Category: News

Grazed from Business2Community.  Author: Robert Cordray.

As more and more of our digital lives are being stored on clouds, the security of these networks has come under more serious scrutiny. A recent study conducted by the Ponemon Institute revealed that of 4,000 businesses and IT managers worldwide that were surveyed, 80% plan to move or are already moving confidential information to cloud networks within the next two years. In fact, about half of respondents said they already do store such information on a cloud.

Even the federal government has implemented major efforts and funds to move its gigantic information systems to the cloud. In fact, with a $2 billion annual budget for cloud computing, the feds are perhaps becoming the largest cloud user in the world. However, with a recent report revealing major vulnerabilities in the NASA cloud network, it is evident that this shift needs to be done with great caution. Fortunately, other recent news shows a significant slowing in the federal government’s cloud computing initiative, which hopefully means agencies are taking great care to protect the sensitive information which is and will be stored in the cloud…

Grazed from InformationWeek.  Author: Elan Yorad.

In the past few months, we’ve seen more and more coverage of how existing laws have been used to gain access to cloud-based data without the data owner’s knowledge or consent. What’s different with the latest revelation, as highlighted in The New York Times recently, are reports of the National Security Agency actively trying to undermine encryption technology and standards, including those adopted by National Institute of Standards and Technology, such as the Dual EC DRBG standard.

Does this mean that the NSA’s reach into electronic communications is so profound, and its abilities to dig into our communications so extensive, that businesses must come to terms with two equally unattractive options: accept that there is no way to control their own data even when they encrypt it, or avoid using cloud services?…

Grazed from CloudPro.  Author: Rene Millman.

Scientists in Bristol and Denmark have made a cryptography breakthrough that may boost the security of cloud computing environments.  Multi-party computation (MPC) is a subset of cryptography that enables two or more people to compute any function choosing secret inputs, without actually revealing the contents of those inputs to either party.  The idea was developed by a team of researchers from the Department of Computer Science at University of Bristol and Aarhus University in Denmark.

The teams are working on developing a practical implementation protocol for MPC called SPDZ (pronounced “speeds”).  Using the SPDZ protocol, the team can now compute complex functions in a secure manner, enabling possible applications in the finance, drugs and chemical industries where computation often needs to be performed on secret data…

Grazed from ToadWorld.  Author:  gilallouche.

“Cloud Computing” has come a long way since the days when that enigmatic buzzword for Web Applications had everyone scratching their heads. In fact, new data from Verizon’s recently released 2013 State of the Enterprise Cloud Report suggests that the cloud—once regarded as a virtual sandbox to play in—is gaining respect and popularity as a serious production tool within the enterprise. Although the report predictably sheds positive light on Verizon Terremark, the company’s own enterprise cloud solution, it did yield some interesting statistics.

Between January 2012 and June 2013, the use of cloud based memory and cloud based storage increased by 100 percent and 90 percent respectively

Those are pretty big increases and Verizon chalks them up to the shift of business-critical applications to the cloud. Still, that’s a lot of shifting going on and it makes you wonder how Verizon arrived at those figures. But the next figure helps to put things in perspective…

Grazed from ComputerDealerNews.  Author: Jeff Jedras.

The solution provider may be the biggest impediment to the cloud computing revolution fully taking hold, and much of the channel doesn’t have the resources or the structure to make the transition to doing business in the world of the cloud.

Those were among the takeaways on Wednesday as Bruce Stuart, channel financing model expert and president of channel consultancy Channelcorp, spoke to attendees at a seminar on channel economics as part of CDN’s 2013 Channel Elite Awards.  Cloud computing is going to have a significant impact on the channel, said Stuart. And the change isn’t in the technology; it’s in the business model…

Grazed from CSO.  Author: Sam Shead.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is helping CloudBees to generate a buzz around its platform-as-a-service (PaaS) offering, which is being used by an increasing number of start-ups and enterprises.  Belgium-headquartered CloudBees claims that its AWS-based PaaS enables Java developers to build and test mobile and web applications more quickly than they would if they did it in house as it means they don’t have to worry about the underlying infrastructure they’re working on.

