A new piece of research from security providers Stratsec has inferred that some cloud providers are unable to block malicious attacks, which could lead to cyber hackers being able to infiltrate systems in a botnet-styled attack.

As a result, according to the research at the Stratsec Winter School, there was an alarming number of reasons why attacking cloud systems was a good idea, such as being relatively easy to set up, costing less, and taking significantly less time to build.

Instead of a traditional botnet setup whereby an attacker would need to know various programming languages in order to hack into a system, in order to set up a botCloud – defined by Stratsec as a group of cloud instances controlled by malicious entities to initiate cyber-security attacks – the attacker only needs to know the cloud provider’s API and requisite sysadmin knowledge.

Worryingly, the researchers stated that based on their …

Generally speaking, up until now, the IT department’s responsibility has been to maintain the organisation’s infrastructure regardless of cost.

With IT providing the backbone to any thriving business, it is no surprise that MDs have favoured security over cost any day – but the advent of cloud computing has changed all of that.

As the economic outlook remains pessimistic, companies are looking for ways to cut costs – often leading to a reduction in staff. With this in mind, IT staff are quick to label the cloud as a passing fad in the fear full adoption could lead to unemployment.

Realistically speaking though, cloud computing doesn’t mean the end of the IT department, in fact; it means the start of a more productive workforce.

The more enlightened members of staff will recognise that the role is changing. Gone are the days of spending all day in the computer room …

Cloud computing has proven to have its many advantages and now it would seem that it is also helping medical science reduce its costs.

If we take the incredible amounts of data that need to be crunched through for advanced treatment purposes, traditionally it would require a set of interlinked computers, in their thousands, to configure the human genome.

This alone would require thousands and thousands of pieces of equipment to conduct such an experiment whilst it would also take years to formulate the small gains made in mapping a strand of DNA whilst costs would continue to escalate.

Cloud hosting can however reverse this.

The multitude of computers can be in a remote location as well as all the resources, including networked data from other research centres.

Cloud computing would enable the whole process to be a lot cheaper since the medics would only pay for the space and …

By Paul Moxon, Senior Director, Product & Solutions Marketing

I’m often asked, “What’s the biggest thing standing in the way of enterprise IT getting on board with cloud adoption?”

My response is always the same: “The biggest thing standing in the way of enterprise IT cloud adoption is IT’s unwillingness to accept that business units (BUs) are already adopting the cloud.”

By 2012, BUs are eager to flout IT authority and circumvent IT constraints in order to solve problems now rather than see their requests languish in IT’s backlog of special projects, hostage to unreasonable wait times.

Those days are over.

IT now has two options: Get on board or get left behind.

I’m seeing this exact scenario in our customer organisations as well. Customer BUs approach IT seeking solutions, without ever involving IT in the preliminary decision making process. They prefer instead to drag IT …

By Roy Illsley, Principal Analyst, IT Software

At the recent Citrix Synergy conference in Barcelona, more than 4,000 delegates heard Citrix’s latest mobile and cloud-enabled-world message. The announcements in Mark Templeton’s keynote this year were based on evidence of what Citrix has, or will in the near term, deliver, and were less visionary in nature than previous announcements.

The four key announcements were: project Avalon, which will act as the cloud orchestration layer; storage zones, which will allow users to select where data is stored; MBX technology applied to Cloud Gateway, which will wrap controls and security around applications; and advances in HDX technology to support greater use of video. While project Avalon is a glimpse into the future direction of Citrix, the other three technologies are all recently released and available.

Project Avalon considers a future where Windows remains the dominant enterprise technology

The premise behind …

The International Data Center (IDC) has come out in support of the European Union’s stance on cloud computing in a new report from the analyst house – albeit one published on the EU’s behalf.

Back in September, EU digital agenda vice president Neelie Kroes set out her strategy to make the EU the ‘e-EU’ in a report entitled “Unleashing the Potential of Cloud Computing in Europe”, which summarised that the cloud could provide a €160bn injection to the European GDP by 2020, and a net gain of 2.5m jobs. 

But the IDC, in their analysis, goes a step further. In a study conducted by IDC on behalf of the EU, removing the barriers to cloud adoption through sustainable policy would bring up to €250bn GDP growth by the end of the decade.

The IDC model is straightforward enough. If the EU doesn’t intervene and introduce relevant policies …

Open Data is data that can be freely used, reused and redistributed by anyone – subject only, at the most, to the requirement for attributes and sharealikes (Open Software Service Definition – OSSD).

As a consequence, Open Data should create value and might have a positive impact in many different areas such as government (tax money expenditure), health (medical research, hospital acceptance by pathology), quality of life (air breathed in our city, pollution) or might influence public decisions like investments, public economy and expenditure.

We are talking about services, so open data are services needed to connect the community with the public bodies. However, the required open data should be part of a design and then integrated, mapped, updated and published in a form, which is easy to use.

MaaS is the Open Data driver and enables Open Data portability into the Cloud.

Introduction

Data models used as a service mainly provide …

By Tim Stammers, Senior Analyst, IT Infrastructure

Microsoft has announced its intention to buy StorSimple, a startup seller of enterprise storage systems, for an undisclosed price.

The move reflects Microsoft’s determination to be a cloud leader, and shows that its promise to become a “devices and services company” extends well beyond its forthcoming Surface tablet, and into data centre hardware.

StorSimple sells sophisticated midrange storage systems, which store data in public clouds, such as Microsoft’s own Azure cloud, as well as on customers’ premises. This is a new style of storage that is being pioneered by a handful of suppliers, most of which are startups, and none of which has yet seen spectacular sales growth.

Microsoft, however, clearly agrees with Ovum that wider enterprise use of public storage clouds will happen in time. It has taken the plunge into data centre hardware so that it can direct the …

Accenture, the IT consultancy reported this year that “cloud computing will increasingly provide banks with new lower cost operating models thanks to virtualisation, greater automation, and the ability to push more activities offshore.”

What does this mean?

In years to come, we should start seeing banks handing a lot of their online infrastructure over to managed hosting companies.

The multiple benefits of managed hosting have already started becoming apparent and many banks are taking strategic measures to incorporate more and more cloud software into their already existing legacy systems. They have started moving non-critical business components over the cloud, such as HR and procurement.

This is reducing internal IT complexity as well as costs.

Still some way to go

Many countries are wary of cloud hosting and question its security. As such, there are still many regulations as to the storage of critical data, in particular the manipulation of confidential …