Category: News

Grazed from ZDNet. Author: Ken Hess.

What’s better than a cloud solution? An easy cloud solution. That’s what SmartCloud Entry 3.1 is—an easy cloud solution. It’s a private cloud solution that runs on your infrastructure in the privacy of your data center. Being a private cloud solution means that you can now enjoy the benefits of cloud computing in a secure environment. The best part, in my opinion, other than it being easy, is that it installs into your virtualized environment no matter which vendor’s products you use.

Don’t let the Entry moniker imply any limitations on the SmartCloud Entry solution, because there aren’t any. Entry just means easy, not limited. SmartCloud Entry is a full-blown, full-featured, highly scalable cloud enabling solution for businesses. IBM has just taken the sting out of cloud adoption both in complexity and in affordability…

Grazed from ReadWriteWeb. Author: Matt Asay.

While both Google and SAP shared a 1980’s music sensibility at their respective conferences this week – Billy Idol performed at Google I/O and U2’s Bono walked the floor at SAPPHIRE – the two companies see the future of computing very differently. Even when the two companies agree on the importance of cloud computing, their strategies couldn’t be more different. For one thing, SAP’s new cloud isn’t even a cloud. But then, SAP’s Bono wasn’t really Bono, either, but merely an impersonator.

Forrester analyst Stefan Ried takes SAP to task for getting cloud wrong in its new HANA Enterprise Cloud: "The Hana Cloud is a very careful move to a new business model. It is not disruptive and will NOT accelerate Hana usage to the many more customers who have been struggling with Hana on-premises because of its licensing. "The announced Hana Enterprise Cloud follows the ‘Bring Your Own License’ paradigm. While this is great for customers that already have a Hana license and would like to relocate it into the cloud, it is useless for customers that might have largely fluctuating data volumes or user numbers and might specifically use a cloud because of its elastic business model."…

Grazed from CRN. Author: Robert Westervelt.

Attacker access to cloud-computing platforms has become an epidemic and may need a global consortium to better educate cloud providers and help reduce the problem, according to a cloud expert who leads Dimension Data’s global cloud initiatives.

Account fraud, account hijacking and the use of stolen credentials to gain criminal access to cloud-computing resources has been a longstanding issue, which is becoming a serious problem that impacts all cloud providers, said John Rowell, formerly chief technology officer at cloud provider OpSource, who now leads global research and development, and service operations in Dimension Data’s Cloud Solutions Business Unit. Rowell said his firm works constantly to weed out fraudulent accounts and address the issue, but other providers may lack the desire or the wherewithal to deal with the problem…

Grazed from IT Pro Portal. Author: Keao Caindec.

Cost savings, convenience, speed-to-market and freedom from technology lock-ins are all benefits of migrating business applications to the cloud, and many that have already adopted cloud strategies have indeed realised significant cost savings and productivity gains. However, some have also experienced performance and availability issues that have led to resistance to migrating business-critical functions. As a result, the bulk of successful cloud projects to date have been departmental and not ‘mission critical’ core systems which have significant requirements for resource-intensive functions such as database replication, file synchronisation, backup and disaster recovery between data centres.

Part of the problem is that the public cloud ‘Infrastructure as a Service’ (IaaS) market is evolving more slowly than other areas such as ‘Software as a Service’ (SaaS). Providers are only beginning to recognise the level to which performance levels need to be increased and the capabilities their offerings need to make them a viable platform for mission critical purposes.
One area of IaaS that providers have quickly evolved is services that support wide area networks (WAN)…

Grazed from VisualStudioMagazin. Author: Katrina Carrasco.

Rackspace US Inc. recently released its Rackspace Cloud SDK for Microsoft .NET, a suite of tools that enables .NET developers to work with the OpenStack cloud OS. OpenStack is an open source cloud computing platform created by Rackspace and NASA. The Rackspace Cloud SDK for .NET "lets the .NET community develop and consume cloud features or services," according to a blog post by Rackspace Product Marketing Manager Cole Humphreys.

