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…

Grazed from TalkinCloud.  Author: Editorial Staff.

Netuitive this week said it has secured an additional $6.5 million in equity financing to accelerate the go-to-market strategy for its cloud-based IT analytics platform.

The Reston, Virginia-based technology provider that assists enterprises with managing the performance of critical business services and apps said its new product platform enables the cloud delivery of its behavior learning technology for both enterprise IT operations and the growing DevOps community…

Grazed from TopTechNews.  Author: Jennifer LeClaire.

Telecom giant AT&T and Amazon are finding common ground in the cloud services arena. AT&T has teamed up with the e-commerce company to extend NetBond, its network-enabled cloud technology, to Amazon Web Services (AWS).

AT&T’s NetBond adjusts the size of the pathway to the cloud to accommodate changing data needs on the fly. That effectively gives customers control of the network. With the Amazon partnership, AT&T customers can scale their networks at the same rates as their enterprise-class apps running on the AWS cloud…

Grazed from InformationWeek.  Author: Charles Babcock.

Cloud computing is beginning to transform the way enterprises buy and use technology resources, and that was evident at the Interop 2014 conference and exhibition in New York this week. Cloud experts and practitioners of all stripes were in attendance and provided some insights — positive and negative — on where this trend is heading.

In a workshop on Designing Infrastructure for Private Clouds, Ivan Pepelnjak, the network architect for UpSpace.net AG, a consulting company in Slovenia, hit upon one of the defining characteristics of cloud computing. "Cloud is all about self-service. … You need to be able to allow your [internal] customer to change the rules on the load balancer and firewall. When someone says, ‘This will never fly in my organization,’ just tell them, ‘Your developers are already using Amazon.’"…

Grazed from Cloud Computing.  Author: Editorial Staff.

The “Security Policy Management in Hybrid Cloud Environments” survey reveals the key network security management challenges organizations face when deploying business applications across hybrid on-premise/public cloud environments.

Key findings of the survey highlight the need for IT professionals to increase visibility across both on-premise and cloud platforms, create new workflows, reconsider team responsibilities and reexamine compliance processes so that they can continue to protect enterprise and ensure network security…

To view infographic and read more from the source, visit http://www.algosec.com/en/resources/security_policy_management_in_hybrid_cloud_environments_2014
 

Grazed from Midsize Insider.  Author: Kelley Katsanos.

Before midsize businesses reconsider using cloud services due to cloud computing security risks, they should assess security vulnerabilities and pinpoint core business activities potentially affected by cloud computing implementation. This will help determine if a move to the cloud is a step in the right direction, especially for those firms delaying cloud adoption due to security concerns.

Avoiding the Cloud

A recent study by the Ponemon Institute featured on Netskope indicates that 53 percent of European IT professionals feel that the chances of a data breach increase with the use of the cloud. A data breach can be costly, especially for midsize companies with limited budgets, and it may threaten a company’s competitive position and damage its reputation. Therefore, businesses need to ensure that proper security measures are in place in order to mitigate security risks…

Grazed from Seeking Alpha.  Author: Paulo Santos.

Usually, this would mostly go unnoticed. Google (GOOG, GOOGL) has slashed cloud computing prices yet again, by a further 10%. However, this time there will be an impact – on Amazon.com (NASDAQ:AMZN). The AWS economicsare turning into a large problem for Amazon.com.

The reason is simple. A large part of Amazon.com’s horrid Q3 2014 guidance, where the company recognized it might face an operating loss of $400 million to $800 million, was due to the price war AWS was facing. Indeed, Amazon.com had earlier recognized that its customers would be saving "hundreds of millions of dollars" due to the latest round in cloud computing price drops, also initiated by Google and matched by Amazon.com. The move also had an impact on Amazon.com’s revenue growth rate, with the "Other" category where AWS is included seeing a large drop in its year-on-year growth rate…