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…

Grazed from SmartDataCollective. Author: Mark Smith.

At Oracle’s recent cloud computing analyst summit in sunny Palm Springs, the company’s executive team insisted that it sees clear skies for its efforts in cloud computing. The summit was led vr_BTI_importance_of_cloud_computingby senior executive Thomas Kurian, who runs the entire product organization and reports directly to CEO Larry Ellison. He affirmed that Oracle intends to offer the full range of cloud computing – public, private and hybrid models – to its customers and partners.

As one of the world’s largest software suppliers Oracle has much at stake to make its database and all tools and applications available in these cloud environments, including managed cloud services. Our business technology innovation research shows this is a smart bet. Cloud computing is important or very important to 57 percent of organizations, and more than half (55%) of cloud users have been using it for more than a year. I noted in 2013 that simplifying IT and innovating in business are key to its software strategy, and Oracle’s efforts since then have executed on this outline…

Grazed from The New York Times. Author: Clair Cain Miller.

Microsoft has lost customers, including the government of Brazil. IBM is spending more than a billion dollars to build data centers overseas to reassure foreign customers that their information is safe from prying eyes in the United States government. And tech companies abroad, from Europe to South America, say they are gaining customers that are shunning United States providers, suspicious because of the revelations by Edward J. Snowden that tied these providers to the National Security Agency’s vast surveillance program.

Even as Washington grapples with the diplomatic and political fallout of Mr. Snowden’s leaks, the more urgent issue, companies and analysts say, is economic. Tech executives, including Eric E. Schmidt of Google and Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, are expected to raise the issue when they return to the White House on Friday for a meeting with President Obama…