Category: News

Grazed from ProofPoint.  Author: Editorial Staff.

The cybersecurity landscape has grown increasingly complex this year. As cloud computing and bring your own device policies have taken center stage in the enterprise, hackers have adapted to the sophistication of the technologies deployed by IT departments.

Large-scale data breaches and cyberthreats hit such trusted firms as Facebook, Dropbox and Adobe, putting millions of users’ sensitive information at risk. It’s clear that data protection in the cloud is an ongoing battle – and as adoption becomes a necessity rather than an option, firms have to prepare themselves to protect their corporate clouds from an ever-changing set of threats…

Grazed from GreatResponder.  Author: Maria Dehn.

The Amazon web services announced its cutting edge cloud computing instances C3 backed by SSD storage and premium processors a few weeks back. It is seeing an unprecedented demand across all domains and regions, which is exerting a heavy pressure on the available cloud resources of the service.

Greatresponder.com – This was informed through a blog post by Jeff Barr an official of the AWS cloud computing services associated with the recently announced cutting edge instances called C3. He writes in his blog that since its launch, C3 instances have been seeing amazingly high demand for modern cloud servers, which are backed by the modern solid state disk SSD storage and premium processors 2.8 GHz Intel E5-2680 v2 ‘Ivy Bridge’ and other latest technologies. This unprecedented demand is putting extra pressure on the existing resources available for this service – sometimes, they are proving to be insufficient to the demands of the customers across all regions…

Grazed from CloudComputingIntelligence.  Author: James Walker.

No one group has all the expertise needed to create a perfect cloud environment – it needs expertise in application behaviour, datacentre design, network and machine virtualisation, wide area networking and so much more. Getting this all working together calls for collaboration, and the CloudEthernet Forum is the way to do it, says CEF President, James Walker

Sometimes society needs to pause, waiting for one single word or symbol that encapsulates its fundamental need, before moving on. Like a seed crystal dropped into a super-saturated solution, the word “cloud” has become the rallying cry for a range of “as a service” business models now spreading like wildfire. And yet the basic idea – that it makes economic sense to invest heavily in central resources and save money on cheaper access to those resources – has been around since the days of the mainframe computer…

Grazed from FederalTimes.  Author: Nicole Blake Johnson.

A year and a half since its designation as the Pentagon’s cloud service broker, the Defense Information Systems Agency is still working through the logistics of managing cloud services departmentwide.  More than 40requestshad been submitted to DISA for cloud services, said Jennifer Carter, DISA’s component acquisition executive. Of those, DISA has matched a dozen Defense Department customers with potential services to meet their cloud computing needs, including those offered by DISA and the private sector.

But only one of those arrangements has resulted in a contract award, according to DISA. The others are in various stages of the contracting process.  “As we move to what we would consider more full operational capability, we’ll be basically automating how we do that, and also working to establish more maturity on the cloud offerings that DISA has, as well,” Carter said of matching customers with cloud offerings…

Grazed from Eduserv.  Author: Ivan Harris.

In any relationship, breaking up is hard to do. This is frequently true when it comes to IT professionals where there can be a reluctance to walk away and move on from the in-house IT infrastructure they manage. And like any relationship which is near or past its sell by date, failing to move on when the time is right can result in a lot more pain in the longer term. So how can you tell if you and your in-house infrastructure need to go separate ways? Here are five signs you should be aware of:

1. Physical evidence: the most obvious sign is there is no room left for your IT infrastructure to grow and meet your future needs. This could be down to a lack of real estate for rack space or the inability to service the power or cooling needs of what is there already. Either way, if the only way you can grow is by major reconfiguration of people and office arrangements then it is a sure sign that you should consider cloud computing to meet your future needs…

Grazed from CIO.  Author: Rebecca Merret.

Private and hybrid cloud models, IT departments acting as cloud brokers, more competition among providers and a maturity in services is where ‘as-a-service’ computing is heading in 2014, say analysts.  Michael Warrilow, research director at Gartner, says more enterprises will look to use public and hybrid cloud models next year as they realise “it’s impossible to private cloud everything”.

“We will see ever-more public cloud adoption … public [cloud] is probably going to be 70 to 80 per cent of cloud workloads,” he says.  “It is hard work to private cloud everything. You have got to be like a cloud provider but you have also got to be like traditional IT as well. So you have got to do security, service delivery, etc. People will be too ambitious. We think they should only target private cloud for the most important and relevant workloads.”…

Grazed from Midsize Insider. Author: Rick Robinson.

As pilots know, cloudy skies can make for a bumpy ride. According to one analyst firm, IT managers at midsize firms may also need to plan to fly around turbulence. The cloud computing marketplace is maturing amid fierce competition, and as many as one in four of today’s cloud providers could be gone by 2015.

Most of these providers will be acquired by other firms, but there is also the potential for some to go bankrupt. For midsize firms, the risk of turbulence in the cloud could be a serious matter. In the worst case, a cloud provider could evaporate, with its data centers going dark and the data they hold being lost without a trace. That is the nightmare scenario. It is more likely that a cloud provider will disappear through acquisition. The transition might be seamless, or it might mean major changes in service offering, sending some firms looking for alternative solutions…

Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Derrick Harris.

Google’s Compute Engine cloud doesn’t yet have a Hadoop offering of its own, but the platform is making a name for itself as a viable, if not ideal, place to run big data workloads. The latest validation came on Thursday when Qubole, the Hadoop-as-a-service startup from Hive creators Ashish Thusoo and Joydeep Sen Sarma, announced an option that users choose to run on Compute Engine, which they claim provides better performance than Amazon Web Services.

Specifically, a company spokesperson told me via email, Qubole has seen 2-3x faster startup times for virtual servers using Compute Engine over Amazon EC2 and more reliable performance from Google Cloud Storage than from Amazon S3. We’ll also assume that AWS is the “CloudX” against which Qubole engineer Praveen Seluka benchmarked Compute Engine, some results of which he shared on the Google Cloud Platform blog…

Grazed from Forbes. Author: Ben Kepes.

One of the common comments about cloud computing is that it opens up the floodgates to so-called shadow IT, the trend of end users self-provisioning solutions either because of IT reluctance to give them what they need or due to apathy about IT policy. A recent survey by vendor Workshare highlighted this situation and in particular the trend of mobile users to circumvent IT and use unsanctioned applications for file sharing and collaboration. The survey took in around 6000 employees in both the US and EMEA and looked at their broader mobile device and file sharing activities. Some high level findings:

• 72% of those questioned had not received authorization from their IT department to use their consumer-based file sharing application, up from 66% in 2012.
• Over half (62%) of knowledge workers use their personal devices for work
• The majority (69%) of these workers also use free file sharing services to collaborate and access shared documents, which is a 3% increase over the last year.
• Larger companies, with over 20,000 employees, had a greater grasp of data security issues around file sharing applications. In contrast, companies with fewer than 500 employees had a much lower proportion (24%) of employees using authorized file sharing solutions…

Grazed from Forbes. Author: David Prosser.

There was a time when technology represented a barrier to entry for companies targeting new markets. The high spend required on IT in order to break into many markets acted as a brake on competition. Small businesses, in particular, found it difficult to compete with larger, more established rivals.

The advent of cloud computing, however, has turned that argument on its head, levelling the playing field for companies of different sizes. As they are now able to buy software and capacity as and when it is needed through cloud-based structures, small businesses no longer have to make huge upfront investments in order to get up and running in a new market. Those with good ideas for innovation can just get on with it, challenging the existing players…