From open source organizations like Joomla to the infrastructure advocacy of the i2Coalition to financial backers like Cheval Capital, the organizations that support hosting and cloud will be part of the big-picture education provided by the HostingCon Global sessions.

HostingCon has always been vendor-neutral, and the variety of perspectives shared in the educational sessions is one of the strengths which makes it the industry’s leading conference and trade show. Open source or proprietary; public or private; enterprise or government; one-stop shop or channel partner, expertise will be shared on the topics closest to every possible kind of hosting and cloud service provider.

Information about the educational sessions at HostingCon Global New Orleans 2016 is still filtering out, and plenty of details are already available to the website.

Source: TheWHIR

As is often the case with prolonged outages, Digiweb’s customer communications gradually became the focus of frustrated Tweets.

@digiwebhosting 15.5 hours after your last update. Seriously, this is all you offer as an update? pic.twitter.com/TfQmxsUpCD

— Kevin Mullen (@mullers75) May 12, 2016

The Digiweb hosting support panel was updated at 2 pm on Thursday to report: “all services are now running as expected. Our engineers are monitoring these and will take appropriate action to ensure normal service.” The disruption did not, however, appear to be over.

@digiwebhosting https://t.co/NeZgAF14vw is gone again, Is the problem fixed or not? Are you going to compensate your Customers for this? — Colin Hoey (@Sammy_Snott) May 12, 2016

Digiweb did not respond to a request for comment in time for publication.

Source: TheWHIR

The attacks had succeeded in installing ransomware on two individuals’ devices after they clicked on Word attachments, though the infected files were retrieved without paying the ransom, a source told Reuters. The FBI issued a warning in June about remote access tools capable of stealing data, including a “BLT” Trojan found on appspot.com.

Appspot.com, where custom Google apps are hosted, has also been blocked on devices connected to the House’s Internet through WiFi or Ethernet.

“We began blocking appspot.com on May 3 in response to indicators that appspot.com was potentially still hosting a remote access trojan named BLT that has been there since June 2015,” one of the sources, a House staffer with direct knowledge of the situation, told Reuters.

A former employee of the House of Representatives told Reuters that he had created two apps hosted on appspot.com for use by congressional staffers, which they now cannot use.

Spokespeople for both Yahoo and Google said they will work with the House on a resolution of the vulnerability.

Ransomware became a significantly more common attack type in 2015, according to research by IBM X-Force, and Trend Micro predicted ransomware attacks would increase in 2016.

The US government is attempting to update Federal IT systems to make use of cloud services through the FedRAMP program, but some within the industry say the process needs to be reformed.

Source: TheWHIR

The decision to use public cloud along with its own data centers represents something of a departure for Salesforce. The cloud PaaS of Salesforce’s subsidiary Heroku is based on AWS, but most Salesforce core services are run out of the company’s data centers.

The Salesforce IoT Cloud has been in beta testing for select customers since it was announced, and Bosworth told the WSJ that it will launch in the second half of 2016.

Read more: Former EU Digital Agenda Commissioner Neelie Kroes Joins Salesforce Board

At the time of the announcement, Salesforce chairman and CEO Mark Benioff said: “Salesforce is turning the Internet of Things into the Internet of Customers. The IoT Cloud will allow businesses to create real-time 1:1, proactive actions for sales, service, marketing or any other business process, delivering a new kind of customer success.”

As the largest public cloud vendor, AWS offers a managed IoT cloud platform supported by tools like the recently announced Bsquare IoT developer software stack.

Source: TheWHIR

Read more: Rackspace Brings Signature Fanatical Support to AWS

The OpenStack growth is hardly surprising, given the emphasis Rackspace has placed on it over the past several years, even prior to announcing its expanded partnership with Red Hat in February. Rackspace continues to develop its OpenStack cloud, most recently through a partnership with cloud optimization startup AppFormix.

Rackspace bought back $68 million in shares in the quarter. Its stock was up roughly $0.80 or 3.5 percent to 23.35 on the New York Stock Exchange mid-afternoon following the report.

Analysts confidence in predicting Rackspace should be tempered by the company’s somewhat unexpected twists and turns over the past few years. Morgan Stanley analysts set a share price range of $40 to $12, with a base of $26 for the company following the report.

Rackspace also recently decided to re-assign 90 employees from its public cloud department, and also updated its OnMetal Cloud Server line.

Source: TheWHIR

Read more: Bigcommerce Ecommerce Platform Raises $50 Million to Expand Reach

The company says it has processed over $9 billion in sales through its platform. This includes sales by thousands of mid-market brands using BigCommerce Enterprise, as well as relative household names Camelbak and Toyota, all of which joined the company in the past year.

GGV Capital is based in both Silicon Valley and China, and it has an extensive history with software and ecommerce companies, including Alibaba and Square. Managing partner Jeff Richards will join the BigCommerce board of directors, where he will join CEO Brent Bellm, who joined the company in June. The company also formed a partnership with 2Checkout in July to enable transactions between international currencies.

