Joab Jackson

Author Archives: Joab Jackson

Microsoft fixes buggy browser in Patch Tuesday update

Internet Explorer, always heavily scrutinized by both security researchers and online attackers, has once again gotten the majority of patches in this month’s Microsoft’s Patch Tuesday round of monthly bug fixes.For June, Microsoft issued 8 bulletins, which collectively contain 45 patches. The bulletin for IE alone MS15-06 contains 24 patches, including 20 that cover critical flaws, meaning they should be applied as quickly as possible.Other bulletins cover faults in the Windows operating system, the Office suite, Windows Media Player, Active Directory, and the Exchange Server.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

CA acquires Grid-Tools for agile development

Adding to a growing portfolio of software development applications, CA Technologies has acquired Grid-Tools, whose software automates the process of testing newly-built applications.CA customers will be able to use Grid-Tools’ products to build software using agile development methodologies, in which small teams work in close collaboration to quickly build and update large applications.Last week, CA announced it is purchasing for $480 million Rally Software, which offers a set of software and cloud services to help developers manage complex software projects.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IBM muscles up on OpenStack with Blue Box buy

Betting that demand for hybrid clouds will grow strongly, IBM has acquired Blue Box, which specializes in offering OpenStack open source cloud hosting services.IBM will use Blue Box’s technology and infrastructure to help its customers adopt hybrid cloud computing, so that their workloads can be easily moved between a public cloud and their own data centers.A private company, Blue Box gives organizations an alternative to setting up and deploying the OpenStack internally, offering the software stack as a service instead. This allows an organization to control workloads from a single console whether they run on Blue Box’s private cloud or on internal infrastructure.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Silk Road mastermind Ulbricht sentenced

The creator and chief operator of the Silk Road has been sentenced to two life sentences in jail for running the online drug marketplace, which federal prosecutors estimated facilitated the sales of more than US$213 million worth of drugs and other unlawful goods between 2011 and 2013.The life sentences are to be served concurrently, along with a five-year sentence for hacking and twenty years for money laundering. The government is also seeking $183 million from Ulbricht based on the profits he made.In February, Ross Ulbricht was found guilty of multiple charges related to the operation of Silk Road, including narcotics conspiracy, engaging in a continuing criminal enterprise, conspiracy to commit computer hacking and money laundering. The narcotics and criminal enterprise charges carry maximum penalties of life in prison. Under current federal sentencing laws, Ulbricht faced at least 20 years behind bars.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

EMC scoops up Virtustream for cloud management in $1.2B deal

EMC is purchasing the privately held Virtustream software provider for approximately $1.2 billion to expand its portfolio of cloud management tools.Storage systems provider EMC will use Virtustream technology to aid customers moving to cloud-based services as an alternative to running data centers in-house. Virtustream's software can be used to manage complex enterprise applications, such as SAP's S/4HANA, so they can be run effectively on hosted infrastructure services.MORE M&A: 2015 Enterprise networking & IT M&A tracker Based in Bethesda, Maryland, Virtustream will be the basis of a new business unit at EMC. Rodney Rogers, the CEO of Virtustream, will lead the new business cloud services unit and report to EMC CEO Joe Tucci.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Survey claims New York startup scene is more innovative

A new survey is attempting to kick-start a rivalry between New York and Silicon Valley, claiming tomorrow’s innovative tech companies will pick east over west to set up shop.Out of 318 executives surveyed, more picked New York over Silicon Valley as the superior place to start a business, due to factors such as growing interest from venture capitalists, support from city and state government, and the considerable talent pool from Wall Street firms and Fortune 500 companies in the city.The survey was conducted by a New York-based data analysis company, 1010data, so we should probably take the findings with a grain of salt. But it claims the executives surveyed, taken from its customer base, were from companies throughout the U.S.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Google launches a service for storing big data

Google has introduced a service for storing large amounts of data online, potentially enabling organizations to execute big data analysis as a cloud service.The offering, called Google Cloud Bigtable, "is based on technology that Google has been running internally for many years, so it is not a brand new thing," said Tom Kershaw, who is Google's director of product management for the Google Cloud Platform.Bigtable powers many of Google's core services, including Google Search, Gmail, and Google Analytics.MORE ON NETWORK WORLD: Big data's biggest challenges The service could be used to store sensor data from an Internet-of-things monitoring system. Finance companies could house petabytes of trading data on the service to analyze for emerging trends. Telecommunications companies, digital advertising firms, energy, biomedical, and other data-intensive industries might benefit from the technology as well.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Microsoft picks security for the enterprise win

