To manage complex web services with lots of calls to the cloud, many businesses have invested in Application Performance Management (APM) and Network Performance Management (NPM) tools. Together APM and NPM tools are essential aids in improving a business’s infrastructure required to support an effective web experience… but they are missing a critical component – Internet visibility.
Internet connectivity has always played a role in customer access to web presence, but in the past few years use of the Internet in the web experience has dramatically increased. The broadening use of Cloud Services sources means that web content is coming to the customer from all over the Internet in a multitude of paths. Relying solely on Network and Internet Service Providers will get you connected but at what cost to performance and cost. Gaining the ability to monitor, analyze and plan managing Internet paths and take more complete control of your customer’s experience is no longer a nice-to-have, it is critical to your brand and profitability.
Vets360 Founder Honored at the ‘Champions’ Leadership Conference
Veteran’s 360 and Rick Collins, Founder & Executive Director of Vets 360, Inc., are being honored at this year’s Champions Leadership, and Research Conference™ . This event, November 6th-7th, 2014 at the Washington Duke Inn & Golf Club in Durham, NC, is an independent conference, and a component of eMerging Entrepreneurs’ “Veterans Economic Advancement project.” A 501(c)(3) non-profit organization, eMerging Entrepreneurs, Inc. provides Career Transition Assistance, Small Business Training, and Entrepreneurial Developmental services to veterans, military spouses, and under-served minority communities. The organization employs a grassroots approach to assisting those who seek to advance their small business interests; partnering with state & federal agencies, universities, local chambers of commerce, and military installations in an effort to extend high-tech training & resource solutions to under-served communities. «Cloud Musings» and GovCloud Network are proud to be strong supporters of Vets 360
Moving Security into the #DevOps Lifecycle by @MMurray | @DevOpsSummit
The speed of product development has increased massively in the past 10 years. At the same time our formal secure development and SDL methodologies have fallen behind. This forces product developers to choose between rapid release times and security.
In his session at DevOps Summit, Michael Murray, Director of Cyber Security Consulting and Assessment at GE Healthcare, will examine the problems and present some solutions for moving security in to the DevOps lifecycle to ensure that we get fast AND secure.
PCaaS Provider @BlueBox Closes $10 Million Series B Financing [#Cloud]
Blue Box has closed a $10 million Series B financing.
The round was led by a strategic investor and included participation from prior investors including Voyager Capital and Founders Collective, as well as the Blue Box executive team.
This round follows a $4.3 million Series A closed in December of 2012 and led by Voyager Capital. In May of this year, the company announced general availability of its private cloud as a service offering, Blue Box Cloud. Since that release, the company has demonstrated market validation through customer adoption, positive reviews from industry analysts and key additions to the company’s technology and commercial teams.
This financing will allow the company to build on its successes over the past year and fuel continued technical innovation, significant growth of the engineering team and continued expansion of the company’s partnership, sales, and marketing programs. Specifically, the company will increase development of its proprietary management suite, Box Panel, with additional capabilities to support features valuable to customers and partners. The company will increase investment in both technical and channel partnerships while expanding sales and marketing teams and programs.
Eric Mandl of Guggenheim Securities advised Blue Box on the transaction.
Announcing @Appcore and @CitrixCloud Presentation @CloudExpo [#Cloud]
What are the benefits of using an enterprise-grade orchestration platform?
In their session at 15th Cloud Expo, Jeff Tegethoff, CEO of Appcore, and Kedar Poduri, Senior Director of Product Management at Citrix Systems, will take a closer look at the architectural design factors needed to support diverse workloads and how to run these workloads efficiently as a service provider. They will also discuss how to deploy private cloud environments in 15 minutes or less.
Announcing @Bitium «Exhibitor» of @CloudExpo Silicon Valley [#Cloud]
Headquartered in Santa Monica, California, Bitium was founded by Kriz and Erik Gustavson. The 1,500 cloud-based application using Bitium’s analytics, app management, and single sign-on services include bug trackers, customer service dashboards, Google Apps, and social networks. The firm states website administrators can do multiple tasks online without revealing passwords. Bitium’s advisors include Microsoft’s former CMO and the former senior vice president of strategy, the founder and CEO of Like.com, a product strategist at IBM and Oracle, Hootsuite’s CEO, and the founder and CEO of KISSMetric, among others. More about Bitium can be found on its website at www.bitium.com.
Announcing CEO Power Panel @CloudExpo [#Cloud #BigData #IoT]
Things are being built upon cloud foundations to transform organizations. This CEO Power Panel at 15th Cloud Expo, moderated by Roger Strukhoff, Cloud Expo and @ThingsExpo conference chair, will address the big issues involving these technologies and, more important, the results they will achieve. How important are public, private, and hybrid cloud to the enterprise? How does one define Big Data? And how is the IoT tying all this together?
