Grazed from Business2Community. Author: Simon Withers.

The past year has been a difficult time for cloud computing. While the technology went some way towards gaining mainstream acceptance much of the talk focused on the numerous high profile outages which affected many businesses and countless customers. Too many high profile businesses have had their reputations affected following prolonged cloud outages. Unsurprising then that the availability and security of mission critical data stored within the cloud has been called into question.

Some of the most reliable organisations such as Salesforce.com and Microsoft have suffered cloud outages, each affecting thousands of businesses who were unable to access their data or service their customers. To provide a financial perspective on the issue, a 49 minute outage suffered by Amazon.com last year cost the business more than $4m in lost sales. The figure is staggering; even more so when you consider that it fails to account for the loss of future sales as fickle customers take their business to rival firms. Research from Microsoft has found that half of organisations believe that data accounts for up to 75 per cent of their total value. If a business can’t access its data then it can’t serve its customers…

Grazed from Cloud Computing Info. Author: Massimo Ferrari.

CloudPhysics is a provider of a SaaS performance and capacity analytics solution, the first in its segment to leverage the informations collected for its customer datacenters to improve the intelligence and effectiveness of the product itself. The company, founded in November 2011 from John Blumenthal and Irfan Ahmad, both former VMware employees, but publicly presented only in July 2012, announced today a new Series C funding of $15M that comes on top of a $10M Series B funding achieved in August 2013 and led by Kleiner Perkins Caufield and of a previous $2.5M funding from angel investors and the Mayfield Fund, announced in August 2012, for a total funding of $27.5M in 3 years.

This new funding, that sees Jafco Ventures to support Kleiner Perkins Caufield and the Mayfield Fund in this new round, will be invested to furtherly improve the storage monitoring side of the product, launched today as a new Storage Analytics, and to develop the custom reporting area where CloudPhysics is already quite strong with the ability to create infographics and scorecards with a more “high level” aim…

Read more from the source @ http://cloudcomputing.info/en/news/2014/06/cloudphysics-raises-15-million-in-series-c-funding.html

Grazed from MITTechnologyReview. Author: Rachel Metz.

In the eight years since Amazon.com rolled out its cloud-computing business, Amazon Web Services, it has grown from a side project that gave scrappy startups cheap access to computing and online storage to a leader in the fast-growing market for remote computing and storage services. The research company Gartner recently estimated that AWS uses over five times as much computing capacity as its top 14 competitors combined. Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos has even predicted that AWS may one day be bigger than Amazon’s retail business.

Amazon’s chief technology officer, Werner Vogels, devotes most of his time to Amazon’s vast cloud empire. He sat down with MIT Technology Review IT editor Rachel Metz at the AWS temporary startup loft (constructed to encourage developers to drop by and learn more about Amazon’s cloud offerings) in San Francisco’s SoMa neighborhood to talk about the future of cloud computing and security…

Grazed from GlobeNewsWire. Author: PR Announcement.

Cirrascale Corporation®, a premier developer of build-to-order, independent blade-based computing and storage data center infrastructure for conventional and modular data centers, today launched its high density, two-in-one ARM64 development platform, the RM1905D. The platform is powered by the Applied Micro Circuits Corporation AMCC -0.01% X-Gene™ 64-bit ARM Server-on-a-Chip™ and NVIDIA® Tesla® K20 GPU accelerators.

"Cirrascale is proud to be part of the growing ARM64 development movement with AppliedMicro and NVIDIA in deploying what we believe to be a growing ecosystem in high performance computing and cloud environments," said David Driggers, CEO, Cirrascale Corporation. "Businesses are looking for competitive advantages that tackle their growing workloads, and this platform will enable that next-generation of data center transformation."…

Grazed from Recode. Author: Amy Schatz.

Doug Wolfe doesn’t stand out in a crowd, which isn’t surprising considering he’s been with the Central Intelligence Agency for the past 30 years or so, most recently as the agency’s chief information officer. But he was center stage Tuesday morning at an Amazon Web Services sales event in Washington, D.C., as he gave a 15-minute speech for other government-IT-procurement types about why the intelligence agency picked Amazon for a recent $600 million cloud-computing contract.

