Category Archives: Cloud computing

Cloud computing, cloud security, Microsoft, News

Microsoft Plans to Buy Security Firm Adallom

Microsoft is set to be paying 320 million dollars in cash for Adallom, a startup with software for monitoring the use of cloud-based services. A source has claimed all 90 employees, including the 30 in the US, will function an independent unit of Microsoft and will manage material related to cybersecurity for Microsoft.

While Microsoft has refused to comment on the supposed deal, the Wall Street Journal claims, “According to the people familiar with the matter, Adallom, which employs 90 people world-wide, will continue to operate from Israel, building up Microsoft’s cybersecurity-focused operations in the country.” The first to report the deal were Israeli media outlets Calcalist and Globes, with reports later coming from the Wall Street Journal.

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Microsoft has continued making the cloud a priority throughout the whole company, and building an intelligent cloud platform is one of three areas of investment for the company. Cloud security is vital to the company as they switch to more internet based occupations, hence the move to purchase Adallom. Usage and revenue from application Office 365 has increased during the first quarter of 2015, and Microsoft want to protect this trend.

This is just one of Microsoft’s myriad of partnerships and acquisitions this year. Microsoft has previously attained a provider of machine learning technologies for e-discovery and information governance. The company’s software uses advanced text analytics to perform multidimensional analyses of data collections, intelligently sorting documents into themes, grouping near-duplicates, and isolating unique data. In addition,  Microsoft has purchased N-trig and Aorato.

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Cloud computing, Cloud Services, Cloud Technology, News

Reliance Communications Launches CloudX

Anil Ambani-owned Reliance Communications launched a next-generation cloud services delivery network in five cities across the country of India. Reliance Communications has positioned Cloud Xchange, abbreviated Cloud X, nodes in Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai, Bengaluru and Hyderabad. They plan to launch 120 more nodes in areas across the world by the end of 2015.

Reliance Group Chairman Anil Dhirubhai Ambani has shared, “We will achieve full deployment of our Next-Generation content and Cloud Delivery Network by the end of this year, with–what is a first in India–five fully-operational Cloud Xchange points. Cloud Xchange nodes can help government departments access 240 times the amount of compute power currently available in government data centers, and over six times the high-speed storage currently available in India.”

This next generation service offers on-demand low-cost cloud services. Users will be able to organize cloud servers and applications and manage lifecycle of these resources online, according to Reliance Communications.

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Reliance Communications and Global Cloud X CEO Bill Barney has stated, “Cloud X is changing the paradigm of cloud computing. The network must now undergo a profound transformation, from a static entity to a dynamic, intelligent, application aware fabric that can support multiple traffic requirements, diverse geographies and flexible pricing models.”

Manoj Menon, Senior Partner & Managing Director of analyst firm Frost & Sullivan, has added, “Cloud computing has already made an impact on the everyday life of many Indians. It is driving business model innovation and helping businesses. Going forward, the impact will be even more pervasive—with innovative solutions around safe cities, smart homes, connected cars and better healthcare.”

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Cloud computing, Cloud Services, News

ComputeNext Launches CloudEd

ComputeNext, a Bellevue-based cloud company, has recently announced the launch of its new Channel Training & Education Program, “CloudED.” The new program will serve to aid cloud resellers migrate customers to cloud-based solutions. The program, created by ComputeNext’s director of channel development Dan Moore, provides marketplace-specific video tutorials necessary for channel professionals as well as general cloud certification provided by partner CompTIA, which will be free of charge. The certifications include certificates for data recovery, IT security and unified communications as well as executive certificates in both cloud computing in beginner and advanced levels.

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ComputeBext claims the program “covers basic and advanced rationales for the cloud computing thought process, as well as hands-on tutorial training on the ComputeNext Marketplace itself.” The program was designed to help meet the difficulties of keeping revenues up while transitioning customers from traditional, physical IT to newer cloud services.

Moore also said there is “a huge need for education and training resources that can better equip these organizations to lead cloud conversations, understand the larger market dynamics of cloud computing, and ultimately exude a sense of trustworthiness to their clients. Unfortunately, the plethora of platform & technology vendors respective to cloud services coupled with the barrage of marketing information about ‘going to the cloud’ can be very daunting and confusing as to what your first steps should be.”

The company’s Marketplace is a platform that allows users to edit and manage cloud services from a multitude cloud hosting providers around the world.

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Cloud computing, Cloud Services, Microsoft, News

Microsoft Will Offer Azure In India

BqRtWXEIMAAQYhFMicrosoft will begin to offer its cloud computing service, Azure, for free to startups speeding up the entrepreneurial ecosystem in India.

Microsoft’s Indian subsidiary has said, “Our Azure cloud services, valued at $120,000, will be given free to qualified startups under the ‘BizSpark plus program’ for building the entrepreneurial ecosystem in the country.”

