For attorneys or paralegals, cloud computing could mean access to data anytime and anywhere.  As long as they can connect to the Internet, work can be accessed from their home, office, client offices or from their smart phones. Lawyers can also work collaboratively on files and documents, even when they are physically not in the same location. For some lawyers, cloud computing is already an affordable and flexible alternative to traditional desktop and client server based software technologies.

Law firms are slowly moving to the cloud. The American Lawyer ‘s 16th annual survey gathered responses from 82 law firms and revealed that 65% of them use cloud computing. Of those firms using the cloud, 77% described it as a positive experience…

The Bloomberg article cites a “person familiar with the matter” saying that the Securities and Exchange Commission brought in the FBI because criminal acts have been alleged. The news comes a day after HP CEO Meg Whitman charged that Autonomy executives mislead HP about the company’s finances, failed to disclose key information and otherwise behaved badly.  HP said it had referred the matter to the SEC in the US and the UK’s Serious Fraud office…

As market awareness and adoption increases, so customer confidence and clarity is growing and companies are better able to evaluate the benefits and challenges that big data presents their individual organisations.

It’s not surprising to see that big data is the top IT spending priority in Gartner’s recent global forecast.  These figures correlate with Cisco’s recent CloudWatch survey, which found that Big Data will be an important aspect of IT strategy and is set to increase in importance over the next 12 months…

VMware, Inc., the global leader in virtualization and cloud infrastructure, has said that it has partnered with RCV Innovations’ ThinkCloud as a VMware Authorized Training Center (VATC) in India.

‘ThinkCloud’ is a training and consulting initiative for cloud computing by RCV Innovations, a Hyderabad-based IT company with a focus on healthcare, education and cloud computing. Under the agreement, RCV Innovations’ ThinkCloud will offer VMware-certified training courses to customers, channel partners and the general public on VMware products, solutions and services in Hyderabad and Kolkata…

A November 2012 survey related to cloud computing revealed the numerous growth opportunities for both buyers and consumers.  According to Michael Skok, Partner at North Bridge Venture Partners, there is a growing interest in the cloud and understanding its potential. He claimed that the survey has enabled a greater understanding of the key issues related to the cloud, from the perspectives of customers and vendors.

“On the inhibitors, one of the things that’s interesting this year is that, if you look back to 2011, 10 percent of the survey respondents would have said that the cloud is just too risky, and they gave many reasons last year. This year, we’re down to 3 percent. So that’s a significant drop,” said Skok…

Convergence according to Wikipedia is the merger of previously distinct technologies into a new form; requiring new theories, new products, and new practices. The convergence of cloud computing, big data and low latency technologies have begun to meld together within the financial industry.

Increasing competition and thinning margins are pushing the technology envelope in the hunt for alpha. This has manifested itself on many fronts, increasing sophistication in the tools to search for alpha, controlling costs and managing risk to the confluence of the underlying infrastructure. The key enablers are big data and cloud deployments where low latency is the ante to play the game…

t’s no secret –- there is money to be made in the cloud computing services space, and everyone wants in on the action. SMB cloud providers are no exception, and as the market heats up and competition gets fierce, smaller players need to find ways to compete with the big boys. They will never be able to take advantage of the economies of scale that the largest hosting providers can generate to drive down costs and preserve margin.

At this year’s HostingCon, we conducted a survey that yielded some very interesting results. Nearly 50 percent of respondents cited cloud price wars as the greatest threat to their businesses. So what are the opportunities for SMB providers to create true services differentiation and "swagger" versus the industry behemoths, like Rackspace, Amazon and Google?  Interest in and adoption of cloud computing has steadily grown over the past several years. Today, momentum is accelerating as cloud technologies evolve and provide more robust public, private and hybrid cloud opportunities, not just for test and development applications but for enterprise applications…

"In addition to federal budget pressure, in a technology-oriented administration there is pressure to be innovative and agile. Cloud computing offers interesting opportunities in those respects," said Patton Boggs partner Monica Desai. "As the administration’s Cloud First reform platform continues to move from aspirational to reality, … other agencies will feel additional pressure to adopt."

Adoption of cloud technology at the federal level is still far from routine — but cloud transactions continue to emerge on a regular basis. The deals range in value, demonstrating that cloud migration can be applied for relatively small deployments or for huge networks…

Lumerical Solutions, a Vancouver-based provider of optoelectronic and photonic design software, today announced that the latest release of their products are compatible with the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). This release expands on Lumerical’s industry leadership in terms of supporting high-performance computing (HPC) systems, with FDTD Solutions being the first commercial finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) solver engineered to take advantage of Amazon EC2. The compatibility of Lumerical’s products with EC2 provides research and design professionals with quickly accessible, cost-effective and scalable computing infrastructure to perform ever-larger volumes of simulations to design and optimize next-generation optoelectronic components, circuits and systems.

Prior to the availability of the Amazon EC2, selecting, purchasing, commissioning and maintaining an on-premise HPC system was a complicated and expensive commitment. This left many smaller companies and research organizations without access to the benefits provided by HPC systems while those who did make major investments in HPC systems often struggled to keep up with evolving user demands. With cloud computing, organizations can purchase almost limitless computing capacity as and when required, offering significant economic and operational benefits compared with buying a fixed computing capacity that either under-services peak usage levels or results in expensive hardware sitting idle…