Category: News

Grazed from CNet. Author: Charles Cooper.

Box on Tuesday became the latest company to remove limitations on the amount of cloud storage it offers business customers. The change affects users who previously paid $15 a month for 1 terabyte of storage. Box already offered unlimited storage to customers choosing a different plan that cost $35 a month.

At the same time, the company announced that it would more closely integrate its products to work with Microsoft’s Office 365 and Outlook starting this fall. The announcement further underscores an industry in transition. With cloud storage costs plummeting, Box and other providers can’t afford to get caught in a breakneck race to the bottom and are keen to play up the ancillary products they offer beyond simply housing files on servers…

Grazed from RiseToTheCloud. Author: Editorial Staff.

Microsoft’s Azure cloud is now being secured by Barracuda Networks. On Monday Barracuda announced that the latest version of its Web Application Firewall is available through Microsoft’s Azure Gallery. Barracuda is presenting the update at the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference being held this week in Washington, D.C.

The update extends support for the Azure platform with automated provisioning and configuration, according to the the Campbell, Calif-based cloud security and storage company. Version 7.9 will be immediately available at no charge to existing customers subscribing to Energize Updates or who have active virtual appliance licenses. The company is listing the software from $4,999 to $61,599 for North American customers, depending on the model…

Grazed from FTFNews. Author: Eugene Grygo.

I concluded late last year that end-user firms and financial technology providers were quietly entering the next phase of the cloud computing revolution. My analysis, based on anecdotal evidence, is that buy- and sell-side firms ignored the cloud hype three years ago and focused on how to alleviate the initial, justified concerns over data security and other operational barriers.

Once those barriers were adequately addressed, application and service providers of all stripes have been tripping over themselves to get on the cloud. The concept, of course, is not new and before the Dot Com bubble burst, there was a lot of excitement over software as a service. What happened in the meantime was that the technologies that support the supposed ephemeral cloud — virtualization, networking equipment, storage software and hardware capacity, security controls and data distribution, in particular — got a lot better…

Grazed from TheVaryGuy. Author: Christopher Tozzi.

Rackspace (RAX) has a new strategy for keeping competitive in the cloud hosting market, and it’s all about offering cloud management expertise and support alongside hosting infrastructure. Starting this week, Rackspace will be offering two new managed cloud service plans. The base package, called Managed Infrastructure, provides guidance in cloud architecture, security, development and deployment, in addition to general support and around-the-clock access to Rackspace engineering staff.

The upper-level service plan, Managed Operations, is even more interesting by providing direct management of cloud servers either by Rackspace staff or automated software, at the customer’s choosing. That plan, which also includes everything that is a part of the base package described above, allows customers to build and manage clouds with virtually no investment in in-house cloud expertise…

Grazed from Forbes. Author: Jason Bloomberg.

Surveys of IT executives regarding their Cloud Computing initiatives can be strangely misleading. Take for example two studies that fellow Forbes authors reported on over the last few months. Back in March, Forbes contributor Louis Columbus reported that a key take-away from an IBM study was that “Cloud computing has rapidly accelerated from 30% of CIOs mentioning it as a crucial technology for customer engagement in 2009 to 64% today.”

And yet, a recent Forbes article by Joe McKendrick indicated that 57 percent of the executives in a recent Saugatuck survey reported that “they are leveraging the cloud to create new revenue-producing products and services. What is suspicious about these results is that the first study asked whether Cloud was a crucial technology, but not whether they were actually implementing it – while the second survey queried about actual implementations, and yet the numbers (64% to 57%) are suspiciously close together…

Grazed from Forbes. Author: Tom Groenfeldt.

Everyone knows how cloud computing works. You log onto Amazon Web Services, pick out the resources you want to use, enter your credit card and start working. But it’s not quite the same thing if you are a global bank planning to move key processes to a cloud environment. For starters, banks tend to be concerned about security and privacy, so many are initiating cloud systems on premises, tucked safely behind their firewalls.

And banks tend to have big, complex applications that may sprawl across numerous servers or even data centers. Managing a complex cloud environment is a task for specialists. Enter BMC with Cloud Lifecycle Manager (CLM) which helps firms develop Amazon-like cloud flexibility in-house. The company recently released CLM 4 for hybrid clouds that enforces IT compliance and change management policies across private and pubic cloud services…

Grazed from CFOWorld. Author: Loek Essers.

Cloud providers seeking business from EU institutions could become subject to more scrutiny from the European Data Protection Supervisor (EDPS). The supervisor is preparing guidance on the use of cloud computing and mobile devices for data transfers by EU institutions to non-EU countries and international organizations.

Part of that guidance could require extra checks for personal data shared with cloud computing services, the supervisor said in a position paper published Monday. "The rapid development of technology, including cloud computing and mobile applications, creates new challenges, which have to be addressed to ensure that the fundamental rights of individuals are fully respected," the supervisor said…

Grazed from Reuters. Author: Teppei Kasai.

Silicon Valley-based VMware Inc said it will form a cloud computing partnership with China Telecom Corp, expanding in China at a time when many U.S. technology firms’ businesses there are experiencing fallout from a cyber security squabble. VMware said on Tuesday it will work with China Telecom to build a hybrid cloud service to be operated by the state-owned company, China’s biggest cloud service provider.

Hybrid services can be used to combine private infrastructure such as on-premises data centers with public cloud services. U.S. equipment and software providers such as IBM Corp and Cisco Systems Inc have seen their China sales drop after last year’s revelations by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden of U.S. spying…

Grazed from ITWorld. Author: John Riberio.

Amazon Web Services is offering on its Marketplace annual subscriptions to over 90 software products, which could help customers cut software costs by over 40 percent, the Amazon.com unit said. Customers can purchase AWS Marketplace products on an annual subscription basis and have unlimited use of the software for that Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instance for the next 12 months, wrote Jeff Barr, chief evangelist for Amazon Web Services, in a blog post on Monday.

Users can apply one annual subscription to a Marketplace software product to one EC2 instance, Amazon said in its help section. The products on offer under the annual subscription program include those from software vendors such as Alert Logic, Barracuda Networks, Citrix Systems, Fortinet, Riverbed Technology and Sophos…

Grazed from CIOL. Author: Editorial Staff.

The benefits of OpenStack, a free and open-source software cloud computing platform, from an end-user perspective are clear. Transitioning to a cloud computing environment promises many benefits, including greater economies of scale and greater flexibility to adopt new application workloads.

With these benefits, however, come new challenges – such as the need to control and re-configure this hyper-dynamic environment as application workloads move in, out, and around the networking infrastructure. Many organisations are turning to cloud orchestration solutions to overcome these issues…