Category: News

Grazed from InformationAge. Author: Ben Rossi.

It has been about a decade since cloud computing emerged as the third platform — the next phase of the IT revolution beyond mainframe and client/server. It has taken a while, but cloud services as a platform for enterprise computing are showing signs of maturity, especially where data security and regulatory compliance are concerned.

In the past, these two areas have caused a lot of restless nights for CIOs wondering where their enterprise data is and who is accessing it. Many CIOs are reluctant to adopt cloud services, at least until they can feel confident that enterprise data isn’t at risk and that compliance requirements can be met…

Grazed from PRWeb. Author: PR Announcement.

Nationwide cloud computing and communications provider, NewCloud Networks has selected Veeam to power their state-of-the-art backup and disaster recovery solutions for virtual environments. Having recently expanded their data center footprint, NewCloud was in need of reliable data protection software in order to provide a surefire backup and disaster recovery (BDR) solution to their virtual and hybrid cloud customers.

“Virtualization in the mid-market is on the rise, and with that comes the need for geographic redundancy and true disaster recovery,” says Sam Kumar, President of NewCloud Networks. He adds that “after extensive research by our Engineers, we selected Veeam as our vendor for backup and disaster recovery in virtual environments because they possess the necessary expertise in our technologies as well as dedication to providing top of the line support.” Mike Waguespack, Senior Director of Veeam Software’s Global Cloud Group, stated, “We are excited that NewCloud Networks has selected Veeam. At their rate of growth, we are confident NewCloud will help increase the number of workloads protected with Veeam.”

Grazed from CSA. Author: PR Announcement.

The Cloud Security Alliance (CSA), a not-for-profit organization which promotes the use of best practices for providing security assurance within cloud computing, today announced the release of two key documents related to the CSA’s Software Defined Perimeter (SDP), an initiative to create the next generation network security architecture. The SDP Version 1.0 Implementation Specification and SDP Hackathon Results Report provide important updates on the SDP security framework and deployment in protecting application infrastructures from network-based attacks. CSA will be providing press briefings about SDP developments at Infosecurity Europe.

The SDP, a collaboration between some of the world’s largest users of cloud computing within CSA’s Enterprise User Council, is a new approach to security that mitigates network-based attacks by creating dynamically provisioned perimeters for clouds, demilitarized zones, and data center infrastructures…

Grazed from PR Web. Author: PR Announcement.

Agile IT is being recognized for its innovative approach to helping organizations integrate with Cloud technology by being nominated for the Microsoft Partner of the Year award for Cloud Excellence, a national honor. The Partner of the Year awards highlight and recognize the excellence and achievement of Microsoft partners who have produced exceptional results for their customers, with a focus on extending business productivity systems and delivering the benefits of Cloud computing.

The winner of the award will be announced in late May and awarded at the 2014 Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference in Washington, D.C. this July. “To be nominated for this national award is an honor that we don’t take for granted – especially as we continue to grow our business,” said John Gilham, CEO of Agile IT…

Grazed from CIO. Author: Byron Connolly.

The Federal Government should follow other sectors like banking and adopt a ‘cloud first’ policy for all low risk, generic IT services. This was the first of two cloud-related recommendations made by the National Commission of Audit today. The commission said this policy could help reduce IT costs over the next three to five years as cloud computing becomes the default option.

“The Commonwealth Government has been slow to adopt cloud computing. A reliance on bespoke, legacy systems, concerns about security and privacy of placing public data in the cloud, and general risk aversion all impede progress,” the commission said. The second recommendation was to establish a whole-of-government cloud computing provider panel…

Grazed from MeshIP. Author: Danny Palmer.

The “cloudification of services” means that IT has become the backbone for every other part of the enterprise, and the department needs to evolve in order to keep up with the pace of change. That’s what Frank Slootman, president and CEO of ServiceNow, told the audience during his keynote at the platform-as-as-service IT solution provider’s Knowledge 14 conference, taking place at the Moscone Centre in San Francisco.

“We really think IT needs to start thinking differently about itself. Too many of us think of IT as another department like facilities, HR or a general services type department. We don’t see it that way,” he said, using the metaphor that IT needs to be strong enough to be the organization’s backbone as more move their services into the cloud…

Grazed from Utilizer. Author: Elizabeth White.

SOASTA® Inc., on Tuesday announced that Huawei has selected SOASTA to provide continuous integration and robust functional test automation for its business and consumer offerings. Huawei will utilize SOASTA TouchTest and CloudTest for internal testing of Huawei’s apps, ensuring peak performance and user experiences for its PaaS (Platform as a Service) and IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) ecosystem.

“We chose to work with SOASTA because of its unrivaled leadership in cloud and mobile testing,” said Guoqiang Rong, President of Device Cloud, Huawei. “SOASTA continues to outperform the competition by ensuring top application performance and quality user experiences, allowing our developer base to bring their apps to market quickly…

Grazed from NetworkWorld. Author: Brandon Butler.

It’s hard to tell when a new technology reaches a critical mass that it’s really worth taking a look at and paying attention to. It still may be a little bit early for Cloud Foundry, but all the signs are pointing toward this open source application development platform being one that could impact the cloud computing industry.

Today Cloud Foundry announced some more big-name backers to its open source platform as a service (PaaS). Accenture, BNY Mellon, Capgemini, GE, Ericsson, Intel, NTT and Verizon jumped on board. They already have ActiveState, and CenturyLink, and the Platinum level members including EMC, HP, IBM, Pivotal, Rackspace, SAP and VMware as supporters. That’s an impressive list of corporate partners…

Grazed from EETimes. Author: Rick Merritt.

IBM is applying technology developed for large server clusters to cloud computing systems. The move is another example of how the company is focusing its efforts on the web datacenters that are the fastest growing slice of today’s server market IBM sees a wide array of applications for its distributed job scheduler, now the basis for a U.S. Patent 8,645,745. It described possible uses including trading, retail, online gaming, and medical research services.

"There are a wide variety of job scheduler techniques to optimize resource usage in a cluster, for example by scheduling jobs in parallel," said Eric Barsness, one of the inventors for the IBM patent. "We flipped that model to have multiple job schedulers running in parallel, each managing a subset of jobs," he wrote in an email exchange…

Grazed from WSJ. Author: PR Announcement.

IBM inventors have developed a method for managing how resources are used and work is done within a cloud by distributing control throughout the interconnected systems, reducing bottlenecks and increasing efficiency. The IBM cloud computing invention, U.S. Patent #8645745: Distributed Job Scheduling In A Multi-Nodal Environment, was originally designed to help manage resources in high performance computing systems used for government and academic research. These systems consist of hundreds or thousands of computing resources that are connected to perform complex tasks where demands for system resources can rise and fall dynamically — similar to the model for cloud computing.

Tracking and prioritizing the many requests for service across these systems, as well as the resources needed to fulfill them — processors, storage, network bandwidth, input-output operations — has typically been performed at one central point, which can cause congestion and slowdowns as demand increases. This invention distributes this function across the various systems in the cloud, each managing the traffic within its own system, but also able to see and borrow resources from other systems to ensure speed and efficiency…