Grazed from FCM.  Author: Mike Hettinger.

Given the growing importance of data, cybersecurity, cloud computing, mobile communications and more, the CIO has taken a more prominent role in nearly all businesses. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for government, where an increasingly crowded management structure often limits the CIO’s influence.

The Clinger-Cohen Act of 1996 established a CIO at each federal agency with the intent of giving that person access to the agency secretary and enough internal “juice” to drive effective IT management throughout the agency. Some 17 years later, it is clear there is a long way to go to fulfill that original intent…

Grazed from GigaOM.  Author: David Linthicum.

As reported By GigaOM’s Jordan Novet, AWS did some chest beating at the AWS Summit held in San Francisco last week.  The message: Microsoft has no chance to beat AWS in the race for IaaS dominance.  This could be a valid point.

“Amazon Web Services Senior Vice President Andy Jassy didn’t refer to any competitor by name when he pointed out AWS’ advantages before a crowd of around 4,000 at the AWS Summit in San Francisco on Tuesday. But it’s not hard to take a guess on who he was talking about. With Microsoft hyping its Windows Azure Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Amazon is trying to persuade people — Amazon faithful or not — that Azure just doesn’t compare…

Grazed from up2v.nl.  Author: Marcel Van Der Berg.

Microsoft published two very interesting documents which assist in designing and understanding  Infrastructure as a Service based on Windows Server 2012 and System Center 2012 SP1.

• Infrastructure-as-a-Service Product Line Architecture Fabric Architecture Guide (Windows Server 2012).
  This 112 pages document provides specific guidance for developing fabric architectures (compute, network, storage, and virtualization layers) of an overall private cloud solution. All of the Windows Server 2012 features are discussed.
  Very much recommended reading if your task is to design a Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V infrastructure.
  Download here...

Grazed from ZDNet.  Author: David Chernicoff.

Virtual datacenter provider ProfitBricks has announced that all of the customers will be getting high-availability as a basic component of their IaaS offering. With claims to already provide the best performance in the industry when compared to better known vendors such as Rackspace and Amazon, ProfitBricks is looking to use availability as the differentiator that drives business adoption of the IaaS offering.

From the high-level perspective this is a great idea and a serious differentiator for PriofitBricks. For people like me, those that keep a close eye on the IaaS market and advise clients on vendor selection, availability should be a top concern…

Grazed from UtilityProducts. Author: Editorial Staff.

The world’s demand for energy is insatiable whether it is solar, wind, tidal, oil and gas, thermal, hydro-electric, wood, nuclear energy. There are two types of energy – renewable and non-renewable. The non-renewable energy is scarce such as fossil fuels and nuclear material and is found in earth and there is a limited availability. This energy we use in our daily lives, whether in our automobiles or for generating electricity, which powers our home.

Renewable resources regenerate as we use them and include solar, wind, water, magnetic and bio-fuel created from farming. This is the future of energy for the planet and its inhabitants and is generally known as green energy. As the cost of energy increases and its availability decreases there is an extensive use of collating data in the discovery, extraction, processing and transmission and distribution of energy. The energy business is increasingly using Big Data and cloud computing to ensure efficiency and cost effective solutions. Let’s take a closer look at the role Big Data and cloud computing is playing in the energy sector…

Grazed from DataCenter Knowledge. Author: Jason Verge.

QTS (Quality Technology Services) wants to help federal agencies get comfortable with cloud computing, and is dedicating some of its data center space toward this goal. The company, in conjunction with i2 Sentinel Associates, has set up a testbed inside its massive data center campus in Richmond, Virginia that will focus on creating highly secure cloud computing capabilities based on the needs of the U.S. Department of Defense, federal agencies and the U.S. intelligence community.

QTS sees the continuous transformational environment (CTE) lab at its Richmond data center as an exciting development in the federal sector’s adoption of cloud computing. “The Richmond CTE lab contains some of the most advanced technologies in cloud computing today,” said Scott Shinberg, executive vice president, federal systems group – QTS…

Grazed from Application Development Trends. Author: Jeffrey Schwartz.

At last week’s CA World conference in Las Vegas, the company made clear it’s not stepping back from expanding its cloud focus on a number of levels. That’s no surprise considering the company tapped former Taleo chief Michael Gregoire as its new CEO late last year. Taleo, was a software as a service based provider sold to Oracle for $1.9 billion.

Adding to its cloud focus, the company also announced at the conference that it has acquired Layer 7, whose secure API offering will bolster its identity and access management suite, which includes SiteMinder, with the aim of providing added cloud security services. CA said it would also tie Layer 7 into its DevOps offerings, notably the LISA suite…

Grazed from Wired. Author: Leo Reiter.

Everywhere you look, there’s a push to consumerize IT. People want to use their own devices — not just in their personal lives but also in their work roles. From email and calendars to file sharing and collaborating, employees are dictating the types of end user experience they want. If CIOs don’t acknowledge and support them, then employees will go around them, introducing serious security concerns. In an even worse scenario for companies in highly competitive industries, top performers will just choose to work elsewhere.

Of course, this puts CIOs in an unenviable position. Do you allow employees to bring their own devices and access business apps from them? Or do you put the company on lockdown, and risk them circumventing you and exposing your data in the process? How do you protect against security gaps while supporting a flexible BYOD policy?…

Grazed from GigaOM. Author: David Linthicum.

According to Forbes, IT is getting sick and tired of the cloud computing hype. “…the biggest threat to cloud-computing companies today is customer fatigue. Businesses are tired of hearing the tech industry squawk about whether this or that is a managed service or a faux cloud or a virtualized cumulonimbus cluster or a passing shower or black cloud of doom.”

I’m seeing a bit of this as well. While we’ve had many technologies emerge in the past, none were as game changing as cloud computing. Thus, it’s at the top of the news, the hot topic at most IT conferences, and a large part of internal discussions within IT organizations. Some have had enough after 4 or 5 years…

Grazed from TheVarGuy. Author: Elliot Markowitz.

Mobile device adoption and cloud computing go hand in hand. The more business professionals use their smart phones, tablets and mini-tablets to access and create new data, the more organizations are embracing a cloud computing environment to dramatically increase their network capacity, storage and back-up capabilities. These movements highlight the critical role of solution providers and continue to drive their business models for the foreseeable future.

Nearly 40 percent of enterprise organizations said they expect to stop providing mobile devices to their employees by 2016 supporting bring your own device programs (BYOD) instead, according to a global survey of CIOs by Gartner. I’ve said it before in this space. The BYOD revolution cannot be stopped. Once you’ve empowered employees and supported their work style preferences, taking away those privileges is a step backwards. By the way, that is also why I believe Yahoo’s headline grabbing CEO Marissa Mayer is making a big mistake to eliminate remote workers. If you treat your employees like 9-to-5 employees, guess what, you get 9-5 employees…