Fujitsu Intros In-Building LTE Femtocell

Fujitsu introduced its BroadOne LS100 Series LTE Femtocell, a small and lightweight indoor base station for North America.

Fujitsu said its new small cell implements a unique interference avoidance capability that provides the highest signal strength from either the macrocell or the small cell, and provides a smooth handoff between them. Interference is mitigated through four distinct control functions – frequency, power, timing and access - in turn helping to improve user data rates. The self-optimizing feature autonomously monitors the local RF environment and intelligently adjusts to maximize user throughput. In addition, the robust QOS and Scheduler features best support premium 4G services like VoLTE.

“As mobile traffic increases with the growing use of smart devices, network operators must increase coverage and capacity of their networks,” said Tetsuya Takase, Head of Wireless at Fujitsu Network Communications. “The LS100 Series provides operators an affordable solution to improve in-building coverage and add capacity where high-speed data is critical, ultimately improving the overall user experience.”

The LS100 Series is one element of the Fujitsu solution that also includes the LS700 HeNB Gateway and LS800 HeMS Element Management System (EMS). The gateway provides high scalability by expanding processing capacity during increased traffic, while the EMS’s open OSS interface and intuitive GUI design ensure flexible, simplified element management support.

http://us.fujitsu.com/telecom

In this sponsored video, Fujitsu introduces its BroadOne GX4000 Multi-Gigabit Wireless Transport System for the North American market.  This E-band solution operates in the 70 / 80 GHz frequency band and uses Fujitsu's “Impulse Radio” technology to enable an ultra-high data rate of 3 Gbps for a wireless link. It provides wireless CPRI transport for cellular fronthaul.

http://youtu.be/m7daZjhOmfg

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Coriant Supplies its hiT 7300 DWDM to Indonesia's PGASCOM

Indonesia's PGASCOM will deploy Coriant's hiT 7300 Multi-Haul Transport Platform to expand the capacity of its long haul submarine cable network that links Jakarta and Singapore.

Coriant said its hiT 7300 will help PGASCOM improve optical performance in its Jakarta to Singapore long haul link and reliably expand network capacity in a pay-as-you-grow fashion to meet the evolving service demands of its end-user carrier customers. Key benefits of the Coriant solution include reduced latency, simpler operations due to a reduction of equipment at cable landing sites, and higher availability due to advanced optical layer management and mesh restoration.

"We are pleased to be chosen as PGASCOM's strategic partner as they expand their network," said Stefan Voll, Vice President, Product Management, Packet Optical & NMS, Coriant. "Submarine networks are critical for international broadband connectivity in Southeast Asia, and these networks can be a potential bottleneck due to the time, expense, and environmental challenges associated with capacity upgrades. Our solution meets these challenges with virtually unlimited capacity, system upgrade simplicity, and unparalleled resiliency."

http://www.coriant.com

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Primary Data Appoints Steve Wozniak as Chief Scientist

Primary Data, a start-up based in Los Altos, California, announced that Steve Wozniak has joined the company as Chief Scientist.

Primary Data is developing data virtualization technology that aligns applications, servers and storage systems in a single, global dataspace.

The comapny's solution is to separate the metadata that describes files from the actual file data to allow universal access to data across all types and tiers of storage. An intelligent policy engine provides on-demand data placement, agnostic storage protocols deliver access across file, block and object stores, and a full complement of data services enable seamless linear scalability of both performance and capacity.

Elements of the Primary Data virtualization platform include:

• Data Hypervisor: Virtualizes data by decoupling the access channel from the control channel. The Data Hypervisor makes clients protocol-agnostic and allows data to be transparently placed across third-party storage under a global dataspace.
• Data Director: A central management system that acts as a metadata server for the Data Hypervisor clients and provides policy definitions for data movement and placement.
• Policy Engine: Enables organizations to manage data independently of storage. User-defined policies automate data movement across all storage types based on the data’s current performance, price, and protection needs.
• Global Dataspace: The Primary Data platform gives data administrators global visibility into all storage resources in the enterprise. Real-time policies dynamically migrate data between storage tiers as application and data demands change.

