Let’s face it — Active Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) attacks are going on right now against critical infrastructure. And the cyber security protection in place to protect it is so minimal that it is quite feasible for cyber criminals to cause chaos.

Over the years, CloudTimes has published a wide range of articles from guest authors – mainly executive level management from leading cloud computing firms all over the world. Here is a list of the most prominent ones.

One of the primary challenges to developing applications in the cloud is testing performance. Most developers use cloud-based PaaS platforms to develop their applications, but in large part, these platforms are missing tools that can assist developers in improving the quality of the deployed apps.

A relatively infrequent shopper, Spirent Communications has picked up Mu Dynamics, adding security testing for applications to the company’s performance-testing portfolio.

Spirent Communications agreed to acquire Mu Dynamics, which offers a network security and application performance testing tools, for $40.0 million in cash.

Spirent Communications (LSE: SPT.L) is adding some flavor to its cloud security service testing strategy by reaching an agreement to acquire privately-held Mu Dynamics for $40 million in cash.

Spirent Communications plc (NYSE: SPM; London: SPT) is to buy applications test system specialist Mu Dynamics for US$40 million, a move that Spirent hopes will make it a major player in the cloud services and service delivery platform testing market.

Spirent Communications plc just inked a definitive agreement to purchase privately held, Calif.-based Mu Dynamics Inc. for $40 million in cash. The deal could close on or about April 23.

Acquires Mu Dynamics for $40m, for expertise in test systems for applications and SaaS security and experience

The only cloud-based content store that delivers 3,000+ ready-to-run application tests and attacks to validate application and security policies on intelligent enterprise networks using real-world traffic. More info.

We’re thrilled to let folks know that we’re continuing to grow our add-on program. We’ve added two new partners this week: Blitz.io and Iron.io. We’re very excited about adding these new tools in the arsenal so you can focus on the business of writing excellent applications with velocity and grace, free from worry about your IT infrastructure. Blitz.io and Iron.io join our existing partners, MailGun, MongoHQ, MongoLab and New Relic. If you are developing and managing applications using our flagship PaaS product, PHP Fog, you absolutely need to check out these new add-ons.

Portland “Platform as a Service” provider AppFog continues to make sure that platform has a whole bunch of functionality.  Today, they announced they have added Blitz.io and Iron.io to their service offering, further extending their customers’ ability to deploy and scale apps.

Cloud platform player AppFog has added Blitz.io and Iron.io to its recently introduced add-on program for third-party service providers. IronMQ is an elastic message queue for managing data and event flow within cloud applications and between systems. Blitz is an application performance management product with a “simple” approach to load testing for programmers using agile technologies like Sinatra, Rails, and node.js for development.

AppFog, the leading cloud-based platform-as-a-service (PaaS), today announced the addition of Blitz.io and Iron.io to its recently introduced add-on program for third-party service providers. Since the program’s conception in December, AppFog has built a strong foundation for its customers with current partners including New Relic, MongoLab, MailGun and MongoHQ. With the addition of Blitz.io and Iron.io, AppFog continues to offer its customers enhanced features to make it easy for developers to deploy and scale web-based applications through a single interface.

We’ve just completed a series of Magento cloud hosting benchmarks using Blitz.io’s benchmarking tool. We scaled the infrastructure up and down to accommodate various traffic levels, then tested across a range of pages for an out-of-the-box Magento Demo Site hosted on Pagoda Box.