Archivo de la categoría: News

GCI Annouces Purchase of Network Business Systems

GCI has announced the purchase of Anchorage-based Network Business Systems on August 6th. They did not disclose the amount they paid. The purchase will double their cloud computing and IT services sector and can capitalize on the expanding cloud service market. The Network Business Systems will add about 30 employees to GCI’s existing infrastructure.

Network Business Systems has been offering cloud services in Alaska since 2009, but the market for the Cloud was rather sluggish. Recently, however, the demand for such services has grown.

GCI did not offer the most cash for Network Business systems, but owner Annette Jones was convinced to let GCI purchase her company for other reasons. “They did not make us the best offer, however we felt that they were the best buyer,” Jones said. “What I mean by that is we thought that our employees had the best growth opportunities with GCI and so that’s why we went with them.”

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Because of this purchase, the amount of employees in GCI’s cloud sector would double from 30 to 60. Jones will continue to work with Network Business Systems as current employees will keep their jobs. GCI spokesman David Morris has said this purchase will better serve GCI’s existing customers who would like to know where their data is stored. He has stated, “Cloud computing is an emerging market, and the thing that we’ve found about Alaska businesses is that they would prefer that their data be stored in Alaska rather than some other place internationally. It makes a difference if you can come and touch and feel where your data is stored.”

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Wuala Cloud Storage Shut Down

Seagate and its LaCie subsidiary have announced the cancellation its Wuala cloud storage service. The closure is set to be complete November 15th. The company stated, “Seagate is discontinuing service of Wuala in order to focus attention on the key areas of business that we see the most opportunity for our growth and revenue. Our partnerships with established consumer and SMB cloud offerings continue to demonstrate strong value to our customers, leading us to the decision to discontinue development of our own service.”

After Novemeber 15th, all data will be deleted, so, the company has advised users to begin to download or transfer their content. It is recommended they use Tresorit, end-to-end encrypted cloud storage service and is offering both an easy transfer and discount upon subscription. Customers who paid upfront for the cloud service may receive a refund.

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Dr Chenxi Wang, VP of cloud security and strategy at CipherCloud, has stated, “Wuala’s closure is emblematic of the commoditisation of cloud storage. We’re likely to see more closures and consolidations, which will mean more end users asking the same questions about their data and business continuity. These closures are highly disruptive for businesses. Customers are unexpectedly having to find another storage provider and face time pressures for moving their data out or face losing it. Aside from the business disruption, customers also have to worry about confidentiality for their data. What measures will Wuala take when they delete data? Will Wuala literally overwrite the bits on the disks, or will they simply delete the handle to the data?”

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F5 Ready Program

F5 Networks has recently announced the launch of its new F5 Ready program that will make it easier for customers to utilize the F5 solutions necessary for their cloud environment. F5 Ready will verify F5’s solutions to be able to encapsulate the needs of cloudproviders throughout the globe. This program plans to make the efficiency of the cloud more accessible to the world.

F5 Ready promotes both interoperability and efficiency, allowing for a smooth transition from industry’s applications and services into private, public, and hybrid clouds. Alex Rublowsky, Sr. Director, Licensing Business Models at F5, has stated, “Organizations going to the cloud want to know that they don’t have to give up their valuable application services to get there. Through the F5 Ready program, customers can keep their trusted security, availability, and acceleration services—even as they evaluate cloud service providers, combine technologies from multiple vendors, and look to scale additional application resources to public cloud environments.”

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This program verifies compatibility with many cloud service providers, including Amazon Web Services (AWS), Bluelock, BT, Cisco Intercloud, Datacom, Dimension Data, Microsoft Azure, Rackspace, and SingleHop. Brian Singer, Senior Vice President, Products and Marketing at Orbitera has said, “Building and running our applications within AWS is key to modernizing our data center, and core to driving a more agile business that responds quickly to our customers’ needs. Now with F5 BIG-IP virtual editions directly available and verified within AWS, we are able to extend our existing F5 skills and policies to ensure the performance, availability, and security of our cloud-based applications.”

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Cryptzone Joins CSA

Cryptzone has joined the Cloud Security Alliance, a not for profit organization that serves to promote the best practices for providing security within the realm of cloud computing as well as disseminating information pertaining to the myriad of cloud computing uses. Cryptzone provides a dynamic context-aware network, application and content security solutions.