“Innovations like wearables, digital assistants, and the Internet of Things are making computing more and more transparent in our lives, and for technology to remain accessible, we need to ensure data remains seamless as it serves us information,” said Wozniak. “Primary Data uses data virtualization to dynamically place data anywhere as applications demand. I’m excited to share our data virtualization platform with the world.”

Most recently, Wozniak served as Chief Scientist of flash memory innovator Fusion-io, where he worked closely with Lance Smith, David Flynn, and Rick White -- the team behind Primary Data.

“Working to develop disruptive technology is always exciting, but it’s even more exciting when you can team up with a talented group of friends to achieve those goals together,” said Rick White, Primary Data co-founder and chief marketing officer. “With Woz on the team along with Lance and David, we now have the band back together, and I’m amped to be reunited at Primary Data.”

http://www.primarydata.com

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OIF Launches New Project to Identify APIs for Transport SDN

The OIF has launched a new project to develop implementation agreements (IAs) for the application programming interfaces (APIs) used between application and network controller.

The new initiative will build on the Service Request and Topology APIs prototyped in the recent Transport SDN demonstration held with the Open Networking Foundation (ONF) last month.

The new initiative will also create IAs for Service Request, Path Computation, Topology and Link Resource Manager interfaces that have been
identified as part of the OIF’s upcoming SDN Framework document. The APIs to be delivered by the new project are based on REST and JSON principles enabling rapid and flexible application development.

“The prototype Transport SDN demonstration revealed a lack of definition for how user applications interact with transport network applications and resource functions,” said Jonathan Sadler, of Coriant and the OIF technical committee vice chair. “The programmability of Transport SDN requires some of the internal interfaces used by ASON to become open.”

http://www.oiforum.com/

• In October, nine vendors and several global conducted an interoperability test and demonstration of Transport SDN. The demo, which was organized by the Optical Internetworking Forum (OIF) and the Open Networking Foundation (ONF), included participation of ADVA Optical Networking, Alcatel-Lucent, Ciena, Coriant, Fiberhome, Fujitsu, Huawei, NEC Corporation of America and ZTE. China Mobile, China Telecom, TELUS and Verizon are hosting the testing in their labs.OpenFlow extensions developed in the ONF Optical Transport Working Group were tested in the demo in both CDPI and CVNI forms. Vendors are also testing prototypes of Controller Northbound interfaces for Service Request and Topology functions developed as an OIF activity. The framework of the demo is cloud-bursting or application-based bandwidth-on-demand between data center sites. Testing based on this real-world use case illustrates potential deployment of Transport SDN technology, common interfaces required, needs for interoperability and any operational challenges. 

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Blueprint: Six Major Hurdles to SDN Adoption

by Charanya Balasubramanian, Veryx Technologies

SDN promises to provide an architecture that empowers enterprises and service providers to realize a high degree of network automation, agility and, a decrease in overall costs of the network. By decoupling the control and forwarding planes, SDN provides a logically centralized control and programmable layer. Thus SDN accelerates service deployment and reduces operating expenses across multi-vendor platforms.

Hurdles for SDN

In the path of trying to realize the promise of SDN however, there are certain major hurdles that SDN implementers could potentially face. Given below is a list of six of these potential hurdles and the ways to tackle them.

Lack of standards for total SDN deployment
While notable standard groups such as the ONF focus on the development and standardization of SDN, the industry is not fully equipped with standards to benchmark SDN implementations. This indeed challenges SDN adoption, since the scope of test performance and interworking capabilities of SDN have not been defined. However, the ONF’s conformance test specification for OpenFlow protocol and a recent IETF draft for SDN controller benchmarking (co-authored by Veryx), could show a standards-based pathway for of measuring performance in a standardized manner.

Performance in centralized networks
While centralization of control enables the network to be highly programmable and agile, in reality, it could also tend to create a performance bottlenecks. Hence, in comparison with the distributed networks, the overall performance of centralized networks is more susceptible to poor quality of experience. The network must be capable to support dynamic programming without compromising on performance as committed in the SLAs. Thus, if performance characteristics such as latency and throughput are tested at various instances, one can be sure that the SDN-based network delivers equal if not better performance.

