Category: News

October 25, 2011 Off

Auditing Cloud Services

By David
Grazed from CSO.  Author:  Puneet Kukreja.

Business agility and the demand for quick turnaround to infrastructure and application requirements to service organisational growth have fuelled the rise of cloud services. For organisations that have had their IT system requirements held back by traditional sourcing and project based delivery of information technology, cloud seems to be the answer. Cloud computing is defined by the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) as a:

“Model for enabling convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications, and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction.”…

October 25, 2011 Off

Tidemark: Enterprise disruption in the cloud

By David

Grazed from ZDNet.  Author: Michael Krigsman.

Some observers believe the growing impact of cloud computing is limited to locating servers remotely and asking users to pay for software over time rather upfront. From this limited perspective, cloud computing is a back office function with minor impact on either business processes or end users.

This simplistic and narrow view ignores the genuine power of cloud computing to transform and improve enterprise business processes. Measurable business improvement is the ultimate benefit of cloud computing; these positive disruptions are far more important than server locations or software payment terms…

October 25, 2011 Off

Equinix launches cloud market-place for data centre tenants

By David

Grazed from IT Wire.  Author:  Stuart Corner.

Global date centre operator, Equinix, has launched an online marketplace to help tenants of its data centres find and connect with potential customers and suppliers of networking and cloud computing services.

Equinix says that, by creating a custom profile and storefront in the Equinix Marketplace, sellers of services ranging from network connectivity to private clouds to alternative trading systems can promote their services to thousands of potential customers or partners…
October 25, 2011 Off

Oracle aims at Salesforce in buying RightNow

By David
Grazed from ComputerWorld.  Author:  Roy Harris.

Software giant Oracle is acquiring RightNow Technologies Inc. for $43 a share, or a total of about $1.5 billion, to expand its Internet-based offerings and offer a challenge to customer relationship management powerhouse Salesforce.com.

Oracle said in a press release that RightNow’s customer service cloud approach helps organizations work across its call centers, the Web, and social networks…

October 24, 2011 Off

Cloud computing changing data management processes

By David
Grazed from Experian QAS.  Author: Richard Jones.

Use of cloud computing has generated a permanent shift in the field of data management, new survey results indicate.

A poll of Chief Information Officers (CIOs) by CIO magazine has revealed that 83 per cent of firms are using some form of virtualized network…

October 24, 2011 Off

Four key reasons to include cloud computing in your business strategy

By David
Grazed from ZDNet.  Author: Mark Skilton.

The issue of success or failure in moving your company data, IT storage, servers or software to the cloud is often driven by technical issues, including performance, bandwidth, security and total-cost-of-ownership (TCO) considerations. While many of these factors are key criteria for selecting cloud solutions, they usually don’t align with the bigger picture that C-level executives must consider when adding new IT solutions…

October 24, 2011 Off

Cloud computing: Gaps in AWS ‘cloud’

By David
Grazed from EurekAlert.  Author: Jörg Schwenk.

Massive security flaws at Amazon Web Services discovered and remedied

Researchers from Ruhr-University Bochum have found a massive security gap at Amazon Cloud Services. Using different methods of attack (signature wrapping and cross site scripting) they tested the system which was deemed "safe". "Based on our research results, Amazon confirmed the security gaps and closed them immediately", said Prof. Dr. Jörg Schwenk, chair for network and data security at the RUB. Amazon Webservices (AWS) offers its customers cloud computing services and hosts, among others, services like Twitter, Second Life and 4Square…

October 24, 2011 Off

Can You Secure A Hybrid-Private Cloud?

By David
Grazed from Network Computing.  Author: Frank Ohlhorst.

They say that security begins at the firewall. Whether that is actually true depends upon the security posture of a business. However, if you do rely on a firewall, especially a software firewall or one integrated into an operating system, you have to make sure that it is configured and managed properly–something that is getting harder to do as firewall policies, threats and intrusions become more complex. Add to that the fact that services and data are starting to exist more and more in the cloud and are becoming virtual, and you have a potential recipe for data leakage, account compromises and unauthorized access…

October 24, 2011 Off

Smart Data Management through the Cloud

By David
Grazed from Sys Con Media.  Author: PR Announcement.

To achieve our goal of making Canada a leader in the global Cloud computing market, we need to create an innovation program that outputs the IP required to underpin new ventures capable of real impact in the sector.

This needs to be combined with an international business development program, so that these startups can be involved in bids like the $100m UK G-Cloud project