Category: News

Grazed from Cloud Computing Today. Author: Arnal Dayaratna, Ph.D.

Blue Box recently announced the release of its early adopter program for OpenStack Hosted Private Cloud. As a result, customers interested in developing applications on OpenStack can now turn to Blue Box for help with the likes of deployment and configuration, load balancing, scalability and customer support. Blue Box’s managed, OpenStack private cloud offering will be based on code released directly by the OpenStack Foundation. As such, the solution leverages OpenStack Nova for compute, Neutron-based software defined networking, a Horizon web interface for configuration and resource allocation and Keystone for authentication and policy management.

The early adopter program supports recent releases such as OpenStack Havana and Grizzly and plans to update OpenStack deployments to subsequent releases from the OpenStack Foundation as they become available. Key components of the Blue Box offering include management of OpenStack orchestration, “including monitoring and release management,” according to the company’s press release. Blue Box also delivers security functionality that accommodates HIPAA and PCI protocols…

Grazed from WhaTech. Author: Shuna Boyd.

Fujitsu introduces the next generation of ‘market-making’ cloud platform service, enabling CIOs to harness the broad potential of cloud with the complete business agility and innovation that cloud delivers. The Fujitsu Cloud Integration Platform – for which pre-release testing is now available for early adopter clients – delivers everything required to integrate, aggregate and manage all cloud services and traditional ICT from a ‘single pane of glass’ to ensure all data is protected, identity is assured and services are governed.

Business leaders continue to enthusiastically adopt cloud services that deliver competitive advantage. The challenge for CIOs is how to manage and ensure appropriate governance and control across an increasingly diverse portfolio of cloud services without adding management overhead or being seen as blocking progress. Over the next three years, Fujitsu predicts organisations will introduce more than 30 cloud services from multiple providers into their existing ICT landscape. CIOs need tools to manage this growing complexity…

Grazed from CMSWire. Author: John Mancini.

While there’s no question that cloud computing is here to stay, the numbers suggest that the need to manage content in the cloud has a variety of business drivers. The challenge facing organizations is that these various drivers are not necessarily consistent or aligned with each other.

Driving the Demand for Cloud Solutions

The needs and requirements of individual knowledge workers provide one driver, as reflected in "AIIM Trendscape: Content and the Cloud." Workers are struggling with assuring availability of their critical work content not only on their work-issued laptops, but also on a variety of personal devices and in countless locations. Many CIOs suddenly find themselves surrounded by hundreds of cloud-based sync and share downloads totally outside the purview or even awareness of the IT department….

Grazed from Business2Community. Author: Jorg Bouman.

Nowadays, internet companies and their associated customers are increasingly relying on the Cloud for their services. This obviously has many advantages. However, there are also a few very serious downsides of providing and using software, infrastructures and services from the cloud. Most of the time a lot of business processes are completely depending on the continuous and uninterrupted delivery and performance of the services of these internet companies. If a service faces unexpected downtime, business processes could potentially come to a complete stop with all the possible and serious consequences.

Reputation depends heavily on uptime

What good is secured data and great business software from the cloud if the data or service isn’t available? In fact, downtime of these services could lead to serious losses in revenue, customers and reputation. Therefore, to these companies and its customers hosting and the associated uptime levels are crucial…

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)…