Archive for the ‘Cloud Hosting’ Category

Secure Cloud Server Management

Friday, July 30th, 2010

Cloudkick has integrated multi-factor authentication into their website by working with YubiKey, the innovative USB-key by the leading open source strong authentication company Yubico, Cloudkick customers can now login easily and securely for managing their cloud servers.

Cloudkick enhances it’s security by having a second authentication factor which would supplement the typical username and password single-factor process and could be used for different authentication and identification purposes, basically from day one. After evaluating different authentication solutions, Cloudkick chose the YubiKey. After 6 months of using the YubiKey internally, Cloudkick decided to offer the solution to their customers.

“The reasons for choosing YubiKey was that it’s secure -technical specifications are open, portable -most of our employees carry it around on a key chain and it’s easy to use -the process is transparent and you don’t need to have any extra software installed to use it,” says Robert Hrdinsky, Community Manager at Cloudkick.

“Cloud management tools have become business critical for the majority of IT-companies. We are pleased to partner with a fast growing and innovative player such as Cloudkick for providing a great user experience of secure cloud management,” says Stina Ehrensvärd, CEO at Yubico.

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Extreme Networks Enters The Cloud

Thursday, July 29th, 2010

Extreme Networks announced that colocation provider Profitability.net has chosen its virtualized 10 Gigabit data center, cloud and storage networking solutions based on its 4 Pillar Data Center strategy, as it rolls out its Appica.com cloud service.

“While time to market and total cost of ownership were top priorities in our network procurement process, we truly benefitted from Extreme Networks expertise in dealing with virtualization and creating a highly available data center and cloud architecture,” said Aaron Larkins, CEO for Profitability.net. “In order to scale our high availability cloud service offering, we needed Extreme Networks Summit X650 with its sophisticated virtualization capabilities, 10 Gigabit copper and high performance stacking.”

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70% of New Cloud Hosting Customers Are Using Windows

Thursday, July 29th, 2010

At Microsoft annual FInancial Analyst Meeting, COO Kevin Turner made the statement “One of the most exciting things about our cloud strategy is that 70 percent of the wins in the cloud that we had in Q4, ladies and gentlemen, were new Microsoft customers,” Tuner told financial analysts. “Yeah, new Microsoft customers. They were IBM Lotus Notes customers, Novell e-mail customers. They were all this other stuff, in addition to the Microsoft customers, that we’re actually able to grow our portion of the pie this next year in a very dramatic way, because we can explode worker productivity.”

Let’s get this clear what he is saying, 70% of New Cloud Hosting Customers Are Using Windows for their cloud server.  He refers to “New” in this statement, meaning that NEW people switching from other places. The number Turner stated is staggering, assuming his definition of “new” means a customer who isn’t using Microsoft products somewhere else, which is a tough claim for this reporter to believe.

“We now have over 10,000 paying customers on our cloud infrastructure platform and that number is continuing to grow every day, Turner said. (By the way, I could not get Microsoft’s video plug-in to work in any non-Internet Explorer 8 browser; I’ve pulled the quotes from the live transcript, which uses a Java plug-in.)

Turner FAM 2010 slide

“Our second big focus for businesses clearly is around the Windows 7 and Office 2010 refresh,” Turner told FAM attendees. Microsoft sells nearly 8 copies of Windows 7 a second. “For the first time in a long time, we grew share versus Apple in the United States in laptops per IVC this past year. Thanks to Windows 7. In fact, we were up 2.7 points against Apple in the United States in laptops.” Now, I am a huge Apple fan and the fact that he’s mentioning Apple in a meeting like this means that they view Apple cloud servers and Apple cloud hosting as a large competitor in the Microsoft cloud hosting world.

I guess we’ll have to see what is in store for Microsoft that can oust the Apple Giant in the next year.  Can Microsoft cloud servers top the new apple cloud servers that are being released?  I guess we’ll see!

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