Lack of confidence in reliability of SDN approach
SDN’s single point of control leads to concerns regarding its reliability. Hence, SDN’s capability to deliver high availability and resiliency should be validated especially under exceptional and error prone conditions. In order to ensure the controller’s capability in guaranteeing availability, rapid notification, switching and convergence of data path during failures, need to be verified since they play a crucial role in making SDN reliable.

Scalability for virtualized network
SDN architecture facilitates both physical and virtual networks in order to deliver various networking services with speed and agility. For SDN to support highly flexible and massively scalable architecture, networks need to support automated provisioning of large scale flows. Thus, before deploying SDN, the network’s capabilities to support dynamic provisioning of flows and the degree of scalability need to be verified. Moreover, since SDN supports dynamic scalability, the controller’s ability to handle infrastructure modification requests and the extent to which it can scale should be verified.

Coexistence with legacy networks
SDN allows end-to-end network automation through coordination and integration with devices at the edge and legacy networks. An SDN-based network is expected to support legacy networking elements and frameworks, which would enable to support end-to-end services. Thus, it is important to verify the interoperability of SDN network with the legacy networks/systems.

Vulnerabilities of centralization
While centralization of control is beneficial, security of centralized approach is a major concern for SDN adopters, as it could hamper the overall network availability. Hence controller support and recovery mechanisms from possible attacks must be evaluated. In addition, the support for enabling real-time traffic monitoring, pro-active detection and prevention of malicious attacks, authentication and authorization access to controller have to be verified.

About Veryx
Veryx offers SDN testing solutions that encompass conformance, performance benchmarking and network emulation for SDN controllers and switches. Veryx PktBlaster SDN is an integrated test solution for benchmarking SDN controllers. Veryx ATTEST solution offers automated test cases that comprehensively test for OpenFlow protocol conformance.

About the Author
Charanya Balasubramanian is the Product Manager at Veryx Technologies. Charanya handles product management efforts for SDN and emerging technologies at Veryx. She has over five years of experience in the Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) industry spanning across several technologies including virtualization and cloud computing. She holds a Master’s degree in Strategy and Marketing from XLRI, Jamshedpur, India and Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science and Engineering from Anna University, Chennai, India.

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Bob Metcalfe on Innovation and the Net Neutrality Debate

Innovation in networking technologies is accelerating.  The debate on NetNeutrality is back in the public square.

Speaking at #GEN14 conference in Washington D.C., Bob Metcalfe, Professor, Electrical Engineering & Director of Innovation, shares his views on Net Neutrality.

Filmed at Metro Ethernet Forum's #GEN14 conference in Washington, D.C.

One Minute Video:  http://youtu.be/kJZKAiYVLXc

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Wedge Networks Leverages NFV for Cloud Network Defense

Wedge Networks, a start-up headquartered in Calgary, introduced its Cloud Network Defense (CND) technology as a means to deliver high levels of cyber security within service provider networks.  Wedge supplies an embedded operating system that enables the delivery of a variety of security functions running on commodity servers.

Unlike current security technologies that rely on proprietary hardware or require security providers to direct traffic to third party infrastructure for inspection, Wedge's Cloud Network Defense integrates Deep Content Inspection (DCI) and Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) with advanced software to direct and load-balance computing resources – including spawning off and ‘shrinking’ instances, which normally executes in hardware. The architecture leverages SDN and NFV to ensure scalability, elasticity (dynamic reallocation per demand), ubiquitous availability, and high capacity for the cloud centric networks.

NFV-S is the heart of Cloud Network Defense's Elastic Security Services Orchestration.  Working as a pooled resource, it dynamically applies specific policy based security inspection to specific user device traffic in response to network load.

The company notes that it is the only cloud security solution to perform high-performance content inspection without requiring traffic to leave the network. Malware signatures can be licensed from the top providers.

“Cloud Network Defense will transform the way security is delivered” says Dr Hongwen Zhang, president and CEO of Wedge Networks. “It is a cloud based software platform leveraging SDN and NFV technology to perform what we call Elastic Security Services Orchestration™. Our software makes it easy for service providers to offer embedded security as a scalable, high performance service for cloud connected networks. Web, email and mobile security policy can now be unified and optimized across all network traffic and all devices, anytime, anywhere”.

