Category: News

Grazed from BusinessInsider.  Author: Julie Bort.

All of the industry’s biggest tech players are going gaga chasing the cloud-computing market these days:

•     Cisco just vowed to spend $1 billion to build a new cloud to compete with Amazon’s Web Services.
• Microsoft spent about $8 billion on cloud computing R&D in 2011 and spends billions more each year on its cloud data centers in 16 regions around the world.
• IBM is spending $7 billion to beef up its cloud.
• Oracle is in the process of building a cloud, too, with parts of it already being used by beta testers, CEO Larry Ellison recently said…

Grazed from MSPMentor.  Author: Michael Brown.

Return on investment (ROI) has been a common performance measurement tool for companies for decades.  However, now it’s come to the attention of numerous companies that perhaps a new variation of ROI will be needed to accompany the arrival of cloud computing.   From this piece over at Forbes:  “A new survey of 350 senior IT executives finds 16 percent see measuring ROI as a hurdle to their cloud computing implementations”

Traditional ROI is based upon the hard monetary return on the purchase and use of products or services.  However, the long term gains from the cloud are not always so easily calculated in a purely financial way…

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: Dan Kobialka.

Researchers claimed earlier this week that they found 30 security flaws in Oracle’s cloud services. Security Explorations, a Polish security and vulnerability research company, published details about security defects it reportedly discovered in Oracle’s Java Cloud Service. In addition, Security Explorations released an attack code that it said would allow hackers to remotely attack apps hosted in Oracle’s US and EMEA data centers.

Security Explorations details its findings in two reports that are available for download here. A Security Explorations security issue disclosure timeline showed that Oracle was notified about 28 security issues on January 31, and another two issues on February 2. Adam Gowdiak, the CEO and founder of Security Explorations, told PCWorld that he decided to publish his company’s findings because Oracle did not immediately respond to the security issues…

Grazed from The Var Guy. Author: Michael Cusanelli.

EMC (EMC) has announced several new products and technologies to add to its data protection and cloud computing portfolio, designed to aid IT companies in protecting their infrastructures while adding support for cloud environments and data protection as a service delivery. Chief among these releases are the company’s Data Protection Suite, Data Domain Operating System and VPLEX and RecoverPoint products. All three focus on storage protection for enterprise users and utilize EMC’s latest in data protection and disaster recovery.

“Over the past few years we’ve delivered numerous integrations that, together with a workload-agnostic protection storage platform as an anchor, provide a protection storage architecture. Today, we are announcing products and new integrations that enable customers to deliver a complete spectrum of data protection and availability capabilities as a holistic, consumable service,” said Guy Churchward, president, EMC Data Protection and Availability Division, in a prepared statement…

Grazed from eWeek. Author: Jeffrey Burt.

Google is making its in-house software-defined networking technology available to organizations using its Compute Engine cloud computing platform. Google has been at the forefront of software-defined networking (SDN) for the past couple of years, developing an OpenFlow-based system dubbed Andromeda for internal use.

Now the Web giant is bringing that network virtualization technology to Compute Engine, a move that will enable customers to "see major performance gains in throughput over our already fast network connections," Amin Vahdat, a distinguished engineer at Google, wrote in an April 2 post on the company’s blog. Andromeda already is available in two Compute Engine zones—us-central1-b and Europe-west1-a. Over the next few months, Google will migrate all of its zones to the SDN platform, wrote Vahdat, who gave a presentation about Andromeda in March at the Open Networking Summit…

Grazed from eWeek. Author: Sean Michael Kerner.

The annual Interop Las Vegas conference, which this year ran from March 31 to April 2, provided insight into a number of sectors of the IT landscape. While the Interop show has its roots as a networking interoperability showcase, the event has expanded to look beyond the network. "To be a networking architect today, you also have to consider applications, cloud and security," says Interop General Manager Jennifer Jessup.

"It’s no longer about just looking at the network." To that end, the Interop 2014 event had multiple sessions on security, including one from the chief information security officer of Western Union. The cloud was also a topic of discussion and presentation at the Cloud Connect Summit, which was co-located with Interop…

Grazed from TheCloudSimplified. Author: PR Announcement.

Established IT firm Xperience Group has launched a new cloud computing platform, thecloudsimplified.com, on 1st April 2014 which enables users to purchase, manage and provision servers in less than 30 seconds, from as little as 23.50 per month – which is further enhanced by a limited time 50% discount for new customers.

The Cloud Simplified (thcloudsimplified.com), a public and private cloud computing platform built on Xperience’s two new world class cloud computing platforms, enables individuals and businesses alike to self provision servers in record breaking time and at competitive prices…

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Laura Aberle.

While cloud computing is the hottest of hot topics, businesses can be lukewarm when it comes to privacy, security and information governance in the cloud. But recent events such as Edward Snowden’s revelations about mass surveillance at the National Security Administration have turned up the heat, according to Else Khoury, the manager of information management services for Niagara Region, a municipal government body in Ontario, Canada. In her AIIM 2014 session "Getting Lost in the Cloud: Privacy Risks and Cloud Computing," she said that privacy has become one of the most buzzed-about issues in information management.

Khoury acknowledged that privacy in the cloud is only one of many challenges discussed at AIIM, but the problems she touched on extend into information governance in the cloud as a whole and to AIIM’s overarching theme of information overload creating chaos but also opportunity…

Grazed from PR NewsWire. Author: PR Announcement.

IBM inventors have patented a cloud computing security technique that enables app developers to ensure that data notifications are securely and confidentially pushed to and from mobile devices. Maintaining the privacy and confidentiality of data shared via mobile networks is a priority for developers, service providers and end-users, yet IBM security researchers found that insufficient security protocols in mobile applications can risk exposing details of data notifications pushed across mobile networks, potentially exposing personal or sensitive information to service providers.

This mobile security exposure is problematic and limiting to organizations that wish to use mobile notifications to communicate sensitive information with their customers, such as a credit card company wanting to notify a customer of suspicious charges or a bank may need to alert customers to suspicious account activity…

Grazed from Responza. Author: Sunni Campbell.

There are some old servers out there reaching the end of their lifespans and its important to consider the pros and cons of jumping to the cloud instead of performing a one-to-one replacement. Here we investigate some of the exciting benefits of moving to the cloud. We touch on security, backup, maintenance, and technical architecture strategy – major factors that should be contemplated when considering any changes to your IT environment. Here are some starter questions to get you thinking:

• Is your hardware older than five years and out of warranty?
• Do you have many users working remotely either from home or in satellite offices?
• Is your organization changing or growing rapidly?
• What are your security needs?…