Grazed from Forbes. Author: Emma Byrne.

Cloud computing is not as disruptive as many organizations feared. Using a cloud provider has come as naturally to most organizations as using webmail. But for the financial sector, international laws make life—shall we say—challenging. Here’s why.

Behind the scenes, there are heavyweight struggles taking place that center around the “sovereignty” of data. If data are stored across international borders, how can your customers be sure that their sensitive personal information is safe? More importantly—at least from the lawyers’ perspective—who can be sued if it isn’t safe? For organizations in the financial sector, the picture can be murky…

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: Chris Talbot.

TraceSecurity has released a cloud-based tool that simulates social engineering to help protect customers from phishing schemes and other advanced persistent threats. The new TraceSecurity Phishing Simulator was designed to mimic real-world social engineering attacks. The cloud-based tool then tracks results to analyze employee actions and determine if the organization is at risk to social engineering attacks. One of the biggest threats to organizations, as well as people in general, is socially engineered attacks, but with this tool, TraceSecurity aims to help organizations identify their vulnerabilities within minutes.

"Deploying a simulated phishing attack against groups of employees not only tests their willingness to click on an unsolicited email, but also determines if they are apt to download potentially harmful code onto company resources," said Jim Stickley, TraceSecurity CTO, in a prepared statement. "Malicious messages often contain malware that, when activated, can easily infect an entire network, which is why we developed Phishing Simulator. We believe every organization should, at a minimum, test a few employees and see how they do."…

Grazed from MarketWire. Author: PR Announcement.

The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux, today announced the findings of its 2013 Enterprise End User Report, "Linux Adoption: Third Annual Survey of World’s Largest Enterprise Linux Users." The study conducted in partnership with Yeoman Technology Group tracks the growth of Linux use in large enterprises and identifies key trends that inform Linux operating system priorities.

Key findings from this year’s report show the world’s largest enterprises are increasing their investments in Linux for the third consecutive year. Industry reports for the most recent quarter (4Q12) show that while overall server revenue is only growing at 3.1 percent year-over-year; Linux experienced 12.7 percent year-over-year growth for the quarter while Windows only increased 3.2 percent and UNIX was down 24.1 percent1. The Enterprise End User Report helps to inform the industry about what is driving this adoption and how market growth is shaping up for the future…

Grazed from ABCNews. Author: Jake Sturmer.

Security experts warn cloud computing in Australia is becoming an increasingly appealing target for hackers as businesses rapidly take up the technology. Tapping the online cloud is fast becoming the service mode of choice for many big Australian businesses, with nearly half of them using the technology. Instead of cables and computers crowding company offices, reams of information floats online.

Advocates say it is a more efficient and cost-effective way to manage data. Analysts Frost & Sullivan estimate the Australian industry was worth $842 million in 2012 and is expected to grow to $3.15 billion in 2016. F&S information and communications technology vice president Andrew Milroy says Australia is leading cloud adoption in the Asia-Pacific region…

Grazed from Midsize Insider. Author: Joe Hewitson.

Computing resources have been a quickly changing and ever-improving facet of modern business for many years. Innovations stream at breakneck pace. The rise of cloud computing has, in recent years, combined PaaS and SaaS (Platform and Software as a service) to provide a unified solution for IT groups looking for a more distributed computing resource strategy. As the data fed into these cloud platforms and applications continues to increase, the infrastructure supporting its growth will need to expand. This foundational need is exactly why many IT professionals in organizations of all sizes, including midsize companies, have begun pushing their computing infrastructure into the cloud.

Growth of IaaS

Gartner Inc., the world’s leading information technology research and advisory company, has recently released a projected growth analysis of public cloud computing and its services. As reported by Forbes, Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) stands out as the fastest-growing sector. Forecast with a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of just over 41 percent through 2016, the increase in demand for computing resources in the public cloud shows no sign of slowing down. The need for agile computing resources and scalable infrastructure has clearly caused a shift in focus for IT professionals. Playing catch up to the other two major services of the cloud, this IaaS growth proves to be a great illustration of the importance of the cloud in today’s business…

Grazed from GizMag. Author: Will Shanklin.

In the past few years, "the cloud" has revolutionized consumer tech – nearly as much as the mobile devices that it often accompanies. But how much has it changed us? Has cloud computing lived up to the tremendous hype that it promised a few short years ago? Let’s revisit 2011’s favorite buzzword, two years later.

Sneaking up on us

A couple of years ago, the tech world was abuzz about the cloud. Cloud storage service Dropbox was growing in profit and popularity. Spotify finally hit the U.S. Even Steve Jobs used his last Apple keynote to introduce iCloud. Sometime between then and now, the cloud went from being the next big thing to being something that’s so closely intertwined with computing – and our lives – that we often forget about it…

Grazed from ArabNews. Author: RD Rasooldeen.

Mobily’s new cloud computing service will offer its customers enhanced security and efficiency at an attractive price, Marwan Al-Ahmadi, Mobily’s chief business officer (CBO), said in Riyadh.
Al-Ahmadi was speaking at a press conference held in Riyadh following the launch of advanced public and hybrid cloud computing services for the business sector in the Kingdom, in cooperation with Virtustream.

Rodney J. Rogers, Virtustream chairman and CEO, was also present at the event. The conference comes following the strategic alliance agreement signed by both companies earlier this year in which public and hybrid cloud computing services were jointly built and provided by Mobily and Virtustream…

Grazed from ComputerWorld. Author: Stephen Bell.

Cloud computing might seem on the surface to be a cause of potential discord between the ICT team and the other parts of the business. Business users, knowing they can flexibly and cheaply fire up applications to handle many standard tasks, will seek to do this without involving ICT.

But in practice, say panellists at a cloud session at the NZ Oracle User Group conference last week in Wellington, the effect will be beneficial, giving the ICT department a means of concentrating on the unique aspects of the company’s business – their market differentiators. Changing the relationship between business and ICT as a result of the rise of cloud can be “a massive positive”, says Doug Hughes, vice president responsible for Oracle’s Fusion cloud services in Asia-Pacific…

Grazed from SBWire. Author: PR Announcement.

"Despite the perception of not being a “cloud company,” Microsoft continues to push its cloud computing platform, Windows Azure, onto the development world," says AJ of Consumerevidence.com. Designed as a platform for both developing and hosting web applications, Azure provides all the tools necessary to build a website or other web-based application. Azure further offers tremendous flexibility in managing applications once they are deployed. When using Windows Azure, one can rapidly deploy websites to its highly scalable cloud environment, easily create both Windows and Linux virtual machines, develop highly-scalable PaaS-based applications and reliably establish secure backends for mobile apps.

Azure is scalable in nature, supporting organizations both large and small. It is designed to be used by the following types of personnel:

• Application Developers
• IT Professionals
• Web Developers
• Graphic Designers…

Grazed from Data Center Knowledge. Author: Bill Kleyman.

Technologies around the Internet and the WAN have been around for some time. However, it wasn’t until very recently that a specific term began circulating which was supposed to emphasize the combination of these technologies. Cloud computing was born out of the idea of a distributed computing system where information was available from numerous different points. Although the idea has certainly caught on – there are still some misconceptions and confusions around the cloud.

Many businesses have found great ways to utilize a cloud model. Now, they’re able to be more agile, grow faster and even add to their business resiliency. Still, there are those that have never really worked with an enterprise cloud model and are held back by myths and confusion points around the technology…