UCaaS and CCaaS in on the way

cloud



"Have you ever used a Swiss Army Knife?

It’s full of everything you could conceivably need in a pocket-sized tool: knives, files, a magnifying glass and even a toothpick and corkscrew. It’s pretty useful, but you still have to pull out the specific piece for the corresponding function.
What if that Swiss Army Knife retained all its functionality, while being as easy to use as a spoon?
Take that concept and apply it to turnkey cloud-based enterprise solutions, and you have the Avaya Collaboration Pod.
UCaaS and CCaas Right Out of the Box
Avaya today announced two new Collaboration Pod models specifically for Cloud Service Providers, enabling them to offer Unified Communications-as-a-Service (UCaaS) and Contact Center-as-a-Service (CCaaS) to end customers. These virtualized products come set up right out of the box and customized to the customer’s specific needs, simplifying the Data Center environment through integrated management and support.
... "

Apple goes green with solar-powered data centres

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Doing Cloud Right




"One of the difficulties in a relatively young market like cloud computing is defining what the cloud actually is. All too often, I hear from cloud purists that cite some startup that drew up a clean-sheet design, hosted everything on AWS, and had great success. The thing is, there are relatively few startups that go on to operate at significant scale - but there are a lot of existing enterprises that would like to get some of those advantages.

Even before we codified our approach as Cloud Lifecycle Management, BMC has always had the goal of enabling existing enterprises to get the best of both worlds: get the best out of their existing IT environment, and also engage with the emerging world of cloud computing.

This approach has been validated both by customers and by analysts, with Ronni Colville of Gartner stating "This market emerged in about 2009 and BMC was one of the first to get there, and of all the vendors probably the only one to stay true to the mission". That quote comes from a recent Forbes article, which recounts the success of one particular customer's cloud computing project."




Read more on >>Doing Cloud Right | Hybrid Cloud Management

BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management

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BMC with Cloud Lifecycle Manager (CLM) helps firms develop Amazon-like cloud flexibility in-house. The company recently released CLM 4 for hybrid clouds that enforces IT compliance and change management policies across private and pubic cloud services. 
 In a Press Release Delivered on 25th June 2014 company reads:

"BMC Demystifies Hybrid Cloud for the Enterprise

Cloud Lifecycle Management Solution Brings Enterprise IT Service Management and Compliance Support To Amazon Web Services™ and Microsoft Azure



