Grazed from InfoSec Island. Author: Kevin L. Jackson.

Cloud computing transitions information technology (IT) from being "systems of physically integrated hardware and software" to "systems of virtually integrated services." This transition makes interoperability the difference between the success and failure of IT deployments, especially in the Federal government.

Recent government IT failures like the healthcare portal roll out highlight this critical difference. Leading specialists serving on the federal health IT committee have voice their concern about the lack of comprehensive interoperability. "I’m concerned that this program isn’t focused on creating an inter-operable system that would allow unaffiliated systems to share medical information,” Sen. John Thune, R-S.D., said in an emailed statement to Fox News…

Grazed from PCAdvisor. Author: Carol Ko.

"Government regulations keeping pace with the market," "exit strategies," and "international data privacy" were found to be the top three areas where organizations have the lowest confidence in cloud computing. The findings were based on the first global survey jointly conducted by non-profit organizations ISACA and Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) on 252 participants in 48 countries, representing cloud users, providers, consultants and integrators from 15 industry segments.

In the "Cloud Market Maturity study," those who identified themselves as cloud users (85%) were asked to rank on a scale of zero to five a number of considerations in cloud computing, with zero being the least confident. The following shows the top 10 issues that cloud users have (ranked from least confident to most confident):..

• Government regulations keeping pace with the market (1.80)
• Exit strategies (1.88)
• International data privacy (1.90)
• Legal issues (2.15)
• Contract lock-in (2.18)…

Grazed from DataCenterKnowledge. Author: Bill Kleyman.

New technologies have emerged over the past few years that have elevated the value of the modern data center. Cloud computing, big data, IT consumerization, and numerous types of virtualization platforms have fueled direct growth around data center demand. There are new types of services around infrastructure extension and creating your next-generation environment.

In the past, the data center was seen as a mechanism to drive and support business. Physical PCs still ruled the domain and a lot was accomplished with pen and paper. The reality these days is that business and technology have completely evolved. The modern data center is the central connection hub for organizations of all sizes and verticals. Now almost everyone is globally connected and reliant on the data center…

Grazed from ITWorld. Author: Joab Jackson.

Amazon Web Services now offers a hosted version of the R programming language, providing an easy way for individuals and organizations to start and test their big-data-styled analysis projects. The cloud service is offering a copy of Revolution R Enterprise 7 on the AWS Marketplace, an online store for different packages that can be run on AWS.

Offered by Revolution Analytics, Revolution R Enterprise is a commercial package of R, an open-source functional programming language designed for statistical computing and graphics. R is being increasingly used for data analysis. Revolution R offers a version of R that can run in parallel, across multiple processors…

Grazed from TheStreet. Author: Keris Alison Lahiff.

Cloud computing specialist Rackspace Hosting is tumbling in the extended session after posting fourth-quarter results and announcing the departure of CEO Lanham Napier. In post-market trading, shares have taken off 8.8% to $36.82, after gaining 2.2% over Monday.

In the three months to December, the San Antonio-based company earned 14 cents a share on revenue 16% higher year-over-year to $408 million. Earnings came in as analysts surveyed by Thomson Reuters had expected, while sales beat by nearly $4 million. Rackspace’s total server count increased to 103,886, up 2% on a sequential basis…

Grazed from MarketWatch. Author: Editorial Staff.

As head of research at Gartner Inc., Senior Vice President Peter Sondergaard sees the big picture: where global technology is heading, and how trends such as cloud computing and business analytics are revolutionizing business. Mr. Sondergaard discussed how companies are responding to these trends in a conversation with Michael Hickins, editor of The Wall Street Journal’s CIO Journal. Edited excerpts of their discussion follow.

Applications Shift

MR. HICKINS: In a Gartner survey late last year, one priority that global CIOs ranked very high for their companies was enterprise resource planning [the suite of systems used to store and use the data necessary to run a business]. But here at the conference, CIOs ranked ERP much lower. Why is that?…

Grazed from TheStreet. Author: Antoine Gara.

Microsoft’s founder and "technology advisor" Bill Gates said on in a Reddit conversation that he believes the company’s cloud computing offerings have "a LOT of potential" as Satya Nadella, a longtime executive, takes the reins of the company from outgoing CEO Steve Ballmer.

Gates said in a Reddit thread he believes Microsoft’s office connected to the cloud is off to a good start, adding Cloud Storage needs to be "a lot richer." Those comments, taken from an about hour-long Reddit conversation, indicate that the Microsoft founder may focus his efforts on cloud computing as he takes an more active role with the company, devoting a third of his time to product work…

Grazed from NetworkWorld. Author: Brandon Butler.

Soon after I became a cloud computing reporter for Network World I signed up for a bunch of different cloud services including Box, DropBox, Google Drive and Amazon Web Services. One other service I used, and liked quite a bit, was SugarSync. The platform is very similar to Box and DropBox, offering a folder on your desktop that you simply drop files into that are then stored in the cloud and can be accessed from anywhere with an Internet connection.

SugarSync has an intuitive mobile app and I set it up to automatically copy some folders form the hard drive of my computer so that I could easily grab a document on my phone if I ever needed to. I used it a couple times and was glad I had it. SugarSync gave me 5 GB of free storage when I signed up in September 2012 and there was no word of a pay service would be required down the line…

Grazed from TechWire. Author: Editorial Staff.

In its continuing drive to capitalize on opportunities presented by the rush of businesses to "cloud computing," Red Hat (NYSE: RHT) is forming a formal partnership with Hortonworks, one of the leading providers of essential cloud software known as Hadoop. SAS already is a partner with Hortonworks as the Cary-based software firm aggressively pursues its own Hadoop technology for use with "big data" analysis.

A beta software version of a joint solution – the Hortonworks Data Platform (HDP) combined with Red Hat Storage – is already available. The deal comes as no surprise. Hortonworks told WRALTechWire in October that undisclosed work with the world’s top Linux software developer was already underway…

Grazed from CloudComputingToday. Author: Arnal Dayaratna, PhD.

Cloudera recently announced the general availability of Apache Spark for Cloudera Enterprise. First developed at UC Berkeley, Apache Spark is a parallel data processing framework that supplements Apache Hadoop by facilitating the development of big data applications related to machine learning, interactive analytics and real-time analytics.

Spark allows users to write parallel sets of code in Java, Scala and Python that operate on Hadoop clusters with a speed up to 100 times faster than MapReduce. Moreover, applications developed in Spark tend to require 2 to 10 ten times less code than a corresponding MapReduce application…