“When a customer decides I want a public cloud or I want a private cloud, regardless of the platform, that’s when you call Racemi,” explained Lawrence Guillory, CEO of Racemi,, in this SYS-CON.tv interview with Cloud Expo Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan at the 10th International Cloud Expo, held June 11-14, 2012, at the Javits Center in New York City.
Cloud Expo 2012 Silicon Valley, November 5-8, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA, will feature technical sessions from a rock star conference faculty and the leading Cloud industry players in the world.
SYS-CON.tv Interview: Top Trends in Cloud Computing
“We see three big trends happening in the cloud landscape right now. The first one is IaaS seems to be winning the battle for new types of IT projects, the second is more and more choices of who companies can partner to do that, noted Michael Crandell, CEO and a Founder of RightScale, in this SYS-CON.tv interview with Cloud Expo Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan at the 10th International Cloud Expo, held June 11–14, 2012, at the Javits Center in New York City.
Symform Joins Cloud Security Alliance
Symform on Thursday announced it has joined the Cloud Security Alliance (CSA). The CSA is a not-for-profit organization with a mission to promote the use of best practices for providing security assurance within cloud computing, and to provide education on the uses of cloud computing to help secure all other forms of computing.
Jim Reavis, executive director at the CSA, stated that “Symform’s deep expertise in security will be a valuable addition to our organization as companies increasingly look to the cloud and distributed approaches to manage and protect their data.”
As the market’s first and largest distributed cloud storage network, Symform is committed to collaborating on and addressing security initiatives, industry standards, and the research and development of cloud computing standards. Symform’s participation in the CSA is an extension of the company’s existing commitment to cloud security, particularly in a decentralized architecture. Symform is SSAE 16 certified and holds two patents for its global cloud storage network architecture and technology. The Symform solution leverages strong encryption and security processes across the network to provide a level of data protection beyond what traditional, centralized data center-based cloud storage services can offer.
SYS-CON.tv Interview: Leveraging the Cloud for Better User Experience
“We’re a user experience agency. We focus on researching, designing, and developing applications and digital products,” stated Ken Guiberson, CTO at EffectiveUI, in this SYS-CON.tv interview with Cloud Expo Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan at the 10th International Cloud Expo, held June 11-14, 2012, at the Javits Center in New York City.
Cloud Expo 2012 Silicon Valley, November 5-8, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA, will feature technical sessions from a rock star conference faculty and the leading Cloud industry players in the world.
Google Fiber Has Far-reaching Implications
Reading this post on Google’s low-cost, super-fast fiber-to-the-home initiative (makes me sort of wish I lived in Kansas City) brought to mind all the other Google products and initiatives that might be empowered by it. Go read it, then come back here and consider:
Chrome OS: it takes a long time to make a new operating system and it looks trivial today, but with widely available gigabit internet at the household and small business level it begins to look like a realistic “the network is the computer” future.
Mobile OS: Google already has that covered with Android.
Add Google Drive: Ubiquitous very high speed connectivity at a low price makes Drive viable for more than backup, sharing and synch. Actually synch becomes easier if the only copy is on a server.
Add Google Compute Engine: A thin-client netbook running Chrome OS, or Android on tablets and handsets, become more appealing if you can quickly access network-based computing resources for high-performance computing tasks like video transcoding.
Add Google Voice: consider all those hypothetical hotspots. Combine with Android and Voice. Can a Google competitor to cell phone providers be far behind, one that leverages the coming Google network? All it would take is a couple extra capabilities in the fiber/WiFi box that seems inevitable. And don’t forget they now own Motorola, a top-notch mobile phone company.
YouTube/Google TV: Already dipping its toe into original programming, and fast fiber means TV will change dramatically.
Living In the cloud would become a real option for everyday consumers. What about effects on professionals and small businesses?
And what about those other seemingly sci-fi projects, self driving cars and Glass? Hey, if the car drives itself my brain then has the bandwidth for augmented reality. How might they benefit from the ability to hop from fiber-connected WiFi hotspot to hotspot?
All this based on a good search engine algorithm, and then ads next to search results? Who’d a thunk it?
Gartner: cloud makes the IT world go round
Cloud, social, mobile and information are the new ‘Nexus of Forces’ with cloud at the apparent epicentre
The convergence of four IT forces – cloud, social, mobile and information – has formed what analyst house Gartner has described as a new “Nexus of Forces” which will become the paradigm for the future of IT.
The research firm predicts that while the four ‘forces’ are currently disruptive as they are, combined they will tear up old enterprise IT models.
Cloud computing, according to Gartner, provides the “glue” for all the forces, thus being the pivot for everything around it.
