Grazed from SFGate.  Author: Benny Evangelista.

At last year’s VMworld, the big news was conference sponsor VMware announcing partnerships with big companies like Hewlett-Packard and Dell to introduce two business virtualization products.  But in July, VMware suffered a setback when HP dropped out of an agreement to bundle VMware’s Evo Rail technology with an HP system.

“We thought it was very interesting and well-intentioned, but when we look back a year later, there was just no real market traction,” said Joe Skorupa, a data center convergence analyst with the Gartner research firm…

Grazed from FierceGovernmentIT. Author: Robert Bartley.

The Defense Department Wednesday initiated two sets of policies to enforce stricter guidelines when dealing with about 10,000 contractors the department trusts with offsite cyber information. One part of the interim rule, called "Defense Federal Acquisition Regulation Supplement: Network Penetration Reporting and Contracting for Cloud Services," will amend the DFARS to include mandates passed in recent Defense funding bills for stricter contractor reporting rules on cyber incidents.

According to the issuance, this is part of a greater effort to streamline contractor incident reports. For their part, the National Defense Authorization Acts from two of the last three years sought to require more DoD oversight on contractor systems during potential cyberattacks. The NDAA from fiscal year 2013 (pdf) requires that cleared defense contractors report network penetrations to DoD…

Grazed from OpenDNS. Author: Editorial Staff.

OpenDNS has gone through many changes in its ten-year history as a leading cloud-delivered network security company. In 2006, the company was launched as a consumer DNS provider. In 2012, the company transitioned to cybersecurity with the release of the Umbrella network security service.

Two years later, OpenDNS announced partnerships with some of the biggest IT security vendors in the world. Next, 2015 saw a new set of APIs that allow any customer to integrate any security product with OpenDNS’s global security network. The latest change came on June 30th, when Cisco Systems announced its intent to acquire the company. Today officially marks not only the close of the acquisition, but also the first milestone in our joint efforts to accelerate Cisco’s cloud-delivered security portfolio…

Grazed from CloudTech. Author: Sharon Wagner.

Around six years ago, Amazon introduced an EC2 usage option at very low costs: Spot Instances. With EC2 Spot Instances, you can save money, but there’s a catch – they won’t necessarily be available when you need or want to use them. Managing and strategising around such temperamental instances can be challenging, not to mention unsuitable for AWS customers who are looking to provide stable online end user experiences.

Amazon created this type of resource in order to optimise their data center utilisation by leveraging their data centre’s spare capacity. However, if a customer on a higher-priced on-demand, or reserved capacity plan requires an instance, Amazon will take it from the Spot Instance pool to provide it to the higher paying customer…

Grazed from GCN. Author: Kevin Fiftal and Steve Orrin.

Federal IT professionals used to be able to depend on keeping their information safe in secure on-premise data centers, but times have changed. Traditional data centers could be depended upon for consistent control, visibility and security, but today’s cloud-based centers offer new variants of those capabilities – a fact that IT administrators struggle with every day.

This is particularly problematic for those managing two adjuncts of today’s cloud-driven environment: geographically dispersed servers and emerging OpenStack deployments. Both pose their own unique challenges, including the need for assurance that systems are adhering to location-specific laws and security concerns in general…

Grazed from NetworkWorld. Author: Jon Oltsik.

It’s the end of the summer of 2015 – the nights are getting cooler, the leaves are starting to change colors, and flocks of students are abandoning the beaches of Cape Cod bound for college campuses. The seasonal change also signals another annual ritual – VMworld in San Francisco.

VMworld used to be focused on virtual server technology, and then it expanded to VDI. Now the show represents all things cloud computing. Of course, I’ll be looking at a specific sub-segment: The intersection of cloud computing and cybersecurity. As such, I’m anticipating discussions around:…

Grazed from TopTechNews. Author: Jennifer LeClaire.

IBM isn’t wasting any time leveraging the strengths of its Blue Box acquisition. Big Blue has integrated the private cloud software into its broader portfolio of OpenStack-based solutions less than 90 days after buying the firm. IBM made the announcement today at the OpenStack Silicon Valley event in Silicon Valley.

Blue Box Cloud Dedicated blends private cloud performance and cost management with public cloud provisioning and operations support. The technology offers a single management tool for OpenStack-based private clouds in any location for more consistency with public, private and hybrid cloud operations…

Grazed from TopTechNews. Author: Shirley Siluk.

Backing up large volumes of physically stored data Relevant Products/Services onto the cloud can take days, weeks or even months, depending on the speed of a user’s Internet connection. Rather than asking clients to take on that task on their own, Google is offering its Cloud Storage customers the option of sending physical storage media to partners that will upload it for them.

Google’s new Offline Media Import/Export service is similar to Amazon Web Services’ Import/Export, which was first launched in 2009. Google is offering the service to North American customers in partnership with Iron Mountain, a Boston-based storage and information management company…

Grazed from CIOToday. Author: Jeff Cozza.

After nine months in preview, Google has finally rolled out a commercial release of its container management service. Called the Google Container Engine, the new service aims to provide enterprise clients with the ability to run their most complex workloads in the cloud.  Containers are a new type of virtualization technology that aim to streamline the process of running workloads in the cloud by allowing multiple isolated user-space instances.

Each instance, or container, appears to have all the characteristics of a normal server from the perspective of the end users. The technique provides better security and helps limit the impact of one container’s activities on other containers. Many applications take advantage of multiple containers. A Web application, for example, might have separate containers for its Web server, cache, and database…

Read more from the source @ http://www.cio-today.com/article/index.php?story_id=1220020U1SBS

Grazed from CFR. Author: Adam Segal.

In December 2013, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) served Microsoft with a warrant requiring the company to hand over the e-mails of a Microsoft customer suspected of drug trafficking. Microsoft refused to turn over the e-mails on the basis that they are stored in servers at a data center in Ireland and that the warrant did not apply to overseas data.

Instead, Microsoft argued the DOJ should work with Irish authorities to obtain access to the data. In July 2014, a U.S. district court ordered Microsoft to turn over the e-mails, but Microsoft appealed to the Second Circuit Court of Appeals, which will hear arguments on September 9. In light of the significance of this case for U.S. consumers and businesses, and the impact that its outcome could have on the privacy of digital communications, Brad Smith, executive vice president and general counsel for Microsoft, took the time to answer some questions regarding the case and what its outcome might mean…