BCS, Inc., a nationwide leader in providing backup and disaster recovery solutions for both on premise and off premise applications, announced today a major contract with AppAssure Software, Inc. of Headquartered in Reston, Virginia.

“We are very excited to partner with AppAssure Software, Dellinger stated.

“This opportunity to partner with an outperformer like AppAssure is an important key to our company being recognized as a business continuity leader in this exploding marketplace,” Dellinger stated.

“AppAssure delivers incredible technology to its clients and is one of the fastest back-up software companies on the market.

To be a part of this solution is a true honor,” Dellinger added. “We estimate the contract value of this agreement will propel our topline growth in 2011 by more than twenty-five percent (25%),” Dellinger concluded.

Source:http://pr-usa.net/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=704338&Itemid=30

Today BMC Software (NASDAQ:BMC) announced significant enhancements to its cloud management portfolio to enable enterprises, public agencies, and service providers to achieve the agility required for building and managing highly flexible cloud services, across public, private and hybrid cloud environments. Simply stated, BMC’s cloud management portfolio creates clouds that work for business. Now IT organizations can finally transform from being the sole providers of IT services to being a broker of internal and external services to more effectively balance business responsiveness, performance, and cost.

Unlike offerings from other IT vendors, BMC’s cloud management portfolio specifically addresses the practical requirements of taking cloud computing from an interesting, pilot technology to a core, business-critical IT service. This includes managing the broad combination of hardware and virtualization technologies that customers already own as well as providing choice for future technology requirements. BMC’s cloud management portfolio is part of BMC’s Dynamic Business Service Management (BSM) platform, which provides IT organizations with a unified management capability across physical, virtual, and hybrid environments, reducing their costs and providing an evolutionary path to cloud adoption.

“IDC’s research indicates that the 2010–2015 compound annual growth rate (CAGR) for the worldwide cloud systems management software market is estimated at 45.5 percent,” said Mary Johnston Turner, research vice president, Enterprise System Management Software, IDC. “We anticipate that by 2015, the majority of enterprise, midmarket, and service provider customers will require integrated hybrid cloud management capabilities when selecting strategic systems management software products and vendors.”

BMC’s second-generation Cloud Lifecycle Management (CLM) solution provides multi-tiered cloud services support for deploying business-ready cloud environments from request to retirement, thereby accelerating provisioning, optimizing ongoing operations, and rapidly meeting the needs of the business. Serving as the intelligent engine within the cloud, BMC’s newly introduced, policy-based Service Governor included with CLM enables customers to leverage automation and policy to expertly place, configure, and manage cloud services. BMC offers this capability today, enabling dramatic increases in the efficiency of provisioning and managing production and pre-production clouds regardless of whether they are private, public, or hybrid in nature.

Within CLM, IT administrators also now have the ability to define and automate multi-tier cloud services through the creation of flexible Service Blueprints, thus giving end users the flexibility to configure their cloud services, while ensuring IT administrators maintain the tight controls necessary to run an enterprise-class cloud efficiently and effectively. As users select services, the Service Governor then automatically implements the services within the infrastructure. Built with a strong commitment to heterogeneity across all infrastructures, CLM supports a broad range of hardware, hypervisor, and public cloud alternatives, ensuring BMC customers have the freedom to make the right business decisions, today and into the future. With this release, the BMC CLM solution now also supports Citrix XenServer.

“We selected the CLM solution because it provides the most complete offering for managing the cloud,” said Joseph King, JDA Software Group, group vice president, managed services. “As a supply chain management solutions provider, providing our customers with the best time-to-value in the market is key to our company’s success, and CLM allows us to quickly provision customer environments to deliver on that expectation. It is also important for us to be able to scale our operations and the integrated approach of the CLM solution helps us accomplish this, by avoiding the IT silos that seem to dominate the industry today, supporting both heterogeneity and customer choice.”

Further, Cisco and BMC continue to work with service providers to implement the Integrated Cloud Delivery Platform, which is a tight linkage between BMC CLM and Cisco Unified Service Delivery solution that helps cloud providers deploy end-to-end cloud services running on a cloud computing infrastructure that spans data center networks, computing systems, storage and applications.

“Over the last two years, we have worked closely with more than 400 organizations to create a comprehensive cloud management solution that enables the agility business users expect from IT,” said Kia Behnia, BMC’s chief technology officer. “BMC is the only solution provider capable of deploying and managing the broadest choice of cloud environments with the full context and rigor of comprehensive dynamic Business Service Management for ongoing operational support.”

Additional new enhancements for creating and managing clouds that work for business include:

Cloud planning and design: BMC’s Atrium Discovery and Dependency Mapping (ADDM) solution for efficient and effective cloud planning. It is now possible to get an accurate understanding of capacity needs and their business impact with dynamic discovery of service attributes and relationships.
Cloud operations: BMC’s ProactiveNet Performance Management (BPPM) solution can now monitor the performance of cloud services running in Amazon’s EC2 environment as well as Microsoft’s Azure platform-as-a-service.
Cloud governance and compliance: Enhanced integration with BMC’s industry-leading Remedy IT Service Management suite provides low-cost integration between cloud implementation and IT processes. This integration enhances the efficiency of supporting cloud environments and lowers the risk associated with managing them. In addition, financial and compliance management capabilities ensure effective conformance with policies and financial requirements in the cloud environment.
Workload automation in the cloud: With newly-integrated capabilities to support clouds running VMware infrastructure and the Amazon cloud, BMC’s Control-M workload automation solution provides businesses the elasticity needed to support the known and unknown spikes in workload processing. This allows businesses to more cost-effectively manage their capacity needs and ensure business service levels are met when processing scheduled work in the cloud, including business transactions and batch processes.

Source:http://www.sys-con.com/node/1806187

Egyptian anti-regime activists found a startling document last month during a raid inside the headquarters of the country’s state security service: A British company offered to sell a program that security experts say could infect dissidents’ computers and gain access to their email and other communications.

The discovery highlights the emerging market of Western companies that sell software to security services from the Middle East to China to spy on the kinds of social media activists who recently toppled regimes in Egypt and Tunisia.

Amid the scattered papers, interrogation devices and random furniture found during the raid, the activists uncovered a proposed contract dated June 29 from the British company Gamma International that promised to provide access to Gmail, Skype, Hotmail and Yahoo conversations and exchanges on computers targeted by the Interior Ministry of ousted President Hosni Mubarak.

The proposal from Gamma International was posted online by Cairo physician Mostafa Hussein, a blogger who was among the activists who seized the ministry’s documents.

“It is important evidence of the intent of the state security and investigation division not to respect our privacy,” Mr. Hussein said.

“This proposal was sent to a notorious department known for torture, spying on citizens to help Mubarak’s regime,” Mr. Hussein said, referring to the State Security Investigations Service. “The company Gamma, I consider them to be partners in the crime of trying to invade our privacy and arrest activists.”

The document was then noticed by a top cybersecurity company called F:Secure, which placed on its website the scanned proposal for the software, called FinFisher.

The Gamma document exemplifies a new commercial market involving private companies who sell malicious software or malware that provides “back door” or remote access to computers without being detected by the machine’s user.

Sometimes called worms, this kind of computer software-based attacker had been used mainly by government intelligence agencies and organized crime groups as well as private hackers.

Today, malware increasingly is sold by security firms to governments and law enforcement agencies seeking to track not just criminals but also political dissidents.

Source:http://www.frumforum.com/lake-firm-offered-spy-software-to-egypts-govt