Author: David

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: Chris Talbot.

Dell is looking to the channel to continue growing its vCloud offering. The company officially announced on its blog the formation of the Dell Cloud Channel Partner Program, which gives partners in the Dell PartnerDirect program the ability to resell Dell’s cloud product or act as a referral partner for Dell’s direct salesforce.

It’s good to see Dell work with its channel to bring its cloud offerings to the market. Over the last few years, there has been a lot of talk about how channel and direct salesforces clash at times over cloud offerings, and although this won’t be a pure channel play by Dell, at least Dell is giving a little and working with its channel instead of strictly in conflict with it.

Stephen Spector posted on his Dell blog about the new channel partner program that will provide Dell’s partners with access to vCPUs, memory, storage networks, IP addresses, firewalls, catalog capabilities and additional services around the company’s Dell Cloud with VMware vCloudDatacenter Service. The opportunities are only available to partners in the Dell PartnerDirect program…

Grazed from ITWorld. Author: Brian Proffitt.

The travails of former Gizmodo writer Mat Honan may illustrate the dangers of the consumerization of the cloud, and serve as a reminder that when it comes to security, the human factor may still be the weakest link.

Honan’s story is pretty frightening: in the course of 15 minutes Friday afternoon, a hacker was able to access his Apple iCloud account, obtain access to his Gmail account by executing a password reset request, and then–after obtaining access to many of Honan’s other accounts, including his access to the Gizmodo Twitter account–proceeded to remotely wipe the data from Honan’s iPhone, iPad, and MacBook, using those devices’ Find My feature.

It was a stunning hack, and one that might have been quietly swept under the Apple rug as “user error,” had not the victim been a well-known technology writer with the social clout to find out answers…

Grazed from Broadcast News. Author: Editorial Staff.

Telx®, a leading provider of global interconnectivity, cloud computing enablement services and data center solutions, today announced that John Freimuth has joined the company as General Manager, Cloud and Enterprise Services. Freimuth brings more than 20 years of consulting, business and IT development experience within financial, healthcare and large-scale business organizations to his new position, where he will focus on maximizing market penetration and bringing new products and solutions to market.

Freimuth will drive all facets of Telx’s cloud and enterprise business solutions, and driving growth of the company’s extensive capabilities to deliver innovative products and solutions for its growing roster of customers. He joins Telx from Internap, where he served as Vice-President of managed hosting and cloud computing. Freimuth was responsible for the overall results of this strategic business unit which became the fastest growth area for Internap. Freimuth was responsible for business development, product management, and product strategies which included the launch of new managed hosting and cloud services…

Grazed from NetworkComputing. Author: Ericka Chikowski.

As organizations start to develop more robust mobile security policies and strategies, they’re looking for mobile device management (MDM) functionality that goes above and beyond simple remote wipe and password management features. Last month’s Black Hat conference in Las Vegas featured a number of talks on the subject, as well as mobile security products announced during and after the show. Here’s a look at some of the releases, as well as the latest vulnerability management and forensics products:

Often, much of the MDM value-add is the context or overall product framework around which the particular device management functionality is built. In the case of BeyondTrust’s PowerBroker Mobile, which was launched at Black Hat, that context is the PowerBroker vulnerability assessment portfolio, which the company picked up with its acquisition of eEye Digital. The new mobile component plays into PowerBroker’s overall endpoint and vulnerability management platform by adding tablets and smartphones to the equation. PowerBroker Mobile offers provisioning and configuration management, plus policy management for VPNs, email, passwords, device encryption, remote locking, GPS tracking and (of course) remote wipe. It’s all built into the same PowerBroker platform to add mobile devices to a company’s governance, risk and compliance (GRC) policy and reporting workflow…

Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Derrick Harris.

Most of us have a lot of data in the cloud, housed in storage services such as Dropbox, e-mail applications such as Gmail or everyday web services such as Facebook. Most of us probably don’t keep it as safe as we should, either. Although certain methods of attack are beyond our control — such as the social engineering attack that befell Wired staffer Mat Honan last week — if you’re willing to undertake a little extra effort, there are still plenty of methods to prevent intruders from seeing your information.

1. Be smart about passwords and security questions.

Ideally, passwords and usernames should be unique for each service so a breach at one doesn’t result in carte blanche access to the rest of your accounts (if the LinkedIn breach didn’t beat the practice into our collective head, nothing will). Passwords also should be obscure enough that someone won’t be able to guess them if they know a few factoids about the target. And complex helps too: interspersing numbers, symbols and upper-case letters makes it harder to guess even if someone gets the phrase right…

Grazed from NextGov. Author:  Eric Katz.

Federal information technology officers view cloud computing as an important part of their agencies’ futures, but specific implementation plans are not yet well known within agency management, an industry report has found.

IDC Government Insights found that while 90 percent of more than 400 IT and business managers surveyed said cloud computing will have some impact on their department’s future, an alarming number did not know the long-term plans for the technology or how to budget for cloud solutions.

Thirty-four percent of the executives surveyed did not know their agency’s cloud budget, while 23 percent of civilian managers were not aware their agencies’ long-term plans, according to the report…

Ninefold has today launched a VMware-based platform on the Ninefold public cloud allowing customers greater choice and flexibility when selecting a cloud platform upon which to run their Ninefold cloud services.

Ninefold’s public cloud service (credit card subscription, self-service, usage based competitive pricing & open API) now offers a VMware cloud platform that many enterprises and business already use to support their mission-critical applications – all located and supported from Australian data centres. This offer will afford Ninefold customers greater portability and further optimisation across a hybrid cloud model.

Alert Logic, the leading provider of Security-as-a-Service solutions for the cloud, today announced general availability of Alert Logic Web Security Manager with ActiveWatch to protect web applications against the most common threats and attacks. The solution combines industry-leading web application firewall (WAF) technology with advanced managed security services from Alert Logic’s Security Operations Center, addressing the operational challenges associated with legacy WAF solutions which have hindered broad adoption of this important security control.

“Web application firewalls are powerful tools for protecting custom web applications, however, often there isn’t free staff or rack space to bring the WAF on premise,” said Gartner Analyst Greg Young. “A managed as-a-service WAF offering can jump these hurdles.”

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Sonja Lelii.

Hewlett-Packard Co. today moved its HP Cloud Object Storage and Cloud Content Delivery Network (CDN) out of public beta and into general availability as it tries to take on market leaders Amazon S3 and Google.

HP sells its cloud services to providers and claims it is best suited for Web content, backup and archiving, storage tiering, disaster recovery and "big data." HP’s service-level agreement (SLA) promises 99.95% uptime, and it will pay service credits if it falls below that number.

HP’s strategy is similar to EMC’s with its Atmos cloud object storage platform, which providers can use to build cloud services around. But HP’s most formidable competition will come from Amazon’s established cloud services…

Grazed from AccountingToday. Author: Michael Cohn.

The how-to guide, “10 Steps to a Digital Practice in the Cloud: New Levels of CPA Firm Workflow Efficiency,” is written by John Higgins and Bryan Smith, a pair of CPAs who also hold the Certified Information Technology Professional credential.

Firms need to have a comprehensive technology plan, according to Higgins, because “it’s very easy to invest in the wrong solutions at the wrong time.” That can be expensive, both in terms of dollars and staff time lost, he added.

“The accounting profession has developed a good understanding of the concept of cloud computing, but not its value proposition,” Higgins said. “Firms often have difficulty seeing the strategic value of technology.”…