Category: News

Grazed from PRNewsWire. Author: PR Announcement.

Cloud computing, mobility, social tools and other technologies that put more power in the hands of individual users pose new challenges for organizations seeking to secure data, devices and networks, new research released today by CompTIA, the non-profit association for the information technology (IT) industry, reveals.

The majority of companies in CompTIA’s 10th Annual Information Security Trends study attribute human error as a contributing cause of security breaches, just as they have in the previous nine years of the study. What’s changing, however, is that the human element is no longer confined to malware, phishing and viruses…

Grazed from ZDNet. Author: Jack Clark.

As if providing cloud computing, cloud storage and cloud networking wasn’t enough, Amazon Web Services is now giving customers access to low-cost cloud archiving. The company’s mainstay S3 storage service is now linked to the low-cost Glacier data archival service from within the AWS management console, Amazon said on Tuesday. By chaining the two together, Amazon has got rid of many of the steps that companies previously had to take to back up data from S3 into Glacier.

"Amazon S3 was designed for rapid retrieval. Glacier, in contrast, trades off retrieval time for cost, providing storage for as little at $0.01 per Gigabyte per month while retrieving data within three to five hours," Amazon wrote in a blog post…

Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Barb Darrow.

Jesse Andrews, an OpenStack veteran who’s done stints at NASA, ANSO Labs and Rackspace, will lead Nebula’s plug-and-play OpenStack development effort as it nears launch, the company said. Companies pushing OpenStack love to boast that they have former NASA technologists on staff. After all, NASA, along with Rackspace, incubated the open-source cloud stack. In that vein, Nebula, which is led by former NASA CTO Chris Kemp, is naming Jesse Andrews as VP of product management. In that capacity Andrews will oversee the entire Nebula project as the company prepares it for launch.

Andrews has a great OpenStack pedigree. He was also formerly CEO of ANSO Labs, the NASA spinoff, where he worked with Kemp and the rest of the team behind the Nova compute engine underlying OpenStack. ANSO was acquired by Rackspace in February, 2011 and Andrews worked on that company’s Cloud Builder program while continuing to contribute to OpenStack. In fact, Andrews is not totally new to Nebula: He was one of the half dozen or so former ANSO people at Rackspace who decamped to Nebula last July…

Grazed from NetworkComputing. Author: Jon Gold.

Researchers from the Georgia Tech Information Security Center today released their official 2013 cyberthreats forecast, detailing what they say will be the most serious computer security issues in the coming year.

THE CLOUD

First on the list — the use of cloud computing for malicious purposes. The same flexible provisioning capabilities that let legitimate businesses quickly add or subtract computing power could be used to instantly create a powerful network of zombie machines for a wide array of nefarious purposes. "If I’m a bad guy, and I have a zero-day exploit and the cloud provider is not up on their toes in terms of patching, the ability to exploit such a big capacity means I can do all sorts of things," Microsoft Windows Azure Distinguished Engineer Yousef Khalidi said in the report…

Grazed from Phys.org. Author: Editorial Staff.

Gross domestic product (GDP) can be boosted by cloud computing, the system in which remote computers on the Internet are used to store, manage and process data rather than the users’ local machines. A report to be published in the International Journal of Technology, Policy and Management suggests that governments should collaborate to boost the adoption of cloud computing internationally. Marco Iansiti of Harvard Business School and Gregory Richards of Cambridge-based Keystone Strategy, LLC, have found that cloud computing is likely to extend economic growth by increasing the efficiency of information technology in developed economies and could foster growth in those economies where IT penetration is not yet fully mature.

"Cloud computing is a further evolution and integration of server, internet and personal computing technology. It is a paradigm that pushes the three driving forces of power, accessibility and economy of scale beyond present constraints," the researchers say. They point out that during the coming decade cloud computing will give individuals and enterprises access to a vast processing power at a low cost that has not been possible before. The team has now developed a model to link IT capital investment to economic growth and applied their model to 45 countries…

Grazed from WRALTechWire. Author:  Editorial Staff.

6fusion, a startup focused on “cloud” computing services, has raised $2 million in new financing and hopes to land another $2 million. The Raleigh-based company, which is backed by Intersouth partners, secured the new money a mix of debt and options financing and aims to raise $2 million more, according to an SEC filing on Nov. 13.

The first money was raised Oct. 29. Two investors have committed money, but neither was identified. Cloud computing, virtualization and related services are among the fastest growing segments in information technology. And 6fushion plays in the space…

Grazed from CloudTweaks. Author: Don Cleveland.

It’s interesting to follow the big money that big companies are spending. It’s a lot like watching a huge ocean liner set sail for exotic places or a stretch limousine glide though town. These oddities can’t help but be seen but I often wonder if anyone is really watching. According to a Wall Street Journal article from last spring entitled, “The Sun Shines on The Cloud” the research firm IDC reported 16 billion in cloud revenue for 2009 and projects a $73 billion investment to be made by 2015. The background of this article is Amazon’s partial cloud failure that kicked Netflix and a host of other customers off the network last June. Amazon explained and apologized and the headlines screamed panic.

At the time and even now Amazon continues with business as usual in the cloud. In Luchi’s Week In Review piece last week on Cloud Tweaks, he reported that Amazon is seeking to control the domain .cloud. The mammoth doesn’t seem very worried about power outages or security risks. Nor has Netflix run away from the cloud when the temporary hitch affected their business. Apparently these disruptions we hear about every now and then are a blip on the radar screen. The big guys are basing their future on the cloud while many remain skeptical and concerned about security. Why can’t smaller companies think like big companies? Perhaps fear holds them back, a fear we are not even aware of…

Grazed from CloudTweaks. Author: Abdul Salam.

Global warming and climate change are on top of world’s list of concerns and one of the reasons is our dependence on dirty energy from fossil fuels. We all consider the transportation sector as the main pollution source of our atmosphere, but is the IT industry really exempted from the blame?

Governments around the globe usually have stringent standards on factory or industrial facility energy consumption and emission while the energy consumption in IT laboratories and data centers is overlooked, with the exception of some universities and research organizations. So there are no standards or laws that are meant to be followed when putting up such facility, which makes this a big problem. Research suggests that a great deal of energy is being wasted during energy conversion from AC to DC and it would cost twice as much, in terms of energy consumption, to cool a server than to run it…

Grazed from CloudTech News. Author: James Bourne.

A week after VMware released its Asia Pacific Cloud Index Survey, another report has come up from the Asia Cloud Computing Association (ACCA) claiming Japan is the most ‘cloud ready’ nation in the Asia Pacific region. Japan’s ranking is unchanged from last year at number one, with South Korea leapfrogging Hong Kong and Singapore into second place.

Hong Kong and Singapore, according to the VMware survey, were the most cloud-knowledgeable Asia Pacific nations, with nine out of ten IT professionals in Hong Kong claiming to have a strong knowledge of virtualisation and 82% of respondents in Singapore having a strong cloud knowledge…

Grazed from CloudPro. Author: Maxwell Cooter.

It could have been dull but the Dell Think Tank threw up some thought-provoking ideas on the future of cloud. There were 16 cloud commentators and they were locked in a room. It sounds like the precursor to a joke but this was no laughing matter (even though there were Englishmen, Irishmen and Scotsmen present) but an event that looked to explore all aspects of cloud in some detail. It sounds like it could have been deathly dull, but the Dell Think Tank was was one of the most interesting events I’d ever been involved in and the resulting debate

What made the event work so well was the wide-ranging experience of the participants. I was there as the token journalist but there were software vendors, cloud providers, analysts, lawyers, academics and Dell executives (generally keeping a low profile)…