Today the OpenStack Foundation announced that Brian Stevens of Google, Mercè Crosas of The Institute for Quantitative Social Science (IQSS) at Harvard University and Junwei Lu of China Mobile are among the speakers committed to the next OpenStack Summit, the must-attend open infrastructure event, taking place May 8-11 at the Hynes Convention Center in Boston. OpenStack users at Bloomberg, eBay and the US Army Cyber School are also among the first round of confirmed speakers. The call for presentations is open through February 6, and the full agenda will be published in March.

More than 6,000 participants from 60+ countries are expected to attend the OpenStack Summit to discuss how open infrastructure is helping companies increase agility and save money as software becomes more strategic to their business. Headline sponsors are Intel, Mirantis, Deutsche Telekom and Red Hat.

Stevens, vice president of cloud platforms at Google, will discuss how open source is the vehicle for hybrid cloud and is also enabling new use cases such as machine learning. Crosas, chief data science and technology officer at Harvard IQSS (Institute for Quantitative and Social Science), will discuss the Cloud Dataverse collaboration with the Massachusetts Open Cloud (MOC) to host datasets, supporting thousands of researchers at more than 500 worldwide institutions using Dataverse, in the MOC’s OpenStack cloud.

ZeroStack, the leader in making self-driving private cloud affordable for all companies, today announced its roadmap and first suite of artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities derived from machine learning. These capabilities build the foundation for self-driving clouds, making deploying, running, and managing on-premises cloud as ‘hands off’ as using a public cloud. Aimed at empowering application developers, other on-premises clouds require major investments in IT infrastructure and internal skills. ZeroStack’s intelligent cloud platform leverages self-healing software and algorithms developed from over one million datagrams. This economic disruption unleashes businesses to choose clouds for application development based on data locality, governance, performance and costs without technology adoption restricting their choices.

"With ZeroStack’s vision for automated cloud, and this first release of real capabilities, I believe they are the only credible cloud vendor to employ artificial intelligence in the service of enterprise customers," said Torsten Volk, senior analyst at Enterprise Management Associates. "Given the increasing complexity of IT operations, deploying AI is an optimal way of managing costs."

Carbon Black, the leader in next-generation endpoint security, today unveiled "Streaming Prevention," a cybersecurity technology that redefines the Next-Generation Antivirus (NGAV) market by combining a breakthrough prevention model with market-leading detection and response to stop both malware and non-malware attacks.

"Streaming Prevention" is the core technology powering Cb Defense, Carbon Black’s NGAV solution, which can prevent, detect and respond to the most advanced cyber attacks, including non-malware attacks.

Non-malware attacks gain control of computers without downloading malicious software. Instead, they use trusted, native operating system tools, such as PowerShell, and exploit running applications, such as browsers, to "live off the land." These attacks pose a bigger risk than malware attacks because they are harder to detect and cause more damage. Virtually every organization was targeted by such an attack in 2016, according to Carbon Black research.

In protecting against non-malware attacks, "Streaming Prevention" is a fundamentally different approach to endpoint prevention than taken by Cylance, McAfee, Symantec and other antivirus (AV) vendors.

Since there are many companies today that has offices around the world and they have a lot of employees who travel back and forth from one office to another, their business methods need a lot of changes in order to make it work. 

Besides the fact that their offices are separated by thousands of miles, they still need to be able to communicate, share information and ideas in order to come up with coordinated business incentives. Additionally, most of those scattered business organizations have a lot of things to consider and they require sophisticated solutions that will allow them to function properly. 

This is where an online wiki software comes into play. It allows organizations to share different types of information between them in a simple, yet very effective way. Still, this is not the only thing you can do with cloud-based wiki software and we will focus upon that a bit more. 

Grazed from CIO.com.  Author: Mary Branscombe

When Microsoft first showed off its disaster recovery service on Azure in 2014, it was called Hyper-V Recovery Manager and was an extension of a System Center tool for failing over Hyper-V virtual machines (VM) to another location, using the public cloud to coordinate testing and managing recovery between your data centers.

