Author: David

Grazed from Midsize Insider. Author: Doug Bonderud.

IBM recently closed a deal to purchase IT security firm Trusteer, which specializes in fraud detection and advanced security monitoring. The company also has a powerful software-as-a-service (SaaS) and mobile security platform, which Big Blue hopes to integrate in its own complement of SaaS programming. Simply put, there is a need for defensible, mobile cloud architecture, especially among midsize companies taking their first steps skyward.

Trust Us

Trust is everything. As Caleb Barlow, IBM’s director of mobile security, noted in a recent eWeek article, "[A] big portion of the value of that brand is now associated with trust. If you can trust that brand, if you can trust them with your data, it’s going to make a big difference in who you choose to do business with." To achieve this trust, midsize admins need to show executives — and therefore customers — that their personal data is secure in the cloud. Trusteer, for its part, provides account takeover protection, compromised device detection and fingerprinting services. IBM also has plans to create a cybersecurity lab in Israel; the 200-employee facility will focus on mobile security, threat protection, malware and financial crime…

Grazed from Midsize Insider. Author: Bert Markgraf.

When IT departments at midsize businesses start to implement cloud computing and transfer some noncritical IT functions from their own data centers into the cloud, the location of the infrastructure is not the only thing that changes. IT departments in such situations suddenly have new and unfamiliar responsibilities and have to develop new skills. At the same time, many traditional computer and network functions are no longer in high demand. ZDNet looks at how some of the skills required of IT professionals are evolving based on recent discussions with a CIO panel. Many aspects of IT work are changing, including such fundamentals as who pays for services and who fixes problems.

Expertise

Traditional IT functions have focused on keeping the company computer systems in operation, integrating new equipment and maintaining security. As new applications migrate to the cloud, these skills become even more important with regard to the critical functions that the company retains in its own data center. At the same time, the scope decreases as fewer changes are made in these existing applications. The emphasis shifts to software maintenance of a reduced application base and increased coordination with external cloud suppliers. IT departments have to develop additional expertise in making their in-house systems work with standardized external applications that often have limited adaptability…

Grazed from USA Today. Author: Alistair Blair.

Amazon Web Services, the popular cloud computing service run by Amazon.com, suffered an outage on Friday. AWS, as the service is known, said on its monitoring website that was "investigating network connectivity issues" in data centers it runs in the Northern Virginia area. AWS is used by lots of start-up Internet companies and increasingly by large enterprises including Netflix and NASA.

When AWS goes down, it can disrupt a notable portion of Internet activity, sometimes for hours at a time. AWS cloud services, such as database offering Redshift, were affected by the Northern Virginia outage on Friday. Some other services, such as Amazon’s Simple Email Service, were back up by 11.24 am, Eastern time, according to Amazon’s monitoring web site…

Grazed from DataCenterDynamics. Author: Editorial Staff.

CenturyLink-owned Savvis has won a cloud hosting contract worth almost US$1.1m over three years from the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC). The order was awarded to Savvis Federal Systems, which will provide managed, scalable public cloud hosting services for www.fcc.gov, myfcc.gov and the commission’s other public website domains.

The contract is for Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) and includes migration of the existing website infrastructure to a CenturyLink cloud data center. Last year, CenturyLink won two task orders to provide private Wide Area Network (WAN) services and Managed Trusted Internet Protocol Services (MTIPS) to the FCC…

Grazed from Piston. Author: Editorial Staff.

Dell can see which way the winds are blowing and has no interest in being left behind. It’s no surprise, then, that it’s basing its cloud on OpenStack architecture as well as deploying (and supporting) other open source software. A July Geekzone article chronicles Dell’s recent announcement that it is expanding its commercial product offerings that leverage open source software like OpenStack and Hadoop.

The fact that Dell is doubling down on the cloud only further indicates how vital cloud computing is for businesses of all sizes – not to mention IT and software companies. Dell is also expanding upon its work with its own Crowbar, an open source community platform to help manage cloud and big data ecosystems…

Grazed from Sys Con Media. Author: David Deans.

There once was a time when many business leaders around the world stood on the sidelines, while the early-adopters of cloud computing reaped the rewards with their first-to-market deployments. Today, managed cloud services are considered a mainstream business technology for all takers — with only the most uninformed laggards still disputing the apparent benefits.

With 90 percent of companies claiming some form of cloud usage, many organizations have moved to the next step, leveraging multiple cloud models in different combinations to optimize benefits and efficiencies, according to findings from the latest market study by CompTIA…

Grazed from Forbes. Author: Joe McKendrick.

In times gone by, people and organizations paid IT vendors for something tangible — be it server boxes or software on a disk. Now with the cloud, IT is no longer a product, it is a service. And as with any kind of service, software has become an intangible that requires ongoing payments. There are a bunch of ways to pay for cloud or Software as a Service — and the industry seems to still be in search of the best formula for attracting and keeping customers.

But for now, cloud and SaaS vendors have settled on four basic models. Byron Deeter, partner with the venture capital firm Bessemer Venture Partners, recently co-authored a paper that reviewed the top pricing models, exploring how each model has evolved, and what’s in it for the customer:…

Grazed from VirtualizationReview.  Author: Jeffrey Schwartz.

Workday, one of the fastest-growing Software as a Service (SaaS) companies, this week launched a big data analytics module to add to its portfolio of human resources and financial applications.  Delivered at the company’s seventh annual Workday Rising conference in San Francisco, the new Workday Big Data Analytics is a key component of the company’s latest update to its SaaS offerings called Workday 20. Workday Big Data Analytics gathers data from its portfolio as well as other data sources to help individuals develop specialized reports and benchmarks.

"For our customers, big data is about opening up the Workday cloud to import non-Workday data to more readily make business decisions," wrote Dan Beck, the company’s vice president of product management…

Grazed from Cloudify.  Author: Editorial Staff.

For many companies, cloud computing might seem like a daunting prospect, the sort of revolutionary technology that only global leaders need to invest in. But in fact the opposite is true; the time, money and energy that can be saved through cloud computing is something that everyone should be taking advantage of.  Cloud computing is a virtual platform which allows companies to access their data: anytime, anywhere, period. Safely stored in the Cloud, company data is accessible for employees, enabling flexible working, enhancing efficiency and reducing costs.

At the same time, data is highly secure, protected from any virtual or physical attacks. To make it a hat trick of benefits, Cloud computing connects colleagues globally ensuring uniformity.  The best part is that cloud services don’t even require users to understand what “saving” is. There’s no longer a need to understand file systems, ushering in a level of simplicity computer engineers have been searching for since the personal computer was invented…

Grazed from TheWhir.  Author: Nicole Henderson.

Cloud provider Virtustream announced this week that it has closed a $40 million Series D investment round led by enterprise software provider giant SAP.  The investment will be used to grow capacity of IaaS growth, and be put into further developing of its xStream cloud management software for enterprise and service provider network. In 2012, Virtustream raised $15 million to help grow xStream and expand into more markets.

The investment comes after a long-standing partnership between the two companies, where SAP was both a strategic partner and customer of Virtustream.  Virtustream’s cloud software and IaaS offerings were built to serve the requirements of enterprise applications, including security, compliance, and SLAs. Its platform was one of the first to be certified to deploy the full line of SAP business applications in 2010…