National IT infrastructure and cloud provider, Peak 10, Inc. (“Peak 10”) on Monday announced that private equity firm GI Partners (“GI”) has agreed to acquire Peak 10 from private equity firm Welsh, Carson, Anderson & Stowe (“Welsh Carson”).
Peak 10 provides hybrid IT infrastructure services including data center services, private and enterprise cloud infrastructure, and managed services. Headquartered in Charlotte, N.C., the company operates 24 data centers in 10 key markets in the U.S., primarily serving mid-sized enterprises around the globe. Peak 10 boasts one of the most comprehensive IT security and compliance programs in the industry and is a leader in Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS). It was recently named the first provider in the Americas to achieve the Cisco Powered DRaaS Certification.
CyberOam Provides Critical Insight for Virtual Datacenter Administrators
Guest Post by Natalie Lehrer, a senior contributor for CloudWedge.
Organizations must provide reliable technical resources in order to keep a business running in an efficient manner. Network security is one of the chief concerns of all companies regardless of size. Although corporations are often pressed to earn profits, the need to protect all company related data at any cost should be a top priority.
Virtual datacenters can be susceptible to a variety of threats including hyperjacking, DoS attacks and more. The importance of keeping up to date on the latest server patches, security bulletins and being aware of the latest malware threats is more important than ever. Therefore, it is critical that all incoming network traffic is properly scanned in search of viruses and malicious code that could possibly corrupt or cause the malfunction of the virtual datacenter.
What is the Solution?
Network appliances such as Cyberoam can act as a unified threat management suite. In addition, Cyberoam scans as all incoming and outgoing traffic while producing detailed reports for system administrators. These granular reports list all virtual datacenter activity while providing logs that give forensic computer scientists direction on where to focus their investigations. Since any activities performed on virtual servers can be retained using Cyberoam, the audit process can provide a clear trail which will lead you to the culprit incase of a data breach. Cyberoam is not a reactive solution. Cyberoam proactively scans all incoming and outgoing data incase viruses and other harmful programs try to compromise and corrupt your entire virtual datacenter.
Security intricacies include intrusion protection services, specialized auditing applications and robust firewall features. Firewalls play an important role in keeping all harmful material from compromising virtual servers. Firewalls essentially block intruders while simultaneously allowing legitimate TCP or UDP packets to enter your system. Cyberoam allows administrators the ability to easily construct firewall rules that keep internal data safe and secure.
When you setup your virtual datacenter, it is important to utilize all of the features at your disposal. Sometimes the most obscure features are the most valuable. The best way to keep your virtual datacenter is safe is be on top of the latest knowledge. There have been reports that many IT professionals find themselves intimidated by new technology simply have not taken the initiative to learn all about the latest datacenter hardware and software available to them today. If you are trying to stay one step ahead of the game, your best bet is to learn all about the tools on the market and make your decision accordingly. Be sure to scrutinize any appliance you decide to utilize inside of your datacenter before adding it into your arsenal of IT weaponry.
Natalie Lehrer is a senior contributor for CloudWedge.
In her spare time, Natalie enjoys exploring all things cloud and is a music enthusiast.
Follow Natalie’s daily posts on Twitter: @Cloudwedge, or on Facebook.
Key Announcements from Citrix Synergy 2014 – Part 1
By Randy Becker, Enterprise Architect, Solutions
Citrix Synergy was held this past week in Anaheim California, and as always it was a great event. For those of you who could not attend, I will provide a recap of the week’s events in a two part blog series.
Tuesday morning the event kicked-off with a live band called iBand. Here’s small sample of Livin’ on a Prayer by Bon Jovi using iPads! It was actually pretty amazing! This was followed by Mark Templeton (CEO) opening the conference. Mark got a standing ovation. Given the public announcement of his intention to retire within the next year, I think most of us realized this will be Marks last Synergy. Mark seemed very touched and got emotional several times during his key note. He said that they had 10,000 attendees (I believe that included online viewers as well as people attending in person). Citrix is celebrating 25 years this year. They did a quick review of the products that were the foundation of Citrix. Mark continued with some of last year’s themes including DOS = “Don’t own stuff,” “Don’t own Servers,” and work is not a place, it’s a thing we do.
