Month: September 2015

Grazed from TheStack. Author: Chris Kelly.

What does it mean to have agility with cloud computing and how can it be an advantage for enterprises? Agility is not a new concept in the IT industry. However, the proliferation of cloud computing has shone a spotlight on how technology is enabling companies to be more agile. When CIOs and CTOs refer to agility in the context of cloud computing, it can mean two things.

The first is a reference to cloud agility in the technological sense: The ability to achieve true cloud agility is tied to the rapid deployment of computer resources. Cloud environments have the capability to provide new compute instances or storage in minutes, compared to weeks or months taken in traditional IT shops…

Grazed from CloudComputingNews. Author: James Bourne.

Japanese IT giant Fujitsu has announced new functionality which the company claims will help CIOs to deliver hybrid IT environments without compromising compliance and data security. The company is announcing Fujitsu Cloud Services Management, which builds on the previous Fujitsu Cloud Integration Platform and aims to enable unified management of various cloud environments, across different departments within an organisation.

Fujitsu is also announcing an extension of its range of standardised managed services, and says it continues to invest in cloud platforms. As this publication reported, last year the IT giant ploughed over £1 billion into strengthening its infrastructure as a service (IaaS), software as a service (SaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS) base. According to Fujitsu, the company grew its global year on year IaaS revenues by 49% last year ,with 91% growth in its virtual cloud IaaS business…

Grazed from CSO. Author: Ben Rothke.

When we wrote our first PCI application security article Who’s Guarding the Data Bank? in 2008, commercially available cardholder tokenization was in its infancy. Generally speaking, data tokenization usually refers to a process through which cardholder data (usually the Primary Account Number or PAN) is replaced with a substitute cyphertext value known as a token.

The token is typically generated via a strong, one-way publicly known mathematical hashing algorithm. If the one-way cryptographic algorithm is suitably strong and utilizes a known publicly validated mathematical algorithm, the resultant cyphertext is no longer considered to be cardholder data as defined by the PCI SSC. It does not require additional obscuring or encryption as the process cannot be reversed to reconstitute the original data (in this case the PAN) short of a brute force ‘dictionary’ based attack…

Grazed from CloudTech. Author: Editorial Staff.

Advances in software architecture over the last eight to 10 years have led to more complex and dynamic software architectures in the form of distributed systems. Despite this progress, today’s software applications, web-based or not, continue to still either provide a slower response or become completely non-responsive too often.

Utilising software like Chaos Monkey, which challenges a software application’s distributed systems by taking random instances offline, allows developers and system architects to test their designs well before the unexpected, yet inevitable system failure does occur. With this, we aim to show how to design applications that contain an Agile-friendly framework to gracefully handle component failure in a distributed system to minimise downtime…

Grazed from Cavium. Author: PR Announcement.

Cavium, Inc., a leading provider of semiconductor products that enable intelligent processing for enterprise, data center, cloud, service provider wired and wireless networking, will be participating at 2015 OVH Summit at Paris, France on 24th Sept 2015. OVH Group is one of the largest cloud computing and hosting providers in the world and the largest hosting provider in Europe. In its booth, Cavium will be demonstrating popular cloud workloads running on ThunderX® based servers deployed in RunAbove™ Cloud, the OVH Group’s site devoted to labs and trying new technologies.

At the Summit developers and customers will be able to login into ARM® based multi-tenant environments demonstrating popular cloud workloads including NGINX, Cassandra, MemcacheD and MySQL. This provides developers the opportunity to experience the advantages of RunAbove’s ARM based cloud offerings and to speak directly with our technical experts…

Grazed from Forbes. Author: Robert Hof.

IBM’s Watson became famous in 2011 when the artificial intelligence-driven supercomputer handily beat the two best players ever on the TV game show Jeopardy. During a demonstration on Sept. 21 of what it has learned since then, it played another role: expert debater. Asked to present an argument that “Wikipedia is reliable,” it pored over some 4 million entries in the crowdsourced encyclopedia.

In nearly natural-sounding English, Watson presented several reasons why it should indeed be considered reliable, concluding politely, “I hope I have convinced you to support my view.” But more significant than the demonstration, which was a scripted version of what Watson is actually doing in IBM labs, was the setting: one of the biggest tech startup conferences of the year in San Francisco…

Grazed from Dell. Author: Shelly Kramer.

When it comes to the enterprise and the hybrid cloud, and what CIOs need to know about that, let’s start here: Nine out of 10 IT decision makers say embracing the hybrid cloud for their business is necessary for building a future-ready enterprise. Odds are that those same nine out of 10 CIOs are still struggling to agree on exactly what the term “hybrid cloud” actually means.

That’s because hybrid cloud is a bit of an “umbrella term,” covering all sorts of collaborative scenarios. That said, it almost always requires the intermingling and central managing of public or private off-site cloud technology, along with some in-house IT—both operating independently of one another—and both able to communicate over encrypted connections. Hybrid cloud also describes the general coordination of two or more clouds…

Read more from the source @ https://powermore.dell.com/technology/the-enterprise-and-hybrid-cloud-what-cios-need-to-know/

Grazed from ITProPortal. Author: Vivek Vahie.

Cloud computing has helped to re-shape the entire IT industry and has made technology services more available and affordable to businesses of all sizes. Over the years cloud has become the advent of computing; this, in turn, has positively impacted the cost of infrastructure meaning that service providers can offer more services for a lower cost.

Due to the flexibility of cloud there has been an emergence of pay-as-you-go models for applications which is often referred to as Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) or software on-demand”. The SaaS model is redefining the business model by creating opportunities for both customers and independent software vendors (ISVs)…

Grazed from TheRegister. Author: Dave Cartwright.

I dislike the term “private cloud". As far as I’m concerned, there’s really no difference between what I’d call a “traditional” homespun virtualised infrastructure and what they call “private cloud” these days. As Gartner puts it, private cloud is: “A form of cloud computing that is used by only one organisation, or that ensures that an organisation is completely isolated from others.”

Frankly, you could remove the word “cloud” and not notice the difference. And, don’t think by saying the word “private” that your cloud is “on premise". Your systems could well live in a data centre somewhere in the country, or the world. The bottom line, and what we’re talking about, is the fact you are the one with control over this cloud – and nobody else is sharing the infrastructure…

Grazed from TechWeekEurope. Author: Duncan Macrae.

Cloud computing was by all accounts inevitable – we can see its steady adoption all around us. According to Goldman Sachs spending on cloud computing infrastructure and platforms will grow at a 30 perecnt CAGR from 2013 to 2018, compared with overall enterprise IT’s five percent. It forecasts global security-as-a-service revenue will reach $106bn in 2016, growing 21 percent over 2015.

Disruption to business

Earlier this year CEO of British insurance company, Lloyd’s said that cyber-attacks cost businesses as much as $400bn a year, including the damage caused by the attack and consequent disruption to the normal course of business. CIOs and their Infrastructure Management teams have historically been concerned about security in the cloud. Lack of trust, relative lack of control, fear of not knowing where the data resides, and complex regulations in different countries have only made this more difficult…

Read more from the source @ http://www.techweekeurope.co.uk/cloud/cloud-management/cyber-security-driving-cloud-adoption-177366#GTQ5l0B5xjr4K88z.99