Knowing what to test is half the battle. Knowing how it was tested the other. Knowing what that means is the third. That’s some testing, real clear numbers.

In most countries, top speed is no longer the thing that auto manufacturers want to talk about. Top speed is great if you need it, but for the vast bulk of us, we’ll never need it. Since the flow of traffic dictates that too much speed is hazardous on the vast bulk of roads, automobile manufacturers have correctly moved the conversation to other things – cup holders (did you know there is a magic number of them for female purchasers? Did you know people actually debate not the existence of such a number, but what it is?), USB/bluetooth connectivity, backup cameras, etc. Safety and convenience features have supplanted top speed as the things to discuss.

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Telenor Norway this week announced that they in partnership with Telenor Group’s Cloud service subsidiary, Telenor Business Internet Services, are teaming up with Microsoft to offer Microsoft Office 365 and Lync bundled with Telenor’s communication services. Parallels made tangible execution among these groups possible.

Parallels partnered closely with Telenor in their Cloud project. Telenor will deploy Parallels Automation, a comprehensive service delivery system, and will work with Parallels broad ecosystem of cloud services providers that are APS certified to build a comprehensive offering. They will use Parallels’ expertise in defining winning go-to-market strategies.

In their announcement this week Telenor Norway communicated that the first order of business for them was to develop a channel outreach and enablement strategy that could be executed in conjunction with launching their first service, syndicated Microsoft Office 365.  Telenor already has an established channel serving over two million subscribers in Norway and Sweden, so it was relatively easy to reach the channel.  The objective though was to find a compelling value proposition that this channel could easily sell.

As it turns out, one of the key differentiators of Telenor’s Office 365 service is that its telephony services are fully integrated into Lync Online from Office 365.  Therefore, it was relatively easy to excite the channel with this highly sought after value-added service.

It became a matter of enabling the channel with proper training to ensure that affiliates could support Office365 effectively for their respective subscribers – and make a decent profit doing so.  Microsoft became a valuable partner in this regard, while Parallels software remains crucial to the provisioning, billing, and self-service enablement of the services.

The next step for Telenor is to expand this program to their subsidiaries across Europe and Asia.  They could make this expansion only with Parallels Automation, as it is the only centralized system that can coordinate across all subsidiaries using Microsoft’s MOSI interface as well as provide comprehensive support for a multi-channel sales motion.  We’ll update this blog post as Telenor evolves their program.

Evolving regulatory compliance requirements can be a major headache for the IT teams responsible for identity and access management (IAM). Sarbanes Oxley, the wide range of privacy regulations and other federal requirements, have transformed IAM from a problem that keeps the chief information security officer up at night into a true business concern shared by all company executives. Knowing who has access to what information within your organization – and whether they should have that access – is a deceptively complex issue that has the potential to drive a wedge between even the healthiest of relationships across the business.
On the surface, it may seem as though the nuts and bolts of IAM should reside in a company’s IT department. This is because there are many islands of information stored in databases across the business that are managed and administered by the IT team. In addition, employee access to particular areas of the network is usually enabled and revoked by IT.

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Using the Holiday season as a way to educate about the cloud.
Happy holidays to all of you and may the season keep your perimeters protected, your assets secure and your networks free of nasty little elves!
Twas the night before Christmas
and all through the net
No access was stirring;
No hackers as yet.
Murphy in sales was showing his app
Tweeting and downloading with only a tap
I grumble and moan ‘cause I know it to be.
That his iPhone and iPad was BYOD
Then out on the site there arose such a clatter,
I sprang from the help desk to see what was the matter.
Without my UniSec dashboard, I would not know
If the network alert meant friend or meant foe.
Cor’lating data from SIEM, Log and ID
Who’s accessing what assets was now clear to me
I knew it in real time where the problem arose
An old password, an account that we froze.
I saw the address was from Kuala Lumpur
Trying to suck data through an open back door
I plugged up the breach, no data would leak
No access tonight—not even a peek.

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Red Hat has bought itself a Christmas present – privately held ManageIQ.
It’s paying $104 million in folding money for the pleasure of what appears to be a made-to-measure glove. The two seem to be a perfect fit. The deal might close by the end of the year.
Red Hat approached the six-year-old UK-based start-up around September when ManageIQ, already a Red Hat partner, was starting to look around for more money to finance a deeper plunge into the channel.
ManageIO says it’s “channel-ready” now and eager to get out there and mix it up.
It brings Red Hat the real-time cloud management and automation it lacks. It’s in the center of Red Hat’s three hot buttons: Red Hat’s KVM Enterprise Virtualization, CloudForms, Red Hat’s hybrid IaaS solution, and OpenStack. It’s got a hybrid cloud bias, which should suit Red Hat to a “T,” since it’s bet the farm on hybrid. And it says it can set up its tent in an enterprise and help coax the user off Red Hat’s hereditary enemy VMware and on to Red Hat’s cheaper alternative.

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“It’s all about Stackato, our enterprise private PaaS solution. It’s all about making it really easy for enterprises to deploy and manage their own Platform as a Service,” explained Bart Copeland, CEO of ActiveState, in this SYS-CON.tv interview with Cloud Expo Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan at the 11th International Cloud Expo, held November 5-8, 2012, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
Cloud Expo 2013 New York, June 10–13, at the Javits Center in New York City, New York, will feature technical sessions from a rock star conference faculty and the leading Cloud industry players in the world.

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In 2012, we began losing our battle against data, as the amount of digital data being created, stored and shared reached new heights. At the same time, we witnessed a record build out of centralized infrastructure, as cloud vendors and enterprises built or expanded datacenters around the globe in an attempt to store and manage all this data. And the pace of both of these are only accelerating as we enter the new year.

This data escalation combined with the continued forces of consumerization and gamification of enterprise IT will lead to a clear mandate for CIOs and IT leaders in 2013:  take back control of corporate data. 

We will see a significant increase in investment around data management, particularly in data classification, storage, big data, and data protection.  IT will also start saying “no” to the many rogue cloud platforms, data sharing and collaboration services being used by employees …

You’re already using it

You may already be familiar with the term ‘Real Time Protection’, which could just as easily be labeled ‘Cloud Protection’. Simply put, when a vendor’s research team identifies a new email threat, the characteristics of the message are sent to all affected hardware appliances straightaway, so that the malicious content is immediately blocked. This all happens far ahead of the regular update by on-premise virus signatures.

Because they are outsourced, Cloud technologies can be implemented far more flexibly; it could also be referred to as an “elastic protection”. Conventional security technologies demand computing power from both onsite hardware and software. But when new threats emerge it means that much more computing power is necessary to take successful action against the threats from one moment to the next. This performance can be provided in the Cloud without having to replace or upgrade the customer’s …

Is Big Data a buzzword with no clear definition? Wikipedia defines Big Data as…
…a collection of data sets so large and complex that it becomes difficult to process using on-hand database management tools or traditional data processing applications…
Here is a collection of 13 (unlucky?) other definitions of “Big Data” – from analyst firms, from government organizations, from technology publication and from technology vendors.

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