Total Defense, Inc., a provider of solutions to combat the growing threat of cybercrime, today announced the launch of Total Defense Cloud Security, an integrated cloud based SaaS (Security as a Service) solution for Web and email protection, for businesses in Europe. This new offering provides organizations with a powerful and versatile Web and email security platform that protects users anytime and anywhere.

The widespread use of the Web as a business tool, coupled with an increasingly mobile workforce, has enhanced corporate productivity, but it has also created new security challenges for companies that must balance providing access with protecting critical corporate assets and data.

“The days of the typical business user accessing the Internet solely from the safety of a protected corporate network are over. Today’s workers are connecting from an array of different devices through a multitude of private and public networks, Wi-Fi hotspots and home networks. Traditional appliance-based Web and Email security solutions are unable to address the evolving security needs of modern businesses,” said Paul Lipman, CEO of Total Defense.

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The island-nation of Singapore, located in the southwest of the ASEAN region, competes with Hong Kong more than 1,500 miles to the northeast for business and attention. It is now also competing with the Chinese special administrative region (SAR) as an emerging cloud-computing center.

A recent development comes from Citic Telecom International CPC Ltd., a Hong Kong-based company that’s launched what it calls a SmartCloud center in Singapore. The center joins similar facilities in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and mainland China.

The company expects cloud services to grow to 20-25% of its overall business within three years, according to a statement from company CEO Stephen Ho.

This is a complex facility, belying any belief one might have that cloud is simple. It incorporates technology from Dell, Riverbed, VMware, and HP (which is adding security management into the mix).

The Riverbed technology, designed to optimize performance, is a key aspect of Citic’s implementation. A local Riverbed spokesperson said the company’s technology will address “the vagaries of the Internet” with the idea of maximizing QoS (quality-of-service) issues.

Citic says Singapore will be its “communications hub” for Southeast Asia, and also says it will extend its presence to Thailand, Indonesia, and the Philippines in the near future.

The Singaporean government has been an active supporter of cloud computing, encouraging investment and developing an aggressive government cloud program that provides XaaS cloud services to local businesses. A non-profit organization in Hong Kong called Asia Cloud developed a “Cloud Readiness Index” last year that aggregated several factors into an Asian ranking. Hong Kong slightly topped Singapore, followed closely by Australia.

I prefer to be in Manila for many reasons, and think there is potential for any of the large-to-massive cities of the region – Manila, Jakarta, Kuala Lumpur, and Bangkok – to emerge more fully. Sydney and Melbourne are present in regional-hub discussions as well.

With Singapore as its communication hub for the ASEAN region, Citic plans to extend its presence to Thailand, Indonesia and the Philippines in the near future. Apart from Singapore, it has deployed more than 50 points of presence already in the Greater China and Asia Pacific, including Malaysia, Vietnam and Australia.

Several network-security vendors are also involved with the project, including Certes Networks, Juniper Networks, Fortinet, and McAfee. The goal is to get Citic’s regional centers to work as disaster-recovery centers for one another.

Note that the technology vendors named here are all US Companies. Is anybody in Washington listening when we plead for them to pay more attention to the great and vast US cloud-computing innovation culture?

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Convincing your clients to add cloud-based backups to their business continuity plan is often thwarted by a fear of losing control over offsite data. With an army of StorageCraft solutions empowering you to quickly access your data in multiple ways, you can easily convince your clients to add this wise level of protection.
In his session at the 11th International Cloud Expo, Kimber Barton, Principle Sales Engineer at StorageCraft, will walks through offsite backup storage options, including StorageCraft Cloud Services, and the StorageCraft technologies that give you the power to maintain ultimate control over your offsite data.

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The popularity of storage products such as Dropbox is infiltrating into enterprise as users go against company policy to utilise cloud-based storage.

According to a recent report from social business network Spiceworks, 33% of organisations said that their staff was using personal storage products.

The report, entitled ‘The Cloud Barometer’, aims to give insight into SMEs and their usage of cloud-based file sharing software. Spiceworks interviewed over 300 users across North America and the Europe, Middle East and Asia (EMEA) region.

The IT industry appears to have a mixed view on this acceleration, with 31% of companies surveyed agreeing that employees could use any provider they wished, yet 32% discouraged the behaviour.

Spiceworks noted that despite the accessibility, collaboration and convenience associated with cloud-based storage software, employers were still wary of the risks associated with file-sharing; evidently the type of data being shared and the usual bedbug, security.

Regarding specifics …

ISF urges business to use Big Data Analytics for security purposes – in a recent ISF study, they had six key findings as well a large number of recommendations. “The key recommendation is for organizations to exploit their existing data analytics capabilities, to identify security areas that can be addressed, and to start small with a limited pilot project.”
Revised Cybersecurity Act of 2012 Again Goes Before US Senate – the re-worked Cybersecurity Act of 2012 might be able to pass through the senate. The earlier bill did not pass due to issues with digital privacy and personal freedoms. “This revised legislation would establish a robust public‐private partnership to improve the cybersecurity of our nation’s most critical infrastructure, which is mostly owned by the private sector,
as stated by the bill.

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