Category: News

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: Chris Talbot.

Centrify has released the 2013 version of its Centrify Suite security and compliance solution. Centrify Suite 2013 has been outfitted with new features around advanced privilege user management and auditing for Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) Windows systems, designed to help organizations more quickly meet compliance requirements and mitigate risks from threats affecting both their on-premise and cloud-based systems.

According to Centrify, these latest additions to the security and compliance product will help businesses reduce their operating costs across all of their systems and platforms. Achieving security best practices is no easy task, and businesses continue to struggle with keeping the bad guys out while allowing their trusted users in. Although point solutions exist for privilege management for Windows, UNIX and Linux, Centrify claims its updated product is the first to provide privilege management across all platforms…

Grazed from IBTimes. Author: David Gilbert.

Businesses are completely ignoring a growing problem facing their organisations as cyber criminals look to target increased security flaws as operations move to the cloud. Cloud computing was one of the buzzwords of 2012, gaining widespread adoption among individuals, SMEs and major corporations all around the world. It is going to make our lives easier while saving us millions of pounds at the same time.

However, one issue which is being ignored by the vast majority of organisation is security, with a Pricewaterhouse Coopers survey from last year showing that more than three quarters of respondents across a range of companies believed cloud computing did not increase their security risk. A belief shattered by a report published this week by security firm Imperva which highlights just how easy it is for even one of the world’s largest online companies to be hacked and have sensitive consumer data stolen…

Grazed from The Guardian. Author: Chris Harding.

The latest market forecasts for cloud computing are predicting 30% annual growth in the industry, as more and more people adopt the latest technology to store information in a virtual space. But cloud computing isn’t just for data, you can also use it to run applications and software remotely, without being tied to one computer.

For a small businesses, outsourcing IT to the cloud lowers the need for specialist skills and frees managers to concentrate on the core business. It may cost slightly more than in-house IT, but this is often outweighed, as it can sometimes enable a small company to take a "big company" approach to problems by increasing efficiency…

Grazed from PRWeb. Author: PR Announcement.

GoGrid, a leading cloud infrastructure company, today announced the availability of GoGrid’s Dynamic Load Balancer, a cloud-based load-balancing solution that provides an ideal, cost-effective way to design, power, and manage high-availability infrastructure. With this new service, customers can deploy and scale load-balancing services in minutes, allowing them to dynamically scale network services to support essential infrastructure. This highly available solution helps businesses control spending, eases maintenance, and provides the elasticity and on-demand control needed to efficiently manage cloud infrastructure.

"If you’re deploying applications in the cloud, load balancing is an essential requirement," said Mark Worsey, GoGrid’s CIO and EVP of technology. "During development, our priority was making sure this service is virtualized and programmable like our other compute and storage services. For the past 10 years, GoGrid has pioneered cloud IaaS services that let global businesses dynamically scale their infrastructure on-demand. With our new Dynamic Load Balancer, we bring our cloud computing expertise to this essential network layer."…

Grazed from Business Insider. Author: Julie Bort.

Oracle this week explained its plans to push into the $72 billion cloud-computing market. During a phone call with reporters on Monday, Oracle president Mark Hurd gave more detail on the plan the company had first unveiled on January 15. Oracle is trying to grab a slice of the "infrastructure-as-a-service" (IaaS) market away from Amazon, Rackspace, Salesforce.com, IBM, and others.

Cloud computing is a vast market, involving software apps, storage, computing power, and other resources. The infrastructure part of cloud usually involves providing the basic computing resources on which customers can run operating systems and software of their choosing. Oracle’s scheme is completely different from the way most companies approach IaaS…

Grazed from Heirloom Computing. Author: PR Announcement.

Heirloom Computing Inc. today announced a new partnership with Java Platform as a Service (PaaS) provider CloudBees to speed the transition of mainframe workloads to the CloudBees PaaS. With the partnership, Heirloom will help IT managers lower costs and modernize their COBOL-based mainframe workloads by deploying them to the cloud, utilizing Heirloom Elastic COBOL and the CloudBees Platform. Deploying Heirloom’s Elastic COBOL on CloudBees is simple – watch this short video for a demo: http://youtu.be/4QmKvt0L9zo

Heirloom Computing is on a mission to efficiently modernize the world’s business-critical enterprise software applications. Heirloom seamlessly migrates legacy systems to private and public cloud computing infrastructures, enabling IT departments to reap the cost benefits of cloud computing and satisfy user demands for applications accessible via web browsers and mobile devices…

Grazed from PRWeb. Author: PR Announcement.

