Long story short, remote wipes aren’t a perfect solution. The original intent had some validity, but it also raises too many concerns. Wiping is really only an effective solution in an ideal world. Unfortunately, thieves don’t play by the rules and find ways around our solutions. For the moment, employees should always ask questions regarding BYOD policies in order to know what the remote wipe procedure is. Also, partition your device, which will increase the likelihood of personal data being protected in the event of a wipe.

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Code-named “Fox Fur”, the twenty-third release of OpenNebula is available today with complete support to build clouds on existing VMware environments. OpenNebula 4.10 seamlessly integrates vCenter virtualized infrastructures leveraging the advanced features such as vMotion, HA or DRS scheduling provided by the VMware vSphere product family. On top of it, OpenNebula exposes a multi-tenant, cloud-like provisioning layer, including features such as virtual data centers, data center federation or hybrid cloud computing to connect in-house vCenter infrastructures with Amazon EC2, IBM SoftLayer and Microsoft Azure public clouds.

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The pace of innovation in such big data-driven targeting technology is advancing unabated. There is so much noise in today’s omnichannel world that anything a marketer can do to get your attention is welcome – and furthermore, the more information they can collect about you, the better. For the marketer, big data mean big cha-ching.
We’ve all been there: on our lunch hour we surreptitiously visit our favorite My Little Pony fan site. Then hours later we bring our laptop to a meeting and project our client’s corporate web site for all to see – and right there at the top is a banner ad for My Little Pony: The Movie. How did that site know about our secret fetish? How embarrassing! How creepy!

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A BriefingsDirect discussion centers on learning new best practices for managing the rapidly changing needs around identity and access management.
Any modern business has been dealing with identity and access management (IAM) from day one. But now, with more critical elements of business extending beyond the enterprise, access control complexity has been ramping up due to cloud, mobile, bring your own device (BYOD), and hybrid computing.
And such greater complexity forms a major deterrent to secure, governed, and managed control over who and what can access your data and services — and under what circumstances.The next BriefingsDirect thought leader discussion then centers on learning new best practices for managing the rapidly changing needs around IAM.

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As I continue to engage customers around cloud and DevOps, I am amazed at the percentage of customers where there is pushback against cloud computing. Even more interesting are the reasons and roles responsible for denying advancement in the use of cloud in companies. For example, one IT executive is caught between the business, where the board is pushing for use of cloud and the Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) that is saying, “you can move processes out to the cloud, but not data.”

One thing is clear, there is a lot of misunderstanding going around when the word “cloud” is used. Many still immediately associate it with public, multi-tenant cloud solutions where their processes and data will be co-located with those from many other businesses. Security is still high on the list of reasons for businesses not engaging with cloud solutions faster. Those with cloudaphobia cite examples, such as Target and JP Morgan Chase as reasons against using cloud, which is hysterical when you consider that these are examples of breaches that occurred against privately managed data center systems.

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The path to successful application delivery has been a long and winding road for many companies. Back in the days of Y2K and the dot-coms, applications were often delivered out of a physical data center. This usually consisted of a dedicated raised-floor room at the corporate headquarters or leased colocation space from one of the […]

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Picture credit: iStockPhoto

More than four in five (82%) of UK IT leaders believe they are not fully ready to move to infrastructure as a service (IaaS) providers because of a shortage of in-house skills, with Microsoft Azure as the most trusted IaaS provider.

The research, commissioned by Reconnix, found that despite the general air of reticence moving apps from traditional servers to the cloud was at least a high or medium priority for 88% of those polled.

Yet there’s a problem – and it’s the dreaded skills gap again. Only 7% of respondents were confident they had all the required skills in their team to run IaaS environments. Overall more than half (59%) said they had only some of the required skills, no skills at all, or did not know.

As for the vendors themselves, Microsoft Azure was considered the most trusted IaaS provider. 36% of respondents chose it ahead of IBM (22%) and Amazon Web Services (14%). Steve Nice, the CTO of Reconnix, described this facet as “surprising” by virtue of Amazon’s market share – yet recent market research shows Microsoft is winning the race for second place in IaaS and closing Amazon’s share.

“There’s a very clear desire for businesses to move applications away from traditional environments and towards infrastructure as a service providers, however a lack of adequate skills seem to be holding back many IT departments from making this move,” Nice said.

“It’s natural for businesses to err on the side of caution, but this conservative approach can mean that many are missing out on the transformative benefits of the cloud.”

Respondents claimed cost savings were the single biggest motivator of moving to the cloud with 32% of the vote, with greater flexibility (30%) and increased compute power (18%) also popular.

Similarly, years ago in software development circles, the debates about outsourcing were fierce and emotional. Back then, much centered on the cost leverage available to companies to move development to low-cost areas such as India, China, and Eastern Europe. However, over time, companies found that while cost gave them flexibility and resourcing mite, the more important benefit ended up being owning development resources and presences close to emerging markets while leveraging outsourcing partners for on-demand resource expansion. Wow, sounds a lot like Colocation + Hybrid Cloud to me! Let’s look at some of the other similarities.

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This week Dell released its first Global Technology Adoption Index (GTAI). This survey of more than 2,000 global organizations took a close look at how organizations are truly using security, cloud, mobility and big data to drive success. While the data collected from this effort should put to rest any doubts about the value of cloud computing, it also calls into question our collective mental state. Are half of us schizophrenic?

The survey data showed that 97 percent of organizations surveyed use or plan to use cloud. This high percentage is not surprising given that the data also showed a strong correlation between cloud use and company growth. Of those using cloud, 72 percent of organizations surveyed experienced 6 percent growth or more in the last three years, with just 4 percent experiencing zero or negative growth. This is in sharp contrast with companies not using cloud, where just 24 percent have growth rates of 6 percent or more, and 37 percent experienced either zero or negative growth. So with this overwhelmingly positive evidence supporting rapid adoption of cloud, why do 52% of the IT decision-makers surveyed still consider security a barrier for expanding cloud computing use?

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