“We believe we are still in the early innings of a massive global shift from offline to online retail, with mobile and younger demographics driving the trend,” said Jeff Richards. “BigCommerce and its competitors have brought hundreds of thousands of merchants online in the past few years, but there are millions left to come online – and today’s shopper shops online first.”

BigCommerce has raised $155 million to date. A recent report by aheadWorks put BigCommerce at 0.5 percent of the Alexa top 1 million websites.

Source: TheWHIR

Read more: Obama Names 12 Members to New Commission on Enhancing National Cybersecurity

Security analysts may need help, given the explosion in data available. IBM says the average organization sees over 200,000 pieces of security event data each day, and enterprises spend $1.3 million and nearly 21,000 hours just on false positives. The company also notes that the 75,000 items in the National Vulnerability Database, the 10,000 security research papers a year, and 60,000 security blogs published each month challenge analysts to move at the speed of information.

The looming problem is that they may not have an easy time hiring help, as studies have indicated that cybersecurity skills are in short supply.

“Even if the industry was able to fill the estimated 1.5 million open cyber security jobs by 2020, we’d still have a skills crisis in security,” said Marc van Zadelhoff, General Manager, IBM Security. “The volume and velocity of data in security is one of our greatest challenges in dealing with cybercrime. By leveraging Watson’s ability to bring context to staggering amounts of unstructured data, impossible for people alone to process, we will bring new insights, recommendations, and knowledge to security professionals, bringing greater speed and precision to the most advanced cybersecurity analysts, and providing novice analysts with on-the-job training.”

Read more: IBM Cloud Unit CTO Retires, Watson Fails to Impress at CES

In addition to Watson’s training, UMBC announced it will create an Accelerated Cognitive Cybersecurity Laboratory in collaboration with IBM Research.

Cybersecurity may be the niche Watson needs to get out there and get a job in the real world, after failing to impress at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show.

Source: TheWHIR

LISTEN: The WHIR: Cloud Talks, Episode 23 with Andrew Blum, HostingCon Keynote

Speed roundtables, industry workgroups, a marketing bootcamp and luncheon, and in-depth workshops provide a variety of formats to fit with the subject matter and the different learning styles of attendees.

As in past HostingCons the sessions are organized according to four tracks: Issues and Trends, Management, Sales and Marketing, and Technology. You can search the HostingCon educational session schedule using those tracks or other search criteria on the conference website, or you can export it to Outlook to set up your schedule.

Andrew Blum, author of the tech best-seller Tubes was previously announced as the keynote speaker, and there are more details about the HostingCon Global educational sessions still to come.

There are still a few choice sponsorship opportunities (PDF) and exhibitor booths available, and Early Bird rates take one hundred dollars off the price of registration for a little while longer, so register now and get a head start on planning for days full of educational experiences, exhibits, networking, and the city of New Orleans at HostingCon Global 2016!

Source: TheWHIR

SEE ALSO: Market Conditions Expected to Delay CloudFlare IPO: Report

“Usually, Internet performance improvements shave just milliseconds. In this case, the impact of HTTP/2 Server Push will be measured in seconds per page load, a quantum leap in performance that no service provider has been able to offer yet,” Matthew Prince, co-founder and CEO of CloudFlare said in a statement. “If with HTTP/2 Server Push we’re able to save one second off every page load served across CloudFlare’s network at our current scale, we would save about 10,000 years of time every day that people would have otherwise spent waiting for the Internet to load.”

HTTP/2 Server Push is currently in beta on Apple Safari, and is already supported in the latest versions of Chrome, Firefox, and Internet Explorer (Windows 10). CloudFlare is also providing an implementation guide for developers.

“HTTP/2 Server Push will enable a whole new class of web applications,” said CloudFlare CTO John Graham-Cumming. “It represents the biggest change in delivery of web content since AJAX–for the first time it gives web servers the power to send assets to a web browser. This upends the way in which the web works eliminating the need for countless browser performance hacks.”

CoudFlare launched a secure domain registrar business in February to appeal to high profile enterprises, and has been preparing to go public in more favorable market conditions, possibly in 2019.

Source: TheWHIR

“We dub it: ‘Cloudways 2.0.’ It is not enough to offer a Platform which performs well on the back-end and hosts super fast web applications,” Pere Hospital, CTO and co-founder of Cloudways said in a statement. “Any Managed Cloud Hosting Provider must offer a superb 360-degree experience. The spirit of Cloud lies in collaboration. Cloudways 2.0 will make working across teams easier. It will also make project handling easier for independent developers, design teams, and web dev agencies.”

Server locations are now available from the four new data centers in South Korea, Canada, France, and Silicon Valley. Cloudways has also introduced pricing plans for high volume users, ranging from $70 to $230 per month.

The company unveiled a new logo to go with its user experience update and complete its new look.

Cloudways also announced support for Let’s Encrypt in April to help drive adoption of the open-source encryption project.

SEE ALSO: Let’s Encrypt Project Issues More than One Million Certificates Since December Launch

Source: TheWHIR