Category: News

Grazed from FCW. Author: Frank Konkel.

The Department of Veterans Affairs has terminated its five-year, $36 million cloud computing contract with HP Enterprise Services, citing a material change in the agency’s requirements. The deal, signed in November 2012, was to eventually move 600,000 VA employees to Microsoft government community cloud e-mail and calendaring services.

Yet only test accounts — no actual users — from VA actually made it to the cloud, despite the agency having the capabilities in place to do so. Those test accounts have since been removed by VA, according to a statement from the agency to FCW. "VA has decided to terminate the cloud email contract for the convenience of the government," a spokesperson for the agency said…

Grazed from eCommerce Times. Author Ed Moyle.

For most technologists in the enterprise nowadays, cloud is a pretty big deal — and securing it can be an even bigger deal still. Security was the top concern of 46 percent of respondents to a recent survey by North Bridge Venture Partners (The Future of Cloud Computing). While this number is actually down from last year’s 55 percent, it does underscore the relative importance of security in these efforts.

This is a natural reaction. It is human nature for people to view as more risky what they cannot control directly, an arrangement many cloud efforts require. So despite some recent evidence that service provider environments might not be as problematic as folks have thought (i.e., data from Alert Logic demonstrating a lower threat diversity and lower incident occurrence rates in service provider environments), the fact of the matter is that the proposition is still pretty scary. Recent events like the revelation of the NSA PRISM program haven’t helped in this regard…

Grazed from CloudTweaks. Author: Adam Hausman.

Ever since the dot-com bubble of the late 1990s, the dream (or perhaps more accurately, fantasy) of creating a successful start-up and striking gold on the Internet has continuously drawn in new entrepreneurs seeking both fame and fortune. Constantly looking for a new market to conquer (or create), entrepreneurs tend to be drawn to sectors that are either innovating quicker than anywhere else, or that are lagging sorely behind the times. As cloud computing is incrementally being introduced as a useful technology in classrooms across America, entrepreneurs have begun to flock to education technology start-ups, quickly making it one of the fastest-growing areas of new development in technology as a whole.

The appeal of pursuing a start-up in education software or web services is multifaceted. Aside from the limited amount of existing education technology companies (obviously changing now), many school districts (specifically in urban and suburban areas) are beginning to spend large amounts of money upgrading their classrooms and buildings to make them useful for education in the 21st century…

Grazed from PR NewsWire. Author: PR Announcement.

CyberFlow Analytics, Inc., a cyber security company that protects the intellectual property (IP) of enterprises from corporate espionage and Advanced Persistent Threats (APTs), has secured $2 million in funding from Toshiba America Electronic Components, Inc. (TAEC) in a seed round of funding.

This brings initial funding to $2.6 million for CyberFlow Analytics as it develops ground-breaking approaches to cyber security. Its SaaS software increases network intelligence to create an early warning system for cyber attacks to an enterprise network or core data before they disable, destroy or steal data…

Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Jordan Novet.

Lots of businesses have been sold on the idea of paying a little bit each month for Software as a Service (SaaS) that doesn’t need to be hosted behind the corporate firewall. But managing all those logins and user access on many devices can be tedious, which is why it makes sense to have a single sign-on system in place.

Ping Identity provides that service, and investors are giving the company $44 million in new funding. DFJ Growth and W Capital Partners led the round, announced Tuesday, along with contributions from previous investors Appian Ventures, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, General Catalyst Partners, Triangle Peak Partners, SAP Ventures and Volition Capital. Debt from Silicon Valley Bank is also part of the mix…

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Beth Pariseau.

Enterprises that want a choice between cloud service providers have several multi-cloud management software offerings to choose from, though workload migrations after initial deployments remain rare. Vendors such as RightScale Inc. and CliQr Technologies Inc. offer multi-cloud management software, which gives users the ability to deploy workloads without modification to different clouds, as well as the ability to move workloads between clouds at will.

We don’t have to tie up to any particular cloud. We can basically profile to see which one is providing the best performance for the best cost and then we can direct our customers to that. Enterprise IT pros who have put these products into production said that, so far, they have helped them migrate workloads to their choice of cloud service providers…

Grazed from ZDNet. Author: Heather Clancy.

It’s got to be tough fighting the name-brand recognition of the biggest cloud infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) providers. So, global IT solutions and services firm Dimension Data recently commissioned a study by benchmarking firm, The Tolly Group, to compare its offering with those of several other venerable options.

As you might expect because I’m writing about it, Dimension Data’s public cloud service, officially branded as the Public Compute-as-a-Service fares just fine, thank you, when compared with the other services that were tested: IBM Smartcloud, Amazon Web Services and Rackspace Cloud…

Grazed from DataCenterKnowledge. Author: William Bain.

Cloud computing is rapidly being adopted by companies across a wide range of industries. Among its many benefits, the ability to offer on-demand elastic computing enables enterprises to maintain fast application performance in the face of burgeoning workloads. Cloud infrastructure must easily scale to add more application instances, and the environment must offer platform services that enable applications to effectively and transparently scale performance over those instances. This is where cloud-based in-memory data grids (IMDGs) enter the picture. By dramatically simplifying and enhancing the deployment of scalable applications within cloud infrastructures, in-memory data grids play a key role in delivering on the promise of cloud computing.

Even better, today’s advanced IMDGs can work across cloud and on-premise environments and some even integrate data parallel computational engines that can perform real-time analytics on cloud-based data, while the data is rapidly changing…

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: Chris Talbot.

Scale Computing, which provides hyperconverged solutions that combine servers, storage and virtualization, has launched a formal channel partner program to help drive its products through the channel as the need for virtualization and private cloud solutions continues to grow. The new Scale Computing Platinum Partner Program was developed to provide the company’s VARs with new revenue opportunities for private clouds in the midsize enterprise market.

According to Doug Howell, director of Channels at Scale Computing, the new partner program combined with Scale Computing’s technology provides the channel with an opportunity in an underserved market. Whereas vendors and partners have been providing high availability and disaster recovery to the enterprise in a way that is typically overpriced for the midmarket, Scale Computing aims to bring that solution downstream in a way that is priced right for the market but also provides the features the midmarket needs…

Grazed from The Var Guy. Author: Christopher Tozzi.

The world of private cloud computing for the enterprise saw a significant development this week with the release of the latest version of ownCloud Enterprise Edition. Major updates to the file syncing and storage platform, which is built on open source code, include security enhancements, usability improvements and new management features, among other changes.

ownCloud Enterprise Edition, which is developed by ownCloud, is based on the open source ownCloud project. It’s one of a growing number of platforms that allow enterprises to create private clouds that run exclusively on in-house infrastructure. That can help to circumvent some of the security and compliance challenges associated with competitors such as Dropbox, as well as reduce costs…