Category: News

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: David Linthicum.

You can’t go a month without hearing about some price drop by a major cloud computing provider, with others quickly following suit. Though it seems like a race to the bottom, in fact the cloud providers are starting to make real money. Public clouds function much like utilities. How much businesses pay for these utilities depends directly on how they consume cloud-based resources such as storage, compute, and applications. Companies that consume cloud services efficiently pay less, and the inefficient ones pay more.

There are two efficiency-related reasons why you’re probably getting larger cloud bills than you should: First, applications aren’t optimized to effectively use cloud resources. This means the applications use the cloud resources in ways that will allow the application both to perform better and to use fewer costly resources…

Grazed from TomsITPro. Author: James Sullivan.

Last week Office 365 users received a crash course in public cloud risks. First, Microsoft’s Lync instant messaging service suffered a North American outage on Monday, June 23. This was followed by an almost nine hour outage of the company’s Exchange email service the next day, June 24.

Microsoft Lync is a business-centric communication service that provides voice over IP (VoIP), instant messaging and video conferencing, among other things; all of this behind Microsoft’s firewall. The outage has been attributed to problems that arose during a data center migration. Microsoft attempted to fix the issue by rerouting traffic to a different data center, but this ended up being a fix for only a portion of affected customers…

Grazed from GreenDataCenterNews. Author: Keao Caindec.

Cloud computing has swept through the IT infrastructure industry and made it easier for companies to use servers, storage and software applications on demand and “as-a-service.” But what about the data center colocation industry? It has changed very little over the last eight years and remains as inflexible as ever with multi-year term agreements and big minimum space requirements.

Businesses want more flexibility to run temporary workloads, build private clouds and have a less risky path to migrating applications to a hybrid public-private cloud model. What can be done to make colocation easier and more “cloud-like?”…

Grazed from Midsize Insider. Author: Marissa Tejada.

The cloud computing market is growing by leaps and bounds, which in turn affects the security services that are paired with it. A new survey found that over the next five years, firms will add to the steady projected growth, and midsize firms in particular will find significant opportunities in this growing market.

A Big Rise

According to a new report from MarketsandMarkets featured in Cloud Times, the cloud security market is set to increase by 15 percent each year. By 2019, it is expected to be worth a whopping $8.71 billion. The report, titled "Cloud Security Market – Global Advancements, Forecasts & Analysis (2014-2019)," revealed that increased use of the cloud and related security services are reshaping the entire market. In its analysis, MarketsandMarkets divided the cloud computing security market into several categories, ranging from data loss prevention, Web security, email security, cloud log management and analysis, encryption, network security and other industrial categories like retail, manufacturing and transportation…

Grazed from CIO-Today. Author: Barry Levine.

A Linux distribution that updates itself. That’s the idea behind the new commercial Linux product from CoreOS, called CoreOS Managed Linux. The service will begin at $100 a month for up to 10 servers, and, as co-founder and CEO Alex Polvi told news media, enterprise Relevant Products/Services users should think of the new service "as the last migration they will ever need."

As with other open-source companies that provide additions and services around open-source software Relevant Products/Services, the CoreOS fee is intended to cover fixes, updates and tech support, not the free core software. CoreOS runs from the cloud Relevant Products/Services or can be managed on-premises…

Grazed from Dark Reading. Author: Ericka Chickowski.

Tens of millions of venture capital dollars recently have been flowing into some growing cloud security endeavors. The cloud security market is heating up within the venture capital community, with the past two months flush in funding for startups operating with a wide range of business maturity levels.

That activity has been punctuated over the last month by a hefty round of funding for three already proven cloud security vendors with established technology and a growing roster of clients: Skyhigh Networks, Netskope, and Okta. The increased investment is another signal of growing IT interest in not only reining in the security of cloud deployments, but also finding better ways to harness the power of cloud computing to deal with some of today’s biggest security challenges. Here’s the skinny on each deal…

Grazed from BusinessWire. Author: PR Announcement.

Faronics, a global leader in simplifying, securing and managing multi-user computer environments, announced today the release of Deep Freeze Cloud Connector. Faronics is announcing the availability of Deep Freeze Cloud Connector at the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE) 2014 conference, being held at the Georgia World Congress Center, Atlanta, Ga., June 28 – July 1. Faronics is exhibiting in booth #2848. Additional details about the conference are available here.

“Cloud computing creates exciting opportunities for IT administrators to take advantage of new services and improve the efficiency with which they manage their school district’s IT infrastructure,” said Heman Mehta, product management leader at Faronics. “Deep Freeze Cloud Connector enables them to handle management, updating and securing tasks from any location at anytime of day or night. It offers a wide range of attractive features that improves the productivity of IT administrators.”…

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: Eric Knorr.

Recently I was asked what I thought was the most important trend in IT. And it wasn’t hard to answer: The shift from proprietary, scale-up systems to commodity, open source, scale-out systems. NoSQL databases provide a good example of scaling out versus up. To beef up Oracle or any other conventional, proprietary RDBMS, you need to scale up the database server with more cores, more caching, more flash, and so on. At a certain point, you’ll need another server, which means you’ll be saddled with sharding the database and maintaining it in that state (yes, you could use Oracle RAC, but that’s another story).

With a NoSQL database — and all the major ones are based on open source — you scale out when you need more performance or capacity. Instead of powerful database servers than can never go down, you deploy a NoSQL database across commodity servers in a distributed architecture that permits failure of individual nodes. A popular analogy uses "pets versus cows" to illustrate…

Grazed from Forbes. Author: Editorial Staff.

Virtualization and cloud computing giant VMware articulated the idea of software-defined data centers last year, aiming to revolutionize the way data centers are built and operated. VMware’s SDDC vision involves virtualization of storage and the network in addition to server virtualization to have a complete software-defined setup.

This architecture is gradually gaining popularity among enterprises and data centers, as it makes more sense than a hardware-centric approach. When the idea of SDDC was bought forward, analysts expected that the private infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) offered by VMware could cannibalize the markets of public cloud providers such as Amazon and Rackspace…

Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Derrick Harris.

Databricks, the company trying to commercialize the Apache Spark data-processing framework, announced on Monday at the second-annual Spark Summit that it has raised $33 million in series B venture capital, and is rolling out a cloud computing service for easily creating, deploying and running Spark workloads. NEA led the funding round, which also included existing investor Andreessen Horowitz and follows up on a $14 million series A round in September 2013.

While the pace and amount of Databricks’ fundraising is impressive, the new service, called Databricks Cloud, is the real big deal here. It gives a lot of guidance as to the company’s plan for making money from Spark — a plan that includes a lot more than just certifying applications to run on Spark, and providing enterprise support and certification to Hadoop vendors that support it…