Rackspace® Hosting on Tuesday announced that Lanham Napier retired from the company as Chief Executive Officer and as a member of the Board of Directors. Graham Weston, Rackspace’s co-founder and Executive Chairman of the Board of Directors, has been appointed Chief Executive Officer. Mr. Napier plans to invest in and advise other entrepreneurial companies following a decision to step away from public company executive leadership. He will remain a consultant to Rackspace for the next several months to ensure a smooth transition.

“It has been a privilege to be part of Rackspace for the past fourteen years,” said Mr. Napier. “I have enjoyed working with Rackers and our customers to bring Fanatical Support® to the fast-growing market of cloud computing. My decision to step down as CEO was a difficult one, but it’s the right choice for me and for the company. With the board and management team aligned around our 2014 strategy and financial plan, I believe now is a natural transition point to select a new leader for the next exciting phase of Rackspace’s growth. I look forward to following Rackspace’s success as I return to my entrepreneurial roots – to build new things and invest in disruptive ideas.

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Rackspace® Hosting on Tuesday announced that Lanham Napier retired from the company as Chief Executive Officer and as a member of the Board of Directors. Graham Weston, Rackspace’s co-founder and Executive Chairman of the Board of Directors, has been appointed Chief Executive Officer. Mr. Napier plans to invest in and advise other entrepreneurial companies following a decision to step away from public company executive leadership. He will remain a consultant to Rackspace for the next several months to ensure a smooth transition.

“It has been a privilege to be part of Rackspace for the past fourteen years,” said Mr. Napier. “I have enjoyed working with Rackers and our customers to bring Fanatical Support® to the fast-growing market of cloud computing. My decision to step down as CEO was a difficult one, but it’s the right choice for me and for the company. With the board and management team aligned around our 2014 strategy and financial plan, I believe now is a natural transition point to select a new leader for the next exciting phase of Rackspace’s growth. I look forward to following Rackspace’s success as I return to my entrepreneurial roots – to build new things and invest in disruptive ideas.

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By adopting Racemi’s migration software, now Phoenix NAP can on-board customers from just about anything (physical servers, VMware, Hyper-V, KVM and Xen) to whatever Phoenix NAP offering makes the most sense for them.
The Racemi server imaging technology quickly clones server workloads between dissimilar physical, virtual or private cloud platforms, reducing the migration process from days to minutes. The Racemi software captures the entire server stack-including operating system, applications, and configuration-and automatically converts it to run on any of the Phoenix NAP products by applying the necessary tools and drivers during the migration process. This ensures existing workloads are migrated in their time-tested configuration, which leads to better reliability and ability to be supported.

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Savvy executive leaders are already prepared for the shift to more progressive business technology deployments throughout the enterprise. Open hybrid cloud architectures, big data analytics and mobile applications are high-growth platforms at the center of this shift.

In particular, the emerging mobile applications must be integrated, flexible, and adaptable to constantly changing business conditions. This is the new normal in many fast-paced industries. That being said, are you ready for the mobile data deluge that’s inevitable?

According to the Cisco Visual Networking Index global mobile data traffic forecast for 2013 to 2018, worldwide mobile data traffic will increase nearly 11-fold over the next four years and reach an annual run rate of 190 exabytes by 2018.

The projected increase in mobile traffic is partly due to continued strong growth in the number of mobile Internet connections — such as personal devices and machine-to-machine (M2M) connections — which will exceed 10 billion …

By adopting Racemi’s migration software, now Phoenix NAP can on-board customers from just about anything (physical servers, VMware, Hyper-V, KVM and Xen) to whatever Phoenix NAP offering makes the most sense for them.
The Racemi server imaging technology quickly clones server workloads between dissimilar physical, virtual or private cloud platforms, reducing the migration process from days to minutes. The Racemi software captures the entire server stack-including operating system, applications, and configuration-and automatically converts it to run on any of the Phoenix NAP products by applying the necessary tools and drivers during the migration process. This ensures existing workloads are migrated in their time-tested configuration, which leads to better reliability and ability to be supported.

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Last year’s revelations of government surveillance programs by the NSA and others, along with possible lack of enforcement of the Safe Harbor program by the FTC, caused the European Civil Liberties Committee to recommend suspending the entire EU-U.S. Safe Harbor approach. If the recommendation was followed, the implications for businesses would be dramatic. U.S. companies would no longer be able to enjoy the simplified data sharing policy currently in place for those that are able to meet EU requirements to earn Safe Harbor certification. Certified companies are able to transfer private customer data out of the EU and receive transfers of data from EU companies as long as they properly meet renewal requirements each year.
While the repeal has not taken place, just recently, a high-level EU official called for suspending the agreement if the US did not meet some new and stricter data sharing policies by this summer.

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Rob Wigley is Director, Cybersecurity Consulting Services at HP Enterprise Services, U.S. Public Sector. He has more than 30 years of information technology experience supporting manufacturing, high tech, healthcare, and public sector market segments. For the last 10 years, he has focused on developing and delivering cybersecurity consulting solutions for public sector clients.

SecuritySolutionsWatch.com: Thank you for joining us today, Rob. Can you please tell us a little about your background and your role within HP.
Rob Wigley: I have more than 30 years of information technology experience supporting manufacturing, high tech, healthcare, and public sector market segments. For the last 10 years, as regulatory requirements for information security have increased in association with mounting threats facing government and businesses today, I have focused on developing and delivering cybersecurity consulting solutions for public sector clients. This market has unique IT security requirements and is facing a significant increase of cyber threats. HP Cybersecurity Consulting Services are soundly structured to help our clients manage risks to their environment.

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Somewhere along the line in between the 1990s and the so-called post-2000 ‘naughties’ a change occurred. This change was subtle but important if you took an interest in enterprise-level management theories, methodologies and delivery mechanisms.
Outsourcing, as we once knew it, became Business Process Outsourcing. With an extended name and an accompanying acronym to boot, BPO arrived.
Actually that’s not strictly what happened; in between outsourcing and BPO we saw outsourcing become offshore outsourcing. Functions from finance and billing to admin and support started to migrate offshore, along with other non-core operations that could be ‘manageably compartmentalized,’ so-to-speak.

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Worldwide IT spending is projected to rise US$3.8 trillion in 2014 according to recent Gartner research, a 3.1 percent increase from spending in 2013, which was $3.7 trillion. While not a huge jump in dollars, it does indicate that companies have been conserving cash over the past few years and are ready and willing to invest – albeit conservatively – with the recovery in place.
The promise of the Cloud has been validated and tested now over several years and organizations are increasing budgets and plans accordingly, more liberal spending is being seen by Cloud service providers who are witnessing an uptick in demand from businesses that are planning to address outdated infrastructure in 2014. Even organizations that are wary of significant cash outlays are recognizing the long-term IT savings it represents and are willing to take the steps to integrate solutions that eliminate CAPEX, and future-proof their infrastructure while providing predictable cash flow.

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