Grazed from WSJ.  Author: Yoree Koh.

Myanmar’s central bank is headed for the cloud.   After decades of performing the bulk of the Central Bank of Myanmar’s work longhand, a trio of Japanese companies are pushing the institution to the technological cutting edge. The three companies — Daiwa Institute of Research Ltd Limited and KDDI Corp.  — collaborated to build the Southeast Asian country its first Internet-linked computing platform in an attempt to help the central bank’s antiquated systems keep pace with Myanmar’s rapid change.

Myanmar has ushered in a raft of reforms over the last 18 months in a move to breathe new economic life into the country lift impoverished and stuck in time after decades of military rule ended two years ago. One of the key challenges is to modernize Myanmar’s aging systems…

Grazed from MarketWatch.  Author: PR Announcement.

Standards have increasingly become the core for countries to reserve strategic resources and enhance international competitiveness. "The man who sets up standards gets the world" has been repeatedly demonstrated in the IT field, where giants like Microsoft, Apple and Qualcomm serve as good examples. Cloud computing, conforming to the worldwide demand for integrating computing resources and service capabilities, is the strategic vantage point in the current international IT competition. Therefore, China’s competitiveness in the international IT field will depend on our ability of setting up independent standards for cloud computing in the future.

Cloud Computing Industry: Risks Behind Prosperity

In 2011, China’s cloud computing industry witnessed a prosperous development. Cloud computing continued to extend from governments to enterprises and to individual users, from the IT industry to traditional agriculture and industry in addition to the modern service industry. The industrial size reached RMB160 billion, up 63.8% year-on-year, and it is expected to reach RMB 800 billion in 2014…

Grazed from InformationWeek.  Author: J. Nicholas Hoover.

In a bid to accelerate and make more cost-effective the adoption of cloud computing, the federal government Thursday issued the first government-wide security authorization for a cloud computing service as part of the new Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP).

The FedRAMP program will eventually be a mandatory, common approach to ensuring that cloud computing services meet federal cybersecurity requirements. It will replace the historically agency-by-agency and therefore often duplicative approach to certifying that services meet these requirements. For now, though, almost 19 months after being announced, FedRAMP is still just getting off the ground…

Grazed from JDSupra.  Author: Editorial Staff.

The term “cloud computing” has been tossed about as the new trend in IT. Unfortunately, just as often has you hear the term echoed as the “next big thing” a comprehensible definition rarely follows. So what is cloud computing? The United States National Institute of Standards & Technology (“NIST”) defines cloud computing as:

A model for enabling ubiquitous, convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction.  This cloud model is composed of five essential characteristics, three service models, and four deployment models.

Perhaps more succinctly put, cloud computing “involves the sum of a service to store, transmit and process information and employs the internet as the means to access and move the information."…

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: Chris Talbot.

Open-Xchange, a provider of communication and collaboration software for mobile apps, will begin deploying its new OX App Suite through cloud service providers in the new year (assuming nobody else on the Internet is predicting the end of the world).

The new "community version" of OX App Suite will provide a set of applications supporting easy management of email, contacts, calendars, media and documents, as well as optimizing workflow and productivity. According to Open-Xchange, the new OX App Suite integrates a variety of cloud and social media platforms, including Google Gmail, Hotmail, Facebook and LinkedIn to help end-users benefit from "intuitive" communication and sharing across various devices…

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Beth Pariseau.

Big data will get even bigger, cloud performance monitoring will be a top priority, and cloud computing pros should beware of further government regulation in 2013, according to the heads of three cloud computing service providers. While it’s been a hot topic in 2012, big data still hasn’t fully hit its stride outside of startups and early adopters. But more vendors will come out of the woodwork to address this growing trend.

Companies including Austin, Texas-based hosting and cloud service provider Rackspace Inc. will do this in 2013 by wrapping products and services around open source tools such as Hadoop, according to John Engates, CTO of Rackspace…

Grazed from e27 Web Innovation. Author: Goutama Bachtiar.

With rising adoption of cloud deployments, users, IT managers and stakeholders will need to be better educated on cloud security standards and best practices.
In cloud computing, one of the bigger concerns among users and IT managers is security. It encompasses these fundamental aspects: authorization (who is allowed to access), authentication (what level of access does someone has), data integrity, and services availability. Furthermore, cloud security will refer to a set of controls, compliances, policies and technologies in regards to securing the data, applications, and infrastructure.

So let’s dig in for more. From a supply and demand perspective, the providers (infrastructure, software or platform) are expected by their users to provide for security measures. For instance, enterprise-grade cloud applications frequently utilize server virtualization, which introduces an additional layer that must be configured, managed and secured in the appropriate way…

Grazed from Sys Con Media. Author: Miles Kelly.

IT professionals including server and storage managers often think that the adoption of cloud computing in the enterprise puts their jobs in danger. To the contrary, the role of the IT professional is evolving into a more strategic position as more organizations adopt private and public cloud, with many using a combination of the two, which is often referred to as hybrid cloud. Recent reports suggest that the cloud will result in increased career advancement for IT professionals both in terms of responsibility and job opportunities. IT professionals should embrace the cloud, not fear it. Consider surfers who once rejected surf board leashes as "kook chords," dismissing them as unnecessary. However, as is the case with many innovations, the "kook chord" has gradually become a reliable standard used by virtually every surfer today.

Let’s be blunt: IT is a terrible place for old-school purists. To succeed, IT professionals must continually refine their skillsets to evolve into the role of strategic IT advisors for the enterprise on cloud initiatives. Rather than being just elbows-deep in motherboards and memory, they are moving from a tactical role into a more strategic role that requires a combination of hands-on work and sourcing, depending on the type of cloud environment that makes sense for the enterprise…

Grazed from DataCenterKnowledge. Author: Bill Kleyman.

To many, cloud computing and WAN utilization can be considered synonymous. More organizations are seeing the direct benefits of moving towards a cloud platform. Whether they’re trying to reduce their internal hardware footprint, or are trying to distribute their data; the data center infrastructure is very much a critical component of the entire process.

Business are trying to find ways to better deliver their information and continue to be more competitive in this “cloud-centric” market. WAN technologies continue to evolve as more bandwidth, better underlying infrastructure and optimization all create a more robust connection. As more organizations move to the cloud, they will increase their reliance on data center availability and technologies. This is where data center managers must look to the cloud to help them stay ahead of the curve and continue to offer great technology solutions…