Category: News

Grazed from ITProPortal.  Author: Wieland Alge.

Recent speeches by UK Prime Minister, David Cameron, and US President Barack Obama demonstrate that cyber security is still a huge concern for national governments.  We should be in no doubt that another raft of counter-measures is being considered at national and international levels.

However, those in charge of IT security in the business community are not necessarily taking their cue from world leaders to re-evaluate their own policies and ensure they are still offering protection from the kind of cyber attacks that are likely to occur in 2015…

Grazed from ITBusinessEdge.  Author: Editorial Staff.

In the last few years, "the cloud" has become a household term, yet it’s not always as well understood as you might think. Used in this popular singular form, "the cloud" suggests that there really is a single, nebulous entity where computing resources and endless data storage magically reside.

Of course, the reality is that the cloud is a network of data centers, and within those, a network of servers and storage nodes. The real mystery begins when organizations start taking a closer look at the cloud’s inner workings, asking such questions as: Where exactly does my cloud data live…

Grazed from TechCrunch.  Author: Kittu Kolluri.

You’re only as strong as your weakest link, and that’s the Internet’s biggest problem today. For more than two decades, the very backbone of the Internet — the network — has subsisted in the shadows, pinned beneath the weight of a fast-growing Internet economy and a powerful cohort of incumbents with much to lose.

Since the early days of SaaS, the tech world has set an astonishing pace for innovation. If the cloud breaks everything (and it does), we are nothing if not resilient — toppling each obstacle in a race to deliver anything-as-a-service, big data and mobility. We have evolved into device-addicted, app-devouring gluttons for bandwidth — all the while coaxing and cajoling the underlying architecture to manage a far greater load than it was ever designed to bear…

Grazed from TheVarGuy.  Author: Michael Cusanelli.

VCE is ramping up its converged infrastructure portfolio with the launch of several new platform and software innovations, including a choice of using either VMware (VMW) NSX or Cisco Systems’ (CSCO) ACI for their systems.

VCE’s new lineup includes several new solutions, most notably the company’s VxBlock Systems family of converged infrastructure solutions, according to the announcement. VxBlock can be customized with a choice of either Cisco Application Infrastructure or VMware NSX for software-defined networking functionality, according to the announcement. Additional setups are expected to be announced later this year…

Read more from the source @ http://thevarguy.com/virtualization-applications-and-technologies/031315/vce-unveils-new-converged-infrastructure-portfolio

Grazed from CCI.  Author: Editorial Staff.

The rise in software as a service cloud applications means there’s now tens and hundreds of cloud apps for almost every business process, and it’s getting harder to decide which one to use. However  as we always maintain there’s safety in numbers, and on the whole people tend to gravitate toward applications that offer the most value and best fit and will discard apps that don’t. But how do you find out the most popular applications?

The answer is to look at what people are using and use that hard data to create a list, but nobody is going to tell you this sort of information are they? Wrong,  Skyhigh are one business that has access to those numbers and this Cloud Growth Top Ten is the result of looking at the cloud apps used by the 15 million users they regularly monitor in over 350 enterprises worldwide…

Grazed from FierceWireless.  Author: Mike Dano.

Amazon acquired a startup called 2lemetry that offers technology for sending, receiving and analyzing data from Internet-connected devices and machines. Terms of the deal, first reported by TechCrunch and confirmed by Amazon, were not disclosed.

It’s unclear exactly what Amazon will do with the startup, which was founded in 2011 and is based in Denver. Amazon said only that it would continue to support 2lemetry’s customers, which include Honeywell, the Demeter energy group, and First Mile, which recycles office equipment…

Grazed from Forbes. Author: Editorial Staff.

Global software giant Oracle Corp. is slated to report its fiscal 2015 third quarter results on Tuesday, March 17th (the company follows June-May fiscal year). Having posted strong results in the second quarter thanks to the rapid expansion of its cloud computing business, expectations are ripe for the continuation of the cloud success story.

Further, this will be the first earnings report since Oracle initiated an aggressive pricing strategy for its engineered systems (Read: Oracle Triggers Price War in the Servers Market). Therefore, Oracle’s hardware business will also be watched closely to determine if the strategy has paid off…

Grazed from EdTech. Author: Frank Smith.

New technology is making it easier for school IT leaders to manage vast amounts of data. While cloud solutions have helped in this regard, some K–12 districts are reluctant to fully embrace the advantages offered by cloud services. In Cloud 401, a new report from CDW, more than 1,200 IT leaders from sectors such as business, healthcare, federal and state governments and K–12 were surveyed about their approaches to cloud services.

K–12 district IT experts surveyed said that 42 percent of their services are delivered either totally or partially through the cloud. “Cloud services have such great appeal that departments outside IT are often sourcing them independently," says Stephen Braat, vice president of cloud and managed solutions at CDW…

Grazed from CMSWire. Author: David Roe.

The public cloud is more than 30 percent riskier than on-premises applications — and security concerns remain a strong barrier to cloud adoption. Those are just two of the findings from a new Cloud Security Spotlight Survey (registration required) by Campbell, Calif.-based Bitglass. The data security company surveyed more than 1,000 IT and IT security practitioners to assess the state of cloud in the enterprise.

It found a third of respondents have experienced more security breaches with the public cloud than with on-premises applications. In addition, 90 percent still express concern about public cloud security. The report also exposed other interesting facts, including that there are greater fears about employee misuse and access control than malware and hacking…

Grazed from ComputerWorld. Author: Joab Jackson.

Cisco and Microsoft have jointly created a software and hardware package designed to help cloud providers spin up new services more quickly. The Cisco Cloud Architecture for the Microsoft Cloud Platform was designed to streamline the process of setting up a cloud service by integrating Cisco hardware and software with Microsoft’s cloud and system software.

The package could be used to set up infrastructure, platform and software services. It has been designed to support enterprise applications in particular. Cloud systems can be difficult and expensive to set up properly because they involve coordinating operations among all the different elements, including servers, networking equipment and operating systems. A set of integrated offerings could cut deployment and maintenance times significantly…