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Unplug ghost servers, save a bundle

By |May 30th, 2014|Categories: IT Industry, Networking, Tech News|

Users who decommission equipment quantify savings for Uptime Institute

May 9, 2014

(Computerworld)

The Uptime Institute estimates that 20% of all racked IT equipment has no earthly function other than to warm the planet. But for data centers that do manage to unplug equipment, the savings are significant.

To draw attention to the issue of what are sometimes called “ghost servers,” Uptime held a contest, inviting data center managers to submit their own efficiency efforts. The results are impressive.

Barclays, the top performer in Uptime’s ranking, removed 9,124 physical servers last year. Those servers, in total, consumed 2.5 megawatts (MW) of power and could fill 588 server racks. The company’s power bill would be $4.5 million higher if the systems were still running.

Moreover, Barclays saved $1.3 million on legacy hardware maintenance costs and freed up more than 20,000 network ports and 3,000 SAN ports.

Sun Life Financial […]

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Trustwave Global Security Report Is Bursting With Valuable Data

By |May 29th, 2014|Categories: IT Industry, Security, Tech News|

Trustwave Global Security Report 2014

Are you in charge of your company’s Internet security? Do you manage the people who are? Then you should read the 2014 Trustwave Global Security Report. Don’t be put off by its size (nearly 100 pages). The report is formatted like a giant infographic, so it’s easy to grasp the facts it presents. In fact, even if you have nothing to do with managing website security, you may want to give it a read. Here are some of the high points.

How’d They Get In?
The data for this report comes from almost 700 Trustwave breach investigations in 2013, along with data from their operations centers, security telemetry, and research. 85 percent of the breaches made use of vulnerabilities in third-party tools, among them Java, Flash, and Adobe Reader. 85 percent! It’s not enough to to put Windows Update in automatic […]

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HP service automation tools make it easier for IT staffs to work with Chef, OpenStack

By |May 29th, 2014|Categories: Cloud Computing, IT Industry, Tech News|

IDG News Service – Hewlett-Packard has integrated its service automation programs with IT configuration and management programs Chef and OpenStack, a move that could make it easier for IT staff to work with these open source applications, often used by individual lines of business.

“We’re giving a lot of focus to open source technologies like Chef and OpenStack,” said Manoj Raisinghani, HP software senior director of global product marketing for automation and cloud management. As a result, “this allows the IT guy to work much more closely with the line-of-business owner.”

In June, HP will release new versions of HP Cloud Service Automation (CSA version 4.1), Operations Orchestration (OO 10.1), and HP Server Automation (SA 10.1).

The company will also launch a new package using these programs, called the Orchestrated Datacenter, that allows organizations to automate many of their data center operations. The package can be used to control physical servers, virtual […]

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“Hack-Proof” TextKey Turns SMS Authentication on Its Head

By |May 28th, 2014|Categories: IT Industry, Security, Tech News|

TextKey SMS Authentication

You’ve probably encountered one of the website authentication schemes that work by sending a one-time code to your smartphone and having you enter it online. The Mobile Transaction Authentication Numbers (mTANs) used by many banks are one example. Google Authenticator lets you protect your Gmail account in the same way, and various other services—LastPass, for example—support it as well. Unfortunately, the bad guys already know how to subvert this type of authentication. TextKey’s SMS authentication is a new approach, one that protects every stage of the authentication process.

Turn It Around
Old-style SMS authentication sends that one-time code to the user’s registered mobile number. There’s no way to be sure that code wasn’t caught by malware or intercepted using a clone of the phone. Next, the user types the code into the browser. If the PC is infected, the […]

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Welsh schools are going Google

By |May 28th, 2014|Categories: Cloud Computing, Computer, IT Industry, Tech News|

Posted by Liz Sproat, Head of Education, EMEA

Around the world, schools are finding innovative ways to use technology to break down the traditional walls of the classroom, while overcoming the challenges of higher academic standards and tighter budgets. Today, we’re pleased to share the stories from two schools in Wales who’ve gone Google to help them meet the demands of a modern-day education system.

Gowerton School in Gowerton Village serves 1,135 students aged 11 to 18. The IT team migrated students and educators from on-premise email to Gmail and Google Apps. Industry experts recognize them as one of the first schools in Britain to embrace cloud technologies.

