Author: David

Grazed from USA Today. Author: Byron Acohido.

Edward Snowden’s whistleblowing escapades could seriously undermine the growth of cloud computing and thus stifle the growth models for America’s biggest tech companies. And that appears to be the reason why Apple CEO Tim Cook, AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson, Google computer scientist Vint Cerf and other tech executives met behind closed doors with President Obama Thursday.

"The meeting appears to be for a variety of reasons, but basically the companies want to understand exactly what the government is doing with their systems as they try to assuage a lot of concerns from a lot of different stakeholders," says Brian Henchey a privacy and information tech attorney at Baker Botts…

Grazed from GlobalNewswire. Author: PR Announcement.

Cbeyond, Inc., the technology ally for small and mid-sized businesses (SMBs), today announced it will participate in Cloud4SMB Expo and CVx ChannelVision Expo, both collocated with ITEXPO West, August 27-29, at the Mandalay Bay Resort & Conference Center in Las Vegas, Nev. Hosted by TMCnet and billed as "the world’s largest communications and technology event," ITEXPO West explores new ways to leverage powerful communications solutions to expand business. Cbeyond cloud experts will be featured on multiple panels and be on hand at booth #224 to discuss the company’s cloud and network solutions for channel partners targeting SMBs.

Cloud4SMB Expo is the first event of its kind focused on the unique needs and challenges of small and medium businesses (SMBs) seeking to leverage the benefits of cloud computing solutions. ChannelVision Expo (CVx) is designed to help channel players and wholesale service providers develop partnerships that cross traditional lines of business…

Grazed from ComputerWorld. Author: Joanie Wexler.

It’s funny how computing and networking trends fall in and out of style cyclically. The patterns are reminiscent of home furnishings and fashion, except that with computer networking, it won’t do you much good to hold on to the old stuff and bank on being able to use it when it becomes faddish the next time. It’ll be too slow, too big, too insecure, too clunky, too something. But the concept behind it might persevere into another era.

This is a roundabout way of pointing out that distributed computing, which became the “in” thing when PCs hit the scene, is likely on its way out. Will it be forever? Who knows, because for most of us mere mortals, it’s impossible to imagine what the future holds. But what we do know is that some trends with virtualization, cloud computing, and wearable gadgets are changing up again where the brunt of computer processing resides…

Grazed from CloudPro. Author: Rene Millman.

SureCloud has added IT process automation functionality to its compliance Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) offering in a bid to help organisations more easily meet their ISO 27001 compliance obligations. The company said one of the main barriers to more widespread adoption of ISO 27001 is that often organisations do not possess the in-house knowledge and expertise, nor do they know where to start. ISO 27001 is the recognised industry standard for establishing, implementing, operating, monitoring, reviewing, maintaining and improving an Information Security Management System (ISMS).

SureCloud pointed to the 2013 Information Security Breaches Survey from the Department of Business Innovation & Skills survey which found that only 25 per cent of respondents have fully implemented ISO 27001, and a similar number haven’t started nor do they intend to…

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: Chris Talbot.

Google (GOOG) Apps partners and customers now have a new auditing tool available free of charge. BeyondTrust, which has focused on providing context-aware security intelligence products, has released PowerBroker Auditor for Google Apps to its user community.

Developed to "ease the burdens associated with auditing these commonly used web applications for proper usage and compliance," PowerBroker Auditor aims to automate the previously manual tasks of gathering auditing events and creating reports for operations management, security and compliance officers, and internal and external auditors…

Grazed from GeekZone. Author: Editorial Staff.

Unisys Corporation is partnering with Intel Corporation to bring to market a secure computing platform designed to handle the demanding requirements of mission-critical cloud and big data workloads, while offering Unix clients a cost-effective path off legacy RISC-based platforms onto an Intel-based environment.

The new platform, to be released later in 2013, will build on the unmatched security Unisys delivers in mission-critical computing. It will combine Unisys’ advanced secure partitioning (s-Par) technology with the computing and security features of Intel Xeon family processors, providing an extremely flexible and powerful environment. The platform will support a range of Intel’s high-performance, availability and security innovations for the Xeon processor family…

CloudCow contributed article.  Author: Tom Kirk, Business Development Representative, Xtium.

Business continuity plans are a must in today’s environment, where even a few hours of downtime could be very costly in lost revenue. Data backup procedures are a critical part of these business continuity plans. But as the menu of backup options increases with the introduction of new technologies it can be difficult to pick criteria around which to base your data backup decisions.

Whether you are looking to replace aging infrastructure, have suffered from faulty or incomplete backups, or are just planning for the future, here is a comparison of the three most common options—tape, disk and cloud backup—along with criteria of price, labor, efficiency and longevity.

Pivotal, the company setting the new standard for enterprise Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), today announced it has named Savvis, a CenturyLink company, to the Cloud Foundry advisory board to help guide the Cloud Foundry ecosystem as it fosters continued open innovation and community growth.

Following Pivotal’s recent commitment from IBM to join Cloud Foundry’s advisory board and be a community contributor and CenturyLink’s June addition of fast-growing PaaS provider AppFog to its Savvis cloud portfolio, the addition of Savvis to the Cloud Foundry advisory board will enable even more developers and organizations to build the next generation of applications on the cloud.

Grazed from PRNewsWire. Author: PR Announcement.

Today, Cloud Connect Chicago, produced by UBM Tech, announces a new conference program built around the most competitive enterprise cloud stacks including OpenStack, CloudStack and Amazon Web Services. As the premier technology event for the cloud community, featuring the latest technologies, strategies and innovations, Cloud Connect will return to Chicago October 21—23 in a new downtown location, McCormick Place. For more information or to register visit: http://www.cloudconnectevent.com/chicago/.

For many organizations, cloud computing has become an integral part of IT, but they continue to face critical technology decisions as competing platforms push for market leadership. As such, this year’s program for Cloud Connect Chicago pits major industry players against each other with five conference tracks, each to represent a divergent cloud software strategy: Amazon Web Services & Eucalyptus, CloudStack, OpenStack, Platform-as-a-Service and Virtualization & Private Cloud. As the unique architectures have both benefits and limitations, speakers affiliated with the different tracks will address key technology considerations and business impact across the leading use cases…

Grazed from ComputerWorld. Author: Juan Carlos Perez.

Dropping the veil of secrecy over Office 365 uptime, Microsoft has released availability data for each of the past four quarters and is celebrating the results. Between July 2012 and June 2013, the overall quarterly uptime for the cloud-hosted email and collaboration suite hit 99.98 percent, 99.97 percent, 99.94 percent and 99.97 percent, Microsoft said on Thursday in a blog post.

Those percentages are calculated based on the number of minutes in each calendar month and the number of minutes in which the Business, Government and Education editions of Office 365 were available worldwide. "Individual customers may experience higher or lower uptime percentages compared to the global uptime numbers depending on location and usage patterns," the blog post reads…