“Without cloud computing, social interactions would have no place to happen at scale, mobile access would fail to be able to connect to a wide variety of data and functions, and information still would be stuck inside internal systems,” Gartner notes.
An important point to note is how the cloud has changed the paradigm …
Avnet Acquires Pepperweed Consulting
Avnet, Inc. announced today that it has acquired Pepperweed Consulting, an IT enterprise management and integration provider. As an HP Software Elite Partner and winner of multiple HP Partner-of-the-Year awards, Pepperweed Consulting works with channel partners and customers to buy, deploy, support and manage HP IT Performance Suite, Converged Cloud and Insight software stacks. With more than 3000 successful engagements at Fortune 500 clients and large-scale government agencies, the company helps customers architect, implement and operate the right solution to meet their data center and cloud initiative goals on time and on budget. The company generated revenue of approximately US$12 million in the 2011 calendar year.
“The acquisition of Pepperweed supports our strategic focus of expanding our services and software portfolio to help drive growth for both our supplier and reseller partners,” stated Jeff Bawol, president, Avnet Technology Solutions, Americas. “The addition of Pepperweed Consulting will complement our industry leading vertical market practices by providing software and services to help our HP reseller partners deliver increasingly complex and customized IT solutions needed by customers in high growth markets such as government, healthcare, energy, financial and retail.”
Founded in 1996, Pepperweed Consulting provides multi-vendor technology expertise, services and support, complemented by internally developed components to meet each project’s specific goals. This acquisition will be integrated into the operations of Avnet Technology Solutions in the Americas.
TwinStrata Earns Top Scores for Value, Product Features
TwinStrata earned top marks in Info-Tech Research Group’s new report “Vendor Landscape: Cloud Backup Gateways.”
TwinStrata was given Best Overall Value award for “coupling its impressive product with an appealing price,” said the Info-Tech Research Group Research Document.
TwinStrata CloudArray was the only product in the report given an overall score of “exemplary.”
Nicos Vekiarides, chief executive officer at TwinStrata, stated, “The Info-Tech results validate our focus on meeting customer needs through our industry-leading feature set, broad solution partner ecosystem and flexible pricing models. We are pleased to have been rated top honors in both value and overall product; it’s a testament to what we deliver to our customers every day.”
Newvem Launches New Tool to Help Amazon Web Services Customers Make Sense of Reserved Instances
Newvem has launched a new tool as part of its KnowYourCloud Analytics web application. Newvem’s new Reserved Instances Decision Tool helps Amazon Web Services (AWS) customers make the right decision on exactly which On-Demand Instances should be moved to Reserved Instances. With KnowYourCloud Analytics, AWS users have insight into their cloud usage patterns and can now easily determine – based on flexibility, availability and cost considerations – whether a long-term commitment to Reserved Instances is the right decision for their business.
To keep ahead of competitors and give customers more value, Amazon is promoting Reserved Instances, which, compared to On-Demand Instances – the popular pay-as-you-go model that AWS is known for, offer even more cost savings and assured capacity availability. Reserved Instances require long-term commitments to Amazon with contracts ranging from one to three years. The problem is that moving to Reserved Instances is an extremely complex decision for IT and finance managers, who must weigh the tradeoffs between costs and utilization over time and between flexibility and a long-term commitment.
“Newvem’s KnowYourCloud Analytics is like Google Analytics for cloud computing,” said Zev Laderman, Newvem’s co-founder and CEO. “It scans AWS usage patterns and lets AWS users know if they can benefit from Reserved Instances, indicates which parts of their cloud would benefit the most, and offers recommendations on how to execute the move.”
Dropbox Employee Account Hack Led to Customers being Spammed
Dropbox this week fessed up to having been hacked, most notably an employee account that contained project data including a list of customer emails (at least it shows they use their own product). That resulted in a rash of spam that eventually led to the discovery of the compromised passwords.
A couple weeks ago, we started getting emails from some users about spam they were receiving at email addresses used only for Dropbox. We’ve been working hard to get to the bottom of this, and want to give you an update.
Our investigation found that usernames and passwords recently stolen from other websites were used to sign in to a small number of Dropbox accounts. We’ve contacted these users and have helped them protect their accounts.
A stolen password was also used to access an employee Dropbox account containing a project document with user email addresses. We believe this improper access is what led to the spam. We’re sorry about this, and have put additional controls in place to help make sure it doesn’t happen again.
They claim it was usernames and password stolen from other sites that led to the trickledown effects on Dropbox accounts. Another reason to use a different password for every site you sign up for.
Their post on the topic includes news of a new page that lets you examine all active logins to your account.
