Grazed from ITPro. Author: Matthew Hall.

The challenge with all new technologies is to ensure users and providers alike sing from the same hymn sheet so that interoperability and performance can be easily benchmarked. And so it is with the relatively new cloud computing trend. Now the Open Data Centre Alliance, a global industry association of heavyweight cloud users, has released a blueprint it wants adopted to ensure consistent enterprise cloud service delivery.

It intends to establish four tiers – from bronze to platinum – for cloud services covering availability, performance, recoverability, security, management, functionality and interoperability. The latest in a series of benchmarks the ODCA intends to establish, the most recent papers specifically address computing ”infrastructure as a service”, or IaaS…

Grazed from The Huffington Post. Author: Daniel J. Solove.

Increasingly, educational institutions and state entities handling student data are hiring outside companies to perform cloud computing functions related to managing personal information. The benefits of cloud computing are that outside entities might be more sophisticated at managing personal data. These entities may be able to manage data more inexpensively and effectively than the educational institution could do itself. In many cases, cloud computing providers can provide better security than the educational institutions can.

The risks of cloud computing are that educational institutions no longer have as much control over the personal data. They must rely on the cloud computing provider to have the appropriate practices and policies to ensure that data is properly maintained, handled, used, or disclosed…

Grazed from ITBusiness.ca. Author: Jeff Jedras.

“To the cloud!” was Microsoft’s rallying-cry, and it appears most organizations agree it’s inevitable that portions of their business will end up relying on cloud computing in the near future. Still, it also appears that significant security concerns remain that could slow cloud adoption.

Those are the findings of a new survey by GreenSQL, a database security company based in Tel Aviv, Israel. It asked its respondents “What is your main security concern when moving your database to the cloud?” and found a number of concerns identified:

* 31 percent: I do not trust the level of security in cloud services
* 28 percent: Compliance and regulations requirements do not allow moving data to the cloud
* 22 percent: I cannot control my data on the cloud
* 19 percent: Cloud services are not mature yet…

Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Barb Darrow.

Zorawar Biri Singh, who leads HP’s cloud effort, says the company’s vision aligns nicely with what enterprises want. HP will fill in check marks to its OpenStack-based game plan next month but the big question is whether HP’s brand still carries weight.

The controversies that have afflicted Hewlett-Packard in the past few years has given even the most loyal customers and partners pause. This is, after all, a company that has gone through a half dozen CEOs in 6 years. That uncertainty doesn’t help the company’s cloud computing strategy, which had so many moving parts that the company launched yet another reorg to rationalize the effort two months ago…

Grazed from CloudTweaks. Author: Gavin Hill.

Since its infancy in the early seventies when the first computer virus was created, the malware and anti-malware business has grown into multi-billion dollar industries. No longer are script kiddies creating malware for notoriety, instead the malware industry is run by organized criminals who invest time and money in new technologies and methods to compromise systems for profit.

The evolution of malware is the driver for the progress of security. Malware propagation has gone from floppy disks, to email attachments, and on to remote exploits of vulnerabilities. Malicious software itself has become more sophisticated by using kernel-level code to hide as rootkits, effectively moving down the stack. The result: an ‘arms race’ between organized criminals and security vendors. Each party reacts to changes in the industry to gain the upper hand. Take for example the growth in broadband adoption since the early 2000’s. As broadband adoption grew so too did the number of endpoints in botnets…

Grazed from Midsize Insider. Author: Rick Robinson.

Dropbox now has 100 million users. Founder Drew Houston noted the benchmark in a blog post, and the company celebrated by giving away a gigabyte of storage space. The sheer number of users indicates that most of them are consumers, not businesses (and certainly not midsize firms).

All the same, this is significant news for the IT community at midsize firms. Cloud computing has gone mainstream, used by millions of people who may not even know that their data is "in the cloud." And some unknown–but probably significant–proportion of those 100 million users are using their personal cloud storage for business purposes. Convenient access to the cloud has spawned a whole added dimension to the "consumerization of IT" that has not drawn much attention. This has downsides relating to security and data management, but a big upside in terms of simplicity and flexibility…

Grazed from PublicService.co.uk. Author: Editorial Staff.

The Met Office has won a new award for its use of cloud services, also taking the prize for the most effective use of collaborative technology at the UK IT Industry Awards The winning Met Office Weather Observation Website (WOW) project, has used the Google App Engine to build and host web applications exploiting cloud and collaborative technologies.

WOW has enabled the Met Office to engage with weather enthusiasts, school students studying weather and climate and other organisations to create an active global online weather community…

Grazed from ITPro. Author: Caroline Donnelly.

Cloud computing is one of the private equity (PE) community’s top areas for future investment, according to a new report from financial advisors Grant Thornton UK. The firm’s “Where is the smart money going in Technology?” report claims more than 92 per cent of PE and venture capitalists consider cloud to be an “attractive” proposition, with half planning to invest in this area within the next two years.

The managed services industry also seems to have caught the imagination of investors, with 30 per cent of the 40 PE experts and venture capitalists who took part in the report expressing an interest in investing in this area…

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: Chris Talbot.

CloudBerry Lab has made an incremental update to its CloudBerry Explorer application, which aims to simplify file management on Amazon S3 so it’s as easy as managing files on local computers. Besides a few other small enhancements to the cloud application, the key addition to the v3.7 release is support for Amazon Glacier. Essentially, the new Glacier-related features revolve around Amazon S3 archiving to Glacier, giving Amazon S3 users the option of using CloudBerry Explorer to archive data stored on S3 to low-cost Glacier storage.

Amazon Glacier, launched earlier this year, provides a low-cost storage option for companies looking for longer-term storage that doesn’t require the high-performance and fast access of storage that is continuously being used and modified…

Grazed from NewEurope Online. Author: Editorial Staff.

For the first time, the Steering Board of the new European Cloud Partnership (ECP) met in Brussels on 19 November, kicking-off the process to help building an EU Digital Single Market for cloud computing.

The board, which aims making the most of the public sector’s buying power to shape the growing market for cloud computing services, brings together tech Chief Executive Officers and government representatives with responsibility for IT procurement. Besides, the committee is Chaired by Toomas Hendrik Ilves, President of Estonia, and will deliver strategic advice to Vice President Neelie Kroes…