Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: David Linthicum.

The term "cloud" has different meanings to different people. It’s so broadly defined with so many meanings that it really does not mean much at all. However, several cloud concepts are gaining more interest, whether in cloud contexts or not. By focusing on these concepts, rather than the more general notion of cloud computing, you can get more value in your organization’s technology, cloud and otherwise.

Three concepts in particular stand out: devops, management and governance, and data analytics. Devops (development and operations) is a software development process and sets of technology that provide an agile relationship between development and IT operations. The objective of devops is to change and improve the relationship by advocating better communication and collaboration between the two organizations…

Grazed from JavaWorld. Author: Peter Wayner.

If the cartoonists are right, heaven is located in a cloud where everyone wears white robes, every machine is lightning quick, everything you do works perfectly, and every action is accompanied by angels playing lyres. The current sales pitch for the enterprise cloud isn’t much different, except for the robes and the music. The cloud providers have an infinite number of machines, and they’re just waiting to run your code perfectly.

The sales pitch is seductive because the cloud offers many advantages. There are no utility bills to pay, no server room staff who want the night off, and no crazy tax issues for amortizing the cost of the machines over N years. You give them your credit card, and you get root on a machine, often within minutes…

Grazed from MarketWire. Author: PR Announcement.

Juniper Networks, the industry leader in network innovation, is honored to announce it was selected as a Reader Trust award winner in the Best Cloud Computing Security Solution, Best Network Access Control Solution and Best Unified Threat Management Security Solution categories at the 2014 SC Awards. Juniper Networks® Firefly Host, Juniper Networks Unified Access Control and Juniper Networks SRX Series Services Gateway for the Branch were selected from a group of finalists representing the best the information security industry has to offer.

The Juniper Networks solutions were recognized by a panel of readers, representing the audience of SC Magazine, as the top product in the Reader Trust award competition. The announcement was made Feb. 25, 2014 at the SC Awards ceremony held in conjunction with the annual RSA Conference in San Francisco…

Grazed from CloudTweaks. Author: Daniel Price.

Amazon gets a lot of coverage on this website for their Amazon Web Services, a fast-growing subset of the company that sells on-demand cloud-computing power to both large companies and private individuals. It has rapidly become the de-facto standard cloud computing services, and is expected to be worth close to $50 billion by 2015.

However, it was another potential Amazon service received a lot of coverage in late 2013, as the company announced ‘Amazon Prime Air’ – a delivery system to get packages from its online store straight to customers in under thirty minutes. Here we look at five lesser-known facts about Amazon’s new delivery drones:…

Grazed from WashingtonTechnology. Author: Stephanie Meloni.

Don’t expect much speed as the federal government moves toward cloud solutions. At a January AFCEA luncheon, Tim Rudolph, U.S. Air Force senior leader for integrated information capabilities, gave an analogy of how the military services are testing the waters with cloud adoption:

• The Army is in the water up to its knees.
• The Air Force is in a car near the edge of the water with a kayak strapped to the roof.
• The Marine Corps is wading in with a knife in its mouth.
• And the Navy is digging its own pond.

His tongue-in-cheek comments highlighted the uneven approach the military departments are taking to cloud adoption. The Army is the farthest along, particularly with its move last year of both unclassified and classified email accounts to the DOD Enterprise Email service, hosted by the Defense Information Systems Agency. The Air Force more recently joined the Army in using DEE, although Air Force participation is limited to just unclassified email accounts for the time being…

Grazed from MidSize Insider. Author: Robert Lawson.

Cloud computing trends for 2014 appear to show positive signs, according to reports. How are these trends playing out so far? The business and financial news website DailyFinance reported predictions for the cloud in 2014, and things are looking good. The article provided an analysis of the ways in which migration to the cloud will become more of a mainstream process this year.

A Growing Cloud Market

This news is not particularly surprising because reports have been indicating an obvious and ongoing shift to cloud computing, even from the consumer side. It has been referred to as the "consumerization of IT," and 2014 will likely bring forth the "capitalization of IT." Businesses and customers will be tied together through systems that exist in virtual machines and in servers managed by providers…

Grazed from CloudTweaks. Author: Andrei Maguleanu.

We’ve talked about how cloud computing is changing our everyday lives. How you use your phone, your game console, even your computer or email has changed for the better, and all thanks to cloud computing. If you don’t yet have a cloud storage account, here’s an overview comparing the three major solutions from the three major players in the IT world: Microsoft, Google and the mighty, Dropbox.

Google Drive

Google’s product is seamlessly integrated with everything with your other Google Services, making it a favorite among Android users. You get 15 GB for free to start you off, and if you should need more than that you can buy packages starting from 100GB for $4.99 a month. Photos stored in Google+ will not count towards your basic 15GB storage, and you can store as many as you want at 2048px. A versatile, easy to use service with a lot of integration options, and free for the most part. Definitely one of the top contenders…

Grazed from TechPageOnce. Author: Dennis Smith.

Cloud computing and cloud servers rely on browser technology, which itself relies on Domain Name Systems (DNS) and secure DNS management to send users to the right site. But what happens when users are sent to the wrong site — a malicious site? DNS servers can be vulnerable to hijacking — obtaining administrator credentials and redirecting traffic to another server — which can also interject malicious code or send traffic to questionable sites, including phishing sites. You may have read about recent attacks on internet sites, including LinkedIn and NYTimes.com. The work of “hacktivists”, DNS hijacking has serious implications for cloud computing. Here are five ways to better secure your DNS servers and avoid or mitigate potential damage from an attack:

Separate DNS servers from applications and data

Whether you manage DNS in-house or outsource, separating your DNS servers from applications and data is a business continuity best practice. It enables you to perform a DNS redirect to a site that informs users of an outage. Without the separation, the DNS will fall should an enterprise or ISP server go down. Separating the DNS minimizes potential data loss in the event of an attack…

Grazed from FierceFinanceIT. Author: Renee Caruthers.

An added wrinkle to the challenge of time synchronization for financial firms is cloud computing. As firms consider how extensively they can rely on the cloud for critical business processes, they are beginning to explore whether the cloud environment adversely affects time synchronization. Unfortunately, the answer appears to be yes, it does.

"Timing in the cloud is just awful," says FSMLabs CEO Victor Yodaiken. "Traditional tools for time synchronization don’t work well at all. You will see the legacy technology lose 10 minutes over a day. If your eventual goal is to have thousands of machines running in the cloud, you will have the times between these instances radically diverge. That’s just unacceptable even for the lowest frequency kinds of operations that people want to push into the cloud."…

Grazed from CloudSigma. Author: PR Announcement.

CloudSigma, a public cloud IaaS provider with advanced hybrid hosting solutions, today announced that it is partnering with CompatibleOne, an open source, cloud-aware software platform that enables organizations to operate as a Cloud Services Brokerage. Through the partnership, CloudSigma customers will now be able to securely manage their cloud environments at different locations, and across different cloud providers, via a single user interface, giving them better insight into how they provision their resources globally.

CloudSigma has always been dedicated to creating flexible, open computing environments that are driven by customers’ needs, and this partnership with CompatibleOne reinforces that commitment even more. CloudSigma customers can provision processing, storage, networks and other fundamental computing resources however they want, as well as deploy any operating system or application with full control. What’s more, they can completely remove their data from the cloud at any given time at little or no cost, without worrying about vendor lock-in. Similarly, CompatibleOne, based on open source and open standards, protects companies from vendor lock-in and ensures they will always have the freedom to provision their workloads as best supports their business…