Category: News

Grazed from WhaTech. Author: Joe Austin.

Asigra Inc., a leading cloud backup, recovery and restore software provider since 1986, today announced selection by ChannelPro Magazine as a 2013 All-Star technology vendor. All-Star vendors, distributors, and membership organizations were selected by ChannelPro Magazine readers as the most partner-friendly in the channel today.

The ChannelPro All-Stars is a professional guide created by the channel for the channel to serve clients in the computing marketplace. Comprised of vendors, professional associations, and distributors, the All-Stars guide highlights the partners ChannelPro readers go to for IT solutions and business development programs to help them thrive in today’s fast-paced business environment…

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: Chris Talbot.

Web hosting and cloud services provider DreamHost has updated its OpenStack-based public cloud offering with the newly released Havana version. The DreamCompute beta is one of the first of many Havana-based public clouds to make it out of the gate.

With the integration of OpenStack Havana, DreamHost is now offering continuous integration and deployment for packaging and rolling out the latest open source cloud computing platform’s features, which include new security functionality. DreamHost plans to keep on top of OpenStack releases, upgrading its public cloud computing offering as new versions are launched…

Grazed from Channelnomics. Author: Larry Walsh.

Sophos Ltd.’s ascension to cloud computing aims to let solution providers offer cloud-based security services that complement or replace, but not compromise, legacy software and infrastructure investments. Unveiled last week, Sophos Cloud will offer endpoint security services in which solution providers and end users can buy and manage protection for PCs and mobile devices through a cloud-based portal. The goal is to simplify the deployment and management processes, resulting in enhanced protection.

“Cloud vendors have disrupted the channel with the cloud model. We’ve been careful as a channel-first company that when we go to the cloud, we do it in a channel-first manner,” said Bill Lucchini, general manager of Sophos’s Cloud Group…

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: Eric Knorr.

The year isn’t over yet, but I’ve already reached my limit of trying to make sense of many new developments. So I’m ready to start the season of prognostication early. Originally, I figured I’d reel off some predictions about the coming year.

But we’re at one of those rare junctures when a bunch of trends have begun to crystallize — and I’m pretty sure many of them will persist for more than 12 months. Here’s my mixed bag of nine trends. Feel free to add your own…

Grazed from MSPMentor. Author: Joe Panettieri.

Amazon (AMZN) CEO Jeff Bezos and ConnectWise CEO Arnie Bellini appear set to address different technology markets and different audiences next week. But if you listen closely, MSPs will discover the two markets are on a collision course — as cloud monitoring, RMM software, BDR, file sharing, and more converge in the IT channel.

Here’s what you need to know the two key conferences — IT Nation (Nov. 13-15, Orlando) and AWS re:Invent (Nov. 12-15, Las Vegas) — and how they may shape the MSP and cloud landscapes for 2014. First let’s look at the big picture. Over the years, the IT Nation conference has helped resellers and VARs to accelerate their managed and cloud services businesses…

Grazed from NetworkWorld. Author: Jon Oltsik.

We’ve all read the marketing hype about “shadow IT” where business managers make their own IT decisions without the CIO’s knowledge or approval. According to ESG research, this risk is actually overstated at most organizations but there is no denying that IT is getting harder to manage as a result of BYOD, cloud computing, IT consumerization, and mobility.

As these trends perpetuate, CISOs find themselves in the proverbial hot seat – it’s difficult to secure applications, assets, network sessions, and transactions that you don’t own or control. So what can be done? I’ve had this very discussion with a multitude of CISOs who’ve come to a similar conclusion: When you can’t control everything, you better have tight control and oversight over what you have. This type of security strategy centers on 5 areas:…

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: Chris Talbot.

Centrify has launched a new identity-as-a-service offering that provides both Active Directory- and cloud-based single sign-on, access management, application management and mobile management across cloud, mobile and on-premise applications.

The new Centrify User Suite, SaaS Edition was designed to help organizations eliminate "password sprawl" and gain centralized control over access to SaaS applications and mobile devices in the enterprise. The real focus of the new SaaS offering is to tackle the "too many passwords" problem that most (okay, all) people are currently dealing with, and then provide a secure way for end users to gain access to apps, even when out of the four walls of the enterprise…

Grazed from ComputerWorld. Author: Anh Nguyen.

Cloud technologies are offering businesses agility but not the cost-savings they expect, a survey of senior IT directors has found. The survey of 50 senior IT decision-makers, including CIOs, IT directors and heads of IT, at UK companies with more than €1 billion (£0.85 billion) turnover, found that while 74 percent of respondents expected to see operational cost savings by using cloud, only 41 percent actually achieved these savings.

Alsbridge, the sourcing advisory firm that commissioned Coleman Parkes to conduct the survey, said that the mismatch of expectations with reality was because businesses were looking at cloud as a technology rather than at the problem that needed fixing…

Grazed from The Var Guy. Author: Christopher Tozzi.

Ceph, the open source, scalable, software-defined storage platform for the cloud and Big Data, is officially ready for the enterprise. That’s what Inktank, the company behind the system, has indicated with the release of Inktank Ceph Enterprise, which is now publicly available.

Inktank is offering the solution on a subscription basis. It offers support services and value-added deployment tools related to the Ceph platform, which itself is free and open source, and features Ceph version 0.67, which includes important enterprise functionality such as copy-on-write and compability with the Swift API, as well as a graphical management application aptly named Calamari…