Grazed from Motley Fool.  Author: Tim Beyers.

Big data used to have a specific meaning. Meant to describe cast-offs such as log files, this information was "big" because of the amount of electronic refuse created when processing, say, an e-commerce transaction. Big data used to be an exercise in digital dumpster diving.

Those days are gone. At the annual South by Southwest Interactive conference, "big data" became a proxy for social data compiled by the likes of Facebook and Twitter. A synonym for capturing sentiment, but on a grand scale. Every company had to become a "big data" company, panelists enthused…

Grazed from Business Insider.  Author: Julie Bort.

A bunch of big enterprise companies are lining up to buy a cloud computing company called SoftLayer Technologies, Reuters’ Nadia Damouni reports.  IBM and EMC are reportedly in talks right now to buy the company in a deal that could be worth more than $2 billion. The sales process is being handled by Morgan Stanley and Credit Suisse.

Dallas, Texas-based SoftLayer is privately held, with the majority of shares owned by GI Partners. It has reportedly turned down other suitors before, like AT&T.  SoftLayer is a cloud-computing and Web-hosting provider with about 25,000 customers, mostly small and mid-sized customers, making it the world’s largest privately held website hoster, Damouni reports…

Grazed from AdvanceWeb. Author: Sharlene George.

Cloud computing and storage is an undeniable migration path and IT strategy. Overall spending on cloud technology is expected to reach an estimated $150 billion annually by 2014, according to a recent Gartner Group study. And within healthcare, 35 percent of health IT professionals surveyed said their organization was implementing or maintaining cloud computing in 2012, up from 30 percent in 2011, according to a new survey by Vernon Hills, Ill., technology vendor CDW.

However, not every software application in healthcare is a candidate for moving to the cloud. And many old myths about cloud computing and cloud storage continue to confuse both covered entities (CEs) and business associates (BAs). The HIPAA omnibus rule, released in January 2013, basically incorporates the HITECH Act security provisions into HIPAA, confirming the security and privacy requirements in the utilization of technology in healthcare. Below are five key changes under the HIPAA Omnibus Rule:…

Grazed from CloudTweaks. Author: Chris Kenealy.

I have always admired the haughtiness of most people when it comes to making everything more human. It truly is a testament to our own sense of entitlement that we must make nonhuman concepts and objects, and change them so we can take an interest in them. We even have a word for this practice called personification. This is the act of giving an animal a human voice in cliche children’s films, and making our early 1990s computers a little too creepy when they said hello and goodbye to you.

Now, I am not saying that making something more human-like is inherently wrong. Sure, we need some things that are familiar to us so we can get that little spark of infatuation and learn a little more about whatever it is that reminds you of you. Of course, the need for the calming of human familiarity could be our undoing in the future when we make strong and artificially intelligent robots with human faces. With a friendly face we will feel comfortable that the robots are like us because of their familiar demeanor…

Grazed from Telecompaper. Author: PR Announcement.

HP has launched its cloud computing platform in Brazil. Called Enterprise Cloud Services – Virtual Private Cloud (ECS/VPC), the new platform has been tested since early 2013 and now enters commercial operation with the proposal to deliver a differentiated offering to corporate clients.

According to HP, the service is the first hybrid cloud in the country, enabling customers to create public and private cloud services, according to their needs. The service includes IaaS and PaaS solutions for the service model. The ECS/VPC is supported by HP’s two data centres in Brazil, located in the cities of Barueri and Sao Bernardo do Campo, in the Greater Sao Paulo area. The platform is part of the global cloud service from HP that is currently being offered in the United States, Canada, Europe and Asia.

Grazed from ZDNet. Author: Larry Dignan.

Amazon Web Services has included virtual private clouds into its EC2 instances in a move that may render the marketing pitches of a lot of hardware companies moot. At the very least, AWS threw a virtual curveball to its physical data center rivals.

In a blog post, AWS outlined that ever EC2 customer will have advanced networking and features included in its Virtual Private Cloud service. Earlier: Amazon dominates cloud infrastructure market – but new challengers emerging | Amazon to set up new EC2 customers on private cloud…

Grazed from CloudTech. Author: John Thielens.

Across the globe, organisations in all industries are facing the increasingly complex job to control the security and privacy of their data – wherever, however and whenever it is accessed. In one way or another, this has always been a challenge for enterprises.

However, as big data, cloud services, mobile tech and social networks converge in the enterprise space, organisations today are under greater pressure than ever before to keep up with the impact this is having on security…

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: David Linthicum.

We’ve seen the news reports with carloads of FBI agents, windbreakers and all, rushing into a business to seize paper records and servers. The evidence is analyzed later to prove a crime using computer forensics. However, the more likely use of computer forensics will be requirements around lawsuits: accounting records, emails, transaction data, and so on, all used to tell a story that will benefit either the plaintiff or the defense.

The problem comes when we move data to the public clouds. How do we deal with legal issues, such as lawsuits and law enforcement? For the most part, organizations moving to the cloud have not even considered this issue…

Grazed from RCRWireless. Author: Roberta Prescott.

Cloud computing is gaining momentum, and telecom operators are battling for cloud computing customers. Carriers face fierce competition in this emerging market, and many have to solve several issues before becoming strong competitors. Almost all data center and infrastructure providers have included some kind of cloud service offering in their portfolio, and they have entered this field with the intention of gaining a huge share of this market.

Anderson B. Figueiredo, IDC research and consulting manager, said that large data center providers have made major investments to build their cloud strategy and portfolio. Together, the main vendors have spent U.S.$17 billion is acquisitions over the past 20 months, an amount IDC forecasts will reach U.S.$25 billion over the next 20 months…

Grazed from CloudTech. Author: James Bourne.

The difficulties around cloud security may be improving, but users don’t help themselves if they’re not street smart about their IT usage. That’s according to Informatica senior vice president Juan Carlos Soto, who said that cloud computing shouldn’t “absolve anyone from common sense IT”. “Cloud has tremendous benefits around cost savings and agility, and typically it’s not the absolute short term cost – it’s all the other benefits that go along with it,” Soto told CloudTech, adding: “Despite all those benefits, cloud does not absolve anyone from common sense IT good practices.

“For example, even as an individual user, we should back up our data. As an individual user, we should put passwords on our computers should we leave it somewhere. “Some of that common sense is often ignored by persons when they’re using the cloud because the cloud has delivered, I dare say, above expectations [in] security and reliability up to now…