Author: David

Grazed from Global Times. Author: Zhang Ye.

Chinese e-commerce firm Alibaba Group announced it would acquire leading domestic cloud storage service provider Kanbox on Wednesday, in an effort to further develop its business in the cloud computing sector and improve user experiences on the mobile front.

With Kanbox’s technology, Alibaba aims to forge an efficient and secure personal cloud storage platform, a PR representative told the Global Times Wednesday, though refusing to reveal the financial details. After the acquisition, Alibaba plans to directly connect its user accounts with Kanbox’s accounts system, enabling online shoppers and sellers to save their trading data in virtual facilities hosted by Kanbox, according to a statement sent to the Global Times by Alibaba…

Grazed from V3.co.uk. Author: Daniel Robinson.

Linux developer Suse has released a new build of its cloud computing platform based on the OpenStack framework, adding new capabilities to make deployment easier. It is also the first OpenStack distribution to add full support for Microsoft’s Hyper-V, the firm claimed.

Available now, Suse Cloud 2.0 is an updated version of the firm’s enterprise-ready OpenStack distribution for building private infrastructure as a service (IaaS) cloud computing environments. Among the chief enhancements is a more robust installation process. This has been delivered through integration with the open source Crowbar project for bare-metal deployment. Used in conjunction with a set of Chef recipes, predefined scripts, and autoYAST, this can be used to rapidly provision and configure a complete private cloud, according to Suse…

Grazed from SiliconAngle. Author: Maria Deutscher.

Red Hat is moving beyond the realm of containerized PaaS with new OpenShift services for plugging cloud-based applications into back-office systems. Based on the company’s JBoss application server, the upcoming “xPaaS” solutions aim to make it easier for OpenShift users to integrate cloud apps into their IT environments.

Red Hat’s xPaas lineup includes a business process management service that offers activity monitoring, process simulation and modeling, and the ability to “configure automation and data” on the fly without having to modify existing code. These capabilities will be made available in the coming months, along with a mobile push notification app and an integration-as-a-service solution which are currently in developer preview. Paul Cormier, the head of products and technologies at Red Hat, explained that his company is unifying its lineup to better address enterprise needs…

Grazed from ComputerWorld. Author: Cliff Saran.

The recent outage of Google’s Gmail service shows that even class-leading cloud services can and will fail. How can IT departments build in resilience to cloud computing failures? Google has been winning business over Microsoft by targeting the huge costs associated with running on-premise Microsoft Exchange servers. Analyst Forrester’s Forrsights Hardware Survey; North American and Europe showed that cloud adoption between 2009 to 2012 increased from 9% to 46%.

The growth in cloud adoption is set to rise as CIOs move more of their traditional IT spending away from capital expenditure to software as a service in the cloud, paid per-user as an annual or monthly subscription. As cloud adoption increases more IT departments will need to have a battle plan in place for a cloud service outages…

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Charles Babcock.

"I can’t tell you how excited I was to get the call to come speak here," said Brad Anderson, Microsoft’s corporate VP for cloud and enterprise engineering, Tuesday as he faced the Oracle OpenWorld audience filled with several thousand potential Windows Azure cloud users. No Microsoft executive had ever made an OpenWorld keynote before.

Oracle and Microsoft, for the last decade, have bitterly vied to see which would be the dominant database on Windows: Oracle or SQL Server. The stakes grew higher as Windows Server became more strongly entrenched in the enterprise data center. At some point, both decided neither was ever going to own the market outright. At the same time, the rise of Amazon Web Services showed what had been brewing while they grappled with each other…

Grazed from CloudTweaks. Author: Editorial Staff.

CloudTweaks has covered a number of emerging startups over the years, such as our “Top 25 European Cloud Computing Rising Stars” lists. The question many startups have is: What does it cost to run a startup? We have an infographic provided courtesy of staff.com which outlines some of these costs in a few of the main technological hotspots of the world. We believe as cloud adoption rates increase, and telecommuting is more prevalent worldwide, many of these costs can be reduced in some capacity.

To read more from the source and to view the infographic, visit: http://www.cloudtweaks.com/2013/09/costs-running-startup/

Grazed from NetworkWorld. Author: Brandon Butler.

Citrix Tuesday updated its cloud computing strategy, saying that its platform – which is based off the Apache CloudStack project – can span both private on-premises deployments and public clouds and is the only one in the market that takes an application-centric approach to architecting clouds.

Citrix officials say that the company’s chief competitors, VMware and Amazon Web Services, “pigeon-hole” users into architecting clouds a certain way. VMware is ideal for virtualized legacy applications, but not new, cloud-native apps, Citrix says. AWS, on the other hand, is perfect for these new apps that were born to run in the cloud, but not legacy applications. Citrix’s cloud platform, by being “application-centric” caters to both legacy and new-age apps, says Krishna Subramanian, vice president of marketing for Citrix’s cloud platform…

Grazed from Information-Management. Author: Joel Jacob.

The adoption of cloud computing has been an undeniable force spreading quickly across all segments of the technology market. In the legal industry, cloud or software as a service accounted for 49 percent of all e-discovery software revenues tracked in 2011, according to Gartner’s report, “Market Trends: Automated, Analytical Approaches Drive the Enterprise E-Discovery Software Market.” Cloud computing is attractive because it enables users to do more with less; however, with this great power comes great responsibility and risk.

This risk comes in the form of legal, security, business continuity and compliance issues. When e-discovery is involved, the risk considerations become increasingly complex. If your organization is considering moving data to the cloud, or transitioning e-discovery systems to the cloud, follow this checklist of the top 10 things to consider before taking the leap…

Grazed from GSNMagazine. Author: Editorial Staff.

Cyber Innovation Labs (CIL), a leading provider of innovative Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) solutions and professional services, announced on September 23 the commissioning and operational delivery of its new 8,000-square-foot Tier 3+ enterprise Cloud computing center located in Iron Mountain’s underground facility in Boyers, PA.

The first phase of customer delivery will house the new disaster recovery center for a leading global insurance carrier and a primary security services vendor to the U.S. Government. The new data center is designed as a Tier 3 enhanced / 2N standard facility and meets SSAE SOC 1 / SOC 2 and PCI DSS LEVEL 2.0 PCI compliance…

Grazed from ComputerWorld. Author: Steve Pate.

There are many benefits to be gained by using the public cloud. Cost efficiencies, elasticity and collaborative access are mentioned most often. But will your data be secure in the cloud? And who is responsible for keeping it safe? These topics bear further exploration.

For small organizations – typically those that can’t justify adding someone with ‘security’ in their title to the team – outsourcing to a cloud service provider (CSP) may be more secure than trying to build and maintain their own data center. But for larger companies, especially organizations that must comply with privacy regulations like HIPAA/HITECH or PCI DSS, ensuring and validating data privacy can be more challenging in a public cloud environment…