Category: News

Grazed from SysCon Media.  Author: Gilad Parann-Nissany.

In a Feb 2014 survey, 94 percent of organizations surveyed reported running applications or experimenting with infrastructure-as-a-service.   According to research firm Nasumi, there is over one exabyte currently stored in the cloud. An exabyte is over a billion GB.  Considering the amount of data in the cloud and the growing rate of adoption for sensitive use cases, it is natural that securing our data in the cloud is a concern.

But, cloud security, though rightfully a central concern, should not be a hindrance to aggressively moving workloads and applications to the cloud.  In fact, there are some misconceptions about cloud security that need to be laid to rest…

Grazed from IBM.  Author: PR Announcement.

International Business Machines Corp said on Friday that US regulators had approved the $2.3 billion sale of its low-end server business to Lenovo Group Ltd, as the company continues its shift to more profitable software and services like cloud computing and data analytics.

IBM has already divested $16 billion in annual revenue over the past decade from low-margin businesses like personal computers and printers.  The approval by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States came despite CIFUS members’ concern, first reported by the Wall Street Journal earlier this year that IBM servers used in the Pentagon’s networks could be accessed remotely by Chinese spies and compromised.

Grazed from BitPipe.  Author: Nick Huber.

Cloud computing is everywhere in business. Whether a small van-hire business in Burnley needs a few extra servers to power its website or a multinational wants a large data warehouse to analyse millions of customer transactions.  The spread of the cloud – large networks of web servers and datacentres that are hosted online rather than on users’ own computers – is in no small part down to Amazon Web Services (AWS).

In just seven years, Amazon Web Services, the services arm of US online retailer Amazon, has become one of the biggest suppliers of cloud computing. It has hundreds of thousands of customers, including Netflix and Instagram, and the Central Intelligence Agency and Unilever. Growth has been rapid. AWS’s revenue was estimated at about $1.5bn in 2012, according to a report by Baird Equity Research….

Grazed from MarkleyGroup.  Author: Paul Diamond.

For companies that haven’t yet dabbled in the cloud, the types and options seem endless and in some cases, intimidating. Where to even start when choosing what’s best for your company? What’s worse – if you’ve been keeping up with the IT industry buzz on the topic, you know that vendors, analysts and pundits have been touting the best cloud computing solutions and strategies for years.

The reasons for why specific solutions and strategies rise to become considered the “best” are for various motives and factors, and often times, pertain to specific infrastructure scenarios. Within industry coverage and articles that debate these cloud computing solutions and strategies, you will often read the comparison described as the “cloud war.”…

Grazed from CyberSecurity News.  Author: Lee Hazell.

Achieving secure data separation in cloud computing is a necessity for many companies wishing to utilise cloud services as a cost effective method for storage, processing and memory functions. Data separation in cloud computing describes the need to ensure that one consumer of a cloud service cannot interrupt, or compromise, the service or data of another.

As many cloud services rely on virtualisation technologies to offer compute power or storage to consumers, it is possible for a sophisticated attacker to compromise one virtual machine on the box and hop to others. This is an attack methodology that is being seen more and more in cloud computing and presents a real risk to companies that need to have some assurance that their data is safe should another consumer be compromised…

Grazed from Pinnacle.  Author: Editorial Staff.

As more businesses adopt cloud computing and storage practices, data governance and security issues are becoming more apparent. A U.S. judge recently ordered Microsoft to give data stored in Ireland data centers to U.S. law enforcement agencies, despite European data protection laws that make Europe-based subsidiaries of foreign companies abide by European law.

IBM is taking strides to change the way public and private cloud data is stored. According to an IBM press release, its inventors recently patented a technique that helps clients automatically analyze and manage the location where information resides. This enables businesses to comply with regulations governing where data can be stored in different countries and continents…

Grazed from GigaOM.  Author: Derrick Harris.

Linode Founder and CEO Chris Aker has no illusions about challenging Amazon Web Services in the cloud, but that doesn’t mean he cant build a quality cloud. As he explains in this Structure Show interview, quality infrastructure and simple billing can go a long way.

So many conversations about cloud computing focus on Amazon Web Services, Google and which is the biggest company that can drive down prices the most. But there’s a whole other group of people and companies not running webscale applications, people who just want a virtual server that’s inexpensive, runs well and, most importantly, they don’t have to manage…

Grazed from BitCoinMagazine.  Author: Cameron Gray.

The future of cloud storage is decentralization. Imagine being able to rent out your extra hard drive space through an autonomous network and getting paid for it in a cryptocurrency. This is being made possible thanks to Satoshi Nakamoto and platforms such as Storj, Maidsafe, Ethereum and others.  Now that we have the ability to tie P2P currency to resources such as storage space, bandwidth usage, and CPU power, services like Dropbox and Google Drive will be getting a run for their money.

Unlike other 2.0 platforms, Storj has decided to take a “baby steps” approach for developing their software. They want to build their system out in small, modular pieces first so that they can be used as working prototypes. The first of these pieces is a drag-and-drop file hosting web app called Metadisk, which recently had its whitepaper and video tutorial released…

Grazed from Jurist.org.  Author: Jason Kellam.

In a recent proceeding before the US Court, Microsoft was ordered to turn-over email belonging to a user of its hosted mail service. That email belonged to a user outside the US. The email itself was located on a server in a data center in Ireland—outside the US, which should be out of the reach of US authorities and subject to the requirements of the EU privacy laws. Microsoft challenged the order and lost.

They argued that the court lacked jurisdiction over this particular data as it was stored outside the US, and therefore it was not subject to disclosure. They were wrong.  On April 25, 2014, Magistrate Judge James C. Francis of the Southern District of New York issued a memorandum and order upholding a subpoena ordering Microsoft to turn-over information held on a server in a datacenter in Ireland…

Grazed from MSPMentor. Author: Michael Brown.

Measuring ROI for cloud usage is no doubt a difficult task, and when prospective clients are considering potential cloud-based MSPs, it may still be something they want to hear about. However each company is different and MSPs need to be able to modify their approaches accordingly. As this article from InformationWeek explains, there are big differences between a new, fast growing company like Airbnb and a monolithic, experienced company like GE, and how they use cloud services such as cloud-based file sharing.

You Merely Adopted the Cloud, We Were Born in It

The perception of the cloud is clearly very different to a company such as Airbnb versus a company like GE. Airbnb, a company that provides a platform where people can rent their apartments or vacation homes directly to strangers via the internet, has never even had its own data center. Six years ago the company launched via cloud services, and subsequently built all of their applications in the cloud…