Grazed from Sys Con Media.  Author: Events Announcement.

Two unstoppable enterprise IT trends, Cloud Computing and Big Data, will converge in Silicon Valley at 13th Cloud Expo – November 4–7, 2013, in Santa Clara, California.

Cloud Expo offers a vast selection of technical and strategic breakout sessions, General Sessions, Industry Keynotes, "Power Panels" and a bustling Expo floor.

For more information and registration details, please visit  http://www.cloudcomputingexpo.com/

Grazed from CIO. Author: Thor Olavsrud.

Today, OpenStack turns 3. The open source Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) platform, released under the Apache license, launched in July 2010 with a seemingly simple idea: to deliver a ubiquitous open source cloud computing platform for public and private clouds. Launched in July 2010 with code donated by Rackspace and NASA, OpenStack has become one of the fastest growing open source efforts in technology: More than 500 individuals from more than 200 different companies contributed to its latest release, Grizzly.

Developers have contributed more than 1 million lines of code, and the stack currently has more than 70,000 contributions from more than 120 countries—an average of 238 contributions per month. The first OpenStack Design Summit & Conference, held in July 2010, boasted 75 attendees. The most recent conference, held in April, had 3,000, and the next one is expected to have more…

Grazed from CMO. Author: Editorial Staff.

The Cloud Security Alliance, a not-for-profit organisation set up to promote best security practices for cloud computing, has released a white paper on conducting forensic investigation in cloud environments and has formed an Incident Management and Forensics Working Group. It warns that “While digital investigations, on the surface, seem to have little to do with the competitive position or profit-and-loss of CSPs, forensic readiness cannot be ignored.”

The co-chair of the group, Dominik Birk from Zurich Insurance, said the aim of the group was to define best practices that consider the legal, technical and procedural elements of responding to security incidents in the cloud in a forensically sound way. "This initial white paper represents a significant effort on behalf of numerous individuals and marks an important first step in conducting proper forensic investigations in cloud environments following a security incident,” he said…

Grazed from eWeek. Author: Pedro Hernandez.

Software innovation, mobile devices and a host of advancements in IT are contributing to an era of profound technological change, according to Microsoft ex-CEO Bill Gates. New advances in software and increasingly more powerful hardware are paving the way for a computing renaissance, of sorts, according to Microsoft’s influential cofounder and current chairman, Bill Gates. In a June 15 address at Microsoft Research’s Faculty Summit in Redmond, Wash., Gates said "I think it’s fair to say that we’re in a golden age of computer science."

Hinting that innovations like cloud computing are finally putting within reach some his early ambitions for his software company, Gates harkened to "the original vision of Microsoft, that we ought to dream about what software could do if we had infinite computing and infinite storage." "That almost is our reality today," he added…

Grazed from SiliconAngle. Author: Mike Wheately.

Wikibon Senior Analyst Stu Miniman recently stated that while cloud computing has been much talked about over the past five years, we’re still in the early stages. Which means there’s still lots that can be improved upon with cloud storage and cloud storage security just some of the chief concerns.

Google is said to be experimenting with new methods of encrypting files stored in its Google Drive product, but with Ed Snowden’s revelations that the government is in cahoots with leading US internet firms to snoop on people’s lives, the looming question is what can people do to keep their files secure? With cloud storage replacing the use of USB sticks to keep files at the ready, some are questioning whether it is wise to use these services knowing that the government can easily take a peek at your files…

Grazed from CIO. Author: Bernard Golden.

A couple weeks ago, I discussed how cloud computing enables affordable agility. Automated provisioning and easy scalability make it possible, for the first time, for companies to experience infrastructure agility.
However, it’s a mistake to assume that agile infrastructure equals application agility (by which I mean both delivering applications into production more quickly and having those applications easily grow and shrink in terms of scale).

In fact, one commonly encounters IT personnel who assume that the mere fact of hosting an application in a cloud environment will magically transform it into an all-singing, all-dancing agile application. That’s far from the truth. Cloud infrastructure is necessary but insufficient to achieve overall application agility…

Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Derrick Harris.

Tableau Software, the poster boy for next-generation analytics software and, now, Wall Street darling, is taking to the cloud with a new Software-as-a-Service offering called Tableau Online. However, while the delivery model is new, the new product itself is really just the same Tableau Server option users have come to know and love (or not).

According to Ellie Fields, a product marketing manager at Tableau, the differences between the new offering and Tableau Server are “very minor” save for the way they’re bought and delivered. The cloud version is less expensive (only $500 per user per year) and is faster and easier to get started with, as SaaS versions of traditional software products tend to be…

[slideshow: 5, layout=top, order=middle, rotate=15, blend=0, height=100%, width=575, fit=0, nowrap=0, dir=|slideshows/5cloudstartups/|yes||Generic Photos|Aren’t they great?||]

Grazed from HNZ Media.  Author: Events Announcement.

To further promote the rapid and sound development of the cloud computing industry and provide insiders and most customers with a platform discussing cloud computing technology and application, 2013 World Cloud Computing Conference jointly organized by the HNZ Media and the ictchina.net intends to be held from 27 to 28 November 2013 in Beijing Exhibition Center.

Showcases will be specially set up to display the latest cloud computing products, services, applications, and research results and share the experience of the cloud computing development so as to promote global innovation and co-operation.

For more information and registration details, please visit  http://www.cloudcomputingworld.cn/2013yunjisuan_English

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Charles Babcock.

Google App Engine gained ground as a developer platform Wednesday when Google added a dedicated, as opposed to shared, caching service that can significantly speed up many applications. The move puts App Engine on a more equal footing with Microsoft’s Windows Azure and Amazon Web Services, which launched its ElastiCache service in August 2011. Platform-as-a-service (PaaS) offerings Heroku and Engine Yard also offer caching services.

The App Engine service is based on open source Memcached (pronounced "mem-cache d"), a caching system that automatically saves frequently used data to cache and, when necessary, pushes out aging data as it falls into disuse. It was created by Brad Fitzpatrick in 2003 to support the operation of the interactive consumer site LiveJournal. It was later rewritten in C and became a popular open source code module…