Grazed from CloudTweaks. Author: Tyle Gillings.

It isn’t far now; the celebrations of next year are just around the corner. Many are looking back over the year and studying what has already come to pass, while others are pondering on what’s to come. Many trends have been offered as possibilities surrounding Cloud Computing. However, what I am tremendously interested in comprises of budgets, security measures and consumer outcomes.

Considering that this time last year there were high debates as to how big the Cloud would actually get, to what extents it would be used and how much it would be worth by the end of the year. Now that the Cloud is bigger than ever, what are the analysts saying about the Cloud; what do they predict for 2014?…

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: Chris Talbot.

As organizations of all sizes adopt cloud computing services, many are beginning to take a more active role in evaluating cloud applications as part of the software procurement process. According to the annual SailPoint Market Pulse Survey, 63 percent of enterprises now require IT decision-makers to evaluate services during the procurement process.

However, just as businesses are starting to dive into the deep end of the cloud pool, the survey also indicates that they are not so quick to adopt security best practices around cloud. The survey indicated that many enterprises are adopting, or even mandating, cloud services, but many of those currently do not have the IT controls in place to properly manage them. It’s creating increased risk of fraud, theft and privacy breaches…

Grazed from eWeek.  Author: Jeff Burt.

When Verizon began laying the groundwork several years ago for its new public cloud, company IT executives set several goals for the environment. They wanted consistent performance, high security and availability, and they didn’t want customers to have to modify their applications in order to run them in the cloud.  They wanted few moving parts and no special hardware.

"We wanted very few actual hardware components," Paul Curtis, chief architect of cloud computing at Verizon, said during Advanced Micro Device’s Developer Summit 2013 in November. "My boss said, ‘I only have five fingers in my hand. Don’t make me use them all.’"  There was to be "no honking router outside of this. … No special firewall, no special anything. It just doesn’t scale."…

Grazed from ComputerWorld.  Author: Jaikumar Vijayan.

The leaking of classified documents detailing the data collection activities of the U.S. National Security Agency earlier this year reignited some long-standing concerns about the vulnerability of enterprise data stored in the cloud.  But instead of scaring businesses away from using hosted services, as some experts predicted, the leaks about the NSA spy programs are driving some long overdue changes in enterprise and service provider security and privacy policies.

When Edward Snowden first began spilling details of the NSA’s surveillance practices to selected reporters in June, industry analysts had expected that the revelations would put a severe crimp on plans for cloud deployment…

Grazed from PR NewsWire.  Author: PR Announcement.

The security of the data and applications is one of the major concerns for enterprises. With many enterprises adopting virtualized computing infrastructure and hosting their data and applications over the cloud infrastructure, there is a need for security features to be incorporated as a part of the enterprise infrastructure.

The VDI solution providers are providing better security features as a part of the solutions, which is leading to higher adoption of these solutions by enterprises and end-users. The communication networks are being enabled with data encoding, which enables secure transmission of data from one point to another. Security features are being provided independent of the underlying hardware configuration, which is another positive factor leading to higher adoption…

Grazed from The VarGuy.  Author: Christopher Tozzi.

What were the biggest developments in desktop Linux in 2013? As much as I’d like to jump on the end-of-year-list bandwagon and write about all the new open source applications and innovations of the last 12 months, this year not much happened in the world of the Linux desktop. The real Linux headlines were in the cloud, Android and embedded devices.

I’ve enjoyed recapping desktop Linux highlights in years past. It gives me something to do on New Year’s Eve while waiting for the pigs-in-a-blanket to bake. (I joke. I am an aspiring vegetarian these days.) But this time around, the list of major developments in desktop Linux during the past year is pretty short…

Grazed from BusinessInsider.  Author: Julie Bort.

Microsoft is creating a brand new computer programming language and it could be using that language to create an operating system that has nothing to do with Windows.  The new language was revealed on Friday by a Microsoft researcher named Jim Duffy in a blog post. Its relationship to the new operating system was discussed on Reddit by someone claiming to be an ex-Microsoft employee.

This operating system is code-named Midori, reports ZDNet’s Mary Jo Foley.  Midori has been in the works since at least 2008 as a pure research project, Foley reports. Midori was initially an experiment to write an operating system from scratch that was small and fast and didn’t need to be compatible with the huge numbers of Windows apps already out on the market…

Grazed from Fiscal Times.  Author: Jeff Morganteen.

Malware will go more mobile next year as digital currencies fuel malicious ransomware attacks worldwide, according to computer security firm McAfee Labs.  After the data breach at Target this month exposed a growing threat from hackers, companies and individuals alike should be careful not to keep all their data in the same cloud service, McAfee Chief Privacy Officer Michelle Dennedy said Monday on CNBC’s "Squawk on the Street."

Some cloud networks remain more private than others, she said. "What I would suggest to you as an individual is to be quite wary of cloud computing, and limit and separate the type of information that you share on various cloud platforms," Dennedy said…

Grazed from InformationWeek.  Author: Daniel P. Kent.

Over the last year, we’ve seen another technology phenomenon added to the long list of IT hype: software-defined networking (SDN). You might ask: "Haven’t networks been defined by software since the days of the ATM or the introduction of VLANs?" The answer is yes, there have been efforts to manage and manipulate physical network components through software, but most of these efforts have focused on easing network management tasks.

What makes SDN different is its intent to allow programmability of the network based on real-time information and data traffic flows. This allows for a closed-loop system where the network can be reconfigured to optimize applications or protect against threats dynamically, based on the current environment…

Grazed from The VarGuy. Author: DH Kass.

Microsoft (MSFT) has plunked down $11 million to buy 200 acres of industrial land in rural Port of Quincy, WA to build a second data center there. Is this another huge bet on Windows Azure, Office 365, Xbox Live and other cloud services? Perhaps. The new facility will triple the size of Microsoft’s current 470,000 square foot server plant.

The vendor has some history in Quincy–first setting up a data center there in 2007 on 75 acres of agricultural land, attracted by cheap electrical power fed by hydroelectric generators drawing water from the nearby Columbia River–and three years later signaling its intention to expand its facilities in the area…