Category: News

Grazed from CloudTech. Author: William Long.

2014 is likely to prove to be a big year in data protection for many industries – none more so that the cloud computing industry with the possible adoption of the EU’s proposed Data Protection Regulation, implementation of European cyber security strategies and moves by Germany and France to set up a European Communications Network.

In a recent weekly podcast, German Chancellor Angela Merkel suggested a European Communications Network should be set up to avoid potential access to data by the U.S. Government. In the podcast Merkel commented: “We’ll talk about European providers that offer security to our citizens, so one shouldn’t have to send emails and other information across the Atlantic”…

Grazed from ServerWatch. Author: Sean Michael Kerner.

Every six months or so, a new release of the open-source OpenStack cloud platform debuts. The open-source release is followed by the stream of commercial vendors, including Piston Cloud Computing, that harden the upstream bits and enhance the platform with their own solutions. Piston OpenStack 3.0 was officially released last week, and one of its key OpenStack promises is that existing Piston OpenStack users could migrate and update to the new platform without any downtime.

"We’re at the point of maturity in the OpenStack market where a lot of our customers have already tried and failed with someone else’s OpenStack product," Joshua McKenty CTO and co-founder of Piston, told ServerWatch. "So what we’re saying is that if you’re giving up on Mirantis, don’t give up on OpenStack; you should try Piston."…

Grazed InformationWeek. Author: Vikram Jain.

Cloud computing represents one of the most substantial shifts in the IT industry. This is reaching to the point where computing functions as a utility, encouraging innovations still unimagined. Yet the major roadblock to the adoption of cloud has been concerns regarding the security, compliance and privacy of information. Information security is always a priority for any enterprise—whether large or small.

Enterprises need to meet compliance requirements and protect sensitive data or information assets of workforce inside or outside the organization. Additionally, they also need to keep investment and operational costs controlled. According to Gartner, cloud-based security services market will rise to USD 3.1 billion by 2015…

Grazed from ITWorld. Author: Joab Jackson.

Challenging Microsoft’s Windows Azure on its own turf, Red Hat is ramping up services that would offer Microsoft .NET and SQL Server capabilities on its OpenShift platform as a service (PaaS). Code to enable the Microsoft services is being provided by Uhuru Software, a company started by a number of former Microsoft executives and engineers that specializes in rendering Microsoft software as cloud services.

The Microsoft services will not be available immediately, and Red Hat has not set a date for when the capabilities will be ready, either on OpenShift itself, or as part of OpenShift Enterprise, a package for running OpenShift services within an enterprise, said Joe Fernandes, who leads product management for OpenShift…

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: William Jackson.

Microsoft has begun giving a select group of federal customers the chance to put Microsoft’s new government-only cloud service through a series of private tests. "The processes, people, technology, and infrastructure are all in place. We want real-world test loads," for a shakedown cruise, said Greg Myers, VP of federal sales, in announcing the news Tuesday at Microsoft’s US Public Sector Federal Executive Forum in Washington.

Although Microsoft’s commercial Azure cloud offering has received authority to operate under the FedRAMP program for cloud services, the new government platform — announced last fall and called Azure for Government — has not yet been certified. The government-only offering is housed in two specially constructed datacenters located in the United States and isolated physically and logically from the public cloud…

Grazed from Bizjournals. Author: Richard Pinson.

Although it has been around for some time, cloud computing has gained popularity over the past few years, and the business world is embracing it. One of the fastest areas of the shift to the cloud is with email. The demand for remote access from a variety of devices — tablets, smartphones and laptops — has contributed to this trend, as has widespread usage of cloud-based email solutions such as Gmail.

There are numerous benefits to moving to cloud-based email services. Maintaining in-house email servers require higher expertise and security knowledge that ultimately becomes prohibitively expensive. Moving away from an in-house solution allows IT staff more time to focus on other initiatives. The cloud service provider that handles email is responsible for the ongoing hardware and storage maintenance, administration and security requirements…

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: Chris Kanaracus.

SAP is introducing a set of new subscription pricing options for its Hana in-memory cloud computing platform, in a move that falls in step with the pay-as-you-go model common in the cloud computing industry. Customers were already able to bring their existing on-premises Hana in-memory database licenses to SAP’s infrastructure service.

Now it’s possible to buy Hana software via subscription there as well, SAP said Wednesday. A third cloud subscription option adds a series of development tools and services to the infrastructure and Hana software components. Cloud computing has dramatically changed the way enterprise software can be obtained, SAP executive board member and technology chief Vishal Sikka said Wednesday during a press conference, which was webcast…

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Bill Kleyman.

The mist still settles from the burst of cloud computing. New marketing terms, new technologies, new infrastructure optimizations, and entirely new cloud delivery models could fill a dictionary with new acronyms. Infrastructure has evolved, giving us more physical resources to utilize, but a big part of advancements are due to breakthroughs at the logical, or virtual, layer.

This has led to software-defined technologiesof every shape and form. Some deserve an acronym, and some are jumping on the bandwagon. The challenge is to understand the different components that make up the SDX revolution, and how they fit together. You’ll also need to know how these technologies relate to the public and private cloud. Most of all, how do they affect your own datacenter environment, applications, and job?…