channel Partner Program, which gives partners in the Dell PartnerDirect program the ability to resell Dell’s cloud product or act as a referral partner for Dell’s direct salesforce.

It’s good to see Dell work with its channel to bring its cloud offerings to the market. Over the last few years, there has been a lot of talk about how channel and direct salesforces clash at times over cloud offerings, and although this won’t be a pure channel play by Dell, at least Dell is giving a little and working with its channel instead of strictly in conflict with it.

Stephen Spector posted on his Dell blog about the new channel partner program that will provide Dell’s partners with access to vCPUs, memory, storage networks, IP addresses, firewalls, catalog capabilities and additional services around the company’s Dell Cloud with VMware vCloudDatacenter Service. The opportunities are only available to partners in the Dell PartnerDirect program…

Grazed from ITWorld. Author: Brian Proffitt.

The travails of former Gizmodo writer Mat Honan may illustrate the dangers of the consumerization of the cloud, and serve as a reminder that when it comes to security, the human factor may still be the weakest link.

Honan’s story is pretty frightening: in the course of 15 minutes Friday afternoon, a hacker was able to access his Apple iCloud account, obtain access to his Gmail account by executing a password reset request, and then–after obtaining access to many of Honan’s other accounts, including his access to the Gizmodo Twitter account–proceeded to remotely wipe the data from Honan’s iPhone, iPad, and MacBook, using those devices’ Find My feature.

It was a stunning hack, and one that might have been quietly swept under the Apple rug as “user error,” had not the victim been a well-known technology writer with the social clout to find out answers…

Grazed from Broadcast News. Author: Editorial Staff.

Telx®, a leading provider of global interconnectivity, cloud computing enablement services and data center solutions, today announced that John Freimuth has joined the company as General Manager, Cloud and Enterprise Services. Freimuth brings more than 20 years of consulting, business and IT development experience within financial, healthcare and large-scale business organizations to his new position, where he will focus on maximizing market penetration and bringing new products and solutions to market.

Freimuth will drive all facets of Telx’s cloud and enterprise business solutions, and driving growth of the company’s extensive capabilities to deliver innovative products and solutions for its growing roster of customers. He joins Telx from Internap, where he served as Vice-President of managed hosting and cloud computing. Freimuth was responsible for the overall results of this strategic business unit which became the fastest growth area for Internap. Freimuth was responsible for business development, product management, and product strategies which included the launch of new managed hosting and cloud services…

Grazed from NetworkComputing. Author: Ericka Chikowski.

As organizations start to develop more robust mobile security policies and strategies, they’re looking for mobile device management (MDM) functionality that goes above and beyond simple remote wipe and password management features. Last month’s Black Hat conference in Las Vegas featured a number of talks on the subject, as well as mobile security products announced during and after the show. Here’s a look at some of the releases, as well as the latest vulnerability management and forensics products:

Often, much of the MDM value-add is the context or overall product framework around which the particular device management functionality is built. In the case of BeyondTrust’s PowerBroker Mobile, which was launched at Black Hat, that context is the PowerBroker vulnerability assessment portfolio, which the company picked up with its acquisition of eEye Digital. The new mobile component plays into PowerBroker’s overall endpoint and vulnerability management platform by adding tablets and smartphones to the equation. PowerBroker Mobile offers provisioning and configuration management, plus policy management for VPNs, email, passwords, device encryption, remote locking, GPS tracking and (of course) remote wipe. It’s all built into the same PowerBroker platform to add mobile devices to a company’s governance, risk and compliance (GRC) policy and reporting workflow…

Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Derrick Harris.

Most of us have a lot of data in the cloud, housed in storage services such as Dropbox, e-mail applications such as Gmail or everyday web services such as Facebook. Most of us probably don’t keep it as safe as we should, either. Although certain methods of attack are beyond our control — such as the social engineering attack that befell Wired staffer Mat Honan last week — if you’re willing to undertake a little extra effort, there are still plenty of methods to prevent intruders from seeing your information.

1. Be smart about passwords and security questions.

Ideally, passwords and usernames should be unique for each service so a breach at one doesn’t result in carte blanche access to the rest of your accounts (if the LinkedIn breach didn’t beat the practice into our collective head, nothing will). Passwords also should be obscure enough that someone won’t be able to guess them if they know a few factoids about the target. And complex helps too: interspersing numbers, symbols and upper-case letters makes it harder to guess even if someone gets the phrase right…

Grazed from NextGov. Author:  Eric Katz.

Federal information technology officers view cloud computing as an important part of their agencies’ futures, but specific implementation plans are not yet well known within agency management, an industry report has found.

IDC Government Insights found that while 90 percent of more than 400 IT and business managers surveyed said cloud computing will have some impact on their department’s future, an alarming number did not know the long-term plans for the technology or how to budget for cloud solutions.

Thirty-four percent of the executives surveyed did not know their agency’s cloud budget, while 23 percent of civilian managers were not aware their agencies’ long-term plans, according to the report…