Category: News

Grazed from GigaOm. Author: JonathanVanian.

Oracle’s OpenWorld is right around the corner and you can almost feel the collective frustration of the thousands in attendance who will more than likely be caught in horrible Bay Area traffic. But beyond the expectations of massive car pileups, I’m curious to see how Oracle attempts to position itself in the tech world as it continues to push its version of cloud computing, something it has been doing for the past couple of years to mixed results.

Last week’s surprise announcement that Oracle’s legendary co-founder Larry Ellison was transitioning from the role of CEO to CTO caused a stir when the news first came out, but for the most part, that’s not going to affect too much of Oracle’s technology direction, considering Ellison oversees over a quarter of the company’s shares and all of its engineers will continue to report to him…

Grazed from NetworkWorld. Author: Editorial Staff.

In 2012 when the Government Accountability Office reviewed the feds cloud computing effort, it found seven core challenges to moving impeding the administrations’ move toward the cloud. In the two years that have passed, the GAO this week reported that government agency use of cloud computing has grown, but a few new challenges have cropped up that hinder widespread cloud adoption.

Lets start with cloud adoption. The GAO reviewed the same seven agencies in 2014 it had in 2012, including the Departments of Agriculture and Homeland Security. “Each of the seven agencies reviewed implemented additional cloud computing services since GAO last reported on their progress in 2012. For example, since then, the total number of cloud computing services implemented by the agencies increased by 80 services, from 21 to 101…

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: Chris Talbot.

The use of solid state disk (SSD) storage is definitely on the rise in cloud computing as cloud services providers look for ways to offer greater performance in their virtual machines (VMs) and instances. Microsoft (MSFT) is the latest public cloud infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) provider to see the SSD light.

Microsoft has launched new VMs called the D-Series, which are backed by SSD storage for better performance and more flexibility in the size of customers’ instances. The new sizes range up to 112GB in memory with compute processors Microsoft noted are 60 percent faster than the A-Series VM sizes…

Grazed from NetworkWorld. Author: Brandon Butler.

Amazon Web Services will be updating a substantial number of its cloud servers, and customers are recommended to re-launch their instances in the coming days, according to AWS consultants. Amazon has not said why the reboot is happening, but AWS watchers believe it is to patch a security issue. The company will be updating many of its servers between Thursday, Sept. 25 at 10 PM ET and Tuesday Sept. 30 at 7:59 PM ET, according to Amazon partner and cloud consultancy RightScale.

On Wednesday evening AWS sent out a notice to at least a portion of its customers notifying them of “required host maintenance,” according to an email an AWS user sent to Network World. The notice to customers does not explain why the reboot is necessary, but speculation is swirling that it is to patch a security bug in the Xen hypervisor…

Grazed from CIO. Author: Kenneth Corbin.

Within the federal government, the shift toward virtualization and cloud computing is already well underway, but agency and industry officials warn that those migrations invite new security considerations, particularly in the form of insider threats. Eric Chiu, president of the cloud and virtualization security firm HyTrust, notes the familiar list of arguments in favor of virtualizing servers and systems – lower costs and increased agility and efficiency chief among them – but points out that there are dangers associated with that transition.

"Virtualization also concentrates risk … You’re taking what used to be lots of separate physical systems that had their own configurations, their own separate management consoles, their own separate group of experts that managed them, and you’re collapsing all that functionality onto a single software layer," Chiu said during a panel discussion hosted by Federal News Radio. "Any virtualization admin can access any VM, could copy any VM, could delete or destroy any VM," he adds. "If you look at today’s threat, it’s really coming from the inside."…

Grazed from DataCenterKnowledge. Author: Colleen Miller.

The cloud computing marketplace is continuing to evolve and the heavyweights are not sitting on the sidelines. As DCK noted this week, Digital Realty is partnering with Carpathia to provide hybrid cloud infrastructure solutions, and 365 Data Centers entered the cloud storage business. This is just the latest among many moves, including IBM’s purchase of SoftLayer, in the cloud infrastructure space.

Cloud computing definitely has an influence on data center operators and owners, said Jack Story of the AFCOM Data Center Institute (DCI) Board of Directors and HP Distinguished Technologist. Story, with 24-plus years of experience in outsourcing and the service provider industry, will lead a panel titled, “Data Centers and Cloud: A Perfect Storm” at the Orlando Data Center World Conference next month…

Grazed from CloudComputingNews. Author: Editorial Staff.

Those who implement cloud computing in general, and AWS in particular, are often confused by the role that managed services providers play. Cost and simplicity are driving the movement to leverage AWS through managed services providers as enterprises look for more ways to consume AWS services. These services are easier to mix and match with existing applications, and provide a better and more effective way to leverage AWS.

Managed services providers can place a well-defined layer of infrastructure, management, and governance between the cloud provider, in this case, AWS, and those who consume AWS as a managed service. Managed service providers get enterprises on-boarded quickly to AWS, and avoid initial issues that many enterprises encounter when going directly to AWS…

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: CJ Arlotta.

Numerify on Wednesday said it has raised $15 million in funding to continue building out its cloud-based business analytics product portfolio. Sequoia Capital led the Series B financing round, with participation from Lightspeed Venture Partners; Amit Singh, president of Google for Work; Deep Nishar, senior vice president of products and user experience at LinkedIn; and Lane Bess, former CEO of Palo Alto Networks.

The Cupertino, California-based company provides IT business analytics through Numerify360, its cloud-native platform that assists organizations with gaining visibility into IT assets through each stage of their productive use. Numerify said it will use the additional funds to expand its marketing sales and efforts, as it seeks to double the size of the company in the next year. It also plans to fill out its suite of cloud analytics applications…

Read more from the source @ http://talkincloud.com/cloud-computing-funding-and-finance/numerify-raises-15m-venture-capital-cloud-based-business-analyti

Grazed from WhaTech. Author: Editorial Staff.

Cloud computing has topped the list of industry sectors in which venture capitalists feel most confident about investing, for the second year in a row, according to the 2014 Global Venture Capital Confidence Survey, from Deloitte and the US based National Venture Capital.

The tenth annual survey, conducted in May and June of 2014, questioned more than 300 venture capital, private equity and growth equity investors in the Americas, Europe, Asia and Africa. It sought to assess investor confidence in the global venture capital environment and understand market factors shaping industries and investments in specific geographies and industry sectors…

Grazed from MidsizeInsider. Author: Doug Bonderud.

While the cloud is a "very viable scenario," there are some things that do not belong in the cloud, such as nuclear command and control, says David Bennett, CIO of the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA), a Department of Defense cloud computing broker. Sure, midsize companies may not have the power to level nations and scorch the earth, but there is solid advice here — the cloud is ideal for many things, but not for everything.

Shields Up

According to a recent CIO article, Bennett has a message for the leaders of other agencies: "carefully consider which data sources and applications are suitable for a remotely hosted and managed environment." His feeling is that certain assets must stay behind local perimeters. Determining what is suitable for the cloud means taking a hard look at existing data sources and applications to identify "crown jewels" that are better safe than as-a-service. He also calls out the need for continuous monitoring that goes beyond watching data to cover an entire business network, everything from application behavior to bandwidth use to employee activity. And of course, it is critical to have access to this monitoring data in real-time…