CA snags Arcot: Another step for cloud identity & security

Not everything in the news this week is about VMworld. CA Technologies pulled in an interesting new security-related acquisition today, one that brings in solutions focused on advanced authentication and on-line fraud detection. The idea is to leverage these capabilities to help solve some of the issues in cloud computing related to one of the key concepts that needs solving: managing identity.As

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Back to school -- for the cloud? Try not to forget the multiple paths for virtualization & cloud

Summer vacation is really a bad idea.At least, that’s what TIME Magazine reported a few weeks back. Despite our glorified, nostalgic memories of endless hours on the tire swing above the old water hole (or, more likely, trying to find towel space on a lounge chair by the gym’s overcrowded pool), apparently kids forget stuff when they aren’t in school.So, now that everyone’s headed back to the

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CA, 4Base, and why consulting is a good idea, even in the era of self-service

Sure, self-service is one of the key attributes expected from cloud services. But contrary to what you may hear from vendors, it’s not always possible to do everything you need to do to using only something that comes in a box (or even if it’s provisioned as a service, as is increasingly the case). Getting virtualization broadly adopted in your organization or a cloud-style infrastructure running

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Despite the promise of cloud, are we treating virtual servers like physical ones?

RightScale had some great data about usage of Amazon EC2 recently that described how cloud computing is evolving, or at least how their portion of that business is progressing. At first glance, it certainly sounds as if things are maturing nicely.However, a couple things they reported caused me to question whether this trend is as rosy as it seems initially, or if IT is actually falling into a

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Video: Time machines and other good uses for cloud computing

The folks working on our 3Tera AppLogic product revved up a short video that I thought was a good illustration of a couple ways customers are using the product to help them.Plus, honestly, I thought the team came up with some amusing names for the not-so-amusing quandaries that customers are in – the things they are using cloud computing to solve. Add a groovy beat behind it all, and it’s

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Internal clouds: with the right approach, you might be more ready than you think

If you saw the headline “You’re Not Ready for Internal Cloud” making the rounds last week, you might have thought Forrester analyst James Staten was putting the nail in the coffin of the private cloud market. Or maybe you just thought he was channeling Jack Nicholson’s Colonel Jessep from “A Few Good Men” (yelling "You can’t handle the truth!”…about cloud computing?).It turns out neither is the

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