Grazed from ComputerWeekly. Author: Warwick Ashford.

Netflix, AirBnB and Uber are all pointing the way to the cloud as the future, and that is also true for security, according to Wolfgang Kandek, chief technology officer (CTO) at security firm Qualys. “Most enterprises are facing today’s cyber security challenges with IT architecture that was developed 25 years ago when IT had full control over computing,” he told the RSA Conference 2015 in Abu Dhabi.

However, he said, this has changed completely with the move to employees using their own consumer devices to access enterprise services, systems and data. “This leads to a much bigger attack surface, which we try to address by piling up security technology on security technology. In turn, this has led to a terribly over-loaded enterprise technology stack that is very brittle and bound to fail,” said Kandek…

Grazed from InTheBlack. Author: Christopher Niesche.

Changes brought about by cloud computing, the oversight of tax financial advisers, and streamlining its services are some of the challenges the Tax Practitioners Board (TPB) is facing over the next 12 months. Just like the broader tax and accounting profession, the TPB is responding to the challenges thrown up by increasing IT capability and cloud storage of information.

Chair of the TPB, Ian Taylor FCPA, says it is providing guidance on these trends. “We’re seeing a very marked change in the way people do business digitally,” he says. “We’re getting an increasingly electronic interchange of information and interaction with the Australian Taxation Office (ATO). That means changes for agents, because a number of agents previously used to lodge only by paper.”…

Infrastructure is increasingly complex, and change is constant — whether immediate, or slower, more insidious configuration drift. A recent CloudPhysics survey indicated that 68% of application disruptions are due to configuration issues, rather than software or hardware failures. Prior to Exploration Mode, when a change-driven problem surfaced in the infrastructure, IT admins were unable to "replay" the environment across time to correlate events or changes that may have caused the problem.

Lenovo and Nutanix today announced a strategic partnership to develop, market and sell a new family of Lenovo hyperconverged appliances powered by Nutanix software. Converging storage, server and virtualization services into an integrated scale-out appliance helps simplify datacenter management and can drive substantial IT cost savings. Both companies are committed to delivering hyperconvergence infrastructure that enables IT organizations to focus on the applications and services that power, and bring greater agility to, their businesses by offering a compelling alternative to public cloud services.

Hyperconvergence combines highly reliable server platforms with state-of-the-art software to build private cloud datacenters that match the agility, scalability and fractional consumption of public clouds. This partnership allows Lenovo to continue its legacy of innovation, commitment to world-class engineering, and vision of how IT will evolve in the coming decade. Lenovo’s global reach including in fast-growing markets such as China provides the partnership with an accelerated route to market in critical segments of the industry.

Today, CoreOS, the leader in container infrastructure, is launching the general availability of Tectonic to provide a software solution to enterprise companies looking to deploy, manage and secure containers anywhere. Tectonic is available today to enterprises looking to move applications seamlessly between cloud and data center, as well as ensure a consistent environment to deploy applications from dev to cloud to data center.

Colm Keegan, cloud analyst from ESG states: "Many organizations are interested in leveraging container technology to enable continuous application innovation, faster time to market and improved operational efficiencies across hybrid cloud environments. But the lack of manageability, security and isolation often serves as an obstacle towards container adoption. CoreOS’ Tectonic offering addresses these concerns by providing a consistent and simplified operational framework that can be utilized to securely and more easily manage containers across hybrid cloud infrastructure. This can potentially enable businesses to reduce costs, enhance their Dev/Ops capabilities and gain a competitive edge through more rapid application development and deployment."

Having to continually invest in and provide support for an older business PC network can often become unsustainable for organizations. Combined with the existing investment of a large PC infrastructure, VXL’s CloudDesktop represents an easy-to-deploy and low cost alternative featuring VXL Software’s latest Gio 6 Linux based operating system.

By extending the life of legacy PC’s as re-configured and fully-optimized thin client devices, VXL’s CloudDesktop offers a seamless PC-to-thin client transition strategy without the cost of acquiring new hardware and maximizing the existing investment.

SmartBear Software, a leader in software quality tools for the connected world, released a new plugin for Ready! API that integrates with Amazon API Gateway. The new plugin allows API consumers and testers to read an API from Amazon API Gateway and quickly generate a test framework based on the API service description. Amazon API Gateway, a fully managed service that makes it easy for developers to create, publish, maintain, monitor and secure APIs at any scale, offers all the power of the Amazon Web Services (AWS) stack with an affordable pay-as-you-go model. Ready! API is one of the most popular platforms for ensuring API quality.

“The Amazon API Gateway is the perfect fit for Ready! API, offering powerful capabilities within an affordable framework and an ecosystem of open source tooling like the Swagger Importer,” said John Purcell, Vice President of Products, API Readiness at SmartBear. “We’re excited to extend that power to our customers, allowing them to import an API for testing and virtualization as well as easily deploy new APIs to Amazon API Gateway.”

IBM Spectrum Storage is designed to help clients securely embrace the explosive growth of data and support both traditional and next generation applications. New features to improve security and cost-effective management of large amounts of data and storage, include: