Category: News

Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Derrick Harris.

Most of us have a lot of data in the cloud, housed in storage services such as Dropbox, e-mail applications such as Gmail or everyday web services such as Facebook. Most of us probably don’t keep it as safe as we should, either. Although certain methods of attack are beyond our control — such as the social engineering attack that befell Wired staffer Mat Honan last week — if you’re willing to undertake a little extra effort, there are still plenty of methods to prevent intruders from seeing your information.

1. Be smart about passwords and security questions.

Ideally, passwords and usernames should be unique for each service so a breach at one doesn’t result in carte blanche access to the rest of your accounts (if the LinkedIn breach didn’t beat the practice into our collective head, nothing will). Passwords also should be obscure enough that someone won’t be able to guess them if they know a few factoids about the target. And complex helps too: interspersing numbers, symbols and upper-case letters makes it harder to guess even if someone gets the phrase right…

Grazed from NextGov. Author:  Eric Katz.

Federal information technology officers view cloud computing as an important part of their agencies’ futures, but specific implementation plans are not yet well known within agency management, an industry report has found.

IDC Government Insights found that while 90 percent of more than 400 IT and business managers surveyed said cloud computing will have some impact on their department’s future, an alarming number did not know the long-term plans for the technology or how to budget for cloud solutions.

Thirty-four percent of the executives surveyed did not know their agency’s cloud budget, while 23 percent of civilian managers were not aware their agencies’ long-term plans, according to the report…

Ninefold has today launched a VMware-based platform on the Ninefold public cloud allowing customers greater choice and flexibility when selecting a cloud platform upon which to run their Ninefold cloud services.

Ninefold’s public cloud service (credit card subscription, self-service, usage based competitive pricing & open API) now offers a VMware cloud platform that many enterprises and business already use to support their mission-critical applications – all located and supported from Australian data centres. This offer will afford Ninefold customers greater portability and further optimisation across a hybrid cloud model.

Alert Logic, the leading provider of Security-as-a-Service solutions for the cloud, today announced general availability of Alert Logic Web Security Manager with ActiveWatch to protect web applications against the most common threats and attacks. The solution combines industry-leading web application firewall (WAF) technology with advanced managed security services from Alert Logic’s Security Operations Center, addressing the operational challenges associated with legacy WAF solutions which have hindered broad adoption of this important security control.

“Web application firewalls are powerful tools for protecting custom web applications, however, often there isn’t free staff or rack space to bring the WAF on premise,” said Gartner Analyst Greg Young. “A managed as-a-service WAF offering can jump these hurdles.”

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Sonja Lelii.

Hewlett-Packard Co. today moved its HP Cloud Object Storage and Cloud Content Delivery Network (CDN) out of public beta and into general availability as it tries to take on market leaders Amazon S3 and Google.

HP sells its cloud services to providers and claims it is best suited for Web content, backup and archiving, storage tiering, disaster recovery and "big data." HP’s service-level agreement (SLA) promises 99.95% uptime, and it will pay service credits if it falls below that number.

HP’s strategy is similar to EMC’s with its Atmos cloud object storage platform, which providers can use to build cloud services around. But HP’s most formidable competition will come from Amazon’s established cloud services…

Grazed from AccountingToday. Author: Michael Cohn.

The how-to guide, “10 Steps to a Digital Practice in the Cloud: New Levels of CPA Firm Workflow Efficiency,” is written by John Higgins and Bryan Smith, a pair of CPAs who also hold the Certified Information Technology Professional credential.

Firms need to have a comprehensive technology plan, according to Higgins, because “it’s very easy to invest in the wrong solutions at the wrong time.” That can be expensive, both in terms of dollars and staff time lost, he added.

“The accounting profession has developed a good understanding of the concept of cloud computing, but not its value proposition,” Higgins said. “Firms often have difficulty seeing the strategic value of technology.”…

Grazed from Cloud Tweaks. Author: Rick Watson.

Large scale industrialization of data centers are just but a minor indicator of the extent to which cloud computing has become entrenched across the globe. Most individuals are not aware of the impact of cloud computing on their life, considering that they are not specifically concerned about the intricacies of the tech world. However, soon, most people will demand to know topography of networks they are on, primarily because most human beings are subject to the bandwagon effect. As soon as issues are raised, everyone suddenly gets a voice, resulting to a chain reaction of views and arguments. People will always be human, but it is important for trust issues to be addressed before the bandwagon effect takes over.

Trust is a weight issue, attached to the physical aspect of human beings through a complex network of senses. Business runs on trust. You of course trust that you are alive, however much you have no idea how it feels to be dead. Forgive my digression, but I seek to outline the importance of trust in every aspect of lives, especially with relation to cloud computing…

Grazed from ZDNet. Author: Paula Rooney.

Like Citrix, Red Hat once hoped to establish its own platform as the de facto standard for open cloud computing.

And like Citrix, the Linux giant backed off that dream in light of the community’s demands for multi-vendor backed open cloud platforms. Citrix donated its CloudStack code to the Apache Software Foundation and Red Hat (which had already donated Deltacloud to the Apache Software Foundation) opted to back the rival OpenStack platform, and reposition its CloudForms Iaas as a hybrid cloud management platform.

In that vein, Red Hat now pushes its homegrown Deltacloud API as one of a number of open APIs that ought to be supported in an open cloud era. In a blog posted August 3, Red Hat announced the completion of Deltacloud 1.0 API and said that it can be used, like CloudForms, as a tool by enterprises for creating a hybrid cloud platform…

Grazed from Sys Con Media. Author: Maureen O’Gara.

VMware is going to go up against Amazon, Microsoft, Google and presumably Rackspace with its own public cloud Infrastructure-as-a-Service developed as Project Zephyr according to CRN, which thinks it could create some channel conflict for vCloud service providers that will have to compete with VMware.

The story is unconfirmed but the book quotes "sources with knowledge of the matter" saying that VMware has been quietly beta testing Zephyr for the last few months on Cisco USC servers and EMC Avamar storage at a big data center space in Nevada.

Apparently it’s afraid if it waits much longer it’ll be closed out. Market share will depend a lot on how aggressive its pricing is.

Grazed from Sys Con Media. Author: Maureen O’Gara.

Oracle has managed to squeeze a few more bucks out of SAP for its admitted copyright infringement a few years ago.

Oracle won a handsome $1.3 billion from a jury in 2010, but the judge thought that was over the top and cut it down to $272 million. Instead Oracle opted for a new trial, which was scheduled to start August 27.

However, last Thursday – "to save the time and expense of this new trial" – the pair came to a settlement agreement that guarantees Oracle $306 million in damages plus attorneys’ fees or at least $426 million while it goes off and appeals to try to get the whole $1.3 billion…