Today, Azure Site Recovery (ASR) lets you fail over into the cloud as well to another location, from physical and virtual servers, and it handles far more workloads than just Hyper-V and System Center Virtual Machine Manager (or even VMware and vSphere, which it also supports).

Bitglass, the total data protection company, today announced support for Amazon Web Services (AWS) and custom apps — two major additions that extend the capabilities of Bitglass’ market-leading Cloud Access Security Broker (CASB) solution.

Bitglass for AWS offers deep visibility, real-time DLP, and granular access controls across all S3 and EC2 instances. According to Neil MacDonald and Greg Young of Gartner*, "Through 2020, 80% of cloud breaches will be due to customer misconfiguration, mismanaged credentials or insider theft, not cloud provider vulnerabilities."

TierPoint LLC, a leading national provider of hybrid IT solutions, today announced that it has been designated a Microsoft Azure Authorized Indirect Cloud Solution Provider – making it one of less than a dozen US-based managed hosting and cloud providers that have achieved this designation and building on TierPoint’s prior designation as a Direct Partner within the Microsoft Cloud Solution Provider (CSP) program.

"This expanded licensing program opens the door to compelling new opportunities for our channel partners and their clients," said Bob Buchanan, TierPoint Vice President, Channel. "TierPoint partners that are enrolled in the Microsoft Partner Network with Indirect Reseller status can now provide one-stop shopping for Microsoft Azure solutions, increase revenue, and leverage TierPoint’s unique and comprehensive mix of hybrid IT services, including cloud design, deployment, and management – all backed by our superior, high-touch service and 39 world-class data centers in 20 geographically diversified markets."

Regardless of the project you’re working on, good project management is a must. In a web design project, for instance, good project management will not only help you organize every part of the project properly, but also allow you to overcome challenges and get the best results without wasting too much time revising and debugging. According to studies complied by Brandeis University and its masters in project and program management program, good project management involves five important steps.

The most important part of the project management cycle is actually planning. You can’t plan for everything, but good planning will help give you that extra set of guidelines that will get you to your goals faster. You can also organize resources and time better with careful planning at the beginning of the project.

Technology is the backbone of your business, but what happens when it fails? Make no mistake – this isn’t an "if" scenario, but a matter of time: From power outages to weather events or network issues, technology doesn’t always work as intended. How do you make sure you’re prepared?

Anatomy of a Disaster

What’s behind an IT disaster? The hard truth is that anything can cause network problems, device failures or total blackouts – some issues are simply more likely than others. For example, power outages caused by large-scale events such as storms or fires often top the list of IT disaster causes. Other common origins include issues with existing networks, such as the migration from local stacks to cloud-based networks or attacks by malicious actors. These could include DDoS attacks that are designed to quickly bring down tech services by overwhelming them with network requests or could be the result of employees accidentally or maliciously allowing attackers access to corporate networks.

ServiceNow, the enterprise cloud company, today announced integrations from leading cybersecurity companies into ServiceNow Security Operations solution. With ServiceNow customers can prioritize threats and use a structured response engine to resolve real security threats fast. Now security analysts can easily enrich threat information, map those threats to the underlying business service at risk, and easily collaborate with IT to automatically resolve them. This replaces the manual, slow and ineffective back-and-forth resolution process of the past.

While enterprises have invested heavily in protection and detection tools, security response is often left unaddressed. Determining whether an alert constitutes an actual threat can take hours. Security analysts use email, phone calls and spreadsheets to coordinate remediation with IT teams. These manual processes are error-prone and unwieldy, leading to lengthy breach containment times of 70 days on average, according to the Ponemon Institute.

ServiceNow Security Operations replaces the manual work patterns of the past with intelligent workflows of the future and just added several new automation integrations from leading security vendors. In as little as 20 seconds, Security Operations automatically enriches each security incident with threat intelligence, including information from potentially affected endpoints. This allows security analysts to spend less time on researching problems and to get to resolution faster. In addition, ServiceNow Security Operations eliminates the need for manual data collection by automatically generating a post-incident report for later analysis, reporting or audit.