Insiders have publicly bet against Red Hat’s platform-as-a-service, but I say it’ll stand by OpenShift without regret. Is platform-as-a-service only a feature of infrastructure-as-a-service and destined to vanish? Citrix’s chief technology advocate Reuven Cohen made that argument recently, but i feel it is the wrong way around: Infrastructure may best be approached through a PaaS. I think there’ll several different platforms-as-a-service that will help you launch your next-generation application at the cloud of your choice. I say several because there’s been a debate recently about whether the successful launch of a Cloud Foundry Foundation amounted to the death knell of Red Hat’s OpenShift PaaS and the related Project Solum in OpenStack. Project Solum is suffering momentary suspended animation, because the dust settles around rival VMware/Pivotal’s announcement of a foundation for its Cloud Foundry project. Some Solum backers, comparable to Rackspace, IBM, and Ubuntu, seem like shifting allegiance. Joshua McKenty, CTO of Piston, gave the look to be only stating the most obvious when he bet... Read More »

Hosting provider’s compromised password system, not a hacked hypervisor, caused defacing of OpenSSL.org site, site reps say – after VMware cries foul. Top 10 Cloud Fiascos (click image for larger view) The administrators of OpenSSL.org have backed off a up to date charge that their site was defaced Dec. 29 by a Turkish hackers group who reached it through a compromised hypervisor. The hypervisor that was under suspicion appears to had been VMware’s ESX Server, and the charge brought a denial on Thursday from VMware, after it conducted its own investigation. OpenSSL site administrators said Friday that the intrusion occurred instead through its hosting provider’s compromised password system. That exposure gave the crowd, calling itself TurkGuvenligiTurkSec, temporary control of a virtualization console and allowed it to put a taunting but otherwise harmless message at the OpenSSL site. Not one of the site’s code repositories were altered within the intrusion, an OpenSSL spokesman said in a post to the OpenSSL.org website. OpenSSL administrators had previously said... Read More »

Cloud security, mobile security, advanced behavioral detection, and some other surprises make this latest crop of newcomers worth watching. It’s boom times for security startups as experienced researchers, security entrepreneurs, and other industry players attempt to profit while helping enterprises cope with the following generation of threats. With technology addressing everything from cloud and mobile security to advanced threat detection, this latest class of startups shows promise, offering a spate of latest development within the year to return. Bluebox Still working in stealth mode, Bluebox just picked up another sizeable chunk of change to continue developing technology to support enterprise data on employee-owned devices. As of now the corporate remains heads down, though it does have a nominal place available in the market with a free security scanner inside the Android app store. The app looks for a flaw that that may give the opportunity to show legitimate apps malicious. TaaSERA Spun out of a $10 million 5-year Army research project, TaaSERA’s patented behavior detection... Read More »

What IT skills and roles could be well-known this year? Recruiters share the inside track. 10 Jobs Destined For Robots (click image for larger view) Sorry, IT job-hunters: If you are hoping for startling predictions about what 2014 has in store, you’re probably going to return away dissatisfied. That’s because it’s unlikely there’ll be any seismic shifts that totally upend the technology skills, roles, and titles that employers want. “There’s nothing that i’d say is the recent ‘hottest thing ever’ ” coming in 2014, said Jack Cullen, president of IT staffing firm Modis, in an interview. Indeed, much of what follows should sound familiar. This might be an even thing. Earth-shattering predictions have a knack for missing the mark. (Apocalypse 2012, anyone?) So the job-market calls that Cullen and other industry experts shared with InformationWeek are more realistic and more useful in case you are in quest of a brand new position in 2014. Here they’re, in no particular order: 1. Big data experts. Yesterday’s... Read More »

As PayPal transforms itself for transactions over smartphones and other mobile devices, it’s found Node.js to be an indispensable tool. PayPal was undergoing a makeover for roughly two years now, and the company’s senior director of user interface design, Bill Scott, says Node.js has become one of many top tools in its transformation. Scott, a former head of Netflix e-commerce user interface design, says Node is an indication of the deeper changes underway at PayPal. One of Scott’s assignments at Netflix was designing an ideal way for Sony PlayStation 3 owners to download movies. Other than creating one user interface to check, his team came up with four and tested they all with PlayStation users. He said in an interview with InformationWeek that the one who won was not the single the developers would have chosen. The tale shows how he prefers to select technologies that let him to experiment and test different options quickly. Scott described how PayPal has used Node.js, in addition to... Read More »