Category: News

Grazed from GigaOM.  Author: Editorial Staff.

Cloud computing is an essential tool for IT. Once perceived as a potential threat to the IT department, forward-thinking IT leaders recognize the cloud’s potential to better serve the business.

Cloud qualities such as rapid provisioning, elastic capacity, and extensive automation mean IT departments can deploy new services quickly, and get out of the business of babysitting infrastructure to focus instead on high-value initiatives…

Grazed from Forbes. Author: Joe McKendrick.

Could financial losses by cloud vendors pose a serious risk to all business customers? Steve Brazier, CEO of Canalsys, has suggested that major players in the cloud industry run the risk of going belly up in hard times, taking customers with them to the brink. Quoted in a Channelonomics piece by Sam Trendall, Brazier suggests that as is the case with banks, economic failure within the cloud industry – particularly infrastructure providers — could have catastrophic ripple effects for large swaths of businesses that increasingly depend on their services.

The financial ground of the cloud industry is already shaky, Brazier opines: “On public infrastructure-as-a-service, I am going to give you a very clear warning: hundreds of millions of dollars are being spent on public cloud infrastructure, but we do not know of anyone [in that space] who is profitable.”…

Grazed from TechPageOne. Author: Drew Robb.

The explosive growth in data volume in today’s cloud-based environments is staggering — as is the cost of storing it. So how do IT departments stay in control of the budget? Clearly, it’s important to pay close attention to pricing and the fine print in any contracts. Just as clouds are nebulous, cloud pricing can be, too. Some vendors quote a ridiculously low cost per gigabyte (GB). But lurking behind that are additional costs for uploading and downloading data, and other hidden fees.

Greg Schulz, an analyst with storage research firm StorageIO Group, advised that anyone looking to the cloud should be wary of lowballing. According to Owen Rogers of 451 Research, cloud computing once promised simple, usage-based charging similar to other utilities such as electricity but the reality is far from this ideal…

Grazed from Net-Security.org. Author: Mirko Zorz.

In this interview, Ravi Ithal, Chief Architect at Netskope, discusses the top threats to cloud security and how they are changing the way we’re using the cloud. He also talks about how the power of the cloud influences the agility of a modern security architecture and offers insight about who is ultimately responsible for data security in the cloud.

There’s no doubt, the cloud is here to stay. If you look at today’s fast paced threat landscape, what are the top threats to cloud security?

One of the biggest threats in cloud computing today is the data breach. There’s no doubt that we are on a cloud-data breach collision course as enterprises adopt cloud rapidly and data breaches grow in number and intensity. There are three ways that the cloud can impact data breaches:..

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…