Wedge Networks is already deployed globally and serving a number of top tier mobile operators.

http://www.wedgenetworks.com/

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Tech Mahindra Expands in Network Services with LCC Acquisition

Tech Mahindra has agreed to acquire Lightbridge Communications Corporation (LCC), a leading provider of network engineering services, for approximately US$240 million. The acquisition expands Tech Mahindra's presence in network services globally.

LCC, which is based in McLean, Virginia, is the largest independent network services company worldwide and has played a key role in the engineering of over 350 networks.  The company has designed more than 350,000 cell sites for over 400 customers and has worked with all major access technologies (LTE, WiMAX, HSPA, EV-DO, CDMA, EDGE and GSM). LCC claims annual revenues of over $400 million and has some 5,000 employees in 50 countries.

Tech Mahindra is a US$3.4 billion company with 95,300+ professionals across 51 countries. It has deep expertise in software, consulting, integration and operations services.  The company, has been a leading provider of IT services to telecom operators since its founding, said this acquisition brings it new opportunities in network engineering at a time when many networks are going through significant transformation.  Tech Mahindra is aligned with major network equipment suppliers.

“This acquisition is a defining moment for Tech Mahindra and the network services sector. We will now be the largest and most comprehensive provider of technology services to Communications Service Providers. Our 25 years of rich experience in delivering technology solutions to enterprises and communications service providers globally will be significantly strengthened by this acquisition,” stated CP Gurnani, MD & CEO, Tech Mahindra.

“This partnership is another significant step towards the globalization of Tech Mahindra as we welcome a diverse workforce of over 5,000 network professionals across five continents and more than 50 countries. We expect network services to be a major growth engine for our organization,” stated Vineet Nayyar, Executive Vice Chairman, Tech Mahindra.

“Over three decades, LCC has grown to become the largest independent provider of wireless engineering services. Bringing LCC into Tech Mahindra will create the industry’s largest network engineering, deployment, and managed services organization,” said Kenneth Young, CEO of LCC. “Having Tech Mahindra’s breadth of services to provide advanced managed network services coupled with its size and scale, will help us increase the performance of our customers’ ever-evolving networks,” he added.

http://www.techmahindra.com
http://www.lcc.com/

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Vitesse Extends Ethernet to IoT with Protocol Stack

Vitesse Semiconductor introduced its IStaX protocol stack to simplify deployment and management of Industrial-IoT network applications such as Industrial Ethernet switching, surveillance, video distribution, LCD signage, intelligent sensors, and metering equipment.

The software is designed to work across Vitesse’s extensive portfolio of Ethernet switches and PHYs to simplify Ethernet networking and connectivity with various capabilities including:

• IEEE 1588 PTP protocol support with Vitesse’s VeriTime to support deterministic network requirements, critical for high-precision industrial control systems;
• Rich set of L2/L3 features enabling customers to segment industrial from Enterprise networks, and optimize the former for maximum bandwidth and uptime; and
• Ethernet ring protection ensuring continued operations during equipment service disruption or failure, meeting the most demanding operational requirements of control systems.

“Vitesse tripled its Industrial-IoT customer base over the past year. As the IoT continues expanding, the number of companies requiring networking know-how will only proliferate,” noted Larry O’Connell, product marketing director at Vitesse. “Our goal is to make their path to market as easy as possible by leveraging Vitesse’s expertise in Ethernet networking, security and timing synchronization. As we’ve proven in Carrier markets, our turnkey IC and software solutions can reduce time-to-market for Industrial-IoT equipment by nearly 70%.”

https://www.vitesse.com/solutions/internet-of-things

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Telefónica Teams with Geotab on M2M for Fleets

Telefónica announced a partnership with Geotab to provide M2M fleet transport telematics technology in Spain, Germany and the U.K. with the intention to explore Latin American markets in the near future.

The solution, which includes Geotab’s plug-and-play device, offers real time fleet management and the ability to develop a number of alerts, notifications, and review driver trip and activity reports. Advanced features also include on-board diagnostics through engine indicators to return feedback, such as engine failures, or an in-depth engine fault code diagnosis; detect accidents and retrace cause of the accident; and allow add-ons such as a navigational device, NFC driver ID key, sensors and more.

http://pressoffice.telefonica.com/

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MACOM Acquires BinOptics for Indium Phosphide Lasers

M/A-COM Technology Solutions Holdings (MACOM) agreed to acquire BinOptics Corporation, a merchant provider of Indium Phosphide lasers, for $230 million in cash.

