Category Archives: News

cloud security, Cloud Services, News

Salesforce Adds Security Service

Salesforce has recently announced Shield, a set of services that expands the security and compliance tool sets of developers creating apps on the Salesforce1 platform for regulated industries. The service adds auditing, encryption, archiving and monitoring services to Salesforce1 to make it easier for developers to ensure that cloud apps meet the security, compliance and governance requirements of their organization and industry standards. Shield may be explored in a drag-and-drop interface instead of requiring app developers to search through code.

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Tod Nielsen, executive vice president of Salesforce1 Platform, said “[Companies] in regulated industries have struggled to take full advantage of the cloud due to regulatory and compliance constraints. With Salesforce Shield, we are liberating these IT leaders and developers, and empowering them to quickly build the cloud apps their businesses need, with the trust Salesforce is known for.”

Shield will have three main features: Field Audit Trail, Data Archive and Platform Encryption. Field Audit Trail allows developers to monitor data exchanged through their apps to ensure that it is kept up to date and compliant with industry regulations; it may track data changes for up to 10 years. Data may be deleted when no longer needed. Data Archive allows historical data that needs to be kept for a long time to be stored, which helps ensure data is available when needed. Platform Encryption allows developers working on the Salesforce1 platform to encrypt data without affecting the way it is used by other areas of the business so that they do not need specialist hardware or software.

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Cloud computing, Cloud Services, Microsoft, News

Microsoft Will Offer Azure In India

BqRtWXEIMAAQYhFMicrosoft will begin to offer its cloud computing service, Azure, for free to startups speeding up the entrepreneurial ecosystem in India.

Microsoft’s Indian subsidiary has said, “Our Azure cloud services, valued at $120,000, will be given free to qualified startups under the ‘BizSpark plus program’ for building the entrepreneurial ecosystem in the country.”

Microsoft Ventures India director Rajinish Menon, has stated, “Startups need all the help they can to get access to the right tools, technology and guidance. At Microsoft, we are committed to supporting these startups and through the BizSpark Plus program we want to support India’s upcoming entrepreneurs.”

 

Microsoft also added qualifying startups must be privately held, below five years old with sub one million revenue annually and be a member of select accelerator or venture capital firm.

To begin, Microsoft is partnering thirteen startup accelerators, including 91Springboard, Reliance GenNext, Zone Startups, and Pitney Bowes. 91Springboard partner Pranay Gupta has said, “The BizSpark Plus program is a unique opportunity for startups who want to leverage the power of the Cloud and give a boost to their product development lifecycle.”

Microsoft BizSpark is a worldwide program that aids startups by offering free Microsoft software development tools, connecting startups with key industry players, investors and giving marketing visibility. Microsoft also added that startups will also receive the full suite of development and test software and Visual Studio, Windows and Office tools in this latest offering.

Microsoft currently has one hundred and fifty startup programs in forty seven countries.

 

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Cloud computing, Cloud Services, hybrid cloud, IaaS, Microsoft, News

Cloud News Daily 2015-07-14 05:38:21

Rackspace Hosting and has paired up with Microsoft to manage and offer technical support to Microsoft’s public cloud computing platform known as Azure. Azure support and managed services are currently available and expansion to overseas customers will begin in 2016.

Rackspace has struggled to compete with larger companies and their cloud platforms, such as Amazon Web Services, and this agreement with Microsoft marks its first major deal to support public cloud services other than its own.

Rackspace Chief Technology Officer, John Engates, has said, “Stay tuned. As part of our managed cloud strategy, a tenet of that is we want to support industry-leading technologies. Our strategy really gives us the opportunity to apply fanatical support to any leading industry platform in the future. So stay tuned in terms of announcements.”

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Rackspace hopes to improve profit margins and reduce capital spending by offering managed services and technical support for public clouds, and it is starting with Microsoft’s Azure. Rackspace’s main strength has been providing fanatical service, training and technical support to smaller businesses.

Rackspace technical support will be available directly to clients through Microsoft. Rackspace may also resell Microsoft’s IaaS services to its cutomers. In the fourth quarter of 2014, IaaS Services accounted for thirty one percent of Rackspace’s total revenue.

Engates also added Rackspace will help customers build apps that run in hybrid, private-public cloud environments. Many companies are becoming interested in the public-private cloud model, with important business apps ran on private servers with accessing public IaaS providers on a as needed basis.

The post appeared first on Cloud News Daily.

Cloud computing, Microsoft, News

Changing Cloud Prices

After years of competitive price cuts within the cloud computing industry, Microsoft is beginning to increase prices on their cloud computing infrastructure, and IBM may be following Microsoft’s lead. This change has been cited due to the current economic disaster in Greece. Regions that are likely to be affected by the price increase are Australia and Europe, excluding the United Kingdom.