China launches “Great Firewall” attack against iCloud
According to a report by web censorship watchdog Great Fire, China’s infamous state firewall is performing a MITM (Man-in-the-Middle) attack against users of Apple’s Cloud-based services. It is suspected the attack has been launched in response to Apple’s new default encryption methods.
It is possible to circumvent the fake site using a VPN, or one of iCloud’s many other IP addresses.
Since iOS 8, authorities can no longer bypass on-device encryption to gain access. The convenient timing of this attack is arising suspicion that the State-run firewall is attempting to steal as many of iCloud users’ details in order to provide complete access to their accounts; including any photos or text messages stored in the cloud.
Heading to iCloud.com using China’s most popular web browser, Qihoo, will redirect the user without warning to a dummy-site which imitates Apple’s site. However, using a browser such as Firefox or Chrome will display a warning message such as below:
It is possible to circumvent the fake site using a VPN, or one of iCloud’s many other IP addresses. It is not recommended to enter details on iCloud.com if visiting from China, and you can help reduce the risk through use of one of the browsers mentioned earlier.
Authorities everywhere are concerned about the new lack of access to mobile devices which has – on several occasions – helped with serious prosecutions and/or implementing preventive measures.
FBI Director James Comey told reporters: «I like and believe very much that we should have to obtain a warrant from an independent judge to be able to take the content of anyone’s closet or their smart phone,»
He continues: «The notion that someone would market a closet that could never be opened — even if it involves a case involving a child kidnapper and a court order — to me does not make any sense.»
Of course the argument against compromisable mobile devices is the lack of legal process which is often used. NSA whistleblower, Edward Snowden, unleashed a barrage of damning revelations about the agency’s PRISM program which had unparalleled access to mobile devices and was even reported to have backdoors in some of the biggest technology companies services – including Apple’s.
What do you think about Apple’s new security and China’s alleged MITM attack? Let us know in the comments.
Tech News Recap for the Week of 10/13/2014
Were you busy last week? Here’s a quick tech news recap of articles you may have missed from the week of 10/13/2014.
Tech News Recap
Another week with some big stories from the industry. EMC bought cloud management vendor Cloudscaling. Meg Whitman faced questions about HP-EMC merger talks. VMware expands its vCloud Air offering. Google widens the downloads lead over App Store. Apple patched 144 security flaws across seven products. VMware’s AirWatch Secure Content Locker was named a leader in Aragon Research Globe for MCM. There have also been some important updates around Cisco’s ASA line.
- Michael Dell To HP: Dell Is On The Attack, Playing Offense In Midst Of HP ‘Chaos’
- VMware expands vCloud Air to help firms move from private to public cloud
- Where giant companies are on their cloud journeys
- Using the cloud to enable a mobile student body
- CIO Focus Interview: Stuart Appley, Shorenstein
- EMC Buys Cloud Management Vendor Cloudscaling
- Snapchat and other online services need to tighten security
- GreenPages Bets Big On New Virtualization Technology
- Whitman Faces Questions About Death of HP-EMC Merger Talks
- CIOs Share Must-Have Cloud Skills
- Google Play widens download lead over App Store, but Apple still wins on revenue
- AirWatch Secure Content Locker named a “Leader” in Aragon Research Globe for MCM
- Average company now compromised every four days, with no end to the cybercrime wave in sight.
- Top CIOs All Share These 10 Traits
- Apple patches 144 security flaws across seven products
- Cisco ASA Line Updates: What You Need to Know
- New iPads on deck: What to expect from the Apple event
- Mark Zuckerberg Was Once on CNN’s List of ’10 People Who Don’t Matter’
What top tech news did we miss? Leave a comment with links to any quality articles from last week that other readers may enjoy! Listen to on-demand webinar to learn how your organization can modernize IT operations by killing the transactional treadmill. By Ben Stephenson, Emerging Media Specialist
Meet @RackWare November 4-6 at @CloudExpo Silicon Valley [#Cloud]
RackWare is a privately held company focused on delivering solutions to easily and cost-effectively enable the use of cloud for today’s enterprises. The company was founded in 2009 by entrepreneurs with extensive experience delivering enterprise-class products in the server, storage, network, and virtualization markets. RackWare brings intelligence and automation to the cloud, to improve availability for enterprises, provide greater flexibility for enterprise IT users, and reduce costs for enterprise IT providers. The Rackware approach enables users to dynamically scale physical, virtual, and cloud resources across private and public environments as computing needs fluctuate.