Author: David

Grazed from eCommerce Times. Author: Jeff Kagan.

We are still early in this cloud revolution, but there are reasons to tread carefully, whether you are an individual saving your personal data and files, or whether you are a company using the cloud to interact with all your employees or customers. There are real benefits and dangers and, you should be aware of them all.

The cloud may be the future, but it’s not a bed of roses. The Amazon Cloud had a meltdown on Christmas Eve, affecting many customers who use the service. Companies that use Amazon as their cloud, their customers and workers were all affected. What should we learn from this high-profile meltdown?…

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Charles Babcock.

Mirantis, a cloud consulting firm and one of the few OpenStack brain trusts outside of Rackspace, announced Thursday that it has received $10 million in funding from Intel, Dell and WestSummit Capital. The latter is a global investment firm with ties inside China.

Mirantis’ story is a little different than other startups’ because the three-year-old firm has successfully self-funded its own growth thus far. CEO Adrian Ionel said it could have continued to do so. Rather than a handful of entrepreneurs working in a garage, it’s already a staff of 300 consultants and engineers with a list of pedigree customers building major cloud projects, such as PayPal and AT&T…

Grazed from CloudTech. Author: Jennifer Marsh.

Although Microsoft Windows still dominates the desktop operating system popularity, Linux has become a dominant force in cloud servers and virtual private servers (VPS). Linux is not only a cheaper way to host cloud applications, but it also comes in several distribution flavors.

Customers looking at cloud hosting as a solution can choose from CentOS, Fedora, Ubuntu and Debian. Each of these distributions offers the same basic functions, but they have different tweaks that some administrators like over other distributions…

Grazed from Sys Con Media. Author: Maureen O’Gara.

In what would be a major strategy shift Apple is reportedly considering selling a "lower-end" iPhone later this year to meet competition from Android, which has been eating Apple’s lunch with its multiple models. The Wall Street Journal said late Tuesday that the cheaper iPhone, which could impact Apple’s healthy margins unless it attracts the non-iPhone consumer, could look like the classic iPhone but come in a polycarbonate plastic case rather than the iPhone 5’s up-market aluminum housing.

The paper also said "other parts could remain the same or be recycled from older iPhone models." The company recently introduced an iPad mini that’s smaller and cheaper than the standard iPad but there’s only been one iPhone with different storage capacities since the dingus was first introduced…

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: Joe Panettieri.

Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) will bang the drum for its Cloud OS initiative on January 15. The software giant plans to discuss new management products and services that "deliver against Microsoft’s Cloud OS vision."

When Windows Server 2012 launched in Sept. 2012, Microsoft claimed it was the first true cloud operating system. The company’s Hyper-V hypervisor, System Center management tools, and Windows Azure public cloud also play into the cloud OS strategy — which faces stiff competition from established Linux offerings and emerging open source platforms like OpenStack and CloudStack…

Grazed from American Banker. Author: Brian Browdie.

A string of cyberattacks that has bedeviled some of the nation’s biggest banks appears to have a state sponsor who is taking the battle to the cloud. The know-how required to mount the attacks, which have slowed the websites of at least six U.S. banks since December, has persuaded U.S. officials that the disruptions are the work of Iran, The New York Times reported Tuesday.

Though security experts have previously tied Iran to the onslaught, whoever is behind the attacks has showed an ability to shift tactics in ways that has left banks vulnerable, according to security experts. The experts also say that regardless of whether Iran is waging the attacks, cyber thieves from around the globe may be piggybacking on the onslaught to commit fraud…

Grazed from ChannelPro. Author: Editorial Staff.

Two in five people say they have little or no understanding of cloud. While the IT industry continues to talk up the potential power of cloud computing, new research published today indicates the general public’s understanding of ‘the cloud’ is still poor. Hosting firm Webfusion polled more than 1,000 members and discovered that almost two in five (38 percent) said that they had little or no understanding of the term, while only a third (34 percent) said they were confident that they knew what it meant.

Although the poll found that ‘cloudy’ applications such as file hosting services similar to Dropbox, email services like Hotmail or Gmail, or online music hosting such as iTunes were each seen as cloud services by around 30 percent of the population, a similar proportion did not recognise these to be cloud. A much smaller proportion (15.7 percent) said that scalable hosting across multiple servers counted as a cloud service…

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: Joe Panettieri.

Red Hat (NYSE: RHT) will update its open hybrid cloud strategy during a North America partner conference, scheduled for Jan. 14-16 in San Diego. North America Channel Chief Roger Egan, in an interview with The VAR Guy, said telcos, cloud services providers (CSPs), VARs and other types of partners are opening their arms to Red Hat’s CloudForms (IaaS) and OpenShift (PaaS) strategies. But can Red Hat really muscle aside VMware (NYSE: VMW) and Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) as partners seek the building blocks for public and private clouds?

In many ways, Red Hat has successfully diversified beyond its Linux heritage. Moves into the virtualization, storage and middleware markets seem to be taking hold. Roughly 500 people, including roughly 175 partners, will listen to Red Hat’s updated vision during the North America partner conference, which is one of The VAR Guy’s Top 100 Channel Partner Conferences for 2013…

Grazed from NetworkComputing. Author: David Greenfield.

Gone are the days when the cloud meant simply a hosted virtual instance or resource on some provider’s network. We’re seeing all sorts of new variants and twists emerge. I’m not just referring to the use of storage or compute resources or those that allow for elastic computing, such as Amazon’s Reserved Instances.

We’re likely to see industry-specific community clouds emerge. These clouds are built to address the security and compliance needs within specific industries. Examples of community clouds may well be Verizon’s Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) cloud service, which targets the healthcare community; and Metal Lynx, a cloud community targeting buyers and sellers of precious metals…

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: Chris Talbot.

Compliance may not be quite the hot topic it was a few years ago when regulations such as HIPAA and SOX came into being, but it’s still of critical importance to many businesses—and particularly to their customers, who would generally prefer not to have their personal information lost or intercepted. Cloud and managed services provider ViaWest knows this, and has expanded its reporting services for its customers using its data centers.

ViaWest typically provides a variety of SSAE 16 (formerly SAS 70) reports to customers, and now it’s expanding that portfolio to include dual-standard SSAE 16 and ISAE 3402 SOC 1 Type II, SOC 2 Type II, SOC 3, PCI reports on compliance for Sections 9 and 12, as well as HIPAA reports for physical controls…