New Cloud Offering from HP
Cloud computing has emerged as a key focus area for all the information technology companies across the globe, and Hewlett-Packard Company (HPQ – Analyst Report) is no exception. The company has recently announced a new cloud computing solution in a bid to revamp its business.
The new cloud-based service enables clients to deploy private, public and managed clouds in a traditional information technology atmosphere, helps address the business needs of several existing and prospective clients and is compatible with all the latest technologies used by various companies.
The new offering from the technology major is expected to help the airline industry to develop an integrated platform for airline reservations and travel. Moreover, the “Cloud bursting” capabilities help external clients to access the blocks of external cloud capacity through the HP Cloud System, Amazon Web Services and Savvis. It is also expected to help in arranging new tools to manage technology across various cloud environments. The new offering includes a printing system that enables driverless printing from mobile devices…
IT and Cloud security provider Qualys files for $100 million IPO
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loud security provider Qualys Inc filed with U.S. regulators to raise up to $100 million in an initial public offering of its common stock.
The company, which provides a cloud computing based platform for companies to secure their IT infrastructure, said it plans to list under the symbol "QLYS", but did not say on which exchange.
Qualys is backed by chief executive Philippe Courtot, who owns about 40 percent of the company, and venture capital firm Trident Capital, which has a 27.4 percent stake…
AWS: Can anyone catch Amazon’s cloud?
One of Amazon’s secret weapons is its attitude to profit margins, where it is happy to undercut its cloud computing competitors.
This combines with its economies of scale to make life very difficult for any of its potential competitors, be they small and nimble or large and rich.
When Amazon adds capacity, it has to buy hard drives by the shipping crate and servers by the rackload, according to Carl Brooks, an infrastructure and cloud computing analyst at Tier 1 research. And the low prices that Amazon can command for its equipment due to its size could make it difficult for competitors unless they are well funded and content with entering into a price war.
"[Amazon’s] margins for selling compute and storage are absurd," Brooks says. He notes that a basic EC2 unit — the workhorse of the AWS cloud — is around one half of one modern CPU (a single EC2 unit is roughly equivalent to a 1.0-1.2GHz AMD Opteron or Intel Xeon processor from 2007, according to Amazon)…
Researcher: Interdependencies Could Lead to Cloud ‘meltdowns’
As the use of cloud computing becomes more and more mainstream, serious operational "meltdowns" could arise as end-users and vendors mix, match and bundle services for various means, a researcher argues in a new paper set for discussion next week at the USENIX HotCloud ’12 conference in Boston.
"As diverse, independently developed cloud services share ever more fluidly and aggressively multiplexed hardware resource pools, unpredictable interactions between load-balancing and other reactive mechanisms could lead to dynamic instabilities or ‘meltdowns,’" Yale University researcher and assistant computer science professor Bryan Ford wrote in the paper.
Ford compared this scenario to the intertwining, complex relationships and structures that helped contribute to the global financial crisis…
Asking the right questions can ensure cloud computing data security
With organizations producing — and responsible for — more data than ever before, the cloud has proven a viable data management option. But don’t expect to just send your data to the provider and be done with it — cloud computing data security is as much your responsibility as it is theirs.
Do [your cloud providers] have processes and procedures in place to make sure people are not accessing information they should not be seeing?
During sessions on this topic at Compliance Week 2012, held in Washington, D.C., this week, experts said doing your homework on your needs, as well as on cloud providers’ business models, are key to ensuring cloud computing data security…
Egenera Makes the Leap to Cloud Management
The way blade pioneer Egenera remembers things it invented converged infrastructure before it had to abandon its x86 BladeFrame servers, switches and storage for software based on its trusty Processor Area Network (PAN) Manager.
It is now making the obligatory move from other people’s virtualized blade servers to the private cloud still focused on blades.
Egenera has yet to make the great leap to rack servers. Blades, according to CEO Peter Manca, are more uniform and – although racks dominate – blades are faster growing.
