Category: News

Grazed from MercuryNews.  Author: Steve Johnson.

Back in 2001, when French-born Philippe Courtot was named CEO of Qualys, cyber security was largely an afterthought at most big corporations.  But he suspected the subject would become a huge money maker, especially if his Redwood City company provided its security products via the so-called cloud, or Internet.

With 376 employees today and annual sales of about $100 million, Qualys is far from the largest company scratching and clawing for a share of the cyber security market. But it already has more than 6,000 customers. And with cyber attacks increasing in ferocity, Courtot — pronounced core-toe — believes growing numbers of other companies will turn to Qualys for help…

Grazed from TechRepublic.  Author: Thoran Rodrigues.

Of the many well-known promises of cloud computing, such as lower costs, faster time-to-delivery, and improved reliability, perhaps one of the most dangerous promises that cloud providers on all parts of the stack (infrastructure, platform and software) are making, is to make business users effectively independent from the IT department. This promise, while a key selling point for some, is in fact a huge threat not only to companies, but to cloud computing as a whole.

In trying to make business users more independent from the IT department, cloud providers have been slowly creating a shadow IT ecosystem that, instead of having its own processes, many times has no process at all, consisting of haphazardly put together sets of solutions that create significant risks for companies, many times without them actually knowing about them…

Grazed from Network Computing.  Author: Tom Trainer.

There’s no question that data center and private cloud environments have struggled to obtain highly available scale-out object storage and a seamless data management capability that extends all the way to the endpoint. Conversely, public cloud architectures are growing more mature and provide low-cost, scale-out object storage and innovative backup functionality. Data centers and private clouds need these public cloud types of storage and data management capabilities. Fortunately, there are a handful of companies stepping up to address this need.

One such company is Druva, which released a new version of its inSync managed data offering Thursday. Along with file storage, inSync now provides highly available scale-out object storage based on the OpenStack SWIFT storage access protocol and has the capability to backup both file and object storage, as well as remote data on endpoint devices (that is, laptops and handheld devices.). Druva is primarily targeting the OpenStack private cloud environment; however, it will continue to support the traditional data center deployment model…

Grazed from CMSWire.  Author: David Roe.

IBM is clearly concerned about the big data skills shortage. It has announced the addition of another 9 universities to its big data training program. The economic importance of the program was also underlined this week by the announcement that it has just secured a US$ 1 billion federal contract for cloud computing.

Big Data, Analytics Skills Shortages

The problem for IT giants that are currently muscling into the big data market is that the development of the technology has been so rapid the number of big data/analytics projects currently underway far outweighs the number of people that have appropriate skills.  In fact between now and the end of 2015, IBM estimates that there will be 4.4 million jobs worldwide in big data support. At the moment it is not clear where all the people required to fill these positions are going to come from…

Grazed from EETimes.  Author: Brian Bailey.

Whether we like it or not, changes in the way we perform computing, and where our data gets stored, seem inevitable given everything we read these days about cloud computing.  Perhaps I am an old fuddy-duddy, but I have been resisting the calls to put my data online. It just does not make sense to me due to convenience and cost issues. I can buy a 1-terabyte disk for quite a bit under $100 these days, and I can make it accessible to all of my devices while at home and through a web interface when I want to access my data from anywhere else. For another $100, I can secure that data by putting it in a RAID array.

Admittedly, if I have a fire in my house, I could lose the data, and I would love to have an offsite disk at a friend’s house to give me that extra layer of protection. Unfortunately, the software is not in place to enable that to be done easily. So, for about $400 total, I can have one terabyte of reasonably secure storage, and assuming a disk life of five years, that equates to under $100 per year plus a little bit for electricity to run them…

Grazed from PRWeb.  Author: PR Announcement.

The Congress takes place at the Assembly Rooms in Edinburgh on 25 – 26 September 2013.  During his session, Eran will be:

• Addressing speculation around the security and privacy implications of applications in the cloud
• Busting myths and uncertainties about apps in the cloud
• Providing guidance to evaluate cloud vendors on security and privacy
• Revealing how Google protects the data and privacy of users.

Google will be joined by a host of other companies all sharing their best practice case studies, including Walmart, News International, Experian, Facebook, European Commission, Bank of America, Merrill Lynch, Cloud Security Alliance, European Cyber Crime Centre (EC3), hibu, DHL, Playtech and many more. The full speaker list can be viewed online.  The Congress is for those securing the cloud and with a passion for pushing cloud computing security to the forefront of Information Security.  Find out more at http://www.cloudsecuritycongress.com.

Grazed from Wired.  Author: Cade Metz.

Eric Frenkiel is through with convention and conformity. It was just too expensive.  In Silicon Valley, tech startups typically build their businesses with help from cloud computing services — services that provide instant access to computing power via the internet — and Frenkiel’s startup, a San Francisco outfit called MemSQL, was no exception. It rented computing power from the granddaddy of cloud computing, Amazon.com.

But in May, about two years after MemSQL was founded, Frenkiel and company came down from the Amazon cloud, moving most of their operation onto a fleet of good old fashioned computers they could actually put their hands on. They had reached the point where physical machines were cheaper — much, much cheaper — than the virtual machines available from Amazon. “I’m not a big believer in the public cloud,” Frenkiel says. “It’s just not effective in the long run.”…

Grazed from eWeek.  Author: Eric Lundquist.

When the chief marketing officer, the human resources manager, the vice president of sales and the chief finance officer all tore off chunks of the technology budget, the obituaries for the Chief Information officer position were many and morbid.  A corporate executive without budget is soon a corporate executive without a job went the thinking. And for a while as organizations including Gartner proclaimed that the marketing department would soon wield a bigger tech budget than the CIO, the predictions of the demise of the CIO’s role appeared prescient.

But, stealing a title from Joseph Heller’s great novel about corporate life, “Something Happened” along the way. CIOs and those with different titles, but in the top technology position have the opportunity to retrieve their status due to the very thing which was supposed to relegate them to irrelevance. Software as a Service and the greater cloud computing universe in general is the driver in the CIO rebirth…

Grazed from BusinessSpectator.  Author: Robert Gottliebsen.

What is happening at Cisco should be an alert not only to those in the information technology industry but to all companies and governments.  Frankly, how companies adapt to cloud computing will determine whether they succeed or fail in the current environment.  In Australia we have bloated government costs and cloud computing represents a rare opportunity to reduce those costs and improve services – but you have to get it right.

As we saw with the Virgin breakdown, new systems can cause chaos if they get into trouble.  For IT companies like Cisco this is make or break time. Get it wrong and you head on a rapid road down. Earlier this month I described how vital cloud computing would be to banks and how SAP was attempting to transform itself as part of that revolution (A dividend danger is clouding bank fortunes, August 8)…

Grazed from Forbes.  Author: Louis Columbus.

Synchronizing new product development, supply chain, production and Maintenance, Repair & Overhaul (MRO) strategies across Aerospace and Defense (A&D) manufacturers while reducing costs continues to make cloud platforms a viable option in A&D.

With sequestration having an impact on these industries from both a budget and merger & acquisition (M&A) perspective, the economics of cloud computing are becoming even more attractive. Teri Takai, CIO of the Department of Defense (DoD) published the DoD Cloud Computing Strategy in July of last year and many of its findings are reflected in the current state of cloud adoption in A&D.  She recently published the presentation DoD CIO’s 10-Point Plan for IT Modernization, which is available for download from the department’s website.  The following is a summary of key DoD IT Modernization initiatives…