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IBM has announced the launch of the first SoftLayer cloud data centre in Germany, joining an ever growing list of cloud service providers (CSPs) setting up roots in the European country.

The move, to Frankfurt, had been coming, with Germany and France on Big Blue’s confirmed list of targets after launching a London data centre back in July, Paris already having been opened.

It’s a prevalent trend for cloud providers for a variety of reasons; it helps customers based in Europe attain the stricter security and data privacy regulations on the continent, as well as lowering latency to improve application performance. IBM claims there is only seven milliseconds of latency between the Frankfurt and Amsterdam data centres.

“Data privacy regulations in the European Union are among the most stringent in the world, and Germany has one of the strongest policies,” said SoftLayer CEO Lance Crosby in a statement. “While all our cloud data centres have SoftLayer’s same strict standards for security and privacy, the new Frankfurt facility will allow German companies and clients to benefit from in-country data storage, a requirement in many industries to comply with German data protection laws.”

The move makes sense for all parties, with Germany consistently in the top five of IBM Cloud’s best performing EMEA countries in terms of monthly recurring revenue and growth.

Following a ruling in New York whereby Microsoft had to hand over data stored on an overseas server, it has become imperative for organisations – and CSPs – to ensure data is truly kept private.

Back in November Interoute launched a second virtual data centre (VDC) zone in Germany, following their Berlin data centre in 2012, while Amazon Web Services opened a series of data centres in Frankfurt in October. Salesforce also mentioned the possibility of expanding its European operations to Germany, following the launch of its first UK data centre in the same month.

Pricing was not disclosed, although IBM is offering a $500 discount to Frankfurt customers, valid until March 31. You can find out more here.

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As cloud continues to pervade businesses, the primary role of central IT will be to protect sensitive data, maintain centralised software and optimise IT spending, managing chargebacks to line of business.

This is the key takeaway from a study published by IDC and Red Hat. Entitled ‘How IT is planning for its hybrid reality’, the study examines how many of the challenges facing IT with the proliferation of cloud relate back to business rather than technology.

The accompanying survey, which polled over 200 IT professionals in North America, found that 69% of respondents were using at least four public cloud IaaS platforms today, including AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, VMware vCloud Hybrid Service, Rackspace, and IBM SoftLayer.

IDC notes the fractured landscape of the IaaS market with this data, although related research suggests a clear pecking order and dominant players, with AWS ahead of Microsoft.

This shared ownership demands a new management model, according to the report. Even though organisations are taking a hybrid cloud approach, cloud management tools have yet to catch up, requiring greater degrees of application and data portability, along with a greater number of integration points.

Primary challenges in creating a new management model include developing a public cloud governance strategy, cited by 35% of respondents, as well as unifying the management of public and private cloud resources (25%). Just under a third (32%) of respondents said they were allowing users to manage cloud services on their own, while 36% said they were enabling IT to enforce policy while looking for ways to allow users to manage their own cloud services.

It’s a clear sign for executives to change. 45% of respondents cite deploying a unified cloud management platform as one of their top five initiatives going forward, although problems with deploying it include managing chargebacks and SLA reports for the business, as well as ensuring alignment between business and IT goals.

One of the more interesting facets to come out from this research goes against the commonly held belief that IT is unaware of how IT services are swapping over to cloud providers. “Respondents displayed awareness of the proliferation of public cloud services, and they do recognise the need to increase their level of responsiveness to users, even if IT believes it is already offering a reasonable set of services,” the report notes.

Gordon Haff, a cloud strategist at Red Hat, said of the results: “Augmenting in-house IT with public clouds can help organisations develop the applications and services the business needs faster and deliver them more flexibly. However, a completely ad hoc approach to using public clouds is a recipe for high costs and compliance failures.

“A cloud management strategy lets you take advantage of new and innovative cloud platforms while maintaining control of IT and protecting the business,” he added.

You can take a look at the full report here.

The race to hire is on. By 2029, the U.S. Census Bureau notes that the entire baby boomer generation will be over the age of 65. But even now, boomers are leaving the workforce in considerable numbers, and finding replacements will be stiff competition among organizations looking to attract the more modern-thinking millennial workforce.
But it’s not just ping-pong tables, summer Fridays, and flexible work environments that will bring you top-tier talent. It’s the technology you deploy throughout your organization, and the commitment you have to staying modern in an ever-changing business world.

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SYS-CON Events announced today that MangoApps will exhibit at SYS-CON’s 16th International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on June 9-11, 2015, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY., and the 17th International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on November 3–5, 2015, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
MangoApps provides private all-in-one social intranets allowing workers to securely collaborate from anywhere in the world and from any device. Social, mobile, and easy to use. MangoApps has been named a «Market Leader» by Ovum Research and a «Cool Vendor» by Gartner. 20,000+ business customers worldwide.

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Cloud Computing has helped us understand both the opportunity, and the need, to decouple physical IT infrastructure from the requirements of business. In theory cloud computing greatly enhances an organization’s ability to not only decommission inefficient data center resources, but even more importantly eases the process an organization needs to develop when moving to integration and service-orientation within supporting IT systems.

Current cloud computing standards, such as published by the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have provided very good definitions, and solid reference architecture for understanding at a high level a vision of cloud computing.

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Tis’ the season – the season where I look back at predictions I made last year, the season where I evaluate and take a deep dive into the breach landscape and the season where I look into where 2015 is headed. In a March 2014 blog post, I discussed how the sheer amount of data breaches (i.e. Target, Adobe, Korea Credit Bureau, Neiman Marcus) is a clear sign cybercrime will continue to rise. We will dive into those predictions, stepping through where we stand today. But before we do so, we’ll provide a quick review on where we stand within the data breach landscape.

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Simply by having access, privileged users may unwittingly put data at risk – or be used by an outside actor as a conduit for siphoning data. Unsurprisingly, privileged accounts are very attractive targets for attackers seeking to leverage access privileges for their own nefarious purposes. Therefore, it’s completely accurate to say that all privileged users – regardless of whether or not they have bad intentions – can be considered an “insider threat.”

The post What We Talk About When We Talk About Insider Threats appeared first on Data Security Blog | Vormetric.

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2014 was a big year for Aria. Most notably, the company announced a record-setting year with revenue best across the board. While this is indicative of Aria’s success as a company, the findings are even more indicative of the space Aria occupies – recurring revenue, now estimated to be a $300 billion market across all industries and companies, is on the fast track with no signs of slowing down.

So now that we know the space is hot, let’s look back to the top read blog posts* of 2014 and identify the key takeaways to bring into the new year.

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According to the 451 Research report, “IndependenceIT’s strategy is focused on technology innovation, especially for multi-tenant and multi-cloud/datacenter scenarios. Its approach to rapid provisioning at scale, platform-agnostic service broker and out-of-the-box application and platform support simplifies the often-complex task of WaaS set up and application provisioning and de-provisioning. Its focus on service provider scenarios and agility at delivering new functionality will make it an attractive alternative for many service providers. Enterprises truly interested in a hybrid cloud approach with on-premises and hosted WaaS infrastructure are a unique opportunity also.”

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