Author: David

Grazed from Securosis. Author: Editorial Staff.

Securing the Storage Infrastructure and Management Plane: Your first step is to lock down the management plane and the infrastructure of your cloud storage. Encryption can compensate for many configuration errors and defend against many management plane attacks, but that doesn’t mean you can afford to skip the basics.

Also, depending on which encryption architecture you select, a poorly-secured cloud deployment could obviate all those nice crypto benefits by giving away too much access to portions of your encryption implementation. We are focused on data protection so we don’t have space to cover all the ins and outs of management plane security, but here are some data-specific pieces to be aware of:…

Grazed from IDG. Author: Brandon Butler.

Who is Amazon’s biggest competitor in the cloud? The go-to answer for many may be companies like Rackspace with its OpenStack platform, perhaps Google with its Compute Engine, Microsoft Azure, VMware or one of the up-and-coming cloud computing companies like Joyent.

But Mikhail Malamud, founder of cloud consultancy startup CloudAware, says another cloud company could pose the biggest challenge to Amazon’s cloud plans: Salesforce.com. These two companies, Amazon Web Services and Salesforce.com, are two of the leading cloud providers in their respective markets of infrastructure as a service (IaaS) for AWS and software as a service (SaaS) for Salesforce.com. But Malamud believes there is one reason why Salesforce.com could be a formidable foe for Amazon in the cloud moving forward: data…

Back in mid-February, the people who help control security of credit card data, the PCI Standards Console, did us all a favor. They clarified something that technically, should make handling credit cards in, around and through “the cloud” more secure. They released the document called, “PCI Cloud Computing Guidelines.” Certainly, clarification was required. Before this document, if you used a Cloud Service Provider (CSP), you couldn’t be sure whether you had to have a separate audit for them, or if your audits covered everything. It was nebulous, to say the least. 

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Tom Nolle.

A new development in the application programming interface (API) market, Backend as a Service (BaaS), offers devel­opers a whole new dimension of opportunity: cloud services to build the mobile applications of the future. Mobility, mobile broadband and mobile apps are transforming the Internet and the way people communicate and use information. For developers, the mobile app represents an enormous, lucrative new market. From a business perspective, each of the mobile platforms has its own benefits and limita­tions. Each also has its technical framework — its own APIs. Mobile develop­ment platform APIs generally fall into two categories: platform APIs related to the mobile device’s own operating system and middleware, and service APIs related to the access of Web-hosted material.

The new opportunity in APIs is Backend as a Service, an extension of the service API model. The goal of BaaS is to convert common and useful elements of mobile application logic — storage, identity management, social network integration, photo enhancing — into representational state transfer (REST) Web services that the application invokes as needed, making these services "back ends" to mobile apps…

Grazed from ZDNet. Author: Nick Heath.

Since Amazon launched its public cloud service in 2006 it has lowered the cost of using the platform 30 times. The gradual reduction in the price of renting virtualised servers and storage through its EC2 and S3 offerings has driven down the wider infrastructure as a service (IaaS) prices. Amazon announced the latest drop in the price of its S3 storage service yesterday, lowering the cost of making GET requests by 60 per cent and halving the prices for PUT, LIST, COPY and POST requests.

Today AWS dominates the IaaS market, with its cloud services netting Amazon an estimated $700m in revenue in 2011 – about 20 per cent of the $4.23bn that Gartner said the "systems infrastructure" market was worth that year. But do these price drops really make a difference to which IaaS a company chooses? Maybe not, according to Kyle Hilgendorf, research director in Gartner’s service for technology professionals, who said the cost of IaaS has dropped to a point where they have less of an impact…

Grazed from TechZone360. Author: Erin Harrison.

Sony is latest company to get into the cloud business, launching a new subsidiary, Sony Media Cloud Services, which is aimed to provide an online platform for creative professionals to store and share their large and complex media files. Sony’s cloud storage platform – dubbed Ci (pronounced “see”) –is currently in beta production and is designed to provide broadcasters, filmmakers, independent producers and marketing teams with a “one-cloud” solution to collect, produce and archive high-definition content, according to Naomi Climer, president of Sony Media Cloud Services.

“Every day, creative professionals around the world spend numerous hours and resources on non-creative tasks like moving and sharing content, figuring out how and where to store it, and getting the right assets to the right places and in the right hands,” Climer said in a statement…

Grazed from CRN. Author: Ken Presti.

The fundamental challenges associated with moving to a new cloud business model dominated the morning keynotes at the UBM Tech Cloud Connect conference, which is under way this week in Santa Clara, Calif. "Nature abhors a vacuum, and organizations abhor change," said Alistair Croll, vice president of Cloud Ops Research. "Cloud computing is about converting an organization into an organism, in which the component parts are acting in the service of a greater whole."

A variety of speakers described their vision for where cloud computing will lead the industry, and also business-as-a-whole. "The Internet will soon begin to transform industrial functions as machines become intelligent and connected," predicted Bill Ruh, Global Technology Director at General Electric. "This will continue to evolve as long as we can demonstrate a resulting increase in productivity…

Grazed from ITWeb. Author: Admire Moyo.

Cloud computing has disrupted traditional on-premise e-mail archiving, paving the way for interactive archiving. This is the view of Grant Hodgkinson, product director for unified e-mail management at Mimecast, who says e-mail is still the dominant form of communication in businesses today. “The interactive archive is a technology platform that fulfils two important business objectives,” says Hodgkinson. “Firstly, it archives content and data relevant to the organisation so that it can be discovered for compliance purposes later. Secondly, it is accessible to knowledge workers, generally making them more productive.”

According to Mimecast, interactive archiving, driven by the cloud, is a more useful and valuable platform for business users as it allows them to leverage the archive and data therein for business intelligence, end-user productivity, ubiquitous access, and the corporate governance and compliance requirements that underpin the archive itself…

Grazed from InvestorPlace. Author: Brad Moon.

Many of those who know me think I’m a bit paranoid when it comes to computer security. I appreciate the benefits of the cloud and take full advantage of what cloud computing offers, but I’m wary. All of my data — everything from documents to digital photos, music, e-books and movies — is backed up on physical media, multiple times and in multiple locations. I shop online (taking whatever precautions I can) and, as someone who’s invested heavily in the Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) ecosystem, I buy much of my digital content through Apple’s iTunes.

But I’m a little uneasy about the growing importance of the cloud compared to its vulnerabilities. Apple has become a leading online retailer of digital media and has focused considerable energy and resources on the cloud — not just its iCloud service, but also cloud-based functions like Siri and iMessage. A whole lot of integrated Mac and mobile functions are now tied up in the cloud, not to mention loads of personal information and financial data…

Grazed from The Register. Author: Jim Clark.

Platform-as-a-service Heroku spent two years misleading customers because it was so focused on building a new product that it didn’t bother to update old documentation – this is unacceptable. The Salesforce-owned company admitted on Wednesday that customers using its ‘Bamboo" application automation technology could have spent two years paying for a service that used different tech to that found in Heroku’s docs, and that this tech entailed poor app performance that was nearly impossible for both Heroku and Heroku analytics partner New Relic to detect.

An equivalent situation would be a logistics company announcing it had not informed customers that it had shifted from using a central dispatcher to direct its trucks, to a system where each driver had a list of all packages and had to work out the delivery order with other drivers with no central command. Moreover, that this change meant packages were not getting delivered on time and that it had no way of informing customers of the tardiness of their packages…