Microsoft is betting that good security support will be key to keeping its enterprise customers from straying to rivals.At the kickoff of the company’s Ignite conference for IT professionals, Microsoft executives unveiled a number of advanced security services, and took jabs at competitor Google for not being as mindful of security.“Google takes no responsibility to update their customers’ devices, leaving end-users and businesses increasingly exposed every day they use their Android devices,” said Terry Myerson, Microsoft’s executive vice president of operating systems. “Google just ships a big pile of code, and then leaves you exposed with no commitments.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Microsoft Build: Windows 10 starts here

Build 2015 is where the Microsoft truly begins the work of selling Windows 10, starting with developers.“This is a really important Build for Microsoft, probably the most important developer conference it has ever done. The company is on the brink of launching a new wave of operating system technologies that will affect almost everything it delivers over the next few years,” said Al Hilwa, IDC analyst who covers enterprise development, by email.Held this week in San Francisco, with the first keynote kicking off Wednesday morning, Build 2015 also promises to provide developers with more information about how to prepare their applications for the cloud, and may even offer a glimpse into HoloLens, the Windows 10-based virtual reality headset.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Amazon says its cloud is ‘a $5 billion business’

Amazon has finally shared some numbers about its cloud business, and not surprisingly they show that it’s thriving and profitable.Amazon Web Services brought in US$1.566 billion in net sales for Amazon’s first quarter, it said Thursday, up 49 percent from $1.05 billion AWS generated the same time a year ago. For this quarter, AWS netted a profit of $265 million, up from $245 million a year ago.AWS is a $5 billion business “and still growing fast—in fact it’s accelerating,” Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos was quoted as saying in a press release. He also called the group an “example of how we approach ideas and risk-taking at Amazon.”AWS now generates nearly 7 percent of Amazon’s total revenue. Overall, Amazon’s net sales for the quarter, which ended March 31, totaled $22.7 billion, up 15 percent from the $19.7 billion collected in the same period a year earlier. The company posted a net loss of $57 million in this first quarter, down from the $108 million it lost in last year’s first quarter.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Qualys devises a virtual patch to protect against vulnerabilities

If you can’t wait for that critical patch to secure your system from some just-discovered bug, IT security firm Qualys may have an answer, through new security software that can secure the trouble spot until the patch arrives.The feature, called virtual patching, comes with the newly released version 2 of the company’s Web Application Firewall, a set of software for securing Web applications against malicious behavior.Virtual patching can address one of the most thorny problems in enterprise IT security, that of protecting against a recently discovered software flaw. Sometimes attackers can start misusing a software bug as soon as it is discovered —- this is called a zero day flaw.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Raytheon forms defense-grade security unit with $1.9 billion Websense buy

Ever since its acquisition of Q1 Labs back in 2011, IBM has been selling its QRadar security event management software in the traditional way, whereby customers pay a price and download the version they want.On Tuesday, however, the company launched two new services that make the technology available through a cloud-based Software as a Service (SaaS) model instead.IBM Security Intelligence on Cloud, for instance, is designed to help organizations determine whether security-related events are simple anomalies or potential threats. Built as a cloud service using IBM QRadar, the tool lets enterprises correlate security-event data with threat information from more than 500 supported data sources for devices, systems and applications. More than 1,500 predefined reports are also available for a variety of use cases.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Raytheon forms defense-grade security unit with $1.9 billion Websense buy

Defense contractor Raytheon is purchasing Websense, which it plans to combine  with its own security unit to create a new, separately operated business to  battle criminal networks and state-funded espionage.Today's Internet attacks "are becoming increasingly more sophisticated and are  being perpetuated by state sponsored groups, criminal organizations,  hacktivists and insiders," said David Wajsgras, president of Raytheon  intelligence, information and services business, in a conference call Monday  announcing the acquisition. "Our goal is to provide defense-grade solutions  that allow our customers defend against [attacks], detect them early, decide  how to counter and defeat such attacks in real-time."To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

