Category: News

Grazed from ZDNet. Author: Colin Barker.

Malware makers are increasingly turning to the cloud to host their adware and other malicious code. According to a report by research firm Solutionary, malware distributors are rapidly and widely adopting cloud computing. They do so by either buying services directly from legitimate domains or by compromising them in other ways, the report said.

"The cloud has become a preferred mode for malicious actors who are using cloud computing for many of the same reasons that legitimate customers are," the report said. Rob Kraus, the research director for Solutionary said: "Malware and, more specifically, its distributors are using the technologies and services that make processes, application deployment and website creation easier."…

Grazed from Biztech2. Author: Editorial Staff.

Hitachi Data Systems Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary of Hitachi, Ltd., and Verizon Enterprise Solutions today announced an agreement to develop a software-defined storage solution based on Hitachi Content Platform (HCP) and Hitachi Content Platform Anywhere (HCP Anywhere) for the new Verizon Cloud.

Verizon is focused on developing an ecosystem of enterprise technologies built to run on Verizon Cloud, the company’s new infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and object-based storage offering. HCP and HCP Anywhere are the latest enterprise-class technologies to be added to the Verizon Cloud, offering tools that enterprises can use to move their businesses forward as cloud-based services…

Grazed from Techopedia. Author: Robert Springer.

While it’s not quite a chicken-or-the-egg conundrum, Software as a Service (SaaS) couldn’t exist without the cloud. Even so, if there are two terms people tend to confuse, it’s SaaS and cloud computing. They do have a lot in common, but they aren’t the same. Here we’ll take a look at their differences.

The Cloud Vs. SaaS

Loosely defined, the cloud could be used as a synonym for the Internet, if the Internet is defined as the worldwide internetwork of computers. Connections to the Internet (cable television, fiber-optic cables, DSL or wireless) that connect businesses and consumers to resources (email, websites, Twitter feeds) stored on servers are what make up the cloud…

Grazed from CIO. Author: Ed Tittel.

OpenStack is an open source cloud computing platform. Designed as an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) environment, this project describes itself as seeking to produce a "ubiquitous open source cloud computing platform for public and private clouds." OpenStack is also something of a computing industry phenomenon, as more than 200 software, hardware and service companies are involved.

OpenStack emerged from a joint initiative undertaken by Rackspace Hosting and NASA in mid-2010, with a primary aim to permit organizations to offer (or consume) cloud computing services running on standard hardware elements. Early code was a combination of the NASA Nebula cloud computing platform and the Cloud Files platform from Rackspace. Since mid-2010, the project has maintained a regular six-month release cycle and a detailed schedule of release milestones, orchestrated through a semi-annual planning meeting called the OpenStack Design Summit…

Grazed from GreatResponder. Author: Maria Dehn.

This is one of the exciting announcements for the students and faculty of the Tecnológico de Monterrey University in Mexico to use their expertise and knowledge of cloud computing technologies in the development of network designs based on the distributed cloud environment. This was announced by the Bell Labs on January 15, 2014 that it has devised a research and development project in the domain of cloud computing; for that purpose, it has established a collaborative partnership with the Tecnológico de Monterrey University in Mexico.

This project will be carried out in the Campus Cuernavaca of the university of Tecnológico de Monterrey Mexico. This project of the research and development department of the Alcatel Lucent company called ?Bell Labs? would be one of the futuristic project in the domain of the cloud computing technologies, which will provide a springboard for both the students and the faculty of the university to apply their expertise, knowledge and research skills in the practical and real environment of cloud computing infrastructure to be established by the Bell Labs…

Grazed from CloudComputingNews. Author: Editorial Staff.

Keeping up with the day-to-day HR needs of a growing workforce can significantly affect your efficiency. Paperwork, approvals, requests for information and staying compliant: all take you away from your strategic focus. A cloud-based HR system can help remove the administrative stress from your growing HR needs and allow you to concentrate on your business.

