Cloud

A high percentage of companies using AWS cloud services have at least one critical security misconfiguration according to a new survey.

Cloud security company Threat Stack has analyzed more than 200 companies using AWS and found a number of well-documented security misconfigurations.

Hardly a day goes by without some media coverage that is focused on cyber. Whether is it sensationalist headlines announcing the most recent cyber-attack that has left some unfortunate company red faced and bereft, the outcome of yet another survey generally conducted by an entity selling cyber related goods or services, or the announcement of new regulation and legislation. A front page headline of CITY AM screams CYBER CRIME WIPES £42BN OFF SHARES -- surely there cannot be a board director left who can deny awareness that cyber-crime poses a threat to his or her business.

Having engaged in the cyber debate for more than a decade, it seems we can at last all agree that the foundation stone is now well in place with widespread, if not universal, acceptance that cyber-crime and cyber risk are real and now an ever present challenge to businesses.

Many enterprises are moving towards hybrid cloud environments, but they face a challenge when it comes to working out how to control their cloud use effectively.

If they fail to do this and govern their cloud use properly, then any gains in agility they achieve will come with high costs and operational risks. We spoke to Andrew Hillier, CTO of Cirba, the company behind the Densify.com SaaS hybrid capacity analytics software, to find out how enterprises can bridge the gap between cloud hype and reality.

Enterprises are accelerating their use of encryption and the strategy is being driven by business units rather than IT teams.

This is among the findings of a study into encryption habits by cyber security company Thales, based on research carried out by the Ponemon Institute. It finds that 41 percent of enterprises now have an encryption strategy in place.

For enterprises, datacenters are at the heart of operations. With Azure, Microsoft has a vested interest in encouraging enterprises to move these operations to the cloud, and it is with this in mind that the company has launched a cloud migration assessment tool.

The free tool has been designed to give enterprises a way to determine whether it would make sense -- and how much it would cost -- to move to a hybrid cloud solution.

With its greater performance, reliability, and scalability, it is little surprise that we’re seeing a boom in  the deployment of public cloud services. According to a recent survey by Gartner, companies consider public cloud to be both the most disruptive and most impactful issue facing them in 2017. In fact, IDC predicts that the worldwide public cloud services spending forecast will double to more than $141 billion by 2019.

For most organizations, this first venture into public cloud has been in deploying new applications to engage with their customers (systems of engagement). Now, having successfully used public cloud platforms for these new applications, a growing number of application development and delivery leaders want to bring the same benefits of fast delivery, high security, and cost flexibility to core business applications.

Businesses encounter a variety of challenges in building systems on and around Spark to meet the needs of data engineering.

Often engineers need to perform mission-critical data cleansing, transformations, and manipulations, to make business activities real-time dashboards or fraud detection possible. Mastering data engineering is therefore an essential step to automating systems and making data-driven decisions.

The adoption of cloud IT services by small and mid-sized businesses (SMBs) is increasing at an exponential rate. But despite the robust adoption rates and proven track record of cloud technology, many organizations of all sizes, including SMBs, are still relying on on-premises backup methods. By doing so they may very well be draining themselves of valuable resources, including financial resources.

This article discusses the specific ways in which these organizations that continue to rely on on-premises instead of cloud backups are costing themselves money. It discusses benefits of adopting the cloud backup model, and addresses common concerns and misconceptions IT and business professionals often mention as reasons for staying with on-premises backups instead of adopting the cloud.

While companies are keen to benefit from the agility and cost savings of using the cloud, there are still concerns about the ability to monitor and secure systems to an enterprise standard.

Ireland-based network analysis specialist Corvil is addressing this with the launch of a software-defined solution for packet-level instrumentation of virtual machines in public, private and hybrid cloud infrastructures.

In the dash to move systems to the cloud many organizations neglect the need to safely backup their information.

Secure file services specialist CTERA Networks is addressing this problem for Amazon cloud users by making its Cloud Server Data Protection Platform available on the AWS Marketplace.

The speed at which companies have adopted cloud services has led in many cases to difficulties understanding and controlling the costs involved.

Enterprise cloud management company RightScale has a solution to this issue with a new stand-alone collaborative cloud cost management and optimization solution.

As shown by disruptive businesses such as Airbnb, cloud computing is changing the face of business as we know it. Organizations of all sizes anywhere can now harness the power of cloud-based tools to innovate and collaborate faster and more seamlessly than ever before.

Cloud is becoming the foundation for digital transformation, enabling enterprises to manage the pressure of increasing the pace of their production cycles and boosting collaboration throughout the world. McKinsey estimates that by 2018, more than half (51 percent) of enterprises will adopt cloud as their primary IT environment -- up from just 10 percent in 2015. Indeed, it is no longer often a question of "if" but rather "which" cloud services enterprises should use.

Organizations are increasingly faced with the need to support a more distributed environment, with employees accessing data on mobile devices and information stored both in-house and in the cloud.

Keeping these systems secure places a strain on traditional gateway security models, but cyber security company iboss is launching a new Distributed Gateway Platform is purposefully designed and packaged to offer today’s distributed organizations advanced gateway security capabilities.

Whilst cloud and hybrid models offer undoubted flexibility, they can lead to problems when it comes to keeping track of software licenses.

Analytics solutions company Teradata is looking to cut through the confusion with the launch of a new simplified licensing model. This aims to deliver portability for deployment flexibility, subscription-based licenses and simplified tiers with bundled features.

It's a rare business that doesn't have a website these days, but for smaller companies the process of building a site and keeping it up to date can be costly and time consuming.

Texas-based startup Snaplitics is aiming to fix this with the launch of an affordable tool for creating professional websites and landing pages without having to hire developers.