Grazed from Business2Community.  Author: Ginger Shimp.

By 2015, the Internet will connect 2.5 billion people and more than 15 billion devices. While those numbers are staggering, we have to ask: What do they mean?  Some prognosticators have opined that CDs and DVDs will be collectors’ items by 2020. They further believe that before the decade is over, 14% of people won’t own physical books and 11% won’t have a TV.  Why? Because of the Cloud.

The professional services industry is moving to the Cloud faster than any other. And for professional services firms the Cloud is not just about IT. It’s about driving rapid innovation throughout the enterprise. It’s about agility. It’s about enabling new business processes. We’ve entered an era where major technology decisions are made outside of the IT department…

Grazed from MSPMentor.  Author: Michael Brown.

Over the last few years, we’ve watched the cloud evolve from an imaginative idea, to a unknown reality, to an ongoing presence in everyday IT management and business solutions. The cloud has grown up right before our eyes.

But the growth isn’t stopping here. The cloud experts over at Forrester decided to take a closer look at the cloud’s projected growth over the next few years, and their vision is really quite remarkable. It’s also a vision that MSPs like yourself should keep in mind as you grow your business and offerings, so let’s take a look at a few predictions in particular:..

Grazed from Investors.com.  Author: Patrick Seitz.

The tectonic shift in the information technology industry caused by cloud computing is paving the way for a few years of "big-time disruption" among systems and infrastructure software companies, says Canaccord Genuity analyst Richard Davis.

That disruption will create long-term investment opportunities and likely will see the emergence of another company or two the size of Salesforce.com (CRM) and Workday (WDAY), he said in a 31-page report Monday. The report profiled 16 private companies that have implications for investors, including online data storage companies Box and Dropbox and Big Data firms Cloudera and Actian. These companies are potential IPO candidates or acquisition targets, he said…

Grazed from Sys Con Media.  Author: Paige Leidig.

Cloud computing brings a myriad of benefits for any enterprise, but it is also a cause for concern in a world where, according to InformationWeek, cyber criminals are now targeting "any company where they can find data to resell, disrupt or exploit."  Moving your company’s sensitive data into the hands of third-party cloud providers expands and complicates the risk landscape in which you operate every day.

In order to understand what concerns should be given emphasis in your cloud security strategy, you need to understand what you can’t afford to lose and what can protect you…

Grazed from NewYork Times.  Author: Quentin Hardy.

Computer scientists at Stanford have developed software that works like the recommendation engines for Amazon shoppers and Netflix movie subscribers, only for the distribution of workloads across large computing environments. The results, they say, can triple the efficiency of cloud-computing systems.

“Google, Microsoft, Twitter — everyone has a problem of underperforming servers,” said Christos Kozyrakis, a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at Stanford University, who led the creation of the management software, which is called Quasar. He has worked in a research capacity at Google and Microsoft, and he used some of Twitter’s resources in his research on Quasar…

Grazed from Verizon.  Author: PR Announcement.

Cloud and cybersecurity professionals Siki Giunta and Eddie Schwartz have joined Verizon Enterprise Solutions’ executive leadership team as the company focuses on providing enterprise cloud, managed security and machine-to-machine technology to its clients.  VES President John Stratton hired Giunta, who handled the global cloud business of CSC, to oversee the company’s global cloud ecosystem and prepare Verizon Cloud for market, Jeff Nelson wrote Thursday.

Schwartz, who was chief information security officer at RSA, joined VES in November and has headed the cyberforensics investigation and global consulting teams as well as formed the Verizon Cyber Intelligence Center.

Grazed from Yahoo. Author: Peter Apps and Jim Finkle.

A sophisticated piece of spyware has been quietly infecting hundreds of government computers across Europe and the United States in one of the most complex cyber espionage programs uncovered to date. Several security researchers and Western intelligence officers say they believe the malware, widely known as Turla, is the work of the Russian government and linked to the same software used to launch a massive breach on the U.S. military uncovered in 2008.

It was also linked to a previously known, massive global cyber spying operation dubbed Red October targeting diplomatic, military and nuclear research networks. Those assessments were based on analysis of tactics employed by hackers, along with technical indicators and the victims they targeted…

Grazed from ITBusinessEdge. Author: Arthur Cole.

If two technologies have ever seen a timelier rise to prominence, it would have to be cloud computing and data warehousing. The symbiosis couldn’t be clearer: Big Data and analytics coupled with the ability to quickly and easily scale infrastructure to petabyte levels. Acceptance of cloud technology is clearly entering the mainstream, and this seems to be one of the key drivers for the advanced analytics capabilities that warehousing provides.

According to TechNavio, the global data warehousing market is set to grow by more than 11 percent per year between now and 2018, which is impressive considering that even with the cloud as a foundation, warehousing is still a complicated process that reaches into just about every legacy system and architecture in the enterprise…

Grazed from NetworkWorld. Author: Brandon Bulter.

Google and Verizon each made announcements this week that are significant in their race to catch the company many consider to still be the market leader in the IaaS public cloud: Amazon Web Services. Google announced a robust partner program this week, including three tiers of third-party vendors who provide technical and consulting services for the company’s cloud product.

Verizon, meanwhile, further committed itself to embracing application development in its cloud with an extension of its previously announced partnerships with CloudBees and CloudFoundry. Through its venture arm, Verizon committed a monetary investment to PaaS provider CloudBees. The moves show how some of AWS’s competitors hope to compete in this market, and highlight the different approaches IaaS vendors are taking…