Grazed from CloudTech. Author: David Trossell.

The data centre is the castle. You can pull up the drawbridge, fill up the moat, or pull down the portcullis. But at some point, you have to let data in and out, and this opens up the opportunity for ransomware attacks. No longer is it a matter of pride and peer recognition in the hacker community for circumnavigating and exposing the security of an organisation because it is now a fully-fledged industry in its own right with the use of ransomware.

That cybersecurity company Herjavec Group estimates to top a $1 Billon in 2016. In the past, those under siege used to flood the moats, pull up the drawbridges and drop the portcullis to protect themselves but with the modern data centre organisations life blood is the movement of data in and out of the data centre…

Grazed from ComputerWorld. Author: Peter Sayer.

Internet-based communications services such as Skype, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Google Duo, Apple iMessage, or Viber offer a host of advantages over the old-fashioned telephone, including, for their operators, exemption from the European Union’s strict telecommunications privacy rules.

The European Commission wants to change that, and on Tuesday proposed new legislation to protect consumers’ online privacy. The move is no surprise: An early draft of the Proposal for a Regulation on Privacy and Electronic Communications leaked in December. Smartphone apps such as Skype and WhatsApp replicate the voice-calling and text-messaging features of older phones but don’t fall under EU communications privacy legislation because they are data services that run over the top of an internet connection, rather than native functions of the network like phone calls and SMS…

Grazed from CIO. Author: Jennifer Ramstrom.

The retail industry is widely adopting cloud computing, with its investment in cloud technologies skyrocketing from $4 billion in 2011 to an estimated $15 billion last year, according to a recent Accenture report. Like the banking and manufacturing industries, retailers are recognizing the transformative role of cloud computing in today’s digital world. Here are the three ways the retail industry is embracing cloud computing to revolutionize long-standing, core business strategies:

Selling Products

Retailers are finding themselves competing in a marketplace that is increasingly dominated by mobile devices. Today, more than 30% of all commerce will occur on mobile devices. Likewise, more than 80% of customers will use a mobile device or app to inform their purchasing decision…

Read more from the source @ http://www.cio.com/article/3156599/cloud-computing/3-ways-cloud-computing-is-revolutionizing-the-retail-industry.html

The application containers market will be worth $2.7 billion (£2.2 billion) by 2020, according to 451 Research.

Assessing the performance of 125 container vendors, 451 Research found that growth of the container cloud development technology follows the trend of OpenStack, which also became popular fast. However, the analyst firm said the containers sector has the potential to have a much bigger impact than OpenStack, despite pegging the latter technology’s value at $5.8 billion (£4.8 billion) by 2020.

Zetta, a leading provider of high-performance business continuity solutions, today announced that it has been awarded a patent by the US Patent and Trademark Office that covers the mechanics of how it makes direct-to-cloud data protection fast and efficient. It also includes protection for technology processes that enable direct-to-cloud backup, without any intermediary appliance or staging area, in addition to concurrent local copies.

The latest in a series of Zetta patents, the new Patent 9,483,359, protects systems and methods which enable Zetta data protection technology for backup and disaster recovery to be applicable to even more customers and use cases, by increasing network transport efficiency. The technology is based on enterprise replication methodologies, which provide state consistent snapshot replication. Like incremental backups, it only transfers changed data segments, but unlike traditional incremental backups it isn’t susceptible to a single bad backup invalidating all subsequent backups.

SolarWinds MSP, a global leader in delivering comprehensive, scalable IT service management solutions to MSPs, today announced that users of its MSP Anywhere powered version of Take Control can now access Mac devices remotely. This latest release allows IT pros to provide full support to their Mac customers in the same way as Windows users.

MSP Anywhere allows IT service providers to remotely connect to machines to solve IT issues quickly and easily. It gives the ability to connect quickly to a machine, open live chat with customers, transfer sessions to other technicians, ask questions in group chat or silently transfer files in the background without disturbing customers.

This enhancement enables MSPs to provide Mac users full access to comprehensive features such as executive reports, LOGICcards and use of real-time architecture to:

InterChange allows Akumina’s customers to meet all the core requirements of a modern intranet, or ‘digital workplace’ including communication, information delivery, systems integration, collaboration and personalization.

Using InterChange developers can build collaborative, personalized and targeted digital workplaces, powered by an organization’s intelligence inside Office 365 and other market leading cloud applications, to create compelling digital experiences. Once deployed, the InterChange AppManager ensures internal business users and subject matter experts can easily manage these applications. The AppManager SDK and InterChange DevFramework allow for the extension and customization of InterChange-based applications by Akumina’s partners and customers.

The end of 2016 marks the strongest year yet for Cloud Service Management pioneer CloudHealth Technologies. After posting a 130 percent year-over-year revenue increase, more than doubling its customer base, and securing a $20 million Series C round in May, the company enters 2017 as business momentum is accelerating.

"CloudHealth has become an integral component of our customers’ day-to-day operations," said Dan Phillips, CloudHealth Technologies CEO and co-founder. "It’s extremely gratifying to see the platform solve their complexity challenges and deliver such strong business value. We continue to push customer-driven enhancements and services, which has been a key factor in our year-over-year growth."

Grazed from MSPMentor. Author: Chris Burt.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) acquired San Diego-based cybersecurity firm harvest.ai for a reported $19 million sometime in early 2016, investor Fred Wang has confirmed. Wang, a general partner with harvest.ai investor Trinity Ventures, declined to confirm the terms of the deal, but told GeekWire “it was a good win for the investors and for the management team.”

“The company works in an area called data-leakage prevention,” Wang said. “At one time a lot of companies got into it, but most of them didn’t get much traction. Harvest.ai automated looking at file-access patterns to detect which are normal and which are not.” It does this by using neural nets, natural-language processing, and other AI algorithms, and tracking data storage and access, and components, applications, and users on the network…