The product can be used to manage "production environments using Windows Server platforms running on a Rackspace hosted infrastructure," Humphreys notes. The Rackspace Cloud SDK for .NET includes a language API and API reference manual, a Getting Started Guide, release notes and sample code, according to Humphreys’ blog post. The Rackspace Cloud SDK is free and can be downloaded from GitHub or from within Visual Studio using the NuGet extension manager…

Grazed from Sys Con Media. Author: Denise Dubie.

You may have heard that cloud computing and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) models can turn software technology into a pay-as-you-go utility that businesses can “plug in to” and use like electricity? Perhaps — however, software technology is far more varied, nuanced and diverse than electricity. You don’t win customers by having better electricity than your competition. Software, by contrast, absolutely is a competitive differentiator for any business today.

Companies in industries as varied as retail and finance use software at the very core of their value proposition to customers. It lets them deliver a variety of services to their customers, improve operational efficiencies, create new offerings and a lot more. That’s not to downplay the business flexibility that SaaS can bring. Being able to “switch on” software and infrastructure delivered as a service for a metered fee can be an attractive alternative to having to build and manage your own IT environments…

Grazed from The New York Times. Author: Quentin Hardy.

Google and NASA are forming a laboratory to study artificial intelligence by means of computers that use the unusual properties of quantum physics. Their quantum computer, which performs complex calculations thousands of times faster than existing supercomputers, is expected to be in active use in the third quarter of this year.

The Quantum Artificial Intelligence Lab, as the entity is called, will focus on machine learning, which is the way computers take note of patterns of information to improve their outputs. Personalized Internet search and predictions of traffic congestion based on GPS data are examples of machine learning. The field is particularly important for things like facial or voice recognition, biological behavior, or the management of very large and complex systems…

Grazed from InfoSecurity-Magazine. Author: Editorial Staff.

Barracuda Networks, eyeing Google’s move to unify storage across its products, has increased the amount of free cloud storage for its own Copy online file syncing users, from 5GB to 15GB. Copy’s sharing and storage service is built on the secure Barracuda Cloud, to provide what Barracuda says is a secure alternative to other cloud storage services. Included data verification inspects data before Copy accepts it into the user’s cloud storage, while file-level ownership is verified prior to transferring anything to other devices. Copy also allows users to share files privately using Copy’s built-in identify verification.

Since its public debut less than 90 days ago, Copy already is approaching half a million users worldwide, the company said. "We think Google’s effort here is great, and we are eager to join in by providing current and new Copy users with a matching amount of free space," said Guy Suter, general manager of storage at Barracuda Networks, in a statement. "We believe people deserve lots of storage to realize the full benefits of using the cloud. They also should be able to control what files count against their capacity.”…

Grazed from NetworkWorld. Author: Brandon Bulter.

Many enterprise IT shops may be reluctant to jump head first into cloud computing. After all, there are a variety of concerns that come with using the cloud, from security to integrations with existing systems, and perhaps most scary: What the cloud will mean for your IT job. But cloud services are being used within organizations with or without the blessing of IT. ServiceNow has a solution for this dichotomy, a sort of onboarding process to get IT comfortable with using the cloud, while enabling functionality to business end users. ServiceNow says what better department to start with using the cloud than IT itself. IT shops get a first-hand look at how the cloud is used, what it’s good for and what it’s not.

ServiceNow has targeted IT service management applications as the first stop for off-loading apps to its cloud. Based on ITIL best practices, the platform provides a way for IT to manage incident reporting and response, change requests and troubleshooting…

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Tom Nolle.

Contrary to popular belief, cloud services actually fail more often than internal data center facilities do. The cloud isn’t inherently unreliable, but like all forms of IT, cloud services have to be selected carefully and managed to achieve specific reliability and availability goals. The steps can be contractual, technical or may even involve rethinking your application architectures. Without careful consideration, you may get less from your cloud services than you expected.

SLAs mitigate risk of using cloud providers’ data centers

Protecting against cloud outages starts by assessing the reliability of cloud providers’ data centers. The majority of cloud providers have a small number of data centers, often only one, and these data centers are subject to the same kinds of failures as an enterprise. The most publicized cloud failures occur when an entire cloud data center fails, usually because of a natural disaster. To protect yourself in case of failure, you’ll either have to ask for specific data center configuration information or obtain an availability guarantee from your provider…