Category: News

Grazed from BizTech2. Author: Editorial Staff.

HP Enterprise Services has announced new and enhanced services that help clients streamline the integration and deployment of critical applications to cloud environments, while maintaining business continuity and addressing data security.

To quickly deliver new services to market, enterprises need to deploy new applications and modernise legacy applications. However, IT teams managing the migration to the cloud are struggling with limited capital, tight deadlines and increased complexity. Additionally, once the migration is completed, they must ensure the continuity of those critical applications…

Grazed from ZDNet. Author: Mary Jo Foley.

Microsoft is opening up an early, limited adopter program for the experimental "Orleans" cloud-programming framework built by its eXtreme Computing Group. Notice of the early adopter program came via a July 25 post by Windows Azure Architect David Gristwood. At the bottom of his post, which highlights a video shown at Microsoft’s Build conference about how the 343 Industries team used the Orleans framework in building some real-time services for Halo 4, Gristwood added this: The “Orleans” team are opening up a small early adopter program. If you want to be considered for access to this program and the “Orleans” code, please email me via this blog.

I mentioned the Halo team’s use of Orleans in one of my posts in January 2013. While neither Halo itself nor Xbox Live run on top of Windows Azure, supporting Halo services — like presence, stats, achievements and more do. As part of its recently announced reorg, Microsoft is moving the Xbox Live and the Xbox operating systems teams into the same OS engineering group as Windows and Windows Phone…

Grazed from ZDNet. Author: Spandas Lui.

A number of companies have yet to take full advantage of cloud computing, according to Accenture. Cloud computing has been hyped up in the IT industry for some time, and many Australian enterprises have accepted it into their businesses. But some businesses haven’t really explored the full potential of this technology, Accenture managing director for cloud in Australia and New Zealand Alison Cairns told ZDNet.

"The conversation is really about growth and what cloud is going to do for the clients’ businesses," she said. "The by-product is cost savings, but that’s a far less interesting conversation." Cairns noted that one of Accenture’s customers, a banking organisation, had already commenced its journey into the cloud when it complained that cloud computing didn’t meet its expectations of improving efficiencies within the business…

With the CloudSigma 2.0 cloud comes many additional features that let customers further tune their cloud servers for additional performance boosts. Advanced CPU options, including CPU emulation and full non-uniform memory access (NUMA) visibility, hypervisor timer settings and virtual core size control, along with full-SDN support and all-SSD storage, all combine to offer high network throughput with ultra-low latency to achieve greater speed and stability for its customers. It’s this level of innovation that allows CloudSigma to continually improve its public cloud price/performance margins with unparalleled flexibility and customer control.

Grazed from Anturis.  Author: PR Announcement

Anturis Inc., a vanguard IT solutions company, today announced it has been selected by ReadySpace, a multi-national provider of cloud and managed hosting services for businesses. Anturis will provide ReadySpace and its customers with its enhanced cloud-based monitoring and troubleshooting solution for web services and IT infrastructure. ReadySpace can offer Anturis’ solutions as a powerful and integrated addition to its Managed Service packages.

Anturis delivers enterprise-grade IT infrastructure monitoring and troubleshooting in a simple, easy-to-setup and use browser-based cloud solution. ReadySpace will deploy Anturis to support its over 5,000 business customers, primarily in the Asia Pacific region, and especially in Singapore and Hong Kong.  

SendGrid, the leader in email deliverability, today announced it has joined the Google Cloud Platform Partner Program as a Technology Partner. SendGrid is the first non-native email solution available to Google App Engine customers as part of the partner program, giving developers a trusted third-party option for adding transactional email management and delivery to their applications. 

The collaboration provides a scalable transactional email platform and set of services that allow developers to focus on building exceptional applications rather than committing time and resources to ensuring app-triggered emails reach their users.

CloudShare, the leading provider of virtual environments in the cloud, today announced the general availability of two new plugins. One for Microsoft Visual Studio 2012 and the other for Microsoft Team Foundation Server 2012 (TFS). These tools combined with the already easiest-to-use cloud for development and testing, allow developers to spend less time building development infrastructure, and more time using it for development.

As is true with all productivity tools, .NET developers who use Visual Studio want to spend more time utilizing the tool than setting it up. The new CloudShare Explorer for Visual Studio allows developers instant access to virtual machines in the cloud directly from the Visual Studio interface. When connected to a TFS Build Controller, code deployments can happen with a click of a button to cloud environments, and access to those environments via RDP with another click.

Grazed from The Var Guy. Author: Christopher Tozzi.

Another private cloud storage offering based on OpenStack hit the channel in recent days as SwiftStack announced the general availabililty of its Swift object storage system. The solution, an example of software defined storage, is poised to challenge alternatives running in the public cloud, which SwiftStack says it can match in scalability and beat in price.

The Swift object storage system is a software defined storage platform that runs on commodity hardware. That strategy allows the company to keep costs low while still delivering scalability, flexibility and extensive control over data stored in the cloud…

Grazed from Sys Con Media. Author: Pravin Kothari.

In the last five years, organizations have increasingly embraced cloud applications to help them innovate and transform their business. Applications that automate sales processes, HR management, collaboration, email and file sharing are growing fast and enabling organizations to meet their needs in a shorter timeframe than ever before.

Cloud applications are ubiquitously employed across all industries. However, there are increased concerns about security and compliance of sensitive information, particularly in banking, insurance and in the public sector. A wide range of regulations and privacy laws make organizations directly responsible for protecting regulated information, but when this data is stored in the cloud, they have less direct control over leaks, theft or forced legal disclosure…

Grazed from HealthITSecurity. Author: Jennifer Bresnick.

The rise of cloud computing has created a host of new challenges for patient privacy and data security, according to two Seton Hall School of Law professors. In a white paper released last month, Frank Pasquale and Tara Adams Ragone assert that government regulators need to issue new laws to specifically protect health data security as data transfer and exchange becomes more facile and ever more prevalent.

Whatever their merits in other areas of business, cloud models have come under scrutiny when used in the healthcare arena,” Pasquale and Ragone say. “Patients are rightly concerned about critical health data being lost or inappropriately accessed. On the one hand, cloud service providers may reduce those risks by deploying their unique expertise. On the other hand, the more entities access data, the more chances there are for something to go wrong. Risks along many dimensions—legal, reputational, medical, among others—need to be addressed.”…