Microsoft Ventures India director Rajinish Menon, has stated, “Startups need all the help they can to get access to the right tools, technology and guidance. At Microsoft, we are committed to supporting these startups and through the BizSpark Plus program we want to support India’s upcoming entrepreneurs.”

 

Microsoft also added qualifying startups must be privately held, below five years old with sub one million revenue annually and be a member of select accelerator or venture capital firm.

To begin, Microsoft is partnering thirteen startup accelerators, including 91Springboard, Reliance GenNext, Zone Startups, and Pitney Bowes. 91Springboard partner Pranay Gupta has said, “The BizSpark Plus program is a unique opportunity for startups who want to leverage the power of the Cloud and give a boost to their product development lifecycle.”

Microsoft BizSpark is a worldwide program that aids startups by offering free Microsoft software development tools, connecting startups with key industry players, investors and giving marketing visibility. Microsoft also added that startups will also receive the full suite of development and test software and Visual Studio, Windows and Office tools in this latest offering.

Microsoft currently has one hundred and fifty startup programs in forty seven countries.

 

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Cloud computing, Cloud Services, hybrid cloud, IaaS, Microsoft, News

Cloud News Daily 2015-07-14 05:38:21

Rackspace Hosting and has paired up with Microsoft to manage and offer technical support to Microsoft’s public cloud computing platform known as Azure. Azure support and managed services are currently available and expansion to overseas customers will begin in 2016.

Rackspace has struggled to compete with larger companies and their cloud platforms, such as Amazon Web Services, and this agreement with Microsoft marks its first major deal to support public cloud services other than its own.

Rackspace Chief Technology Officer, John Engates, has said, “Stay tuned. As part of our managed cloud strategy, a tenet of that is we want to support industry-leading technologies. Our strategy really gives us the opportunity to apply fanatical support to any leading industry platform in the future. So stay tuned in terms of announcements.”

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Rackspace hopes to improve profit margins and reduce capital spending by offering managed services and technical support for public clouds, and it is starting with Microsoft’s Azure. Rackspace’s main strength has been providing fanatical service, training and technical support to smaller businesses.

Rackspace technical support will be available directly to clients through Microsoft. Rackspace may also resell Microsoft’s IaaS services to its cutomers. In the fourth quarter of 2014, IaaS Services accounted for thirty one percent of Rackspace’s total revenue.

Engates also added Rackspace will help customers build apps that run in hybrid, private-public cloud environments. Many companies are becoming interested in the public-private cloud model, with important business apps ran on private servers with accessing public IaaS providers on a as needed basis.

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Cloud computing, Microsoft, News

Changing Cloud Prices

After years of competitive price cuts within the cloud computing industry, Microsoft is beginning to increase prices on their cloud computing infrastructure, and IBM may be following Microsoft’s lead. This change has been cited due to the current economic disaster in Greece. Regions that are likely to be affected by the price increase are Australia and Europe, excluding the United Kingdom.

Microsoft said in a statement, “We always evaluate current market conditions, the increased product value for a customer, customer deployment scenarios and other factors when determining pricing for our products and services. Microsoft is committed to sharing pricing and licensing updates with our partners to ensure they and our customers are prepared and able to evaluate their options. Customers should speak with a Microsoft partner to learn more.”

A spokesman for Microsoft also commented, “In light of the rapid evolution of the market for cloud services and evolving local dynamics, we can confirm that as of August 1 2015, we will adjust prices for most enterprise cloud products within the EU/European Free Trade Association region. The changes will not affect existing annuity volume licensing agreements but will apply to most enterprise cloud products under new or renewing contracts.”

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IBM has also confirmed that it is changing its SoftLayer cloud pricing, claiming it is a price cut. However, a customer using entry-level Virtual Server Instance in SoftLayer paid $35 per 5TB of outbound bandwidth, that rate has increased to $615 per 5TB of bandwidth.

While competitive price cuts in the cloud market used to be the norm, a trend of increasing cloud costs may be on the rise.

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Cloud computing, Cloud Services, News

Chicago Cloud Tax

Tech entrepreneurs took to city hall in Chicago to complain about the tax ruling put in effect last week. They claimed the tax, which extended a nine percent lease tax to cloud-based technology services, would hurt business and discourage startups in Chicago.

Spokeswoman for Mayor Rahm Emanuel said in statement, “Based on feedback we have received from Chicago’s vibrant start-up community, the administration will be taking measures to provide relief to small businesses so as not to put them at a competitive disadvantage. Proposals are being discussed with stakeholders, and we will release further guidance later this month.”

Relief may include exempting small businesses based on income.

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Harper Reed, founder of Modest, a mobile-commerce technology provider to small and mid-sized businesses, said, “My initial concern was that I might have to charge our Chicago customers more, which is kind of a bummer. Then there was the other part of it . . . where all cloud services would be taxed. This is a big thing.”