While the company works out what to do about racks, its new Pan Cloud Director offers a self-service portal that handles both physical and virtual environments, taking care of all those applications that don’t like to be virtualized and sidestepping lock-in issues…
Cloud computing gaffes and other letdowns
Everyone makes mistakes. Cloud vendors let you down by failing to live up to promises spelled out in their SLAs, and even Internet giants like Google get caught meddling using seemingly Orwellian tactics. And that’s what this installment of Quotes from the Cloud is about: The mistakes we make.
Made a major gaffe recently? Don’t panic. Sometimes when it seems like nothing is going right, all you need is a place to turn when the proverbial stuff hits the fan. Here’s some advice for cloud admins in the midst of a meltdown. And, if nothing else, this week’s news will prove you aren’t the only one making mistakes.
"There is nothing ‘next generation’ about HP’s announcement."
Shlomo Swidler, CEO of Orchestratus Inc., is less than impressed with HP’s Converged Cloud updates. Though the hardware giant hasn’t made any mistakes, per se, it seems like HP is constantly playing catch-up to compete with well-established cloud players. Was it too quick to release its first iteration of the Converged Cloud portfolio? Or were the updates just really good afterthoughts? Though some are cautiously optimistic about HP’s next-round of updates, some experts say they still may not be enough to sway enterprise customers…
FAA Chooses Office 365: Microsoft One-Ups Google In Battle For Government Cloud Market
In early 2011, former U.S. Chief Information Officer Vivek Kundra and team helped institute a “Cloud First” policy, which aimed to speed up the government’s internal adoption of cloud computing and services. Since then, many government agencies have begun moving their collaboration and productivity applications to the cloud. Today, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) became the latest to transition, awarding Computer Sciences Corp a contract worth as much as $91 million to implement its cloud productivity solution based on Microsoft Office 365, which includes messaging, calendaring, IMs and webconferencing.
According to Microsoft’s statement, 60,000 FAA employees and 20,000 employees at the Department of Transportation will be migrating to Office 365. The contract, which is for one year service with an option for an additional six years, is somewhat of a big, symbolic win for Microsoft in its ongoing efforts to win control of the government cloud market….
Could Cloud Computing Help Restore Our Trust in Banks?
Could cloud computing help restore our trust in the banking system? That’s a tall order, since the responsiveness and stability of our financial system rests on many factors, from adroit management practices to proper and measured fiscal and monetary policies. But some financial technology experts say technology — particularly cloud computing — can help repair some of the damage wrought in recent years and advance the banking sector into a new realm.
Cloud computing’s disruptive impact on banking will affect how institutions transform how consumers research, learn about and buy financial services and products, and manage their personal finances. That’s the view in a new report out of Accenture, authored by Emmanuel Sardet of Accenture Financial Services, and Emmanuel Viale of Accenture Technology Labs. No company in any industry can afford to ignore cloud computing, they write, but it’s impact will be strongly felt within the financial services sector…
CitizenHawk Introduces Cloud-Based Online Brand Protection Platform
CitizenHawk, a global provider of online brand protection and enforcement services, has introduced a powerful online brand protection tool and offering it to clients on a subscription basis.
HawkDiscovery is a cloud-based technology platform that enables users to search the entire Web and detect use of trademarked terms and phrases, helping uncover instances of brand abuse ranging from counterfeiting to cybersquatting. It also permits monitoring of content on specific websites and produces alerts notifying users of new activity. HawkDiscovery features a fully integrated workflow and case management system that acts as a kind of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system for brand protection. The system lets users analyze and assess particular instances of online infringement, determine appropriate responses, and manage remediation activities from initial detection through final resolution – with every action tracked, recorded and shared with appropriate personnel.
“Major companies realize their brands are among their most precious corporate assets, and they spend enormous amounts of time and money promoting them to consumers, investors and others,” said David Duckwitz, CitizenHawk’s president and chief executive. “Unfortunately, the more well known and popular a brand is, the more attractive it becomes to typosquatters and others seeking to exploit it on the Internet. Marketing, legal, compliance and IT professionals now have a way to fight back with cost effective tools that not only can uncover such abuse but effectively respond to it.”