Grazed from HealthCare IT News.  Author: Benjamin Harris.

With all the talk about switching from data centers to cloud-based computing, it seems like the cloud is an etherial magic bullet for every problem that healthcare IT might face, from reduced costs to improved flexibility. Not so fast, says Steve Jacobs, president of Velocity Data Centers, a firm that provides private cloud solutions.

While "there are some definite business advantages to operating in a cloud IT environment, the risks are very real and concerning," says Jacobs. For all of the pros of cloud-based solutions floating around, he points out that some of the cons can be big nails in the coffin for any organization that relies as much on data as healthcare does.

Here are four reasons providers should consider delaying making the jump to the cloud…

Grazed from VentureBeat.  Author: Garrett McCullum.

CloudBeat 2012 is right around the corner, and we’re confident it’s going to be the cloud event of the year. Here’s why:  It’s unlikely that any single player will dominate the cloud computing market in the foreseeable future. So more and more enterprise IT leaders are taking a pragmatic, creative approach and adopting a wide range of solutions.

CloudBeat is unlike other cloud events because it puts those customers (the companies that are adopting cloud solutions) front and center to share their experiences and insights on what’s working and what’s not…

Grazed from Investor’s Business Daily.  Author: Donna Howell.

Clouds will be the new norm, security firm Symantec (SYMC) says. They can make handling data easier and sometimes cheaper.  But given that safe use of cloud computing can be sometimes lacking, Symantec — the largest company in IBD’s Computer-Security industry group — this week fleshed out a strategy to develop more protections.

Using resources distributed across the Internet and different networks will become so prevalent that the term "cloud" may go away, predicts Dave Elliott, a senior marketing manager in Symantec’s cloud unit…

Grazed from The IT KnowledgeExchange. Author: Editorial Staff.

The latest prognostication about public cloud computing from IDC calls for a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 18.5 percent between now and 2016 – with$43.2 billion in revenue anticipated by the end of the forecast period. (That compares with $18.5 billion in 2011.)

This forecast doesn’t include private cloud infrastructure or hybrid cloud integration work; it only covers services that are “shared among unrelated enterprises and consumers, open for a largely unrestricted universe of potential users, and designed for a market, not a single enterprise.”…

Grazed from GCN. Author: Rutrell Yasin.

The Interior Department is working to give employees access to IT resources anywhere, anytime with any device enabled by cloud computing through DOI’s data center consolidation initiative. “I view cloud computing as helping us meet the needs of our dispersed workforce,” said Interior CIO Bernard Mazer.

With 2,400 locations, DOI is all over the place, Mazer noted. “We are there where [telecommunications] carriers are; we are there where carriers aren’t,” he said. As a result, DOI has to use a variety of tools to ensure that employees are supported no matter where they are located – in a refuge, a Bureau of Land Management office, a Bureau of Indian Affairs’ project or a national park in a remote hinterland. This support also includes access to the business applications associated with contract, financial and human resource management systems…

Grazed from Midsize Insider. Author: Doug Bonderud.

As cloud computing becomes a ubiquitous part of IT business life, administrator confidence grows–at least according to VMware. The virtualization giant’s third annual Cloud Index says that many Asia-Pacific IT pros now believe they "strongly understand the cloud." But despite increased use and comprehension, investor surety in the cloud isn’t keeping pace. Even companies with huge sales numbers are still unprofitable; is the market headed for a cloud tipping point? Does this get worse for midsize IT before it gets better?

Certain in Singapore

According to the VMware Cloud Index 2012, Singapore tops the list with 82 percent of respondents confident in their knowledge of the cloud. The study covered 10 economies in the Asia-Pacific region, with nine of those boasting numbers above 70 percent. Only Malaysia came in under that mark, but 66 percent is still a solid percentage given the immaturity displayed by many cloud services. Among the top drivers of cloud adoption in the region were optimizing IT and reducing costs; interestingly, cost also made it into the "top cloud concerns" along with data privacy and security. Singapore and Hong Kong especially expressed concerns about data privacy and residency, despite efforts by their governments to encourage local data centers over foreign owned interests…

Grazed from CloudTimes. Author: Florence de Borja.

In a conference in Orlando, Florida, Gartner Inc. revealed that the central focus of IT consisting of social media innovations, mobile devices, web information, and cloud computing can disrupt the whole IT environment. Addressing at least 10,000 participants, Gartner Vice President David Cearley said that at the rate things are going the mobile experience is overshadowing the desktop experience. Cloud computing, together with mobile devices, is set to alter the modern corporation’s primary architecture of computing. Instead of focusing on client-server, IT shops must now set their sights on cloud-client architecture.

With this new type of architecture, it is also possible for skill sets necessary for enterprise software development to be altered significantly. The front-end interface must have better designs and development teams must gear towards HTML5 Web browser opportunities aside from the usual mobile device operating systems. Cearley also claimed that consumers have fresh expectations. As such, application developers and architects must obtain new design skills to meet these new expectations…

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Diana Kelly.

On Sept. 27, 2012, the Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) and ISACA (formerly the Information Systems Audit and Control Association) released their Cloud Computing Market Maturity study. It offers an important review of the state of cloud computing services, and specifically how information security is affecting cloud computing adoption. Cloud services swept into markets a few years ago promising fast ramp-ups and low prices, but little in the way of security. This isn’t uncommon in the cloud industry: Despite security professionals’ pleas for organizations to build security in, it’s still a reality that excellent business benefits (for example, in the case of wireless networking) trump security — at least during the heady days of early roll-outs. With maturity comes security, but how mature is the cloud market? And what does that mean for those of us who have to manage our data in the cloud?

The joint CSA/ISACA survey addresses the maturity question. Though fairly small in sample size (a total of 252 responses) the distribution of the sample is impressive. The results include responses from managers and organizations from around the globe, and both large and small size organizations responded. One fact to note: 173 of respondents identified themselves "… as a cloud service provider, integrator or consultant …," indicating that the respondents were already at a fairly high level of maturity because of their involvement as providers of (or consultants on) cloud services…

Grazed from HPCWire. Author: Michael Feldman.

The epic supercomputing event of the year, SC12, will be booting up next week in Salt Lake City, Utah, attracting HPC digerati, vendors, press, and analysts from around the world. And even though the DOE won’t be there in full force this year, big crowds are still expected. This year’s event should deliver plenty of fodder for those looking to keep up on the latest and greatest in the field, especially in the cutting edge areas of accelerators, big data, cloud computing, exascale supercomputing, and green HPC.

In fact if you take a look the SC12 conference schedule, those five topics just mentioned dominate much of the technical program this year. Eye-balling the listed sessions, there are 48 on accelerators (GPUs, Xeon Phi, DSPs and FPGAs), 37 on big data, 32 on cloud computing, 20 on exascale, and 19 on green computing. Of course, there’s also the usual fare of presentations on interconnects, parallel programming, storage technology (although curiously, not much specifically on flash storage), software development tools, and various HPC use cases…