Category: News

Grazed from Stratosec.co.  Author: Editorial Staff.

In April, the SEC’s Office of Compliance Inspections and Examinations (OCIE) made headlines as they released a Risk Alert stating they would be examining the information security posture of “more than 50” registered broker-dealers and investment advisors. As we provide secure cloud services to organizations that may be examined as part of this process, we’re watching with interest.  In particular, we wanted to know: how does the OCIE cybersecurity initiative affect cloud computing?

The OCIE is basing their questions on NIST’s Framework for Improving Critical Infrastructure Cybersecurity. Generally, the NIST document is a common-sense framework for an organization to describe their existing security posture, describe the organization’s target security state, and then prioritize how to get there. For organizations that do not have a mature information security program, the NIST Framework provides a great way to understand their current security posture, and create a plan to improve it…

Grazed from GuardianLV.  Author: Nicholas Grabe.

Red Hat Inc. has spent the past decade becoming one of the dominant commercial providers of the Linux operating system, but it is now looking to expand by exploiting opportunities in Indonesia, and in the field of cloud-computing systems. Red Hat Inc., which generated approximately 1.5 billion dollars in revenue last year, is expecting double digit revenue growth over the next year.

This would follow 48 consecutive financial quarters in which Red Hat has shown revenue growth, but it is nonetheless a very optimistic expectation on the part of David Yap, Red Hat’s country manager for Malaysia and Brunei. This optimism, however, is strongly supported by indicators from the Asian Pacific market…

Grazed from Oracle.  Author:  Jeurgen Kress.

Why is everyone talking about cloud computing? Drawn-out, expensive IT projects that are planned and implemented without any benefits for the business stakeholders are commonplace. In contrast, cloud computing offers business users the chance to immediately implement services with usage-based billing that are tailored to their requirements, often without the need to consult with the IT department.

However, aspects like security, architecture, availability, and standards are often not evaluated. Cloud consumers find themselves at the mercy of the cloud provider. Scenarios that require changing cloud providers after a cloud provider goes bankrupt, and the associated moving of data and/or applications, have not yet been sufficiently tested. Business continuity should play a key role from the start of a cloud evaluation process…

Grazed from BusinessWeek.  Author: Nick Summers.

Cloud computing provider Rackspace says it’s open to being acquired—and there’s no shortage of suitors.  The San Antonio company has hired Morgan Stanley to explore its options, Bloomberg News first reported yesterday, amid “inbound strategic proposals” from a number of parties.

Rackspace (RAX) shares lost more than half their value from September to May 9 as the company struggled to keep pace with Amazon.com (AMZN), the leader in cloud computing, and a host of other competitors that have plowed billions upon billions into the burgeoning market. Rackspace stock shot up as much as 30 percent on the news, to more than $36…

Grazed from Barrons.  Author: Tiernan Ray.

Piper Jaffray hardware analyst Andrew Nowinski today offered his thoughts coming out of the Global Tech Distributor Conference held in New York, where Ingram Micro (IM), Tech Data (TECD), Anvet (AVT) and others spoke about their experiences selling cloud computing wares.

His conclusion from the talks by distributors is that public cloud computing services such as those offered by Amazon.com (AMZN), are “not having as much of an impact on enterprise storage revenue growth as the valuations seem to imply,” and that spending is improving for traditional tech products, and so he’s still bullish on EMC (EMC), NetApp (NTAP), and also on shares of challenger Nimble Storage (NMBL), all of whose shares he rates Overweight…

Grazed from EnterpriseTech. Author: Timothy Prickett Morgan.

Running distributed applications on cloud computing capacity means, in theory, that IT shops never have to do capacity planning again. For large enough aggregations of lines of business inside of a company or enterprises that share capacity on a public cloud, the ups and downs across time zones and workloads should all balance out.

This is precisely what Microsoft executives recently told EnterpriseTech was one of the key benefits of hyperscale cloud computing, and added that this was something that very few companies in the public cloud arena could offer. (Amazon Web Services, Google Compute Engine, and Microsoft Azure has massive scale for sure, and IBM SoftLayer, Rackspace Hosting, and a bunch of others are working on it.) Even with excess capacity, all cloud builders need to be able to get more capacity online relatively quickly, whether it is the internal IT department or your public cloud provider…

Grazed from Forbes. Author: Cheryl Conner.

What does every entrepreneur have in common? A need for increasingly better tools to accomplish work faster and without compromise, from the devices they already have. We hear the same questions continually: “How do I streamline collaboration?” “How can I improve project management?” “How do I maintain internal controls?” “How can I enable my employees to communicate and work more efficiently?”

Increasingly, the answers include one of today’s fastest growing sectors, according to my friend and frequent collaborator Tom Lowery: Cloud Virtualization. (Forbes staffer Bruce Rogers has written about this emerging sector in his profile of startup Veeam Software here.)…

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: Joab Jackson.

Red Hat continues to enhance its software portfolio for helping organizations run and manage cloud services in their own data centers, adding more features to its OpenShift Enterprise software package to accommodate enterprise requirements such as policy orchestration and multiregion availability.

OpenShift Enterprise 2.1, available now, also includes new releases of the latest open source software used in the platform-as-a-service (PaaS) hosting package, such as PHP and MySQL. Although it gets less attention than the IaaS (infrastructure-as-a-service)-style cloud services, PaaS services can be valuable…

Grazed from FCW. Author: Alistair Mitchell.

Three years ago Vivek Kundra unveiled the Federal Cloud Computing Strategy. The strategy set out to transform the government’s existing IT environment, which was "characterized by low asset utilization, a fragmented demand for resources, duplicative systems, environments which are difficult to manage and long procurement lead times." Cloud computing would be the change agent and transform federal IT for the better.

With Kundra estimating 25 percent of the government’s $80 billion annual IT spend could be migrated to cloud computing services, it would only be a matter of time before agencies could reap the rewards of the cloud’s key benefits: efficiency, agility and innovation. To accelerate cloud computing adoption, the cloud-first policy was instituted to ensure cloud services were evaluated prior to any new IT investments being made…

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Charles Babcock.

IBM, HP, Cisco, and AT&T are the preferred infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) providers, topping the likes of Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, or Rackspace, according to a new IDC report on enterprise cloud computing. In a key finding, the report says, "buyers selected IBM as their overall top preference among providers they believe can most effectively provision IaaS, whether private or public. Following IBM in the top spots were Cisco, HP, AT&T, and Google."

The report, "U.S. Buyers Rank IBM, Cisco, HP, AT&T, and Google as Likely Most Effective Top 5 Providers in Delivering IaaS," is IDC’s first Public Cloud Tracker report. It was authored by IDC analyst David Tapper. Tapper defined infrastructure-as-a-service as either shared, multi-tenant servers in the cloud (public IaaS) or dedicated servers in the cloud (private IaaS)…