The company, which now has 500 paying businesses on its books, announced yesterday that the number of new customers signing up to its cloud service doubled in the first half of 2013 compared to the same period last year, suggesting that enterprises and start-ups are increasingly looking to PaaS to build apps. Indeed, enterprises including eBay, HP and Cisco have all used the CloudBees platform, as have start-ups such as story-sharing app Movellas and weight-loss app Lose It…

Grazed from WBSLaw. Author: Editorial Staff.

The popularity of cloud computing is increasing and with it the amount of copyright-protected material which is saved and edited with cloud computing services. Here is an overview of how cloud computing and the law on copyright interact.

1. What are the issues cloud computing and copyright law?

A large amount of data stored in the cloud is protected by copyright law. These include films, texts, photographs, computer games and computer programmes. Under copyright law, a person who creates a work is automatically the copyright holder. Their rights are protected and they may use their work as they see fit, including storing it in the cloud. For any other person, however, the reproduction of a work is generally prohibited, even in the cloud. There are, however, a number of exceptions to this prohibition…

Grazed from Midsize Insider. Author: Doug Bonderud.

IBM recently closed a deal to purchase IT security firm Trusteer, which specializes in fraud detection and advanced security monitoring. The company also has a powerful software-as-a-service (SaaS) and mobile security platform, which Big Blue hopes to integrate in its own complement of SaaS programming. Simply put, there is a need for defensible, mobile cloud architecture, especially among midsize companies taking their first steps skyward.

Trust Us

Trust is everything. As Caleb Barlow, IBM’s director of mobile security, noted in a recent eWeek article, "[A] big portion of the value of that brand is now associated with trust. If you can trust that brand, if you can trust them with your data, it’s going to make a big difference in who you choose to do business with." To achieve this trust, midsize admins need to show executives — and therefore customers — that their personal data is secure in the cloud. Trusteer, for its part, provides account takeover protection, compromised device detection and fingerprinting services. IBM also has plans to create a cybersecurity lab in Israel; the 200-employee facility will focus on mobile security, threat protection, malware and financial crime…

Grazed from Midsize Insider. Author: Bert Markgraf.

When IT departments at midsize businesses start to implement cloud computing and transfer some noncritical IT functions from their own data centers into the cloud, the location of the infrastructure is not the only thing that changes. IT departments in such situations suddenly have new and unfamiliar responsibilities and have to develop new skills. At the same time, many traditional computer and network functions are no longer in high demand. ZDNet looks at how some of the skills required of IT professionals are evolving based on recent discussions with a CIO panel. Many aspects of IT work are changing, including such fundamentals as who pays for services and who fixes problems.

Expertise

Traditional IT functions have focused on keeping the company computer systems in operation, integrating new equipment and maintaining security. As new applications migrate to the cloud, these skills become even more important with regard to the critical functions that the company retains in its own data center. At the same time, the scope decreases as fewer changes are made in these existing applications. The emphasis shifts to software maintenance of a reduced application base and increased coordination with external cloud suppliers. IT departments have to develop additional expertise in making their in-house systems work with standardized external applications that often have limited adaptability…

Grazed from USA Today. Author: Alistair Blair.

Amazon Web Services, the popular cloud computing service run by Amazon.com, suffered an outage on Friday. AWS, as the service is known, said on its monitoring website that was "investigating network connectivity issues" in data centers it runs in the Northern Virginia area. AWS is used by lots of start-up Internet companies and increasingly by large enterprises including Netflix and NASA.

When AWS goes down, it can disrupt a notable portion of Internet activity, sometimes for hours at a time. AWS cloud services, such as database offering Redshift, were affected by the Northern Virginia outage on Friday. Some other services, such as Amazon’s Simple Email Service, were back up by 11.24 am, Eastern time, according to Amazon’s monitoring web site…