Do chief information officers really prepare and provision their datacenter backbones especially for Christmas? Do CIOs honestly talk to systems architects, software development team leaders and individual programmers about the festive season and plan for an additional data burden?
The fact is that the IT industry has a vibrant and healthy media and publicity scene. Come the “holiday season” (let’s use the politically correct term), the stories turn to the so-called seasonal spike ahead.
Of course, Christmas is really only one seasonal spike among many for the truly discerning CIO. During normal trading hours companies witness demand spikes for any number of reasons including new product launches, web-based viral (usually positive) publicity surges and even the weather.

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HighCloud Security, one of those rare cloud security start-ups, is warming up to its subject.
A year ago when it first came to market it was focused on encryption and policy-based key management in the private cloud. It has now moved on to the public cloud in rev 2.0 of its widgetry and figures it could change the way companies buy security. After all, encryption isn’t reserved to the CIA anymore.
It claims its particular brand of magic is the first cloud encryption solution to let enterprises and cloud service providers lock down data across private, hybrid and public clouds.
It’s not something legacy solutions can do; at least not easily; they’re hard to manage and hard to deploy, not to mention expensive. And data security is often the gating factor scaring companies off the cloud.

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10gen, the open source document-oriented MongoDB creator, says Intel Capital and Red Hat have made strategic investments in it.
It means to use the undisclosed amount of money for product development and support of its rapidly growing worldwide community and user base. It has visions of being the top NoSQL database on the cloud and is reportedly hiring.
It doesn’t need the money. It’s up to Series E and got $42 million in September from VCs – who supposedly valued the company at between $500 million and $550 million – followed by an undisclosed investment from the CIA’s venture arm In-Q-Tel. Since 2009 the start-up has gotten more than $73.4 million and with these last two undisclosed investments TechCrunch thinks the total amount is now around $81 million.

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In the current world, data is continuously being generated across various layers of organizations and environment due to changes in the system states or due to the occurrence of new events. These changes in the state of the existing system can happen due to the arrival of a new order request, customer service calls for complaints or feedback, changes in the company stock prices, text or multimedia messages, emails, social media posts, traffic reports, weather reports or any other kind of data. Simply producing reports using these data on a predefined schedule is not enough. Decision makers need real-time alerts and intelligent insight of all that is happening within and around the organization so that they may take meaningful reactive and proactive action before it is too late based on the new information being continuously generated.

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A survey commissioned by Asigra and conducted by TechValidate has found security as the primary concern with storing data in the cloud.

Of the companies surveyed, security (21%) was the biggest concern, followed by location of company data (7%), cost (3%), cloud service provider going out of business (3%) and user error leading to data loss (3%).

There is a reason if these numbers appear particularly low – the top answer for respondents was “all of the above” (59%).

So, evidently, the majority of respondents can’t choose between various cloudy pain points, but of those who can, security worries once again come out on top.

3% selected user error leading to data loss – a pertinent worry, given data recovery expert Kroll Ontrack released its annual Top 10 Data Disasters list, including one man who ran over his camera and another whose iPad slipped into the sea off a Nigerian oil …

SYS-CON Events announced today that Coraid Inc., a leading developer of Ethernet-based storage solutions, has been named “Gold Sponsor” of SYS-CON’s 12th International Cloud Expo, which will take place on June 10–13, 2013, at the Javits Center in New York City, New York.
Coraid redefines storage with its breakthrough line of EtherDrive and EtherCloud solutions. Coraid delivers scale-out performance, Ethernet simplicity, and an elastic storage architecture to handle massive data growth. Designed from the ground up for virtualization and cloud architectures, Coraid’s platform has been deployed by more than 1,500 customers worldwide.

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Worldwide IT services deals with a cloud computing element have tripled since 2010, according to research from IT outsourcing consultancy ISG.
ISG used its TPI index to analyze IT outsourcing deals and found 2012 will bear 300 IT contracts awarded that involve cloud computing services. This compares with 110 in 2010 and 220 in 2011.
Stanton Jones, emerging technology analyst at ISG, said the move to standardized platform-based services which are difficult to customize is a step-change for the IT services sector.
“Cloud services, especially shared platforms, are a new terrain for providers and clients alike, as they are highly standardized and can’t be easily customized – the antithesis of traditional outsourcing,” said Jones.
He added that the greatest potential for growth and momentum is in Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) – especially for human resources (HR), customer relationship management CRM) and collaboration.

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