Category: News

Grazed from WatersTechnology.  Author: Max Bowie.

Any discussion of return on investment relies on the ability to measure two things: the return generated, and the amount spent to achieve it. In the world of market data, the question is, “How much money can I make as a result of buying and using dataset x, net of the cost of that dataset?” In many cases, this is quantifiable, and traders have used this very argument to justify buying expensive data services.

However, over the past few lean years, one of the main drivers of any meager spend increases has been regulatory compliance—an area of spend that firms are reluctant to swallow because it is not something that offers any monetary return on their investment, unless you count avoiding non-compliance fines. So, many firms are looking to cloud computing to deliver cost savings around these initiatives as the “least bad” option to reduce a cost burden that didn’t exist until recently…

Grazed from TelcoReview.  Author: Editorial Staff.

Every cloud provider has its own technologies, its own buzzwords, its own APIs – and that’s a challenge for enterprises.  High on their cloud shopping lists are ideas like portability, compatibility and interoperability.  So far, cloud providers have been unable to address those demands. That’s about to change, thanks to standards work being done by the CloudEthernet Forum, a relatively new nonprofit organization spun out of the well-established MEF (Metro Ethernet Forum).

The CEF previewed two new programs at the NetEvents Cloud Innovation Summit, held here in late March 2014: the CloudE 1.0 Framework and OpenCloud Project.  The CloudE 1.0 Framework defines a set of standardized services to be offered by cloud service providers…

Grazed from Forbes.  Author: Ben Kepes.

Yesterday it was the news that former bitter rivals, Salesforce and Microsoft, has found new love and respect and had entered into a broad-ranging partnership. Today Salesforce scored another coup with the announcement that it is the first vendor to be granted Federal Certification for both Software as a Service (SaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS). The Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP) has long been the holy grail for cloud infrastructure vendors – since its introduction back in 2011 a number of infrastructure vendors have obtained certification. Amazon Web Services, Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard among them.

But until now FedRAMP hadn’t covered the higher levels of the cloud stack, SaaS and PaaS. While this might sound like a confusing series of acronyms, it is actually pretty important. Infrastructure as a Service allows organizations to essentially buy servers on demand. Instead of having to buy physical boxes, build data centers and wrangle the details of running the same, they can instead “hire” infrastructure from a cloud vendor…

Grazed from ComputerWorld.  Author: Paul Ferrill.

What do you get when you combine four independent servers, lots of memory, standard SATA disks and SSD, 10Gb networking, and custom software in a single box? In this instance, the answer would be a Nutanix NX-3000. Pigeonholing the Nutanix product into a traditional category is another riddle altogether. While the company refers to each unit it sells as an "appliance," it really is a clustered combination of four individual servers and direct-attached storage that brings shared storage right into the box, eliminating the need for a back-end SAN or NAS.

I was recently given the opportunity to go hands on with a Nutanix NX-3000, the four nodes of which were running version 3.5.1 of the Nutanix operating system. It’s important to point out that the Nutanix platform handles clustering and file replication independent of any hosted virtualization system…

Grazed from Cadalyst.  Author: Alex Herrera.

After years of working in the era of the personal computer, we’ve all grown accustomed to the familiar sight of a PC or workstation tower under our desks, or a notebook or mobile workstation on our laps. But with a host of new technologies and solutions coming to market — backed by the biggest names in computing silicon, systems, and software — CAD users may need to adjust their expectations about where their computers reside.

Server-based computing (SBC) is back in the IT limelight. Granted, it has taken a different shape than in the past, and marches under several different banners: cloud computing, virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), client consolidation infrastructure (CCI), and hosted virtual desktops (HVD), to name a few…

Grazed from PRWeb.  Author: PR Announcement.

 Panda Security, The Cloud Security Company, has announced the latest findings of the PandaLabs Quarterly Report for Q1 2014. The main conclusions of the study include the fact that malware creation has broken all records during this period, with 15+ million new samples overall, and more than 160,000 new samples appearing every day. The full report can be found here.

Trojans are still the most abundant type of new malware, accounting for 71.85% of new samples created during Q1. Similarly, infections by Trojans were once again the most common type of infection over this period, representing 79.90% of all cases…

Grazed from StreetWiseTech.  Author: Thomas Larson.

The word ‘cloud’ refers to an informal expression used to describe a network of computers which are joined together in real time by a single computing network. This whole system of communication is called a cloud computing technology.  Cloud computing technology is used today by the help of the internet. The medium of the internet helps in maintaining a real time or live communication forum for cloud computing technology.

In this, large quantities of computers are connected via the internet. The term cloud computing technology does not indicate or represent the scientific term for such a network. In computer science studies, this term, cloud computing technology is used to simply describe the ability or capacity for people to be able to operate a single program over many connected computers all at the same time…

Grazed from TargetedNewsService.  Author: PR Announcement.

Numerous regional cyber leaders convened at Hanscom Air Force Base May 28 to discuss, and sometimes debate, the merits and challenges of secure cloud computing.

Organized by the Advanced Cyber Security Center (ACSC) and hosted by leaders at Hanscom, the event fostered vigorous discussion about the most efficient and secure ways to store and protect critical data and systems. Participating companies and organizations included Akamai, Google, State Street Financial, Liberty Mutual, Biogen Idec, Manulife Financial, MITRE, the RAND Corp. and Boston University’sHariri Institute for Computing and Computational Science and Engineering…

Grazed from GigaOm.  Author: Erik Pounds.

Few trends have gained as much mind share and momentum as the rush to move all our data and computing to the cloud. The fever for the cloud runs high — and it runs largely unchecked. Some, including AppZero CEO Greg O’Connor, believe that the move to the cloud is only going to accelerate. In this vision of the future, all information will be stored in centralized services and your computing devices (laptop, phone, tablet, etc.) will all access storage in the cloud.

In the more than 15 years I’ve spent in the data protection, storage and networking spaces, I’ve witnessed firsthand the benefits many companies — and users — have reaped from this trend. In the eyes of the consumer, the internet has morphed into a group of centralized services that many of us use on a daily basis…

Grazed from TechTarget.  Author: Branden Blevins.

Enterprise information security teams may fear the worst as their organizations implement cloud services, but according to an expert panel, security professionals shouldn’t resist the change and should instead position themselves to manage cloud risk.

Speaking Thursday at the second-annual MassBay Community College Information Security Summit, panelist David Escalante, director of computer security and policy at Boston College (BC), shared a story highlighting the worst-case scenario of what can happen when security teams fail to position themselves as trusted advisors on cloud security management within their organizations…