Grazed from Forbes. Author: Matt Bulter.

Incredibly, only 16% of people can explain what cloud computing is, a recent survey said. Most believed it was about drugs, pillows, the weather, or toilet paper. (No, I’m not making this up.) But just because people don’t understand the cloud, it doesn’t mean they aren’t using it. The fact is that many use cloud computing without knowing.

In other words, that lack of knowledge isn’t as big a problem as it might seem. Of the more than 1,000 Americans surveyed, more than half initially reported that they’d never used it. However, further questioning revealed that 95% of those surveyed do actually use popular cloud services like Gmail, iTunes, or Amazon…

Grazed from iHealthBeat. Author: Editorial Staff.

Researchers are beginning to leverage cloud computing to advance health care research, NPR’s "All Tech Considered" reports. Through cloud computing, analyzing data that used to take years and tens of millions of dollars now can be done much faster and for less money. Organizations can rent massive computer resources on an hourly basis at a relatively low cost.

Using the Cloud for Patient Data Analysis

Michael Cunningham — medical director of Seattle Children’s Hospital’s Craniofacial Center — treats young patients whose skulls have fused prematurely. He said that researchers have been able to identify such patients whose cells looked similar by using cloud computing to analyze vast amounts of data…

Grazed from Reuters. Author: Noel Randewich.

Speaking at Oracle’s annual investor day on Thursday, Catz said Oracle is now a one-stop shop for companies moving to cloud computing, while rivals like Amazon.com and Salesforce.com each offer some but not all of the necessary components. Echoing comments by Oracle co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Larry Ellison to CNBC television earlier this week, Catz said Oracle has no need for any big acquisitions, but left the door open.

"You know us, I’m a personal shopper for our CEO. When we find something that’s really compelling that we think we can make a lot of money for all of you with, we’re going to buy it," she said. "We don’t feel pressed to buy anything. We’ve got all the most incredible parts right now," she added…

Grazed from InfoQ.com.  Author: Abel Avram.

Zenoss has conducted a survey among IT operations specialists in order to evaluate virtualization, open source cloud and PaaS adoption. This article contains a digest of the survey results.

With The State of the Open Source Cloud 2012 survey, Zenoss has tried to evaluate data center virtualization and cloud computing usage. One of the main questions was related to the virtualization technology used, VMware taking the first spot with 74% followed by Linux KVM – 23.3%, and Microsoft Hyper-V with 19.6%. Several respondents noted that they were using multiple virtualization technologies, while 5.9% did not use any such technology. The graphic below shows all the responses to the virtualization question:..

Grazed from Cadalyst. Author: Carles Marti and Rick Rundell.

Two industry insiders provide perspectives about hardware and software solutions that are changing the way professionals work. Cloud technologies are increasingly prevalent these days: There are web-supported calendars, cloud-based phone systems, and CAD software programs hosted in the cloud. You even can print projects from cloud servers.

That said, what is the impact of cloud computing on the AEC field? Rick Rundell, Autodesk’s senior director for project, data, and collaboration services, joined Carles Marti, marketing project manager for Designjet web services at HP, to address that question. Their consensus is that AEC companies that want to stay competitive should consider the cloud as a way to help their employees be productive outside the office…

Grazed from Forbes. Author: Bob Evans.

As cloud computing’s enormous business value is convincing a rapidly growing number of CEOs and CIOs to join the cloud revolution, it’s not surprising to see IT vendors of every stripe attempt to position themselves as the industry leader. And hey, why not? It’s a market filled with massive opportunities for customers eager to begin bending their IT spending curves toward away from infrastructure-sprawl and toward innovation, and for tech vendors looking to satisfy that surging demand.

Business executives are viewing the cloud as a way to begin shifting the IT-budget spending ratio away from 80% on infrastructure and 20% on innovation to something much closer to 50-50, which would liberate desperately needed capital to fund market-facing growth initiatives. (For more on that incredibly important topic, please check out our recent post called The Top 10 Strategic CIO Issues for 2013.)…

Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Barb Darrow.

Sift Science says it can help you finger people on your website who are likely to create fraudulent accounts, post fake reviews or do other dastardly deeds. The startup’s service, now in private beta, uses machine learning to help ID the bad guys.

The problem of online fraud, fake reviews and sock puppetry is only going to get worse, according to recent research. But there are ways to identify likely perpetrators and that’s what Sift Science aims to do. The 8-person San Francisco startup uses machine learning to analyze user interaction with web sites and create a digital profile of who will likely perpetrate online fraud, said company co-founder Brandon Ballinger, an ex-Google software engineer…

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Jessica Scarpati.

Are customers scared of cloud security breaches? Absolutely. Are they uncomfortable with their lack of control over cloud providers’ infrastructure? You bet. But do businesses see these two issues as their biggest problems with cloud computing? Not exactly, according to a new TechTarget survey.

More enterprises and small to medium-sized businesses (SMBs) say they are delaying public cloud adoption because they’ve sunk too much money into legacy IT, according to TechTarget’s recent Cloud Pulse survey, which polled 1,497 IT professionals about their use of and attitudes toward cloud services…

Grazed from ComputerWorld. Author: Joab Jackson.

Further emphasizing Larry Ellison’s fresh enthusiasm for cloud computing, Oracle has updated its Solaris Unix operating system with a number of new capabilities to give it greater cloud capabilities, including a new distributed storage file system and SDN (software defined networking) features.

Solaris 11.1, the first update in almost a year, includes over 300 new features and performance improvements. Oracle announced the new edition at its Oracle OpenWorld conference, being held this week in San Francisco…

Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Barb Darrow.

 vCider’s virtual networking smarts will help Cisco build distributed cloud infrastructure that ties into its own Open Networking Environment. The move is seen as a counter to VMware’s acquisition of Nicira.

Cisco is buying vCider, a specialist in virtual network overlay technology (and a former GigaOM Structure LaunchPad finalist). The move is a response to VMware’s acquisition of Nicira and its software-defined networking technology in July which has strained the once close partnership between Cisco and VMware…