Articles about Cloud

Protecting sensitive data and meeting compliance rules is an issue for all companies. A new cloud-based module offers on-demand encryption to allow businesses to meet their security needs.

The hardware security module (HSM) from nCipher Security is called nShield and, delivered as a service, can be used in cloud-first strategies, selective cloud migration, or to add HSM capacity to handle workload spikes.

Continue reading →

Enterprise adoption and deployments of multi-cloud technology have grown 50 percent year-on-year according to a report from continuous intelligence specialist Sumo Logic.

As customers adopt multi-cloud, Kubernetes adoption has significantly risen too with enterprises backing the container solution to drive their multi-cloud strategies. According to the study 20 percent of customers in AWS-only environments use Kubernetes.

Continue reading →

System and database administrators are now being forced to do something about legacy SQL Server 2008 and 2008 R2 database applications. The reason is the end of Extended Support in July 2019. Extended Support will also end for its common companion Windows Server 2008 and 2008 R2 in January 2020. Upgrading to the latest versions is always an option, of course, but Microsoft is providing an attractive alternative when upgrades are not viable or cannot be cost-justified: Migrate the database to the Azure cloud and get three more years of Extended Security Update support at no additional charge over the standard virtual machine pricing.

This article highlights important considerations for migrating mission-critical legacy SQL Server 2008/R2 databases to the Azure cloud to help administrators make more informed decisions. Among the key considerations is knowing which options are and are not available.

Continue reading →

New research from internet infrastructure company Nominet finds that 61 percent of security professionals believe the risk of a security breach is the same or lower in cloud environments compared to on-premise.

The study of nearly 300 UK and US C-level security professionals, marks a major shift in the perception of security of the cloud. However, it doesn't mean the cloud is viewed as entirely safe.

Continue reading →

The UK government has always maintained that following Brexit, the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) will be absorbed into UK law. This means that there will be no material changes to the data protection rules that organizations in the UK will need to follow.

However, the French data protection regulator has recently said that in the event of a no-deal Brexit and absence of an adequacy decision, it will treat the UK like any other country that is outside the European Economic Area. In other words, it will treat the UK as a "third country."  It’s likely that other EU country regulators will take this approach too -- and such decisions have legal implications for organizations.

Continue reading →

Organizations are going global and their infrastructures, thanks to the cloud, are going global as well. Today, mid-sized and even small companies are doing business on a global stage. Whether this global growth takes place by opening new offices or by acquiring them, one of the thorniest challenges is enabling collaboration between them, because it requires sharing large, unstructured data and application files across vast distances. And this task only becomes more complex and difficult as both files and the number of people who need to work with them simultaneously grow larger. This shift toward more companies going global creates a distinct need.

The traditional IT infrastructure -- one in which the corporate data center is located at the headquarters -- is not at all suited for providing collaboration with large files at scale. What's required is a new, disruptive technology category, with platforms that combine the control and performance of network attached storage (NAS) with the unlimited capacity and economy of the cloud.

Continue reading →

It's widely acknowledged that there's a skills shortage in the cybersecurity field. Many businesses are looking to address this by training their own security talent, but this in itself can be a challenge.

We spoke to Zvi Guterman, founder and CEO of virtual IT labs company CloudShare to find out how the cloud can help address security training issues.

Continue reading →

A new survey of over 1,100 IT professionals carried out by managed service provider Faction reveals growing usage of and interest in VMware Cloud on AWS.

According to the study 64 percent of respondents say they have workloads in Azure, 57 percent AWS, 25 percent VMware Cloud on AWS, and 26 percent Google. But 29 percent of respondents plan to increase workloads on VMware Cloud on AWS in the next 12 months, while 15 percent plan to start running workloads and 14 percent plan to increase the number of workloads.

Continue reading →

The cloud computing industry has seen huge growth in the past nine years, considerably more so than what was anticipated. In 2018, as many as 96 percent of businesses utilized it in some way.

In 2010,  the cloud computing industry was worth approximately $24.50 billion. Now, in 2019, it is worth over $100 billion, and it keeps on growing. It's predicted that by the time 2020 rolls around, the industry will be worth a massive $150 billion!

Continue reading →

At this year’s VMworld, a relatively little-known feature of vSphere is getting a surprising amount of attention. The VMware vSphere APIs for IO Filtering (VAIO) aren’t as well-known as other storage features like Virtual Volumes or Virtual SAN, but they’re very important for VMware vSphere as a hybrid cloud platform, especially with respect to cloud-based services for disaster recovery (DR) and business continuity (BC).

The new attention to VAIO is due to a number of well-known data protection vendors announcing that their solutions will begin to use the API. This article doesn’t take a deep dive into the API itself (there’s an excellent technical introduction in this blog post). Rather, the point of this discussion is to explain why IO filters are increasingly important to enabling DR/BC services and why the vendors in this space are updating their products to use the IO filters API.

Continue reading →

Having your browser read web pages to you is a great accessibility feature, and it also allows for multi-tasking. There's just one problem -- the computerized voices used are little short of terrible... often to the point of being distracting.

With the Dev and Canary builds of Chromium-based versions of Microsoft Edge, however, this changes. Embracing the power of the cloud, Edge now features 24 more natural-sounding voices driven by Microsoft Cognitive Services.

Continue reading →

Within enterprises, legacy platforms are becoming marginalized as modern data-driven platforms become the preferred choice for data teams. Artificial intelligence and machine learning are powerful solutions for big data that are encouraging enterprises to accelerate their digital transformation towards the cloud. It should be no surprise then that, according to Cisco, four percent of workloads will be hosted in cloud data centers by 2021. Despite this, there is some reluctance amongst organizations to build on their data programs with these solutions. Regardless, ignoring the cloud is a critical oversight for enterprises looking to meaningfully analyze the vast quantities of structured, semi-structured or unstructured data within their networks. More concerning, however, is the critical insights that will be overlooked or missed entirely by enterprises relying on legacy software.

The cloud is starting to clearly denote itself as the de facto choice for investment in big data. Canalys estimates that cloud investment will surpass $143 billion by 2020. While Fortune 500 companies have historically been reluctant to dip their toe in the digital transformation pool, there has been a radical shift in attitude in recent years. More than a corporate buzzword, the term 'digital transformation' now carries with it the promise of large ROIs and even larger data pipelines. This has lead to a culture where having large-scale, full production workloads is a tangible reality and not merely a distant goal.

Continue reading →

Once upon a time you bought a license for a piece of software and you could, essentially, run it forever. While much of the market has now shifted to subscription models, 65 percent of producers are still offering perpetual licenses, while 74 percent utilize subscription models for some or all of their products.

A new report from Flexera, which looks at changing licensing and deployment models, finds that when software producers are asked how they will change their monetization models over the next 18 months, both usage and subscription models will see the strongest increases.

Continue reading →

A new report from enterprise file sharing platform FileCloud looks at cloud and data security and finds that 50 percent of companies don’t plan on moving mission critical workloads to the public cloud.

The survey of 150 professionals from industries including health care, financial services and educational institutions finds that shifts in perceptions of data security are impacting movement to the cloud.

Continue reading →

The cybercriminal's most effective weapon in a ransomware attack is the network itself, which enables the malicious encryption of shared files on network servers, especially files stored in infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) cloud providers.

This is according to a new report from threat detection specialist Vectra which finds that by encrypting files that are accessed by many business applications across the network, attackers achieve an economy of scale faster and far more damaging than encrypting files on individual devices.

Continue reading →