Category: News

Grazed from PRNewsWire. Author: PR Announcement.

Palo Alto Networks, the leader in enterprise security, today extended its leadership in security services for private, hybrid and public cloud with the latest release of its virtual firewall series (VM-Series). Enterprises are keen to take advantage of the agility, scalability and cost benefits of cloud-based virtual data centers (VDCs) by building their own private cloud, purchasing public cloud services from providers, or adopting a hybrid cloud approach. Most enterprises are ultimately aiming for the portability of both the application and security policies, regardless of where the application is deployed.

However, when it comes to security, most public cloud environments are based on inconsistent network architectures common in traditional data centers and still rely on legacy security technologies – such as stateful inspection and port-based firewalls – that aren’t capable of securing public cloud or hosted VDCs against sophisticated cyber threats…

Grazed from CIO. Author: Ann Bednarz.

There’s no easy path to the cloud for large companies with decades of legacy IT investments. Roughly 20 percent of Progressive Insurance’s business applications run in a SaaS model, while 80 percent run on the company’s own hardware. On the infrastructure side, Progressive uses IaaS, but mainly for experimentation.

It would be “a whole new ballgame” if Progressive were some medium-sized business that didn’t have an extensive data center footprint, says CIO Ray Voelker, but “we already have assets we own that we can leverage.” Chris Drumgoole, chief operating officer for cloud at General Electric, says legacy is “where it’s more interesting for us; we need to be more thoughtful there.”…

Grazed from MSPMentor. Author: Michael Brown.

The cloud undoubtedly has its many benefits. It’s accessible from many devices, it’s scalable, sharable, and supports dozens of apps that can be useful to you in your professional or personal life and offers almost infinite backup and storage. But it’s these very features that you find valuable that also put you at risk for a data breach. And that’s something that managed service providers (MSPs) who offer cloud-based file sharing services, must protect against.

A report by Ponemon Institute titled “Data Breach: The Cloud Multiplier Effect” addresses these concerns, and highlights the ways in which the risk of a data breach in the cloud is multiplying. It is therefore the job of MSPs to address and ease these justified worries. Through educating, making aware, and preparing your users, minimizing and mitigating security threats is very possible even as the Cloud expands. Here’s a look at how…

Grazed from CNNMoney. Author: Editorial Staff.

Today at VMworld® 2014 Europe, VMware, Inc. (NYSE: VMW) announced a wave of new cloud management offerings and capabilities including updates to VMware vRealize™ Suite 6, a cloud management platform purpose-built for the hybrid cloud. VMware today also unveiled a major update of VMware vRealize Operations™ (formerly VMware vCenter™ Operations Management Suite™), the new VMware vRealize Code Stream to enable DevOps teams to deliver frequent, reliable software releases, and the beta launch of VMware vRealize Air™ Compliance, a new addition to VMware’s family of cloud management software as a service (SaaS) offerings.

IT organizations today face a mix of conflicting priorities. IT must improve speed and agility to ensure success with new mobile, social, big data and web-scale applications. But also maintain control to ensure security, compliance and efficiency managing traditional IT systems. On top of that, IT is also tasked with managing both modern application architectures as well as traditional three-tier business applications that are both deployed on-premises or in the public cloud…

Grazed from Bloomberg. Author: Jack Clark and Dina Bass.

EMC Corp. has agreed to acquire cloud-computing startup Cloudscaling Group Inc., pushing to make its storage products work better with a set of free software tools. The deal is for less than $50 million, according to people with knowledge of the situation, who asked not to be identified because the transaction isn’t public.

Cloudscaling helps companies manage large numbers of computers that are linked together by OpenStack, a free open-source technology developed by companies including EMC and Oracle Corp. Cloudscaling also designs technology to make it simple to connect computers running OpenStack to so-called public clouds, operated by providers like Amazon.com Inc. and Google Inc…

Grazed from DataCenterKnowledge. Author: Bill Kleyman.

Cloud computing continues to steamroll ahead as more organizations adopt the platform, but to be clear, what we’re really seeing is an increase in how organizations are utilizing the Internet. Marketing terms aside, there are more resources out there, better underlying systems for support and a greater need to distribute data.

When cloud computing first emerged, we had some distinct models to work with. Hybrid became the more popular option among enterprises. But the challenge was connecting a public and private instance together to form a robust and secure cloud environment. Now, technology has come far enough where creating that link is much easier…

Grazed from Zacks. Author: Editorial Staff.

On Oct 10, 2014, we issued an updated research report on Citrix Systems, Inc. (CTXS – Analyst Report), a leading provider of virtualization, networking and cloud computing solutions in the U.S. Citrix is concentrating on three broad markets: Desktop virtualization, Cloud Infrastructure and networking, and Collaboration and sharing. As desktop virtualization has become a top priority for any IT set-up, Citrix is continuously introducing innovative products that will facilitate business flexibility, security and centralized management system.

We believe the global trend toward virtualization and cloud computing will facilitate Citrix to retain its momentum in the long term. Moreover, both its XenMobile and XenApps are gaining significant market traction in the highly lucrative enterprise mobility segment and Windows app virtualization…

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: CJ Arlotta.

Some Dropbox users are missing files from their accounts. And in response to this problem, Dropbox is offering these users a little something for free. The San Francisco-based file synchronization and sharing company has confirmed that a bug in its desktop application might have accidentally deleted files from a "small number of users" who have used the Selective Sync option, a feature that enables users to sync folders to a computer.

The company said users who haven’t applied Selective Sync settings to their accounts haven’t been affected. To resolve the issue, Dropbox said it has patched its desktop client, retired affected versions of Dropbox and made sure all its users are using newer versions of its software. The company also took additional preventive measures:…

Read more from the source @ http://talkincloud.com/cloud-computing/101314/dropbox-apologizes-losing-user-files

Grazed from ComputerWeekly. Author: Indy Dhami.

The past couple of months have seen several leaks of sensitive celebrity pictures and videos. This leak is of course unfortunate and highly embarrassing for all of the victims involved. So how does this security lapse relate to corporate information that may be stored in the cloud? It is important for all employees of an organisation to understand data of any type rarely resides only on the device where it was created or stored.

Once uploaded to cloud storage services, it becomes much more difficult to manage and monitor who has access to that data. Information security professionals need to provide technical solutions and facilitate improved awareness of how to create, classify and manage data that resides in the cloud. The two Information Security Forum (ISF) reports Securing Cloud Computing and Data Privacy in the Cloud describe how organisations can protect themselves while moving sensitive information in and out of the cloud…

Grazed from ITWeb. Author: Admire Moyo.

Understanding and capitalising on hybrid cloud are priorities for today’s CIOs. That’s according to Servaas Venter, country manager at EMC Southern Africa, who explains because it incorporates public and private clouds, a hybrid cloud brings together the best of both worlds by enabling businesses and their IT organisations unprecedented flexibility where they host their many and varied workloads.

Market analyst firm Gartner believes almost 50% of large enterprises will have hybrid cloud deployments by the end of 2017. It says in the past three years, private cloud computing has moved from an aspiration to a tentative reality for many large enterprises. Hybrid cloud computing is at the same place today as private cloud was three years ago: actual deployments are low, but aspirations are high, according to Gartner…

Read more from the source @ http://www.itweb.co.za/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=138383:Hybrid-cloud-makes-sense-for-CIOs&catid=869