June 14, 2012 Off

Are You Up to Date? Today’s Top Five Security Threats to Your Data

By David

Contributed Article. Author: John Milburn, vice president and general manager, Identity and Access Management, Quest Software

Are You Up to Date? Today’s Top Five Security Threats to Your Data

If you’re feeling a little paranoid about data security threats, you can relax. You’re not paranoid! The threats are real. While financial institutions have gotten smarter (the recent breach at Global Payments notwithstanding), companies in other industries, such as retail and hospitality, are now in the crosshairs, and hackers and scammers are finding easier prey in small to medium businesses.

According to the Verizon Business report, “2012 Data Breach Investigations,” last year saw the second-highest data loss total since the company started keeping track in 2004. Some 855 incidents resulted in 174 million compromised records.

June 14, 2012 Off

8 questions that will dominate enterprise cloud adoption

By David

Grazed from NetworkWorld. Author: Brandon Butler.

Enterprises have spent the past few years considering if they’ll embrace cloud computing. For the many that have made the move, their attention has now turned to managing the cloud and getting business value from it, says IDC Chief Cloud Analyst Frank Gens.

As IT transitions from the "if" to the "how" phase, enterprises are wrestling with a slew of fresh questions. On the infrastructure side, will a public or private cloud be used? Which vendors are best to work with — legacy IT players or emerging cloud companies? Which mobile device operating systems should be used to enable access to cloud software and what platforms should be used to build next-generation cloud applications?

Those questions were the focus of discussion Wednesday morning at the Cloud Leadership Forum, a three-day event in Santa Clara sponsored by IDC and IDG Enterprise (Network World is an IDGE company)…

June 14, 2012 Off

Top Cloud Computing Myths

By David

Grazed from EBN. Author: Dr. Cagri Tanriover.

If you randomly selected 10 people on the street and asked them to define "cloud computing," you would likely get 10 different answers. This is not surprising, given the wide spectrum of (confusing) literature and viewpoints on cloud computing available on the public domain. This confusion has been escalated in recent months by the marketing departments of service providers and equipment manufacturers keen to promote these new buzzwords at every opportunity.

To clear up some of the confusion surrounding cloud computing, let me share the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s definition of the term:

Cloud computing is a model for enabling ubiquitous, convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications, and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction.

That definition is concise but insufficient, because of some of the ways cloud computing has been used in recent years. In fact, as a result of the ubiquity and rapid adoption of the phrase "cloud computing," many myths have developed about what it is and what it can or cannot do, driving further confusion about the utility of the technology for operational purposes. I would like to help dispel some of those myths, including the ones you may not have heard before but will cross your path eventually. Here are some of the interesting (and popular) myths I have encountered…

June 13, 2012 Off

Cloud Federation: It’s Happening; Business Models are Emerging

By David

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: Sevcik and Wetzel,

Although far from a fait accompli, cloud federation is in the works. Like ants in the Internet ant hill, cloud providers are beginning to join forces to improve their individual prospects for long-term growth and sustainability.

Three companies — SpotCloud, OnApp, and Tier 3 — have placed bets on the idea that small-to-medium-sized cloud providers can benefit by federating resources. Each has a different business model that potentially blazes a trail for cloud federation. As its name implies, SpotCloud is a spot market that brings together buyers and sellers of commodity IaaS resources. OnApp federates cloud provider resources to deliver global content delivery network (CDN) services. And Tier 3 federates cloud provider resources to expand geographic reach and scalability for cloud computing services…

June 13, 2012 Off

Numerix and GreenButton Partner to Accelerate Financial Services Cloud Enablement of Derivatives Valuation & Risk Calculations

By David

Grazed from MarketWatch. Author: PR Announcement.

Numerix ( www.numerix.com ), the leading provider of cross-asset analytics for derivatives valuations and risk management today announced a partnership with GreenButton to provide Numerix clients with seamless, secure, on-demand access to cloud computing resources. Enabled in the latest release of Numerix CrossAsset XL, a flexible Microsoft Excel-based platform for pricing any derivative or structured product, clients can offload their compute-intensive calculations to any cloud provider including Microsoft Windows Azure via GreenButton’s intuitive interface. End users can now immediately leverage cost effective cloud resources to respond to market dynamics and regulatory pressures with consistent and more timely analytics.

