Druva, the leader in cloud data protection and information management, today announced the results of its Annual Ransomware Report. The report reveals ransomware as the great equalizer, a ubiquitous global threat affecting enterprises large and small and devices of all types. With over 800 companies participating, the report uncovered that over 80 percent of respondents reported ransomware attacks are on the rise and that  half of businesses hit by ransomware were attacked multiple times. To combat the increase in these attacks, eight out of ten organizations turn to modern backup solutions as the most effective strategy to minimize costly downtime and crucial data loss.    

Ransomware has quadrupled over the past year, reaching an estimated $1 billion in 2016 with 4,000 attacks occurring per day. As further proven by the recent, widespread attack known as WannaCry, protecting against ransomware is paramount for companies of all sizes and industries. With an increased technological sophistication among attackers, today’s IT organizations are becoming more vigilant and proactive to mitigate data damage caused by attacks and fully prepare to swiftly and seamlessly recover from them.

Cirba, Inc. today unveiled an analytics service, Densify, for optimizing public cloud and on-premise virtual infrastructure. The Densify service is the next evolution of SaaS as it combines the organization’s predictive and real-time optimization analytics with an assigned Densification Advisor, eliminating the burden of learning, operating, managing and maintaining software.

Cirba also announced it is rebranding to Densify, reflecting the company’s strategic value proposition to reduce cloud and infrastructure costs while also improving application performance. The Densify service offers fast time to value, ease of adoption and use and the greatest potential for savings in the market through the industry’s most powerful optimization engine. For a limited time, customers can start with Densify service free for the first 14 days.

"Based on our experience, we know that organizations desperately want to reduce their cloud bill and show highly utilized infrastructure, but there are only so many hours in the day," said Gerry Smith, CEO of Densify. "We understand that IT is looking for more than a software product – they want outcomes. They are looking for experts who can tune and watch over the automated analytics; they want to know that someone is there for them, helping them deliver results – not another management and maintenance burden."

Fugue, Inc., has today released the results of its 2017 State of Cloud Infrastructure Operations Survey. The survey, fielded to over 300 IT operations professionals, executives, and developers, found that most respondents believe that the cloud is not living up to expectations because of compliance and security concerns, unexpected downstream costs, and the glut of cloud management tools available in the market today.

Security, compliance, and cost control are top cloud challenges businesses and agencies face

Only 1 in 5 surveyed felt they are getting "the most" out of the cloud, while 80 percent feel they are failing to do so. Thirty-nine percent said security/compliance is slowing them down, 36 percent said CXOs fail to understand the complexity of the cloud, 26 percent said IT leadership doesn’t understand the complexity of the cloud, and 20 percent said developers don’t understand the complexity of the cloud. Another 22 percent pointed to a lack of cohesion between the cloud and data center teams.

Continuum, the exclusive provider of the only vertically integrated IT service delivery platform that enables MSPs to scale rapidly and profitably, today announced the availability of Archive for Continuity247, Continuum’s managed backup and disaster recovery (BDR) platform. Archive gives MSPs a low-cost backup and restore option for less time-critical data, expanding Continuity247’s capabilities as a unified BDR solution.

Archive takes advantage of the scale and economics of the public cloud, creating a cost-effective, long-term cloud storage option for MSPs to provide archiving, future referencing and offsite redundancy for their clients’ less time-critical local backups. Continuum’s MSP partners using Continuity247 now have the option to store these backups in Amazon Glacier or their own cloud environment.

Splunk Inc., provider of the leading software platform for real-time Operational Intelligence, today announced Rackspace®, a managed cloud leader, is leveraging Splunk® Enterprise and Splunk Enterprise Security (Splunk ES) as the foundation for the company’s decision analytics engine. Rackspace uses Splunk solutions across security, compliance, DevOps, business intelligence, application management and IT operations.

