Grazed from CIO. Author: Bernadette Jew.

Not so long ago, cloud computing services were viewed as alternative or fringe options for large enterprises – useful for limited purposes, but not viable as mainstream solutions. However, given the rapid rate of technology evolution over the past 12 months, there is now an air of inevitability around migration to the cloud. In the past, the focus was on the risk to enterprises of moving to the cloud. That focus hasn’t gone away but the debate has now moved on.

The cost imperatives and speed-to-market capabilities are so compelling that we will be forced to find solutions to address any impediments arising from security, privacy, data sovereignty, etc. And it’s only a matter of time before just about everything will be delivered as a service…

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Grant Moerschel.

The traditional worker bee comes into the office, logs in to a dedicated computer via Microsoft Active Directory credentials, and gets access to local applications and data shares needed to conduct daily activities. Simple, familiar, controlled — and totally out of date for companies dealing with mobile devices, cloud computing, BYOD, and the blurring line between work and home, business and personal.

As the use of mobile and cloud computing booms, we’re outgrowing our trusty old technology for identity and access management. But our future vision — to know a person’s identity across all the multiple devices, cloud services, and roles he has — isn’t possible with today’s still-emerging technology. This causes lots of confusion as vendors vie to be the next great thing and IT tries to determine where to place bets…

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: CJ Arlotta.

OwnCloud enables choice of storage, public or private. Cloud-based file sync and share technology provider ownCloud has raised $4.4 million of a proposed $7 million round of funding. The round of funding was disclosed in an SEC filing this week by OwnCloud. The funding will be used for the company’s sales and marketing, and developer organizations, a company spokesperson told Talkin’ Cloud.

An ownCloud spokesperson told MSPmentor explained the company’s differentiation from other vendors such as Box or Dropbox in the following way:…

Read more from the source @ http://talkincloud.com/cloud-computing/owncloud-raises-44m-expand-sales-and-marketing

Grazed from Forbes. Author: Dick Csaplar.

Cloud computing is and will have an extensive impact on the IT infrastructure of companies of all sizes. I’ve come to this conclusion thanks to my extensive research as a Senior Analyst with the Aberdeen Group. And after a survey of a wide range of companies in January, we’re able to see an even clearer picture of how the public cloud is being used.

The data show that small companies — organizations with up to 100 employees — are, in general, gaining much from using new services based in the cloud, specifically ones they could not afford to purchase and manage on their own. As seen in the chart below, small companies do not find application integration and customization a challenge. Because these tasks are very technical, small businesses don’t even attempt them: They use the cloud services as they are provided, “right from the box.”…

Grazed from CloudComputingInfo. Author: Kenneth van Surksum.

The Xen Project, the community which develops the Xen hypervisor under the GNU Public License (GPLv) and which is now part of the Linux foundation yesterday announced the release of version 1.0 of the Mirage Operating System. The Mirage OS represents an approach where only the necessary components of the OS are included and compiled along with the application into a "unikernel", resulting in more efficient and lean "appliances" which the same or better functionality but a much smaller foodprint and attack surface.

Application code is developed in a high-level functional programming language OCaml on a desktop OS such as Linux or Mac OSX, and compiled into a fully-standalone, specialized unikernel that runs under the Xen hypervisor APIs. Since Xen powers most public cloud computing infrastructure such as Amazon EC2, this lets your servers run more cheaply, securely and finer control than with a full software stack. The release notes for version 1.0 can be found here and the Mirage OS can be downloaded here

Read more from the source @ http://cloudcomputing.info/en/news/2013/12/the-xen-project-releases-version-1-0-of-its-mirage-operating-system.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Virtualization_info+(virtualization.info)

Grazed from Bloomberg. Author: Alex Barinka.

International Business Machines Corp. (IBM), the world’s largest provider of computing services, continues to face economic challenges as it tries to reignite declining sales, Senior Vice President Erich Clementi said. Demand for technology services, IBM’s biggest source of revenue, “depends on what the economic climate is, and that has not been very encouraging,” Clementi said at a Bank of Montreal conference today in New York. “Europe has shown signs of recovery. North America has been a little more uncertain.”

Many businesses remain wary about spending money on physical assets, such as computer hardware, machinery or warehouses. Instead, they’re using software and cloud-computing services to increase efficiency and reach more customers over the Internet. While IBM ultimately expects to benefit from that shift to the cloud, the hardware slump has contributed to six straight quarters of declining revenue. “The big bet is on cloud and the software that are on top,” Clementi said…

Grazed from CIO Insight. Author: Karen A. Frenkel.

At last month’s annual Georgia Tech Cyber Security Summit, security experts from academia, private industry and government gathered to discuss new technologies and strategies to ward off sophisticated cyber-attacks. The resulting report, "Emerging Cyber Threats," discusses emerging threats, their potential impact and countermeasures. The report notes that organizations face a dilemma: they must protect information from data-stealing malware while allowing employees to efficiently access data in order to do their jobs.

"With recent revelations of data collection by the federal government, we will continue to see a focus on cloud security," says Wenke Lee, director of Georgia Tech’s information security Center. "But encryption in the cloud often impacts data accessibility and processing speed. So we are likely to see increased debate about the tradeoffs between security, functionality and efficiency."…

Grazed from Midsize Insider. Author: Robert Lawson.

Cloud storage will be changing in a number of ways in the coming year, with various features and capabilities evolving as more businesses adopt the technology to store their small and midsize businesses’ data. Storage trends in 2014 will be driven by strong consumer and business demand for improvements in flexibility and scalability. Changes to both will include revisions in infrastructure, cost, performance, features, capacity, security and reliability.

A Demand For Flexible Storage

Cloud computing technology has been around for longer than its coined phrase has been, but with its increasing application by both business and consumer users, storage is becoming a concern for IT providers and departments in small and midsize companies. This might mean taking a look at the storage capability infrastructure…

Grazed from Midsize Insider. Author: Marissa Tejada.

Servers will increasingly be shipped to cloud service providers, a new survey by IDC finds, as cloud computing creates a shift in how servers are being used in today’s business world. This trend shows that more businesses are choosing to migrate to the cloud and software-as-a-service (SaaS).

Shipments for the Cloud

According to InfoWorld, IDC predicts that up to 30 percent of all servers that will be shipped in 2014 will be shipped to cloud services providers. Within four years, that number will increase to 45 percent. Part of the reason for this is that IT professionals are aiming to lessen the amount of servers that they manage. Other reasons include increased implementation of SaaS and virtualization technologies and plans by firms for data center consolidation. Businesses are getting rid of certain servers to acquire denser servers that can handle larger amounts of data…

Grazed from Sys Con Media. Author: Jiten Patil.

Disaster Recovery (DR) has typically only been used by organizations for applications deemed to be mission critical. This was because organizations didn’t want to incur the expense associated with DR for less important applications. Today, because of cloud computing, many organizations are considering the use of DR for as many applications as is essential for the business. DR in the cloud is relatively a new concept still and, like many technology trends we’ve seen so far, there’s a lot of hype and misinterpretation out there.

Multiple schools of thought exist on whether or not to implement DR in the cloud. Today, cloud-based DR has shaken up traditional legacy approaches and presents a persuasive alternative. Some organizations see cloud as a part of their DR plan, and for some, the cloud has become the de-facto DR plan…