Category: News

Grazed from ZDNet. Author: Joe McKendrick.

A recent survey of IT leaders finds most acknowledge that hybrid cloud computing is the way to go. However, most are also still trying to understand what it all means. Such is the result of a study of 1,050 IT executives by The Hybrid Hive, a news site sponsored by Fujitsu and several other partners.

Hybrid is already commonplace — two-fifths of respondents report they already have a hybrid IT environment in place, while 51% are open to it. Companies are spending almost a third of their total IT budgets on cloud, with 14% spending more than half of their budgets on this technology. Four-fifths (79%) of IT executives believe it is "inevitable" that the future of corporate IT infrastructure is hybrid, while 81% agree they will have to deploy a hybrid IT environment to meet the needs of their organizations…

Grazed from FTFNews. Author: Eugene Grygo.

Something interesting is underway as far as cloud computing and securities operations — the Amazon Web Services (AWS) offering has been quietly gaining ground after some initial resistance. I recall that the main concerns about using the AWS cloud revolved around compliance and security.

But Amazon zeroed in on the compliance and security demands and concerns of the securities industry by putting out a document that offers an overview of how AWS meets the regulatory requirements of the SEC’s Office of Compliance Inspections and Examinations (OCIE)…

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: Christopher Tozzi.

Mirantis wants to become the "one-stop shop" for users of OpenStack on enterprise Linux. The company this week announced a new partnership with SUSE, adding another Linux option alongside its existing Red Hat and CentOS offerings. Mirantis is a major distributor of OpenStack, the open source platform for building cloud infrastructure on top of a Linux-based operating system.

Mirantis seeks to distinguish itself in the crowded OpenStack market by delivering what it calls a "pure-play" OpenStack distribution, allowing users to deploy any type of Linux platform in conjunction with OpenStack. While Mirantis can support any Linux distribution, it has now forged closer ties with SUSE, which develops SUSE Linux Enterprise Server…

"We are delighted to again be mentioned by Gartner among DaaS vendors. Our just released concurrent pricing model, also highlighted in the report, offers customers flexibility regardless of company size. With the increased demand for enterprise BYOD, The Sixth Flag offers an attractive alternative to furnishing end users with costly hardware. BYOD and complementary solutions like The Sixth Flag not only reduce hardware costs but also full lifecycle management, including asset tracking and recovery," said Pete Kofod, Founder of The Sixth Flag, Inc.

Fugue, Inc. announced today the availability of its cloud-native solution for fully automating the deployment, operations and enforcement of cloud infrastructure at scale. 

Enterprises are moving to the cloud to increase competitiveness and efficiency. However, complexity explodes in the cloud, and achieving those goals is challenging, as most DevOps teams today are forced to manually stitch together disparate tool sets. Fugue tackles this complexity with a cohesive system that allows DevOps professionals to define infrastructure upfront, leverage a runtime component to ensure that all cloud resources remain consistent with that definition, and automatically correct configuration drift. Furthermore, Fugue eliminates wasteful and error-prone cloud maintenance burdens that slow innovation and increase compliance and security risks. As the technological gateway that unlocks the power of the cloud, Fugue helps businesses achieve digital transformation and competitive advantage goals.

HotLink Corporation, the market leader in transformation solutions for hybrid IT, today announced its new HotLink Cloud-Attach Platform that enables customers to quickly, easily and holistically incorporate public cloud resources into their existing production data centers. The HotLink Cloud-Attach technology offers industry-first capabilities for out-of-the-box interoperability between VMware management infrastructure and Amazon Web Services (AWS) – without adding operational or integration complexity. Additionally, new managed services complement HotLink’s award-winning technology with expert services, so customers can deploy “cloud-attached” data centers efficiently and without public cloud expertise on staff. 

Zenoss Inc., the leader in hybrid IT monitoring and analytics software, today announced it has released new extensions that provide granular level monitoring capabilities for popular OpenStack components, such as Ceph and Cinder Storage, Nova Compute services, and Neutron networking connectivity. These components represent some of the most highly utilized projects in the OpenStack Community according to an OpenStack User Survey released in April 2016, which showed an incredible 97% adoption rate for Nova and equally impressive 90% adoption rate for Neutron.

Zenoss Service Dynamics is an Open Source monitoring platform that can be extended through plug-ins, called ZenPacks, that allow you to monitor a vast array of devices, applications, and systems under a single unified dashboard. The OpenStack ZenPack provides insight into the overall status and health of an OpenStack deployment, and provides actionable data for dozens of the most highly utilized elements of an OpenStack cloud including:

Panzura, the leading provider of hybrid cloud storage for the enterprise, today announced its 5000 series of expandable enterprise hybrid cloud controllers, available immediately. This new generation of controllers scales from 1000s of users in a single site to tens of 1000s of users across global offices. Using Panzura’s patented hybrid cloud storage software, customers can accelerate time to market of multi-billion dollar projects and high value software products by months, reduce on-premise storage costs by millions of dollars, and deliver a future proof hybrid cloud storage architecture. Organizations like Electronic Arts, Milwaukee Tool, National Instruments and the Department of Justice use Panzura for global software development and build delivery, high value asset distribution, cross-site CAD collaboration, hybrid cloud NAS and active archive.

Panzura software, available with the 5000 series, enables globally dispersed employees and machines to work together like they are in the same location. With Panzura, customers can implement distributed continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) environments to move software builds of up to hundreds of gigabytes to multiple sites worldwide in minutes totaling terabytes of builds globally distributed per day. Example projects include developing and distributing game builds globally, architecting skyscrapers and amusement parks using teams from multiple offices, transferring large-scale seismic data to compute farms on different continents and designing power tools collaboratively between teams in different countries. 

Grazed from CloudTech. Author: Matt Kingswood.

The benefits of storing data in the cloud are clear. However, as businesses are beginning to closely examine what having data in the cloud entails, they’re discovering that their relationships with cloud vendors are sometimes, well, cloudy. In a 2015 Forrester Consulting survey, more than 60% of businesses said issues with transparency were stalling further expansion into the cloud. These organisations are justified in being wary, because knowing where data is going and how it is being treated is paramount. I’ll explain why the next wave of successful cloud providers will compete on these issues rather than price, product or market.

Why is location important?

If backups are vaulted in the wrong geographic location, businesses limit their ability to rebound from an incident within the necessary recovery time objectives (RTOs), due to latency concerns and bandwidth cost. The goal of strategically selecting where data will be vaulted is to minimise organisational risk as much as possible…

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: David Linthicum.

Cloud computing offers lots of benefits, but improved security is not one that makes many IT lists. In fact, many — perhaps even most — IT pros still believe that cloud computing means a huge step backward in terms of security risk. That doesn’t seem to be the case. About 10 percent of our workloads now run on public clouds, and so far, so good.

Why? Ironically, partly because IT has been so paranoid about public clouds that it spent time and money to implement advanced security approaches such as identity and access management and to be more proactive about security measures. Moreover, public cloud providers themselves understand the importance of security. If they get one cross-tenant hack, they are done for…