Category: News

Grazed from CSOOnline. Author: George V. Hulme.

When the Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) launched in 2008, the questions around cloud computing centered around whether cloud was secure enough to be trusted, how it could be managed securely and in such a way as to keep regulators happy. There was also plenty of talk about whether cloud would fully displace traditional enterprise data centers.

Today, we know that yes, the public cloud can be secured (reasonably so for many types of data) and that cloud won’t completely displace on premise IT systems any time soon. However, the technologies that power the cloud are transforming those data centers into hybrid architectures that consist of traditional enterprise, private, and public cloud environments that will co-exist for years to come…

Grazed from Fool. Author: Andrew Tonner.

Beyond plenty of publicity, just what have Apple and IBM gained from the much-ballyhooed partnership they announced last July? Well, since then, Apple and IBM have introduced 23 enterprise-focused apps covering a whole host of industries, including social work, insurance, and telecom. And in unveiling their latest creation, Apple and IBM once again demonstrated their big-ticket collaborative potential. Here’s a quick review of three important points of this emerging story.

1. Meet Watson Health Cloud

Last week, Apple and IBM announced their newest product: Watson Health Cloud, a collaborative service that leverages the analytical horsepower of IBM’s storied Watson computing platform to provide custom, real-time data analytics for health care professionals. The service will also utilize IBM’s secure cloud platform to help ensure the safety and integrity of sensitive user health data…

Grazed from ScientificComputing. Author: Leo Reiter.

Once upon a time, high performance computing (HPC) was mainly about one thing: speed. It started with fast processors, memory, bus fabrics and optimized software algorithms to take advantage of them. We ran FORTRAN-based computational benchmarks powered by LINPACK, which still to this day factors in the TOP500 list of supercomputers.

We soon learned of limiting factors such as heat, power and the pesky speed of light. Seymour Cray realized that “anyone can build a fast CPU. The trick is to build a fast system.” We responded with massively parallel systems made up of lots and lots of very fast components. All was good in the world…

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: Mike Vizard.

When the open source OpenStack cloud management framework first launched, there appeared to be a lot of overlap with an open source CloudStack project that Citrix took over when it acquired Cloud.com way back in 2011. Ever since then there has been a fair amount of sniping going back and forth between proponents of the two open source cloud management frameworks.

Citrix today announced it wants to put an end to the war of words between the two camps by formally becoming a member of the OpenStack Foundation. Nand Mulchandani, vice president of product marketing for the Cloud Platforms Group at Citrix, said that over the years the scope of the OpenStack project has expanded well beyond the ambitions of the CloudStack project, which he said is designed to provide a fairly simply to standup cloud management framework…

Grazed from CloudTweaks. Author: Editorial Staff.

While you can easily access your cloud data from any spot in the world, you must be rather cautious when using it within your business. You must keep your access plans for your cloud network in check so you will not be at risk of having your data becoming compromised at any point.

1) Manage your passwords the right way.

As useful as passwords can be for your cloud access needs, you must be careful when going anywhere with such passwords. In addition to having complicated or detailed passwords that are hard to predict, you must also use several passwords within your cloud. You can add different passwords for specific access points or even have different passwords for specific accounts that want to reach your cloud setup…

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: David Linthicum.

My first job out of college was as a decision support application analyst, and it allowed me to work with systems using early versions of artificial intelligence. The idea was compelling to me then, and it remains compelling to me today. The systems learned as they processed information. The objective was predicting the future, aka predictive analytics. This is still the objective today in larger enterprises.

The problem with these systems in the past was that to really analyze all the relevant data, they needed a huge amount of processing power and storage. Thus, businesses seeking to use the so-called learning systems for tasks like predictive analytics had to shell out major bucks for hardware and software — or do without…

Grazed from Datamation. Author: Pedro Hernandez.

Cloud computing’s ever-expanding footprint is good news for IT vendors, particularly HP and Dell. In the fourth quarter of 2014 (4Q14), cloud data center operators snapped up $8.0 billion worth of servers, disk storage and Ethernet switching equipment worldwide, according to IT market research firm IDC, a 14.4 percent year-over-year improvement.

In total, the cloud represented 30 percent of all IT infrastructure spending in 4Q14, compared to 27 percent during the same year-ago period. Private clouds are growing more popular among enterprises, IDC’s data indicates. Spending in the segment reached $2.9 billion, an 18.3 percent year-over-year increase. Public clouds accounted for $5 billion in IT revenues, a 12.3 percent gain…

Secure Channels provides Ingram Micro resellers with impenetrable encryption solutions for enterprise networks and small businesses for strong security in in the Cloud, Private Data Centers, various Mobility Platforms, and securing a wide array of database systems.

Designed to help enterprise developers securely build, deploy and manage cloud-native applications, these new open source projects will integrate into VMware’s unified platform for the hybrid cloud — creating a consistent environment across the private and public cloud to support cloud-native and traditional applications. By open sourcing these projects, VMware will work with a broad ecosystem of partners and the developer community to drive common standards, security and interoperability within the cloud-native application market — leading to improved technology and greater customer choice.

"Through these projects VMware will deliver on its promise of support for any application in the enterprise — including cloud-native applications — by extending our unified platform with Project Lightwave and Project Photon," said Kit Colbert, vice president and chief technology officer for Cloud-Native Applications, VMware, Inc. "Used together, these new open source projects will provide enterprises with the best of both worlds. Developers benefit from the portability and speed of containerized applications, while IT operations teams can maintain the security and performance required in today’s business environment."

“The principle of least privilege is nothing new to the security world, but applying it to network security down to the host level has historically been impractical. Thanks in part to emerging analytics and automation technology; network segmentation at a granular level – micro-segmentation, in other words – is now possible,” said Adrian Sanabria, Senior Security Analyst at 451 Research. “This is a significant security advantage of virtualization, and is a prime example of how software-defined innovations present an opportunity to reinvent defenses. The combination of virtualization and automation is allowing enterprises to improve security without adding significant implementation and management effort.”