It is hard to say which of the two buzzwords tops IT news today: Big Data or Cloud. It’s much easier to see how these two can play nicely together.

Big data symbolizes the explosion of computer generated data, which is said to double every year and outgrowing the capacity of IT data centers. In trying to cope with ever-increasing data volumes and make sense of the data, companies find themselves in desperate need of high scale data aggregation, processing and analysis tools.

I won’t dare give another definition to such a multi-faceted thing as Cloud. Instead, let me summarize a few of its inherent capabilities, representing different levels of the cloud stack:

Grazed from CloudTech.  Author: Dome9.

If you’ve been around the block a few times, you’re probably wondering why the title of this post isn’t, 50 Reasons VPNs Suck in the Cloud.   VPNs have long been the bane of both administrators and users (and lets not forget, support). They’re clunky, complex, and costly, and the same is true when they’re deployed to secure cloud access.   Today, VPNs are increasingly used to connect to cloud computing resources.

Either by routing traffic back through the corporate network or direct to the cloud provider, VPNs offer authentication and transport-layer encryption to keep the bad guys out and sensitive information secure. But at what cost?   Both VPN configurations (corporate and provider) are complex to set up, require client agents with loads of support, and can be expensive to maintain. Arguably, there’s room for – and exists – a better approach to securing access to cloud servers.   We’ll get to what that is in a coming post, but for now we thought we’d share a few reasons why VPNs suck in the cloud, in reverse order (for effect)…

Grazed from CloudTweaks.  Author: Chris Kenealy.

In the course of my illustrious writing career, I have come across new and entertaining topics that I would have otherwise never cared to learn. For example did you know computers were called electronic brains in the 1950s? Of course knowing what we know now about the electronic brains’ memory capacities of the 1950s, it makes me wonder if all the asbestos lined schools and DDT neighborhood spray play dates were a reason for such a slow start in advancements of this electronic brain? Yet, the slang of the 1950s for computers is not what this article is about.

No, instead, I decided since I am going to be writing more about the cloud network I should read up on as much as I can. Yet, after starting my research I realized that I know remarkably little about this computing concept. So I figured we should have a little one on one time because I now feel it is my job to enlighten as many as I can on this foreign concept with a few facts that surprised me, but may help us understand the true vision of the cloud…

Grazed from TechTarget.  Author:  Lynn Haber.

Targeting VARs, systems integrators, managed service providers and cloud services providers, CSPcommunity, launched this week, is an online information and education site, and network of industry professionals devoted to helping partners with any level of cloud savvy learn how to build a robust cloud services practice and transition to a reoccurring revenue business model.

Started by high-tech sales and marketing veterans Todd Hussey and Dave Zwicker, co-founders and partners of Andover, Mass.-based MSPexcellence, a business building consultancy for managed services providers (MSPs) and cloud computing service providers, CSPcommunity offers three levels of membership, or business building models for becoming a cloud computing service provider (CSP): Silver, Gold and Platinum. The membership levels correspond to a variety of resources, from the fundamentals of learning what cloud means to a partner’s business, to transforming and operating a successful cloud service provider business…

Grazed from eWeek.  Author: Nathan Eddy.

While businesses have improved their practices around cloud computing security, there are continued concerns about organizations’ use of security best practices and their awareness of the cloud services used within their organizations, according to the "Security of Cloud Computing Users 2013" study commissioned by CA Technologies and research firm Ponemon Institute.

When compared to a previous study from 2010, the latest study, based on survey of 748 IT and IT security practitioners in the United States, indicated progress. However, the report pointed to conflicting views on who is most responsible for cloud security, with a bias toward end users and IT security “getting a pass.”  The study also cited conflicting views in the case of best practices, such as vetting services for security risk, engaging the security team in determining cloud service use and assessing how a cloud service could affect data security…

Grazed from ScienceDaily.  Author: Editorial Staff.

Computer scientists at the University of California, San Diego, and Google have developed a novel approach that allows the massive infrastructure powering cloud computing as much as 15 to 20 percent more efficiently. This novel model has already been applied at Google. Researchers presented their findings at the IEEE International Symposium on High Performance Computer Architecture conference Feb. 23 to 27 in China.

Computer scientists looked at a range of Google web services, including Gmail and search. They used a unique approach to develop their model. Their first step was to gather live data from Google’s warehouse-scale computers as they were running in real time. Their second step was to conduct experiments with data in a controlled environment on an isolated server. The two-step approach was key, said Lingjia Tang and Jason Mars, faculty members in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the Jacobs School of Engineering at UC San Diego…

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: Chris Talbot.

Cloud outages are never going to go away. The minute the IT downtime problem is solved, we’ll all have to find something else to complain about, after all. But still, unexpected cloud downtime remains one of the larger pain points skeptics point to when they get their hackles up regarding cloud computing. These same people seem to forget about the amount of downtime they experience within the four walls of their organizations—but there are IT people to blame at that point. The faceless cloud is something else. Still, cloud services fared well last year, according to research from RightScale, which recently released an infographic with all kinds of data points regarding cloud outages in 2012.

RightScale found that there were 27 notable publicly-reported cloud outages around the world. We reported on many of these outages on Talkin’ Cloud. Six of them were actually caused by Hurricane Sandy. However, when we’re talking about these outages, we’re included hosting providers, as well. Based on the RightScale information, 26 percent of outages in 2012 were private data centers, another 26 percent were public clouds, 7 percent were SaaS offerings, and 41 percent were hosting providers…

Grazed from ITProPortal. Author: James Morris.

The Internet, and indeed every business, runs on data – usually lots of it. Thanks to the proliferation of cloud-based services we discussed in the first feature in this series, that data could be all over the place, too. Keeping track of all this data, and ensuring that it is secure, is a major logistical nightmare. As we explained in an earlier feature focusing on Big Data, interlinked information and its analysis is also the next big revolution currently brewing in Web culture. In this feature we examine the issues of data growth, and look at some of the solutions available.

Reaching for the cloud store
In reality, cloud storage shouldn’t be about having some documents on a service like Google Drive and others stored locally, which is clearly a recipe for confusion. It should be about having your documents appear to be in the same place all the time – on whatever machine you are currently using – but also having them seamlessly and securely stored in a remote location as well. You could, of course, standardise on just one cloud service and specify that everyone in your organisation use this for all primary document storage…

Grazed from ElectronicDesign. Author: Al Wegener.

Let’s examine an impending problem looming at the intersection of big data and cloud computing. Big data is the vague, all-encompassing name given to immense datasets stored on enterprise servers like those at Google (which organizes 100 trillion Web pages), Facebook (1 million gigabytes of disk storage), and YouTube (20 petabytes of new video content per year).

Big data also is found in scientific applications such as weather forecasting, earthquake prediction, seismic processing, molecular modeling, and genetic sequencing. Many of these applications require servers with tens of petabytes of storage, such as the Sequoia (Lawrence Livermore) and Blue Waters (NCSA) supercomputers…