Grazed from BetaBeat. Author: Steve Huff.

Researchers at North Carolina State University and the University of Oregon have discovered a way to turn cloud computing into hacker heaven. Disguising data transfers with URL-truncating services like TinyURL or Bit.ly, researchers found that cloud-based processing power intended to shift computing tasks from laptops, tablets and mobile devices could be converted to crack encoded passwords or used for a large scale denial-of-service attack.

WhiteHat Security’s Jeremiah Grossman told Dark Reading that cloud browser providers need to “ensure adequate security controls are in place to prevent their end users from abusing the system.”…

Grazed from Investors.com. Author: Reinhardt Krause.

Amazon Web Services, the top provider of cloud computing infrastructure services, and No. 2 Rackspace Hosting are campaigning overseas to keep their heady growth on track. Like presidential candidates dueling in swing states, the two cloud rivals are showing up in the same markets. Amazon Web Services, part of online retail king Amazon.com (AMZN), announced on Nov. 12 that it would open a new data center in Sydney. Rackspace (RAX) in August unveiled a new data center in Australia, which it expects will start operating by year’s end.

In Latin America, Rackspace is eying a move into Brazil, a market AWS entered last December. "I think wherever we will be, they will be — and vice versa," Rackspace CEO Lanham Napier told IBD. Oppenheimer analyst Tim Horan, in a report, says the move by AWS into Australia "is a slight negative for Rackspace."…

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Alex Barrett.

When the trappings of public cloud computing — security concerns, lack of control, long-term costs — hinder adoption, many IT teams turn their attention, dollars and deployment efforts to private cloud. Still, not everyone is convinced that private cloud computing is the answer.

Indeed, some people at IT organizations who have embarked on a traditional private cloud project are concerned that private cloud didn’t fix the problems it was supposed to solve, said Pat O’Day, CTO at BlueLock, a cloud provider based on VMware’s vCloud offering…

The Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board is a non-partisan, non-political agency created by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. It has two goals:

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Adam Riglian.

The task of selling the concept of cloud computing isn’t just for the marketers and executives at major tech companies. A little selling can also help rank-and-file IT employees and business users get the cloud tools they need without running afoul of company brass.

Shadow IT, which refers to the use of hardware or software — often cloud software — without the official permission of the IT department, is potentially harmful, according to Adobe Senior Cloud Engineer Tim Prendergast. Speaking at the Amazon Web Services re:Invent show, Prendergast outlined the best ways to garner support for cloud applications within a company without getting into trouble…

Grazed from Bloomberg. Author: Alex Sherman.

Cox Communications Inc. is considering acquisitions of business-services companies with annual revenue of about $200 million and could announce a deal in the next six months. The third-largest U.S. cable company is targeting telecommunications-services and cloud-computing companies as it seeks to increase its potential revenue base by 10 percent in 2013, Phil Meeks, senior vice president of Cox Business, said in an interview.

Atlanta-based Cox is also looking at partnerships and acquisitions of smaller companies, he said. U.S. cable companies are counting on faster-growing business services to buoy growth as residential video customers decrease…

Grazed from Forbes. Author: Joe McKendrick.

Cloud computing may represent the beginning of a shift of control of business technology away from information technology departments and into the hands of managers and professionals from other parts of the business. While a third of executives responding to a recent survey (32%) agree that the IT department is currently the main driver of cloud adoption, another 45% report that individual business units are ultimately responsible for cloud adoption strategies.

These are some of the findings from a new survey of 460 IT leaders and senior business managers conducted by Capgemini. However, just because cloud computing is in more of the hands of the business doesn’t mean it’s run as effectively as possible. For example, the board of directors is seen as both a driver (29%) and a blocker (28%) of cloud initiatives. This suggests that in many cases, “benefiting from the cloud is still being hindered by a lack of appropriate senior level understanding and commitment,” the report states. “It is safe to conclude that by now the benefits of the cloud are clear and widely understood.”…

Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Derrick Harris.

AWS CTO Werner Vogels and I sat down at the AWS re:Invent conference yesterday to talk about whether large companies are actually using the cloud to innovate through new styles of applications. Vogels says they are, and has plenty of examples to prove his point. Maybe big businesses really do understand cloud computing after all.

When I sat down with Amazon CTO Werner Vogels at the Amazon Web Services re:Invent conference on Wednesday, we began the discussion by talking about applications designed to take advantage of everything the cloud has to offer in terms of control, resiliency and programmability — what Vogels calls 21st-century architectures. It’s great in theory but, I asked, “Who’s actually building these apps?”…

Grazed from FierceCIO. Author: Caron Carlson.

Enterprises have been loud and clear about ongoing security concerns regarding cloud computing, but by and large, vendors haven’t responded with robust service level agreements or any other reassuring controls, experts say. Customers should be on the lookout for nine controls that could relieve their concerns, reports Brandon Butler at Network World. One of the most effective security provisions customers should ask for in a cloud contract is a certificate that shows data is deleted when the contract expires. This is not at all common, Butler notes, but it is legally defensible.

Other highly effective provisions would include a disaster recovery clause and a clause that establishes that the provider is responsible for the customer’s losses if a security breach occurs. Unfortunately, these provisions are also non-existent today…

Grazed from ZDNet. Author: Jack Clark.

Cloud computing is rearranging the datacentre infrastructure market: large server makers are seeing their dominance wane as competition grows from low-cost Asian manufacturers that sell directly to the clouds of Google, Amazon and others. HP, Dell and IBM are all struggling to ship servers due to competition from low-cost and specialist vendors, figures from Gartner shows.

The latest report by the analyst company on the worldwide server market was released on Wednesday. It paints a grim picture of the global datacentre market, with the market’s overall revenues during the third quarter decreasing 2.8 percent year-on-year and overall shipments growing a measly 3.6 percent…