Grazed from TechPageOne.  Author: Dennis Smith.

The cloud is fast and secure. It’s wildly flexible, and it offers true mobility without compromising on productivity. These are the reasons most companies make the shift to cloud computing. But sometimes, the cloud experience doesn’t come as advertised. Some businesses, to their dismay, find the cloud to be sluggish, moody or altogether absent. Some find it costlier than physical data centers.

Disaster constantly looms over organizations in cloudland, silent but ready to strike. The signs are usually there; seemingly insignificant but providing advance warning. Here are some tips to help businesses stop their cloud honeymoons from turning into nightmares…

Grazed from TechTarget.  Author: James Staten.

BYOE, or bring your own encryption, is a cloud computing security model that allows cloud services customers to use their own encryption software and manage their own encryption keys. It works by allowing customers to deploy a virtualized instance of their own encryption software alongside the business application they are hosting in the cloud. The business application is configured so that all its data is processed by the encryption application, which then writes the ciphertext version of the data to the cloud service provider’s physical data store. 

In this Ask the Expert, James Staten, an analyst at Cambridge, Mass.-based Forrester Research Inc., discusses with SearchCIO Senior Features Writer Karen Goulart why this model is important for enterprises today, the skills required to employ BYOE and when the trend will peak…

Grazed from TechTarget.  Author: David Davis.

Cloud Computing is all the rage right now and you likely are being barraged by every vendor under the sun about it. But, how can you tell if the cloud is really beneficial for you or if it’s just a bunch of marketing hype?

The most useful form of cloud computing marketed toward data center admins and infrastructure professionals is Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). With IaaS, you are simply running your servers in the provider’s data center. This model gives you elasticity, pay as you go pricing and the ability to offload the work associated with running those servers. However, with a typical IaaS provider, your servers aren’t on your network…

Grazed from EnterpriseCIO.  Author: Rick Blaisdell.

When it comes to emerging technologies, cloud computing has drawn more controversy than any other tech out there. These two words have driven countless debates, caused numerous arguments in IT departments and, more often than we like to admit, have left many in the industry profoundly confused.

But interest has continued to increase and many companies have successfully moved part or their entire IT into the cloud. We are currently moving and living in the cloud era, and our thinking is being shaped by several key areas like the need for flexible IT infrastructure, the emergence of big data analytics and increased mobile usage…

Grazed from WashingtonPost.  Author:  Mohana Ravindranath.

The United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission has selected Dell to build a private Internet cloud for the agency, the company announced Wednesday.  The NRC is responsible for regulating nuclear power and materials, as well as inspecting nuclear facilities and licensing.

Grazed from ScientificComputing.  Author: Tom Abate.

Just as Netflix uses an algorithm to recommend movies we ought to see, a Stanford software system offers by-the-moment advice to thousands of server-farm computers on how to efficiently share the workload.

We hear a lot about the future of computing in the cloud, but not much about the efficiency of the data centers that make the cloud possible. In those facilities, clusters of server computers work together to host applications ranging from social networks to big data analytics…

Grazed from FierceCIO. Author: David Weldon.

Government agencies at the federal and state level are lured to cloud computing by the promise of cost savings and expanded services. But there are also risks associated with moving operations and applications to the cloud. A recent report by researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill looks at contracting issues that government agencies face with adopting cloud services. The report was written for the IBM Center for the Business of Government.

"As with any form of government contracting, there are risks to be considered," notes an article at Governing. "Do governments lose control over their data? Do they risk losing access to it? Are they locked into a single vendor? The key to success is writing and negotiating a strong contract."…

Grazed from ITWeb. Author: Editorial Staff.

Global trends, like big data, cloud computing and advanced security threats, are challenging the relationship between IT and the business, forcing a new operating model for IT. As a result, today’s CIOs must act as independent service providers, competing for the end-user’s business in an open marketplace.

That’s the opinion of Servaas Venter, country manager of EMC Southern Africa, who says CIOs are at the centre of value creation. "As brokers of value, CIOs will find that protecting corporate data and improving productivity are the top goals of their major technology investments over the next 12 months," Venter says…

Grazed from PRWeb. Author: PR Announcement.

A senior official at HSBC has expressed concerns that IT bosses could end up behind bars due to loose regulation in the financial services sector. Speaking at Cloud Expo Europe, head of Research and Innovation Barry Childe said regulators have not yet created adequate standards around cloud services, which could create risks for those using them, V3 reports.

He explained: "Right now a financial services IT professional is at risk if he outsources a service elsewhere and a leak happens. There is a risk that he would potentially go to prison. There’s no get out of jail free card because he used a third party. "We need a code of conduct of due diligence. We need a standard to allow financial services firms to work with third parties."…

Grazed from Wired. Author: Klint Finley.

When former government contractor Edward Snowden revealed that the NSA was conducting digital surveillance on a massive scale, many feared for the future of cloud computing. The Information Technology and Innovation Foundation estimated that Snowden’s revelations could cost U.S. cloud companies $22 billion to $35 billion in foreign business over the next three years, and countless pundits predicted that American businesses would flee the cloud as well. People would prefer to run software and store data on their own computers, the argument went, rather than host their operations atop outside services potentially compromised by the NSA.

But it looks like the cloud industry is still growing. And in very big way. The world’s largest cloud computing services — services where you can run software and store data without buying your own hardware — are run by Amazon, and according to a new study from independent researcher Huan Liu, Amazon’s operation grew by a whopping 62 percent over the past two years…