They performed a demo using a Chromebook with HTML5 showing access to your applications without any required software. This has been around for a while, but there seems to be a new emphasis, maybe to show the differences with the competition. The new Citrix Receiver “X1” was also announced using HTML 5. I instantly thought of the Comcast XFINITY X1 commercial with Jimmy Fallon imitating Arnold Schwarzenegger. The new receiver will fully integrate your workspace into a single interface. They showed how businesses can perform their own automations and branding. WorxNotes was announced, which integrates into XenMobile and seems to be a corporate version of Evernote. There will obviously be some good integration points, and I’m sure that security will be a key push for this. Organizations generally seem a bit nervous about storing company data, including notes, in the cloud without any real control.
Several other notable announcements included XenMobile 9, NetScaler 10.5, a View Rescue Program, and Workspace Services. This looks very exciting. Workspace Services will allow for the Design and Build of your XenDesktop/XenApp environment on premises or in Microsoft Azure Cloud. Below is a more detailed breakdown around some of the product announcements that came out of the event.
XenMobile 9 and Worx Mobile Apps
XenMobile 9 will provide full support for Windows 8 phones and will be able to run WorxMail and the WorxWeb Applications. Citrix is continuing to lead the Enterprise Mobility Management (EMM) market with their application wrapping technologies in the Mobile Application Management (MAM) space and they are continuing to expand their partnership with companies that produce the Worx application. Capriza was the Mobility Ecossystem Winner this year, with a Citrix Ready Worx verified app that enables the development, distribution and management of lightweight enterprise mobile apps for existing business applications. Citrix is proving to be the visionary in this space. During the keynote, Citrix demonstrated WorxDesktop. This is a way to remotely access your remote desktop. You can browse as well as access and edit files on the remote computer, and it seems to be OS independent. At first glance this appears to be better than GoToMyPC. I can see a number of use cases for WorxDesktop! If you haven’t seen WorxMail you should check-out this quick demo. Anyone that is on the road a lot will love these built-in features in your calendar invite, Join Meeting, Dial In and, my personal favorite, Running Late (single click emails everyone to let you know you are running late). If you haven’t seen the YouTube of “A Conference Call in Real Life” you have to check it out (it has over 7 million views). It’s laugh out loud funny that everyone can relate to and these new announcements from Citrix may help with some of these common issues!
Workspace Suite
Citrix Workspace Suite was announced as well. This is just a license bundle which includes XenDesktop, XenApp, ShareFile, and XenMobile. There are some enticing programs to get customers into this licensing model. Check out the following link for more info and a nice overview and comparison of features.
Citrix Workspace Services
Citrix Workspace Services is a cloud based Desktop as a Service (DaaS) model that leverages the Citrix Platform. This is the kind of architecture that I like, as the control and data planes can be split. Microsoft Azure will host the control plane (deliver controllers, AD, etc.), but the actual desktops can be deployed back to on premise infrastructure or any number of public cloud providers so you’re not 100% locked into using Azure. More info can be found here.
Workspace Services allows you to design, deploy and manage Workspace Services (Software Defined Workspaces). This looks amazing and will allow for deployment to on-premises and cloud based infrastructure. I can see how this will benefit customers directly, and also the partner community, for easier deployments utilizing the back-end fabric provided by Citrix to ensure best practice deployments.
The second part of this series will cover news and announcements around Intel Iris Pro Graphics, XenServer with 64-Bit, XenDesktop 7.5, XenApp 7.5, and NetScaler 10.5. Stay tuned!
Photo credit: www.thevarguy.com
InMage Takes Data Protection & Migration to the Cloud & Beyond
InMage on Monday announced the release of Scout 7.1, enabling customers to leverage the public, hosted and private cloud as a target for backup and/or disaster recovery (DR). This next generation solution for hybrid cloud backup, recovery and migration is available in three form factors – software, SaaS and the InMage 4000 Series appliance.
“We’ve always been ahead of the pack with our award winning technology, but with the addition of public and private cloud support for backup and DR, we’re now truly in a class of one,” said Kumar Malavalli, CEO, InMage Systems.
