Countdown to Citrix Synergy

Next week, Citrix Synergy takes place in Orlando, Florida. As we look back at the past year, and the last few months in particular, we can see some telltale signs pointing to the underlying themes of the conference, as well as some of the likely highlights.

The Attack Seen Around the World

The attack seen around the world. In one of my more recent posts, I brought attention to the release, or better yet the data dump of exploits and hacking tools targeting Microsoft’s Windows OS, Linux, firewalls, and others. One of the main purposes of my post was to bring attention to the grave dangers that these exploits bring to the world and as such, I really hoped that there would be enough interest from individuals in the industry to get a copy of the exploits and contribute to the countermeasures that would be needed to defend against exploits to better protect and defend the companies and corporations that we all represent. I was absolutely sure that there would be many individuals around the world that would be reverse engineering the exploits for more devious purposes and it appears that we have just experienced the first, of what I believe, to be just the beginning attacks seen around the world.

Unity — Is Not in the Cards for Nexsan and EMC

Recalling the 1960s movie David and Goliath, a battle between IT titan Dell EMC and relative minnow Nexsan has been waged in the federal court for the District of Massachusetts over the use of the trademark “Unity.” Both companies market storage arrays branded “Unity.” EMC wrote a cease and desist letter to Nexsan concerning misuse, claiming prior use. …

Educate, Upgrade, Patch, or Else..

I had a debate with a fellow technologist at Dell EMC World this year about whether the cloud is more secure than any given data center not used by a cloud provider. The argument put forth was that cloud service providers often have better security controls in place, they can auto-patch systems, etc. All in …

Earnings for 1st Quarter of 2017

Can you believe we have reached the month of May already? Where does the time go? The end of April also is the time for some of the public cloud companies to release their earnings for the 1st Quarter of 2017 and as such, we have some numbers to report on from Amazon, Microsoft, Alibaba, IBM, Oracle and SAP. For full disclosure the sources that I have used for this post are as follows. The publicly released company reports, Cleveland Research, Factset Estimates and CRC Estimates. The SAP numbers have been converted to dollars for the comparisons and revenues being reported include IaaS and SaaS/PaaS that have been sold on an IaaS platform.