Savvis on Wednesday announced the availability of Savvis Symphony Database, a cloud-based database platform, in Europe.
Symphony Database, which Savvis unveiled in October 2011 in North America, brings the advantages of cloud computing to Oracle and Microsoft SQL Server environments without long-term licensing or server provisioning.
With just a few clicks, Symphony Database supplies everything necessary for a complete, secure database solution. Performance levels can be scaled up or down based on business needs, without interrupting operations, while providing performance guarantees and reduced costs compared with hosted database solutions.
«Savvis clients choose Symphony Database because of its quick availability, pay-as-you-go model and instant scalability translates into reduced database expenses and complexity,» said Neil Cresswell, EMEA managing director at Savvis. «We bring Savvis’ mission-critical expertise to the Symphony Database, providing performance levels and availability on par with your traditional data center.»
London City Lifeline Colo Gets ISO27001 Security Certification
City Lifeline, the central London colocation data centre, has today been awarded ISO27001 Information Security Management Certification. This accreditation confirms that City Lifeline’s security systems and processes meet the highest recognised international standards for physical security and information security.
Security, both of equipment operation and data integrity, is critical for all companies and organisations. When asked, organisations using data centre and colocation services consistently rate security as their number one priority. The internationally administered and recognised ISO27001 certification gives customers confidence that a data centre operates at the highest level of security and that it consistently delivers what it claims.
Commenting on the achievement, Roger Keenan, managing director at City Lifeline said: “We are thrilled to have been awarded the prestigious ISO27001 accreditation. Achieving ISO27001 took us over a year of hard work. All of our existing processes and procedures were reviewed and overhauled where needed and comprehensively documented. City Lifeline has always been strong on security and this new certification confirms that companies and organisations can trust and rely on us to keep their equipment and data 100 per cent secure.”
ISO27001 is an internationally recognized certification that sets out specific physical and information security standards, which must be continuously maintained by those to whom it is awarded.
Cloud Computing: Compuware Unveils Outage Analyzer
Compuware Corporation on Wednesday announced a new generation performance analytics solution that raises the intelligence of software-as-a-service (SaaS) application performance management (APM). Outage Analyzer provides real-time visualizations and alerts of outages in third-party web services that are mission critical to web, mobile and cloud applications around the globe. Compuware is providing this new service free of charge. Check out Outage Analyzer here.
“Compuware’s new Outage Analyzer service is a primary example of the emerging industry trend toward applying big data analytics technologies to help understand and resolve application performance and availability issues in near real-time,” noted Tim Grieser, Program VP, Enterprise System Management Software at IDC. “Outage Analyzer’s ability to analyze and visualize large masses of data, with automated anomaly detection, can help IT and business users better understand the sources and causes of outages in third-party web services.”
Cloud Expo Silicon Valley: Building a "Mainstream" Private Cloud
Private clouds are a great way to provide real-time service delivery of IT resources with a single-tenant, customized, secure environment. However, the challenge of scaling and managing physical resources still exists. The solution may be to leverage an Infrastructure-as-a-Service provider to build an off-premise Private Cloud to add scalability to your current private cloud.
In his session at the 11th International Cloud Expo, Duke Skarda, CTO of SoftLayer, will discuss:
How to achieve scalability at Internet speed
Why it makes technical and business sense to host the cloud off-premises
What hosting options are available
Cloud Data Privacy – Perspecsys
Perspecsys are a vendor offering technologies for ‘Cloud Privacy By Design’ best practices, or what they call ‘Cloud Data Protection’. They are pioneering a key segment of the Cloud industry, the ‘On-Site Cloud Gateway’ device. Although Cloud value is conveyed by the centralized and shared hosting of applications, there are a number of factors that […]
Is cloud ROI “of the people, by the people, for the people”?
Originally posted on ComputerWorld
Companies are shifting resources to the cloud for a variety of reasons: efficiency, cost, analytics, customer service, etc. While these are worthy goals, there’s a more fundamental objective that companies leveraging the cloud should strive for: unlocking the collective brainpower of your workforce and customer base.
While the term «social» means different things to different people, at the heart of the concept lies an understanding that people are the organisation’s most valuable asset.
