Grazed from Forbes. Author: Maribel Lopez.

CEO Satya Nadella’s first major press conference last week was a return to basics for Microsoft. It focused the vision and the technology, not the glitz and glamour. The pacing and rally cries were replaced with literary quotes. Gates once spoke of a PC on every desk. Nadella talks about the cloud fueling every device and Microsoft cloud software becoming a crucial part of this ecosystem.

In the excitement surrounding Office for the iPad, many people I’ve spoken with have overlooked the key message that Nadella discussed on Thursday. First, Nadella proclaimed that it is a mobile cloud world. “The cloud is how a device becomes your device. And the cloud is how your device becomes part of your life, by connecting to all the people, information and experiences that matter to you…

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: William Jackson.

The government has established an online collaboration called Project Interoperability to help develop tools and technologies for sharing threat information among organizations inside and outside of government. The project, recently launched by the Information Sharing Environment (ISE), a partnership between the defense and intelligence communities, addresses the need to make intelligence useable by many parties to counter increasingly sophisticated threats to national and cyber-security.

The need for better information sharing was one of the primary lessons learned from the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. Increased dependence on the Internet and the recent emergence — and convergence — of cloud and mobile computing to make systems and data accessible anytime from anywhere have stepped up the need for automated collaboration against attacks…

Grazed from KMWorld. Author: Stephen E. Arnold.

Cloud computing and big data appear to be a new technology marriage made in heaven. For many organizations, the cloud and big data could crack the knowledge management problem. In 2011, the National Institute for Science & Technology (NIST) published a draft definition of cloud computing. The definition articulated several "essential characteristics," service models and deployment models.

The main idea is that most enterprise applications can run in a time-sharing setup with such bells and whistles as collaboration, reports and guaranteed uptime. On-premises systems—despite their security advantages—require specialized staff. To control costs and shift from the hard-to-control expense of on-premise systems, cloud computing offers a managed solution. If the costs are about the same or higher, the efficiencies of outsourcing appear to make sense to many organizations…

Grazed from FierceEnterpriseCommunications. Author: Scott M. Fulton III.

On first reading, it sounds like a stretch. For many legal scholars, it continues sounding like a stretch after the twelfth reading. But given the historically unique confluence of circumstances leading up to next month’s round of oral arguments before the U.S. Supreme Court in the case of ABC v. Aereo, it’s impossible to rule it out entirely: Aereo’s argument is that, if the distribution of programming from its cloud-based servers to its subscribers’ devices counts as a "performance"–and thus a potential copyright violation–then any distribution of media from a cloud server to those same devices should also count as "performances."

Aereo is the innovative service, backed by former TV network chief Barry Diller, that uses arrays of patented micro-antennas to capture over-the-air TV signals, and then delivers those signals through cloud servers to Internet-based clients. It’s a subscription service that can deliver (almost) live television to viewers in locales where VHF antennas and coaxial cables can’t reach…

Grazed from Midsize Insider. Author: Doug Bonderud.

Server virtualization is a given for most midsize businesses. Any company running on a shared public cloud stack understands that while their data lives alongside information from other customers, there is no communication and no diffusion of data across hypervisor partitions. The result is a single server taking the place of multiple servers and portioning out resources as needed. While it is easy to argue for cloud computing as the final step in the virtual chain, the emergence of viable network virtualization technologies may be changing this landscape again.

Not So Smart?

Virtualized networks are not new. As a recent Forbes article notes, they are needed to operate multiple guest operating systems (OSs) on most physical servers; but this first-gen network virtualization technology is not particularly bright. Author Kurt Marko describes the infrastructure as "rather dumb devices, really more bridges than switches, and completely isolated from and ignorant of the underlying physical network topology they operate on." New technologies aim to bolster virtual network intelligence using overlay software, tunneling protocols such as VXLAN or NVGRE and software plug-ins that permit hypervisor oversight. In short, network virtualization is getting schooled…

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Andrew Froelich.

If you look at the most popular roles in enterprise IT today compared to a decade ago, you’ll notice that key IT roles have changed dramatically. Today’s hot IT jobs — including security engineers, server virtualization administrators, and mobile developers — were nonexistent or played a far less significant role in the past. We can expect the same to happen in the future. One role starting to develop prominence is what’s known as an "IT service broker."

And if you don’t think your department needs one now, you probably will see the need in the not too distant future. Gartner’s Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends for 2014 called out the IT service broker as a position that would be gaining importance in cloud-leveraged organizations. The broker’s responsibilities are to work with public, private, and hybrid cloud service providers to assist in the design, implementation, and support of cloud services…

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Dina Gerdeman.

As companies gain efficiencies in the cloud, they often look to emulate the same kind of experience in their own operations. Forrester Research Inc.’s James Staten said he’s seen a pattern at companies that use quite a bit of public cloud. Eventually many come to realize that some apps really aren’t a good fit for the public cloud. Perhaps these apps sit 24×7 and rack up high bills, or they require too much monitoring. What often happens next is the company will decide to build internal systems that mirror the public cloud.

"That usually ends up being pretty effective," Staten said. One concept that companies have borrowed from the cloud: charging per user or per department for the various IT services each department needs. This chargeback model charges each department that uses email a certain amount for that email service, for example…

Grazed from TheAge. Author: Editorial Staff.

Remember when getting a new project off the ground in a large business took months of argument, analysis and testing? And that was only to create the business case, before anyone could persuade the finance department to fund it. If the project involved software development it might then take months or years for the code to actually be written, implemented and tested, and even longer before its effectiveness was known.

By then, it was possible that the reason for starting the project had been rendered redundant by changing business needs. For some businesses, that is still the way projects are managed. But now concepts perfected in the tech start-up industry, such as cloud computing and agile software development, are being adopted by large businesses such as Suncorp Bank and Vodafone Australia to get small projects off the ground in a matter of just days…

Grazed from Vaultive. Author: PR Announcement.

Vaultive today announced that the first global investment bank to adopt Microsoft’s Office 365 service has selected Vaultive to provide the data encryption required to enable the bank to migrate its global workforce to the cloud. The bank chose Vaultive after an exhaustive 6 month competitive review, citing Vaultive’s strongest level of data encryption, functionality, performance, responsiveness, and support for multiple cloud-applications.

While banks and other financial services firms have long been at the forefront of technology trends, this is not the case with cloud computing. Strict regulatory requirements, as well as security and disclosure concerns, have prevented cloud adoption. In addition, firms that operate globally are constrained from migrating to the cloud by a growing number of international data residency laws…

Grazed from Enterprise Irregulars. Author: Louis Columbus.

Microsoft’s latest study shows enterprises’ pace of cloud computing adoption continues to accelerate. Nearly half of the respondents (45%) report they have cloud-based applications running in production environments. 58% report that they selectively target new applications and projects for cloud computing.

Microsoft commissioned 451 Research to complete one of the most comprehensive global surveys to date of hosting and cloud computing, titled Hosting and Cloud Go Mainstream releasing the results earlier this month. The 74 page slide deck of results provides a wealth of insights into the current and future state of hosting and cloud computing…