HOUSTON, June 25, 2014 - BMC Software today announced the release of BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management 4.0 (CLM 4),the first hybrid cloud solution that enforces IT compliance and change management policies across both private and public cloud services.
CLM 4 addresses the competing needs for hybrid clouds to deliver fast time-to-value and long- term governance. This new offering is available as an appliance or service that can take customers from zero to cloud in less than one week.  CLM 4 also includes new support for Microsoft Azure and an expanded integration with Amazon Web Services™ public clouds.
BMC is the first company to offer end-to-end compliance and IT Service Management governance across physical and virtual infrastructures and private and public clouds. This is particularly important for regulated industries, including:
  • Health care hybrid cloud: BMC helps hospitals and health care providers enforce HIPAA requirements both inside their firewalls and in the public cloud.
  • Financial hybrid cloud: BMC enables financial services companies to apply uniform PCI and SOX compliance rules to all workloads within a hybrid cloud environment.
  • Federal hybrid cloud: BMC ensures that both civilian and defense agencies are able to take advantage of cloud computing while meeting the applicable DISA, NIST and SCAP security compliance standards. 
Addressing the need for more agile and cost-efficient cloud services, CLM 4 delivers a next generation service designer and auto-scales cloud resources according to pre-defined service performance requirements. This ‘auto-scaling’ capability ensures high levels of service availability while driving down costs by guarding against over-provisioning of resources.
Supporting Perspectives
Dr. Swamy Kocherlakota, managing director, Global Head Infrastructure Architecture and Engineering, Bank of NY Mellon:
"BNY Mellon has deployed its cloud solutions using BMC's Cloud Lifecycle Management (CLM).  Using CLM, we were able to rapidly deploy our critical infrastructure on-demand and CLM's integration capabilities enabled us to extend our cloud as a fully functional Platform-As-A-Service. CLM 4’s auto-scaling functionality, service designer and open stack integration will further enable us to enhance our cloud offerings internally."
John Frazier, vice president of Cloud Services, JDA Software:
“As a long term customer of BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management, we have benefited from the powerful automation capabilities of the solution which mean faster time to value for our customers.  We are excited to be moving to this latest release, CLM 4, which will continue to help us drive business agility while ensuring compliance and ITSM governance across our cloud infrastructure.” 
David Savino, chief technology officer, Column Technologies:
“BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management 4.0 provides the IT automation, compliance and change management functionalities that private and hybrid cloud customers have been asking for.  This product demonstrates BMC’s responsiveness to the demands of the market and their commitment to offer a Cloud Management Solution that is more capable and flexible than any other offering I have seen.”
Mary Johnston Turner, research vice president, Enterprise System Management Software, IDC:
“As enterprise cloud usage matures, customers are moving beyond simply prioritizing rapid infrastructure provisioning to automate production-grade cloud operations that optimize resource utilization for both deployment and day to day operational activities.  To support these more complex cloud environments, the need for IT process integration to drive compliance in hybrid cloud computing is clear. BMC's latest release of Cloud Lifecycle Management provides important automation and change management capabilities that are critical for today's production-grade clouds.”
Michael Coté, research director, Infrastructure Software, 451 Group:
“Our market research shows that compliance is important to customers and they are challenged by balancing the speed and agility of cloud computing with the ongoing need for governance and compliance.  Cloud management platforms' challenge here is helping these customers by providing agile automation functionality while enforcing a consistent governance and compliance framework across all infrastructure – existing physical and virtual as well as private and public clouds.”
Chris Keene, president, BMC cloud and datacenter automation group:
“There is a dangerous compliance gap in cloud computing today, where IT compliance and governance rules are not applied consistently across public and private clouds.  BMC is leading the way in providing CIOs with a hybrid management solution that can enforce compliance requirements consistently across on-site services like vSphere and off-site services like Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure.”
Links for further information:
BMC Software.  IT innovation drives business transformation.
BMC Software delivers innovative IT management solutions that have enabled more than 15,000 customers worldwide to leverage complex technology to drive extraordinary business performance.  BMC does this by helping companies understand how they can place technology at the forefront of business transformation to improve delivery and consumption of digital services, increase operational agility and vastly exceed previous infrastructure capabilities, from mainframe to cloud to mobile. To learn more, visit bmc.com.  "

A new malware treatens point-of-sale (POS) Systems

cloud

A new malware threat scans the Internet for POS systems and tries to access them using common usernames and passwords.





Thousands of compromised computers are actively trying to break into point-of-sale (POS) systems using brute-force techniques to guess remote administration credentials.
The computers are part of a botnet, dubbed BrutPOS by researchers from security firm FireEye, that has been active since at least February. The botnet scans attacker-specified IP (Internet Protocol) address ranges for systems that accept Remote Desktop Protocol (port 3389) connections.
When an RDP service is identified, the BrutPOS malware attempts to log in with user names and passwords from a predefined list.
"Some of the usernames and passwords indicate that the attackers are looking for specific brands of POS systems such as Micros," the FireEye researchers said Wednesday in a blog post.
Micros Systems is based in Columbia, Maryland, and provides software applications, services and hardware systems, including POS terminals, to the hospitality and retail industries.
If the BrutPOS malware successfully guesses the remote access credentials of an RDP-enabled system it sends the information back to a command-and-control server. Attackers then use the information to determine whether the system is a POS terminal and if it is, to install a malware program that's designed to extract payment card details from the memory of applications running on it....
Data collected from these servers suggests that the botnet is made up of 5,622 compromised computers from 119 countries. The researchers identified 60 RDP-enabled systems -- most likely POS terminals -- that have been compromised, 51 of which are based in the U.S.

