Grazed from ZDNet. Author: Stephanie Condon.

IBM officially announced Wednesday that it’s signed a deal to build, manage and operate a private cloud data center for the US Army, within the Army’s Redstone Arsenal near Huntsville, Alabama. The deal marks the first time the Army has turned to a private company to run a large-scale data center on its behalf within a military installation.

The on-premise private cloud initiative is part of a one-year task order. Under the Army Private Cloud 2 (APC2) contract, awarded to seven companies in 2011, the contract with IBM could be extended by as much as four additional years. Should it last the full five years, the contract will be worth approximately $62 million, IBM said…

Grazed from CloudTech. Author: James Bourne.

Google has announced the launch of Cloud Key Management Service (KMS), which enables admins to manage their encryption keys in Google Cloud Platform without maintaining an on-premise management system. The news marks Google’s entry into this particular security arena, following Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft who launched such initiatives as far back as 2014 and 2015 respectively.

“Customers in regulated industries, such as financial services and healthcare, value hosted key management services for the ease of use and peace of mind that they provide,” wrote Maya Kaczorowski, Google Cloud Platform product manager in a blog post. “Cloud KMS offers a cloud-based root of trust that you can monitor and audit…

Dome9 Security, a leader in cloud infrastructure security, today announced native support for the Microsoft Azure public cloud platform. With this release, Dome9’s Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) security platform provides built-in, API-enabled integration with Azure, the public cloud of choice for many global enterprises. Azure customers can now leverage the powerful control fabric offered by the Dome9 Arc platform to manage security and compliance across their Azure and Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud infrastructure environments.

The Dome9 Arc platform allows security and operations teams to visualize the network security posture and exposure levels by analyzing network security groups and attached network-based assets like virtual machines, load balancers, and database services in their Azure environments. Customers can detect and audit changes to security policies across Azure subscriptions and regions, correlate security events in the Azure Security Center, and continuously monitor their state of compliance. This enables security operations teams to quickly identify and proactively resolve misconfigurations and vulnerabilities that could lead to downtime or costly breaches.

Infrascale, a leading provider of cloud backup and disaster recovery solutions, today announced it is now a Google Cloud Platform Technology Partner, providing a fully-managed cloud backup and disaster recovery service that provides guaranteed 15-minute failover of critical business applications in the event of a ransomware attack, server crash or site-wide disaster.

The collaboration between Infrascale and Google Cloud Platform enables organizations to better protect their data, uptime, and operational resiliency with a pay-as-you-go model, eliminating the upfront investment for organizations to procure and maintain secondary site infrastructure.

Backup to the Google Cloud

NuoDB, the elastic SQL database company for cloud applications, today released NuoDB 2.6 to enable customers to elastically scale out their modern cloud applications as part of their digital transformation efforts. With formal support for active-active database deployments across Amazon Web Services (AWS) Availability Zones, NuoDB 2.6 enables organizations to maximize their AWS investments including better availability, utilization, performance, and resiliency.

NuoDB 2.6 also introduces table partitions and storage groups to efficiently improve performance, helping organizations improve customer satisfaction, reduce total cost of ownership, and provide a foundation for future growth. In addition, organizations migrating off of traditional relational databases can capitalize on NuoDB 2.6’s extensive SQL compatibility to reduce the complexity, cost, effort, and time typically required from database migration.

Active-Active Database Deployment in AWS Eliminates Downtime

Many organizations are using VMware, OpenStack and other technologies to take their clouds in-house, building private cloud infrastructures to reduce their costs and dependence on providers like Amazon AWS.  Anyone who has already ventured on a private cloud project has more than likely encountered the enormous complexity of the field, at every level: business, architecture, infrastructure, virtualization, and workload management.

With that in mind, I recently spoke with the team at Stratoscale – the maker of Symphony, a tool that sets up a private cloud with AWS-like capabilities on your local machines in minutes – and found out that they have set out to make private cloud more accessible, not just for cloud infrastructure specialists, but also for ordinary IT and DevOps professionals who want to better understand how they can leverage this technology.  To do that, they have created something that has totally blown me away!  They have taken it upon themselves to build a Private Cloud Wiki.  After spending quite some time navigating it, I’m dubbing it a ‘must visit knowledge hub’ that collects all the relevant information on private cloud technology from around the world, and organizes it in a meaningful structure:

The OpenStack Foundation, the open infrastructure community comprised of 34,000+ voting members globally, has elected its 2017 Board of Directors. With 24 members across nine countries and 19 organizations, the Board represents a large, diverse and vibrant open source community.

According to a recent Forrester Research Report, "OpenStack’s Global Traction Expands for its Newton Release," OpenStack has "grown into a de facto standard platform for the private cloud market and now serves as the foundation for public clouds, particularly in Europe and China."

The OpenStack Foundation Board of Directors includes 24 board members-eight Individual Directors elected by the individual members of the OpenStack Foundation; eight Platinum Directors, each appointed by a Platinum Member of the Foundation; and eight Gold Directors elected by the Gold Members of the Foundation. The elected and appointed directors for 2017 will begin their terms on January 24.

Grazed from 1RedDrop. Author: Shudeep Chandrasekhar.

Infrastructure-as-a-Service, or IaaS, was the fastest growing cloud segment in 2016, and there are several indications that we could see a repeat of strong growth in 2017 as well. Early in 2016 Gartner projected that the Infrastructure-as-a-Service market will reach $22.4 billion in size.

That turned out to be another feather in Gartner’s cap, because Business Insider recently reported that the IaaS market hit the $22 billion mark for 2016. By 2015, the IaaS market was worth nearly $16 billion, and if the numbers by the two reputed sources are correct, then the cloud infrastructure market has recorded an eye-popping 38% growth in 2016…

Read more from the source @ http://1reddrop.com/2017/01/16/infrastructure-service-iaas-growth-critical-cloud-computing/

Grazed from Director. Author: David Stokes.

The Cloud has undoubtedly changed the way modern business operates, and in today’s digital economy there’s little room for error. Yet, with high stakes also comes a wealth of opportunity for the UK economy. 2016 saw many dynamic, political and socio-economic shifts, which will play out over the course of the next few years.

But ultimately the game changer remains the same: businesses are realising the significance of flexibility and choice when it comes to data and the cloud, and how this can help their business to accelerate growth, be successful, and stave off future competition. From Travis Perkins to Shopdirect and Dixons Carphone, brands are witnessing how cloud technology can transform their business to create a more seamless, personalised experience for their customers, and accelerate the digital transformation of a company…