Category: News

Grazed from Forbes. Author: Joe McKendrick.

While cloud computing has many advantages, too few organizations weigh the long-term impact of over-reliance on vendors providing cloud services. The goal of cloud computing should be to reduce dependence on vendors — but the opposite seems to be happening.

I recently had the opportunity to chat with Thomas Erl, co-author of the just-released book, Cloud Computing: Concepts, Technology & Architecture, about these concerns. Erl’s latest book is intended to explore the building blocks, or “concrete, well-defined, models, architectural layers, and technology mechanisms” of cloud…

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Shamus McGillicuddy.

F5 Networks strengthened its relationship with Microsoft’s network virtualization and IaaS technologies by adding NVGRE gateway functionality to its BIG-IP application delivery controller and the availability of a virtual BIG-IP for the Windows Azure cloud.

Network Virtualization using Generic Routing Encapsulation (NVGRE), the tunneling protocol analogous to VMware’s virtual extensible LAN (VXLAN), is the foundation of building network virtualization with Microsoft Hyper-V. F5 Networks will start by offering NVGRE gateway functionality on the virtual edition of its BIG-IP application delivery controller (ADC) and later add support on hardware appliances…

Grazed from NetworkWorld. Author: Andy Gottlieb.

Having spent the last several columns looking in depth into why MPLS is no longer the only answer for building enterprise WANs, this time let’s go up a few thousand feet and look at the bigger picture, before any further dives down into the details.

"The cloud" is happening. We’ll leave aside for the moment exactly what "the cloud" means, as it tends to mean different things to different people, but I think readers here have at least a "kinda sorta" understanding of what it is. As it relates to wide area networks and enterprise IT, let’s go for now with Gartner’s definition of cloud "as a style of computing in which scalable and elastic IT-enabled capabilities are delivered as a service using Internet technologies."…

Grazed from ThinkStrategies. Author: PR Announcement.

THINKstrategies, Inc., the leading strategic consulting company focused on the business implications of the Cloud Computing services market, announced today that FrontRange, the only provider of Hybrid IT Service Management solutions, has been named a winner of the Best of SaaS Showplace (BoSS) Award. This program promotes the measurable business benefits delivered by today’s Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solutions.

The BoSS Awards is an ongoing program administered by THINKstrategies’ Cloud Computing Showplace to recognize SaaS companies that are delivering measurable business benefits to specific user organizations. These benefits can include increased sales, lower costs, higher customer satisfaction, faster operations and greater profitability…

Grazed from CloudPro. Author: James Stirling.

A new Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offering from Progress Software will make it easier for organisations to build and manage ‘connected apps’ on any cloud, mobile or social platform, the company has claimed. Dubbed Progress Pacific, the offering is built on technology the company gained through its recent acquisition of independent software vendor Rollbase.

It is, Progress claims, the foundation of a major PaaS transformation for the software vendor and will address customer and partner demand in the fast growing cloud market. Progress Pacific is designed to give users the freedom to choose the data sources, deployment environments and business logic tools that best fit their needs and allows them to avoid vendor lock-in…

Grazed from CloudPro. Author: Jane McCallion.

Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) company Memset is to partner with professional services firm CoreStream to make it easier for customers to manage SharePoint services. The deal has ramped up Memset’s support for SharePoint, the company claims, as users can now benefit from CoreStream’s pre-configured, production grade SharePoint farms, which they can test in the cloud before moving into production.

Memset’s end-to-end product for SharePoint includes full support of enterprise class infrastructure, which the organisation claims allows customers to focus on using SharePoint, rather than maintaining the underlying environment. Memset will also provide application level and administrative support, while CoreStream will be responsible for delivering professional services around customisation, administration and training…

Grazed from Bank Security Info. Author: Jeffrey Roman.

Operating in a cloud exposes organizations to a new dimension of insider threat problems, says Alex Nicoll of Carnegie Mellon University’s CERT Insider Threat Center. Cloud computing providers must step up and develop approaches to prevent their employees from stealing or harming customer data they host, says Nicoll, a senior cybersecurity analyst, and Dawn Cappelli, CERT technical manager, in a joint interview with Information Security Media Group.

"We’re hoping that the cloud service providers understand insider threat," Cappelli says. "We have recommendations that we provide for organizations for what they should do to protect themselves against rogue administrators and to protect themselves against theft of intellectual property. Our hope is that cloud service providers understand that as well."…

Grazed from CloudTweaks. Author: Ali Raza.

By 2018, Gartner predicts that 70 per cent of professionals will conduct their work on personal mobile devices, enabled by the revolutionary concept of cloud computing. Cloud computing essentially separates software from the logical functionality of local hardware. In other words, instead of needing computing power to be housed locally, major computing functions will instead be accessible from afar, usually via the Internet. The obvious benefit here is that risk of ownership of software is eliminated, as well as the need to hire in-house resources to service them.

What will this do to the market?

In the case of hardware, cloud computing is likely to open the market up by lowering barriers to entry for manufacturing. The recent emergence of Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) in the workplace presents renewed scope and opportunity for the hardware market, as by 2016, 38 per cent of businesses expect to stop providing devices to staff, allowing them instead to select their own…

Grazed from MIT. Author: Larry Hardesty.

Homomorphic encryption is one of the most exciting new research topics in cryptography, which promises to make cloud computing perfectly secure. With it, a Web user would send encrypted data to a server in the cloud, which would process it without decrypting it and send back a still-encrypted result.

Sometimes, however, the server needs to know something about the data it’s handling. Otherwise, some computational tasks become prohibitively time consuming — if not outright impossible. Suppose, for instance, that the task you’ve outsourced to the cloud is to search a huge encrypted database for the handful of records that match an encrypted search term…

Grazed from CloudSpectator. Author: Editorial Staff.

As the market quickly saturates with IaaS providers, the decision-making complexity of choosing the right provider evolves as well. Cloud Spectator monitors IaaS performance of over 20 of the world’s most well-known cloud providers to guide businesses in the selection process to maximize performance efficiency and minimize cost.

This report highlights and analyzes the performance of 5 of the largest cloud providers in the market today: Amazon EC2, Rackspace OpenStack Cloud, HP Cloud, SoftLayer CloudLayer Compute, and Windows Azure. Results from the 5-day experiment prominently display the performance differences in providers, with Windows Azure, the highest-performing provider, scoring 3 times better than Amazon EC2, the lowest-performing provider, on average…