Jim Reavis, CEO of the CSA, has stated, “Cryptzone offers a unique, comprehensive approach to securing data across both on-premises and cloud-based networks – a model that is very typical of what we see end-users leveraging today. Cryptzone offers a unique, comprehensive approach to securing data across both on-premises and cloud-based networks – a model that is very typical of what we see end-users leveraging today.”
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Cryptzone has an extensive portfolio of solutions including but not limited to AppGate, a dynamic, context aware security gateway that prevents unauthorized access, Compliance Sheriff, which provides content governance for public websites, intranets and extranets, and Simple Encryption Platform, which secures data in email, removable storage, files and folders.

Kurt A. Mueffelmann, President and CEO of Cryptzone has also said, “Sophisticated cyberattacks are forcing enterprises to dramatically shift their thinking on how they secure their most valuable data and assets. The CSA has been at the forefront of research, not only to secure cloud computing, but to leverage the cloud to secure your entire compute infrastructure. We look forward to working with the CSA to further this research, and educate enterprises on how they can leverage best practices and proven models to improve their security posture now and for the future.”

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Googles Cloud Services

In order to compete with Cloud giants such as Amazon, IBM, and Microsoft, Google has created two new cloud services, Cloud Dataflow and Cloud Pub/Sub, to handle Big Data necessities. Cloud Dataflow will perform very complex computations on large amounts of data in either batches or streaming mode. Cloud Pub/Sub may send and receive data from applications in a message form.
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Cloud Dataflow product manager Eric Schmidt and Cloud Pub/Sub product manager Rohit Khare have written in a blog post, “These fully-managed services remove the operational burden found in traditional data processing system. They enable you to build applications on a platform that can scale with the growth of your business and drive down data processing latency, all while processing your data efficiently and reliably. Every day, customers use Google Cloud Platform to execute business-critical big data processing workloads, including: financial fraud detection, genomics analysis, inventory management, click-stream analysis, A/B user interaction testing and cloud-scale ETL.”
The authors have described Cloud Dataflow as “specifically designed to remove the complexity of developing separate systems for batch and streaming data sources by providing a unified programming model.” This program was based on previous Google innovations such as MapReduce, FlumeJava, and Millwheel.
Cloud Pub/Sub “addresses a broad range of scenarios with a single API, a managed service that eliminates those tradeoffs, and remains cost-effective as you grow, with pricing as low as 5¢ per million message operations for sustained usage.”

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Azure Data Factory Launch

Microsoft has greatly improved its big data analytics sector through the release of Azure Data Factory, a cloud based data integration service. Azure Data Factory (ADF) has been designed to both automate and streamline moving data from sources into and organizations business intelligence and analytics system to change it into a form companies can utilize.
Joseph Sirosh, corporate vice president of Information Management and Machine Learning at Microsoft, has stated, “With ADF, existing data processing services can be composed into data pipelines that are highly available and managed in the cloud. These data pipelines can be scheduled to ingest, prepare, transform, analyze, and publish data, and ADF will manage and orchestrate all of the complex data and processing dependencies without human intervention. Solutions can be quickly built and deployed in the cloud, connecting a growing number of on-premises and cloud data sources.”
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ADF is the connecting thread between services such as Azure HDInsight, Azure ML, and Power BI.
Sirosh also added “Using ADF, businesses can enjoy the benefits of using a fully managed cloud service without procuring hardware; reduce costs with automatic cloud resource management, efficiently move data using a globally deployed data transfer infrastructure, and easily monitor and manage complex schedule and data dependencies.”
The new service is very efficient and has been decreasing prices. Sirosh has commented, “At the same time, with the new cost efficiencies gained with the on-demand use of cloud resources, they were able to utilize 600 percent more compute hours and double their supported customer base.”

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Fortinet Announcement

Fortinet, a global leader in high-performance cybersecurity solutions, has recently announced improvements to its FortiCloud management system. In addition, it announced a new line of cloud managed wireless access points. This marks yet another investment into the secure wireless networking market. Fortinet’s “FortiAP-S series” wireless LAN (WLAN) APs among the most secure cloud managed Wi-Fi products in the world, so, companies will not need to compromise security while managing their enterprise wireless LAN from the cloud.

John Maddison, vice president of marketing at Fortinet, has stated “Fortinet’s new FortiAP-S series combines the flexibility of cloud management, the latest generation of wireless access point technology and the proven security of FortiGuard, all forming a secure wireless architecture for enterprise access networks. We can now apply mobile-specific security policies and updates such as application control and virus scanning directly to the wireless access points, giving the customer a layer of perimeter defense for BYOD devices.”
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The FortiAP-S series APs have a plethora of security features such as intrusion prevention, web filtering, rouge AP detection, antivirus security protection, granular application controls and more, all running directly on the access point. These features are backed by FortiGuard Labs’ threat intelligence. This level of hardware has been created through Fortinet’s extensive expertise.

