Grazed from CIO. Author: Thor Olavsrud.

The decision over whether to move your organization’s IT to the cloud can be a daunting one. After all, it means a wholesale change in the sourcing and delivery of IT products and services. However, many companies are making the leap, at least for select capabilities—a recent by CDW of 1,242 IT professionals found that more than half of organizations are moving a variety of capabilities to the cloud. And a majority of them are recognizing cost savings and increased profits, according to another study by Rackspace Hosting.

"The findings were pretty telling in terms of the adoption of cloud computing and the benefits of cloud computing," says John Engates, CTO of Rackspace Hosting. "The bottom line is cloud saves companies money and increases their profits." Rackspace, in conjunction with the Manchester Business School and Vanson Bourne, recently conducted a survey of 1,300 companies in the U.K. and U.S., supplemented by qualitative telephone interviews by the Manchester Business School with companies that used the cloud during December 2012 and January 2013…

Grazed from Forbes. Author: Reuven Cohen.

As cloud computing technology reaches a saturation point in North America many in the space are beginning to look at other markets to supplement growth prospects. According to IDC, the Middle East could be the next major market to adopt cloud computing. A recent report by IDC expects total spending on cloud delivery in Saudi Arabia to increase 34.86 percent year on year in 2012 with long term spending to expand at a compound annual growth rate of 49.7 percent between 2012 and 2016.

In a story published in the Saudi Gazette, Hamza Naqshbandi, senior research analyst for IT services with IDC Saudi Arabia said, “Organizations across the kingdom have traditionally preferred to manage their IT operations internally, however, there has been growing interest in outsourcing models, with organizations increasingly using hosting and managed services. This growing adoption of outsourcing services is seen as a first step toward moving to a cloud-based model, as companies become more comfortable with the concept of remote services delivery.”…

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: David Linthicum.

In my days as CTO of a technology company, I often received outside advice as to how I could improve my technology. A new set of eyes is a good thing, and often the recommendations were solid ideas I implemented to improve the product.

It appears that some cloud providers, such as Google, are also open to suggestions, as Phys.org reports: "Computer scientists at the University of California at San Diego, and Google have developed a novel approach that allows the massive infrastructure powering cloud computing to run more efficiently. The new approach can make these warehouse-scale computers run as much as 15 to 20 percent more efficiently." The scholars analyzed a bunch of Google Web services, including Gmail and search, and performed two basic steps:

• Gathered live data from the Google cloud in real time
• Analyzed that data on an isolated server…

Grazed from MITNews. Author: Larry Hardesty.

For many companies, moving their web-application servers to the cloud is an attractive option, since cloud-computing services can offer economies of scale, extensive technical support and easy accommodation of demand fluctuations. But for applications that depend heavily on database queries, cloud hosting can pose as many problems as it solves. Cloud services often partition their servers into “virtual machines,” each of which gets so many operations per second on a server’s central processing unit, so much space in memory, and the like.

That makes cloud servers easier to manage, but for database-intensive applications, it can result in the allocation of about 20 times as much hardware as should be necessary. And the cost of that overprovisioning gets passed on to customers. MIT researchers are developing a new system called DBSeer that should help solve this problem and others, such as the pricing of cloud services and the diagnosis of application slowdowns…

Grazed from MarketWatch. Author: PR Announcement.

Oppenheimer & Co. Inc., a unit of Oppenheimer Holdings OPY -0.94% , held its sixth annual Cloud Computing/Services One-on-One Conference on March 6, 2013. Eleven public companies and one private venture discussed cutting-edge information on advanced telecommunications with approximately 75 institutional clients in a One-on-One and small group meeting format.

This year’s conference was hosted by Oppenheimer’s leading Research Analysts covering this sector: Timothy K. Horan, CFA, Managing Director and Senior Analyst heading up the Communications and Cloud Services research team; Shaul Eyal, Managing Director and Senior Analyst covering the Communications, Security and Infrastructure Software sectors; and Brian Schwartz, Managing Director and Senior Analyst covering the SaaS/Applications Software space…

Grazed from FierceGovernmentIT. Author: David Perera.

