Category: News

July 19, 2015 Off

How to avoid security issues in cloud computing

By David

Grazed from TechTarget.  Author: Steve Weissman.

A recent piece I wrote on the outsourcing considerations for software as a service (SaaS) and cloud services has sparked some interesting conversation, especially in the realm of security issues in cloud computing. Yet, most of this discussion hasn’t touched what I see to be one of the biggest areas of possible vulnerability: avoidable gaps that open as departmental initiatives weaken the enterprise imperative.

Sure, access control, encryption and policy ramifications and the like are all critical — but what happens when business units are given (or assume) the right and ability to do their own thing? Nothing good, I can tell you…

July 17, 2015 Off

Delivering Network Services via the Cloud

By David

Grazed from TalkinCloud.  Author: Mike Vizard.

One of the unfortunate tendencies when it comes to the cloud is trying to replicate the way everything that was done on premise within a public cloud computing environment. Rather than looking to consolidate layers of computing that over the years have emerged inside the data center, IT organizations often just wind up shifting the mess.

For that reason solution providers should be looking for new ways to deliver IT services via the cloud that actually transform how they are delivered. Case in point is Appcito, which this week announced that it is making its application delivery controller (ADC) available on the Microsoft Azure cloud…

July 17, 2015 Off

Analysing cloud as the target for disaster recovery

By David

Grazed from CloudTech.  Author: David Auslander.

If we think about the basic functionality that we take advantage of in the cloud, a whole set of possibilities open up for how we plan for disaster recovery (DR).  Until recently, disaster recovery was an expensive, process intensive service, reserved for only the most critical of corporate services. In most cases DR has been about large servers in two geographically distributed location and large data sets being replicated on a timed basis.

Many smaller or less critical services were relegated to a backup and restore DR solution although in many cases as these applications “grew up”, organisations realised that they too needed better protection. Unfortunately, the cost of standing up a legacy style DR environment remained prohibitive for all but the largest and most critical services…

July 16, 2015 Off

Amazon CTO Vogels on competing with Microsoft in hybrid cloud, keeping partners and customers happy

By David

Grazed from NetworkWorld. Author: Brandon Butler.

Werner Vogels joined Amazon.com in 2004 and a year later became CTO. During the past decade he helped define the public infrastructure as a service cloud market. To do so, Amazon Web Services built a massive network of data centers around the world, which to this day continues to grow rapidly. This month at the AWS Summit in New York, Network World Senior Editor Brandon Butler spoke with Vogels about the state of the cloud industry, challenges facing AWS, its relationships with partners and customers, and what he’s learned from growing AWS into the business it is today.

Amazon Web Services is credited by many as the market-leader in the public IaaS market, but Microsoft is hot on your tail. One of the key differentiators for Microsoft Azure is its focus on the hybrid cloud. What are you doing to support hybrid cloud computing? Customers have made major investments in their infrastructure, so that will not disappear overnight…

July 16, 2015 Off

Enterprise Cloud Migration Spurs Infrastructure-as-a-Service Double-digit Growth, Finds Frost & Sullivan

By David

Grazed from MarketWatch. Author: PR Announcement.

The technological and economic benefits offered by cloud services are accelerating enterprise migration from on-premise IT infrastructure solutions to hosted alternatives. This is driving rapid growth in the European infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) market. Cloud providers are also pursuing regional strategies such as setting up of local data centres to fast-track uptake among European customers.

New analysis from Frost & Sullivan, Analysis of the European Infrastructure-as-a-Service Market (https://www.frost.com/mab4 [https), finds that the market earned revenues of 1.95 billion USD in 2014 and estimates this to reach 10.11 billion USD in 2019. For complimentary access to more information on this research, please visit: http://owl.li/PDhQC …

July 16, 2015 Off

Microsoft-Rackspace Partnership To Provide Better Cloud Service; Is Amazon Next?

By David

Grazed from MorningNewsUSA. Author: Sohini Auddy.

Microsoft and Rackspace are going to team up to provide a better experience to users with Microsoft’s Azure cloud computing service. The Microsoft-Rackspace partnership will provide assistance to the companies using Azure. They will be presenting a guide to make them get the best out of data storage, processing, database and other services.

Microsoft needs no introduction to be precise. Rackspace Hosting Inc is a data center service company known for its top-tier technology support. The company is also known for its customer support. The reputation of the company can give Microsoft a significant boost while competing with Amazon as far as the latter’s web service is concerned…

July 16, 2015 Off

DoD Sets Ambitious Cloud Goals

By David

Grazed from e-CommerceTimes. Author: John K. Higgins.

The U.S. Defense Department, often cited as a bit sluggish in taking advantage of the benefits of cloud computing, appears now to be emerging as a government leader in adopting the technology. In the short run, DoD has far outpaced other federal agencies in setting up cloud contracts. During the first quarter of fiscal 2015, the value of all federal contracts for cloud projects amounted to US$668 million, of which the overwhelming amount, $531 million, was attributed to the Defense Department.

The DoD upsurge in 2015 versus 2014 "is largely attributable to the award of the Defense Information Systems Agency’s Enterprise Storage Solutions II contract, which calls for a hybrid cloud data storage service, with vendors supplying hardware housed in the agency’s data centers," said Alex Rossino, a research analyst at Deltek…

July 16, 2015 Off

Cloud Computing: Security and advanced automation in the enterprise – Getting it right

By David

Grazed from CloudTech.  Author: Phil Cristensen.

Complexity is a huge security risk for the enterprise.  While security is always a top priority during the initial build phase of a cloud project, over time security tends to slip. As systems evolve, stacks change, and engineers come and go, it’s very easy to end up with a mash-up of legacy and cloud security policies piled on top of custom code that only a few engineers know how to work with.
 
The security of your system should not depend on the manual labour — or the memory — of your engineers. They shouldn’t have to remember to close XYZ security loophole when deploying a new environment. They don’t have time to manually ensure that every historical vulnerability is patched on every system across multiple clouds…
July 16, 2015 Off

9 Spectacular Cloud Computing Fails

By David

 Grazed from InformationWeek.  Author: Andrew Froelich.

Most of us have heard about at least one spectacular cloud failure, and some of us have been directly affected by one. While cloud technologies and security mechanisms continue to mature, they still suffer the same types of issues as in-house infrastructures. The primary difference, however, is that cloud failures impact many more users than an in-house problem would and therefore have greater visibility when problems occur.  Failures that plague cloud service providers tend to fall into one of three main categories:
 
  • "Beginner mistakes" on the part of service providers. This is when the provider starts out or grows at a rate faster than can be properly managed its by data center staff. Cloud giants, including Amazon Web Services and Google Compute, were often plagued with outages early on as each company grew at incredible rates. Even Microsoft, which entered the cloud game later than the others, ran into outage problems early and often…
July 15, 2015 Off

Superstar-backed Rescale nets $6.4 million to build a better engineering cloud

By David

Grazed from Fortune.  Author: Barb Darrow.

Engineering jobs—things like the design of a complex airplane or car part and the virtual testing of that design—pose special and intense computing challenges. And that’s the job San Francisco-based Rescale, which just announced $6.4 million in funding,

The money comes in the form of a seed round led by the Data Collective with contributions from such luminaries as Amazon AMZN -0.84% founder Jeff Bezos, Virgin Group founder Sir Richard Branson, Ycombinator’s Paul Graham and Sam Altman, and Paypal co-founder Peter Thiel…