Akamai Technologies, Inc. and Prolexic Technologies, Inc. announced on Monday that the two companies have signed a definitive agreement for Akamai to acquire Prolexic, a provider of cloud-based security solutions for protecting data centers and enterprise IP applications from distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks.
Faced with an ever-changing threat landscape, organizations require comprehensive security solutions that address many different protection scenarios. These include securing mission-critical Web properties and applications from attack, as well as protecting the full suite of enterprise IP applications – including email, file transfers, and VPN – across a data center.

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Fredrik Tunvall, Analyst, Software – Information Management

At its recent Software Analyst Insights summit in Stamford, Connecticut, IBM gave analysts an in-depth look at the products and underlying strategy of its extensive business analytics (BA) portfolio. A product that caught Ovum’s eye is IBM’s recently announced visual data discovery tool, codenamed “Project Neo.” The solution is the result of IBM Labs coalescing some of the company’s latest in-memory database, analytics, data visualization, and design initiatives.

IBM aims to attract nontechnical business users

Business analytics is front and center for IBM. Investments of nearly $20bn into R&D and M&A activity have left IBM with an impressive (and extensive) list of BA solutions. However, IBM has been somewhat underrepresented in the increasingly competitive market of visual data discovery solutions. Vendors such as Tableau, Tibco Spotfire, and QlikTech have led the way with intuitive solutions that have attracted a …

Google has announced general availability of its Compute Engine IaaS platform, with the search giant aiming to play alongside the likes of Amazon and Microsoft in infrastructure as a service.

The service was available to developers and as a preview for companies to sign up back in May. Now, it’s been fully launched – and the Mountain View giant hasn’t set the bar too high with a 99.95% SLA.

CloudTech readers will know full well the issues with claiming a 100% service agreement – so this, alongside 24/7 support, comes as refreshing news. Amazon’s EC2 and S3 clouds come in at 99.95% and 99.9% respectively.

Underpinning this step to avoid fallover, Google Compute Engine can be set up so that instances can be automatically restarted in the event of hardware failures or maintenance, meaning virtual machines can be up and running again within minutes.

Google …

As we move closer toward everything-as- a-service (XaaS), the title “Internet of Agents” seems to fit what is really happening. Agents are systems and devices that sense what is going on, and they exchange information with and act on behalf of other agents and people in ways that ultimately result in useful services being performed.
When we start to view the delivery of services as a distributed cooperative effort conducted by millions of agents, as opposed to the actions of a few dedicated and single-minded service platforms, we start to get a glimpse of the huge potential of the Internet of Agents. We also must face the challenge of keeping track of this expanding service universe: managing security and permissions, making the dynamic portfolio available and usable, and ultimately monetizing all of this and ensuring that each contributor to these increasingly complex value chains is compensated for the fragments of service capability provided.

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In September, the NCOIC delivered the Geospatial Community Cloud (GCC) demonstration. Sponsored by the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, this demonstration showed how an interoperable, hybrid-cloud operating environment can be quickly enabled and used as a rapid response capability.While this demonstration was designed around lessons learned in the 2010 Haitian Earthquake, the effort showed how a cloud services brokerage approach could be used to quickly provide critical information technology infrastructure support to an unplanned event.
The NCOIC is an international organization for accelerating the global implementation of network centric principles and systems–to improve information sharing among various communities of interest for the betterment of their productivity, interactivity, safety, and security. The NCOIC Rapid Response Capability (NRRC) video series supports that mission by broadly disseminating information about the GCC demonstration for the good of the global community.

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In September, the NCOIC delivered the Geospatial Community Cloud (GCC) demonstration. Sponsored by the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, this demonstration showed how an interoperable, hybrid-cloud operating environment can be quickly enabled and used as a rapid response capability.While this demonstration was designed around lessons learned in the 2010 Haitian Earthquake, the effort showed how a cloud services brokerage approach could be used to quickly provide critical information technology infrastructure support to an unplanned event.
The NCOIC is an international organization for accelerating the global implementation of network centric principles and systems–to improve information sharing among various communities of interest for the betterment of their productivity, interactivity, safety, and security. The NCOIC Rapid Response Capability (NRRC) video series supports that mission by broadly disseminating information about the GCC demonstration for the good of the global community.

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“We see many companies looking to adopt BYOD strategies for employees, but few who are solely BYOD,” observed Milja Gillespie, Director of Product Marketing, Mobile Security, SAP, in this exclusive Q&A with Cloud Computing Journal. “Often, they offer corporate devices for certain types of workers for whom mobility is a core function and BYOD for others who may want to access business resources on a personal device but don’t require it for productivity purposes.”
Cloud Computing Journal: Describe for us a bit the recent growth of mobile, and the projected growth over the next few years.
Milja Gillespie: According to a recent Infonetics Research survey, respondent organizations reportedly averaged approximately 9,000 devices on their networks, which is expected to grow to 20 percent by 2015, and about 2/3 of those enterprises surveyed allow their employees to bring their own devices into work and connect to the company networks today.

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As with all powerful ideas, these idées fortes are works in progress. If anything, they bring up more questions than answers. Yes, we’ve made substantial progress so far this century, and hopefully ZapThink has been a part of that success. But there’s much more work to do.
As enterprises struggle with middleware-centric, Web Services-based SOA, they eventually move to next generation, RESTful approaches. SOA still calls for an intermediary, but now it’s stateless and exposes functionality via RESTful URIs. The REST-based SOA intermediary is policy-driven and provides a loosely coupled Business Service abstraction, but because it is stateless, it requires a RESTful approach to state that separates application state from resource state.

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There’s been a lot of hullaboo in the last few years about the current cycle of disruption in IT: Public Cloud, Private Cloud, SDN, DevOps, Everything-as-a-Service… the list goes on and on and every vertical, every field, and every niche is feeling the churn. Every day there is no shortage of opinions “for” and “against” something in tech that is emerging, in decline, or re-emerging. There is one aspect to all of it though that is largely ignored: “The Short ‘t’.”

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