Category: News

Grazed from BusinessCloudNews. Auuthor: Editorial Staff.

A recent landmark US Supreme Court ruling on the legality of searching a mobile phone without a warrant is a ‘historical moment’ for defenders of privacy rights according to Microsoft general counsel & executive vice president, legal & corporate affairs Brad Smith. This case focused on whether police can search a suspect’s cell phone without a warrant during an arrest.

David Leon Riley was arrested on August 22, 2009 after a traffic stop, which resulted in the discovery of loaded firearms in his car. The officers subsequently seized and searched Riley’s phone and its contents, and the officers charged him with an unrelated shooting that had taken place several weeks prior to his arrest based in part on information found during that search…

Grazed from V3.co.uk. Author: Daniel Robinson.

IBM’s SoftLayer cloud division is due to launch an additional data centre in London as part of a $1.2bn global expansion that will also see Paris and Frankfurt added later this year. The firm also said its BlueMix development platform is now out of beta and generally available from SoftLayer.

The opening of the new data centre is part of an expansion programme that IBM announced at the start of 2014, which will see the IT giant deliver cloud services from 40 data centres worldwide in 15 countries across the globe by the end of the year. The London data centre, which was due to be operational by the end of June, will now come online sometime in July, IBM said. It will deliver additional capacity for IBM SoftLayer cloud services, and its location near Chessington places it close to key customers in the City of London, according to the firm…

Grazed from ComputerWorld. Author: Juan Carlos Perez.

A "unique" breakdown coupled with a previously unknown flaw in Exchange Online caused Tuesday’s extensive outage, and to make matters worse, the service disruption alert system also malfunctioned, leaving some affected customers in the dark.  So said Rajesh Jha, corporate vice president of Office 365 engineering, in an incident report posted to the Office 365 support forum in which he also addressed another separate, prolonged Lync Online outage from Monday.

"I want to apologize on behalf of the Office 365 team for the impact and inconvenience this has caused. Email and real-time communications are critical to your business, and my team and I fully recognize our accountability and responsibility as your partner and service provider," he wrote. For customers on U.S. Eastern time, the Exchange Online outage covered virtually the entire workday…

Grazed from BusinessWire. Author: PR Announcement.

Enterprises continue to move towards cloud deployments to save time, costs and resources, but need assurance from their cloud providers that their critical business data is secure. Demonstrating its commitment to delivering secure cloud solutions, Axway (NYSE Euronext: AXW.PA), a market leader in governing the flow of data, announced today that it has completed an independent review of security controls for its Cloud Services organization and completion of Service Organizations Control 1 (SOC 1)/SSAE16/ISAE 3402 type 2 report.

Conducted by a leading audit, tax and advisory services firm, the SOC1 examination analyzed the design and operational effectiveness of the processes and security controls within Axway Cloud Services. Customers depend on Axway Cloud Services to extend critical business flows into the cloud, in order to enable rapid adoption of complex integration solutions…

Grazed from Business2Community. Author: Zach Taji.

As cloud computing has become a more reliable, affordable and secure technology over the past few years, more businesses have started to use it as an additional or even primary method of storing and backing up their data. A variety of industries are already using the technology – from tech startups to government (more than half of the US government has already moved to the cloud).

The cloud storage industry is expected to generate over $4.04 billion in revenue by 2016, and it’s only going to increase as more than 70% of businesses have already started using cloud storage solutions or plan to soon, and 3 out of 4 IT professionals have stated that cloud storage is the #1 reason for migrating to the cloud…

Grazed from Sys Con Media.  Author: Roger Strukhoff.

I recently led a panel discussion for SYS-CON.TV on the topic of "Cloud Computing 2.0," a term I decided to employ just a few minutes before we started recording.  A few years ago, any right-minded person would wince at the use of "2.0" to describe anything, as it had long become a meaningless cliché.  So I don’t know if I was being ironic, too clever by half, or just tedious when I told the panelists that we’d go with the topic of Cloud Computing 2.0.

The Debate Evolves

My point was, and is, that the discussion about cloud computing has notably changed this year.  Three years ago, the debate was how to define cloud, whether virtualization alone was enough to fit the definition, whether an on-site datacenter could even fit the definition of cloud, and to what degree the big-vendor latecomers were engaged in cloud washing…

Grazed from CloudWedge.  Author: Editorial Staff.

The County of Los Angeles has nearly 100,000 employees on its payroll. When Richard Sanchez, CIO of LA County, saw an opportunity to begin evaluating a more matured Exchange Online Office 365 offering, he halted the onsite Exchange implementation and began testing out the cloud email service with some of his end users. Although Sanchez’s onsite Exchange migration was nearly 40% complete, Sanchez decided to put the project on hold.

What caused Sanchez to change the direction of Los Angeles County’s entire email system? Sanchez mentioned, “There were considerable costs we were incurring on for migration services, as well as for storage, computing facilities and the like.” While Sanchez’s crew hustled along with the traditional build out of on premises exchange server, Sanchez’s research showed him that his end users would get more functionality at a smaller price tag by choosing the cloud alternative. Once fully migrated to Office 365, LA County’s end users will receive full-fledged access to the Microsoft Office 365 suite including extras such as Sharepoint, Exchange and OneNote…

Grazed from Forbes.  Author: Joe McKendrick.

Do organizations that have mastered cloud computing have an easier time advancing into the digital realm? Is digital enterprise even possible without cloud computing? It’s very likely that cloud paves the way to the digital enterprise, but don’t expect overnight transformation as a result of cloud. Digital enterprise, associated with the design, development and delivery of innovative products and services through online channels, is the result of a long, multi-year journey that includes cloud computing as a vital component.

That’s the word from Saugatuck Technology, which just released two new reports that explore the connection between digital enterprise initiatives and cloud computing. Business and IT leaders still have plenty of work ahead of them — even if they are well along in their cloud implementations, says Saugatuck Technology analyst Mike West in a recent post…

Grazed from Decoded.  Author: Julie Sinclair.

The need for reliable operations and secure access increase as companies migrate to cloud technologies. Defending your applications from distributed-denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks is a top area of concern for your business. Before moving your company’s important data to a cloud service provider, implement a plan to deal with DDoS threats. When designing your DDoS plan for your business, understand how your cloud service provider protects your data.

Five Top Security Issues

1. Securing a new perimeter:

Moving your data to cloud technologies means your data is distributed to multiple data centers. How can you effectively create a new security perimeter for your company and protect your data from attacks? Understand what tools your cloud provider uses to protect your data against DDoS attacks. Check the comprehensive detection tools your cloud provider uses for detection of DDoS attacks. Understand the inline deployment used for examining all inbound and outbound traffic for DDoS attacks…

Grazed from BuildYourBestCloud.  Author: Editorial Staff.

Cloud computing is becoming a more strategic initiative to many companies, according to a newly published survey. In fact, nearly half of companies queried said they’re using cloud to grow revenues and/or drive product development.

The survey, “2014 Future of Cloud Computing,” was conducted by North Bridge Venture Partners and Gigaom Research and interviewed 1,358 technology decision-makers.  There’s plenty of interesting data in this survey, and I’ll go over some of it in two blog entries. I think of particular interest is just how many view cloud computing as a strategic endeavor for their companies…