Rackspace Hosting, the service leader in cloud computing, on Thursday announced its acquisition of SharePoint911, an industry leader in SharePoint consulting, training, and "JumpStart" services within SharePoint. The unification of both companies provides capabilities to deliver unparalleled SharePoint hosting solutions along with expert services to the enterprise market. John Engates, chief technology officer at Rackspace, noted that they are "thrilled to have the world-class expertise of SharePoint911 on our team to give us greater application delivery service capabilities. SharePoint911 will add the talent and expertise to our teams to make SharePoint deployments easier for our customers while increasing their scalability and performance through better integration of the workload and infrastructure." Founded in 2004, SharePoint911 is widely recognized in the Sha... (more)

Riding the Enterprise Cloud Computing Wave of Change into the Future

The term cloud computing was first coined in 2007. Enterprise Cloud Computing seems to have emerged as a term in 2009. It's now 2011 and many are trying to ride the wave of Enterprise cloud computing or private cloud into the future. In a short four years, we've seen this phenomena of cloud permeate everything. Some question its validity as a technology and a term. If you look at the Gartner hype curve, the mere questioning of cloud can be considered validation. The abbreviated Gartner curve shows the rapid progress of cloud and private cloud from term introduction to the "peak o... (more)

Oops! HTML5 Does It Again

A multitude of security-related solutions rely upon the ability to extract and examine mime-objects from web-content. HTML5 may significantly impair their ability to do so. The trade off between security and performance has long been a known issue across IT organizations. One of the first things to go when performance is unacceptable is a security solution. This isn’t just an IT phenomenon either; consider how many of us have disabled endpoint security solutions like anti-virus scanners to improve performance? Our refusal to be slowed down by what may seem to some as extraneous s... (more)

Startup Debuts with Encryption for Cloud Computing

Israel-based startup Porticor launches this week with technology aimed at giving enterprises a way to encrypt data held in cloud computing services, including those from Amazon and Rackspace. Porticor Virtual Private Data is focused on protecting data at rest in cloud-based computing centers where customers rent disk space or servers, says Gilad Parann-Nissany, Porticor’s co-founder and CEO. What Porticor is doing that’s distinct is relying on a so-called “split-key” method in which the service to encrypt and decrypt doesn’t work unless both pieces of the key are together. The ... (more)

We Need Cloud UI Standards

If you're like me, you rely on a host of cloud applications to get your job done each day. While the convenience and familiarity of apps built for the web is great, I can't help but notice the difference between each user interface (UI) I use. Currently, all cloud-based ERP software vendors are approaching the user interface with their own design style. For users that work with multiple cloud apps each day, this can be disorienting - not to mention bad for productivity and usability. As more products are built for the cloud, I believe that we ought to start thinking about creati... (more)