Scott Fuhriman, vice president of sales and product development at TierPoint, a national provider of managed services, as said “We’ve worked closely with Fortinet to deliver best-in-class, business enabling wireless solutions that are tailored to meet the unique needs of each of our customers.”

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OpenStack And Kubernetes Integration

Mirantis and CoreOS have recently announced that they are going to pair up to integrate Mirantis’ OpenStack distribution with CoreOS’s Tectonic container platform. The two companies will offer companies the ability to utilize both OpenStack and Kubernetes, the Google-incubated container management tool, on a platform that offers enterprise-grade support as well as manageability. In this format, OpenStack will function as an engine that will manage virtual machines and containers with the aid of Kubernetes.
Jonathan Bryce, executive director of the OpenStack Foundation, has said “OpenStack is quickly becoming the preferred open source cloud platform for a range of technologies — VMs, containers, bare metal and whatever comes next. Project contributors like CoreOS, Mirantis and Google are helping the community offer enterprises a cohesive open source cloud solution powered by OpenStack.”
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Alex Polvi, CEO of CoreOS has also stated, “Now that Kubernetes is production-ready, companies using Tectonic and Mirantis OpenStack can have a Google-like infrastructure at their fingertips. Mirantis possesses a deep understanding of open source software and their commitment to the open source ecosystem around OpenStack is second to none. It was natural to work with Mirantis to help customers see the benefits of Kubernetes on OpenStack.” Tectonic can run on premise and public clouds. It offers a Container infrastructure platform that combines Kubernetes, CoreOS and Docker containers.
This shift has begun in the light of companies’ new interest in the idea of containers.

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GE Adds Infrastructure As A Service To Internet of Things

GE has recently announced the expansion of its Predix Internet of Things platform to provide Infrastructure as a Service, a market currently dominated by cloud giant Amazon Web Services, followed by Microsoft, Google, and IBM. However, GE hopes to stand out amongst the competition by offering these infrastructure services specifically to meet the needs of its industrial customers.
GE currently manufactures large machinery such as jet engines, turbines, and locomotives, all loaded with sensors. These sensors generate massive amounts of information.
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Predix was originally a Platform as a Service that allowed customers as well as third party developers to utilize the data from the sensors to build applications. With the expansion, the company will be providing infrastructure services to run those applications made.
While this greatly resembles the IBM cloud strategy, Harel Kodesh, CTO of GE Software has noted that there is a more focused set of services dedicated to the Internet of Things. He went on to explain that one of the main selling points was that the new infrastructure offering couples nicely with its software development platform. Also, the security layer has been designed specifically to meet the needs of companies running highly sensitive industrial equipment.
Another thing that sets GE apart from competitors like Amazon Web Services is that GE is able to understand how these large pieces of machinery work because it has built them. So, Predix will be able to process the amount of data the devices generate and also better predict the impact a given set of data will have on equipment based on factors such as temperature and workload.

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Zscaler raises $100m in round led by TPG

California based Zscaler, which provides security-as-a-service (SAAS), has raised $100 million dollars in Series B funding round. This was led largely by late stage investor TPG. Other investments have come from existing investors EMC, the storage company, and Lightspeed Ventures. The company has now raised well over $130 million dollars and its valuation last round was estimated to be at over a billion.
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Jay Chaudhry, CEO of Zscaler, has said in a recent announcement, “Our mission is to make the Internet safe for business by delivering an amazing security platform that protects our clients and enables the strategic adoption of cloud computing, mobile devices and the Internet of Things. The investment and partnership from TPG and the global relationships and experience they provide will enable us to accelerate investment in our technology, grow our customer base and aggressively scale our business to meet growing demand. We are excited to join an elite group of security companies valued in excess of $1 billion.”
The companies’ customer base has nearly doubled since last year. The company has an estimated 5000 customers, including Humana, NBC, ExxonMobil and the UK’s National Health Services, and protects over 13 million employees.
Nehal Raj, a partner at TPG, and now a Zscaler board member, has also said, “We see tremendous opportunity in the rapidly growing cybersecurity industry, and after spending significant time in the space, we found Zscaler to be the leading cloud-based security solution for the world’s largest and most demanding customers — a true SaaS platform like that of Salesforce or Workday. We are looking forward to partnering with Jay and his team to accelerate growth, most immediately by introducing Zscaler to the potential customers and channel partners within our global network.”

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