Category: News

Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Barb Darrow.

It’s become a truism to say that data is the new gold –but that doesn’t mean there are easy answers about where to store this gold. For now, many corporate customers will hold back on full cloud computing adoption until they’re convinced that they can move their data off a given cloud as easily as they put it there in the first place. Face it: fear of vendor lock-in is not limited to the on-premises IT world and it’s time enlightened vendors get this problem in hand.

The advent of cloud computing should make it easy to mix and match services from multiple vendors within a cloud and to let data flow in and out of parts of the clouds as needed. But that’s not necessarily the reality now…

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: Juan Carlos Perez.

Microsoft will upgrade on Wednesday its existing Office 365 cloud email and collaboration suites for businesses, as well as introduce new bundles, growing even more the list of Office 365 editions, which some analysts and users had already termed somewhat confusing.

The components of the Office 365 suites for businesses, like the Web-hosted versions of Exchange, SharePoint and Lync, are getting upgraded to the latest 2013 code base of the products. In addition, Microsoft is introducing three new configurations of the suite. Office 365 ProPlus, which had been previously announced, includes Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, Outlook, Publisher, InfoPath, Access and Lync. Customers can download it from Microsoft data centers and install it on up to 5 Windows PCs or Macs. It costs $144 per user, per year if bought as a standalone suite…

Grazed from WSJ. Author: Steve Rosenbush.

Good morning. For many CIOs, the main decision about moving at least some of their IT infrastructure to the cloud is no longer if, but how. We’re not talking about simply moving noncore business apps like email to the cloud. We’re talking about moving computing power and storage to the cloud. It may seem like the products in this quickly growing market are all the same, but they aren’t. That’s what CIO Journal’s Tom Loftus learned when he called three vendors–Amazon.com Inc., Microsoft Corp. and Google Inc.–and asked them to explain what they have to offer customers in the way of infrastructure and platform services.

Loftus’s main conclusion: “Amazon and, to a lesser extent, Microsoft provide customers with certain amenities that Google’s new offering, at the moment, does not.” Don’t miss his report–including the survey that clarifies how these three companies structure agreements with customers…

Grazed from CloudTweaks. Author: Abdul Salam.

I have talked about security in cloud computing many times before, explaining why it is just as safe as conventional networking security, even citing its benefits over the conventional. However, there are many who still find cloud computing security lacking.

Individuals which still worry about cloud security, are those that fall under the financial institution category like banks, brokers, lenders and the like. They do not trust third party cloud computing providers and vendors, at least not with their most sensitive information and data. They might use cloud computing for some things like websites and applications that they think they can risk security with, but they would never consider parting with direct access of their financial and other similar data. The biggest reason behind this is simpler than most would imagine as it has something to do with numbers and probability, thought they probably would not admit it is something as basic as that and would rather cite some technical issue like migration and data integrity…

Grazed from USAToday. Author: Edward C Baig.

Here’s what you thought you knew about Google’s Chromebook laptops: They’re designed for Internet computing and are known for plain designs and bargain-basement prices. The former is still true. You’re supposed to be connected to the Internet when using a Chromebook, at least a good chunk of the time. But the latter is now only partially the case. You can still purchase an Acer Chromebook in the Google Play store for a mere $199, or spend $50 more for a Samsung model.

But the new Chromebook Pixel laptop that began shipping this week is not only beautiful, it fetches $1,299 for a Wi-Fi-only model. The Pixel that I tested is even pricier, a $1,449 model that complements Wi-Fi with fast LTE cellular service from Verizon Wireless. It ships in April…

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: CJ Arlotta.

Enterprise API management and SOA governance products provider SOA Software recently announced SOA Software OAuth Server, an enterprise authentication and authorization product, enabling users to use their enterprise credentials to log in and control access to their data from partner and cloud applications.

SOA Software’s OAuth Server uses a security token server that integrates with enterprise identity and access management systems, enabling businesses to publish and interact with secure data and users to share private data between different applications and approve applications to act on their behalf without sharing passwords…

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: Chris Talbot.

Juniper Networks is aiming to take a new approach to dealing with security threats with the announcement of a cloud-based global attacker intelligence service. Dubbed Junos Spotlight Secure, the new cloud service was designed to provide customers with "definitive intelligence about threats, attackers and individual devices across a wide number of networks and Juniper security products."

Spotlight Secure is meant to be the next evolution in dealing with attackers, moving beyond the traditional security method of tracking reputation feeds of IP addresses. According to Juniper, that’s the old way of doing things, and Spotlight Secure will be identifying individual attackers at the device level and then tracking them through a global database…

Grazed from Fort Mills Times. Author: Editorial Staff.

Heirloom Computing Inc. today announced a first-of-its-kind scheduler to run batch jobs on ELPaaS, Heirloom’s Platform-as-a-Service for moving mission-critical enterprise applications to the cloud. The Heirloom Job Scheduler works with Heirloom’s Job Entry Subsystem (JES) to make it easier and much less expensive for IT managers to manage their legacy applications in the cloud. Heirloom offers full support for legacy batch job languages such as IBM Job Control Language (JCL) as well as common scripting dialects, including UNIX shell and Python.

“We’ve been hearing from IT managers that they would really like the ability to schedule jobs to run in the cloud. Heirloom’s new scheduler solves that problem,” said Gary Crook, CEO of Heirloom Computing. Watch this short video to learn more about the Heirloom Job Scheduler: http://youtu.be/mANO2BULOu4 …