Grazed from TripWire. Author: David Bisson.

Many organizations migrate to the cloud because of increased efficiency, data space, scalability, speed and other benefits. But cloud computing comes with its own security threats. To address these challenges, companies should create a hybrid cloud environment, confirm that their cloud security solution offers 24/7 monitoring and multi-layered defenses, and implement security measures like encryption, data backups and identity access management (IAM).

Organizations can take their cloud security strategy one step further by hiring IT professionals with the proper certifications. These accreditations ensure your new employees are qualified to properly configure your cloud servers and secure your data. Coupled with the proper amount of experience, certified employees can serve as a crucial resource towards helping your company defend against a data breach…

Grazed from ITBrief. Author: Julia Gabel.

The latest analysis on cloud pricing by 451 Research highlights that the cloud price battle field has shifted from virtual machines (VMs) to object storage. And the firm predicts that other services, particularly databases, will undergo the same pricing pressures over the next 18 months. 451 Research says that virtual machines have been the traditional battleground for price cuts as providers seek to gain attention and differentiation.

But now, the tide has turned as object storage pricing declines, including a drop of 14% over the past 12 months. For comparison, the cloud mainstay of virtual machines has dropped a relatively small 5% over the same period. The analysts believe that the move of price cuts beyond compute is due to market maturity. Other factors include increasing cloud-native development and faith in the cloud model, as well as a competitive scrum to capture data migrating out of on-premises infrastructure…

Read more from the source @ https://itbrief.com.au/story/war-cloud-pricing-object-storage-moves-mainstream/

Grazed from ChannelLife. Author: Editorial Staff.

Regardless of which particular model of cloud computing your clients adopt – Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, Revera’s Vault (or any other NZ-based cloud solution) or their own virtualised environment – they still need protection. Typically the cloud provider manages the security of the cloud and the client is responsible for security in the cloud.

Fortinet’s purpose-built public cloud FortiGate firewalls are designed to run inside public cloud-based data centres to provide extra layers of protection including internal segmentation, intrusion prevention, application control, WAN optimisation, data loss prevention, anti-virus, antispam, anti-spyware and VPN (IPsec and SSL)…

Rubrik, the Cloud Data Management company, today announced its data protection solution for Pure Storage FlashBlade, along with new integration between Rubrik’s Cloud Data Management Products and Pure Storage’s FlashArray//M. With this new collaboration, customers can achieve simplicity, performance and integrated data management across hybrid cloud environments. 

"We are pleased to lead the market with our data protection solution for FlashBlade. Finally, customers can achieve unparalleled simplicity, performance and scalability across their environment with Pure and Rubrik," said Bipul Sinha, founder and CEO of Rubrik. "Our integration truly ties together Pure’s performance and manageability, to Rubrik’s cloud native data fabric, making data more agile across hybrid cloud environments."

As new Avaya customers embrace Avaya Midmarket Cloud solutions, three examples offer unique stories that highlight their business models and reasons why full-on or hybrid cloud makes sense for them. From a small, start-up design business, to a youth soccer-focused camp and gear company, to a growing movie and TV studio with ever-changing requirements, Avaya Midmarket Cloud delivers the features, flexibility and cost-effectiveness they need for success, offered by Avaya channel partners.

The Crossing Studios in Burnaby, BC rents over 350,000 square feet of space to Hollywood movie and TV production crews, growing from a single location to eight in record time. Production needs can change frequently, and the number of people needing communications for a single customer can jump from a handful to more than a hundred with only a moment’s notice. Since all eight locations had different communications infrastructure, IT spent inordinate amounts of time re-configuring and adapting systems that had sub-par reliability to begin with.

Capturing 44 percent more deployments and gaining input from 22 percent more organizations than one year ago, the OpenStack Foundation User Survey, published today, reveals growing adoption, increased scale and a more diverse user base, driven by the desire to accelerate innovation and avoid vendor lock-in.

OpenStack’s ninth User Survey demonstrates the open infrastructure platform used for private clouds, public clouds and telecom networks has broad appeal for organizations of all sizes around the world. Thirty-two percent of users have 10,000 employees or more, while 25 percent of organizations have fewer than 100 employees. Sixty-one percent of these users and 74 percent of deployments are physically located outside of the United States.

Bluelock, provider of Disaster Recovery-as-a-Service (DRaaS) for complex environments and sensitive data, is pleased to announce its rating as a leader in Forrester Research’s The Forrester Wave^TM: Disaster-Recovery-As-A-Service Providers, Q2 2017 report.

The report evaluates DRaaS vendors against current offering, strategy and market presence criteria to identify leaders in the space, detailing how each vendor fulfills the selected criteria. Bluelock received the highest score possible in 10 of these criteria, including data security, implementation and support.

Grazed from VCCircle. Author: Editorial Staff.

Amazon.com Inc’s chief technology officer is working toward a day when people can control almost any piece of software with their voice. The company on Wednesday rolled out the technology powering Alexa, its voice assistant that competes with Apple Inc’s Siri, to developers so they can build chat features into their own apps, CTO Werner Vogels said in an interview.

The service, Amazon Lex, was in a preview phase since late 2016. The move underscores how Amazon is racing to be the top player in voice-controlled computing, after losing out in mobile to Apple and Alphabet Inc’s Google. Vogels said that Amazon’s headway in processing how humans write and speak would make conversational assistants or “chatbots” more helpful than the clunky tools they’ve been in the past…

Read more from the source @ https://www.vccircle.com/amazon-launches-chatbot-in-bid-to-lead-voice-controlled-computing/

Grazed from OpenStack.org. Author: Editorial Staff.

Mirantis, the managed open cloud company, today announced availability of a commercially-supported distribution of OpenStack and Kubernetes, delivered in a single, integrated package, and with a unique build-operate-transfer delivery model. “Today, infrastructure consumption patterns are defined by the public cloud, where everything is API driven, managed and continuously delivered.

Mirantis OpenStack, which featured Fuel as an installer, was the easiest OpenStack distribution to deploy, but every new version required a forklift upgrade,” said Boris Renski, Mirantis co-founder and CMO. “Mirantis Cloud Platform departs from the traditional installer-centric architecture and towards an operations-centric architecture, continuously delivered by either Mirantis or the customers’ DevOps team with zero downtime…