Grazed from BusinessTechnology.  Author: Editorial Staff.

When looking at cloud security, you want to make sure that your data is protected, and that the risk of data loss is eliminated.  As businesses move more information and data into the cloud, the concern of security is important.  Commensus takes your data protection seriously and it is a priority to ensure that you are fully protected and that you can access your data quickly and safely.

“Over the last year we are seeing more questions being asked about risk of migrating to the cloud, and data protection. Compared to 2012 and last year we are finding that more organisations are moving to the cloud,” says Alex Parker, CIO of Commensus.  Commensus is often asked about platform and cloud services. Here are its answers to the top three questions asked about data security…

Grazed from BusinessTechnology.  Author: Editorial Staff.

At Phoenix we are taking a different approach to cloud services. We have many years of experience in delivering services remotely to our customers and have a well-established estate of UK data centres on our own high speed network.

By its very nature, the IT industry is great at confusing the world with new technologies and even more new ways of describing them. The fact is that cloud is a fundamental shift in the way IT is delivered, but the technology behind it is nothing new. Wide-area networks have existed for many years, as have data centres. What really is new is the level of innovation and improvements applied to these technologies that give cloud the potential to change IT service delivery forever…

Grazed from TechRepublic.  Author: Tony Patton.

One benefit of Google, Netflix, and other companies that build businesses on the web is that the innovations these businesses spawn can benefit everybody. Amazon is a great example; the company turned its infrastructure expertise into Amazon Web Services (AWS), which now powers much of the web.  Netflix utilizes AWS for services and content delivery and has refined the technology to better fit its customer base. Netflix is sharing this refinement with the world.

Make AWS more reliable

Netflix’s Open Source Software (NetflixOSS) is aimed at making the services provided by AWS more reliable; the company’s efforts have involved everything from infrastructure to caching to building and deploying. Netflix has not reached the point where outages do not occur (is that possible?) as we saw in December 2013…

Grazed from ARNews.  Author: Editorial Staff.

Mobily, a major enterprise-class cloud solution provider, announced that it is now an SAP-certified provider of hosting services for SAP Cloud technology.
This is in line with its strategy to become an ICT key player, Mobily stated, adding that it is among the first SAP partners in the GCC to achieve this certification from SAP AG.

This certification recognizes Mobily ability to deliver services for SAP Cloud with high-quality operation standards.  The company delivers cloud hosting services across the entire life cycle of the SAP Business Suite applications — test, development, quality assurance, staging and production by utilizing Virtustream xStream cloud management software and its µVM technology, which enables application-level SLAs to guarantee performance and availability of critical SAP Business Suite applications running on the platform….

Grazed from ArsTechnica.  Author: Sean Gallagher.

When Microsoft unveiled its Cortana “digital personal assistant” technology this week, some dismissed it as a far-too-late answer to Apple’s Siri and Google Now. But aside from a female voice and some functional overlap, Cortana is not strictly an answer to either of those voice-based tools—it is an answer to broader questions about how to wield the power of cloud computing services in a personal, non-intrusive way.

Cortana is just the first big pay-off from Microsoft’s continuing investment in the Bing platform as well as a host of big-data technologies that could have wide-ranging impact on how people interact with information, applications, and the world around them…

Grazed from Forbes.  Author: Dave Thier.

In what could be construed as a response to some of the framerate and resolution differences between the Xbox One and the PS4, Microsoft MSFT -2.76% took the stage at the San Francisco Build Conference to demonstrate how cloud computing technology can enhance video game graphics. This is the sort of thing that Microsoft has been talking about since the Xbox One reveal, but we’ve yet to get much of an idea of how it will work when the rubber hits the road.

The video is a demonstration of two high-end gaming machines, one of which is connected to Azure’s cloud server, one of which isn’t. When the Microsoft presenter starts loading the scenario up with some complex physics, the unconnected machine struggles to maintain framerate while the connected one clips along at 32 fps. It should be noted that this is not Xbox One footage, but rather a PC prototype. The recording is courtesy of Arekkz Gaming…

Read more from the source @ http://www.forbes.com/sites/davidthier/2014/04/04/microsoft-shows-off-power-of-the-cloud-for-xbox-one/

Grazed from SysCon Media.  Author: Gilad Parann-Nissany.

The combination of cloud computing and big data is a match made in heaven. Big data requires a flexible compute environment, which can scale quickly and automatically to support massive amounts of data. Infrastructure clouds provide exactly that. But whenever cloud computing is discussed, the question comes up:

What about cloud security for big data?

When it comes to cloud security in a big data use case, the expectation is that any security solution will provide the same flexibility as the cloud without compromising the overall security of the implementation. When taking your big data to the cloud, the following four tips will enable you to achieve cloud flexibility paired with strict cloud security…

Grazed from CloudTech.  Author: James Bourne.

Cloud services provider Interoute has announced the launch of a new virtual data centre (VDC) in Hong Kong, joining other vendors in setting up shop in the lucrative Asian region.   The company also announced that its customers can move data and apps across the entire services platform, across VDC zones, for no cost.

Lee Myall, the general manager of Interoute’s enterprise app store CloudStore, told CloudTech that while European expansion was still key, this was big news for Interoute on a global scale…

Grazed from PrivateWifi.  Author: Jared Howe

Cloud computing is used by virtually every organization because it’s a convenient way to use applications and share data in a web-based environment.  But there are also risks to consider. IT firm SoftChoice Cloud has published the findings of an interesting survey that highlighted how employees who use these applications are exposing their organizations to security breaches and data losses at a much higher rate than non-cloud users.

The cloud, as it’s known colloquially, is also referred to as SaaS (Software as a Service) and it has grown exponentially over the last decade. As part of this survey, SoftChoice interviewed 1,000 employees in the U.S. and Canada and found that employees who use SaaS apps for work have developed bad habits and risky behaviors that may compromise the security of their organizations…

Read more from the source @ http://www.privatewifi.com/what-you-dont-know-about-cloud-computing-could-be-hurting-your-company/

Grazed from BusinessInsider.  Author: Julie Bort.

All of the industry’s biggest tech players are going gaga chasing the cloud-computing market these days:

•     Cisco just vowed to spend $1 billion to build a new cloud to compete with Amazon’s Web Services.
• Microsoft spent about $8 billion on cloud computing R&D in 2011 and spends billions more each year on its cloud data centers in 16 regions around the world.
• IBM is spending $7 billion to beef up its cloud.
• Oracle is in the process of building a cloud, too, with parts of it already being used by beta testers, CEO Larry Ellison recently said…