In a truly «social» business, technology implementations – be they cloud, mobile or social media – all support the ability of your workforce to collaborate, innovate and remain agile.
To offer a techy twist on James Carville’s famous election season adage, when it comes to maximising cloud investment, it’s the people, stupid, that ultimately determine the value of your implementation.
How smart, or stupid, then, are today’s cloud-dwelling companies?
If …
Parallels and CloudFlare Deliver the Perfect Upsell: Web Performance and Site Security for SMBs
Parallels is pleased to announce the latest milestone in our alliance with CloudFlare, a global leader in Web performance and security. CloudFlare for service providers selling Parallels Plesk Panel (versions 11 and 10.4) is now available through the APS catalog. It takes less than 5 minutes to install and comes in two plans: CloudFlare Free and CloudFlare Performance Plus. Parallels is now making it extremely easy for service providers to upsellCloudFlair’s enterprise-grade website performance accelerator with built-in security, perfect forsmall and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) who are concerned about cloud security, yet also seek competitive advantages like Web acceleration for their sites.
In addition, CloudFlair delivers many operational benefits to Parallels Plesk Panel service providers by reducing server load and bandwidth usage, while protecting their servers from DDoS attacks. On average, a website on CloudFlare loads twice as fast for its visitors, experiences 65% fewer requests and can save upwards of 60% of bandwidth. There’s even an automatic IPv4/6 gateway, which enables site availability for visitors on IPv6 networks, while keeping IPv4 infrastructure intact until you’re ready to migrate.
Improved website performance and lower operational costs are only part of the CloudFlair story. SMBs continue to cite security concerns as a major barrier for adopting cloud-based applications and services. By securing their websites from potential threats, service providers can rest assured their hosting customers are better protected, while their end user site owners concentrate on managing their content and running their businesses. «The new CloudFlareplugin for Parallels Plesk Panel allows for quick and easy deployment,» said Gerado Altman, National Partner & Reseller Manager at Velocity Host. «We would love to keep CloudFlare as our own secret weapon, but really the more users who are on the network the greater the power CloudFlare has to wield against malicious attacks and help all those who use their services.»
CloudFlare aims to bring premium performance and security services to every website. Today, over 500,000 websites use CloudFlare, ranging from blogs and SMB e-commerce storefronts to governmental agencies and Fortune 500 companies. Interested Parallels Plesk Panelservice providers can download CloudFlare today via the APS catalog. Not a Parallels Partner yet? Sign up here (even at the no obligation Member level), then head down the path to greater profitability with Parallels Plesk Panel and CloudFlare.
Senior Business Development Manager, Parallels Service Provider Marketing
GreenButton CEO to Present at 11th Cloud Expo with Dell Cloud Evangelist
Scott Houston, chief executive officer for GreenButton, and Stephen Spector, cloud evangelist for Dell, Inc., will be co-presenting «Game Changer – High Perfomance Computing in the Cloud For Everyone,» at the 11th International Cloud Computing Expo. Scott and Stephen will discuss how companies of all size and budgets can best leverage cloud based high performance computing, without breaking the bank. They will also demonstrate the simplicity and cost efficient methodology for running a rendering workload in the cloud in a matter of minutes instead of hours.
Amazon Simple Workflow Service: Easy to Program Glue for Complex Processes
One of the more obscure services Amazon AWS offers is the Simple Workflow Service. Using Deciders and Workers, SWS allows the building of complex tasks, including those that run in parallel, all while retaining fault-tolerance and scalability. This video gives a nice overview.
Cloud Expo Silicon Valley – Cloudonomics: Can the Cloud Be Strategic?
Many have focused on the cost reduction possibilities of the cloud, some have focused on business agility. However, the cloud can play a strategic role, as well.
In his session at the 11th International Cloud Expo, Joe Weinman, Sr. VP of Cloud Services & Strategy at Telx, will discuss how the cloud can enhance operational excellence, i.e., improve business processes. It can enhance customer relationships and the customer experience. It can help differentiate products and services. And, it can accelerate innovation. Moreover, it can play a key role in sustainability, thanks to its ability to act as a substitute for other energy-intensive approaches and its ability to optimize physical processes.