This would affect startups that run their business from the cloud, using big businesses such as Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure or IBM Cloud Services, that have been switching to the cloud.

City Hall has not provided a clear interpretation of the law, worrying tech entrepreneurs.  J.B. Pritzker, a venture capitalist who is one of the most prominent leaders of the tech community, has commented, “If they don’t want to lose momentum in the startup community, it has to be more narrowly applied. Most startups are not particularly well-funded or making money. To the extent there’s an interpretation hat would bear down on those companies and take capital out of their nascent, small treasure chests, it’s the wrong place to look.”

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Cloud computing, cloud security, News

Open API Efforts Begin

Ciphercloud and the Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) have been working to fill a gap in the cloud access security broker market. It is a new working group for defining a uniform Open API. The group is led by CipherCloud and also includes from Deloitte, Infosys, Intel Security and SAP. The Open API looks to define a standard for the emerging cloud access security broker (CASB) space. CASB will cover four categories: data protection, threat prevention, visibility and compliance.

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Cloud identity is mainly handled by Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) assertions, which can enable federated identity across cloud vendors. Chenxi Wang, vice president of Cloud Security & Strategy at CipherCloud, explains that identity management is only part of the battle in cloud security, and that the API will cover not only identity management but also data classification, data protection and access management.

Wang describes, “We will not propose new protocols to replace SAML, but instead, we will fill gaps where existing standards are lacking. For instance, how does the enterprise specify to the cloud service that a particular piece of data and content can only be stored in a particular geography? You can’t do that today automatically.

“This Open API effort will standardize the specification, control and assessment across the tiers of the cloud infrastructure, which will in turn significantly lessen the work on the developers’ part and hence expedite time to market for cloud adoption. The immediate goals of this effort are to issue specifications for the API framework, reference architecture documents, as well as a few whitepapers. After that, we may propose to incorporate that as part of the CSA STAR, if the industry embraces the API standards.”

The group is focused on its immediate goals first and foremost. While the groups formation was announced in late June, it is expected to begin operations in July.

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Cloud computing, Cloud Services, Google, News

Google Pairs Up with Broad Institute

Google has paired up with high profile Broad Institute at MIT to develop its cloud genomics platform. The scientific community has needed new technologies to deal with the scale of genomic information and Google and the Broad Institute are looking to provide that.

This technology will process store, process and share genomic information as well as making it useful and accessible. The institute released a statement saying: “The goal is to enable any genomic researcher to upload, store, and analyze data in a cloud-based environment that combines the Broad Institute’s best-in-class genomic analysis tools with the scale and computing power of Google.”

Broad Institute will make its Genome Analysis Toolkit, or GATK, available as a service on the Google Cloud Platform. Initial access to the GATK will be limited, but eventually the service will be made more widely available. Any user will be able to upload their data to the cloud and GATK will analyze it using Google’s computing capacity.

 

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Product manager at Google Genomics, Jonathan Bingham, wrote in a blog post: “In order to scale up by the next order of magnitude, Broad and Google will work together to explore how to build new tools and find new insights to propel bio-medical research, using deep bioinformatics expertise, powerful analytics, and massive computing infrastructure.”

This partnership allows researchers to outsource the configuration of technical specifications and maintenance of computing capacity to Google.

GATK could give Google an edge over other cloud computing companies such as Amazon Web Services in the genomic field; however, Google partnership with Broad is not exclusive.

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Cloud computing, cloud security, News, Partnerships

North State Communications to Acquire Stalwart

North State Communications, a leading fiber optic network, data center and cloud services provider, has announced its plans to purchase Stalwart, an IT security integration firm. The purchase will complement DataChambers, North State Communication’s data center and cloud computing subsidiary. While North State Communications said that it expects to close the deal in the third quarter, no details pertaining to the deal were disclosed.

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Royster Tucker III, CEO of North State describes, “North State is extremely pleased to be gaining such a highly qualified and well-rounded IT security firm as Stalwart. Their professional integrity and mastery of advanced threat protection are ideal counterparts for DataChambers’ data center and cloud offerings. Bringing Stalwart onboard further fuels our strategic growth and helps round out our ability to effectively address some of the greatest IT challenges facing businesses today.” Tucker also said that the deal originated from North State Communication’s search for ways to add value for business customers.

Tucker also said, “As businesses begin to move into the cloud and IT infrastructure becomes distributed and moves into the cloud, we wanted to build that business and Stalwart has real expertise in IT infrastructure and security. Today more than ever, you have to wrap that in an envelope of security, and that’s what Stalwart brings to the table.”

Bill Cooper, CEO of Stalwart, also shared his opinion of the deal:  “North State is a strategic acquirer who shares our core virtues and beliefs. This, more than anything, will continue to make Stalwart unique and better. It is exciting to think of the myriad ways our team will now be able to create additional value for our coveted and growing customer base.” Bill Cooper will continue to lead Stalwart as it joins North State.

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