The growing use of tablets, smart phones and cloud services is making it more complicated for IT organizations to manage user authentication and authorization to enterprise resources – as if it wasn’t difficult enough.
Consequently, the market for technology that provides secure single sign on is heating up. I delved into growing identity management as a services (IDMaaS) landscape a few months ago (see Going Cloud: Identity Management as a Service). In recent weeks, a number of companies have moved to up the IDMaaS ante including Centrify, Microsoft and Okta. And this week IBM rolled out an upgrade to its Tivoli Security Access Manager, with the launch of ISAM v. 7.0.
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Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 12/20/20120 comments
It looks like CA Technologies is going to step up its emphasis on cloud computing based on yesterday's announcement that it has appointed former Taleo CEO Michael Gregoire.
Gregoire will replace existing CEO William McCracken effective Jan. 7, CA announced yesterday. McCracken, 70, is retiring after a three year stint as CEO. Like his predecessor, John Swainson, McCracken spent more than three decades at IBM. Though former CEO Swainson retired in early 2010, he re-emerged in February as president of Dell's newly formed software group, where he recently engineered the $2.4 billion acquisition of Quest Software, a CA rival.
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Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 12/13/20120 comments
Citrix wants to ensure its place in managing employee-owned tablets, PCs and smartphones as well as cloud-based file sharing with the planned acquisition of leading MDM supplier Zenprise.
Citrix announced the agreement on Tuesday, for undisclosed terms. Citrix plans to integrate the Zenprise MobileManager, Zencloud and Zensuite offerings with its own MDM solution CloudGateway and the Me@Work portfolio, which includes the respective GoToMeeting and ShareFile cloud-based conferencing and document storage services.
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Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 12/06/20125 comments
VMware and its corporate parent EMC next year will form a new business entity, called Pivotal, that brings together the two companies' respective cloud platforms and products that enable the processing of big data. It's not clear whether the companies are spinning these assets off outright or how they will structure the new organization. VMware said it will formally announce the business structure next quarter. So far, we do know that the unit will be led by Paul Maritz, the former VMware CEO and current EMC chief strategy officer.
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Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 12/05/20120 comments
At its first-ever customer and partner gathering, Amazon Web Services officials this week were loud and clear in their assertion that corporations and the public sector should hasten their transition from operating traditional datacenters to instead running their infrastructures in Amazon's rapidly growing cloud service.
While Amazon is already the leading cloud infrastructure provider, the company used its re:Invent conference in Las Vegas to crank up the volume on its message that its vast array of cloud-based compute, storage and application services offer unlimited capacity and elasticity, coupled with its More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 11/29/20120 comments
Less than seven years ago, Amazon Web Services disrupted traditional datacenter computing with its cloud-based infrastructure services, allowing enterprise customers to provision compute and storage and pay based on usage without having to make capital outlays for hardware or software. Many who have moved to this model of paying for IT infrastructure as an operational expense have enjoyed considerable reductions in capital expenditures.
Now, Amazon is looking to similarly upend the way organizations deploy data warehouses. More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 11/28/20120 comments
In its latest bid to unify converged datacenters with cloud infrastructure and services, Cisco today said it has agreed to acquire Cloupia for $125 million.
Cloupia, founded in 2009, is based in Santa Clara, Calif. and offers software that lets organizations administer traditional datacenter infrastructure with cloud-based infrastructure. Cloupia's software provides a common interface to manage and monitor infrastructure across physical, virtual and cloud environments and is aligned with key providers.
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Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 11/15/20123 comments
Cloud Foundry, the VMware-sponsored open source initiative to provide interoperable platform as a service clouds, moved to simplify its effort to provide PaaS interoperability.
That interoperability comes in the form of its new Cloud Foundry Core, a framework aimed at enabling developers to build portable applications across PaaS-based clouds and includes an open mechanism to validate that an app is portable along the lines of the Cloud Foundry specs. It allows developers to enter an API endpoint to its Cloud Foundry Core-compatible.
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Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 11/15/20123 comments
Should organizations scrap their SharePoint deployments in favor of Office 365 or some other instantiation of Microsoft's collaboration platform that's subscription-based or hosted elsewhere? Microsoft left little doubt about the answer to that question as it showcases SharePoint 2013 and the SharePoint online upgrades to its Office 365 service this week at the annual SharePoint Conference in Las Vegas.
"We really recommend moving to the cloud for the best experience overall," said John Teper, the Microsoft corporate vice president known as the "father of SharePoint," speaking in his opening keynote at the annual SharePoint Conference on Monday. "We understand not everyone is there yet. This will take time. People who want to run their own servers, that's great. We have the best server release we've ever done in SharePoint 2013. The thing you should take away from our cloud focus is all we've learned about optimizing the system and deployment and monitoring, we've put into the server product and put into the deployment guidance."
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Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 11/15/20120 comments
Like millions of people in the Northeast, I am hunkering down as Hurricane Sandy is living up to its promise as the worst storm to hit this region in decades.
We have been told to expect power outages of anywhere from seven to 10 days -- not a prospect I am looking forward to, if that prediction comes true. Call me a prima donna, but I'm not one who enjoys roughing it, even though as a child I did my share of camping. But that was a long time ago.
I have done everything I can do to prepare for this storm. I stocked up on batteries early on (you can't find D batteries anywhere now to save your life), water, non-perishable food and an extra bottle of wine. And because business doesn't stop, of course I did whatever I could to ensure I could work, presuming we are otherwise safe.
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Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 10/30/20124 comments
At its annual Cloud Innovation Forum here in New York, IBM this week emphasized Platform as a Service (PaaS) as the next frontier for enterprise cloud computing.
IBM spent much of the one-day event, attended by 100 customers and 200 other stakeholders including business partners, talking up PaaS. The company's PaaS offering, called SmartCloud Application Services (SCAS), is available in pre-release form for customers of Big Blue's existing infrastructure as a service (IaaS) offering, SmartCloud Enterprise (SCE) and it will be generally available later this quarter.
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Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 10/18/20120 comments
Microsoft's deal to acquire StorSimple Tuesday for an undisclosed amount fills a key hole in Redmond's effort to offer enterprises its so-called Cloud OS.
StorSimple is a three-year old provider of cloud integrated storage (CIS) appliances that allow those who manage datacenters to add public cloud services to the storage tier of an enterprise network. By using cloud services for data storage, StorSimple argues companies can offer improved disaster recovery, while lowering total cost of storage ownership by 60 to 80 percent.
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Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 10/18/20120 comments