Announcements Pour In from Cloud Expo In New York

As we noted yesterday, the big Cloud Expo show is going on at Javits Center in New York this week. There are already a number of announcements and interesting soundbytes on the cloud computing front coming out of the conference. Here are some of the notable developments from the show, including some alarm bells that have been raised about cyber-attacks specifically directed at cloud computing deployments.

Regarding cyber-attacks, eWeek took note of these comments from Cloud Expo:

"We are in the middle of a war,” Terry Woloszyn, CTO of PerspecSys, told attendees. He compared the current security climate to an 'arms race' as cyber-attackers are continuously developing new attack vectors and modifying existing threats, leaving vendors and businesses to play catch-up."

This, of course, plays on the longstanding fear that moving data and applications to the cloud represents too much relinquishment of control. The theme was echoed by others at Cloud Expo, including citations by Allen Vance, director of product management of the data and applications security group at Dell SecureWorks, claiming that virtualized technologies have almost doubled between 2008 and 2010, while security events marking attacks on virtualized environments have allegedly risen 500 percent over the same time frame.

Several vendors at Cloud Expo, including SoftLayer and Voxel, announced that they are joining Telx cloudXchange,  a leading data center and cloud services provide. Telx cloudXchange leverages a community of cloud service providers and focuses on businesses and organizations moving data and applications to the cloud.

Additionally, Layer7 Technologies announced at the conference a new API Portal targeted to provide enterprises and service providers with a turn-key way to manage developers creating applications against their application programming interfaces (APIs). The API leverages Layer7's management suite.

In other news focused on cloud service providers, OpSource, focused on  enterprise cloud and managed hosting, has announced an alliance with VCE, the Virtual Computer Environment Company, to deliver solutions for service providers that purportedly speed time to market for launching public cloud services. VCE was formed by Cisco and EMC with investments from VMware and Intel.

OStatic will update news and soundbytes out of Cloud Expo throughout the week. For more on open source cloud computing, see our roundup of resources.