Grazed from CSO. Author: Carric Dooley.

When you moved your applications to the cloud, your attack surface changed while the vulnerabilities at the application, database, and network level persisted. To address these issues, securing your cloud perimeter, preventing unauthorized access, and protecting your data is crucial.

The first step to reduce the attack surface is to run a port scan specific to an instance IP and lock down all the unnecessary open ports. In addition, be sure to lock down your meta and user data. Detailed instructions on how to perform these security measures in AWS are available from our team…

Grazed from ScienceBusiness. Author: Eanna Kelly.

The EU is to spend €6.7 billion on a “science cloud” to provide computing power and data storage, giving the continent’s 1.7 million researchers access to a virtual environment to store, share and re-use their data across disciplines and borders. The results of future Horizon 2020 projects would be go to the cloud "by default", said Commissioner for Research, Carlos Moedas.

Of the €6.7 billion, about €2 billion will come from the Horizon 2020 programme for research and innovation, with the remainder coming from sources of financing at EU and national level, and from industry. A pilot platform will start at relatively small at €50 million. Only researchers involved in the pilot organisations will have access at first, but ultimately it will be made open to everyone…

Grazed from TheInquirer. Author: Carly Page.

CHIPMAKER Intel has announced plans to axe 12,000 employees, a drastic restructuring that comes as a result of a years-long slump in PC sales. Intel’s CEO Brian Krzanich announced the layoffs, which mark the most drastic change he has initiated since taking up the role back in May 2013, during the company’s first-quarter earnings on Tuesday.

As well as delivering the news that Intel’s revenues fell short of expectations, Kraznich announced that 12,000 positions, or 11 per cent of the company’s global workforce, will be axed by mid-2017. This follows 5,300 job cuts announced back in January 2014, which Intel also blamed on falling sales of desktop and laptop PCs…

Bright Computing, the leading independent provider of management software for high performance computing (HPC) clusters, big data clusters, and OpenStack clouds, announces that its Bright OpenStack solution is now fully integrated with Talligent’s advanced proprietary Openbook billing software for OpenStack clouds.

Openbook supports key cost and capacity reporting requirements for an efficient OpenStack cloud deployment. Its integration with Bright OpenStack will be a huge benefit for users who operate OpenStack clouds, especially when multiple clients, departments, or teams are sharing resources and a chargeback or usage reporting mechanism is required.

Red Hat, Inc., the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced the general availability of Red Hat Cloud Suite and Red Hat OpenStack Platform 8, helping to bridge the gap between development and operations teams at the scale of cloud computing. With today’s newly-available products, Red Hat now offers a complete, integrated hybrid cloud stack with a container application platform (OpenShift by Red Hat), massively scalable infrastructure (Red Hat OpenStack Platform 8) and unified management tools (Red Hat CloudForms), all available individually or via a single, easy-to-deploy solution with Red Hat Cloud Suite.

A growing number of organizations are building private clouds, to give them massively scalable and modern infrastructure, while maintaining increased security and control. According to the Red Hat Global Customer Tech Outlook 2016, a global survey of Red Hat customers, private cloud deployments are expected to outpace public cloud by 6x. In addition, development teams are looking to streamline the creation and deployment of new cloud-native applications while IT leadership is hoping to meet growing business demands with cloud-based automation.

Mirantis, the pure-play OpenStack company, recently announced Supermicro and QCT as the latest Certified Rack Partner to offer Mirantis Unlocked Appliances. These turnkey, rack-based appliances ship with Mirantis OpenStack pre-configured to run in production environments and are easy to install, deploy and operate at scale.

I asked Jim Sangster, senior direct of Solutions Marketing at Mirantis, about why customers now seem to be embracing dedicated OpenStack appliances for building clouds instead of running off-the-shelf commodity servers.

VMblog:  OpenStack appliances have been the downfall of a number of startups – why are they working now?

Canonical announced today it will release Ubuntu 16.04 LTS on 21st April, featuring the new ‘snap’ package format and LXD pure-container hypervisor. This is the latest version of the world’s most widely used Linux platform across desktop, IoT and cloud computing.

“The leading cloud-based operations and the most advanced robotics run largely on Ubuntu, and this new release is the basis for the next wave of their innovation,” said Mark Shuttleworth, Founder of Canonical. “We are proud to serve the needs of the enterprise, and research, and millions of personal and non-profit users, with one single shared free software platform.”

Midokura, the global innovator in software network virtualization, today announced that Dell is offering the open-source Midokura Enterprise MidoNet (MEM) as an optional performance accelerator for the Dell Red Hat OpenStack Cloud Solution, the on-premise cloud offering based on the Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform.

"The Dell Red Hat OpenStack Cloud Solution helps organizations rapidly build their OpenStack clouds and transform their IT environment into a cost-effective, secure, highly-available, and dynamic service-delivery center," said Ranjith Purush, director of product management, Dell Engineered Solutions and Cloud. "This collaboration enables organizations to flexibly build Dell’s solution with optional network virtualization technology from Midokura."

Grazed from MSPowerUser. Author: Editorial Staff.

According to the latest report published by JP Morgan analysts Mark Murphy, Doug Anmuth, Sterling Auty, Rod Hall, and Philip Cusick, the cloud computing “wars” are “entering a new phase”, and it will cause bad implications for traditional IT vendors like SAP, Oracle and IBM. They surveyed more than 207 CIOs at companies with a budget of $600 million or more annually.

According to their survey results, Microsoft will remain the dominant IT vendor ahead of Amazon, IBM and others. In fact, Microsoft seems to be one of the very few traditional IT vendors that will not lose market share. CIOs report that 16.2% of workloads are currently running in the public cloud, and that in five years 41.3% of workloads will run in a public cloud…

Grazed from Fortune. Author: Barb Darrow.

Amazon unveiled several new cloud computing services on Wednesday including a way for business customers to identify the applications they already run internally so that it’s easier to switch them to Amazon’s public cloud. The new AWS Application Discovery Service is intended to solve a big problem for companies: They don’t necessarily know about all the software they use. It also identifies “dependencies” between those applications and the computers they run on,.

Matt Wood, general manager of product strategy for Amazon Web Services, announced the product, slated to go to preview in a few weeks, at an event in Chicago. While the new services will point the way, Wood said Amazon’s partner—companies like Accenture, or 2nd Watch, or Cloud Technology Partners—can provide the support and handholding to do the whole migration…

Read more from the source @ http://fortune.com/2016/04/19/amazon-cloud-migration-options/