Category: News

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…

Grazed from DarkReading. Author: Editorial Staff.

Centrify Corporation, a leader in Unified Identity Services across data center, cloud and mobile, today from NetSuite SuiteWorld 2013 announced Centrify for NetSuite. Centrify for NetSuite is a free, comprehensive solution for Active Directory-based NetSuite single sign-on, user provisioning and mobile management for NetSuite. With Centrify, organizations can secure NetSuite for employees, reduce helpdesk burden, improve access controls, and leverage their existing Active Directory infrastructure and skillsets.

NetSuite’s SuiteCloud is a comprehensive offering of cloud-based products, development tools, and services designed to help customers and commercial software developers take advantage of the significant economic benefits of cloud computing. SuiteCloud Developer Tools provide a comprehensive cloud customization environment, whether users are extending NetSuite to fit their business needs or developing completely new applications. SuiteCloud Developer Tools include workflow management, scripting, analytics, web services and more…

Grazed from FortMills Times. Author: Editorial Staff.

CloudBees, Inc., the Java Platform as a Service (PaaS) innovation leader, today announced a new office in Brussels, Belgium, as well as another record-setting quarter in Q1 2013 of new account acquisition and revenue growth. In 2012, CloudBees’ business increased by 350 percent. That success, along with an expanded presence in Europe, will lay the foundation for even greater growth in 2013.

CloudBees is increasing the size of its European operations by investing in top local talent in Europe, beginning with Michel Goossens, vice president of worldwide sales, who was hired in 2012. Since the opening of the Brussels office in early 2013, the office has expanded rapidly, becoming the hub for European sales, marketing and business development. The new office joins existing CloudBees offices in Boston and San Francisco…

Grazed from IT News Online. Author: PR Announcement.

CohesiveFT has been shortlisted for the 6th Annual International Datacentres Award. CohesiveFT is nominated in the award category for Public Cloud Services & Infrastructure. "The need for business application-layer security remains universal, and largely unanswered by IaaS and cloud vendors," said CohesiveFT CEO Patrick Kerpan. "By combining VNS3 Overlay SDN with IaaS provider infrastructure security features, our customers are able to create and control a multidimensional security solution."

The International Datacentres Awards, called "the Oscars of the datacentre industry," focus on recognising excellence across the datacentre and cloud sector. "The quality of entry this year was among the highest ever at the 2012 event. This reflects both the growth and confidence of the datacentre sector across Europe," wrote chairman of the Judges Panel, Ashley Davies…

Grazed from Talkin Cloud. Author: Chris Talbot.

Rackspace (NYSE: RAX) is the latest company to make an investment NoSQL database-as-a-service (DBaaS) provider Cloudant. The Rackspace investment of an undisclosed sum follows three months after Samsung Ventures made a similar strategic investment in the company.

According to a blog post by Pat Matthews, Rackspace’s senior vice president of Corporate Development, the investment in Cloudant has been made to reinforce the important of DBaaS and to help developers spend their time on building new features rather than maintaining databases. That’s where Cloudant’s DBaaS comes into play. The service was designed to "let developers focus on new development and not on operations."…