Grazed from TheTrademarkCompany.  Author: Editorial Staff.

Size matters in the computer industry, or at least that’s what we were once told.  Computer hard drives once could be measured in megabytes.  But as the size of programs and operating systems grew they moved to gigabytes.  Soon we were told we would need to have storage measured in terabytes to accommodate the latest programs.  But then along came the cloud and size, at least on your home or business devices, was no longer as significant of an issue.

In the past few years cloud computing has swept across the technology industry offering the solution to our programs insatiable need for more and more bytes.  Hand-in-hand with this remedy, cloud computing also purports to provide greater security for your data in the form of redundant servers constantly backing up the same.  Not surprisingly, with the wave of cloud computing there has been a veritable gold rush to register trademarks to identify respective companies’ cloud computing goods and services…

Grazed from CloudComputingToday.  Author: Arnal Dayaratna.

In a stunning announcement, Joshua McKenty, co-creator of OpenStack and co-founder and CTO of Piston Cloud Computing (Piston), revealed this week that he has accepted a position at Pivotal as field CTO. McKenty transitions to Pivotal after a three year stint at commercial OpenStack vendor Piston, during which time he was central to raising approximately $20M in capital, growing the team by a factor of 15 and increasing sales by a multiplier of 1000.

McKenty helped build Piston from a “fledgling startup” into “a real business with an incredible group of customers, an established leadership team, and a mature product” as noted in a blog post reflecting on his tenure at Piston. More importantly, however, McKenty served as an OpenStack evangelist that demonstrated the commercial viability of OpenStack as a prominent alternative to proprietary Infrastructure as a Service technologies such as Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure…

Grazed from Datamation.   Author: Editorial Staff.

Two of the chief values for the cloud are speed and agility. Cloud orchestration and automation tools promise to allow IT organizations to move significantly faster and become more competitive as service organizations. While orchestration tools typically do a great job of deploying applications flexibly once virtualization is in place, the underlying (or horrors—the non-virtualized and legacy) infrastructure is not very agile or automated.

People are not addressing this head on. Instead, a lot of hand waving has been done at physical infrastructure issues, and it’s the Achilles’ heel of IT when trying to get agile. However, it doesn’t have to be this way…

Grazed from Business2Community.  Author: Naagesh Padmanaban.

In the last few weeks we have seen new products launched by IT majors that have the potential to greatly influence the fortunes of the Analytics and Insights business. IBM’s Watson Analytics and Oracle’s Cloud based Analytics are just two new solutions/ platforms that have hit the market. We can rest assured that many more such offerings will be launched in the coming weeks. As the products keep coming, they raise some important question for the analytics industry. What impact they will have? Is the Analytics & Insights business ready for these changes at all?

It is almost two weeks since Big Blue launched its Watson Analytics. It is a natural language-based cognitive service that can provide businesses instant access to powerful predictive insights and cool reports. Launched as a freemium service, it will provide predictive insights for a small fee and hopes to leapfrog user base…

Grazed from ITWorld.  Author: Joab Jackson.

Sometimes the best path to success is to learn how to avoid failure.  Netflix was able to keep serving its customers while its cloud hosting provider, Amazon Web Services (AWS), rebooted servers, because it had prepared for that happening.

"When we got the news about the emergency EC2 [Elastic Cloud Compute] reboots, our jaws dropped. When we got the list of how many Cassandra nodes would be affected, I felt ill," said Christos Kalantzis, Netflix engineering manager of cloud database engineering, in a Netflix blog post discussing the outage…

Grazed from WallStreet and Tech.  Author: Becca Lipman.

Skyhigh Networks assembles a board of cryptography experts to consider a range of academically vetted cryptographic solutions that do not reduce functionality.  A group of accomplished experts in cryptography research have announced they are forming what is believed to be the first industry-focused Cryptography Advisory Board. The board will provide oversight of encryption schemes for cloud security to ease the adoption of cloud services.



Data security continues to be one of the major hurdles preventing companies from moving data to the cloud, and for good reason. Enterprises worry about cloud data breaches, NSA surveillance, and court orders that can subpoena documents holding sensitive information (with which many cloud providers willingly comply). Increasingly, firms want to secure files with encryption to hinder outside parties who access sensitive documents from being able to read them...

Grazed from NetworkWorld.  Author: Brandon Butler.

Cloud computing offers many advantages, but with those benefits come a new range of security concerns.  “From a security perspective, the cloud has introduced new risks,” says David Levin, director of information security at Western Union, who oversees the security of applications being used at the money transfer company.

Levin says the first step toward addressing risk is figuring out how much there is … and that first means knowing which cloud services are being used.  Levin turned to the services of Skyhigh Networks, a vendor in what Gartner calls the emerging market of Cloud Access Security Brokers (CASB). Products in this market basically sit between end users and cloud services, injecting security protocols between the two. Gartner estimates that CASB will be a $3.1 billion market by 2015…

Grazed from CloudTech.  Author:  James Bourne.

Communications provider CenturyLink has opened up a Shanghai data centre and announced the availability of its managed hosting service in China.  The latest expansion continues the telco’s aggressive move to the cloud, after a series of data openings this year including Toronto, Reading and Chicago. Back in May CenturyLink slashed prices on its cloud storage, in line with competitors, and in August they announced launch ofCenturyLink Private Cloud, which aims to combine the security of private with the agility of public cloud.

The expanse in Asia brings the total number of data centres at CenturyLink to 57.  “For multinational corporations looking to grow their customer base, entering China presents enormous opportunities and challenges,” said Gery Messer, CenturyLink Asia Pacific managing director. “CenturyLink makes it easy for businesses to host within China’s borders, offering access to the same highly secure managed services and consistent IT experience available across our global footprint.”…

Read more from the source @ http://www.cloudcomputing-news.net/news/2014/oct/03/centurylink-expands-further-asian-market-chinese-managed-hosting/

Grazed from Network World.  Author: Jim Duffy.

Cisco is fortifying its ISR branch routers to give users more options when accessing cloud services and backing up primary links.

Cisco is expanding its ISR 4000 series devices with four more modular platforms that support hybrid WAN capabilities – the ability to turn up Internet and wireless 3G/4G links as backups or ancillary connections to primary MPLS circuits. The company is working with Vodafone to enable that European carrier to offer a 4G plus wired managed service bundle based on the ISR 4000s, Cisco officials said at the Interop New York exhibition here this week…

Grazed from TechTarget.  Author: Editorial Staff.

Government bureaucracy remains slow-moving despite AWS security certifications that allow the cloud provider to host sensitive data.  Amazon Web Services (AWS) was the first public cloud to receive a provisional authorization from the Department of Defense (DoD) under the Defense Information Systems Agency’s Cloud Security Model to host Level 3-5 workloads, in late August. Levels 3-5 refer to unclassified, but highly sensitive data. Level 6, which is still excluded from the provisional authorization, pertains to classified data.

Meanwhile, the DoD is methodical in deploying new technologies, said U.S. Air Force Brigadier General Steve Spano, who now works as Amazon’s general manager for defense and national security, in a keynote here this week during the Cloud Computing Association’s Cloud Developers Summit and Expo 2014…