This week in the States, the Nation celebrates it’s Independence and many people will be attending or setting off their own fireworks show. In Hawaii, fireworks are shot off more during New Year’s Eve than on July 4th and there is even Daytime Fireworks now.

Cloud computing is exploding like fireworks with all the Oooooooo’s and Ahhhhhhh’s of what it offers but the same groan, like the traffic jam home, might be coming to an office near you.

Recently, Ponemon Institute and cloud firm Netskope released a study Data Breach: The Cloud Multiplier Effect, indicating that 613 IT and security professionals felt that deploying resources in the cloud triples the probability of a major breach. Specifically, a data breach with 100,000+ customer records compromised, the cost would be just over $20 million, based on Ponemon Institute’s May 2014 ‘Cost of a Data Breach’. With a breach of that scale, using cloud services may triple the risk of a data breach. It’s called the ‘cloud multiplier effect’ and it translates to a 3% higher risk of a data breach for every 1% increase in the use of cloud services. So if you had 100 cloud services, you would only need to add 25 more to increase the possibility of a data breach by 75%, according to the study.

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This week in the States, the Nation celebrates it’s Independence and many people will be attending or setting off their own fireworks show. In Hawaii, fireworks are shot off more during New Year’s Eve than on July 4th and there is even Daytime Fireworks now.

Cloud computing is exploding like fireworks with all the Oooooooo’s and Ahhhhhhh’s of what it offers but the same groan, like the traffic jam home, might be coming to an office near you.

Recently, Ponemon Institute and cloud firm Netskope released a study Data Breach: The Cloud Multiplier Effect, indicating that 613 IT and security professionals felt that deploying resources in the cloud triples the probability of a major breach. Specifically, a data breach with 100,000+ customer records compromised, the cost would be just over $20 million, based on Ponemon Institute’s May 2014 ‘Cost of a Data Breach’. With a breach of that scale, using cloud services may triple the risk of a data breach. It’s called the ‘cloud multiplier effect’ and it translates to a 3% higher risk of a data breach for every 1% increase in the use of cloud services. So if you had 100 cloud services, you would only need to add 25 more to increase the possibility of a data breach by 75%, according to the study.

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Last week, the news that Code Spaces suffered a breach that overnight put the company out of business and cost their clients untold millions reminded everyone in the IT community how devastating a major data security breach can be for our companies and clients. 

At Logicworks, we manage highly available, compliant cloud infrastructure on Amazon Web Services, and in the wake of this catastrophe, we decided to publish a list of AWS security best practices.

Data security is not binary.  Best practices are to use defense in depth and continuously evaluate what improvements can be made and how the threats are changing.  AWS, and public cloud computing in general, provide many new capabilities, but along with that come new threats and new tools to counter them.  Here are some of our recommendations to improve AWS security and build a good foundation for a secure scalable environment.

Improving Amazon Web Services …

CRM and business IT solutions provider Autotask has reportedly gone down, with the company citing “a known issue in a few zones”.

The company posted this tweet 18 hours ago at the time of writing, but has since gone deathly quiet to customers’ ire, including not replying to a request for comment from CloudTech:

We are currently working on a known issue in a few zones. If you have any questions please contact support. We will keep you updated!

— Autotask (@Autotask) July 1, 2014

It would seem, however, that this hasn’t quite been the case:

Big questions going to be asked of @Autotask following this level of outage. #autotask #downtime

— Jimmy Madrid (@jimmymadrid) July 2, 2014

@Autotask Poor show. At least provide an update after the last one 19 hours ago!

— Ricardo Meechan (@rm83) July 2, 2014

@autotask #autotask Thanks for all the updates on the site being down …

SYS-CON Events announced today that Harbinger Systems will exhibit at SYS-CON’s 15th International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on November 4–6, 2014, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
Harbinger Systems is a global company providing software technology services. Since 1990, Harbinger has developed a strong customer base worldwide. Its customers include software product companies ranging from hi-tech start-ups in Silicon Valley to leading product companies in the US and large in-house IT organizations.

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How often have you heard someone say ‘We’re moving to the cloud’ or ‘It’s all in the cloud now’? Going to the cloud has become part of the vernacular in everyday conversation. The cloud is the place to go, the place to be. If you haven’t gone to the cloud you are being left behind. There is no denying, the cloud is a growth industry. Gartner predicts that the bulk of IT spend will be for the cloud by 2016. They also believe that ‘nearly half of large enterprises will have hybrid cloud deployments by the end of 2017.’ IDC forecasts ‘Worldwide Public IT Cloud Services Spending to Reach Nearly $108 Billion by 2017.’

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As the number of companies adopting cloud-based solutions continues to increase, security remains top of mind for vendors, companies and their customers. Organizations of all types and sizes are opting for cloud e-signatures for many reasons including speed-to-market, agility and a lower total cost of ownership. What organizations concerned with cloud security may not know is that all e-signature solutions are not created equal; enterprise-class cloud e-signatures enable security that is beyond simply passing a security audit or obtaining certification. There are four areas organizations should keep in mind when considering SaaS e-signatures.
Recent large-scale data breaches and general concern over personal privacy in digital spaces have understandably left many wondering if their customer data is secure. E-signature solution vendors have the responsibility to ensure data is safe, which includes protecting against privacy breaches or malware attacks and ensuring that data is encrypted in transit and at rest.

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The industry is heated with debates on whether adopting private or public cloud is the smartest, best, cheapest, you name it choice. But this debate is missing the mark. Businesses shouldn’t be discussing public vs. private, but rather how can they make the two work together to their greatest advantage. The ideal is to merge on-premise and off-premise into a seamless environment that can be managed as a single entity – a forward-looking stance that will eventually see major adoption. But as of late 2013, hybrid cloud was still “rare,” noted Gartner analyst Tom Bittman.
In his session at 15th Cloud Expo, Marten Mickos, CEO of Eucalyptus Systems, will discuss how public clouds need on-premise satellites to win and, conversely, how on-premise environments cannot be really powerful unless they are connected to the public cloud. It’s not two competing worlds; it’s two dimensions of the same world.

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Technology is moving at a blistering pace. In today’s era of data-centric, complex environments where the lines between business and technology are becoming increasingly blurred, organizations are moving beyond virtualization to cloud computing to meet new challenges and keep up with the pace of change. Critical investments are needed to keep companies competitive, and chief among these technologies is cloud computing. In fact, Gartner expects cloud computing to become the bulk of new IT expenditure by 2016. The bottom line is, if you’re not already looking at cloud as an essential investment, you’re risking your survival into the next era of computing.

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Accomplish much more, very rapidly, while spending less – this is the business technology trend that savvy executives everywhere have embraced. Worldwide IT spending will reach a total $3.7 trillion in 2014, that’s a 2.1 percent increase from last year, according to the latest global market study by Gartner.

This forecast, however, is down from their earlier projections of 3.2 percent growth.

What’s driving the ongoing transition to lower business technology spending? The slower outlook for 2014 is attributed to a reduction in growth expectations for end-user devices, data center systems and IT related services.

Moreover, the typical IT investment is evolving. It’s transitioning from a legacy focus on technology and processes, to a focus on new business models and associated strategic outcomes that are purposefully enabled by digitalization.

Transition within enterprise mobile devices

The IT end-user devices market – which includes PCs, ultrabooks, smartphones, tablets …