Grazed from BusinessWire.  Author: PR Announcement.

Threat Stack, the provider of security solutions purpose-built for the Cloud, has raised an additional $5M in funding from Atlas Venture and .406 Ventures. The additional funding will be used to further develop and commercialize Threat Stack’s cloud security monitoring service, which officially launched last month, and expand its footprint with customers using Amazon Web Services.

Threat Stack’s Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) provides continuous security monitoring on application workloads, helping companies detect malicious activity and protect their systems from intrusions and data loss. Optimized for the cloud, Threat Stack uses a lightweight agent on the host to enable fast deployment, auto-scaling and flexibility in elastic environments. After a highly successful and over- subscribed beta program, Threat Stack launched on-stage in November at Amazon CTO Dr. Werner Vogel’s Start-up Launch keynote during the AWS re:Invent Conference…

Grazed from TheStack.  Author: Alice MacGregor.

Chip maker giant Intel announced yesterday that it is to introduce what will be known as the Intel IoT Platform, providing an all-in-one solution for enterprise IoT deployment.

The platform will incorporate x86-based processing power, cloud computing infrastructure, as well as tailored software. It will connect to the cloud through Wind River Edge Management Systems to “facilitate device configuration, file transfers, data capture, and rules-based data analysis and response.”…

Grazed from ITBusinessEdge.  Author: Mike Vizard.

As part of an effort to ensure that implementations of the Cloud Foundry platform-as-a-service (PaaS) environment are consistent with one another, the Linux Foundation, in conjunction with EMC, HP, IBM, Intel, Pivotal, SAP and VMware, announced today the formation of the Cloud Foundry Foundation project.

Jim Zemlin, executive director for the Linux Foundation, says the primary goal of the Cloud Foundry Foundation is to make certain that applications developed for Cloud Foundry can actually be ported between implementations. While multiple vendors have committed to embrace Cloud Foundry, Zemlin says implementations of an open source project can vary widely…

Grazed from CloudComputingIntelligence.  Author: Ian Finlay.

The business challenges of shadow IT have emerged from the darkness and are now firmly in the spotlight. With PwC estimating that shadow IT accounts for between 15 and 30% of IT spending outside of the IT enterprise budget, it not only presents a real blind spot for enterprises, but has a significant impact upon both the security and integrity of company information, and customer confidence.

IT departments no longer have control over all IT solutions implemented within the organisation. With many trying to lock down their infrastructures to prevent shadow IT the balance has been tipped too far. By bringing it out of the shadows and into plain sight, enterprise IT Directors will be able to regain control and ensure their entire infrastructure – wherever it is – is transparent and compliant…

Grazed from TopTechNews.  Author: Editorial Staff.

It’s official.  The Cloud Foundry Foundation has launched as an independent, nonprofit foundation to manage the global open standards for platform-as-a-service (PaaS) technology. The foundation will be managed as a Linux Foundation Collaborative Project and will be governed by a team of open source experts from founding Platinum Members EMC, HP, IBM,Intel, Pivotal, SAP, and VMware.

Cloud Foundry is currently the leading PaaS platform and has seen a 36 percent increase in community contributions over the past year, with more than 1,700 "pull requests" for contributions to the open development project. The Pivotal Cloud Foundry, IBM Bluemix, HP Helion, and Canopy Cloud Fabric are among the most notable deployments, thus far…

Read more from the source @ http://www.toptechnews.com/article/index.php?story_id=021000CJALVX

Grazed from ChicagoInno.  Author: Editorial Staff.

With private cloud hosting companies, enterprises receive the same agility and control that they would with a public cloud provider (like DigitalOcean or AWS), but with fixed economics and superior hands-on service. Because of this, ‘Hosted Private Cloud Solutions’ has been SingleHop’s fastest-growing and most popular product category in 2014.

To meet this demand, SingleHop – a Chicago-based provider of cloud computing and IT infrastructure – launched a brand new, state-of-the art $30 million data center today that features key capabilities designed specifically for hosting private clouds…

Grazed from TechCrunch.  Author: Frederic Lardinois.

Microsoft today announced that its Azure Government cloud computing service for federal, state, local and tribal U.S. governments is now generally available after more than a year of being in preview. This means the service is now open to all U.S. government customers. There are no more preview programs and the service is also now open for all workloads.

By default, Azure Government ensures that all data stays within the U.S. and within data centers and networks that are physically isolated from the rest of Microsoft’s cloud computing solution. It’s in compliance with FedRAMP, a mandatory government-wide program that prescribes a standardized way to carry out security assessments for cloud services…

Grazed from Bloomberg.  Author: Caroline Hyde and Marie Mawad.

Google Inc. predicts the best days are still ahead for cloud computing.  The pace at which customers are moving their data to the cloud is picking up, and the price of such services will drop at a slower pace in 2015 compared to this year, said Barak Regev, Google’s cloud chief for Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

“The adoption curve is extremely accelerating and we’re seeing it coming from a variety of companies,” Regev said today at the Bloomberg Enterprise Technology Summit in London. Cloud is “bigger than any market out there if you think about the potential for adoption — even bigger than the advertising market.”…

Grazed from ITWeb.  Author:  Editorial Staff.

France-based computing solutions provider ViFiB has deployed a new resource allocation algorithm that reportedly reduces energy usage of cloud computing by 30%.  According to the company, thanks to this new algorithm, ViFiB net power usage effectiveness (PUE) reached a new low of 20%.

PUE is a measure of how efficiently a computer data centre uses energy; specifically, how much energy is used by the computing equipment, in contrast to cooling and other equipment. The PUE metric is widely believed to be the most popular method of calculating energy efficiency…

Grazed from GigaOM.  Author: Derrick Harris.

Altiscale, the Hadoop-as-a-service startup started by ex-Yahoo CTO Raymie Stata, has raised a $3o million series B round of venture capital led by Northgate, as well as previous investors Sequoia Capital and General Catalyst Partners. The company has raised a total of $42 million since it was founded in 2012.

Stata said the company, which essentially sells full-on managed Apache Hadoop (as well as Storm, Spark and other ecosystem technologies), now has a couple dozen customers running production Hadoop clusters that average about 100 terabytes. Altiscale’s platform became generally available in January 2014…