VMware prepares its virtualization stack for Docker

VMware may have pioneered enterprise virtualization, but until Monday it had been relatively quiet when it comes to Docker containers, the popular lightweight form of application virtualization.Now it’s addressing the market for Docker with two open source software packages that will allow its customers to more easily deploy containers in their existing VMware infrastructure.The company has released a Linux distribution, called Project Photon, which was designed to run within a VMware virtual machine hypervisor and contains only the barest essentials that an operating system would need for running containers. The company has also released access management software, called Project Lightwave, that gives system administrators a way to control the access to their containers.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Percona expands into NoSQL turf with TokuDB purchase

Expanding from its roots as a MySQL software vendor, Percona has also added the MongoDB to the roster of open source databases it supports, thanks to its acquisition of open source database software specialist Tokutek.With the purchase, “we’re becoming more of a database performance business rather than one focusing on a particular type of technology like MySQL,” said Jim Doherty, Percona chief marketing officer. “We’re broadening the scope of our technologies to better serve our customers and the market.”Tokutek offered a commercially supported distribution of the open source MongoDB NoSQL database, TokuMX. Percona will continue to offer TokuMX alongside its own enterprise-grade edition of the open source MySQL database, called Percona Server, which is a competitor to Oracle’s own MySQL commercial distribution.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Microsoft Patch Tuesday: The patches just keep coming

For Microsoft, the vulnerabilities just keep popping up, and appear to be surfacing more quickly than ever before.Like last month, Microsoft issued a fairly large number of security bulletins for April Patch Tuesday—11 bulletins addressing 26 vulnerabilities. Last month brought 14 bulletins from Microsoft, covering 43 vulnerabilities.A year ago, Microsoft’s monthly bulletins tended to be fewer in number, usually in the single digits, noted Wolfgang Kandek, chief technology officer for IT security firm Qualys.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Amazon offers network file storage in the cloud

Amazon Web Services continues to chip away at the enterprise storage market, with plans for a new service designed to be a nimbler alternative to network attached storage (NAS) appliances.The Amazon Elastic File System (EFS) will provide a shared, low-latency file system for organizations or project teams that need to share large files and access them quickly, such as a video production company.“The file system is the missing element in the cloud today,” Amazon Web Services head Andy Jassy said Wednesday at the AWS Summit in San Francisco. The service is not yet available for full commercial use, though a preview will be available shortly.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

In a mock cyberattack, Deloitte teaches the whole business how to respond

A security breach or big data loss can trigger an emergency for the entire business, not just for the IT or security teams, so staffers from multiple departments must know how to react quickly and effectively in such situations.This was one of the main lessons taught in a cyber incident war-gaming exercise held for the media on Tuesday in New York by consulting firm Deloitte.Deloitte typically conducts such exercises on behalf of large organizations that want to prepare for when they are hit by a major computer breach. In Tuesday’s event, the participants were executives from various companies, many of whom had participated in such an exercise before.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Microsoft creates a container for Windows

Hoping to build on the success of Docker-based Linux containers, Microsoft has developed a container technology to run on its Windows Server operating system.“We’re finding that interest in containers is very high,” said Mike Schutz, who runs cloud platform product marketing for Microsoft. Twenty percent of Azure users deploy Linux and a significant number of those users run Docker containers, he said.The Windows Server Container can be used to package an application so it can be easily moved across different servers. It uses a similar approach to Docker’s, in that all the containers running on a single server all share the same operating system kernel, making them smaller and more responsive than standard virtual machines.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IBM to pump $3 billion into new IoT business unit

Hungry for a bigger piece of the Internet of things market, IBM will invest US$3 billion over four years to establish a new business unit dedicated to providing IoT systems and services to enterprises.“We’re only at the very beginning of an amazing revolution. If we thought we were dealing with big data now, we haven’t seen anything yet,” said Erick Brethenoux, IBM director of analytics.IBM General Manager Chris O’Connor will oversee the new unit, which will initially court enterprises in travel, logistics, insurance, public utilities, transportation and retail, Brethenoux said.IBM will also tailor a new cloud service, the IBM IoT Cloud Open Platform, providing a way for enterprises to build their own data-driven systems, Brethenoux said. Over time, it will also develop specialized packages for specific fields like the insurance industry.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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