Grazed from 2X. Author: Charlie Williams.

Private clouds can be used for a number of different purposes, but one of the most popular uses involves providing users with virtual desktops. Building a private Desktop as a Service (DaaS) architecture involves more than just hosting desktop operating systems on a hypervisor. There must be a system in place to connect end users to the virtual desktops.

Matching end user requests to virtual desktops is usually the job of a connection broker. In most DaaS environments, the connection broker receives the end user’s request for a virtual desktop session and then connects the user to one of the available virtual desktops within a virtual desktop pool. Although this brokering of connections is of undeniable importance, there are other tasks that the connection broker must also perform if the DaaS infrastructure is to operate efficiently. One of the most important of these tasks in load balancing…

Grazed from Sys Con Media. Author: Tim Crawford.

IT is dead. Long live IT! 2013 is turning into a watershed year for CIOs as the traditional CIO is not the CIO of today. Business expectations, IT leadership styles and technology solutions are all driving an evolutionary change for CIOs and the IT organizations they lead. The changes did not happen overnight as business shifts, Shadow IT and New Technology were all contributors. Now that the industry is reaching a tipping point where the new CIO model becomes the new standard, look for a number of changes moving forward:

Business-IT Relationship
The CIO will lead the charge in transforming the relationship between IT and the rest of the business. In a related post I talk about the importance of the Three-Legged Race on the business, CIO and IT relationship. As such, business leaders start to view IT as providing greater business value rather than just a support organization. The new CIO works with peers toward revenue growth, not just expense containment…

Grazed from TechNet. Author: Steve Lipner.

Today marks the first day of the Security Development Conference 2013. Security professionals from companies, government agencies and academic institutions have traveled from all over the world to learn, network and share proven security development practices that can reduce an organization’s risk. As I sit here waiting for Scott Charney to take the stage, I am reminded that it’s been almost a decade since Microsoft implemented its Security Development Lifecycle (SDL). So much has changed in that time.

In the past decade, Internet usage has gone from roughly 350 million people online to more than 2.4 billion. Today there are more opportunities than ever before for developers. Windows 8 is still relatively new, the cloud is in its early stages of adoption and there has been an explosion in new mobile devices and platforms. While the Internet has created many new opportunities and ways to do business, it has also spawned a digital underground for online crime. Security breaches that have financial consequences or lead to intellectual property loss, website defacement or espionage have become a reality in today’s computing landscape…

Grazed from MarketWire. Author: PR Announcement.

Engine Yard, the leading Platform as a Service (PaaS), today announced general availability of PHP on Engine Yard Cloud. Building on its commitment to transform cloud application development, Engine Yard offers increased levels of choice, control and management to PHP developers and DevOps professionals. Engine Yard also introduced support for Riak, the distributed, highly available database from Basho. Both of these announcements coincide with reductions in Engine Yard pricing that make it even easier to get started and scale applications.

"As a strong advocate of open source technology, and with our acquisition of Orchestra in 2011, PHP has been a key part of our vision for a flexible application cloud, which is now a reality with our release of PHP on Engine Yard Cloud," said Bill Platt, senior vice president of operations at Engine Yard. "PHP developers will benefit from our leading commercial grade platform and world class support services, while taking advantage of the new innovative technologies that continue to be rolled into Engine Yard Cloud."…

Grazed from MarketWatch. Author: PR Announcement.

Fujitsu today announced its FUJITSU Cloud Initiative to develop the Company’s cloud business by providing various cloud-related products and services in a new systematic way to meet the cloud needs of customers.

The FUJITSU Cloud Initiative represents the Company’s constant efforts to provide its customers with cloud solutions that are ideally suited to their ICT needs, from private clouds to hybrid clouds, and from integration services to the full cloud sphere of IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS. Today’s announcement details the first stage of the initiative with 10 new services (two IaaS, four PaaS, and four cloud-integration services) and two upgraded services (one PaaS and one security service)…

Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Jordan Novet.

It’s clear that Wal-Mart Stores wants to stay on top as a major online retailer in the United States and abroad, as it takes steps to turn stores into fulfillment centers and bolster its virtual capabilities. What hasn’t been clear is how that transition will look, or how long it will take.

@WalmartLabs gave people a glimpse at its playbook on Tuesday by disclosing in a blog post the acquisition of OneOps, a finalist in the LaunchPad competition at GigaOM’s 2012 Structure conference, as well as Tasty Labs, whose CEO, Joshua Schachter, founded Delicious. Terms of the acquisitions were not disclosed…

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Thomas Claburn.

Last year, when Google combined the privacy policies for more than 60 services into a single policy governing most of the company’s services, the company assured lawmakers that its consolidated privacy policy would allow for a more seamless user experience and information sharing across different products. On Monday, Google extended that policy merger into the product realm. The company broke down the wall that separated Gmail from Drive and Google+ Photos. Henceforth, Google users have access to 15 GB of free online storage that covers Gmail, Drive and Google+ Photos. Previously, Gmail came with 10 GB of free storage and Drive and Google+ Photos collectively came with 5 GB.

The combined free storage pool puts an end to Google’s previous practice of slowly increasing Gmail storage over time. But Google product management director Clay Bavor insists separate storage doesn’t make any sense anymore…

Grazed from MarketWatch. Author: PR Announcement.

Kognitio, driving the convergence of Big Data, in-memory analytics and cloud computing, and DMG Federal, providing quality Information Technology and Business Intelligence services and solutions to the federal government and commercial clients since 1995, today announced an agreement, under which the two companies will work together to deliver secure, cloud-based data analytics to federal government and other public sector agencies.

DMG Federal’s FISMA-compliant Cloud Framework, Federal IQ, is available through its GSA schedule and other contract vehicles. Federal IQ enables public service agencies to perform in-depth analytics of vast amounts of data in a secure manner, at a low cost that saves significant amounts of taxpayer money over previously implemented solutions…

Grazed from ComputerWorld. Author: Thomas J. Trappler.

From time to time, organizations are asked to provide access to data for legal reasons. Those requests can be more complicated when the data is in the cloud. But a new report sheds some light on one critical aspect of such requests. One risk with cloud computing is that the customer has less control over who can access its data. When customer data is stored on and processed by the cloud vendor’s data center instead of in-house, what’s to stop a third party, such as the government, from going directly to the cloud vendor to obtain access to that data without the customer’s permission or knowledge? And if that happens, will the cloud vendor’s priority be to protect its customer’s rights and data or to protect itself?

With the April 30, 2013, release of its third "Who Has Your Back?" report, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has tried to answer these questions. The report reflects that, as with most things in the cloud, vendors vary widely on how they handle third-party requests for access to data. For the 2013 report, the EFF used six criteria to assess cloud vendors, and awarded a star for good performance in each category. The six criteria are:…

Grazed from Forbes. Author: Bob Evans.

While cloud computing’s popularity as a powerful and transformational business tool is soaring, some companies have been frustrated with cloud apps procured from multiple vendors requiring extensive integration that has dragged out time to value, stunted innovation initiatives, and reinforced the very silos those cloud apps were intended to break down, a new survey has found.

Called Cloud for Business Managers: the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, the report reveals that a fragmented approach to cloud apps has led many companies into their very own troughs of disillusionment, in which the hoped-for increased business agility, nimbleness, and optimized decision-making continue to remain beyond their reach…