Grazed from Forbes.  Author: Louis Columbus.

Cloud and SaaS-based start-ups are generating the greatest levels of confidence with global investors today, up 2% from 2013.  Global investors continue to place a very high level of confidence in Cloud- and SaaS-based startups, with the industry receiving a 4.11 score on a 5.0 confidence rating scale.

These and other key findings are from the 2014 Global Venture Capital Confidence Survey published last month by Deloitte & Touche LLP and the National Venture Capital Association (NVCA).  331 venture capitalists from the Americas, Europe, Middle East, and Asia Pacific were interviewed from firms with assets under management ranging from less than $50M to greater than $10B….

Grazed from F5.  Author: PR Announcement.

  F5 Networks (NASDAQ: FFIV) today announced an award received at last week’s VMworld 2014 conference. During the event, VMware formally recognized the Best Cloud Management Marketplace Solutions, with F5 capturing the award in the Cloud Automation category.

VMware partners and vendors from around the world that have contributed solutions to the Cloud Management Marketplacewere considered for these awards. Winners were selected based on the number of solution downloads, indicating breadth of use throughout the industry…

Grazed from ScientificComputing.  Author: Editorial Staff.

Grazed from SecureIDNews.  Author: Thomas Flynn.

It’s been six years since the notable cloud service breach at Salesforce.com, when an employee surrendered a password in a phishing attack against the company. As a result, hackers were able to obtain the details of thousands of Salesforce customers, and then target them with a series of phishing emails that appeared to be from the company. At the time, Salesforce told its customers to “consider using two-factor authentication.”

Fast forward to today and cloud security issues continue to persist. Last October, hackers managed to get past the security of Adobe’s Creative Cloud and its Revel photo sharing service to obtain Adobe customer IDs and encrypted passwords. If Adobe customers were using two-factor authentication, they would have been safe because the compromised passwords would have been useless without the second authenticator…

Grazed from ZDNet.  Author: Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols.

So, you think OpenStack is perfect for your company’s cloud-needs, but you just discovered that finding OpenStack-savvy architects, designers, or even just administrators is like looking for the perfect New York style pizza… in San Diego.

As Tom Norton, HP’s vice president of Helion Professional Services, said in a statement, "OpenStack technology is gaining traction in the enterprise, but the lack of in-house OpenStack expertise can be a barrier to realizing the technology’s full potential."…

Grazed from WebHostReview.  Author: David Hamilton.

Three Citrix executives involved in Citrix’s cloud computing efforts, including its open-source cloud operating system CloudStack, have left the company.  According to a GigaOm report, Cloud Platforms Group VP and GM Sameer Dholakia, CTO Sheng Liang and Market Development VP Shannon Williams have all left the company. Liang and Williams are starting a new company, according to an email sent from Williams.

Meanwhile, Klaus Oestermann is remaining with Citrix to lead a new cloud group that combines the Cloud Platforms Group and Cloud Networking into a single business unit known as Networking, Cloud & Service Provider Group or “NCSP”…

Grazed from NetworkWorld.  Author: Linda Musthaler.

With cloud computing there’s no longer a question about whether you should encrypt data. That’s a given. The question today is, who should manage and control the encryption keys?

Whether talking to an infrastructure provider like Amazon or Microsoft, or a SaaS provider, it’s imperative to have the discussion about key control. The topic is more relevant than ever as more companies move regulated data into the cloud and as concerns about data privacy grow…

Grazed from DigitalOcean.  Author: Joab Jackson.

One of the fastest growing cloud hosting services, DigitalOcean, now offers one of the hottest virtualization technologies, Docker.  Customers now have the option to run the Docker-friendly CoreOS Linux distribution as a virtual machine on the service. Running CoreOS "is the easiest way and most affordable way for developers to start experimenting with Docker containers," said Mitch Wainer, the company’s co-founder and chief marketing officer.

Users can run a DigitalOcean virtual machine for as little as US$5 per month.  The hosted version of CoreOS also provides DigitalOcean customers with a way to rapidly set up clusters of virtual machines to work together on one large task, such as running a heavily used Web application…

Grazed from TopTechNews.  Author: Jennifer LeClaire.

 Tech giant Apple is taking the iCloud hack that revealed naked selfies of various celebrities seriously. The iPhone-maker plans to roll out new security measures to keep its users, whether celebrities or everyday Joes, safe.  Apple CEO Tim Cook told the Wall Street Journal the company will alert users via e-mail and push notifications when someone tries to change an account password, restore iCloud data to a new device, or when a device logs into an account for the first time.

Apple also plans to implement two-factor authentication, which would demand hackers have access to at least two pieces of info the user offered when signing up for the account, such as a code, a password, or a log access key…

Grazed from TheVarGuy.  Author: Christopher Tozzi.

As SSD cloud hosting and storage provider Linodecontinues to redefine itself, its latest move is the introduction of a "Professional Services" option that adds full deployment and management off-loading to the company’s customer service offerings.

Professional Services is a fee-for-service support option designed to allow enterprises to hire Linode staff to perform work on their clouds. "Should a customer not have the time, expertise, inclination or staff-bandwidth to tackle essential sysAdmin duties, Linode can be enlisted to implement them," the company said…