Category: News

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: Chris Talbot.

Total Defense has made a major update to its Total Defense for Business security offering that the company says will provide new features and functionality to its end users, as well as to its channel partners, particularly managed services providers (MSPs). According to the company, the updated version of the cloud security offering provides a more expansive analytics package to help customers make smarter decisions in strengthening security for web, e-mail, data leakage and endpoint security assets.

Total Defense calls the offering a "unified content and endpoint security service" that is delivered solely via the cloud. The company targets traditional "legacy" products with the offering, promising much higher scalability and flexibility. Total Defense for Business is also deployable in hours rather than days or weeks, the company noted in its announcement…

Grazed from BetaNews. Author: Robert X. Cringely.

Amazon Web Services quietly released on Tuesday a pair of new instances on its EC2 cloud computing service. Not just new instances but a whole new type of instance aimed at 2D and 3D graphical computing. For the first time from AWS in a generally available instance, developers and users will have access to virtual machines with GPUs.

It’s like putting a PC in the cloud. More properly it is like putting your PC in the cloud. I think this has great disruptive potential. And that means we’ll see similar services coming soon from other cloud providers. Autodesk must think it has potential, too, because it’ll be offering several applications on the new platform, though notably not AutoCAD, at least not at first…

Grazed from Develop-Online. Author: Seth Tipps.

Agawi is bringing its True Cloud app streaming platform to the new high-power GPU provided by Amazon Web Services EC2 G2 instances. The new cloud computing instances Amazon unveiled yesterday allow developers to take advantage of DirectX and OpenGL when developing games for deployment on a streaming service, and backs them with a pretty potent GPU on the hardware side.

“This is a big step forward in virtualizing apps in the cloud and cost-effectively streaming them to any mobile device in the world with the lowest interactive latency possible,” said Agawi co-founder and CEO Rohan Relan. “We are leveraging our cutting-edge technology and work with AWS to deliver a compelling and scalable platform for multiple use cases."…

Grazed from Midsize Insider. Author: Marissa Tejada.

Cloud computing security services are on the upswing according to the latest figures from Gartner. The IT research firm predicted that cloud security services will be worth $2.1 billion in 2013 and rise to $3.1 billion in 2015, with certain services exhibiting the biggest growth potential.

Focus on Security

Gartner’s latest figures featured in an article on eWeek found that the top three cloud services include email security, Web security services and identity and access management (IAM). Gartner also reported that cloud-based tokenization and encryption, security information and event management, vulnerability assessment and Web application firewalls specifically will see the highest growth within the next year. The report also found that more firms are aiming to use cloud-based IAM services to replace on-site IAM tools…

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Michael C. Daconta.

Gartner research director Richard Watson once observed, "When the CIO issues the simple directive: ‘Move some applications to the cloud,’ architects face bewildering choices about how to do this, and their decision must consider an organization’s requirements, evaluation criteria and architecture principles."

Unfortunately, many architects assume that migrating your legacy systems means migrating your applications to the cloud. However, the reality is that such a migration involves both data migration and application migration. Each of these must be assessed, planned, designed and executed separately and then integrated. They are two parts of the same migration of a legacy system, but each requires different analysis steps and different skill sets…

Grazed from TheVarGuy. Author: Editorial Staff.

OpenStack, the open source cloud program, has achieved multiple milestones this week. Cisco Systems (CSCO), Canonical, Hewlett-Packard (HPQ), Red Hat (RHT), VMware (VMW), Mirantis and others have announced major moves at this week’s OpenStack Summit in Hong Kong. From cloud services providers (CSPs) to VARs, it’s time for the IT channel to take a much closer look at this technology and its business implications. Here’s why.

OpenStack started off as an open source project led by Rackspace (RAX) and NASA. The idea was to help customers and CSPs rapidly stand up private and public clouds rapidly. In theory, if OpenStack became ubiquitous, it would allow customers and service providers to more easily move workloads from one cloud to another. In some ways, OpenStack has also emerged as a potential standard alternative to Amazon Web Services (AWS)…

Grazed from ScienceDaily. Author: Editorial Staff.

A software re-encryption system could allow users to pay for and run applications "in the cloud" without revealing their identity to the cloud host. The same approach would also allow the software providers to lock out malicious users. Writing in the International Journal of Grid and Utility Computing, Ronald Petrlic, Stephan Sekula and Christoph Sorge of the University of Paderborn, Germany, explain how the emergence of cloud computing has allowed end users access to powerful computer resources hosted at remote locations via the internet.

Such services include simple applications such as web-based email and file storage as well as more sophisticated social networking and multimedia communication tools, website hosting systems, file editing and manipulation and many other applications. However, with ease of access, comes the issue of privacy. To utilize proprietary cloud services users must provide personal details or otherwise tie their identity to the digital rights management (DRM) system or the license built into the software…

Grazed from The HuffingtonPost. Author: Daniel Burrus.

Thanks to exponential advances in processing power, bandwidth, and storage (what I call the three change accelerators), the business environment is undergoing a major transformation. I have been tracking the trajectory of these three change accelerators for the past thirty years and they have now entered a predictable new phase–one that will transform every business process.

In fact, based on the technology-enabled hard trends that are already in place, including advances in cloud computing and virtualization, over the next five years we will transform how we sell, market, communicate, collaborate, innovate, train, and educate. In order to fully understand how cloud computing and virtualization will work together in new ways to transform the business world, let’s take a quick look at the evolution of each…

Grazed from CloudTech. Author: Russell Poole.

It is over five years since the term ‘cloud’ was first adopted into the mainstream to describe a fundamental change in how – and where – information technology is deployed. Cloud’s building blocks had been developing for several years prior: the rise of the Internet as a backbone for service delivery; hardware platforms so powerful that they could run multiple web scale workloads; and the opening of standards for application and infrastructure architecture; all contributed to the cloud phenomenon, which went beyond simple hosting or application service provision.

The ability for providers to create massively scalable, homogeneous computing platforms enabled new delivery models which, it was clear, would reach beyond what had previously been possible in terms of processing capability, at the same time as making costs more affordable. No wonder, then, that industry players were so excited…

Grazed from CloudComputing. Author: James Bourne.

Open cloud provider Rackspace has rolled out a complete revamp of its public cloud with Performance Cloud Servers – and according to Nigel Beighton, international VP technology and product, it represents a serious shift in how companies use their servers. The architectural redesign of the Rackspace Performance Cloud Server comes with four times the total RAM, double the CPU performance and 132 times the I/O of its competitors, according to benchmark tests.

But Beighton argues that simply drooling over the figures is the short-sighted approach. “The more interesting sub-context here is that this is responding to the changing nature of applications on cloud,” Beighton told CloudTech. “When I look back over six months worth of data, we’ve had an increase of 200% over that six months of people taking what we call ‘fat slices’, which fundamentally takes the whole machine…