“This is not something in my 30 years that we have traditionally done,” Wolfe said, joking that when he agreed to speak, no one told him he’d be addressing upwards of 3,000 government and IT professionals in a cavernous hall at the Washington Convention Center. “It’s been a pretty interesting clash of cultures here,” Wolfe said, describing discussions the agency has had with Amazon over the past few months as they’ve worked on the CIA’s new cloud-based system…

Grazed from Reuben2. Author: Derrick Harris.

NASA launched a new contest Tuesday for imagining and then building new uses for the space agency’s trove of earth sciences data. The challenge — actually two of them, broken down into the imagination and building stages — kicks off on July 1 and runs through Nov. 15, and utilizes the NASA Open Earth Exchange platform.

The exchange’s datasets and informational material, as well as the computing resources for the challenge, are hosted on Amazon Web Services. This is not the first time NASA has opened its data to the public as part of a challenge. It had previously partnered with TopCoder, a platform for crowdsourced challenges, on a number of competitions. The OpenNEX challenge is in partnership with Innocentive…

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Eric B. Parizo.

More than a year after Edward Snowden leaked confidential information about the breadth of the National Security Agency’s domestic intelligence-gathering, the former head of the NSA staunchly defended the agency’s actions while advocating for enterprises to adopt the computing paradigm that helps keep the NSA’s systems secure.

In a keynote address Tuesday at the 2014 Gartner Inc. Security & Risk Management Summit, retired U.S. Army General Keith B. Alexander, who led the NSA for nearly nine years and since 2010 the U.S. Cyber Command as well, said the NSA’s bulk metadata collection programs are vital to U.S. efforts to thwart terrorism, support U.S. military operations and ultimately keep Americans safe…

Grazed from FoxBusiness. Author: Adam Samson.

Big Blue has been singing the blues a lot lately. As other tech names woo Wall Street with shiny gadgets and myriad online services, IBM (IBM) sputters. IBM, perhaps the biggest player in the “Old Tech” space, saw its stock dip 2.1% last year just as the broad markets posted a blockbuster performance that included stellar results by a wide variety of technology stocks.

This year hasn’t been much better for the Armonk, NY-based heavyweight, as the firm nurses a year-to-date loss of 3.4% against 6% gains for U.S. equities. In fact, the stock has underperformed the S&P 500 every year since 2012 after beating the benchmark barometer by a wide margin in 2011, according to data from FactSet…

Read more from the source @ http://www.foxbusiness.com/technology/2014/06/24/ibms-not-so-secret-weapon-hybrid-cloud-computing/

Grazed from PRNewsWire. Author: PR Announcement.

As organizations use the power of mobility to transform business operations, Verizon Enterprise Solutions and VMware today announced an expansion of their strategic relationship to include mobile security and enterprise mobility management solutions. Driven by a shared vision for how enterprises will enable the mobile cloud era, Verizon will now provide its enterprise clients in the U.S. greater choice by offering the comprehensive AirWatch(R) by VMware Enterprise Mobility Management Platform as part of Verizon’s mobile device management portfolio for on premise deployments.

The mobile cloud era represents one of the greatest tectonic shifts for IT in the past decade. VMware and Verizon share the vision that organizations need the right solutions delivered by trusted technology partners to enable the modern workforce to work at the speed of life. These solutions will be designed to allow employees to access all of their personal and corporate applications and information securely across any device, virtually anywhere at any time, while enabling businesses to run more effectively by providing unprecedented device choice and flexibility…

Grazed from Business2Community. Author: Danny Walker.

Running all your IT in-house: the old approach… Until recently, most businesses have had to manage their own IT systems. This has either meant employing a team of technical experts or paying for expensive consultants. The reliance on computer hardware and software means that any problems which crop up need to be addressed swiftly in order to keep day-to-day business running smoothly.

As programs become more advanced, regular office PCs can start struggling and taking longer to boot and leading to lost productivity. A good example of this issue is highlighted in a tweet by the government’s new COO in 2013, Stephen Kelly -but constantly upgrading your hardware to cater for the latest software can be a drain on expenses…