For some time, cloud computing has been moving from beyond a purely IT-owned paradigm to a more readily accepted part of how different business units achieve their end goals. Application development is no exception.

Product managers and application architects have been at the forefront of this mass adoption, utilizing cloud infrastructure resources to dramatically improve the way applications are developed, tested, and launched.

But for agile development methodologies, cloud presents an opportunity for businesses to maximize software testing.

Firewall considerations

Cloud’s direct benefit to programmers depends greatly on the type of methodology they are employing. One of the key components to agile development is getting instant feedback from customers. If a customer is outside your firewall, you have to enable them to access the application in your environment through an outside server or allowing them a connection into your private network. In traditional IT organizations, this set up process …

“When a company can combine scale with innovation…and can execute…then I think it can build a sustainable business,” said Thai Lee, Founder, President & CEO of SHI International, as she opened 13th Cloud Expo in Silicon Valley today at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, California.

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“When a company can combine scale with innovation…and can execute…then I think it can build a sustainable business,” said Thai Lee, Founder, President & CEO of SHI International, as she opened 13th Cloud Expo in Silicon Valley today at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, California.

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ProfitBricks, the infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) company that completely reengineered the delivery of Cloud Computing, is speaking, sponsoring and exhibiting at Cloud Expo Silicon Valley, the 13th International Cloud Expo conference. Pete Johnson, senior director of cloud platform evangelism at ProfitBricks, will discuss the evolution of cloud and the needed flexibility that Cloud Computing 2.0 offers.
ProfitBricks – the IaaS price/performance leader who introduced Cloud Computing 2.0 – offers more speed, flexibility and value than any other cloud provider. Founded in 2010 by the co-founders of the 1&1 Internet Web Hosting business, ProfitBricks enables customers to build true virtual data centers with custom defined instances, live vertical scaling and class-leading double redundant cloud storage — all with simple and transparent minute-based billing. ProfitBricks also developed the first graphical Data Center Designer that makes the ProfitBricks cloud computing service the easiest to set up and maintain. Talkin’ Cloud recently named ProfitBricks top on its list of 25 Fastest Growing Cloud Service Providers, and ProfitBricks was named to CIO Review’s 20 Most Promising Cloud Computing Companies. Headquartered in Berlin, Germany and Boston, Massachusetts, ProfitBricks can be found online at www.profitbricks.com.

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A cloud security take on an old riddle: analyze risks, identify needs, develop priorities, deploy scalable model, and leave room for dessert.
Security is big. It encompasses a great many definitions, confronts a great many issues and is addressed through a great many solutions using a great many formats. For many organizations, it can be an overwhelming proposition. Beyond the issues of data defense, regulatory compliance, traffic management, identity regulation, archiving, reporting, access control, intrusion detection, encryption, app administration, help desk assistance, there is the job the IT pro was hired to do…ensure the smooth technical operation of their organization. Securing the disappearing network perimeter and beyond has become more than a full-time job in itself.

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Best effort networks aren’t good enough for today’s mission-critical cloud-based applications. To ensure optimal performance, developers and IT managers must have a holistic view and understanding of all the factors impacting performance.
In her session at the 13th International Cloud Expo®, Pascale Vicat-Blanc, founder and CEO of Lyatiss, will explain how Application Defined Networking (ADN) provides this visibility and insight, delivering combined application and network awareness, and performance predictability from end-to-end. It also will show how ADN enables intelligent orchestration of networked resources and their automated (re)configuration to ensure that the application and network adapt when workloads and conditions change.

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Lunarline, one of the U.S. government’s leading cyber security and privacy providers, announced on Thursday that Spence Witten, Lunarline director of federal sales, will speak about successfully navigating FedRAMP during the Cloud Expo 2013 Silicon Valley (@CloudExpo) in Santa Clara, CA.
With more than 10 years of private and government sales experience, Witten can sell ice to polar bears. But more importantly, he knows a thing or two about FedRAMP – the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program – and what it takes to sell to Uncle Sam.

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SYS-CON Events announced today that SPAN Systems, an EVRY Group company, will exhibit at SYS-CON’s 1st WebRTC Summit, which will take place on November 6–7, 2013, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
SPAN, an EVRY Group company, is an established software services company with a keen accent on Insurance, Financial Services, Retail, Travel, Transport, Logistics and Independent Software Vendors. Our focus is to ease our client into a long-term relationship with a business and execution model that aligns with their culture. SPAN’s management team is deeply involved in sustaining relationships through the fulfillment of both measurable and intangible expectations. We believe in being a strong partner and ‘Steering Progress. Together’.

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With the ever-increasing pace of change in business, line-of-business groups are demanding new application creation in days rather than weeks or months. Since the traditional IT application development cycle is ill-suited for this type of quick application development, we’re seeing CMOs and LOBs turning to “boutique shops and shadow developers” to get their applications developed more quickly: applications that are often developed by stitching together services that reside in the cloud.

In this presentation, Rachel Reinitz, Distinguished Engineer and CTO of IBM Software Services, will discuss the State of the Cloud focusing on IBM’s view of what is needed in the Next Generation Cloud Platform and how new and emerging cloud technologies will affect both business groups and IT. During the presentation, Cloud Expo delegates will see a demonstration of BlueMix, an IBM strategic initiative based on Cloud Foundry that provides developers a way to quickly compose services to create applications running in a cloud environment without dealing with the underlying infrastructure, resulting in a quicker time-to-value for our customers.

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The Switzerland-based telco Swisscom is in the process of building a national “Swiss Cloud” – but denies claims that the primary motivation is around acquiring customers spooked by the NSA scandal.

The story first broke on Reuters, with the news agency reporting that the move is “driven more by a desire to cut costs and make its systems more dynamic”, according to Swisscom head of IT services Andreas Koenig.

Yet there’s a link to perceived security threats – given Switzerland’s stricter privacy laws, Koenig argues it would make sense for companies to store data there.  

Swisscom would need a formal request from a prosecutor before giving access to stored data, and as Nick Farrell, writing for Fudzilla, notes, the system as it stands would be “useless to the spooks”.

A small clue to this news came in the form of a whitepaper Swisscom published last month, which revealed that, in …