Grazed from eWeek. Author: Pedro Hernandez.

Extending its "lockbox" approach to securing data on the cloud, Microsoft’s research arm today announced a new technology dubbed Verifiable Confidential Cloud Computing, or VC3. Last year, the Redmond, Wash.-based software giant announced a new process for safeguarding cloud data called a lockbox.

Encompassing a set of technologies, along with strict policies and IT practices at the company’s cloud data centers, the approach essentially places customers in complete control of their data and requires that they issue their approval before even Microsoft’s own administrators can access protected information…

This latest virtualization exploit is being widely reported to affect virtual machines running on hypervisor platforms such as Xen, KVM and native QEMU. 

A security researcher, CrowdStrike, discovered and reported the new vulnerability, claiming it could allow a hacker to infiltrate potentially every machine on a datacenter’s network, leaving millions of virtual machines vulnerable to attack.

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: Serdar Yegulalp.

The race to the bottom in cloud computing continues apace, and Google’s doing its best to plummet the fastest. The latest Google Cloud Platform revisions have cut prices between 5 and 30 percent for various virtual machine configuration types. Plus, there’s a new VM type, called Preemptible VMs, that seems specifically designed to put pressure on Amazon.

According to the official Google Cloud Platform blog, the current round of price reductions cuts the cost of a U.S.-based Standard instance by 20 percent, and a Micro instance by 30 percent, with similar price reductions set for Europe and Asia. Google’s pushing the whole package of cost reductions — including automatic discounts and per-minute billing — as a 40 percent cost reduction for common workloads over the competition…

Grazed from ZDNet. Author: Jason Perlow.

My ZDNet colleagues Ed Bott and David Gewirtz are both fed up with Microsoft over software licensing issues, albeit for different reasons. Ed is annoyed with Microsoft over its poor communication of its Windows editions and David just wants to line up Microsoft’s legal department in front of a firing squad.

Let’s be absolutely clear — figuring out software licensing, regardless of which vendor you are dealing with, is never fun. I never enjoyed it when I was an IT consultant in the financial sector, I hated it when I worked as a systems architect at IBM, and I certainly don’t enjoy it today in my role at Microsoft…

Grazed from BusinessWire. Author: PR Announcement.

Nexenta (@Nexenta), the global leader of Open Source-driven Software-Defined Storage (OpenSDS) solutions and Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu and Ubuntu OpenStack, today jointly announced its strategic alliance agreement. The alliance will allow Canonical’s Ubuntu OpenStack customers to benefit from Nexenta’s full spectrum of OpenSDS products for their large scale private and hybrid clouds.

Since its launch in 2004, the Ubuntu OS, has become the natural choice for users of all kinds, from Fortune 500 companies to hardware makers, content providers, software developers and individual technologists. With developers, support staff and engineering centers all over the world, Canonical is uniquely positioned to help its partners and enterprise customers make the most of Ubuntu. Ubuntu is the leading cloud OS and Ubuntu OpenStack is the leading distribution of OpenStack. According to the OpenStack User Survey, over 55% of production clouds today run on Ubuntu, many of whom have large requirements for enterprise quality storage…

Grazed from V3.co.uk. Author: Editorial Staff.

Dropbox for Business has been awarded ISO 27018 cloud security certification by EY CertifyPoint, marking the latest step in the company’s bid to allay customer fears about privacy and data protection. The certification makes Dropbox one of a select few cloud service providers to meet ISO 27018 standards. Microsoft’s Azure platform was one of the first to receive the accreditation in February.

ISO 27018 was published by the International Organisation for Standardisation as a new component of the ISO 27001 standard in July 2014 and offers a variety of assurances for cloud service users. "ISO 27018 specifies guidelines based on ISO/IEC 27002, taking into consideration the regulatory requirements for the protection of personally identifiable information (PII) which might be applicable within the context of the information security risk environment(s) of a provider of public cloud services," read the ISO description…

Read more from the source @ http://www.v3.co.uk/v3-uk/news/2409027/dropbox-for-business-gets-iso-27018-cloud-security-classification

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: Mike Vizard.

Under the heading of turning lemons into lemonade, Xplenty has reinvented itself as a provider of data integration services delivered via the cloud that don’t require any programming expertise. Xplenty founder and CEO Yaniv Mor originally created the Xplenty solution to provide the market with a platform for running Hadoop in the cloud.

Unfortunately, however, in 2014, his company discovered that there just wasn’t enough demand for Hadoop delivered as a cloud service, he told Talkin’ Cloud. The two primary issues, said Mor, was that fierce competition in the form of services such as Amazon Redshift and the simple fact that when it came to Hadoop most organizations prefer to deploy the open source framework for managing big data on premise…

Read more from the source @ http://talkincloud.com/big-data-and-cloud-computing/05182015/big-data-integration-made-simpler

Grazed from TechCrunch. Author: Frederic Lardinois.

Google today announced yet another round of price cuts for its cloud computing platform, as well as a new instance type that will allow businesses to save even more on some of their cloud computing tasks. Today’s cuts focus on the Compute Engine side of the service and include cuts of up to 30 percent for the smallest instances.

A Micro instance on Google Cloud platform will now cost as little as $0.006 per hour under regular usage. For other instance types, the price cuts are somewhat less dramatic and range between 5 percent for High CPU instances and 20 percent for the Standard instances. Google argues that these cuts mean “Google Cloud Platform is now 40 percent less expensive for many workloads.”…

Grazed from VirtualizationReview. Author: Dan Kusnetsky.

Several suppliers have announced small, limited operating systems (OS) designed to live inside a virtual machine (VM). A few examples of this are the recently announced VMware Project Photon, Piston’s CloudOS, CoreOS, and the OS component of Red Hat’s OpenShift. When I recently had the opportunity to speak with Jim Morrisroe, CEO of Piston Cloud, the company had the following things to say:

"Piston CloudOS is a new type of operating system that manages clusters of commodity servers in your datacenter as a single pool of highly-available resources. These resources may be shared by any service or framework, including OpenStack, Hadoop, Spark, Kubernetes, Docker Swarm, or Mesos for better resource efficiency, and streamlined operations…

Read more from the source @ https://virtualizationreview.com/articles/2015/05/18/are-cloud-oses-a-benefit-or-bane.aspx

Grazed from ITbusinessEdge. Author: Mike Vizard.

As part of an effort to provide a set of managed IT services in the cloud, CDW has announced that it will now manage implementations of the Microsoft Azure cloud on behalf of its customers. Best known as a multi-billion dollar reseller of IT hardware and software, CDW in recent years has expanded its service portfolio to include managed services for IT hardware and software installed on premise.

Now Stephen Braat, vice president of cloud and managed solutions for CDW, says the company is expanding the scope of those services to include the cloud. While not committing yet to providing managed services for clouds other than Microsoft Azure, the company does have plans to support multiple cloud computing platforms via its network operations centers (NOCs), Braat says…

Read more from the source @ http://www.itbusinessedge.com/blogs/it-unmasked/cdw-outlines-cloud-computing-ambitions.html