Category: News

Grazed from eWeek. Author: Nathan Eddy.

Legacy security systems and practices are often not sufficient to protect companies’ expanding use of cloud and mobile technologies, according to a CompTIA study. Malware and hacking are still the top threats causing concern, with nearly half of all companies citing these as serious concerns.

"One of the most important things that small businesses can do is to form a policy around security," Seth Robinson, senior director, technology analysis, CompTIA, told eWEEK. "Only 44 percent of SMBs say that they have a comprehensive security policy in place. The key part in forming a policy is having discussions across an organization to ensure that everyone is on the same page."…

See more at: http://www.eweek.com/small-business/cloud-mobile-technology-complicating-it-security.html#sthash.Pt7aQWV1.dpuf

Grazed from TechCrunch. Author: Catherine Shu.

Cloud computing giant Salesforce has acquired Toopher, an Austin, Texas based security software startup. The news was announced on Toopher’s site and confirmed to TechCrunch by Salesforce. Terms of the deal were undisclosed. According to Toopher’s post, the company has stopped selling its products as its team prepares to join Salesforce.

“We are thrilled to join Salesforce, where we’ll work on delivering the Toopher vision on a much larger scale as part of the world’s #1 Cloud Platform. We can’t imagine a better team, technology and set of values with which to align,” wrote founders Josh Alexander and Evan Grim…

Read more from the source @ http://techcrunch.com/2015/04/01/toopher-salesforce/

Grazed from CloudTech.  Author: James Bourne.

A report from United Software Associates (USAIN) has found MongoDB to be top of the pile of NoSQL database providers in benchmark testing.  The research tested three leading products – Cassandra, CouchBase and MongoDB – through Yahoo!’s cloud standard benchmark, YCSB. USAIN wanted to assess the durability of each, going on the theory that most applications should prioritise durability over performance, not accepting data loss. The databases were put through the ringer on three types of performance metric; throughput optimised, durability optimised, and balanced.

In workload A of 50% read and 50% update with throughput optimised, under the YCSB benchmark MongoDB hit 160,719 operations per second, ahead of Cassandra (134,839) and Couchbase (106,638). With workload B’s 95% read and 5% update, MongoDB again came out on top with 196,498, ahead of Couchbase (187,798) and Cassandra (144,455)…

Grazed from Business2Community.  Author: Ian Moyse.

2015 is rumoured as the tipping point for cloud. For the last four to five years, we have heard that cloud (Internet-delivered solutions) is about to go mainstream, however, this year it is not the hype, but real user benefits that are driving adoption

What do I mean by this. Well people are not going out looking for cloud-based solutions (“I want some cloud”), instead they are looking for a solution to a real problem. Some users are unknowingly using a cloud-based solution (either in their business or personal lives) and are quickly seeing the benefits. Take for example Dropbox, a free tool for sharing (large) files across devices seamlessly, easily and from anywhere, where users adopt it from a need that it solves and not because of the technology factor behind it or because of any cloud hype…

Grazed from ITBrief.  Author: Catherine Knowles.

In order to stay ahead of the game, businesses need to keep pace with the rapid evolution of cloud computing, leverage cloud investments to connect with customers and employees, and seize opportunities available from cloud technology, says KPMG.

KPMG, the global advisory organisation, has released its 2014 Cloud Survey Report, and shares insights on cloud computing for today’s businesses.
A primary finding of the survey is that, "Cloud has clearly come of age. Driven by the demand for speed, flexibility, scale and anywhere access, consumers have fully embraced a cloud-enabled world…

Grazed from VCCircle. Author: Anuradha Verma.

California- and Bangalore-based WAN optimisation and cloud computing startup Aryaka Network Inc has secured $16 million (Rs 100 crore) in funding from existing investors led by Nexus Venture Partners with participation from Trinity Ventures, InterWest Partners, Mohr Davidow Ventures and Presidio Ventures.

The firm will use the money to scale up its sales infrastructure as it has seen rapid demand for its family of network and application acceleration as-a-service offerings, it said. “The funding will allow us to support large global partners, who are excited about adding Aryaka’s capabilities to their traditional WAN offerings. We are positioned to achieve faster market growth and sustained profitability,” said Ajit Gupta, founder and CEO at Aryaka…

Grazed from ZDNet. Author: Colin Barker.

IBM and The Weather Company want to use big data, the cloud, and the Internet of Things to improve weather forecasting for businesses. As part of a new deal between the companies, The Weather Company will shift its massive weather data services platform to the IBM Cloud and integrate its data with IBM analytics and cloud services.

The deal reflects how competition in the cloud market is heating up too: The Weather Company is a close partner with Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Bryson Koehler, the CIO/CTO for The Weather Company, told ZDNet: "I believe in the multi-cloud story and believe that any serious cloud-based business or application needs to be built in a cloud-agnostic way."…

Grazed from ITWorldCanada. Author: Don Sheppard.

Net neutrality has been in the news a lot lately, but there’s much less discussion of its relationship to and impact on cloud computing (or, for that matter, the Internet of Things).

Recent developments in net neutrality

On February 26, 2015, the FCC in the United States ruled in favor of “net neutrality” by reclassifying broadband access as a telecommunications service and applying Title II (common carrier) of the Communications Act of 1934 to Internet service providers (ISPs). FCC decision FCC-15-24A1, a massive 400 page document, was released publicly on March 12th. The lawsuits, which were fully anticipated, are already starting to be filed.

According to the Public Knowledge website states (I would have thought this also applies to organizations and applications, not just individuals!):..

Grazed from MidsizeInsider. Author: Shawn Drew.

The cloud is an established technological force, recognized for its superior ability to transform a business. Help desk software and CRM solutions have both proven to be powerful tools, yet new research shows that the uptake on cloud-based help desk solutions remains slow. IT managers at midsize businesses are beginning to understand just how effective a cloud-based help desk solution can be and look beyond the market trends to find ways to better deliver technological assistance to their employees and customers.

The State of Help Desk Software

A new report from Software Advice finds that ticket management, reporting and analytics and chat integrations all rank highly as critical functionalities driving businesses’ investment in modern help desk solutions, according to Biz Report. Despite these needs, investment in the help desk appears to be somewhat stagnant, with half of the survey respondents claiming they have no plans to alter their current help desk investment…

Grazed from Bloomberg. Author: Jack Clark and Sarah Frier.

A creator of Amazon.com Inc.’s cloud-services operation has joined Twitter Inc. to help keep its website running smoothly. Chris Pinkham started as a vice president of engineering at the social-media service in January. San Francisco-based Twitter has been reworking its engineering department to help the company expand and release products more quickly.

The company promoted Alex Roetter last May to be head of engineering with a mandate to improve the site’s performance. Twitter used to crash so often that it had a Fail Whale icon, an image of little birds attempting to lift a large cetacean, it could trot out with an apology to users when their pages wouldn’t load. Pinkham led cloud development at Oracle Corp. after the database company acquired his startup, Nimbula Inc., in 2013…