Author: David

Grazed from Business Wire. Author: PR Announcement.

The forecast for cloud computing in 2013? A veritable downpour of innovation: the first touch-based operating system. Greater emphasis on the “open cloud.” Apple’s new virtual server. VMWare’s new “self-service” virtualization product. And that’s just for starters. “With openness comes questions of security and data and application interoperability, among other issues.”

For an IT environment defined by seemingly non-stop evolution, cloud computing will welcome a host of groundbreaking technologies in 2013, according to Infinitely Virtual CEO Adam Stern. “In looking at innovations shaping the cloud hosting and computing environment for next year, I believe this will be the most exciting time in the history of the cloud model,” Stern says. “Whether you’re a medium-size business or an early stage startup, in 2013 you will be able to take advantage of new technology that gives you both greater control over your virtual environment, and also more flexibility.”…

Grazed from The Houson Business Journal. Author: Lisa Chason.

Businesses all over the world are making the leap to the cloud as a cost-effective way to store and protect vast amounts of transactional data and information. Financial institutions are no different. However, given the sensitive nature of the data that banks handle with every transaction, it is crucial to understand how to design and deploy the right cloud solution to ensure security of customers’ information.

In recent years, security breaches impacting financial institutions and their customers have been widely reported, so banks are continuously updating their security platforms — and may be hesitant to transition to the cloud, which is sometimes perceived as less secure…

Grazed from Security Info Watch. Author: Deborah O’Mara.

Prism Skylabs, based in San Francisco, recently unveiled a new partner program for systems integrators. The Silicon Valley company, a cloud-based service that is changing the way video is accessed, stored and analyzed, recently launched the program designed specifically for installation companies who understand the importance of bringing a differentiated product to market.

With little or no barrier to entry and the ability to offer the service to current customers with smaller IP/IT footprints consisting of off-the-shelf hardware, the program gives participants an easy way to leverage the existing video infrastructure, add value and increase their recurring monthly revenue…

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Charles Babcock.

VMware announced Monday that it has integrated its virtualized environment software with its cloud management products, putting into one box the software that generates virtual machines, applies cloud management, and introduces performance and capacity management to the resulting environment.

Dubbed VMware vCloud Suite 5.1, it combines the latest version of three previously separate products: vCenter Operations Management Suite 5.6 for virtual systems management; vFabric Application Director 5.0 for deploying applications in a virtual environment; and vCloud Suite 5.1 for managing pooled resources as a cloud operation…

Grazed from SMH. Author: Brad Howarth.

While many businesses are still weighing up the benefits and risks of cloud computing, the cloud saved the skin of Australian games developer Halfbrick when dealing with the explosive popularity of its Fruit Ninja games.

Halfbrick’s executive producer Dale Freya said the launch of Fruit Ninja Frenzy on Facebook resulted in user numbers rocketing from hundreds of thousands to millions.
“At one point Facebook did a promotion on the game, and we weren’t even aware of it,” Freya said. “The game went from one million active monthly users to about 9 million in the course of a couple of months.”…

Amazon Web Services Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com company (NASDAQ: AMZN), today announced that the AWS Marketplace now supports Windows-based software and other new software categories including Big Data solutions. AWS Marketplace is an online store that makes it easy for customers to find, compare, and immediately start using the software they need to build products and run their businesses. Customers can now quickly discover and 1-Click deploy software products running on Windows Server to the AWS Cloud, including well-known business intelligence, database, and hosting solutions. As with all products in the AWS Marketplace, customers pay only for what they use and can scale their software up or down as needed. Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances running Windows Server, include 2003 R2, 2008, 2008 R2, and 2012 editions, and as with all Amazon EC2 Windows instances, customers have the option of enterprise-class support and updates, while taking advantage of the security, scalability, and pay-as-you-go pricing of AWS. To learn more about the AWS Marketplace, visit http://aws.amazon.com/marketplace.

Grazed from CloudPro.co.uk. Author: Davey Winder.

A new research paper has described how hackers can benefit from Google for cheap cloud computing – will this open the floodgates? Because I spend the most of my working day writing about the IT security space, you might think I get to read an awful lot of research papers concerning proof of concept threats and potential exploits.

And you would be right. On the whole, while these are interesting enough to someone such as myself, when it comes to the actual real-world risk posed to your average enterprise by such research that is best summed up in the title of a recent blog of mine: Cryptography attack: side-channel cloud threat is all nerd and no knickers. I concluded that particular piece by saying that "If you are a business with real data out there in the real cloud, and assuming you’ve followed basic security best-practice strategies, including the rather obvious non-use of public clouds for highly sensitive data storage, you can move on: nothing to see here…"…