Rackspace ingests nearly three terabytes of data per day into Splunk software to create meaningful visualizations, to diagnose anomalous activity, and to remediate issues across all business processes. As a result, Rackspace’s security and compliance teams are projected to improve the speed of security event detection by at least 70 percent, accelerate investigation of high-priority security incidents by at least 70 percent and decrease the overall financial impact of security outages by at least 50 percent. Through automation of these processes, Rackspace security analysts will get valuable time back to focus on establishing proactive security strategies.

Grazed from GameIndustry. Author: Will Freeman.

Over in the consumer space, the notion of stuffing a hard drive with files has become rather antiquated. By default, music, movies and games are streamed in many homes, while lay-software is increasingly bearing the burden of its gradual superseding by offerings like Google Docs.

And yet, at many different games developers where a flag is confidently staked in the cutting edge, development pipelines are still housed in on-premise hardware, stitched together from middleware, software and other technologies. They thunder away, handling files and assets while pushing data to workstations, at a time where even the once-futuristic gigabyte is now seen as trivial volume of data…

Read more from the source @ http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2017-06-27-light-not-bytes-the-evolution-of-the-pipeline

Grazed from Madison. Author: Editorial Staff.

While much attention has been paid in recent months to digital currencies like Bitcoin, with prices soaring due to fervent speculation, the underlying blockchain technology is slowly gaining steam in the technology industry. International Business Machines (NYSE: IBM) has invested in blockchain, looking to use the technology to remove inefficiencies and reduce costs for its customers.

A blockchain is a distributed, decentralized database that can be used to record transactions in a way that can’t be altered. Any process that requires multiple parties to maintain records and verify those records against those of the other parties can benefit from blockchain technology. IBM CEO Virginia Rometty put forth the example of buying a house in an op-ed for The Wall Street Journal, a process that involves various parties like banks and tax agencies, and typically takes about 50 days to complete…

Grazed from Slator. Author: Florian Faes.

Google Translate could get a formidable challenger. Amazon is preparing to roll out its own machine translation service, CNBC reported, citing an anonymous source. Slator was unable to independently verify the report. We will provide follow-up coverage as the situation evolves.

Amazon will offer the machine translation (MT) technology it is already using internally to third parties, according to CNBC. The service, to be provided by cloud computing arm Amazon Web Services, could be announced before the annual Re:Invent conference in Las Vegas in November 2017…

Grazed from Silicon. Author: Sam Pudwell.

Having passed through the first wave of cloud computing, businesses are now looking at how to optimise their cloud operations and get the best ‘bang for their buck’ related to their specific needs. This is happening across all industries and has led to organisations frequently splitting workloads across different cloud platforms and vendors, taking either a multi-cloud or hybrid-cloud approach in what has become an extremely complicated world to navigate. According to Simon Walsh, COO of Dell-owned Virtustream, the route taken is usually triggered by a business problem – or what he calls “a compelling event” – and more often than not, the answer is hybrid.

A hybrid world

“Cloud is a way of doing stuff, it’s something you do not something you buy,” he explained. “Every single company will have a compelling event which forces a change of something.” He cited Jaguar Land Rover as an example, a Dell EMC customer that is currently focusing on updating its legacy data centre infrastructure in order to keep pace with a rapidly changing industry environment. This poses some interesting questions for CIOs…

Read more from the source @ http://www.silicon.co.uk/cloud/virtustream-hybrid-cloud-215785?inf_by=595261ac681db80f048b4767

While Google, Bing, Yahoo and other search engines all have their specific algorithms and formulas, most imitate one another to some extent. Because of this, improving your SEO performance across all search engines is relatively straightforward. Nevertheless, it still takes time and patience to produce noticeable results.

One area where many brands have wondered about the implications of SEO is in cloud hosting. What are the ramifications of using a cloud-based hosting system and what are the potential benefits? Today, we’ll review the ways that cloud hosting can affect your broader SEO strategy so that you can decide whether making the switch is worth it.