Author: David

Grazed from NetworkWorld. Author: Editorial Staff.

The technology industry is about to come together next week for VMworld in San Francisco. In the span of a few short years, this show has become a real showcase of the latest and greatest IT technology and industry vision. At VMware, every company wants its IT department to look like Amazon, Google or Zynga, running applications on fully-automated and orchestrated cloud computing platforms, and easily managing thousands of servers and petabytes of data across multiple data centers.

Maybe we’ll get there someday – maybe. For now however, many companies can’t get beyond basic use of these technologies. Why? There are lots of reasons but information security issues remain at the top of the list…

Grazed from Business2Community. Author: Ann Smarty.

The cloud is a very complex, and yet oddly simple configuration where there is a low likelihood of failure and a lot of speed and scalability built right in. But of course, just like anything else in the world, it does have some problems.

Among those problems is that it is not perfect, regardless of how much great talent, money, and time have been spent making it as close to perfect as is humanly possible. Additionally, cloud computing is also going to forever face the challenge of human nature. While there may one day be a better solution to the problems that cloud computing solves, it will most likely carry a great deal of staying power…

Grazed from Datamation. Author: Pedro Hernandez.

Piston, a San Francisco-based cloud computing startup, is making it easier for organizations to jump on the OpenStack bandwagon with a free distribution of the fast-growing open source cloud platform called Airframe.

Intended as a stepping stone to the company’s paid Piston Enterprise OpenStack product, Airframe is targeted at organizations that are thinking of adopting the private cloud services model and are evaluating the alternatives. Piston hopes to stand out by making it easy for organizations to get up and running quickly with minimal risk, low management overhead and little in the way of IT investment…

CloudLinux (http://www.cloudlinux.com), the developer of the only operating system (OS) tailored to the needs of shared web hosting providers, announced today its latest sales and distribution figures. These figures reveal a particularly high adoption rate, with 9,000 servers now running on the CloudLinux platform.

“This is a momentous occasion for the CloudLinux team,” says Igor Seletskiy, Founder and CEO at CloudLinux. “We have always had absolute confidence in CloudLinux to improve the level of service that hosting companies can offer and enhance the experience of their customers – but nobody’s opinion is more important than the industry’s. The latest figures show that shared hosting providers recognize the value of CloudLinux, and are deploying the OS on all their shared hosting servers.”

Grazed from HeroldOnline. Author: Editorial Staff.

OpSource, Inc., Dimension Data’s wholly owned enterprise cloud and managed hosting business, today announced that the company will exhibit at VMworld 2012, to be held August 26 – 30 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. The conference, hosted by VMware, brings together IT professionals and decision-makers across a wide range of industries. OpSource will be exhibiting at booth #318, showcasing its cloud computing solutions and services that are designed to help enterprises increase business agility.

OpSource will share with attendees the many ways companies can benefit from public and private cloud solutions based on the VMware’s vSphere virtualization software. Built on VMware’s toolset, OpSource’s cloud servers are highly configurable, secure, virtual machines that provide granular control and allow easy customization…

Grazed from CloudTimes. Author: Zath Cruz.

According to a recent IDC research, the segments of the government sector that are least enthusiastic about cloud computing are the local governments, which is ironic at best as they are the ones who stand to benefit the most from a shared-resource model compared to on-premises IT.

Based on the research, which surveyed over 400 IT employees from local, state, and federal governments, it was the local IT guys who were “least optimistic” about cloud computing, with 14.7 percent of the group stating that cloud wasn’t important at all to them. When it comes to federal IT guys, there was only 10.4 percent who responded the same way, while defense department federal IT people had 8 percent, and state IT has the lowest at 7.1 percent who considered cloud as not important…

Grazed from MSP News. Author: Shahin Pirooz.

Moving to the cloud can mean different things to different people, and it all comes down to what exactly is being delivered as a hosted solution. As CTO at CenterBeam, I’ve heard from a lot of customers frustrated when moving to the cloud because they ended up having to do much of the work themselves.

They thought the cloud was going to simplify IT management, but in many cases, the consumer-class solutions that are offered from companies such as Amazon and others that offer Infrastructure as a service (IaaS) only solutions created more work in terms of integrating all the pieces to ensure they worked properly together…

Grazed from Phys.org. Author: Editorial Staff.

A new class of organic materials developed at Northwestern University boasts a very attractive but elusive property: ferroelectricity. The crystalline materials also have a great memory, which could be very useful in computer and cellphone memory applications, including cloud computing.

A team of organic chemists discovered they could create very long crystals with desirable properties using just two small organic molecules that are extremely attracted to each other. The attraction between the two molecules causes them to self assemble into an ordered network — order that is needed for a material to be ferroelectric…

Grazed from: ITWeb. Author: Ugan Naidoo.

Cloud providers should have a documented process for handling access rights, including employees entering or leaving the company, or changing roles. Regular audits should be performed to confirm that all privileges match current roles and needs.

Once access security is understood, it is important to determine how the systems housing your most sensitive information will be secured and the data itself controlled. This will mean considering how to secure virtual and multi-tenant environments.

Access control tools can be configured to restrict access to individual virtual machines based on the privileges of each hypervisor administrator identity. This helps ensure that even in a shared environment, only the appropriate administrators have access to an organisation’s virtual machines. Because virtual environments are so dynamic, security controls must be automated, and individual virtual machines must be managed in a way that conforms to their required security…

Grazed from CRN. Author: Doug Woodburn.

The industry body behind a new security stamp for cloud computing providers is confident it will carry the same clout as an ISO badge.

The Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) is rolling out what it claims is the world’s first security-focused certification scheme for cloud computing providers, in partnership with the British Standards Institution (BSI).

The CSA Open Certification Framework is divided into three tiers: a basic, self-certification tier that is already available; a second, independently assessed tier set to go live next year and that draws on ISO 27001; and a top tier structured around a continuous monitoring-based certification that is still under development…