Grazed from Sys Con Media. Author: Maureen O’Gara.

Google wiggled out of antitrust charges over its core search business in the US last week but its luck may not hold in Europe where Joaquín Almunia, the head of the European Commission’s antitrust unit, told the Financial Times Thursday that "We are still investigating, but my conviction is [Google] are diverting traffic" to give its own vertical search services preferential treatment.

"They are monetizing this kind of business," he said, "the strong position they have in the general search market and this is not only a dominant position, I think – I fear – there is an abuse of this dominant position." He added that he’s not talking about Google’s sacred algorithms but "the way they present their own services."…

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: David Linthicum.

With the rise of cloud computing comes a rise in tools and models that estimate the cost benefit of the technology. Most are created and promoted by cloud providers that sell their services, and a few come from analysts and consulting organizations. Whatever their source, their ROI calculations are based on the same assumption: Cloud computing avoids hardware and software investments, and because you pay only for the resources you use, the cost of those resources should align directly with the amount you require.

Those assumptions sound great, but the resulting ROI calculations are drastic oversimplifications of the problems the cloud is there to solve. In fact, these ROI calculators confuse businesses about the real value of the cloud and mislead both IT and business units…

Grazed from HostReview. Author: John Peter.

Today due to the involvement of the cloud computing virtualization technology many companies and firms are gaining a lot form this technology. And obviously with this technology, it’s very easy to gain high-performance, flexibility and added resources for your business. Virtualization will with the help of shared servers provide data, software’s and other hardware resources to the system and the business. With this it completes every demand of the client at will.

And as we know cloud servers are charged on the basis of pay per use basis. The concept of cloud technology itself works on the method of virtualization. And every user can use them without concerning about the maintenance and proper management of the server because those are the problems of the cloud provider. All you need to do is to pay for the resources that are used by your company. Where you can avail these services?…

Grazed from The Register. Author: Editorial Staff.

Innovations in mobile and cloud computing, social technology and the use of "big data" present an emerging risk to organisations’ IT security, experts have warned. The European Network and Information Security Agency (ENISA), which is an EU advisory body, said that those technologies would increasingly provide the platform for "most of the innovation expected in the area of IT" and warned that with their emergence would come an associated increased cyber threat.

ENISA warned that the threat stemming from mobile computing comes from the fact that mobile communications take place over "poorly secured … or unsecured channels". It said that the software used for such systems were not the most "mature", and added that devices were vulnerable to being lost or stolen due to their "mobility". The very fact that they are universally popular also enhances the threat of the technology being exposed to hackers, the agency added…

Grazed from i-Programmer. Author: Editorial Staff.

Cloud computing is one of those topics we all need to know about. However, this book concentrates on the ‘end user’ aspects of using online data storage rather than anything aimed at business or technical users. While it isn’t aimed at developers, it would be a good introduction to these aspects of the topic for any non-techie users or managers you need to work with.

Like all the Easy Steps titles, it is written in straightforward English, with lots of color illustrations. There are 15 short chapters, each covering an aspect of using the cloud or an app that lets you work with personal or ‘desktop’ level data in the cloud…

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: Bob Lewis.

Hot technology chatter, like most other business discussions, assumes business success comes from brilliant concepts, careful planning, and disciplined execution. I wonder if what actually happens is more of the million-monkeys-at-a-million-keyboards situation: If enough companies throw enough products and services into the marketplace, some will stick, even if the products and services are the result of random tossing, not superior thinking.

Way back in 1999 I proposed a simple set of criteria to bring order to the randomness when it comes to new information technology. According to the proposed model, three filters predict the success or failure of any new technology product:…

Grazed from Sys Con Media. Author: Maureen O’Gara.

NetSuite said Thursday that it’s bought 28-year-old Retail Anywhere in a deal that’s supposed to deliver the first cloud-based system that unifies POS and e-commerce in a single application.

The company, which is majority owned by Larry Ellison, says it’s bringing brick-and-mortar retail businesses to a global commerce cloud, grafting multiple-customer touchpoints onto its SuiteCommerce platform to deliver an integrated cloud business suite for retailers including POS, web sites, smartphones, tablets and call centers.
Terms were not disclosed…

Grazed from AOL.Defense. Author: Henry Kenyon.

New technology creates new capabilities — and new vulnerabilities. "Moving to the cloud" is the trend du jour, even in the intelligence world, but the recent attacks on the nation’s banking system has raised uncomfortable questions about how to make cloud computing secure.

"The cloud" may seem amorphous, but in reality it consists of a host of modestly capable user terminals connected to a high-powered central server or server farm. The great advantage of the cloud is that individual users can borrow capacity — storage, processing power, even entire applications — from the central server when they need it. The great vulnerability is a successful attack on the central server can compromise everyone on the cloud…

Grazed from eCommerce Times. Author: Jeff Kagan.

We are still early in this cloud revolution, but there are reasons to tread carefully, whether you are an individual saving your personal data and files, or whether you are a company using the cloud to interact with all your employees or customers. There are real benefits and dangers and, you should be aware of them all.

The cloud may be the future, but it’s not a bed of roses. The Amazon Cloud had a meltdown on Christmas Eve, affecting many customers who use the service. Companies that use Amazon as their cloud, their customers and workers were all affected. What should we learn from this high-profile meltdown?…

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Charles Babcock.

Mirantis, a cloud consulting firm and one of the few OpenStack brain trusts outside of Rackspace, announced Thursday that it has received $10 million in funding from Intel, Dell and WestSummit Capital. The latter is a global investment firm with ties inside China.

Mirantis’ story is a little different than other startups’ because the three-year-old firm has successfully self-funded its own growth thus far. CEO Adrian Ionel said it could have continued to do so. Rather than a handful of entrepreneurs working in a garage, it’s already a staff of 300 consultants and engineers with a list of pedigree customers building major cloud projects, such as PayPal and AT&T…