Grazed from PRNewsWire.  Author: PR Announcement.

Oliver McGee, former U.S. deputy assistant secretary of transportation for technology policy in the Clinton Administration, and founder of Partnership Possibilities for America, gives histake on mega-technology trends of international aviation safety and security in the next decade and beyond.

When asked recently by Reuters about lessons learned from Malaysia Flight 370, Oliver McGee said, "It’s time to move the black box to ‘the cloud’ at least for essential limited flight recorder data for long flights over (areas) like the Indian Ocean, or other remote areas across large land masses like across the Brazilian Amazon."…

Grazed from CIOToday.  Author: Matt Krantz.

Microsoft hit its highest level since 2000 Tuesday and was one of the top five performing stocks in the Standard & Poor’s 500 on increasing chatter a version of Office is coming for Apple’s iPad.  Shares of Microsoft gained $1.50, or 3.9%, to $39.55 in the stock’s biggest one-day move in seven months. The stock is up nearly 6% this year, outpacing the broader market. Tuesday’s rally alone lifted Microsoft’s market value $12.5 billion to $328.3 billion.

Office is the dominant software and cloud service used by businesses and professionals to create documents, calculate spreadsheets and design presentations. By taking the service to Apple’s iPad computers, Microsoft would demonstrate its seriousness in using its edge in cloud-based services to bring services to all devices to boost revenue…

Grazed from AppDeveloperMagazine.  Author: Richard Harris.

IBM has announced an agreement to acquire Cloudant a database-as-a-service (DBaaS) provider. Cloudant, an active participant and contributor to the open source database community Apache CouchDBTM, offers elastic scalability and innovative mobile device synchronization through its JSON cloud-based data service which allows mobile and web developers to store and access mobile data through an API.

Grazed from InformationWeek.  Author: Thomas Claburn.

Moving to restore trust in cloud computing services, Google said Thursday that it has made encrypted HTTPS connections mandatory for Gmail.  "Today’s change means that no one can listen in on your messages as they go back and forth between you and Gmail’s servers — no matter if you’re using public WiFi or logging in from your computer, phone or tablet," Nicolas Lidzborski, Google security engineering lead, wrote in a blog post.

The company turned HTTPS on by default in 2010. From then until now, users were able to disable it — for the sake of marginal speed gains or compatibility — but no longer…

Grazed from PRNewsWire.  Author: PR Announcement.

BAE Systems today announced the launch of SIBA™, a tool that redefines and simplifies secure data collaboration and dissemination for both government and commercial customers. SIBA provides an innovative solution to secure information sharing for the nation’s Intelligence Community, as well as banks, law firms, and users of electronic medical records. The SIBA solution works seamlessly with Microsoft Office^® and SharePoint^®, without modifying those applications. The tool was unveiled today before joint customers at the Microsoft Technology Center in Reston, Virginia.

It is imperative that agencies in the Intelligence Community are able to quickly migrate intelligence data to shared repositories, where it can be accessed securely in real-time by multiple users in multiple agencies…

Grazed from ReadWrite.  Author: Matt Asay.

What do popular projects like Docker, Heroku’s Force.com and Cloud Foundry’s (Go)Router all have in common? They’re all written in Go (a.k.a. "golang"), Google’s five-year-old programming language.

While languages like Java continue to dominate programming, new models have emerged that are better suited to modern computing, particularly in the cloud. Go, written expressly for the cloud, has been growing in popularity because of its mastery of concurrent operations and the beauty of its construction…

Grazed from InfoStor.  Author: Pedro Hernandez.

CloudBerry Lab, a Newport Beach, Calif.-based cloud backup specialist, wants to help SMBs maintain multiple data backups on the cloud with the release CloudBerry Backup v3.8.  Cloud backup servicesAccording to Alexey Serkov, CloudBerry Lab CTO, the new software tackles some of the thornier issues of managing backups on multi-cloud environments. While the data centers of major cloud services providers are generally robust, they can’t protect against every risk to backup data.

are gaining in popularity, particularly among SMBs. They allow smaller firms — often lacking in big IT budgets or technical know-how — to safeguard their vital files on off-site, enterprise-grade data centers. For an affordable subscription fee, business can trade juggling external hard drives and tapes, for automated backups and the ability to recover data after disaster strikes…

Grazed from MidsizeInsider. Author: Melissa Busch.

Many companies that have utilized public clouds have likely moved on from the experimental, "getting acquainted" stage of their relationship and may be aiming to fully commit to each other with mass migration, according to an article from InfoWorld.

It’s Not Me, It’s You

As the relationship between companies and their clouds evolves, organizations grow choosier about the services being delivered, and certain issues start to create static between them. When high prices, substandard services or poor security become major detriments to the relationship, it may be time to start looking for a new public cloud vendor…

Grazed from MidSize Insider. Author: Doug Bonderud.

Contrary to the hype, cloud computing is not unique; in fact, this "as-a-service" concept closely resembles the provision of such common utilities as electricity, natural gas and water. As cloud computing deployments become more popular and the service terms of providers align, how do midsize IT professionals ensure that they are getting the right price combined with the best access? In other words, what is the best way to keep cloud resources flowing?

You’re Not Special

That is the take-away from a March 19 Government Executive article titled "Why Cloud Computing Is Like Water." Author Kimberly McCabe says that "successfully acquiring cloud services requires suppressing the notion that your agency’s computing resources needs are truly unique and require a customized product or service." She boils it down to a simple concept: Water is water and computing is computing, no matter the purpose or the buyer…