The school’s entire curriculum – from geography to cooking – is taught with Google Apps. Students can access assignments, lesson plans and other learning resources through Google Drive, while teachers can provide immediate feedback through Google Docs. This has brought about significant teaching […]

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Tick, tock: Windows 8.1 users face patch ban as Microsoft sets next week’s updates

By |May 28th, 2014|Categories: IT Industry, Microsoft, Security, Tech News|

Computerworld – Microsoft today said it will issue eight security updates to customers next week that will include fixes for flaws in Internet Explorer (IE), Windows, Office and SharePoint.

Four of the bulletins, including the one targeting IE, affect Windows 8.1, the fall 2012 refresh of Windows 8. However, to receive those four updates, users of Windows 8.1 must have upgraded to Windows 8.1 Update, which Microsoft released just last month.

Of the eight updates, two were tagged “critical,” Microsoft’s most serious threat rating, and the remaining six were marked “important,” the next step down in the firm’s four-part scoring system.

May’s collection of updates is the largest so far this year: Microsoft issued four updates each in January and April, five each in February and March.

“It’s in the range,” said Andrew Storms, director of DevOps at CloudPassage, today. “It’s not like this is a giant update.”

Storms recommended that users apply the IE […]

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HP plans to invest $1B in open cloud services

By |May 26th, 2014|Categories: Cloud Computing, IT Industry, Tech News|

IDG News Service – Following a similar move by IBM, Hewlett-Packard is unifying its cloud portfolio under a single architecture and brand name, called HP Helion.

The company has pledged to invest $1 billion in open cloud products and services over the next two years, along with community-driven, open-source cloud technologies.

“Just as the community spread the adoption of Linux in the enterprise, we believe OpenStack will do the same for the cloud,” said Hewlett-Packard CEO and President Meg Whitman, in a webcast announcing Helion Tuesday.

Customers have been asking for open-source-based cloud technologies, Whitman said. Harnessing the collective effort around open-source projects such as OpenStack, “the result is something that is more flexible, secure and affordable than any one company could do alone,” she said.

A distribution of OpenStack, called Helion OpenStack, is the first Helion component HP has released. Helion OpenStack will serve as the cornerstone for the Helion line of […]

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Time to Limit the Cyber Arms Race

By |May 20th, 2014|Categories: IT Industry, Security, Tech News|

We are in the middle of the biggest arms race since the Cold War, one that could lead to cyberwar, which we discussed in a recent post. Massive amounts of money are globally put into building cybercapabilities for defense, offense, and intelligence. This development is part of a large on-going trajectory: the strategizing of cyberspace and its movement into the national security sphere. Curiously, it is not the amount of weapons that serves as the defining factor in the race. It is the skills that people have and the level of technology they are able to develop.

A cyberweapon needs to be up to date on the target system, capable of exploiting a vulnerability that the defenders are not aware of, and able to create the desired impact. This makes cyberweapons products that cannot be stockpiled and shelved for a long period or used when needed. […]

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Lenovo set to launch cloud-based services for mobile devices, data centers

By |May 18th, 2014|Categories: Cloud Computing, Data Storage, IT Industry, Mobile/Wireless Devices, Tech News|Tags: , |

IDG News Service – The ability to come up with cohesive cloud offering has eluded Lenovo for years, but the company is taking steps to offer more services that it can wrap around its mobile devices and enterprise products.

Lenovo subsidiary Stoneware is planning to offer hosted application services that will build on existing secure cloud and virtual desktop services. Lenovo opened its first public cloud service just a year ago, building it around technology acquired from Stoneware in September 2012.

Stoneware’s current WebNetwork virtual desktop offering is more like a cloud desktop, with a browser-like interface providing access to remote applications, storage services and other Web application services. The tiled user interface provides access to applications like Microsoft Office and Adobe Photoshop, which are hosted in data centers and don’t need to be downloaded and installed locally on mobile devices and PCs. The cloud desktop […]

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Citrix adds desktop management to XenMobile

By |May 16th, 2014|Categories: Cloud Computing, IT Industry, Tech News|Tags: |

IT staff will be able to manage Windows 8 desktops in addition to mobile devices

May 6, 2014
(IDG News Service)

Citrix Systems wants to manage desktops and mobile devices with the latest version of XenMobile, and is also working on making it easier for XenApp users to upgrade.

Citrix is this week gathering employees, partners and customers for the company’s most important event, the Synergy conference in Los Angeles. The main theme this year is Citrix’s continued efforts to let users access data and apps on any device, and let the IT department manage and secure all of it, according to Matt Morgan, vice president of corporate product marketing management at Citrix.

To get closer to that goal, Citrix is announcing upgrades, new products and demonstrating technologies the company’s developers are working on. That includes XenMobile 9, a […]

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