Category: News

Grazed from Network World. Author: Bob Brown.

A small team of ex-Symantec security experts has formed a stealthy Silicon Valley start-up called CirroScope that’s focused on shielding enterprises from threats stemming from their use of SaaS applications such Box, Salesforce.com and Google Apps. CirroScope is keeping things pretty quiet on its website, only explaining that the company “is building a next generation security product to help businesses adopt and use popular cloud applications with confidence and ease!“ You can request a product evaluation, and will be asked, among other things, about how many cloud apps your organization is using.

CirroScope is looking to address the threat posed to enterprises’ data by breaches involving cloud apps, whether self inflicted or not. It points to events such as breaches of Evernote and Dropbox. But it also wants to help monitor your data, via a service, to eliminate the inadvertent release of private information by enterprises into the public cloud, as has been documented on Amazon Web Services and other offerings…

Grazed from Xconomy. Author: Matt Fates.

There are a lot of “new rules” in enterprise software sales. We discussed many of them in depth at a recent industry forum: it’s now a buying process and not a selling process, the steak dinner and golf game are out, the length of the sales cycle has shortened, and so on. Many of the new rules can be traced to the shift to the cloud. With much quicker proofs of concept and shorter implementation times, enterprises can realize software’s value (or lack thereof) much faster and with less pain.

Even Microsoft, provider of the most widely used on-premise software suite, has made a huge push in recent years around cloud-based Office 365. Senior sales folks at Microsoft tell me that 75 percent of their accounts are now buying varying amounts of their cloud services. Like other vendors, Microsoft realized that the IT managers of today and tomorrow are increasingly partial to implementing SaaS-based (Software as a Service) resources, rather than installing and maintaining on-premise applications…

Grazed from Gravitant. Author: Samantha Jackson.

Sequestration burst out of obscurity and entered our household vocabulary in 2013. It got our attention because the impact of it is $1.2 trillion in automatic spending cuts from the Federal budget over the next ten years. About $85B of these cuts will occur by September of 2013 — and these cuts are being disproportionately applied: Once you exempt the sacred programs, what’s less sacred (like Federal IT spending) is going to get hit hard. Forrester Research analyst Andrew Bartels expects that the Federal budget cuts will shave at least $12B out of 2013 U.S. tech spending.

So what’s to be done? Computerworld points out that “Dale Luddeke, chair of the Industry Advisory Council (IAC), an IT industry group expects to see a shift in government to things with cost savings attributes, such as open source, and agile development and cloud technology.”…

Grazed from GigaOm. Author: Derrick Harris.

Heroku has rolled out a new feature in its Heroku Postgres service that lets the database act a lot more like NoSQL fave MongoDB. It’s probably good news for Heroku’s revenues and database customers, although possibly less so for the MongoDB-based services that the platform-as-a-service provider also supports.

In a nutshell, the new feature, called PL/V8 is Google’s V8 engine for running JavaScript, but turned into a procedural language within the Postgres database. V8 already runs within MongoDB and is part of what makes that database so adept at handling the JSON data type that is common among web applications. Because they are schemaless, JSON files let developers and applications work with different data types that might not fit within the rigid structure required by relational databases…

Grazed from PRNewsWire. Author: PR Announcement.

Akamai Technologies, Inc. the leading cloud platform for helping enterprises provide secure, high-performing user experiences on any device, anywhere, is showcasing its cloud delivery and optimization expertise at Cloud Expo NY 2013 which will be held at New York’s Javit’s Center, June 10-13, 2013. Through a combination of keynote, general and technical sessions, as well as booth demonstrations (Booth 418) of the company’s Terra Alta solutions, Akamai will show attendees how they can maximize the results of their cloud computing strategies.

Terra Alta is a cloud-based application delivery platform designed to improve enterprise agility and collaboration by offering the power to instantly configure and deliver all web-based applications, to any users, anywhere in the world. The solution also can help overcome the inherent challenges related to performance, availability, scalability and security, which cannot be accomplished by deploying specialized hardware within the data center…

Grazed from Forbes. Author: Joe Lazauskas.

By 2015, global cloud computing traffic will have increased twelve-fold compared to 2010, according to a study by Cisco. As you might assume, that growth is occurring in tech-savvy metropolises like Silicon Valley, New York and London, but it’s also being driven by the developing world.

Businesses in developed nations have embraced cloud computing for the boost in speed, efficiency and flexibility it provides, but in the developing world, it provides a different set of advantages to young businesses. In lands where the electrical grid is unreliable at best, a combination of cheap, battery-powered smartphones and inexpensive cloud computing servers based in the United States or Europe allow businesses to circumvent the electrical grid all together…

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: Nancy Gohring.

After exuberantly throwing its weight behind OpenStack, IBM now says it will offer cloud services based on CloudStack too, through its SoftLayer acquisition. News broke this morning that IBM plans to buy SoftLayer, which it calls the largest privately held cloud computing infrastructure provider. SoftLayer is known for offering hosting and infrastructure-as-a-service, primarily to small and medium size businesses.

SoftLayer also is known primarily as a Citrix house, including a private cloud product based on CloudStack (formerly owned by Citrix). It also uses OpenStack for its object storage service. Given IBM’s stated support of OpenStack, I was curious about the future of CloudStack at SoftLayer and asked IBM what the acquisition means for the CloudStack products…

Grazed from Geek. Author: Ryan Whitman.

There was a time, not that long ago, when most users managed their own data. Now faster internet connections and cloud services offer not only storage, but data processing. But how can companies looking to crunch data in the cloud know it’s being done correctly? A new piece of software developed by Microsoft and IBM aims to tell you if the cloud is lying about the sanctity of your data.

The software is amusingly dubbed “Pinocchio”, and is being billed as a lie detector for the cloud. At its most basic level, Pinocchio could be used to verify that a cloud service did what was instructed with a data set. Alternatively, it could alert you if the service was somehow compromised, thus altering the results…

Grazed from Business2Community. Author: TJ Jones.

What’s the best way to increase your profits? Improve your leading product or service? Branch out into new markets? Launch an innovative marketing campaign? All of these are great options, provided you have the ability to implement them. Sometimes, though, the best way to increase the amount you make is to decrease the amount you spend. Cutting back on costs makes your business leaner, meaner, and better able to compete in the marketplace.

It is one area which is absolutely essential for businesses of all sizes, but which can get prohibitively expensive. Even with just a couple of employees you need to ensure that you have the right software and a reliable email system. Cloud computing is quickly gaining popularity as a cost control method, with hundreds of thousands of businesses worldwide adopting at least one cloud-based service in the workplace…

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: Ted Samson.

The Apache CloudStack project today announced Version 4.1.0 of the CloudStack, signaling that the cloud orchestration platform continues to thrive since emerging from the Apache Incubator in mid-March. The 4.1.0 release includes news features such as an events framework, API-request throttling, and Amazon Web Services-style regions. It also includes major changes in the codebase, aimed at making the platform easier for developers, along with a new structure for creating RPM/Debian packages and the full adoption of Maven as a build tool.

This new release of CloudStack should be heartening to supporters of the platform, which has been down a long and winding road since being acquired by Citrix in 2011 — then handed it off to the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) last year. In March of this year, the ASF approved CloudStack as a TLP (top-level project), helping the open source cloud software effort further establish its independence from Citrix…