Grazed from TheVarGuy. Author: Christopher Tozzi.

ownCloud, the open source file sharing and syncing platform, is aiming to provide a "Dropbox-like" experience, in its own words—as well as to blur the line demarcating private from public clouds by letting users share file between ownCloud instances. That’s all part of ownCloud 7 Community Edition, the latest version of the platform, which has been released in beta form.

The "Dropbox-like" enhancements in the newest edition of ownCloud come in the form of a completely new web interface for managing cloud data, as well as support for mobile browsers and performance improvements, ownCloud developers said. That the ownCloud community is officially boasting of ownCloud’s ability to look and feel like Dropbox is a clear sign that ownCloud’s backers feel they are ready to compete in primetime with the world’s best known cloud-based file syncing service—albeit one that, in contrast to ownCloud, is not open source…

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: Brent Bensten.

The public cloud is finally gaining acceptance. Freed from the shackles of the IT department, employees and their business units can now obtain the resources they need at a low cost of entry and hassle. But what’s good for the individual is not necessarily good for the enterprise. As familiarity with cloud architectures rises, so does the awareness that the public cloud does not suit every IT function, particularly when it comes to high-volume, low-latency applications like big data and rich media processing.

Cloud wars and the cost of commoditization

The main drawback of running high-end applications on public cloud resources is lack of customization. This is primarily due to the race-to-the- bottom pricing that top providers like Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and others have engaged in recently. It is now possible to find storage resources for about 2 cents per gigabyte per month and database operations for about a penny per 1,000 transactions…

Grazed from ZDNet. Author: Drew Turney.

Emeryville, California-based SellPoints used the cloud to create a completely new line of business based on the market insights it was generating from customers’ data. Driven by performance marketing and analytics vice president Benny Blum, the company adopted a cloud computing solution to crunch their own big data product in 2012 using Hadoop as a service from provider Altiscale.

SellPoints delivers rich media to online and in-store point of sale systems and social media. With 251 retail partners including Wal-Mart, Costco, Best Buy, and Office Depot, and 130 million unique customers a month, that’s a lot of customer behaviour. With so much data collected from those partners, the company realised there was a business opportunity in higher-value services delivering market intelligence to its clients…

Grazed from Bio-ITWorld. Author: Wolfgang Gentzsch.

Cost savings, shorter time to market, better quality, less product failures: the benefits that engineers and scientists can expect from using technical computing in their research, design, and development processes can be huge. Yet, still relatively few scientist and manufacturers use servers when designing and developing their products on computers. The vast majority still perform virtual prototyping or large-scale data modeling on workstations or laptops. Not surprising, many of them face problems due to the lack of performance of their machines. More accurate geometry or physics, for instance, require much more memory than a desktop can be fitted with.

There are two realistic options today to acquire additional computing: buy a server or use a Cloud solution. Many system vendors have developed a complete set of products, solutions and services for high performance computing (HPC), but buying an HPC server for a small to medium enterprise may still be more of an investment than many wish to make…

Grazed from BusinessInsider. Author: Julie Bort.

Cloud computing player Joyent, one of VMware’s most vocal competitors, is about to announce a management shake-up that is somewhat of a coup. The company has hired a new CEO, Scott Hammond, who was formerly running Cisco’s cloud computing software business. Hammond will replace Henry Wasik as the outgoing CEO. The formal announcement will go out on Thursday, we’re told. Hammond landed at Cisco when it bought a company called Newscale in 2011 for an undisclosed sum. He was CEO. That was his third successful exit including two Internet startups from 1990’s sold before the bubble burst.

So it’s not surprising that after three years at Cisco he’s ready to become CEO at a smaller company again. He tells us of working for startups: "It’s an addiction, the ultimate challenge. I love slaying the dragon." Still this is another round of change at the 10-year-old company. Wasik had been with Joyent for about 18 months, since November 2012. He replaced David Young, co-founder/CEO…

Grazed from MSPAlliance. Author: Kat McClure.

In a big-picture sense, the story of this decade’s tech is the story of decentralized computing: the vanishing of locational and structural constraints on the backbone of business infrastructure. The business world’s introduction to this concept came with the cloud, still a carefully delineated place away from the fabric of the business itself- the cloud for storage, the cloud for hosting. But what’s really changing the way we work these days is the integration of these technologies directly into the workflow, and nowhere is that more obvious than in the explosion of Hadoop.

Hadoop, if you’re unfamiliar, is the driver of big data- the inevitable consequence of our business, marketing and technological needs outpacing our ability to store and process massive chunks of data. Hadoop does this by decentralizing the data, creating a distributable, atomized method of storage and processing. Where traditional avenues of managing this data break down, from Excel to NumPy, there’s Hadoop…

Grazed from NASDAQ. Author: Editorial Staff.

Information technology (IT) systems consulting company, Computer Science Corporation ( CSC ) has strengthened its position in the cloud cybersecurity service market by expanding its portfolio. The expanded offerings include cloud-based solutions, which will provide users a secure and flexible network. With computing going mobile and moving to the cloud, the security needs of corporate networks are also changing. CSC solutions are designed to address these evolving needs.

The CSC Cybersecurity suite provides three enriched offerings including Cloud Managed Vulnerability Assessments (CVMA), Cloud Security Incident and Event Monitoring (CSIEM) and Cloud Endpoint Protection (CEP). These solutions can manage and protect against malware attacks and at the same time connect public and private clouds securely…

Grazed from TheRegister. Author: Trevor Pott.

The implosion of source-code hosting biz Code Spaces should have rung plenty of alarm bells. A company with a loyal following and a bright-looking future suddenly disappeared, never to be seen again. What’s worse, for the past several years a significant chunk of the IT community has been warning about exactly the sorts of issues that ultimately resulted in Code Spaces’ failure. I feel sorry for the real human beings affected by this incident; jobs lost, years of work evaporated.

Unfortunately, that’s not all I feel. I also feel something almost, but not quite, entirely unlike schadenfreude. When I heard the news, the dark uncharitable part of my soul wanted to climb atop the tallest tower and bellow: "I told you so!" A release of years of pent up tension and frustration at watching company after company swallow cloud vendor marketing tripe hook, line and sinker. A lot of people told the world so. Nobody listened…

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Henry Kenyon.

By moving its core operating functions to the cloud, the Securities and Exchange Commission has increased the speed and flexibility of its financial data services and saved money through increased efficiency, a top official claims. Responsible for regulating the securities industry, the SEC manages massive amounts of data for analysis and to provide the finance industry and individual investors with updated information. To do this, the commission’s website and data centers must be able to absorb massive spikes in use.

Over the last three years, the SEC has modernized its IT infrastructure, improved funding for its online component, and started to move its core functions to public and private clouds, said Thomas Bayer, the commission’s CIO, who spoke at a recent government cloud computing symposium held by the Armed Forces Communications Electronics Association…

Grazed from RCPMag. Author: Jeffrey Schwartz.

Security is still the biggest showstopper when it comes to cloud computing and, given the events of the past year — from the Edward Snowden revelations to a number of high-profile breaches — many customers expect cloud providers and their partners to double down. The counter-argument is despite the proliferation of data theft, cloud providers are better positioned to safeguard data than customers running datacenters on-premises.

The truth is, whether customers store their data on-premises or use a cloud services provider, information is as secure as the safeguards put in place. Snowden never could’ve leaked the troves of classified data if the National Security Agency (NSA) hadn’t given him unfettered access. Even worse, the NSA didn’t appear to have the proper auditing controls to discover what he had done, even after the fact…