Category: News

Grazed from SCMagazine. Author: Steve Gold.

Whilst this may seem a misnomer, given the cost advantages that a cloud data centre resource can deliver over its local bricks and mortar counterpart, budgets – even in the corporate cloud – are still under significant pressure. According to Ed Macnair, EMEA MD of Intermedia, the key security issue in his opinion is how to embrace the cloud without losing control of the data.

"Our research suggests that around 56 percent of companies make use of six or more SaaS (software-as-a-service) applications, whilst 76 percent of network intrusions exploit weak and stolen passwords," he told the audience, adding that – just to make life more difficult – the average business user has 25 different passwords they have to remember for internet-based services…

Grazed from ReadWrite. Author: Matt Asay.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) sets the pace for innovation in cloud and sets pricing. For all of the "Everything is awesome!" singing surrounding the open-source cloud-computing platform OpenStack, it still lags AWS in almost every feature that cloud customers value. Most attempts to improve OpenStack come from longtime open-source contributors like Red Hat.

But one new entrant, Tesora, is something of a johnny-come-lately to open source. Last week, Tesora announced that it was open sourcing its previously proprietary database virtualization engine as part of its commitment to OpenStack’s Trove database-as-a-service (DBaaS) project…

Grazed from ZDNet. Author: Aimee Chanthadavong.

Cisco Systems is confident that Australia will be the global market leader to take up its big cloud play that has been dubbed Intercloud. Speaking to a room of media this week, Cisco development and sales president Robert Lloyd said Intercloud — which the company initially announced in March as part of its US$1 billion investment to secure its position in the cloud computing market — is an "enterprise response to the multiple uses of cloud technology that is expected to unfold in the next decade".

"We have heard for a year or two about the construct of the market, and how it has been trying to respond to the complexity that has emerged in networking … [but] command line interface network units that’s expected to lead to the agility and flexibility that customers are looking for today isn’t going to be the answer," he said…

Grazed from BinaryTribune. Author: Editorial Staff.

Oracle Corp. made an official statement yesterday, posting its profit and sales for the fourth quarter of the financial year that missed analysts’ forecasts. The announcement comes at a moment when the company is trying to shift its focus to providing primarily cloud-computing services and become a worthy rival of companies such as Salesforce.com Inc.

The Co-president and Chief Financial Officer of Oracle – Ms. Safra Catz said on a conference calL yesterday, cited by Bloomberg: “We’ve successfully grown the company’s revenues and earnings through every transition, whether it was many computer databases to a complete suite of products, client-server Internet, hardware engineered systems and now on-premise cloud.” Ms. Catz also added: “We are well under way with our most recent transition.”…

Grazed from BusinessNewsDaily. Author: Sara Angeles.

Considering a cloud computing solution for your small business? Here’s the million-dollar question: Should you use a public, private or hybrid cloud? After costs, scalability, security and other factors, some small businesses may find that mirroring its resources across public clouds with private environments may be the best option.

A public cloud lets you store data remotely in shared servers housed in off-site data centers, whereas a private cloud does so in on-premise servers within your own secure network. A hybrid cloud, however, gives you the benefit of both public and private clouds, letting you store regular files remotely and sensitive files in your own backyard. But for most budget- and resource-strapped small businesses, constructing their own in-house infrastructures for a private or hybrid cloud is out of the question…

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: CJ Arlotta.

Rackspace (RAX) is hoping to reduce cloud complexity by providing a new infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) solution to its customers. The San Antonio-based cloud hosting company on Thursday said it’s rolling out the limited availability release of OnMetal Cloud Servers, a new offering designed for businesses in need of a way to spin API-driven bare metal servers without any multi-tenant challenges.

The company said OnMetal Cloud Servers are available in several sizes, powered by OpenStack and built with Open Compute hardware. Every OnMetal Cloud Servers customer also receives access to Rackspace specialists, enabling them to optimize their application architecture, identify security threats, assist with code debugging and monitor their infrastructure, Rackspace said…

Grazed from Investors. Author: Reinhardt Krause.

Corporate America has been moving computing workloads to the cloud more slowly than expected. Equinix aims to change that with Cloud Exchange, a new offering for enterprise customers. Equinix (NASDAQ:EQIX), a provider of computer data centers, is expected to lay out more of its Cloud Exchange strategy at its analysts day event in New York on Wednesday. Equinix stock touched a 13-month high Thursday.

Data-center operators provide space, power and cooling. Customers pack the centers with their own computer servers and other gear. Equinix also specializes in providing connections to high-speed, fiber-optic networks operated by AT&T (NYSE:T), Verizon Communications (NYSE:VZ) and other telecom services providers…

Grazed from WashingtonToday. Author: David Blankenhorn.

Today, you can’t attend a technology-focused conference in the Washington, DC area without hearing at least one panel or presentation on cloud computing. The benefits have been touted loudly and often: reduced costs, increased efficiency and agility, and enhanced productivity. According to a 2013 Gartner report, between fiscal 2012 and fiscal 2013 the value of awarded cloud contracts in the federal government nearly quadrupled. By 2018 the market is expected to hit $10 billion.

Despite a few agencies that were early adopters of cloud computing technology, many agencies have remained slow to leverage the technology. Why? I see four major roadblocks to accelerated adoption across the federal government: education on the different cloud computing models, security, procurement, and industry noise…

Grazed from Computing.co.uk. Author: Editorial Staff.

Financial services giant Morgan Stanley has dealt with the problem of "rogue IT" – departments contracting their own IT services from cloud computing companies – by restricting access to Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Dropbox and other big-name providers at the network layer.

The security problem posed by cloud computing services being used or procured under the radar of IT has become endemic – and poses a particular problem to organisations, like banks, that need to operate to a high degree of security. But at a presentation at the World Cloud Forum this week in which Laszlo Kollar, executive director of global cloud at Morgan Stanley, revealed how the bank is – slowly – shifting some services towards an internal cloud, Kollar admitted that the bank simply blocks Amazon, Dropbox and other popular cloud service providers to prevent staff from using them…

Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Jeff John Roberts.

It’s not often you write “Microsoft” and”open” in the same sentence but, well, these are special times. The company is straining to make its Azure cloud service a bona fide rival to Google Cloud and Amazon Web Services, and believes that offering customers openness and options are one way it can stand out.

“It’s a change from the historical Microsoft by embracing openness in a new way,” said Scott Guthrie, EVP of the company’s cloud and enterprise group, speaking Wednesday at Gigaom Structure in San Francisco. Guthrie pointed out that Azure offers tools for clients to run Linux and a wide variety of SDK’s, and touted its drag-and-drop machine tools for machine learning as a “democratic” way for companies to get more analytics…