Grazed from Arstechnica. Author: Kyle Orland.

For months now, Microsoft has been touting how Xbox One games will be able to make use of cloud computing resources to handle certain time-insensitive tasks that aren’t really feasible to calculate on a single local box. While Microsoft has gone into some detail on how this process works, a lot of the company’s talk has taken the form of vague hand-waving about how the magic of the cloud will make everything more powerful.

So when we had a chance to talk to Forza Motorsport 5 Director Dan Greenawalt recently, we wanted to take a deep dive into how, precisely, the game makes use of Microsoft’s cloud resources to power its adaptive, machine learning-based AI system, called Drivatar. And we learned how processing a massive amount of data on Microsoft’s servers allows for possibilities that Greenawalt says weren’t really possible on previous consoles…

Grazed from DataCenterKnowledge. Author: Bill Kleyman.

It was bound to happen. The increase in cloud computing and cloud utilization has also increased the amount of targets for malicious attacks. As more organizations move towards cloud computing – there will be extra security measures that will have to be taken into consideration. There are more devices, a lot more users, and all of this result in more data being pushed through the data center and the cloud.

As cloud computing continues to gain ground, new models and platforms will require new ways to secure a growing infrastructure. Here’s the good news: New security platforms are being designed to help facilitate cloud growth, not hinder it. Next-generation security is evolving to directly support cloud computing. To help with this heavy lifting, security organizations need to adapt their technologies to the workloads of the cloud…

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Charles Babcock.

Amazon Web Services’ revenues are on track to hit the $1 billion mark in the fourth quarter. If they do, AWS will have generated an estimated $3.2 billion in revenues for parent company Amazon.com in 2013 — a striking accomplishment for a business still in the "other" category on the balance sheet.

The estimates, from Technology Business Research analysts Jillian Mirandi and Michael Barba, were released Thursday during a teleconference held by Amazon CFO Tom Szkutak. AWS revenues in the third quarter alone are estimated at $850 million, more than double those in the third quarter a year ago. In both the second and third quarters, AWS revenues grew by 136% over the same periods a year earlier, according to TBR analysts. Service revenues generated by AWS represent 84% of the monies in the "other" category, they said…

Grazed from Forbes. Author: Tom Groenfeldt.

For a long time IT experts in financial services said finance would never move to the cloud because of security concerns. That appears to be changing in capital markets, says Ovum, the UK consultancy. “Due to improvements in cloud security and a wider variety of applications, investment in cloud, by both the buy side and the sell side, is set for further growth,” the firm reports, while noting that the buy side leads in cloud adoption.

“The buy side tends to be an easier target for cloud than the sell side, given that more of its participants are smaller firms with limited IT budgets,” says Rik Turner, senior analyst, financial services technology, Ovum. “That said, the sell side is changing. With budgets and headcount under more constraints since the global financial crisis, there are clearly opportunities on that side of the business too.”…

Grazed from SpendMatters. Author: Thomas Case.

Considering the current mess with the Healthcare.gov website and related aspects of putting wheels on the Obamacare bandwagon, I thought I’d bring in my perspective from complex procurement solution implementations. Since this involves the government, I’ll (somewhat ironically) have to label this a conservative (aka old school) software rollout.

In the procurement software provider space, some of the most old-school prospects are the ones in aerospace and defense, financial services, and – drumroll – healthcare. When I say old-school I mean that they often use on-premise software, running on their own hardware – sometimes even inside their own data center, managed by their own people – or in hardened subsections of Level 4 (exceedingly robust) class data centers…

Grazed from Time. Author: Harry McCracken.

Over at ITworld, my friend (and former boss) Dan Tynan has a chilling account of cloud computing gone awry. It begins with his discovery that his Box online storage account had mysteriously gone missing. And the explanation of what happened is downright bizarre:

I had exhausted my support options, so I put on my reporter’s hat and politely asked Box.com corporate to look into this problem for me. At this point, I still held out hope that it was something stupid I had done that caused my files to be mislaid. Perhaps one of my various collaborators had sent a password reset and changed the email address associated with it. Perhaps I had hit my storage limit and missed the emails from Box.com prompting me to upgrade…

Grazed from TechRepublic. Author: Scott Matterson.

TechRepublic ran an article in April of 2013 titled, “Cloud computing and the evolution of the data center.” The article, written by Thoran Rodrigues, looked at how data centers are tied to the cloud computing era, approaching the topic from the standpoint of what might be expected of data centers within cloud computing organizations. What about data centers in regular businesses, however? What lies in store for server rooms in companies that may (or may not) be branching out into the use of cloud computing?

Of course, the answer to this question depends on company outlook and requirements. Of the organizations that elect to utilize cloud services, their involvement may be a little (just using Salesforce to track campaigns) or a lot (no local resources and everything running in someone else’s cloud data center). You don’t have to go “all in” on the cloud, of course – there are private, public and hybrid cloud solutions to mix and match with…

Grazed from ITWorld. Author: Nancy Gohring.

It’s been a week of controversy surrounding OpenStack and the platform as a service market and it just got more interesting. OpenStack yesterday announced a new project called Solum, backed by eBay, RedHat, Ubuntu/Canonical, dotCloud/Docker, Cloudsoft, Rackspace and Cumulogic. The blog post about it is very light on details. It says the project aims to ease the pain associated with:

• Application development and deployment
• Application lifecycle management across dev, test and production environments
• Portability between public and private clouds…

Grazed from IDEvnews. Author: Vance McCarthy.

By the end of the year, VMware is poised to ship an ambitious range of cloud management offerings aimed to help IT quickly and easily embrace business-facing cloud services. Earlier this month, VMware executives previewed releases for vCloud Automation Center 6.0; VMware vCenter Operations Management Suite 5.8; VMware IT Business Management Suite, and VMware vCenter Log Insight 1.5. The company also updated the automation and management features of its VMware vCloud Suite 5.5, which it rolled out in August.

“With these cloud management solutions, VMware is pulling out all the stops to support for heterogeneous and on-demand services in a way that IT is more responsive to business needs,” VMware’s Martin Klaus, group manager for product marketing, told IDN…

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Charles Babcock.

At Cloud Connect 2013 in Chicago this week, sessions and keynotes addressed Amazon Web Services, Eucalyptus Systems and Apache Cloudstack. Google App Engine was recognized as a leading platform-as-a-service. But attendees, voting with their feet, flocked to the sessions on OpenStack.

Speakers from newly publicized OpenStack implementers Gap, BrightTag and Argonne National Laboratory talked about their experiences with it. Surprisingly, one OpenStack cloud was initiated on a handful of used servers purchased "cheap" off of eBay. Another implementer warned that moving to OpenStack is a good idea, but you won’t be able to find operations people with any experience with it…