BinOptics' highly differentiated edge-emitting and surface-emitting Fabry Perot and DFB lasers are used in applications such as data centers, mobile backhaul, silicon photonics and access. The company has developed proprietary Etched Facet Technology (EFT) for lasers that enable compelling wafer-scale economics in both device manufacturing and testing. The company is based in Ithaca, New York.

MACOM is a leading supplier of high performance RF, microwave, and millimeter wave products.

http://www.macom.com/
http://www.binoptics.com/

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Verizon Opens Cloud Marketplace

Verizon officially opened its Cloud Marketplace featuring enterprise-class cloud based services from multiple third-party providers.  The marketplace, which is available to users of the Verizon Cloud, offers software-based cloud resources that are certified to operate in Verizon’s cloud environments.

The storefront initially features pre-built cloud solutions from AppDynamics, Hitachi Data Systems, Juniper Networks, pfSense and Tervela. Juniper is offering its Firefly Perimeter virtual firewall solution, which is a virtualized version of the company's SRX Series Services Gateway. Firefly Perimeter can be deployed and managed centrally or individually as a full-featured virtual firewall for each department, application or tenant.

Verizon Cloud Marketplace applications are consolidated on a single monthly invoice for all cloud services.

“The launch of Verizon Cloud Marketplace is an important milestone in the ongoing evolution of our cloud ecosystem,” said Siki Giunta, senior vice president of cloud services, Verizon Enterprise Solutions. “Verizon Cloud Marketplace is all about simplifying and streamlining migration to the cloud, and enterprises using Verizon Cloud will now have access to a growing number of industry-leading cloud-based applications required to power their businesses in the digital age.”

http://cloud.verizon.com/cloud-portfolio/marketplace

In September 2014, Verizon Enterprise Solutions announced a new service model for cloud services under which it will encourage multi-cloud hybrid architectures while offering a variety of services tiers, onboarding and workload migration services to encourage help enterprises to migrate business critical workloads.

Verizon promises seamless integration with third-party cloud services.  It will offer several deployment options ranging from public cloud to private on-premise cloud.

At the centerpiece of the strategy is its own Verizon Cloud, which is tightly bound with network and security capabilities. A unified user console will tie multiple cloud services together.

Verizon's MPLS-based Secure Cloud Interconnect (SCI) provides Private IP access to major cloud service providers, including just announced connectivity to AWS.

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CALIENT Develops OpenDayLight Controller for Optical Switches

CALIENT Technologies introduced a software controller to facilitate dynamic reconfiguration of the optical network layer to handle the "elephant flows" typically caused by data replications, storage migrations, and movements of big data sets in Hadoop distributed file systems. These elephant flows can overflow buffers on conventional packet switches.

CALIENT said its new Optical Topology Management Controller, which built using the OpenDayLight framework, allows efficient optical topologies to be built on demand, optimizing access to compute and storage nodes to achieve maximum utilization of these critical resources.  It also lays the foundation for hybrid network fabrics in which CALIENT’s S-Series optical circuit switches augment third-party packet-based networks.

With the addition of traffic analysis and traffic engineering capabilities (planned for early 2015), the controller will support the full hybrid packet-optical network, in which the optical layer is reconfigured dynamically to create optical “express” paths that offload highly persistent traffic flows from the L2/3 packet network.

The new CALIENT controller will be used in conjunction with the company’s S-Series family of optical circuit switches. The S320 flagship is a 320-port optical circuit switch used to create an all-optical network fabric with total throughput of more than 32 terabits per second. The switch allows any-to-any, layer one network connections with almost no latency and can be reconfigured on demand under software control. Each switch port is transparent to bit rate and can support data speeds to 100 Gbps and beyond.

