Grazed from eWeek.  Author: Darryl K. Taft.

IBM has announced that the U.S. Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) has authorized the company to deliver IBM Cloud services at the highest security levels—known as Impact Level 5—for Controlled Unclassified Information as defined by the U.S. Department of Defense.  The DISA authorization enables DoD agencies to take advantage of IBM’s cloud offerings to support applications and manage sensitive data. DISA has granted IBM a "conditional authority to operate" IBM Cloud services hosted at the Allegany Ballistics Laboratory data center in West Virginia, which is owned by the Department of the Navy and leased by IBM.

Big Blue says it is the first cloud provider with a direct connection to the DoD’s internal network known as the Non-Secure Internet Protocol Router Network (NIPRNet). The authorization granted by DISA will give other DoD agencies the opportunity ultimately to streamline their authorizations by taking advantage of the thorough process DISA followed…

Grazed from Sci-Today.  Author: Jeff Cozza.

Grazed from FedScoop.  Author:  Greg Otto.

Grazed from Fortune. Author: Jen Wieczner.

Netflix, which began shifting its billions of hours of film and TV content to Amazon’s cloud in 2008, has finally finished that process. In a post on its blog Thursday, Netflix said it had migrated the last of the data stored in its own facilities to Amazon Web Services—a shift that Netflix credited with its fast speeds and eight-fold membership growth since it began the transition seven years ago.

But Netflix also acknowledged that its reliance on Amazon can come with problems, as illustrated back in September when a glitch in Amazon’s cloud database caused a temporary Netflix streaming outage for some customers. “We have hit some inevitable rough patches in the cloud,” Netflix wrote in its post, referencing an outage on Christmas 2012…

Read more from the source @ http://fortune.com/2016/02/12/netflix-amazon-cloud/

Grazed from ComputerWorld. Author: Sharon Gaudin.

The cloud market shows no signs of slowing down, with 90% of enterprises planning to maintain or boost spending on cloud computing this year, according to a survey from Washington, D.C.-based research firm Clutch. The majority of enterprises in the U.S. said they would increase cloud spending in 2016, with 42% eyeing increases of between 11% and 30% and 14% looking to boost cloud spending by 31% to 50%.

Another 7% plan to increase spending by more than 50%. Those increases are consistent with numbers from 2015, according to Alex Miller, an analyst with Clutch. "Businesses are continuing to expand into cloud services and operations," Miller told Computerworld. "More and more companies are either moving to the cloud or moving more operations to it…

Grazed from SmartDataCollective. Author: Sean Mallon.

The number of cloud users – both corporate and personal – increases dramatically each year. And as these numbers grow, so do the security threats. Cybercriminals realize that many of these cloud providers aren’t as safe as believed and will target this vulnerable data. As a business owner or IT professional, you need to take a long look at security before trusting your data to the cloud.

Growth of the Cloud

Last year, only eight percent of the $1.6 trillion in IT spending was spent on cloud solutions. In 2016, the cloud will make up 60 percent of all IT spending growth. By 2018, that number will balloon to a decisive 100 percent. In other words, cloud computing is growing at maximum capacity. And it’s not just a trend happening at home…

Grazed from FedScoop. Author: Greg Otto.

IBM’s cloud services have been given the authority to handle Defense Department data at the highest impact level for controlled unclassified information, giving DOD agencies a second commercial option for managing highly sensitive data. IBM Cloud has been granted a conditional authority to operate by the Defense Information Systems Agency, paving the way for the New York-based tech giant to handle data at Impact Level 5.

For the past 18 months, Amazon Web Services has been the only cloud service provider allow to handle all levels of unclassified data. IBM’s cloud is hosted out the Navy-owned Allegany Ballistics Laboratory in West Virginia, giving agencies the option for their own private cloud or hybrid model…

Read more from the source @ http://fedscoop.com/ibm-cloud-impact-level-5-disa-dod-2016

Cirba Inc., the leading provider of software-defined infrastructure control solutions, today announced workload routing and management support for hybrid cloud environments that include Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and IBM SoftLayer.

"Cirba provides the necessary decision control point for automatically determining where applications can safely run in hybrid environments. It is only through detailed analysis of application requirements against the security, cost, and technical capabilities of available public clouds and internal infrastructures that the best hosting environment can be chosen," said Andrew Hillier, co-founder and CTO of Cirba. "Without analytics, organizations cannot automate the process nor can they effectively determine how to meet application requirements without risk or excessive cost."

Rackspace today announced the release of Rackspace Private Cloud powered by Red Hat, which delivers OpenStack private clouds as-a-service using the Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform. The new offering expands the Rackspace OpenStack-as-a-Service product portfolio, further extending the company’s strategy to deliver the most reliable and easy-to-use OpenStack private and hybrid clouds in the world.

"As the leading operator of OpenStack clouds with the most comprehensive OpenStack product portfolio in the industry, Rackspace is excited to expand our managed services and expertise to the Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform," said Darrin Hanson, vice president and general manager of OpenStack Private Cloud at Rackspace. "We help make OpenStack simple by eliminating the complexity and delivering it as-a-service to customers in their data center, a Rackspace data center or in a colocation facility."

ContainerX today announced a new, seamless integration with VMware’s vSphere, the leading server virtualization platform for virtual data centers, into its ready-to-go, all-inclusive container infrastructure platform designed for enterprise IT admins, now available for beta customers. ContainerX will discuss the new integration at Container World 2016, a three-day event dedicated to container technology in practice, taking place February 16-18, 2016 at the Santa Clara Convention Center.

ContainerX eliminates the container landscape confusion by offering enterprise IT a ready-to-go, enterprise-class solution for multi-tenant container management, including orchestration, compute, network and storage management. The first beta released at DockerCon Barcelona in November 2015 included support for both bare-metal & AWS clusters. Now VMware vCenter admins have access to ContainerX’s unique patented technology approach, Elastic Container Clusters and Container Pools, which provide multi-tenancy and high levels of resiliency, elasticity and horizontal scalability not offered by other container solutions, while using on-premise virtual machine-based clusters.