Grazed from HedgeWeek. Author: Editorial Staff.

NCC Group surveyed chief investment officers from financial services companies with over 1,000 employees, and found that less than half of those surveyed carry out third party audits of prospective cloud providers prior to engagement, and over 60 per cent do not have any contractual protection in place if their cloud provider fails.

Cloud adoption in the sector is gaining momentum, with a massive 80 per cent of respondents planning to adopt further cloud services in the next 12 months. Daniel Liptrott, managing director of NCC Group’s escrow division, says: “Financial services firms are increasingly turning to the cloud due to the benefits of cost and flexibility, but many are not taking the proper precautions…

Read more from the source @ http://www.hedgeweek.com/2014/06/19/205122/financial-sector-adopting-poor-%E2%80%98cloud-practice%E2%80%99

Grazed from BroadwayWorld. Author: PR Announcement.

North Bridge Venture Partners, in conjunction with Gigaom Research and a record 72 collaborating organizations, today released results for its fourth annual Future of Cloud Computing survey. This survey is the industry’s deepest and broadest examination of the cloud technology revolution. It analyzed the inhibitors and drivers behind cloud adoption, separating the hype surrounding the cloud from genuine industry trends and real world cases across a sample of 1,358 respondents. See the complete findings slideshow here: 2014 Future of Cloud Computing survey, along with analysis and commentary on the results here.

"With four years of data, we’re now really beginning to see some interesting trends, such as the five-fold increase in SaaS adoption to 74% and the nearly six-fold increase in PaaS adoption to 41%." said Michael Skok, founder of the Future of Cloud program and General Partner, North Bridge Venture Partners…

Read entire report here: http://www.broadwayworld.com/bwwgeeks/article/Industrys-Largest-Cloud-Computing-Survey-Reveals-5X-Adoption-of-SaaS-20140619#.U6LsXZRdWRM

Grazed from TMCNet. Author: Gilad Parann-Nissany.

The global village, mobile devices, online marketplaces, social networks, and on-demand entertainment all have a part to play. People all over the world are increasing the time they spend in the virtual world. They’re buying, selling, sharing, studying, developing apps, hanging out in social networks, and starting to use digital currencies that bypass traditional banking.

Alongside these community-driven ideas, we are also seeing enormous change in business to business relationships. Cloud computing enables any size business to obtain and manage big-business manufacturing, warehousing, marketing, data analytics, enterprise applications and global spread. Supply chains are radically altered: a business of any size can buy, produce and sell globally, and leverage vertically and horizontally integrated supply chains…

Grazed from Business2Community. Author: Matt Smith.

Cloud computing is rapidly transforming business processes both domestically and in international emerging markets. Information technology is projected to be based more than 50 percent in the cloud within the next few years and it may be an ideal environment for many developing markets. This shift will allow emerging international markets to move past costly technology barriers and drastically increase productivity and growth. Cloud services are becoming more readily available in a variety of regions, which has fueled a strong desire for increased capacity.

Although the use of cloud services is still in its formative years in many emerging markets, the adoption of the cloud is becoming more prevalent. This steadily increasing switch to the cloud by an assorted range of organizations has fueled the need for providers to invest in new data centers and cloud infrastructures as well as related offerings such as security and management services…

Grazed from RealWire. Author: PR Announcement.

Interoute, owner operator of Europe’s largest cloud services platform, has today launched a new Interoute Virtual Data Centre (VDC) zone in New York in a move that will further expand its cloud services globally. With latency as little as 68ms[1] between Interoute’s London and New York VDC zones, users of Interoute’s IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) platform have the benefit of a low latency, globally distributed cloud at their fingertips.

Interoute CTO, Matthew Finnie, commented, "European developers and businesses with their sights set on the US need more than just a data centre to effectively gain a foothold there. They need a networked cloud to give them the speed and performance to compete. Interoute VDC provides massively distributed cloud architecture, globally, and we’ve thrown in the network for free. Opening our first US zone in New York is part of Interoute’s expansion beyond our European base, following the launch of our Hong Kong zone earlier this year."…

Grazed from Investors. Author: Editorial Staff.

Hewlett-Packard has stepped up investments in cloud computing, prompting some analysts to speculate that it could make a big move such as acquiring Rackspace Hosting. That, however, would require HP (NYSE:HPQ) to ratchet up its spending significantly, since Rackspace (NYSE:RAX) could sell for $6 billion or $7 billion.

HP in May said that it plans to spend $1 billion over the next two years to develop cloud products and services. At an annual conference for business customers in Las Vegas this month, the Palo Alto, Calif.-based HP said that it will expand from two data centers to 25 by the end of 2015. The data centers will be packed with servers and data-storage systems that customers rent via the cloud…

Grazec from NYTimes. Author: Quentin Hardy.

Intel is solving a tough business problem, using a little technical innovation. The company said Wednesday that it would enable its Xeon processor, used inside big computing environments, to handle a customer’s large-scale proprietary algorithms as if the chip were customized for that process.

The idea is to enable some of computing’s biggest workloads, like security for a telecommunications company, or Facebook’s widely used homepage, to work faster across thousands of computer servers at once. Provided those are servers with this Xeon chip. Taking advantage of the optimized chip, “applications should work twice as fast as before,” said Diane Bryant, general manager of Intel’s data center group. “As cloud computing grows, the infrastructure of it has to change.”…

Grazed from Midsize Insider. Author: Shawn Drew.

It has been repeatedly claimed that a migration to cloud computing services will bring with it productivity and collaborative gains at the expense of data security, since the data is being managed by a third party. However, the cost of that increased security risk has never been quantified until now, in a new report from Netskope and the Ponemon Institute. Midsize businesses should take note of the report’s findings, but they should also approach these numbers with the requisite grain of salt.

Hidden Dangers With Cloud Computing Services

The data comes from a survey of over 600 cloud-aware IT professionals who attempted to quantify the "cloud multiplier effect," the cloud’s added risk of a costly data breach. As detailed in a recent eWEEK article, the report found that in certain situations — for example, when there is a 50 percent increase in the use of cloud-based storage of sensitive information — the expected cost of a data breach can increase by more than 200 percent…

Grazed from LightReading. Author: Mitch Wagner.

While security fears about cloud computing are legitimate, they also serve as an excuse to avoid change, according to John Considine, CTO, Verizon Terremark. Security is a concern for enterprises contemplating the cloud, and some of that is valid, Considine said during a keynote here today.

"But it’s also being used very broadly as a reason not to do something," he said. "I have a lot of challenges when people say, ‘Let me find all the reasons I can’t do something.’ " Some enterprises fear the cloud is dangerous and should be avoided. And yet even the biggest banks, airlines, and retail operations have been doing IT hosting, managed services, and co-location for years. "Now that it’s cloud, somehow it’s a little more scary," Considine said…

Grazed from ITWorld. Author: James Niccolai.

Breaking with other players in the IT industry, Amazon’s CTO has downplayed any impact of the Edward Snowden revelations on its international business. "Growth outside the U.S. is as strong as it ever was," CTO Werner Vogels said in an onstage interview at the Gigaom Structure conference in San Francisco Wednesday.

Cisco and a few other vendors have complained that revelations about surveillance by the National Security Agency have eroded trust in U.S. technology firms overseas, harming their businesses. Cisco CEO John Chambers even complained to President Barack Obama, after reports that the NSA had intercepted routers en route to customers to plant surveillance tools…