CIOs considering moving mission-critical applications to the cloud must fully understand the inherent differences between cloud services created for consumer use and those designed to serve the more demanding needs of enterprise businesses. Well-publicized outages point out the need for enterprise-ready cloud services designed from the ground up with the enterprise in mind.

These disruptions draw attention to the need for enterprise IT pros to make important decisions about where to locate cloud-based mission-critical infrastructure based on a thorough understanding of the associated selection criteria. To help, Logicalis, an international IT solutions and managed services provider (http://www.us.logicalis.com), has created a list of five important best practices IT pros should employ when choosing a cloud provider to serve their enterprise business needs…

Grazed from Public Service Europe. Author: Carsten Bruhn.

New research reveals a worrying picture of a European public sector equipped with the latest technologies but unable to effectively use them, writes IT expert. The European public sector has a great opportunity right now. Against the backdrop of the eurozone crisis and pressure to reduce operational budgets, cloud computing could well be the solution to the monumental challenge of delivering more with less. In fact, the public sector has already embraced the cloud to some extent, with recent research showing 47 per cent of employees in the public sector are using the cloud to share critical documents – more than any other sector surveyed – and 71 per cent are using it to enable mobile access to documents.

Its adoption could be down to an increased expectation by citizens to access information online and a commitment from governments across Europe to adopt more e-government services. As well as playing a central role in the migration of paper to digital documents, through the cloud information can flow more freely with workers able to gain mobile access to critical information on the move. This means staff can continue working from anywhere, without being hindered by traditional information technology constraints…

Grazed from PRNewsWire. Author: PR Announcement.

Intacct, a leader in cloud financial management and accounting software, today announced record results for calendar year 2012. Over the past twelve months, Intacct increased new customer bookings by more than 47 percent over 2011. In the company’s second fiscal quarter, ended December 31, Intacct rode strong momentum from companies outgrowing QuickBooks and those looking to switch from outdated midmarket on-premises software to secure a record number of new customer additions. All of this points to increasing momentum in the cloud financials market as gains in other business application areas, such as customer relationship management and human resources, are now reaching core financials.

To meet increasing demand, Intacct continues to attract a growing number of CPA firms and the top Microsoft and Sage partners to its channel program, adding several key new partners in 2012. The Intacct Business Partner Program added three new Accounting Today Top 100 resellers during the year: SVA Consulting (#48), e2b teknologies (#74), and InterDyn CFO Consulting (#97 and now part of InterDyn BMI) – bringing the program’s overall count to 21 of the Top 100 firms. Meanwhile, Intacct’s partnerships with the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA) and CPA2Biz, the technology subsidiary of the AICPA, have helped to strengthen the Intacct Accountants Program. In 2012, the program added more than 75 new firms and now boasts 22 of the Top 100 accounting firms…

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Charles Babcock.

IBM has established a global network of eight data centers to supply infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and is now offering SmartCloud Enterprise+ for running production workloads, including SAP applications. Unlike Amazon.com or Rackspace IaaS, IBM customers will find System Z mainframes and System P servers running AIX in the IBM cloud. That makes SmartCloud more compatible with the workloads of IBM customers. Most services are based strictly on standard Intel or AMD x86 servers, and it remains difficult to migrate Z series or P series workloads to x86 servers.

IBM’s IaaS data centers are located in Boulder, Colo.; Raleigh, N. C., Montpellier, France; Ehningen, Germany; Sydney, Australia; Sao Paulo, Brazil; Tokyo; and Toronto. It will add a ninth at mid- year in Barcelona, Spain. The company has previously offered IaaS in the U.S. and Europe. Offering greater geographic coverage often helps companies find a site in which to store their data. France, Germany and Canada all have regulations on what data may leave the country and what may not…