Grazed from MidSize Insider.  Author: Shawn Drew.

A new survey on the state of cloud security shines a light on the increasingly complex task of securing data and applications, with which midsize businesses are having a particularly tough time. These businesses need to understand the importance of security and find a way to mitigate risk as they make the almost inevitable push toward the cloud.

Businesses Finding Difficulty With Cloud Computing Security

The latest cloud security insight comes from a survey conducted by AlgoSec, which asked cloud-based security questions of over 350 IT professionals, data center architects, application owners and CIOs. The results of the survey, summarized in eWeek, prove that even as the cloud becomes a standard part of almost every information infrastructure, cloud computing security has a long way to go…

Grazed from CMSWire. Author: Virginia Backaitis.

"The times they are a changin’." For anyone who’s not a fan of rock music history that quote may not resonate, but it comes from a song that Bob Dylan wrote in the 1960s. It describes a period when the world began to change how it looked at issues like women’s rights, racism, poverty and social policy.

Though the term wasn’t used at the time, "more democratized" fits the bill pretty well. More people had an opportunity to play a role in their own future. And people began to learn that when they worked together they could get more, and often more significant things, done with greater satisfaction…

Grazed from ComputerWeekly. Author: Archana Venkatraman.

Security on the public cloud is one of the most important concerns for CIOs. Microsoft Azure cloud CTO Mark Russinovich identified ten key security risks of public cloud services, including malicious insiders, shared technology, data breaches, artificial intelligence and data loss. He also outlined strategies and best practices for users and service providers to beat these risks.

“We are in the third era of computing – the cloud and mobile era – but security considerations on cloud are still not widely understood. It is important to address the public cloud security concerns to facilitate its adoption,” Russinovich told delegates at the annual IP Expo 2014 in London. “This is important because there is no cloud without trust.”…

Grazed from SCMagazine. Author: Doug Drinkwater.

The firm’s principal cyber-security strategist Jeff Jones was presenting at the IP Expo Europe exhibition in London on Thursday, where he suggested that the leaks from NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden had impacted the Redmond technology giant and the cloud computing market as a whole.

The firm claims to offer more than 200 cloud service products but has been in the headlines for all the wrong reasons over the last 18 months; first over claims that SkyDrive was continually tapped by the NSA, and then over the US DOJ decision that the government could view information held at its non-US data centres…

Grazed from BSMInfo. Author: Pete Johnson.

The data center world was changed forever by the virtualization revolution – and that change has only accelerated with the cloud computing technology that followed. Over the last 18 months the market has settled on the notion that any sizable organization that has enough workload diversity benefits the most by using both public and private cloud in a hybrid model.

Throughout this evolution, VARs and MSPs have had to ask themselves hard questions about where value can be added. The world of simply delivering hardware does not exist anymore – other aspects of the value chain have to be explored. As businesses begin to adopt hybrid cloud and all the flexibility it promises, a new class of products that help them do so effectively is emerging – and this is the perfect place for VARs and MSPs to play in because of the huge potential for added value on an ongoing basis…

Read more from the source @ http://www.bsminfo.com/doc/tips-to-adding-value-to-hybrid-clouds-with-cloud-management-platforms-0001

Grazed from ITWire. Author: Greg Barnes.

Integrating OpenStack, the free open source cloud computing software platform, with an advanced cloud architecture based on application delivery controller (ADC) technology offers significant advantages for cloud data centre operators.  While OpenStack gives IT professionals an open and standards-based approach to scalable and agile cloud deployment, an ADC-based architecture utilises L4-L7 network application services to provide a consistent solution for cloud provisioning and management.

Their integration allows cloud data centre operators to combine application networking services seamlessly with their other infrastructure, permitting them to meet service-level agreements (SLA’s) and compliance. A choice of form factor provides the flexibility to create a tailored offering in a high-density multi-tenant environment…

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: David Linthicum.

Twitter filed a lawsuit against the FBI and the Department of Justice on Tuesday to publish a full "transparency report," which documents government requests for user information. Its objective is to gain more information about government surveillance of its users. The published report does not include national security requests — Twitter has been prohibited from disclosing that information.

But Twitter believes it’s entitled under the First Amendment to "respond to our users’ concerns and to the statements of U.S. government officials by providing information about the scope of U.S. government surveillance." What’s really happening here? The government is requesting user information from Twitter, but wants Twitter to keep quiet about that fact…

Grazed from ZDNet. Author: Dirk-Peter van Leeuwen.

Enterprise IT is constantly evolving, and is driven to innovate with emerging technologies and processes. Open source has the capability to meet future enterprise IT requirements, and this has led many enterprises to take a look at these technologies. A survey by Black Duck Software in 2014 showed more than 50% of all enterprises surveyed are expected to contribute to and adopt open source.

The need for open enterprise cloud

Modern IT operations depend on a strong underlying infrastructure, especially in enterprise environments where high capacity and performance are essential. An open enterprise cloud can enable organizations to meet these future IT needs, as the platform can be tailored to meet the exact requirements of an organization – regardless of size…

Grazed from ReCode. Author: Arik Hesseldahl.

Business software giant Oracle is getting serious about cloud computing and has made its first hire demonstrating exactly how serious. Sources familiar with the move tell Re/code that two weeks ago it hired Peter S. Magnusson, the former VP of Engineering at Snapchat and a former director of engineering at Google, to run its cloud computing efforts.

At the company’s Oracle Openworld event in San Francisco last month, founder and CTO Larry Ellison spent a lot of time talking about Oracle’s plans to build a platform-as-a-service and an infrastructure-as-a-service offering. Among its new offerings are its core database technology, which is now being offered as a service available in the cloud, as well as a cloud-ready version of Java, the programming language over which it took stewardship when it bought Sun Microsystems in 2010…

Grazed from PCWorld. Author: Joab Jackson.

Microsoft researchers have figured out a new way to keep data and applications secure in the cloud, by cordoning them off in memory from the underlying infrastructure. The approach, which Microsoft calls Haven, could help enterprises feel more comfortable using the cloud for mission-essential data and applications, said the researchers, who are presenting the approach at the USENIX Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation in Broomfield, Colorado, this week. Microsoft researchers Andrew Baumann, Marcus Peinado and Galen Hunt authored a paper about Haven, which USENIX named the best of the conference.

They use a technique called “shielded execution,” which protects the program and associated data from the platform on which they run, including the cloud provider’s operating system, administrative software, firmware, and other software that supports the application. Haven provides additional protection that can’t be offered by existing techniques, runs on commodity operating systems and works with any legacy application…