Microsoft said in a statement, “We always evaluate current market conditions, the increased product value for a customer, customer deployment scenarios and other factors when determining pricing for our products and services. Microsoft is committed to sharing pricing and licensing updates with our partners to ensure they and our customers are prepared and able to evaluate their options. Customers should speak with a Microsoft partner to learn more.”

A spokesman for Microsoft also commented, “In light of the rapid evolution of the market for cloud services and evolving local dynamics, we can confirm that as of August 1 2015, we will adjust prices for most enterprise cloud products within the EU/European Free Trade Association region. The changes will not affect existing annuity volume licensing agreements but will apply to most enterprise cloud products under new or renewing contracts.”

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IBM has also confirmed that it is changing its SoftLayer cloud pricing, claiming it is a price cut. However, a customer using entry-level Virtual Server Instance in SoftLayer paid $35 per 5TB of outbound bandwidth, that rate has increased to $615 per 5TB of bandwidth.

While competitive price cuts in the cloud market used to be the norm, a trend of increasing cloud costs may be on the rise.

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Cloud computing, Cloud Services, News

Chicago Cloud Tax

Tech entrepreneurs took to city hall in Chicago to complain about the tax ruling put in effect last week. They claimed the tax, which extended a nine percent lease tax to cloud-based technology services, would hurt business and discourage startups in Chicago.

Spokeswoman for Mayor Rahm Emanuel said in statement, “Based on feedback we have received from Chicago’s vibrant start-up community, the administration will be taking measures to provide relief to small businesses so as not to put them at a competitive disadvantage. Proposals are being discussed with stakeholders, and we will release further guidance later this month.”

Relief may include exempting small businesses based on income.

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Harper Reed, founder of Modest, a mobile-commerce technology provider to small and mid-sized businesses, said, “My initial concern was that I might have to charge our Chicago customers more, which is kind of a bummer. Then there was the other part of it . . . where all cloud services would be taxed. This is a big thing.”

This would affect startups that run their business from the cloud, using big businesses such as Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure or IBM Cloud Services, that have been switching to the cloud.

City Hall has not provided a clear interpretation of the law, worrying tech entrepreneurs.  J.B. Pritzker, a venture capitalist who is one of the most prominent leaders of the tech community, has commented, “If they don’t want to lose momentum in the startup community, it has to be more narrowly applied. Most startups are not particularly well-funded or making money. To the extent there’s an interpretation hat would bear down on those companies and take capital out of their nascent, small treasure chests, it’s the wrong place to look.”

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Cloud computing, cloud security, News

Open API Efforts Begin

Ciphercloud and the Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) have been working to fill a gap in the cloud access security broker market. It is a new working group for defining a uniform Open API. The group is led by CipherCloud and also includes from Deloitte, Infosys, Intel Security and SAP. The Open API looks to define a standard for the emerging cloud access security broker (CASB) space. CASB will cover four categories: data protection, threat prevention, visibility and compliance.

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Cloud identity is mainly handled by Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) assertions, which can enable federated identity across cloud vendors. Chenxi Wang, vice president of Cloud Security & Strategy at CipherCloud, explains that identity management is only part of the battle in cloud security, and that the API will cover not only identity management but also data classification, data protection and access management.

Wang describes, “We will not propose new protocols to replace SAML, but instead, we will fill gaps where existing standards are lacking. For instance, how does the enterprise specify to the cloud service that a particular piece of data and content can only be stored in a particular geography? You can’t do that today automatically.

“This Open API effort will standardize the specification, control and assessment across the tiers of the cloud infrastructure, which will in turn significantly lessen the work on the developers’ part and hence expedite time to market for cloud adoption. The immediate goals of this effort are to issue specifications for the API framework, reference architecture documents, as well as a few whitepapers. After that, we may propose to incorporate that as part of the CSA STAR, if the industry embraces the API standards.”

The group is focused on its immediate goals first and foremost. While the groups formation was announced in late June, it is expected to begin operations in July.

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cloud security, Cloud Services, News

Cisco to Acquire OpenDNS

Cisco has announced that it plans to buy cloud security company OpenDNS for $635 million. This amount is to be paid in cash and assumed equity awards, plus retention based incentives for OpenDNS, according to information released by Cisco.

OpenDNS provides a cross-platform online threat-protection service that Cisco will utilize to increase its own security, stating, “broad visibility and threat intelligence from the OpenDNS cloud delivered platform.”

Hilton Romanski, leader of business development at Cisco, said, “The acquisition will extend our ability to provide customers enhanced visibility and threat protection for unmonitored and potentially unsecure entry points into the network, and to quickly and efficiently deploy and integrate these capabilities as part of their defense architecture.”

