Grazed from GamingBolt.  Author: Kartik Mudgal.

SimCity developers recently faced the wrath of Reddit in an AMA, where they were asked about the DRM that was included in the game. Reddit members completely rejected the game citing DRM and mentioned that the developers should remove it if they want any sales.

The developers have responded and since it’s a directive from the publisher to include DRM and other things, their hands are tied, but here’s what they had to say.  Maxis’ Lucy Bradshaw mentioned that there’s a lot of cloud computing required to power SimCity so the DRM was required…

Grazed from Bloomberg.  Author: Editorial Staff.

Mobily owns today a strong infrastructure supporting the 3G and 4G networks, said its CEO Khalid Al-Kaf.  He was speaking at the Mobily Application Developers Conference 2012.  Senior Mobily officials were also present.  A large number of local and international experts in information technology as well as amateur developers, professional mobile application developers are taking part in the event.

The CEO opened the conference with a speech about the future of telecommunications and information technology.  He said: "The technical world today is running at an accelerated pace, each day witnessing significant shifts and developments created by the people’s need to communicate in social media…

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…