You already use the cloud

It’s amazing how many people are aware of "The Cloud" but don’t know they’re using it, over 75% of businesses are in, or are looking to move to the cloud for a variety of reasons. But first, if you’re on Facebook, Twitter, shop online or bank online you are actually more familiar to the cloud then you already know. They all use the cloud because it’s simple, it?s mobile and pretty much anyone can use it, working in real time makes your life easier. This is why HR is moving to the cloud, for the same reasons you use the above; Instant access, easy to use. Cloud makes business simple! So you’re probably wondering how The Cloud can reduce your HR burden in 2014?…

Grazed from MarketWire. Author: PR Announcement.

GreenButton(TM), the leading provider of compute intensive and integrated on-demand cloud solutions, today announced a partnership with NVIDIA, which complements the company’s existing offerings in the Digital Media and Entertainment industry, and provides a more complete service for both studios and freelance artists. The Academy Award(R) winning mental ray(R) is the most widely available production rendering solution in the world, and the native renderer within the Autodesk(R) Maya(R), 3ds Max(R), and Softimage(R) product suites. By enabling mental ray in the cloud through GreenButton, users of Maya, 3ds Max and Softimage will now have the ability to access massive computing resources on-demand at an extremely affordable cost.

"NVIDIA is very pleased to make mental ray available in the Cloud with GreenButton," said Phillip Miller, director of NVIDIA Advanced Rendering Products. "As the rendering quality of productions continually rises there’s an ever growing need for more processing power to satisfy it. GreenButton now enables mental ray artists to have the rendering power of a major studio to ensure their creative vision isn’t constrained by local resources."…

Grazed from CloudComputingExpo. Author: Paul Miller.

The ‘platform’ tier in the middle of cloud computing’s architecture is being squeezed, folded and reshaped beyond recognition. Even with continued investment, can it survive the transformative pressures forcing down upon it from the software/application layer above, or the apparently inexorable upward movement from the infrastructure layer upon which it rests?

To look at recent investments and enthusiastic headlines, it would be easy to assume that Platform as a Service (or PaaS) is on the up. RedHat recently trumpeted the launch of OpenShift Enterprise – a ‘private PaaS,’ whatever that might be. Eagerly tracked super-startup Pivotal pushed PivotalOne out to the world, strengthening the position of the Cloud Foundry PaaS offering upon which it sits. Apprenda, a PaaS that almost predates wider recognition of the term, secured an additional $16 million to continue expanding. And, more tightly integrated into Salesforce’s latest vision for world domination, Heroku continues to attract enthusiasts…

Grazed from FierceCIO. Author: David Weldon.

By all accounts, activity in the cloud will continue at a thunderous pace in 2014, and the SaaS and IaaS markets are expected to be especially strong. A recent study by GigaOM Research finds that the cloud computing market is on pace to grow by 126 percent in 2014, Business 2 Community has reported. That includes a growth in the software-as-a-services market of 119 percent, and growth in the infrastructure-as-a-service market of 122 percent.

The news isn’t all good in the IaaS space for vendors, however, as Gartner recently predicted that one-in-four IaaS vendors will disappear by the end of the year, due to feverish competition. Another major trend: "as the cloud matures, larger established businesses and enterprises have started to get on board public and private cloud platforms," the article notes…

Grazed from Forbes. Author: Ben Kepes.

One of the awesome things about cloud computing, especially when it comes to Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), is that customers don’t have to even think what sort of hardware is used to run their virtual machines. The rise of the cloud has mirrored the rise of low cost, commodity hardware and the move away from IT caring about what brands sit in their data centers. You’d have thought then that cloud would pose a real threat to vendors whose widgets tend to be differentiated by brand – in a nameless, faceless world, what do they have left to go with?

Which is why it is so perplexing from the outside, an an undeniable coup from the inside, that Intel INTC has managed to take its "Intel inside" brand and make it relevant in the cloud world. Even more perplexing when we first saw it, late last year, was that it wasn’t a second rate underdog using the branding – that would have made sense as a kind of a point of differentiation against the incumbent…