Computer Weekly names the 25 most influential women in UK IT

cloud

Computer Weekly has revealed its list of the 25 most influential women in UK IT in 2014.
The aim of compiling the annual list of the top 25 women in UK IT is to focus on the role of women in IT, to recognise the most influential role models and to discuss the vital part that female IT leaders will play in the UK’s high-tech economy.
Here is 5 of them

1. Dame Wendy Hall, professor of computer science at the University of Southampton, and founder of the Web Science Research Initiative

Dame Wendy Hall is founding director – along with Tim Berners-Lee, Nigel Shadbolt and Daniel J Weitzner – of the Web Science Research Initiative, a long-term research collaboration between the University of Southampton and MIT. 
She is a fellow of the BCS, the Royal Academy of Engineering, the Institute of Engineering and Technology, and the Royal Society. She was awarded a DBE in 2009 and a CBE in 2000.

2. Dame Stephanie Shirley

Dame Stephanie “Steve” Shirley is a British businesswoman and philanthropist who in 1962 founded software company FI Group (later Xansa, subsequently acquired by Steria). She created work opportunities for women with dependants, and predominantly employed women – only three out of FI’s 300-odd programmers were male – until the Sex Discrimination Act 1975 made that illegal. 
She adopted the name “Steve” to help her in the male-dominated business world. 
In 1993, she officially retired at the age of 60 and has taken up philanthropy since then. She was awarded an OBE in 1980  and made a Dame (DBE) in 2000. 
She set up the UK-based Shirley Foundation in 1986 with a substantial gift. Its mission is to facilitate and support pioneering projects with strategic impact in the field of autism spectrum disorders, with particular emphasis on medical research.

3. Joanna Shields, non-executive director at the London Stock Exchange Group and chair of Tech City

Joanna Shields is an American-British non-executive director at the London Stock Exchange Group. Before that she was CEO and chair of Tech City Investment Organisation and the UK government’s business ambassador for digital industries. Since stepping down, she has stayed on at Tech City UK as chairman. 
Before that she was vice-president and general manager of Facebook in Europe. She has also been president of people networks at AOL, a position she assumed after AOL’s acquisition of Bebo. At Bebo, she served as CEO, and before that was managing director for Google Europe, Russia, Middle East and Africa. 
In February 2013, she was rated one of the 100 most powerful women in the UK by Woman’s Hour on BBC Radio 4.

4. Chi Onwurah, shadow Cabinet Office minister for digital government

Chinyelu Onwurah is shadow Cabinet Office minister for digital government, including cyber security. She is also leading Labour’s pre-election review of digital government policy. 
She was elected at the 2010 general election as MP for Newcastle upon Tyne Central. 
A chartered engineer and former head of telecoms technology at UK telecoms regulator Ofcom, she became shadow minister for business, innovation and skills (innovation, science and digital infrastructure) in 2010. She is co-chair of the Parliamentary ICT forum (Pictfor) and board member of the Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology.

5. Maggie Philbin, CEO, TeenTech CIC

Maggie Philbin has worked in radio and television for over 30 years on a wide range of science, medical and technology programmes. She is co-founder and CEO of TeenTech CIC, an award-winning organisation that helps young people, their parents and teachers understand more about the real opportunities in science and technology. 
In 2012, she was awarded an honorary doctorate from De Montfort University for her contribution to the intellectual and cultural life of the nation and for stimulating interest in science and technology. 
She reports on science and technology for the BBC’s Bang Goes The Theory, provides analysis and comment on technology for BBC Webwise, and is a regular reporter on BBC 1’s Inside Out. She has a unique resonance with audiences, having presented on much loved shows such as Swap Shop and Tomorrow’s World.
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