With all the talk of fiscal cliffs, financial binds and “next year’s budget,” I started thinking about cloud security in more tangible ways. Specifically returns on investment, economic impact and total costs of ownership.

Just like death and taxes, businesses can add intrusion and attack to the list of sureties. I can hear CFOs all over the world sigh in exasperation as they feel pressured to add another expense line item to minimise the building security threats to their enterprises.

Before you add another decimal place to security budgets, maybe it’s time you consider the how cloud-deployed security options can not only address the complexities of enterprise security ably, but do so at considerable savings.

Study after study promotes that a cloud computing model saves a organisation money. We know that more and more functionality is moving to the cloud. For things like CRM or other standard business …

Recent evidence suggests that cloud competition in Australia is about to intensify. Australia’s high-tech population and its concern about cloud-hosting outside of the country should prove very tempting for cloud companies to set up domestically.

Technology research firm, Gartner believes that the cloud market spending will reach $2.4 billion this year, which is an increase of about 20% from last year. It is predicted that there will then be continual increases of around 16% per year until 1016.

Amazon Web Services has just set up in Sydney, with two ‘availability zones’ and Rackspace is launching its cloud data centre in Sydney, also. This should open up a number of cloud services to the Australian consumer.

Gartner says that they have “seen a lot of interest in cloud services, both public cloud and private cloud services, in Australia…so even when Amazon did not have a direct presence in …

There have been intriguing developments in terms of utilising the cloud as an entertainment vehicle during the past 24 hours, with Dropbox acquiring personal music streaming service Audiogalaxy and Amazon’s Cloud Player arriving on Samsung Smart TVs.

The acquisition of Audiogalaxy by cloud storage expert Dropbox may be a sign of things to come. Dropbox already allows limited music streaming as part of its cloud storage solution, and with Audiogalaxy’s expertise in that area, it seems like a match made in heaven.

In a blog post entitled “Hello, Dropbox” the three founders of Audiogalaxy, Michael Merhej, Tom Kleinpeter and Viraj Mody, wrote: “Over the last few years we’ve built a wonderful music experience on the web and mobile devices, attracting loyal users from all over the world.

“Today, we are thrilled to announce our team is joining Dropbox!” the blog continues, adding: “We are excited about the …

Research from identity management provider SailPoint has revealed that US and UK based IT leaders see one in three mission critical apps as currently in the cloud, with that figure rising sharply by 2015.

The Market Pulse Survey of 400 IT and business leaders, which defined ‘mission critical’ as apps mainly focused on storage, file-sharing and communications, forecast that the number is expected to grow to one in two in three years.

The figures differed slightly dependent on which side of the Atlantic respondents were based – 32% in the US compared to 30% in the UK for cloudy mission critical apps now – but the consensus was the same.

Another element of the research centred on pain points with moving to the cloud, with the usual suspects present.

Security was the top risk for 73% of US and 74% of UK-based respondents, with compliance and (56% US, 52% UK) and uptime …

Recent technological developments improved the ways in which we can create and manage different types of digital data.

As more and more documents go online, better solutions are being offered by cloud service providers. While the simplest apps can generally solve individual necessities for storage space and file transfer, the problems still exist in corporate settings where the amount of data generated daily is much bigger.

Services like Dropbox and SugarSync are primarily intended for individual consumers but there are other cloud services that focus on creating corporate data management solutions. The amount of digital data in companies and organisations grows at a very high rate and now many of them face the challenge of big data processing. This is why big data is increasingly becoming a focus of cloud industry.

Big data is a common name for huge amounts of digital data that cannot easily be processed and transmitted …

By Ken Smith

I have had a number of clients reach out to me about how to implement whole disk encryption, SQL transparent data encryption, and encryption of VMware VMDK files in order to satisfy “data at rest” security requirements. My response is usually something like “Say that again?”

These types of encryption approaches are designed to better protect data at rest on media that may be accessible to individuals who are not authorized to access such data. This is usually some form of portable media such as a hard drive in the notebook computer, a portable USB hard drive, a USB stick, a backup tape, etc.

And by “at rest” we are talking about files that have been saved to media and are not currently open or active. So to summarize, these types of encryption solutions are intended to protect data at rest on some form of portable media …

Building contractors were told this week that cloud computing could make a huge difference to the construction industry, especially when it comes to project management.

Autodesk, which develops some of the most influential design software such as AutoCAD and 3DS Max, claimed this week that the construction industry could use cloud hosting to power remote servers, given the nature of working on a building-site, an essentially rugged environment.

This would enable an industry which has otherwise been slow in taking up cloud technology (mainly due to security / reliability concerns) to flourish, changing the nature in which projects are run.

Autodesk senior VP Amar Hanspal thinks that the technology is now ripe for the construction industry to jump on board, just as they did for Building Information Modelling (BIM).

Hanspal said that by using technology such as mobile phones, the work force could be reached and drawings, building models and instructions …

With 2013 just around the corner, it’s not surprising to see many companies rolling out their 2013 tech predictions – and it’s even less of a surprise that cloud computing features heavily.

Analyst house Forrester has revealed its top 10 cloud computing predictions for next year, with all the contributors to the Forrester cloud playbook giving their view before narrowing down their insight to the best 10 enterprise cloud forecast.

These predictions include a waning of AWS’ cloud prowess, companies no longer fussing over service level agreements (SLAs), and a further convergence of cloud and mobile.

“We can stop speculating, hopefully stop cloudwashing, and get down to the real business of incorporating cloud services and platforms into our formal IT portfolios”, wrote Forrester analyst James Staten in a blog post.

The 10 predictions from Forrester are:

1. We’ll finally stop saying that everything is going cloud: Specifically, people will …

By Sharon Florentine

The Cloud ERP (enterprise resource planning) landscape is expanding, and competition is heating up. Back in July 2012, Web-based business software provider NetSuite’s Q2 revenue and earnings numbers were the first indicators of a growing trend in the Cloud ERP space.

As Ben Kepes reported in the Cloud Ave blog, NetSuite’s subscription and support revenues were $61 million, a 27 percent increase of Q2 2011. And NetSuite’s cash flow from operations was up 80 percent year-over-year to $15.2 million.

Don’t yawn – yes, earnings reports in and of themselves aren’t exactly riveting. But as Kepes said, the trend that these numbers indicate signals a very important shift in the ERP space. 

Enterprise software isn’t «sexy,» but it continues to be a growth sector year-over-year, he said, because it’s directly monetisable – enterprise software companies deliver a service customers are very willing …

While trawling the blogs, feeds and news I came across an analyst’s article about best security practices in which he kept referring to “the stack.” And by this he meant a multitude of various solutions that address certain security needs and capabilities; everything from email filtering, firewalling, authenticating, credentialing, logging and intrusion detection, etc…

And, if you read my blogs often enough, you know I am a big proponent of unified security. However, unified security is not a stack. It is easy to be confused as both look to utilize best of breed tools to prevent negative impact on IP assets. A stack references a number of technologies where each operates independently from one another. Single sign on by itself is a sufficient tool, but when operating alone in its own silo, important contextual information is lost.

The unified approach, as I describe in REACT, is a collaborative practice …