Author: David

Grazed from NewsFactor.  Author: David Holmes.

The U.S. National Security Agency’s website, nsa.gov, was knocked offline Friday afternoon, and as of Friday evening, it was still unavailable. Only a browser message indicating that the serverwas not responding appeared.

Sources quoted by various news agencies have speculated that the site has apparently fallen victim to a DDoS (distributed denial-of-service) attack, and that it was believed that the hacker group Anonymous would claim responsibility. However, as of the time of publication of this report, the group has not claimed responsibility…

Grazed from ComputerWeekly. Author: Clive Longbottom.

When talking to end users about cloud computing, security still raises its ugly head on a very regular basis. It makes no odds if the basic platform is in reality pretty secure, the perception is that it is not, making organisations hesitant to allow use and work in the cloud as a result. In order to give users peace of mind to adopt the cloud, certain steps need to be taken to bolster basic security measures and give users a tangible and visible classification for cloud security.

The problem with existing security approaches lies in how data is secured. While many cloud file-sharing systems protect documents when they are stored within the solution provider’s siloed network, security often ends there. Because employees need to deal with an ever-expanding value chain of suppliers and customers that reside outside the network perimeter, organisations can no longer contain their employees within the firewall. Existing security approaches do not support these new practices, nor the ever-changing needs of their end users…

Grazed from Midsize Insider. Author: Marissa Tejada.

The combination of cloud computing and predictive analytics is helping businesses make better business decisions. However, security concerns remain. A new survey featured in Information Management analyzed the combination of the two technologies and how firms are utilizing them. As midsize firms consider big data in the cloud, security will continue to be the top concern.

Analytic Services

The research by Decision Management Solutions, as reported in Smart Data Collective, referred to three types of cloud-based analytic services: decisions as a service, cloud-based modeling and cloud-based model deployment. According to the findings collected, about two-thirds of firms have already utilized one of the three types of services. The large majority — 90 percent — will deploy another service in the next few years…

Grazed from WestLawInsider. Author: Editorial Staff.

In Part Two of this series we discussed the physical and electronic security that should be offered by your cloud computing provider’s data center. This week we focus on your organization’s role in protecting your data, and how you can work with your cloud computing provider to ensure they are meeting your data privacy and security needs.

WHAT’S YOUR ROLE IN CLOUD COMPUTING SECURITY?

As we’ve seen above, most cloud computing providers take extraordinary measures to keep your data safe on their end. But the fact is, the biggest risk to your data comes from inside your organization, from misrouted data and other simple mistakes to outright data theft by employees…

Grazed from NetworkWorld. Author: Brandon Butler.

The model of buying cloud computing resources is different from that of buying traditional hardware and software. Instead of buying licenses and investing in equipment, in a cloud computing model, users pay for the resources they use – no more, no less. That model has been proven out extensively on the compute side, with services like Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), and a variety of other IaaS offerings on the market. But storage has been slow to catch up.

Sure AWS has Elastic Block Storage (EBS) and Simple Storage Service (S3), but Ben Woo, an analyst at Neuralytix – and former IDC storage analyst – says for highly transactional databases and workloads, those don’t always cut it…

Grazed from Arstechnica. Author: Kyle Orland.

For months now, Microsoft has been touting how Xbox One games will be able to make use of cloud computing resources to handle certain time-insensitive tasks that aren’t really feasible to calculate on a single local box. While Microsoft has gone into some detail on how this process works, a lot of the company’s talk has taken the form of vague hand-waving about how the magic of the cloud will make everything more powerful.

So when we had a chance to talk to Forza Motorsport 5 Director Dan Greenawalt recently, we wanted to take a deep dive into how, precisely, the game makes use of Microsoft’s cloud resources to power its adaptive, machine learning-based AI system, called Drivatar. And we learned how processing a massive amount of data on Microsoft’s servers allows for possibilities that Greenawalt says weren’t really possible on previous consoles…

Grazed from DataCenterKnowledge. Author: Bill Kleyman.

It was bound to happen. The increase in cloud computing and cloud utilization has also increased the amount of targets for malicious attacks. As more organizations move towards cloud computing – there will be extra security measures that will have to be taken into consideration. There are more devices, a lot more users, and all of this result in more data being pushed through the data center and the cloud.

As cloud computing continues to gain ground, new models and platforms will require new ways to secure a growing infrastructure. Here’s the good news: New security platforms are being designed to help facilitate cloud growth, not hinder it. Next-generation security is evolving to directly support cloud computing. To help with this heavy lifting, security organizations need to adapt their technologies to the workloads of the cloud…

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Charles Babcock.

Amazon Web Services’ revenues are on track to hit the $1 billion mark in the fourth quarter. If they do, AWS will have generated an estimated $3.2 billion in revenues for parent company Amazon.com in 2013 — a striking accomplishment for a business still in the "other" category on the balance sheet.

The estimates, from Technology Business Research analysts Jillian Mirandi and Michael Barba, were released Thursday during a teleconference held by Amazon CFO Tom Szkutak. AWS revenues in the third quarter alone are estimated at $850 million, more than double those in the third quarter a year ago. In both the second and third quarters, AWS revenues grew by 136% over the same periods a year earlier, according to TBR analysts. Service revenues generated by AWS represent 84% of the monies in the "other" category, they said…

Grazed from Forbes. Author: Tom Groenfeldt.

For a long time IT experts in financial services said finance would never move to the cloud because of security concerns. That appears to be changing in capital markets, says Ovum, the UK consultancy. “Due to improvements in cloud security and a wider variety of applications, investment in cloud, by both the buy side and the sell side, is set for further growth,” the firm reports, while noting that the buy side leads in cloud adoption.

“The buy side tends to be an easier target for cloud than the sell side, given that more of its participants are smaller firms with limited IT budgets,” says Rik Turner, senior analyst, financial services technology, Ovum. “That said, the sell side is changing. With budgets and headcount under more constraints since the global financial crisis, there are clearly opportunities on that side of the business too.”…

Grazed from SpendMatters. Author: Thomas Case.

Considering the current mess with the Healthcare.gov website and related aspects of putting wheels on the Obamacare bandwagon, I thought I’d bring in my perspective from complex procurement solution implementations. Since this involves the government, I’ll (somewhat ironically) have to label this a conservative (aka old school) software rollout.

In the procurement software provider space, some of the most old-school prospects are the ones in aerospace and defense, financial services, and – drumroll – healthcare. When I say old-school I mean that they often use on-premise software, running on their own hardware – sometimes even inside their own data center, managed by their own people – or in hardened subsections of Level 4 (exceedingly robust) class data centers…