The Xen Project, hosted at The Linux Foundation, today announced the release of Xen Project Hypervisor 4.8. The latest release focuses on advanced embedded use cases, features to support security-first environments and continued advancement in support of ARMv8-A based servers. Xen Project technology continues to see growth in these environments due to its flexibility, extensibility and customizability.

ABBYY, a leading provider of technologies and solutions to action information, today announced the launch of the ABBYY.cloud platform that provides services and solutions in the cloud – capture and transfer of information from paper documents into business applications, accurate content classification and prompt translation in 80 languages. With ABBYY.cloud organizations can access a wide variety of tools for knowledge processing from a single dashboard.

As the cloud market continues to accelerate in 2017 an increasing number of organizations are moving workloads to the cloud in a big way. According to Forrester’s Dave Bartoletti, enterprises need to take a fresh look at industry-specific cloud providers with specialization and get their cloud strategies in shape.

IaaS platforms such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) provide an excellent layer of foundational security, but the shared responsibility model is clear: businesses are still responsible for the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of their data in the cloud. Organizations that are storing sensitive data in the cloud, which is 93 percent according to a recent Forrester survey, need a consistent security model across on-premises and IaaS to reduce the risk of data breach. Yet Gartner predicts that 95 percent of IaaS security failures will be the customer’s fault, and more than half of those will be attributed to inadequate management of identities, access and privileges.

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: Matt Asay.

Open source has never been more important or, ironically, irrelevant. As developers increasingly embrace the cloud to shorten time to market, they’re speeding past open source, making it even harder to build an open source business. After all, if open source were largely a way for developers to skirt legal and purchasing departments to get the software they needed when they needed it, the cloud ups that convenience to the nth degree. In Accel’s annual business review, the vaunted venture capital firm writes: "’Product’ is no longer just the bits of software, it’s also how the software is sold, supported, and made successful." The cloud is changing the way all software is consumed, including open source.

The cloud is eating your database

The database market, where open source databases like MySQL and Postgres have dominated adoption for years, makes the shift to cloud readily apparent. Even among this open source elite, the cloud is making waves. More recently, MongoDB, Cassandra, and Redis have climbed to rank among the top 10 most popular databases, as shown in DB-Engines most recent findings…

Read more from the source @ http://www.infoworld.com/article/3147864/cloud-computing/cloud-convenience-is-killing-the-open-source-database.html

Grazed from BaseLine. Author: Eileen McCooey.

Fulfilling predictions made 20 years ago, cloud computing has reached the tipping point, with the majority of enterprises now opting for a cloud-first strategy. Just over half of the 1,850 mid- to senior-level managers participating in "The 2016 Cloud Computing Tipping Point Survey," commissioned by ServiceNow, said they prefer to host new apps and services in the cloud rather than in a traditional data center.

That number is expected to climb to three out of four within the next two years. The study reveals that DevOps is fueling the shift to a cloud-first world, uncovering data center bottlenecks that could be resolved with cloud computing. In a worrisome indication for IT, nearly nine out of 10 survey participants reported that their IT staff doesn’t have the skills to help them make the shift to a cloud-first strategy…

Grazed from CloudComputing. Author: Mike East.

Today’s threat landscape is constantly evolving. In 2016 in particular, we’ve seen a huge shift with adversaries penetrating organisations from the DNC to WADA and gaining access to sensitive documents that were later leaked to embarrass individuals. Yet, while many believe that this trend starts and ends with a contentious election, it’s not something that’s going away in 2017.

In fact, we’re starting to see continued and varied threats, most recently with DDoS attacks taking down the likes of the EU commission. Overall, the pace and variation of exploits driven by technically astute adversaries, will only gain momentum in the coming year if not managed effectively…

Read more from the source @ http://www.cloudcomputing-news.net/news/2016/dec/07/preparing-year-unknown-unknowns-cyber-security/

Grazed from GovTechWorks. Author: Editorial Staff.

Security tops the concerns of federal information technology managers as they look to move data and applications into the cloud – and that’s consistent with other public sector IT executives. But federal managers are substantially more likely to settle on private cloud solutions when compared to those managing state and local or higher education IT services. Five trends that define the differences between how IT chiefs in each sector are approaching cloud migration:

1. Feds Keep it Private

Some 64 percent of federal IT managers said they are most likely to place a majority of their cloud-based applications in a private cloud, according to a recent study by market researcher MeriTalk. That compares with 54 percent of state and local IT managers and only 50 percent of those handling IT services for institutions of higher education. Confining agency data to private clouds does not necessarily mean building a cloud from scratch…

Read more from the source @ https://www.govtechworks.com/public-vs-private-cloud-5-trends-to-watch/#gs.9Ro0qcI

Zadara Storage, the provider of enterprise-class storage-as-a-service (STaaS) today announced that Keio University has selected the Zadara VPSA storage array to provide file services to their over 2,000 member university staff. By working with Zadara’s partner CDC, Keio University is able to upgrade their aging IT infrastructure to address immediate disaster recovery and cost challenges, and also position themselves for future growth.

Zadara’s partner CDC, is a leading provider of enterprise storage solutions. With over 30 years of experience, the company focuses on providing industry-leading solutions to solve key customer challenges. By focusing on both short- and long-term requirements, CDC is able to architect solutions that address both immediate challenges, but also provide the scalability and flexibility customers need to enable growth and long-term success.

The explosion of SaaS gives organizations a far greater number of vendors to choose from as they seek out best-in-breed SaaS applications that closely fit their needs. By mid-2017, large enterprises are expected to have adopted 52 SaaS applications on average, according to BetterCloud’s Trends in Cloud IT research.