Zadara Storage, the provider of enterprise-class storage-as-a-service (STaaS), and eBiztech today announced the availability of Zadara’s award-winning Virtual Private Storage Array(VPSA) at Kinx data center, supporting the newly launched AWS Seoul, South Korea, region. The Zadara expansion follows the recent AWS announcement of their Seoul region. Zadara has previously announced regional support following AWS expansion into Dublin, Sydney, Tokyo and Frankfurt.

The South Korean market continues to show signs of rapid growth, driving the need for increasing amounts of high-performance, enterprise-class storage. IT professionals are leveraging the flexibility and economic benefits of public and private cloud architectures as they grow their infrastructures. However, they are quickly realizing that traditional Capital Expense-based (CapEx) storage does not meet their scalability and cost targets. Zadara Storage, with its Operating Expense-based (OpEx) offering provides a cost-effective, infinitely scalable, block (SAN) and file (NAS) Storage-as-a-Service solution.

Grazed from ComputerWeekly. Author: Caroline Donnelly.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has agreed to waive some charges the academic and research community must pay to transfer data out of its cloud. As such, the infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) company is offering to wipe up to 15% off users’ monthly bill on AWS services, and dropping the upload charges when researchers and scientists choose to shift data between its storage, compute and database services.

In a blog post outlining the move, AWS said it wanted to lower the cost barrier to making scientific discoveries. “The pace of research is no longer limited by the availability of computing resources. Researchers are beginning to rely on cloud computing to drive breakthrough science at breakneck speeds, and AWS wants to fuel the pace of new discoveries by making it possible for all scientists to have their own supercomputers in the cloud,” the company said in the blog post…

Read more from the source @ http://www.computerweekly.com/news/4500277797/AWS-cuts-cloud-data-transfer-fees-for-academic-and-research-user-groups

Grazed from SCMagazine. Author: Karen Epper Hoffman.

There used to be a time when large enterprises, in particular, took pride in the idea of managing all their various and sundry IT functions, every backend process, in-house. The idea was that these organizations fielded such depth and breadth of talent and infrastructure that they could manage all their IT tasks, store all their data and manage their security quite well.

But, arguably, the pendulum has swung in the opposite direction, directed by the prevailing winds of reducing capital investments and ongoing maintenance costs, improving technology assets more rapidly, and a growing appreciation for outsourcing opportunities. With that in mind, more and more organizations are utilizing cloud computing, software-as-a service (SaaS) and managed security services providers (MSSPs) to gain greater efficiencies and better scalability and taking advantage of newer technologies and more specialized expertise…

Carl Eschenbach, VMware’s president and chief operating officer, has announced that he is leaving the company after 14 years of service.  In an official company statement made today, VMware confirmed that Eschenbach has resigned from his operational role to "pursue a new career opportunity."  VMware also stated that he would continue to strategically advise VMware chief executive officer Pat Gelsinger, the VMware Board of Directors and the executive team.

Although the official announcement did not specify where Eschenbach was headed, Fortune reported that he will land at venture capital firm Sequoia Capital as a partner.

Grazed from Datamation. Author: Pedro Hernandez.

Cisco is bulking up its hybrid cloud technology portfolio. The networking giant kicked off the month today by announcing that it is acquiring CliQr Technologies, a San Jose, Calif.-based provider of application-centric hybrid cloud management software in a deal worth $260 million. "Customers today have to manage a massive number of complex and different applications across many clouds.

With CliQr, Cisco will be able to help our customers realize the promise of the cloud and easily manage the lifecycle of their applications on any hybrid cloud environment," said Rob Salvagno, vice president of Cisco Corporate Development in a March 1 announcement. CliQr co-founders Gaurav Manglik and Tenry Fu, both formerly of VMware, founded the company "to provide a uniquely easy and powerful way to make cloud computing simple and application-centric – a platform to model, deploy and manage the entire lifecycle of applications onto any data center or private or public cloud environment," wrote Manglik in a blog post today…

Grazed from eWeek. Author: Darryl K. Taft.

IBM celebrated the second anniversary of its Bluemix Platform as a Service with by releasing a long list of new features at the company’s IBM InterConnect 2016 conference in Las Vegas last week. The new functionality includes a set of new Watson APIs available on the IBM Watson Developer Cloud on Bluemix. These include three APIs in beta evaluation mode, Tone Analyzer, Emotion Analysis and Visual Recognition.

In addition the company’s updated its existing Text to Speech (TTS) API with new emotional capabilities and re-released it to generally availability as Expressive TTS. Since its introduction as a preview at the IBM Pulse conference two years ago, Bluemix has grown significantly. Bluemix is more than a typical PaaS, which enables enterprise developers to build, run, and manage applications without the expense and complexity of maintaining the computing infrastructure typically associated with modern software development.  Bluemix does all of that, but it also provides a broad catalog of services and adheres to IBM’s strict commitment to provide options for enterprises to run hybrid cloud environments…

Read more from the source @ http://www.eweek.com/cloud/ibm-steadily-building-bluemix-as-critical-part-of-its-cloud-strategy.html

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: Dan Kobialka.

CipherCloud has launched a solution designed to deliver cross-cloud visibility and data protection. The San Jose, California-based cloud security provider has released Cloud Security Broker, which "extends the CipherCloud platform with frictionless application programming interface (API) integration to entire categories of clouds such as cloud storage applications, CRM systems, HR applications and more."

Cloud Security Broker delivers 360-degree user behavior analytics, threat detection compliance controls and encryption, according to CipherCloud. In addition, CipherCloud noted Cloud Security Broker works across a range of applications across Microsoft Office 365, OneDrive, Box and other cloud applications through cloud APIs…

Read more from the source @ http://talkincloud.com/cloud-computing-security/ciphercloud-announces-cloud-security-broker

Grazed from Network World. Author: Tom Henderson.

It’s been a miserable couple of years for enterprise security. The list of Fortune 500s, US (and other) Government, university, even outing an ex-NSA director’s emails have been both frightening, and perhaps a little bit amusing. There is a certain pomposity, that vague smell of we-can-do-it flatulence, which tends to make me shudder at RSA. Security is a moving target. But even ICANN let its https certificate expire earlier this year, so the problem is pervasive.

Lifting all boats, to use that hackneyed phrase, is tipping some of them over. I’m surprised my fellow journalists gave ICANN a pass. But Mozilla via Firefox gives a pass to Symantec to let some dead certificates float for a little while longer, like flotsam in the septic—somehow permitted. Microsoft infuriates its users by jamming Windows 10 down their throats, although its enterprise clientele is given a forcefeed-pass…

Gone are the days where IT could operate as a siloed business unit. Today, IT is challenged to not only facilitate, but drive business objectives, and deliver faster, more agile service. This is due to factors both in and outside of IT jurisdiction, all of which will be explored in this article. 

Factors Transforming IT 

Widespread adoption of cloud-based infrastructure is changing the way IT operates – it is no longer weighed down by inflexible on-premises hardware. Accordingly, IT departments are expected to deliver service faster, quickly adapt to changing objectives, and work towards automation. Changing expectations of IT are largely due to an overall shift in the pace at which the business sector operates. With an anytime, anywhere approach to productivity, changes can happen quickly. 

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