The cloud can be a great investment for most organisations. It offers the promise to significantly increase capacity and agility, while simultaneously reducing costs.

Companies invest significant resource to attain a great ROI in the cloud, but if that investment isn’t secured, migrating could turn out to be a disaster.

Most cloud adopters underestimate the philosophical and technological change required to security when migrating to the cloud. It’s a problem that affects organisations of all sizes, whether they have a few or a few hundred cloud servers. So, to help these and others, we’ve put together the following list of the five most common cloud server firewall mistakes to avoid:

#1: Too many rules = Trouble

In development, you typically start with just a few rules in your cloud firewall or Amazon Security Groups. By the time you get into production, however, the list of rules and policy …

Cloud security is not a paradox!

 “Is cloud computing secure?” A question that has been asked since the dawn of “the cloud” and the answer has been debated many times over. Cloud security has been a long, never-ending discussion and more often than not evidence shows businesses rarely regret taking the plunge into a cloud infrastructure.

Despite the misconception that the cloud is entirely unprotected, there has still been a phenomenal growth in the cloud market in recent years. Forrester Research predicts that the public cloud market will develop from around $40 billion today to $160 billion by 2020.

Nevertheless, moving to cloud computing can be as risky as any major change if you do not understand what the change means for your business.

The risks and issues of cloud computing

Businesses have the same concerns with cloud infrastructure as they do with conventional computing; ensuring that the company’s …

According to a new report from KPMG, companies need to assume cost reduction in the cloud is ‘a given’ and consequently need to look at more transformational ideas.

KPMG’s report, ‘The Cloud Takes Shape’, polled nearly 700 IT professionals and looks at cloud computing as a maturing technology, noting that seven out of 10 IT professionals agree that cloud computing is currently “delivering efficiencies and cost savings”.

Yet the report advocates that organisations need to go further; merely stating that the cloud drives value isn’t telling the full story.

“Gaining real cost savings from the cloud is about more than simply moving from fixed costs to operating costs,” says Rick Wright, KPMG US global cloud enablement program leader in the report.

“The greatest cost savings – and, more importantly, the transformational business benefits – will come from the longer-term outcomes, such as more efficient processes, more flexible operating models and …

Remember when Twitter went out for 40 minutes last July? Twitter was so contrite that it posted the following statement:

“The cause of today’s outage came from within our data centres. What was noteworthy about today’s outage was the coincidental failure of two parallel systems at nearly the same time…We are investing aggressively in our systems to avoid this situation in the future.”

Glitches like this have consequences – many of which aren’t immediately obvious, and often aren’t public. Many are much more serious, because their business value is more intense for any one customer. I can think of four cautionary tales right off the bat.

1) Silent but deadly financial claw-backs

When one firm’s systems experienced serious performance degradation during the holiday season (at precisely the time when traffic was expected to peak), savvy customers took financial action behind closed doors.

“We did issue …

By Sharon Florentine

Sharon Florentine is a freelance writer who covers everything from data center technology to holistic veterinary care and occasionally blogs for Rackspace Hosting.

Welcome to Generation Now. Today’s users want information in an instant. Make them wait more than a second or two for your webpage to load and they’ll surf over to the first competitor who feeds their demand for instant gratification.

Using a Content Delivery Network or Content Distribution Network (CDN) to quickly load static elements of your site to hasten access can deliver quicker gratification for customers. And stickier eyeballs — and greater profits — for you.

Basically, a CDN is a number of highly optimised web servers located around the globe, explains Joost de Valk in an article posted to Yoast.com. Though de Valk’s article deals specifically with using a CDN to speed performance of WordPress sites, a CDN is beneficial …

When the CEO of a rust-belt manufacturer speaks of cloud computing as critical to his company’s business strategies for competing globally, it’s clear a fundamental shift is underway.

Nearly every manufacturing company I’ve spoken with in the last 90 days has a mobility roadmap and is also challenged to integrate existing ERP, pricing and fulfillment systems into next-generation selling platforms.

One of the most driven CEOs I’ve met in manufacturing implemented a cloud-based channel management, pricing, quoting and CRM system to manage direct sales and a large distributor network across several countries.  Manufacturers are bringing an entirely new level of pragmatism to cloud computing, quickly deflating its hype by pushing for results on the shop floor.

There’s also been an entirely new series of enterprise software and cloud computing forecasts and market estimates published. I’ve summarised the key take-aways below:

• Enterprise sales of ERP …

As the new technologies emerge, the number of technical terms also gets piled up. While those who are always updated are familiar of all the seemingly “vague” terms, the rest of the world remained confused. Such is the case tackling the collaboration, crowdsourcing, social media and a lot more. In this article, we will differentiate between cloud computing and virtualization.

Virtualization and Cloud Computing

Apparently, many businesses have been alarmed and informed on the advantages of using cloud computing against traditional storage for their files and data. Aside from the power of accessibility, mobility and security, cloud computing brings in more savings and more efficiency for maintaining the operations of the company. In line with this, the concept of virtualization is often mixed up with the former approach. Both are gaining dominance, however people are not sure just how different they are from each other.

There have been heated arguments …

Cisco released findings from two global studies that provide a vivid picture of the rising security challenges that businesses, IT departments and individuals face — particularly as employees become more mobile, blending work and personal lifestyles throughout their waking hours.

Despite popular assumptions that security risks increase as a person’s online activity becomes shadier, findings from the Cisco 2013 Annual Security Report (ASR) reveal that the highest concentration of online security threats tend to target legitimate destinations visited by mass audiences — such as major search engines, retail sites and social media outlets.

Cisco found that online shopping sites are 21 times as likely, and search engines are 27 times as likely, to deliver malicious content than a counterfeit software site.

Security risks rise in businesses because many employees adopt “my way” work lifestyles in which their devices, work and online behavior mix with their personal lives virtually anywhere — in the …

Luca Schiavoni, Analyst, Regulation, Ovum

The celebration of the Data Privacy Day on January 28, 2013 came at a moment when awareness of the importance of the matter is higher than it has ever been. However, many obstacles get in the way of full data privacy, including companies’ unwillingness to fully disclose what they do with their users’ data, consumers’ unwillingness to actually read lengthy terms and conditions pages when signing up to a service, and the fact that some companies’ business models rely on their users’ data to distribute targeted advertising.

Regulation in this area is often quite confusing and obsolete, and it can be it unclear whether the rules that apply are those of the service provider’s country or the user’s country. There is a clear need for coordinated approaches between regulators around the world.

The rise of OTT services is prompting policymakers to take action …