Grazed from Business2Technology.  Author: Brian Wallace.

Managed service providers (MSPs) are the trusted, outsourced technology companies that make small businesses thrive. MSPs have worn many hats throughout the history of technology. Today, they are leading the cloud computing charge. It’s worth taking a look at how exactly MSPs have reached this point today by exploring key points in their history.

In 1981, IBM PC launched—VisiCalc, the first computer spreadsheet program, opened a world of opportunity for CFOs and accountants. From 1984 to 1986, financial and operations departments in small businesses were the first to take advantage of PCs. In 1988, IBM PS/2 and 286/386 Revolution brought computers beyond the C level to more employees. 1995 would be a big year for MSPs as Windows 95 launched. A year later, MSPs became involved in the rise of the multimedia PC—CD-ROMs, sound cards and speakers were added to desktops. In the late 1990s, MSPs were busy as email moves down employee ranks and BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES) launches…

Grazed from TheConversation.  Author: Sean Cubitt.

Friction-free, weightless, immaterial: the information economy is losing all sense of gravity. The phrase “cloud computing” is completely at home in this floating world.  Like little brooks tinkling down the Big Rock Candy Mountain, film streams from the ether onto our screens. Away with clunky VHS tapes, DVDs and Blu-ray discs. Today we can view content (whatever happened to “watching films”?) on any device, from home cinemas to mobile handsets, that’s connected to the cloud. We are showered with plenty from an invisible otherworld of audiovisual refreshment.

Apple’s iTunes started selling video content in 2005, adding iCloud online storage and streaming in 2011. In 2008, five of the six Hollywood film and television majors launched their own Ultraviolet service. This allows consumers to create a “locker” where they store licenses to stream and download content…

Grazed from XO Communications.  Author: Editorial Staff.

A massive surge in unstructured data creates tough challenges for IT. Businesses need more intelligent network infrastructure to support their Big Data plans…

To view infographic, visit: http://www.xo.com/resources/infographic/Manage-the-Surge-In-Unstructured-Data/

Grazed from EETimes.  Author: Jim Ballingall.

A new approach to computer R&D is being born from the rise of mobile systems and the slowing of CMOS scaling.  In 2012, several of the world’s leading computer scientists and engineers collaborated on a whitepaper that describes a strategy for computing R&D. The whitepaper sets forth several goals to be achieved by the end of this decade across the spectrum of computing scale from tiny sensors to expansive datacenters.

The goal is to improve the energy efficiency of computers by two to three orders of magnitude. Furthermore we want to realize by the end of this decade an exa-op datacenter that consumes no more than 10 megawatts…

Grazed from Sci-Tecj-Today.  Author: Editorial Staff.

NASA says new strategies will be needed to manage the ever-increasing flow of large and complex data streams from the agency’s many space missions.  Dozens of missions pour in data every day like rushing rivers — data that need to be stored, indexed and processed so spacecraft engineers, scientists and people across the globe can use the data to understand Earth and the universe beyond, the agency said.

For NASA missions, hundreds of terabytes — one terabyte is equivalent to the information printed on 50,000 trees worth of paper — are gathered every hour, creating what the technology community dubs "big data."…

Grazed from NewsFactor.  Author: David Holmes.

The U.S. National Security Agency’s website, nsa.gov, was knocked offline Friday afternoon, and as of Friday evening, it was still unavailable. Only a browser message indicating that the serverwas not responding appeared.

Sources quoted by various news agencies have speculated that the site has apparently fallen victim to a DDoS (distributed denial-of-service) attack, and that it was believed that the hacker group Anonymous would claim responsibility. However, as of the time of publication of this report, the group has not claimed responsibility…

Grazed from ComputerWeekly. Author: Clive Longbottom.

When talking to end users about cloud computing, security still raises its ugly head on a very regular basis. It makes no odds if the basic platform is in reality pretty secure, the perception is that it is not, making organisations hesitant to allow use and work in the cloud as a result. In order to give users peace of mind to adopt the cloud, certain steps need to be taken to bolster basic security measures and give users a tangible and visible classification for cloud security.

The problem with existing security approaches lies in how data is secured. While many cloud file-sharing systems protect documents when they are stored within the solution provider’s siloed network, security often ends there. Because employees need to deal with an ever-expanding value chain of suppliers and customers that reside outside the network perimeter, organisations can no longer contain their employees within the firewall. Existing security approaches do not support these new practices, nor the ever-changing needs of their end users…

Grazed from Midsize Insider. Author: Marissa Tejada.

The combination of cloud computing and predictive analytics is helping businesses make better business decisions. However, security concerns remain. A new survey featured in Information Management analyzed the combination of the two technologies and how firms are utilizing them. As midsize firms consider big data in the cloud, security will continue to be the top concern.

Analytic Services

The research by Decision Management Solutions, as reported in Smart Data Collective, referred to three types of cloud-based analytic services: decisions as a service, cloud-based modeling and cloud-based model deployment. According to the findings collected, about two-thirds of firms have already utilized one of the three types of services. The large majority — 90 percent — will deploy another service in the next few years…

Grazed from WestLawInsider. Author: Editorial Staff.

In Part Two of this series we discussed the physical and electronic security that should be offered by your cloud computing provider’s data center. This week we focus on your organization’s role in protecting your data, and how you can work with your cloud computing provider to ensure they are meeting your data privacy and security needs.

WHAT’S YOUR ROLE IN CLOUD COMPUTING SECURITY?

As we’ve seen above, most cloud computing providers take extraordinary measures to keep your data safe on their end. But the fact is, the biggest risk to your data comes from inside your organization, from misrouted data and other simple mistakes to outright data theft by employees…

Grazed from NetworkWorld. Author: Brandon Butler.

The model of buying cloud computing resources is different from that of buying traditional hardware and software. Instead of buying licenses and investing in equipment, in a cloud computing model, users pay for the resources they use – no more, no less. That model has been proven out extensively on the compute side, with services like Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), and a variety of other IaaS offerings on the market. But storage has been slow to catch up.

Sure AWS has Elastic Block Storage (EBS) and Simple Storage Service (S3), but Ben Woo, an analyst at Neuralytix – and former IDC storage analyst – says for highly transactional databases and workloads, those don’t always cut it…