“We’ve seen tremendous customer interest in the powerful value proposition of the dynamically reconfigurable optical layer offered by our S-Series optical circuit switches, but the stumbling block has been the lack of a controller to allow applications and traffic patterns to drive and orchestrate the new topologies,” said Daniel Tardent, Vice President of Marketing at CALIENT. “Our new Optical Topology Management Controller is the missing link and we’re now moving ahead on a number of proof-of-concept deployments with our customers.”

http://www.calient.net

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Huawei and Singtel to Launch 5G Innovation Program

SingTel and Huawei signed an MoU to launch a 5G Joint Innovation Program which will serve as a research hub for the advancement of 5G mobile broadband technologies. The parties shall endeavor to set up a 5G trial for SingTel’s customers.

Huawei is working on a range of 5G technologies.  The company has recently disclosed a 128TRX Massive MIMO prototype. By providing higher resolution in angular domain, it supports 3D user location distribution, so that spectrum efficiency and system capacity can be greatly improved. Massive MIMO is considered as a key technology required for the evolution to 5G. Sparse Code Multiple Access (SCMA), a significant breakthrough technology, is also demonstrated by Huawei in the forum. Live test shows that SCMA can improve the number of connections by 300%, and decrease air interface latency by 7 times.

SingTel Group CTO Mr. Tay Soo Meng says "SingTel Group is constantly seeking opportunities to advance the technologies that bring the best communications experience to our customers throughout the region. We are pleased to participate in this 5G Joint Innovation Program with Huawei to keep abreast and appreciate 5G technologies to ensure SingTel continue its technology leadership in the mobile communications domain as we move towards the 5G era.

http://pr.huawei.com/en/news/hw-397408-5g.htm#.VG1mpPmjOM4

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Mellanox Intros Programmable Network Adapter with FPGA

Mellanox Technologies introduced its Programmable ConnectX-3 Pro adapter card with Virtual Protocol Interconnect (VPI) technology and aimed at modern data centers, public and private clouds, Web 2.0 infrastructures, telecommunication, and high-performance computing systems.

The new adapter uses an on-board integrated FPGA and memory to enable users to bring their own customized applications such as IPSEC encryption, enhanced flow steering and Network Address Translation (NAT), overlay networks bridge or router, data inspection, data compression or deduplication offloads, and others.

The programmable adapter card supports both InfiniBand and Ethernet protocols at bandwidths up to 56Gb/s. In addition, the FPGA can be engaged on the PCIe bus, the network interface, or in both locations simultaneously, giving the card complete flexibility for HPC, cloud, Web 2.0 and enterprise data center environments.

“Data center administrators and application users have looked for simple, powerful and more flexible ways to run applications at their highest potential, and to enable their own innovations as a competitive advantage,” said Gilad Shainer, vice president of marketing at Mellanox Technologies. “The Programmable ConnectX-3 Pro adapter card with FPGA completely revitalizes a data center’s ability to boost application performance by enabling a flexible and efficient programmable capability as data enters the network interface or is sent out.”

http://www.mellanox.com

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PacketSled Announces Cloud-based Threat Detection

PacketSled, a start-up based in San Diego, introduced its cloud-based threat detection and response platform as a service -- PacketSled Cloud. The service lets enterprises continuously monitor their networks for evolving threats, detect attacks, and investigate them in real-time.

PacketSled said it deeply examines layers 3-7 of every session on the network in real time, determining the "who, what, when, where, and how" of each session it sees, and securely storing these sessions over days, weeks, months, or years, making a rich forensic history instantly accessible.

"As a society, we've moved from shock that another brand name has been breached to the position of uncomfortable normalcy. CEOs, CISOs, and boards are now being judged on the quality and speed of their response, in addition to the conditions that led to the incident," said Matt Harrigan, PacketSled's President & CEO.

"To date, the tools available to the enterprise have not been usable, scalable or cost-effective enough to get the widespread adoption that will positively impact global cybercrime statistics. Our goal is to make easily consumable breach detection, network forensics, and incident response capabilities  available to everyone," Harrigan added.

http://www.packetsled.com/

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IBM Patents Data Privacy Engine for Clouds

IBM has patented the design for a data privacy engine for protecting personal data as it is transferred between countries, including across private clouds.

IBM's new patented Data Privacy Engine invention – U.S. Patent #8,695,101 – lets businesses aggregate international and organizational requirements for data transfers and apply them to individual projects. The company said its innovation lets organizations see what restrictions have been put in place for different types of protected information when transferring it between two countries, including data stored in a private cloud. The engine also flags cross-border privacy issues and provides recommendations on how to resolve each based on the information the business has input into the engine. In the event underlying privacy requirements change, the engine can be updated to reflect these rules. Users can then notify teams that previously approved transfers may need to be revisited in order to prevent potential violations.

