Grazed from ChinaTechNews. Author: Editorial Staff.

Alibaba’s cloud computing platform’s five systems, including cloud computing, large-scale storage, cloud network, data crunching, and Yun OS, will be integrated and renamed the Feitian platform. Wang Jian, president and chief technology officer for Aliyun.com, told local developers of the company’s move at a developer conference.

At present, Amazon has already achieved profit in the global cloud computing market, and many companies, including Apple, use Amazon’s cloud computing services. In China, Alibaba, Huawei, and Shanda provide cloud computing services to developers. Due to the largest investment in the early stages, Aliyun.com has not yet made any profit…

Grazed from NextGov. Author: Josh Smith.

The FBI’s digital detective work not only brought down CIA Director David Petraeus, it also provided rare insights into the bureau’s latest methods for tracking people across cyberspace and the fight over government surveillance. Petraeus resigned suddenly on Friday, citing an affair that was uncovered after FBI agents followed an electronic trail that eventually linked the former Army general to his biographer, Paula Broadwell. The explosive combination of sex and spies was only embellished by the details of how federal officials stumbled across the liaison.

“Anyone more alarmed by FBI snooping through a journalist’s emails & investigating the sex life of CIA Dir. than who Petraeus was schtupping?” New Yorker Washington correspondent Ryan Lizza tweeted on Sunday. “FBI SPIED ON CIA DIRECTOR, WOMAN; EMAILS?” blared a headline on theDrudge Report…

Grazed from The Register. Author: Natalie Apostolou.

Australia and New Zealand’s limited international connectivity has cast a shadow over both market’s cloud computing competitiveness against their Asian neighbours. According to the Cloud Readiness Index (CRI), an annual study produced by the Asia Cloud Computing Association (ACCA), Australia has slipped three positions in the rankings due to its perceived limited international bandwidth, where it ranked second last.

While Australia scores highly in data privacy and data sovereignty its overall competitiveness in the cloud stakes sees it trail Japan, which secured top ranking followed by Korea, Hong Kong, Singapore Taiwan and New Zealand…

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: J. Nicholas Hoover.

President Barack Obama’s first term was marked by ambitious IT reform initiatives in cybersecurity, cloud computing, mobility, project management and more. With his reelection, Obama’s focus must now shift to finishing what he started.

On his first day in office in 2009, Obama signaled that IT would be high on his agenda when he issued a memo calling on federal agencies to "harness new technologies" to promote open government. It remains to be seen if he will launch a tech policy of similar scope on day one of his second term, but there’s already enough to keep the federal CIO and federal CTO — positions created in Obama’s first term — busy pushing those existing programs forward…

Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Barb Darrow.

One hurdle to corporate adoption of PaaSes is customer concern about being locked into one vendor’s platform. A new Cloud Foundry app will let them, in real time, see which of several Cloud Foundry PaaSes will run their workloads.

Cloud Foundry wants its Platform-as-a-Service to be the basis for a wide array of PaaSes going forward — a sort of super Paas foundation. And so far, it’s got some promising partners in that effort: AppFog, Uhuru, ActiveState, and Tier 3 all offer PaaSes based on Cloud Foundry…

Grazed from Information-Management. Author: Ken Klika.

When it comes to ‘the cloud’, defining specifics can be challenging as there are many nuances in terms of how technology services can be delivered, but one thing remains consistent in that organizations can choose to leverage the power of cloud computing in order to move their business forward or can surrender market to more nimble competitors.

The reality of today’s market is many of your competitors will be new entrants leveraging new ways and approaches to doing business enabled by IT. More importantly, if you aren’t prepared to address the cloud computing wave with your clients, you’ll soon be left behind…

Grazed from CloudTweaks. Author: Robert Shaw.

Cloud computing naysayers have long cited security and privacy as their number one concerns. While more and more companies are adopting cloud services, many corporations and small businesses are still hesitant to embrace the cloud because of concerns about lax security and hacker attacks.

Companies like Microsoft, Google, and Amazon claim to have extremely strong security and have never reported a major security breach. But smaller companies like Dropbox and Zappos have, but the breaches were typically due to internal programming bugs. The question is, should consumers believe that their data is safe with major cloud players? Can cloud computing giants really deliver on their security promises? The answer, in most cases, is a resounding yes. The largest U.S. data centers are almost always certified by the federal government under programs like FISMA and SAS 70 Type II certification. Cloud companies that hold these designations have implemented physical and cyber security measures…

Grazed from TI. Author: PR Announcement.

To most technologists, cloud computing is about applications, servers, storage and connectivity. To Texas Instruments Incorporated (TI) it means much more. Today, TI is unveiling a BETTER way to cloud with six new multicore System-on-Chips (SoCs). Based on its award winning KeyStone architecture, TI’s SoCs are designed to revitalize cloud computing, inject new verve and excitement into pivotal infrastructure systems and, despite their feature rich specifications and superior performance, actually reduce energy consumption.

To TI, a BETTER way to cloud means:

• Safer communities thanks to enhanced weather modeling;
• Higher returns from time sensitive financial analysis;
• Faster commuting on safer highways in safer cars;
• Exceptional video on any screen, anywhere, any time;
• More productive and environmentally friendly factories; and
• An overall reduction in energy consumption for a greener planet…

Grazed InformationWeek. Author: J. Nicholas Hoover.

In what could be one of the biggest cloud computing contracts to date by number of users, the Department of Veterans Affairs will move 600,000 users to Microsoft cloud email and collaboration services. The five-year, $36 million contract will first see 15,000 VA employees move to Microsoft’s government community cloud collaboration offering, Office 365 for Government, with the rest of the agency’s 600,000 users to follow over the remainder of the contract period. The agency will use Office 365 for email, calendaring, instant messaging, web and video conferences, Office collaboration tools and SharePoint.

Instead of working directly with Microsoft, VA has signed on with HP Enterprise Services, which will act as the systems integrator and provide disaster recovery services. However, VA has a long history as a big Microsoft shop. In July, for example, the agency signed a five-year enterprise agreement giving the agency access to a broad array of Microsoft products and services…

Grazed from ComputerWorld. Author: Rohan Pearce.

Commonwealth Bank CIO Michael Harte today told participants at a Sydney event organised by Amazon.com’s cloud computing arm, Amazon Web Services (AWS), that data sovereignty and security have been used as unjustified excuses to stop businesses moving to the cloud.

"The favourite [excuses] I used to hear when I talked to the big household names in infrastructure equipment was, ‘It doesn’t look very secure Michael. You can’t do that. And there’s data sovereignty; you’d want to look very, very carefully at that. And this on-demand pricing — no we just can’t do that we’ve got rules saying specifically we can’t."…