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OpenDNS will join the Cisco Security Business Group and the deal is expected to close during the first quarter of fiscal 2016.  David Ulevitch, founder and CEO of OpenDNS, said,  “We’re not going anywhere and OpenDNS as you know it will continue to work as it does today.” While OpenDNS has over 50 million users, it has only 10,000 paying customers and runs 24 data centers.

Cisco has stated, “The burgeoning digital economy and the Internet of Everything are expected to spur the connection of nearly 50 billion devices by 2020, creating a vast new wave of opportunities for security breaches across networks.”

Hilton Romanski also added “As more people, processes, data and things become connected, opportunities for security breaches and malicious threats grow exponentially when away from secure enterprise networks.”

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Cloud Services, News

Cloud News Daily 2015-07-03 06:15:55

iiNet will begin to provide cloud services on a consumption based infrastructure-as-a-service model to the South Australian Departments of Premier and Cabinet; Planning, Transport, and Infrastructure; and Communities and Social Inclusion.

iiNet general manager for Business and Government ,Daryl Knight, said “This infrastructure will be there for government to use. We’re very confident there will be significant workloads that will be put onto this platform, and we’re confident it will be there for some time, provided we deliver a good service and deliver value for money for the state. Its spread across two data centers iiNet owns in Adelaide, and there is a natural advantage there that appeals to the state, because the infrastructure is located in the state it resides, and we’ve got connectivity straight into the state’s internal data network.” In addition, iiNet will also offer the Australian government back up services.

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The South Australian government is taking advantage of this opportunity to promote its cloud credentials.  Public Sector Minister Susan Close said in a statement “In line with the government’s SA Connected ICT strategy, it allows agencies to invest in services rather than buying hardware and software. This solution improves agility for state government agencies with no upfront costs and provides the ability to spin up or shut down servers as required in minutes instead of months. Consumption-based pricing requires no minimum spend. With the rapidly maturing cloud market, we are now at the point where government agencies can benefit from quicker deployment speeds, greater flexibility, and improved value for money by using this model through iiNet.”
The cloud will be hosted in iiNet’s two Adelaide-based data centers and the private cloud will consume hardware reserved for the state government.

 

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Cloud Technology, News

Cloud Technology Partners Raises $3.5M

Cloud Technology Partners, the professional services firm behind hundreds of the world’s most advanced cloud initiatives, has announce that it has  finished an approximately 3.5 million  dollar top-up round. Led by existing investors Pritzker Group, Venture Capital and Oak Investment Partners, the funding will go towards increasing Cloud Technology Partner’s sales and delivery capabilities.

Chris Greendale, CEO and Founder, has said “We have been doubling the number of cloud professionals we hire every year, and we need to increase this level of hiring in order to support the exponential growth in demand for our services. The good news is that given our position in the market, we have been able to recruit outstanding cloud thought leaders and experienced practitioners. We are exceedingly pleased with the vote of confidence our investors, ecosystem partners and clients have made in us as we continue to build a great cloud company.”

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In addition, Managing Partner of Pritzker Group, Chris Girgenti, stated, “Across the industry, we are seeing profound IT and business results achieved by leveraging cloud as an enabling platform – many of which have been realized by Cloud Technology Partners’ clients. We are pleased to participate in this funding round as it serves to further enable Cloud Technology Partners’ growth.”

Cloud Technology Partners has completed more than 200 cloud projects for a myriad of enterprise clients throughout the world while working with cloud giants such as Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud Platform to accelerate the adoption of both public and hybrid cloud services by enterprises.

 

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Cloud computing, Cloud Services, Google, News

Google Pairs Up with Broad Institute

Google has paired up with high profile Broad Institute at MIT to develop its cloud genomics platform. The scientific community has needed new technologies to deal with the scale of genomic information and Google and the Broad Institute are looking to provide that.

This technology will process store, process and share genomic information as well as making it useful and accessible. The institute released a statement saying: “The goal is to enable any genomic researcher to upload, store, and analyze data in a cloud-based environment that combines the Broad Institute’s best-in-class genomic analysis tools with the scale and computing power of Google.”

Broad Institute will make its Genome Analysis Toolkit, or GATK, available as a service on the Google Cloud Platform. Initial access to the GATK will be limited, but eventually the service will be made more widely available. Any user will be able to upload their data to the cloud and GATK will analyze it using Google’s computing capacity.

 

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Product manager at Google Genomics, Jonathan Bingham, wrote in a blog post: “In order to scale up by the next order of magnitude, Broad and Google will work together to explore how to build new tools and find new insights to propel bio-medical research, using deep bioinformatics expertise, powerful analytics, and massive computing infrastructure.”

This partnership allows researchers to outsource the configuration of technical specifications and maintenance of computing capacity to Google.

GATK could give Google an edge over other cloud computing companies such as Amazon Web Services in the genomic field; however, Google partnership with Broad is not exclusive.

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