Category: News

Grazed from CloudComputingInfo. Author: Kenneth van Surksum.

The Xen Project, the community which develops the Xen hypervisor under the GNU Public License (GPLv) and which is now part of the Linux foundation yesterday announced the release of version 1.0 of the Mirage Operating System. The Mirage OS represents an approach where only the necessary components of the OS are included and compiled along with the application into a "unikernel", resulting in more efficient and lean "appliances" which the same or better functionality but a much smaller foodprint and attack surface.

Application code is developed in a high-level functional programming language OCaml on a desktop OS such as Linux or Mac OSX, and compiled into a fully-standalone, specialized unikernel that runs under the Xen hypervisor APIs. Since Xen powers most public cloud computing infrastructure such as Amazon EC2, this lets your servers run more cheaply, securely and finer control than with a full software stack. The release notes for version 1.0 can be found here and the Mirage OS can be downloaded here

Read more from the source @ http://cloudcomputing.info/en/news/2013/12/the-xen-project-releases-version-1-0-of-its-mirage-operating-system.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Virtualization_info+(virtualization.info)

Grazed from Bloomberg. Author: Alex Barinka.

International Business Machines Corp. (IBM), the world’s largest provider of computing services, continues to face economic challenges as it tries to reignite declining sales, Senior Vice President Erich Clementi said. Demand for technology services, IBM’s biggest source of revenue, “depends on what the economic climate is, and that has not been very encouraging,” Clementi said at a Bank of Montreal conference today in New York. “Europe has shown signs of recovery. North America has been a little more uncertain.”

Many businesses remain wary about spending money on physical assets, such as computer hardware, machinery or warehouses. Instead, they’re using software and cloud-computing services to increase efficiency and reach more customers over the Internet. While IBM ultimately expects to benefit from that shift to the cloud, the hardware slump has contributed to six straight quarters of declining revenue. “The big bet is on cloud and the software that are on top,” Clementi said…

Grazed from CIO Insight. Author: Karen A. Frenkel.

At last month’s annual Georgia Tech Cyber Security Summit, security experts from academia, private industry and government gathered to discuss new technologies and strategies to ward off sophisticated cyber-attacks. The resulting report, "Emerging Cyber Threats," discusses emerging threats, their potential impact and countermeasures. The report notes that organizations face a dilemma: they must protect information from data-stealing malware while allowing employees to efficiently access data in order to do their jobs.

"With recent revelations of data collection by the federal government, we will continue to see a focus on cloud security," says Wenke Lee, director of Georgia Tech’s information security Center. "But encryption in the cloud often impacts data accessibility and processing speed. So we are likely to see increased debate about the tradeoffs between security, functionality and efficiency."…

Grazed from Midsize Insider. Author: Robert Lawson.

Cloud storage will be changing in a number of ways in the coming year, with various features and capabilities evolving as more businesses adopt the technology to store their small and midsize businesses’ data. Storage trends in 2014 will be driven by strong consumer and business demand for improvements in flexibility and scalability. Changes to both will include revisions in infrastructure, cost, performance, features, capacity, security and reliability.

A Demand For Flexible Storage

Cloud computing technology has been around for longer than its coined phrase has been, but with its increasing application by both business and consumer users, storage is becoming a concern for IT providers and departments in small and midsize companies. This might mean taking a look at the storage capability infrastructure…

Grazed from Midsize Insider. Author: Marissa Tejada.

Servers will increasingly be shipped to cloud service providers, a new survey by IDC finds, as cloud computing creates a shift in how servers are being used in today’s business world. This trend shows that more businesses are choosing to migrate to the cloud and software-as-a-service (SaaS).

Shipments for the Cloud

According to InfoWorld, IDC predicts that up to 30 percent of all servers that will be shipped in 2014 will be shipped to cloud services providers. Within four years, that number will increase to 45 percent. Part of the reason for this is that IT professionals are aiming to lessen the amount of servers that they manage. Other reasons include increased implementation of SaaS and virtualization technologies and plans by firms for data center consolidation. Businesses are getting rid of certain servers to acquire denser servers that can handle larger amounts of data…

Grazed from Sys Con Media. Author: Jiten Patil.

