Late last week, Verizon issued its Verizon 2012 Data Breach Investigations Report, highlighting IT security issues. And while the telecom’s own summary of the report highlights the rise of hacktivism – 58 percent of data breaches in 2011 were attributable to hackers out to advance political or social agendas, the report says – there’s some good ...

Tracelytics announced today a a $5.2 million Series A round of funding led by Bain Capital Ventures. Tracelytics tackles the challenges of monitoring Web applications across an entire stack, between layers and hosts. In a blog entry, Tracelytics Chief Technology Officer Spiros Eliopoulos explains how their cloud-hosted, software-as-a-service (SaaS) application performance management (APM) platform stands ...

A report released by the National Inflation Association (NIA) indicates that by 2013, cloud computing could be a $150 billion market – bigger than the dot-com boom of the year 2000. The proof, according to the NIA, lies in the cloud’s solid performance on Wall Street. Just take a look at 2012’s cloud IPOs thus ...

At this week’s Structure Data conference, Google discussed BigQuery, its forthcoming entrant into the emerging big data marketplace, leveraging Google’s computing power and algorithmic know-how as a cloud platform for business intelligence and analytics. The service has been available in a closed preview since 2010 and is available now in a closed beta. Google BigQuery, ...

In a pair of customer case studies released today, Amazon Web Services hammered on the usual sales pitch for the cloud: Lower OpEx, higher ROI, better scalability and so forth. But what really stood out to me was the Foursquare Labs study, which went into some detail on how the cloud is helping the 10 ...

Earlier this week, Google made a quiet announcement that could have a widespread impact: Web applications that integrate with the Google platform no longer use passwords or shared keys, relying instead on certificates and the OAuth 2.0 secure login standard. To be more precise, these new Google Service Accounts are designed to both secure and ...

Online video provider Movideo has signed a four-year contract (sorry, “strategic agreement”) with Microsoft Windows Azure to move its Java-based platform into the cloud as it attempts to grow its business in the Asia Pacific region. It’s a huge Java transition, and the fact that Movideo tapped Windows Azure for this project speaks volumes about ...

Amazon Web Services, the cloud services arm of e-retail giant Amazon.com, and Eucalyptus Systems, purveyors of the namesake infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) private cloud platform, have announced a partnership that enables the easy migration of workloads between public and on-premises clouds. Just don’t call it a hybrid cloud. The short version is that Amazon is supporting Eucalyptus ...

In a blog post, Gartner analyst Tom Bittman identifies the top server virtualization trends to watch out for in 2012 as the market matures. Short version: VMware’s dominance in this space is threatened as competitive choices mature and customers begin to fear the ramifications of getting locked into its ecosystem. Here are Bittman’s points, distilled: ...

Cloud-hosted Internet telephony provider RingCentral is bringing an old technology into the modern IT landscape with the introduction of CloudFax, promoted as the first-ever fully cloud-integrated fax solution – which may be akin to developing a new, innovative steam engine. That cloud enablement comes by way of integration with Dropbox, Box and Google Docs. A ...