Cloud computing adoption within the Defense Department will require establishment of clear security mandates, says a report from a Defense Science Board task force. The report (.pdf), dated January 2013, says among the mandates the DoD chief information officer and the Defense Information Systems Agency could establish include aspects of trusted computing such as hypervisor attestation to assure that it hasn’t been corrupted, cryptographic sealing and "strong virtual machine isolation."

Data at rest should be stored in encrypted form with keys protected using a hardware attestation "such as a trusted platform module" and data in transit should likewise be encrypted with hardware-attested keys, the report says…

Grazed from CloudTweaks. Author: Danielle Arad.

The next big thing in the evolution of internet is the industry of Cloud Computing. With technological advancements making a leap in every quarter of the year, new methodologies are being devised to meet out the requirements of millions of users worldwide. The field of Cloud Computing has greatly eased the cognitive dissonance caused by multiple user experiences, thereby acting as a bridge to create the same UX across all platforms, namely – tablets, PCs, smartphones, and even televisions.

Though the Cloud is a fairly recently coined term, the actual concept of Cloud Computing dates way back when mainframes were used to access information in colleges and corporations with the help of a terminal computer. The great saying of the famous scientist John McCarthy, “Computation may someday be organized as a public utility,” back in 1960, has become a reality now. Clearly, the ever-expanding field of the Internet has played a pivotal role in taking the Cloud to the next level. By doing so, apart from enhancing the UX, the collaboration between Cloud and the Internet greatly helps businesses cut short their IT expenses by outsourcing their maintenance and operations to that of the Cloud provider…

Grazed from PRNewsWire. Author: PR Announcement.

Today, Investors Alliance announced new research reports highlighting Cisco Systems, Inc. CSCO +0.07% , Juniper Networks, Inc. JNPR +0.27% , Finisar Corporation FNSR +0.21% , Riverbed Technology, Inc. RVBD -0.48% , and Aruba Networks, Inc. ARUN -0.47% . Today’s readers may access these reports free of charge – including full price targets, industry analysis and analyst ratings – via the links below.

Cisco Systems, Inc. Research Report

As the Internet of Things market is rapidly emerging, Cisco takes action to accelerate its development, by announcing the inaugural Internet of Things World Forum to unite leaders and innovators in order to create a framework for collaborative industry innovation and market adoption that will accelerate the impact of the Internet of Things on the global economy, society, and the environment. The forum, hosted by Cisco, will take place in October 2013 in Barcelona, Spain. The Full Research Report on Cisco Systems, Inc. – including full detailed breakdown, analyst ratings and price targets – is available to download free of charge at: [http://www.investors-alliance.com/r/full_research_report/fdb0_CSCO]…

Grazed from CloudTech. Author: Aiden Grayson.

For everything cloud computing offers – speed, convenience, simplicity, offsite backups – its “public” nature remains a touchy subject for enterprise. This simple fact explains why many organisations have been slow to embrace the cloud. In business, data security is everything. And for decision makers at big firms, trusting all mission-critical data into the care of a third-party IT vendor sounds just a bit too risky. But with the arrival of the private cloud, organizations can enjoy the conveniences of cloud computing without a lot of the tradeoffs. Here’s why they might want to give it a shot:

1. Data security and compliance

“A virtual infrastructure that offers on-the-go, anytime data access may sound great, but how can we be sure our data is safe?” This was – and still is – the big question for enterprise when confronted with cloud computing. The public cloud, they reason, is simply more vulnerable to misuse than data hosted in-house. On the other hand, a private, managed virtual network that delivers data and services is a different thing altogether. And it’s a thing more organisations are warming up to…

Grazed from TheEngineer. Author: Editorial Staff.

The platform allows robots connected to the internet to directly access the computational, storage, and communications infrastructure of modern data centres for robotics tasks and robot learning. The new RoboEarth Cloud Engine extends earlier work on allowing robots to share knowledge with other robots via a WWW-style database, thereby speeding up robot learning and adaptation in complex tasks.

The developed Platform as a Service (PaaS) for robots allows to perform complex functions like mapping, navigation, or processing of human voice commands in the cloud, at a fraction of the time required by robots’ on-board computers. By making enterprise-scale computing infrastructure available to any robot with a wireless connection, the researchers believe that the new computing platform will help pave the way towards lighter, cheaper, more intelligent robots…