Disaster Recovery (DR) has typically only been used by organizations for applications deemed to be mission critical. This was because organizations didn’t want to incur the expense associated with DR for less important applications. Today, because of cloud computing, many organizations are considering the use of DR for as many applications as is essential for the business. DR in the cloud is relatively a new concept still and, like many technology trends we’ve seen so far, there’s a lot of hype and misinterpretation out there.

Multiple schools of thought exist on whether or not to implement DR in the cloud. Today, cloud-based DR has shaken up traditional legacy approaches and presents a persuasive alternative. Some organizations see cloud as a part of their DR plan, and for some, the cloud has become the de-facto DR plan…

Grazed from OpenMarkets. Author: Ari Studnitzer.

Today, I am on a panel at the Bloomberg Enterprise Technology Conference in London to talk about all recent developments ushering in the next generation of financial technology. It probably won’t surprise many to hear that we are living and benefiting from an era of convergence – from network access to data to digitization to cloud computing. Convergence has become the new black. With a desire for increased transparency and risk management, we are experiencing the convergence of OTC with common clearing and Trade (Swap Data) Repositories along with Swap Execution Facilities and the increased trading of standardized products.

Convergence is the name in cloud computing where advancements in compute, storage, and network are converging to enable new capabilities, decrease cost, and introduce scale previously thought unimaginable. Mobility is furthering that convergence with access from anywhere enabled itself from a convergence of voice, network, compute, and software. Just as cloud and mobile computing are enabling new business models and driving innovation, convergence in the financial industry is creating similar opportunities and new drivers for technology innovation…

Grazed from Jeda Networks. Author: PR Announcement.

Jeda Networks (www.jedanetworks.com) today announced that it has been named winner of the 2013 UP-START Cloud Award for the category "Best Cloud Storage Solution." The company was recognized for its flagship Fabric Network Controller (FNC), a Software-Defined Networking (SDN) approach to storage that solves the cost, complexity and scalability issues inherent in many of today’s storage networks. The UP-START Awards are part of the UP Cloud Computing Conference and honor disruptive, next-generation cloud computing companies who are defining key elements of cloud technology.

Jeda Networks was selected from ten other companies by cloud industry experts during a two-stage open vote on the Up Cloud Computing Conference website and LinkedIn. Conference attendees accounted for the third and final round of voting, selecting the most outstanding cloud solution as measured by technical innovation, marketability and likelihood to be a market leader…

Grazed from SysCon Media. Author: Paige Leidig.

For some organizations, cloud computing can be a hard sell, even before you come to the question of how to handle cloud-computing security. Public cloud, private cloud, hybrid cloud, encryption, tokenization, data residency, privacy regulations – all are factors involved and the perceived effort can sometimes seem to overshadow the benefits. But just as cloud computing comes with a slew of demonstrated business benefits, so does effective cloud computing security. Included below are three specific benefits to implementing a cloud computing security system…

1. Regulatory compliance prevents costly fines.

One of the most common reasons enterprises have for investing in cloud computing security is, of course, regulatory compliance. Heavily regulated industries like finance and health care – industries that handle the most sensitive personal information – must remain in compliance with relevant regional, national, and international laws, as well as with industry-specific standards. Failure to do so can come with a high price. In fact, banks that fail to comply with the PCI DSS requirements, for example, may face fines of anywhere from $5,000 to $100,000 per month, costs that tend to get passed downstream, resulting in higher costs for all, according to the PCI Compliance Guide’s FAQ…

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: Chris Talbot.

A new application from CloudPassage combines the cloud infrastructure security firm’s Halo event data with correlation and analysis from Splunk Enterprise 6 to monitor security events on both public and private cloud servers. CloudPassage Halo App for Splunk Enterprise was designed for users of both CloudPassage and Splunk to collect 80 unique security event types across cloud infrastructures, and then analyze and correlate the data with other machine data indexed within Splunk Enterprise.

According to the two companies, the new app enables end users to create unique dashboards for insights that come from pairing Halo’s "massive event data" with Splunk Enterprise’s ability correlate and analyze data. Additionally, the application provides the ability to geo-locate user login attempts and cloud computing instances on any cloud provider for additional insight and control into cloud infrastructure services…