Category: News

Grazed from Midsize Insider. Author: Shawn Drew.

It has been repeatedly claimed that a migration to cloud computing services will bring with it productivity and collaborative gains at the expense of data security, since the data is being managed by a third party. However, the cost of that increased security risk has never been quantified until now, in a new report from Netskope and the Ponemon Institute. Midsize businesses should take note of the report’s findings, but they should also approach these numbers with the requisite grain of salt.

Hidden Dangers With Cloud Computing Services

The data comes from a survey of over 600 cloud-aware IT professionals who attempted to quantify the "cloud multiplier effect," the cloud’s added risk of a costly data breach. As detailed in a recent eWEEK article, the report found that in certain situations — for example, when there is a 50 percent increase in the use of cloud-based storage of sensitive information — the expected cost of a data breach can increase by more than 200 percent…

Grazed from LightReading. Author: Mitch Wagner.

While security fears about cloud computing are legitimate, they also serve as an excuse to avoid change, according to John Considine, CTO, Verizon Terremark. Security is a concern for enterprises contemplating the cloud, and some of that is valid, Considine said during a keynote here today.

"But it’s also being used very broadly as a reason not to do something," he said. "I have a lot of challenges when people say, ‘Let me find all the reasons I can’t do something.’ " Some enterprises fear the cloud is dangerous and should be avoided. And yet even the biggest banks, airlines, and retail operations have been doing IT hosting, managed services, and co-location for years. "Now that it’s cloud, somehow it’s a little more scary," Considine said…

Grazed from ITWorld. Author: James Niccolai.

Breaking with other players in the IT industry, Amazon’s CTO has downplayed any impact of the Edward Snowden revelations on its international business. "Growth outside the U.S. is as strong as it ever was," CTO Werner Vogels said in an onstage interview at the Gigaom Structure conference in San Francisco Wednesday.

Cisco and a few other vendors have complained that revelations about surveillance by the National Security Agency have eroded trust in U.S. technology firms overseas, harming their businesses. Cisco CEO John Chambers even complained to President Barack Obama, after reports that the NSA had intercepted routers en route to customers to plant surveillance tools…

Grazed from ChannelWeb. Author: Sam Trendall.

The big four cloud computing firms will begin to "have a significant influence" on the server market as they account for a large and growing portion of total shipments. That is the view of networking and comms market watcher Dell’Oro Group, a report from which finds that, in the first quarter of 2014, 17 per cent of North American server shipments were white-box servers. Such units are non-major brand technology primarily used by system builders and integrators.

Alan Weckel, vice president at the analyst, estimated that about one in four of all server shipments were accounted for by cloud providers. He claimed that, while numerous hosting firms surely played a part in the server market’s solid showing in Q1, the leading quarter of public cloud players – Facebook, Google, Amazon, and Microsoft – are collectively becoming a major force…

Grazed from CNet. Author: Stephen Shankland.

Adobe Systems plans to release new technology Wednesday that amplifies the power of software running on mobile devices — and points to part of the the future of computing. The technology, called the Creative SDK (software developer kit), lets apps running on relatively feeble tablets and phones tap into more powerful servers connected over the Internet. It’s built into its new Photoshop Mix app for iPads, but Adobe also is beta testing it with third-party programmers.

Its initial services are limited to file sharing via Adobe’s Creative Cloud and to perform three high-powered image-processing chores: sharpening photos blurred by camera shake, content-aware fill for advance copying and pasting, and the "upright" tool for correcting perspective corrections. But there’s more on the way…

Grazed from ComputerWeekly. Author: Archana Venkatraman.

John Finch, the CIO of the Bank of England, warned potential cloud users to be wary of financial promises made by cloud providers and urged them to worry about legal aspects, security, compliance, service level agreements (SLAs) and data scalability while planning out their cloud strategy.

“Do not, do not, do not let the bean counters determine your cloud strategy,” Finch warned delegates at Cloud World Forum in his keynote focusing on the practical realities of cloud computing. “I may sound like I’m in cloud-denial, but I am not. Cloud can deliver good value and I know of many use cases where cloud has been a real enabler,” Finch said…

Grazed from MSPMentor. Author: Michael Brown.

As we recently learned from federalnewsradio.com, an astonishing 90 percent of federal agencies have adopted cloud computing. While that information should be of particular interest to MSPs who cater to government, what’s more important is why these agencies are moving to the cloud at such a high rate. The TechAmerica survey identified the following top three priorities of federal CIOs:

1. Cybersecurity:

Cybersecurity ranked as the number one priority. Many MSP customers identify the same concern. In today’s cyber age cloud and data security is of the utmost importance whether you are handling top secret government plans or retail customer payment information. One survey respondent cited the need to “transform the cybersecurity mindset from compliance to a risk management perspective” as a priorty. Similarly managing the risk of security breaches is a top concern of MSPs using cloud-based systems to manage services for their clients…

Grazed from IT Business Edge. Author: Editorial Staff.

As companies accelerate their adoption of cloud technologies – like infrastructure as a service (IaaS) or software as a service (SaaS) – the need for solutions that provide secure access and reliable operations in the cloud increase in importance. A top area of concern is defending applications from distributed-denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks.

Any plan to move to the cloud should include a plan for dealing with the pervasive and growing threat that DDoS present. In this slideshow, Bill Lowry, director of cloud services at Radware, takes a look at some of the burning issues you should look for when adopting a DDoS mitigation strategy for a cloud-based solution…

Read more from the source @ http://www.itbusinessedge.com/slideshows/five-burning-security-issues-in-cloud-computing.html

Grazed from TheRegister. Author: Joe Fay.

There are only three companies capable of delivering hyperscale cloud computing, the head of Microsoft’s Azure declared yesterday. After years of cloud tub-thumping, it was inevitable that marketers would need a new modifier or level of hyperbole, and “hyper” is the obvious next choice. Definitions are elastic, but it’s agreed hyper-gear can ramp up to handle exponential increases in demand with no hiccups.

Jason Zander, corporate veep of Windows Azure engineering, told the crowd at the Cloud World Forum in London yesterday, there were only “three vendors in the hyperscale world”. The first is, inevitably, Microsoft with its own Azure offering; Zander took the opportunity to highlight the platform’s underpinning of first-person-shooter splatter-fest Titanfall, which avails itself of 100,000 cores within the Azure cloud…

Grazed from ArsTechnica. Author: Ron Amadeo.

We live in the golden age of cloud computing. Storing user data and preferences on the Internet makes our multi-device lives easier than ever before. Data input on one device is often seamlessly available on every other device, making it a snap to jump from desktop to laptop to smartphone. Some software has come to depend so completely on these cloud servers, though, that we are starting to create a software ecosystem that will be historically untraceable.

That’s an issue, because software we use today will eventually be an important part of history. Computers are one of mankind’s most significant achievements, and the devices have enabled an era of change that is more rapid than any other time in history. Historical record is a vital, precious thing. We’ve kept records of just about everything since before written language…