"Global businesses today face significant challenges in protecting personal data and keeping up with regulations in an environment where cross-border flows of information are more important than ever," said Christina Peters, chief privacy officer, IBM. "Our new invention provides a privacy technique that could help businesses navigate an increasingly complex landscape and help companies proactively manage risk."

http://www.ibm.com

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A New Competition Launches for Hot Cloud Start-ups

The Cloud Ethernet Forum has kicked off a competition to identify and support the hottest start-ups powered by cloud technologies.  This competition is for pre-IPO cloud companies, and provides two award categories:

• The Hottest Cloud Start-up -- preparing for early stage A-round funding
• The Hottest Pre-IPO Cloud Company -- for those companies at a more advanced B/C round stage.

"We are throwing the door wide open to fresh, original thinking. But there are three key criteria that will be strictly enforced: it must be something new and different; it must be practical; and above all it must deliver significant benefits. As a participant in the OpenCloud Project, winners will have a head start on interoperability with the systems of major datacenter, network service, and cloud and software providers. There could not be a better head-start in any development or go-to-market process," stated James Walker, CEF President and Vice President for Managed Network Services at Tata Communications.

The competition is open for entries until 2nd February, 2015 and a shortlist of finalists will be announced at the end of February.

http://www.cloudethernet.org/cld/

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CipherCloud Raises $50 Million for Cloud Encryption

CipherCloud, a start-up based in San Jose, California, announced a $50 million round of financing for its cloud protection.

CipherCloud provides cloud encryption and tokenization gateways to help enterprises to securely adopt cloud applications by eliminating concerns about data privacy, residency, security and regulatory compliance.

The funding round was led by Transamerica Ventures joined by Delta Partners, and existing investors Andreessen Horowitz and T-Venture, the venture capital arm of Deutsche Telekom.

The CipherCloud cloud security platform contains the following essential components:

• Cloud application discovery that provides aggregated reporting and dashboards of cloud applications including understanding employee usage and behavior, whether they are using enterprise approved cloud applications or not, and the level of risk of using them and most importantly putting data into them.
• Cloud data security that delivers based on corporate policies, industry regulations, or country required compliance laws the maximum level of protection to all sensitive data through a combination of searchable strong encryption, tokenization and malware detection controls.
• Cloud user monitoring that enables the tracking and identification of anomalies that help to reduce the source of risk from both of insider and external threats.

"We began our cloud security journey in 2010 by solving the cryptographer's dilemma – enabling the breakthrough of searchable strong encryption while preserving the operations of cloud applications," said Pravin Kothari, founder and CEO, CipherCloud. "Now four years later, CipherCloud is the clear leader in the market with over three million users and is establishing the standard for how enterprises adopt the cloud while controlling and securing their data."

http://www.ciphercloud.com

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VS2 Promises New Approach to Cyber Security

Virtual Software Systems (VS2), a stealth-mode start-up based in Waltham, Mass., said it is on track to unveil an entirely new approach to security based on the founders' expertise in systems architecture, design and development.

Set to demonstrate its groundbreaking technology in early 2015, VS2 will provide a missing piece of the puzzle in today's security infrastructure, filling the gap between current perimeter solutions (firewall, intrusion detection/prevention, anti-virus, etc.) and interior defenses such as encryption, which is currently the only method for protecting data following a perimeter breach.

To date, security companies have taken a traditional, defensive approach to protecting data and intellectual property assets.

"They've applied technologies and methodologies from the physical world to the virtual world – but the headlines tell us every day that this approach is incomplete," said VS2 President and CEO John Conway. "The mechanisms used by intruders to evade detection and trick perimeter defenses are infinite, so the key is to simplify and manage the attack surface from the inside of the computer. VS2 achieves this by rethinking security at the system design level, combining principles of fault tolerance with a new spatio-temporal architecture that virtually manipulates time and neutralizes attacks before they can become harmful exploits."

http://www.virtualsoftwaresystems.com/

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