Grazed from FierceHealth IT. Author: Susan D. Hall.

Johns Hopkins researchers are relying on cloud storage of thousands of cell samples to discern the most effective treatment for cancer patients. Supported by a five-year, $3.75 million grant from the National Cancer Institute, the project aims to help physicians better predict how cancer will behave, since it can spread rapidly in one patient and glacially in another.

The team of experts in cancer and engineering are creating a database of samples collected through a process called high-throughput cell phenotyping, according to an announcement. The data is stored on computers at the Los Alamos National Laboratory…

Grazed from BCS.org. Author: Editorial Staff.

Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) should not be put off from adopting cloud computing due to security worries as the majority of providers do all they can to keep client’s data safe, according to an industry expert.

Stuart Hibbert, managing director and co-founder of icomplete.com, a firm which offers internet telephony and online marketing services to SMEs, understood that many smaller organisations would be concerned about security but assured them that safeguards are in place to ensure data is adequately protected…

Grazed from NewScientist. Author: Jacob Aaron.

Most people are happy to give their neighbours a spare house key in case of emergencies, but you probably wouldn’t want to give them your digital passwords. Now security researchers have shown that you may not have a choice, at least when it comes to cloud computing.

Cloud servers let users run simulations of an ordinary computer, called virtual machines (VMs), on remote hardware. A VM performs exactly as an ordinary computer would, but because it is entirely software-based, many of them can run on a single hardware base. Yinqian Zhang of the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and colleagues have discovered that it is possible for one VM to steal cryptographic keys – used to keep your data secure – from another running on the same physical hardware, potentially putting cloud-computing users at risk…

Grazed from PRNewsWire. Author: PR Announcement.

To support the expanding role of the network in deploying cloud services, Dimension Data, the $5.8 billion global specialist IT solutions and services provider, today announced that it has achieved the Cisco Cloud Builder designation within the Cisco Cloud Partner Program¹. This designation recognizes Dimension Data’s competencies in selling and implementing Cisco end-to-end cloud solutions for end customers and cloud providers².

"As companies increasingly embrace cloud computing to enhance their business, we realize that planning, building and managing a cloud can be very complicated," said Jim Hirt, vice president of Enterprise Services, Dimension Data Americas. "Building upon our cloud services portfolio and global cloud platform, earning the Cisco Cloud Builder designation better positions us to help our clients with their journey to the cloud – including design, implementation, management and support."…

Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Barb Darrow.

 Netflix is putting Edda, aka Entrypoints, its tool for rapidly querying and reporting on Amazon Web Services resources, onto Github so other AWS customers can apply it to their own workloads, according to a company blog post.

Video streaming giant Netflix, which has become something of an Amazon Web Services whisperer, is open sourcing code for a dynamic querying tool that can help engineers “learn the stories” of their AWS cloud deployments, according to a Netflix blog post. The tool, called Edda (known internally as Entrypoints), can poll a company’s cloud resources using APIs and record the results…

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Mark Eisenberg.

What’s wrong with Windows Azure? In a word: marketing. From the beginning, Microsoft’s efforts to explain Windows Azure to the world fell under the assumption that potential customers understood cloud computing. After all, if they know what a nail is used for, then you only need to explain the features and benefits of a hammer.

First, consider how cloud computing looked three years ago. It was generally accepted that everyone had their own definition of cloud. When Windows Azure entered the market, vendors and customers were free to define the cloud to suit their needs or, more often, their desires. The architects of Windows Azure created a Platform as a Service (PaaS) implementation that closely matched NIST’s definition of cloud computing. Microsoft went with it — it didn’t have to create and defend its own definition; a generally respected standards organization had already done the legwork…

Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Barb Darrow.

With its OpenStack-based cloud coming online, Rackspace CEO Lanham Napier says the company can take on Amazon Web Services for the biggest of big accounts, provided those accounts want the sort of value-add service Rackspace provides.

OpenStack gives Rackspace the scale it needs to attack the biggest of big public and private cloud customers, according to CEO Lanham Napier. Now it just needs to snag a few of those customers…

Grazed from The Register. Author: Timothy Prickett Morgan.

The cloud computing wave and the goodwill and technical expertise that Rackspace Hosting has attained through its founding of the OpenStack cloud control freak, more than two years ago, are helping to puff up the company’s finances. Both revenues were up 27 percent and net income was up 36 per cent in the third quarter, to $336m and $27.2m, respectively.

If there is a jittery economy, Rackspace is benefitting from it. And perhaps, now that it has shifted its compute cloud to OpenStack and is now operating the largest public cloud based on that control freak in the world as well as helping to code it, it is also benefitting from some migrations off Amazon Web Services, which has had a number of challenges with outages this summer and fall…

Grazed from CloudTweaks. Author: Walter Bailey.

Superstorm Sandy has been the center of global news through October/November, 2012. It has caused massive damage to property, loss of income, and lives. In fact, the storm has become more relevant than this last weeks US presidential race. To businesses, the storm has elucidated another debate as far as sustainability in aftermath of the disasters.

How safe is our data? How important are data backups to business recovery? How will we bounce back after the storm? How sustainable is our cloud computing policy as far as disasters are concerned? These are some of the questions policy and decision makers in businesses are grappling with in the aftermath of the raging storm. According to experts, business and corporate leaders have to rethink how they treat disaster recovery in cloud computing terms. This article looks at the role of cloud computing in disaster recovery…

Grazed from ZDNet. Author: Jamie Yap.

Companies in Singapore are the most confident of their knowledge about cloud computing across the Asia-Pacific region, thanks to the strong push and lead by the government for enterprise cloud adoption and national efforts to attract service providers to make datacenter investments in the country. According to the VMware Cloud Index 2012 report, 82 percent of Singapore respondents said they believed they had a strong understanding of cloud computing, higher than the regional average of 75 percent, said Michael Barnes, vice president and research director of Forrester Research, which conducted the study.

Respondents who believe they strongly understand cloud
1. Singapore: 82%
2. Korea: 80%
3. India: 79%
4. Australia: 72%
5. Hong Kong: 74%
6. Taiwan: 72%
7. China: 72%
8. Thailand: 70%
9. Indonesia: 70%
10. Malaysia: 66%

Source: VMware Cloud Index 2012…