One in three cloud services was susceptible to Heartbleed, research shows
One third of cloud services was vulnerable to the debilitating Heartbleed virus, it has been revealed.
The findings were posted in a research paper from cloud security provider Skyhigh Networks’ Cloud Adoption & Risk report, and found that 1,173 cloud services from the 3,571 in use had left data exposed by Heartbleed when the bug first broke.
Skyhigh reports that the number of vulnerable services was less than 1% a week later following cloud providers stepping in to address the breach. However there was still plenty of scaremongering in the report, with only 7% of services rated with enterprise-grade security. 16% provided multi-factor authentication, whilst only 11% encrypt data at rest. Interestingly, the number of enterprise-ready services went down from last quarter’s 11%.
Despite this, the use of cloud services is growing at a rapid rate. The current number of 3,571 is significantly up on 2,675 …
Select the Right Partner for Privileged Identity Management
This report details findings from Forrester Research, Inc. about how the nine most significant solution providers for privileged identity management meet the 18-criteria evaluation and where they stand in relation to each other to help security and risk (S&R) professionals select the right partner for their privileged identity management.
Five Key IT Security Issues for the Next Two Years
Last month, the Information Security Forum released their annual prediction of the top 10 information security threats they foresee for the next two years – through 2016. While I found the entire list insightful, half of the list resonated strongly with me as someone who is working with large enterprises as they wrestle with security and compliance challenges as they embark on cloud adoption. I believe this group of five predictions is particularly relevant for anyone utilizing the cloud over the next two years and I’ve added a few of my own thoughts on each.
1. Service Providers Become a Key Vulnerability
I find this first prediction especially valid and timely because of some recent headlines. Service providers, given the nature of their business, are a prime “aggregation” for all types of sensitive/valuable data. Cyber criminals and hackers realize this, which puts a big target on the backs of service providers. Think about it – a successful breach equals a treasure trove of coveted information from potentially multiple tenants. And the reality is that service providers acting as a central storage point for large amounts of sensitive data will continue to increase over the next two years, so the prize will only become richer. In response and in preparation, enterprises need to takes steps to protect their most sensitive and important data and decide which data they truly need to send to public cloud service providers.
Integrated PaaS/IaaS Technology Complements Your Enterprise Cloud Strategy
Infrastructure-as-a-Service and Platform-as-a-Service are technologies that are fast becoming integrated, and this is good news for enterprises looking to implement private, public or hybrid clouds.
The availability of resources on-demand through companies like Amazon and Google has provided developers with the ability to quickly define a scalable and highly available infrastructure to develop and deploy applications. The availability of Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) means that anyone can provision servers, storage and networking in the cloud with a high level of configurability and control and pay (in general) for the amount of resources reserved.
From PaaS to SaaS to Hybrid Clouds
“I see almost no one running hybrid clouds,” noted Seth Proctor, CTO of NuoDB, in this exclusive Q&A with Cloud Expo conference chairs Larry Carvalho and Vanessa Alvarez. “The few examples are usually public cloud deployments with backup and/or DR options in a private setup.”
Cloud Computing Journal: How are cloud standards playing a role in expanding adoption among users? Are standards helping new business models for service providers?
Seth Proctor: I think the only standards are de facto standards like OpenStack or the AWS interfaces. Honestly there are no “cloud standards” I know of that are fueling adoption. What have become standard are the assumptions around virtualization, provisioning tools, monitoring methods, etc.
Box strikes deal with General Electric, enterprise investments pay off
Around 300,000 General Electric employees are going to be using Box as a standard for content sharing and collaboration, the cloud storage provider has announced.
Following the rumours that Box was to delay its much-vaunted IPO, this client win comes as timely news for Aaron Levie and company.
Levie wrote in a blog post that he was “incredibly excited” to be partnering with “one of the most tech-centric companies of the Fortune 500.”
“While GE has a long history of technology-driven innovation, few enterprises of its scale have reinvented themselves by putting information technology at the centre of their competitive strategy,” he wrote.
He added: “Under [CEO] Jeff Immelt, we’ve seen this manifest in GE’s corporate strategy with the industrial internet, bringing intelligent data to industrial machines and processes; GE is applying that same creativity to empowering its global workforce with better access to information and tools …