Grazed from Computing. Author: Peter Sbarski.

There’s a new term that’s stirring up interest and passion in the IT community. Funnily enough, it might herald the future of cloud computing, at least going by the amount of attention that major cloud vendors? -? Amazon, Microsoft, Google and IBM ?- ?are giving it. ‘Serverless’ is the term that’s causing ruckus but the awareness and understanding of serverless technologies and architectures is growing day by day.

What is serverless?

Serverless technologies are managed services that developers can use to build systems. These services can execute code, store data or perform other useful operations such as authentication. A common thread among these services is that the developer doesn’t have access to the underlying infrastructure. There’s no way to change hardware or update the operating system. Everything is managed and looked after by a vendor such as Amazon or Microsoft…

Read more from the source @ http://www.computing.co.uk/ctg/opinion/2470770/serverless-technologies-the-future-of-cloud

Grazed from CIOToday. Author: Jef Cozza.

Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) kicked off its Global Partner Conference in Boston yesterday, its first since the company split off from its printer and personal computer division. The event brings together the company’s strategic partners with member of HPE’s senior management, including CEO Meg Whitman, EVP and GM of the enterprise Relevant Products/Services group Antonio Neri, and chief sales officer Peter Ryan. While partner sales are often major sales channels for enterprise technology companies, that is particularly true for HPE, which generates the vast majority of its sales through strategic partners.

Expanding Flexible Capacity

At the event, HPE announced a number of changes to its existing partner program, including an expansion of its Flexible Capacity program that offers on-premise IT and cloud computing services through a utility sales model that can be scaled up or down depending on the end clients needs…

Read more from the source @ http://www.cio-today.com/article/index.php?story_id=03300129C7WF

Grazed from FedTech. Author: Phil Goldstein.

The Defense Department is going all-in on the cloud, according to DOD and service branch IT leaders, but how — and how quickly — the services and commands move applications to the cloud will depend on a variety of factors. The migrations will depend on their missions, how apps relate to each other, and the security requirements for the data, they say.

Speaking Wednesday morning at an AFCEA DC event in Arlington, Va., DOD officials argued that they are working to shift their agencies to a new cloud-based world, but acknowledged that it is a major cultural change for many IT workers. The event, moderated by Matt Goodrich, director of the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP), offered a deep dive into how the Army, Navy, Air Force and Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) are approaching cloud migrations…

Read more from the source @ http://www.fedtechmagazine.com/article/2016/09/dod-service-branches-say-cloud-migrations-will-depend-missions-interoperability

The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit advancing professional open source management for mass collaboration, today announced its newest massive open online course (MOOC) is available for registration. The course, LFS152x – Introduction to OpenStack, is offered through edX, the nonprofit online learning destination founded by Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). The course is free and will go live this October.

This is the third edX MOOC offered by The Linux Foundation. Its first course, Intro to Linux, has reached more than 600,000 students globally and continues to grow in registrations. The second, Intro to Cloud Infrastructure Technologies, became available in June.

"To keep current with their profession, sysadmins of all stripes must have at least basic knowledge of cloud technologies, especially OpenStack," said Linux Foundation General Manager for Training and Certification Clyde Seepersad. "We knew edX was an ideal partner to help increase the pool of talent qualified in OpenStack by providing a platform to make high-quality education easily accessible to people looking to build rewarding careers managing OpenStack clouds."

The cloud can transform how your enterprise does business — poised to deliver improved reliability, flexibility, and performance. However, these benefits are all for nothing if you shift to a cloud environment and your company’s confidential data is compromised.

For organisations thinking about a move to the cloud, security is the number one concern. In fact, a survey from Hytrust found that such worry is holding business and IT professionals back from a cloud migration.

Xterity Cloud Console is an application that delivers:

RackWare, the leader in enabling comprehensive cloud management for the enterprise, today announced the close of a $10M Series B round of funding led by Signal Peak Ventures, with additional funding from Kickstart Seed Fund and Osage Venture Partners. RackWare will utilize the funding to enhance and accelerate product development and to expand sales, marketing, partnerships and customer support teams. 

Guided by CEO Sash Sunkara, a female executive with a proven track record in technology and business development, RackWare has emerged as a mainstay for enterprise IT teams seeking to manage their on-premise, private-cloud and public-cloud applications on one platform. Customers include Blue Cross Blue Shield of CA, Coca-Cola, IBM SoftLayer, HBO, Crayola and Zebra.

"As cybersecurity threats continue to rise, more businesses are left vulnerable to sophisticated attacks such as zero day and targeted attacks," said Ryan Walsh, senior vice president of Partner Solutions. "Solution providers looking to protect their customers’ endpoint devices need advanced, evolved security protections like artificial intelligence from machine learning, generic exploit mitigation, and behavioral-based technologies provided by Symantec. The easy to manage and fast to deploy features along with real-time protection enables solution providers to confidently offer Symantec Endpoint Protection Cloud to their customers."

Citrix quietly announced that it has acquired Norskale, a French-based startup with a proven track record of optimizing workspace performance, accelerating application delivery, and enhancing environment scalability.  The company has operated throughout the European, Asia-Pacific and Americas markets by providing a full-featured workspace and user environment management solution.  With more than 100 customers worldwide and enterprise deployments reaching up to 80,000 seats, Norskale brings a welcomed amount of performance and scalability value to the Citrix XenApp and XenDesktop application and desktop virtualization solutions.

Demand for business mobility by end-users is creating far-reaching implications for how mission-critical applications are being delivered.  These businesses are increasingly searching for solutions that help simplify the management of end-users as they move from desktops, laptops, tablets and smartphones due to the complexity of managing these assets in silos.

But in the last couple of years, Citrix has fallen behind in this area.  The company, which was once a market leader in this space, seemed to find itself playing catch up with competitors like VMware who in February of 2015 acquired Immidio to beat Citrix to the punch by offering its own Workspace Environment Management (WEM) solution.  With that acquisition, VMware gained a strong UEM solution which they have been integrating more and more into their existing product lines.

Veritas, the leader in information management, and Red Hat, Inc., the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced a collaboration aimed at supporting business critical enterprise applications on OpenStack. Building on their long history of technology collaboration focused on business continuity, storage management and data protection solutions for Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Red Hat Virtualization, the two companies plan to work together to offer predictable quality of service to OpenStack applications and workloads, regardless of scale.

Red Hat OpenStack Platform is a highly scalable Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) solution that enhances OpenStack with advanced features needed for cloud environments. It is a co-engineered solution that integrates the proven foundation of Red Hat Enterprise Linux with Red Hat’s OpenStack technology to form a stable, high-performing and production-ready cloud environment. Veritas has selected Red Hat OpenStack Platform to build OpenStack solutions that provide a highly predictable quality of service to meet the requirements of business critical workloads with cost-effective direct-attached storage (DAS) using Veritas storage management technologies. Through the collaboration, Veritas aims to bring the ability to execute data protection tasks through integration with backup software without impacting production operations to Red Hat OpenStack Platform environments.