Grazed from Reuters.  Author: Jonathan Stempel.

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on Friday said it has shut down a worldwide pyramid scheme that falsely promised fast gains to tens of thousands of Asian-American, Hispanic and foreign investors from cloud computing services.  A federal judge on Thursday granted the regulator’s request for an asset freeze over entities operating as WCM and WCM777, which are based near Los Angeles and in Hong Kong and run by Ming Xu of Temple City, California.

WCM and WCM777 allegedly raised more than $65 million since March 2013 by promising people they could double their money in 100 days by investing between $399 and $1,999 in cloud services such as website hosting, data storage and software support…

Grazed from TechTarget.  Author: Nicole Laskowski.

Security is still a major obstacle for IT when it comes to cloud adoption. That was made crystal clear at the Massachusetts Technology Leadership Council seminar on securing data, availability and reputation in the cloud, which attracted a mix of security, IT, entrepreneurs and business folks. As one attendee succinctly put it, "Why should we trust AWS [Amazon Web Services] when we have no visibility into their other side?"

The Data MillStill, there are plenty of organizations thinking in terms of a "cloud first" strategy, including the federal government. For readers who are looking for guidance on cloud security, here are five quick tips from the seminar’s expert panelists on how to minimize security risks before partnering with AWS or any number of Anything as a Service providers…

Grazed from SmartCEO.  Author: Editorial Staff.

“Big Brother” is by no means a new notion, and in fact, George Orwell wrote about this very topic in his famous book “1984” over six decades ago. A recent example surfaced just recently when Edward Snowden disclosed top secret documents to prominent media outlets outing U.S. government Internet surveillance programs.

Another notable example of a privacy infringement was the Target data breach that occurred during the holiday shopping season of 2013. These poignant examples are just two among several that occurred during this past year, and they are enough to create trepidation around the conversation of cloud computing. The NSA spying scandal and the high-profile hacks have left many to wonder if the embrace of these data stores is happening too fast for safety’s sake…

Grazed from TechTarget.  Author: Harvey Koeppel.

Conduct a Google search on the phrase "What is the cloud?" and one of the first answers to pop up is ‘the cloud is just a metaphor for the Internet.’ While that statement is debatable, the bigger question is what questions CIOs should be asking to develop sound cloud computing strategies.

In the first part of this CIO Matters column, IT and business strategy expert Harvey Koeppel discussed the quagmire of technology that is dubbed the cloud and why the technology itself does not translate into cloud computing strategies. Here, he  runs through 14 cloud strategy questions that will lead CIOs to extract more business value from cloud computing…

Grazed from ProjectDisco.org.  Author: Matthias Langenegger.

his post is part of a series on the opportunities and challenges of cloud computing in the developing world. Previous posts covered the following topics:

    Part 1: The transformative potential of the cloud and the different types of cloud services

    Part 2: The economics of the cloud and the protectionist threat

ICTs are generally among the most restricted of all industries when it comes to forced localisation. They suffer from virtually all types of localisation barriers, from local production requirements to local content requirements. With regards to the cloud, the two most relevant localisation barriers are IT infrastructure requirements and data storage requirements (e.g. forced localisation). The use of those two barriers increased significantly in the past few years…

Grazed from SC Magazine.  Author: Steve Gold.

According to Lieberman Software’s report, the bulk of these `cloud defectors’ are opting to store their data in local data centre resources, rather than the cloud, thanks in part to Edward Snowden’s revelations on the NSA and GCHQ over the last 10 months.

Interestingly, the Privileged Identity Management specialist says that – in its 2012 analysis on the same subject – distrust in cloud computing was even higher. And whilst trust in the cloud has risen by 15 per cent over the last year or so, the government surveillance reports in the news have caused trust levels to take a dive again…

Grazed from Business2Community.  Author: Raj Narayanaswamy.

The cloud services model for delivering software has become wildly popular over the last few years because it offers benefits that legacy, on-premise software can’t match. Its consistent, hassle-free updates, economies of scale derived from centralized maintenance, and predictable cost models have all contributed to the global rush for businesses to move many of their enterprise applications to the cloud.

By 2017, enterprise spending on cloud computing will amount to a projected $235.1 billion, triple the $78.2 billion spent in 2011, according to the market research firm IHS. Spending for infrastructure and services related to the cloud will reach an estimated $174.2 billion this year, up 20% from the amount spent in 2013, the firm reported…

Grazed from MarketWatch.  Author: Jeff Reeves.

Box Inc., the latest player to ride the wave of Wall Street optimism for cloud computing, just filed its S-1 this week to go public.  But while the media circus around “the cloud” continues and another baby-faced 20-something CEO gets ready to ring the opening bell on Wall Street, investors need to start getting real about the current bubble in tech stocks.

Here’s a heaping helping of reality to get you started, direct from Box’s filing with the SEC:  “We have a history of cumulative losses, and we do not expect to be profitable for the foreseeable future.”…

Grazed from CIOInsight.  Author: Samuel Greengard.

In recent years, as organizations have embraced cloud computing, CIOs and other executives have witnessed significant gains. In many cases, their enterprises have boosted IT availability, reduced demands on internal infrastructure and notched productivity improvements along with cost savings. Last October, Gartner reported that cloud computing will emerge as the bulk of IT spend by 2016 and half of all cloud services will take a hybrid cloud approach by 2017.

But as more and more organizations drift into the cloud, one fact is perfectly clear: the risk of an outage or outright failure is real, and such an event could have significant repercussions during and after an event. Already, a number of high-profile cloud providers have endured episodic outages and failures, including Amazon Web Services, Google Drive, Dropbox and Microsoft Azure. In some instances, companies using these products and services haven’t just endured downtime, they’ve also lost data…

Grazed from MidSize Insider.  Author: Shawn Drew.

While the benefits of cloud computing continue to outshine any potential drawbacks, some IT managers and executives at midsize businesses still take a cautious approach with this new technology. While the needs of businesses differ, some new research, as discussed in a Forbes article, shows that employees are adopting cloud computing services en masse without IT’s knowledge. That is a reality that IT managers have to consider when thinking about the cloud, security and their business.

Significant Shadow IT Spending

The new research comes from a Microsoft survey, conducted by 451 Research, of over 2,000 executives from around the world. The focus of the survey was cloud computing and how businesses are adopting the technology now that it has grown into more than just a buzzword…