It seems that the days of fear, uncertainty and doubt surrounding cloud adoption will soon be well and truly behind us.

The majority of industry sectors have either already implemented, or have begun investigating, cloud services. Even the most security-conscious sectors are beginning to take their first steps into cloud computing as we have seen with central government and banking.

Cloud adoption in the UK is continuing to rise, with end user satisfaction soaring due to the flexibility and cost-savings cloud services offer. But despite adoption levels growing rapidly over the past few years, it is only recently that the legal sector has begun to give cloud services serious consideration.  

Due to the very nature of law firms, the storage of sensitive information in an external environment has naturally been met with some caution. While early-movers have been experimenting with cloud services for some time now, the majority of the …

Virtualisation giant VMware has announced ‘VMware vCloud Hybrid Service – Disaster Recovery’, a service which provides a continuously available recovery site if a VMware data centre hits the skids.

The system, which promises an RPO (recovery point objective) of 15 minutes, offers 1 terabyte of storage from a minimum pricing point of $835 a month, with the service available in all five of VMware’s vCloud Hybrid Service data centres in the US and UK.

The overall effect is that VMware has joined the disaster recovery game head first, with the virtualisation biz offering ease of access, security and cost with ‘a simple, automated process for replicating and recovering critical applications and data in a warm standby environment at a fraction of the cost of duplicating infrastructure or maintaining an active tertiary data centre.’

“We continue to aggressively execute our hybrid cloud vision, delivering capabilities like DR that businesses can use …

The cloud computing revolution is well underway and there are lots of benefits to be realized. According to Awesome Cloud research the industry will be worth more than $150 billion this year, compared to $46 billion just six years ago. Mirroring the general trend for SaaS solutions, cloud-based IT security systems can be an ideal fit for smaller businesses, freeing them from internal IT overhead, cutting complexity, and providing scalability.
Here are five reasons that switching to a cloud-based endpoint security system makes sense for your business.

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VASCO Data Security International, Inc., has announced on Tuesday that it will release its Q1 2014 results on Thursday, April 24th.
On April 24, at 10.00 am EDT/16.00 CET, VASCO will hold a conference call, which will be streamed on the VASCO website.
Mr. T. Kendall Hunt, Chairman and CEO, Mr. Jan Valcke, President and COO and Mr. Cliff Bown, Executive Vice President and CFO of VASCO, will be available on April 24 to answer analyst, investor and media questions.

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Cloud computing security can be a conundrum. The point of using the public cloud is to outsource certain infrastructure and application needs to third party providers, after all. How can you secure your data once it leaves your perimeter and your control? As puzzling as it may seem, there is hope.
Luckily for organizations looking to adopt the cloud, securing sensitive information outside the corporate perimeter isn’t as daunting (or as impossible) as it may appear. Technologies exist to enable cloud computing security strong enough for companies to remain in compliance while taking full advantage of the flexibility, agility, and economies of scale of the cloud. Avoid these common pitfalls for a secure cloud experience.

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Jelastic on Tuesday announced support for multiple ISV software packages in Jelastic’s products for enterprises, hosting service providers and developers. This support is achieved using OpenShift by Red Hat’s pluggable Cartridge standard, allowing those developers to build application interfaces only once, instead of multiple times for each PaaS/platform, and immediately achieve support for OpenShift PaaS and Jelastic Platform-as-Infrastructure.
“Jelastic is committed to dramatically simplifying the development, deployment and management of the enterprise cloud, providing full control to IT management while allowing self-management of environments and resources to developers and DevOps,” said John Derrick, Jelastic CEO.

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SOASTA on Tuesday announced the company has expanded its award-winning mobile functional test automation solution, TouchTest, to include local test labs of Apple iOS and Google Android smart phones and tablets. The TouchTest Private Device Cloud is a simple to manage, affordable internal cloud for mobile application testing. It provides a comprehensive platform to manage and control mobile application testing assets. With TouchTest Private Device Clouds, mobile development and testing teams can now remotely manage devices, apps and tester activity.

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Back in September, Nirvanix announced to its customers that they had two weeks to move its data before the company went down the plughole.

As the enterprise cloud storage provider waved the white flag, Gartner research director Kyle Hilgendorf noted in a blog post that the analyst house’s paper on cloud exit strategies was one of the least popular in the collection.

“I suspect it is because cloud exits are not nearly as sexy as cloud deployments,” he demurred. “They are an afterthought.”

This is an issue that patently needs to change. As Hilgendorf asserted, recovery in the cloud may not be sexy, but they’re just as vital as moving to the cloud, whether it’s through natural disasters or company shutdowns.

The good news is that there are plenty of options out there, from niche providers to the big guys, such as VMware, and IBM, who added …

You use an agile process; your goal is to make your organization more agile. What about your data infrastructure?
The truth is, today’s databases are anything but agile – they are effectively static repositories that are cumbersome to work with, difficult to change, and cannot keep pace with application demands. Performance suffers as a result, and it takes far longer than it should to deliver on new features and capabilities needed to make your organization competitive. As your application and business needs change, data repositories and structures get outmoded rapidly, resulting in increased work for application developers and slow performance for end users. Further, as data sizes grow into the Big Data realm, this problem is exacerbated and becomes even more difficult to address. A seemingly simple schema change can take hours (or more) to perform, and as requirements evolve the disconnect between existing data structures and actual needs diverge.

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ActiveState on Monday announced that Bernard Golden has joined the company as Vice President of Strategy. Named in Wired.com as one of the ten most influential people in cloud computing, Bernard has extensive experience working with organizations to help them adopt and integrate cloud computing effectively. He will help ActiveState customers apply best practices and meet their goals as they leverage the cloud with ActiveState’s Stackato® solution.
“Cloud computing is becoming the rule for enterprises,” commented Bernard Golden, VP of Strategy, ActiveState. «Organizations across the gamut of industries, CPG, telecom, banking, medical, retail, they’re ramping up cloud adoption. Those enterprises who leverage the cloud most effectively will continue to be first to market and game changers spawning entirely new types of applications made possible by a leading cloud. The Stackato solution provides the cloud governance and agility that enterprises require, alongside development, deployment and social monitoring tools for next generation innovation. ActiveState is well-positioned for continued growth. I look forward to being part of the ActiveState team and helping our customers leverage cost-savings, accelerate app deployment and innovate.”

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