Regulatory pressures and business requirements demand that both buy-side and sell-side firms generate faster, more frequent and accurate pricing and risk analysis. At the same time, firms need to assess trading and risk management decisions from a consistent, enterprise-wide, cross-asset point of view. Together these factors combine to necessitate a myriad of increasingly complex and compute intensive pricing and risk calculations. Thus many firms, particularly hedge funds, asset managers and insurance companies, are now in need of customizable cloud-based solutions to meet their unique business requirements and demand for more compute power…

June 13, 2012 Off

Startups Show How to Extend Devices Using the Cloud

By David

Grazed from Forbes. Author: Phil Keys.

Love it or hate it, the buzzword “cloud computing” seems to be stuck in the technology industry lexicon (anyone interested in a betting pool on whether it will last longer than “Web 2.0?”). At its basics, cloud computing represents the ability for software developers to cheaply and easily use the resources of masses of servers sitting somewhere in a data center (essentially supercomputers) to do something interesting or useful. One of the areas I’m particularly interested in is the promise of cloud computing to extend the capabilities of what are often called embedded devices.

Unlike the more powerful general purpose computing device such as the personal computer or, more recently, the smartphone, embedded devices are typically things like cars or thermostats which are only given a limited amount of computing power and memory to accomplish specific tasks. As embedded devices become increasingly connected to the Internet, there are some real interesting possibilities around extended the capabilities of extending the capabilities of these limited devices by connecting them to cloud computing…

June 13, 2012 Off

SPEC Forms Cloud Benchmarking Group

By David

Grazed from MarketWatch. Author: PR Announcement.

The Standard Performance Evaluation Corp. (SPEC) has formed a new group to research and recommend application workloads for benchmarking cloud computing performance.

The group functions under SPEC’s Open Systems Group (OSG) and is working in cooperation with other SPEC committees and subcommittees to define cloud benchmark methodologies, determine and recommend application workloads, identify cloud metrics for existing SPEC benchmarks, and develop new cloud benchmarks.

Current participants in OSGCloud include AMD, Dell, IBM, Ideas International, Intel, Karlshuhe Institute of Technology, Oracle, Red Hat and VMware. Long-time SPEC benchmark developer Yun Chao is a supporting contributor. The group collaborates with the SPEC Research Cloud group, which is working on gaining a broader understanding of cloud behavior and performance issues…

June 13, 2012 Off

Cloud experts puzzled by Oracle’s approach to cloud computing

By David

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Stuart J. Johnston.

Oracle’s latest public cloud vision continues the company’s lock-in approach that leaves experts skeptical, if not outright cynical about the company’s cloud strategy.

Oracle Corp.’s cloud platform was re-introduced by CEO Larry Ellison during an hour-and-a-half presentation last week where he appeared to laboriously read off of slides and largely rehashed last fall’s launch of the company’s cloud initiative.

Given that the Oracle Cloud remains highly proprietary, it’s no surprise that it primarily appeals to existing Oracle customers. Non-Oracle shops don’t see value in the cloud offering and wonder why the company would take such an approach…

June 13, 2012 Off

How to make the right choice with cloud IT services

By David

Grazed from The Guardian. Author: Danny Bradbury.

With all of the conflicting messages on cloud services coming from technology companies, it can be difficult to work out what is actually best for you. What are the pros and cons of the different models?

‘Beware of the false cloud," said Marc Benioff, the CEO of Salesforce, recently, taking aim at rival cloud service providers and their "fundamentally misnamed" solutions. But while such sniping is not unusual among cloud providers, who all use different definitions to cast their own narrowly focused "cloud" products in the best light, most customers just want something that gets the job done cheaply and safely.

For the purest definition of a cloud, turn to the National Institute of Science and Technology (Nist). It defines the cloud as a shared pool of computing resources that can be configured, provisioned and released quickly and easily, without the help of a service provider. The cloud is "elastic", which means services, such as processing power or storage, can be scaled up or down very easily depending on user need…

June 13, 2012 Off

Cloud Computing: Stoneware Announces Availability of webNetwork 6.1

By David

Grazed from MarketWatch. Author: PR Announcement.

Stoneware, the leader in Unified Cloud computing, announced that webNetwork version 6.1 is now available and shipping. webNetwork 6.1 is a significant release that provides customers a platform to deliver files, applications and reports whether those resources reside in their private data center, the public cloud or on a local device, and delivers them all through a secure browser-based webDesktop.

"webNetwork 6.1 marks a milestone in the journey toward the Unified Cloud," said Rick German, CEO of Stoneware. "The ability to deliver IT services through the cloud is a unique feature that has no equal in the marketplace. Unifying private cloud, public cloud and device resources will lead to a better user experience, while minimizing the burden on overloaded IT staff. This solution delivers the vision VDI failed to provide, through the cloud, without the expensive overhead and at a significantly lower cost."…