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…

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Caitlan White.

As talk of cloud computing makes its way from the CIO’s office to enterprise IT departments, companies want to ensure they have the right talent for the job — and employees need to ensure their skills remain relevant. Much debate has come up around cloud computing certification among IT professionals. And much fear has been stirring that cloud signals the end of the IT admin. Can a stamp of approval or a certificate for a cloud technology help job retention as IT departments evolve?

Rackspace Hosting Inc., announced Wednesday its open cloud training initiative, which aims to certify IT administrators on OpenStack software. Open source cloud computing has made waves in cloud-savvy enterprises, but with OpenStack still not in a large number of production environments, can this certification make a difference among IT job candidates?…

Grazed from Data Center Knowledge. Author: John Rath.

IBM unveiled several new technologies to help customers take advantage of cloud computing, and manage and analyze vast amounts of data. The new offerings include the most powerful enterprise Power Systems to date, a new high-end disk storage system and key software updates for IBM’s newest mainframe computer.

Power Systems

As a result of a $1.4 billion research and development investment IBM announced its enterprise Power System, with Power 770 and Power 780 Servers featuring the new POWER7+ microprocessor. The POWER7+ offers an expanded 2.5x L3 cache memory, greater security with faster file encryption for the IBM AIX operating system, and memory compression that results in no increased energy usage over previous generation POWER7 chips. The Power 795 addresses demanding applications, such as business analytics, fast by utilizing up to 16 terabytes of memory with new 64GB Dual In Line Memory Modules (DIMM)…

Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Barb Darrow.

Continuous integration (CI) tools are becoming a bigger deal in the software development world. That’s why Google is helping App Engine developers use Cloudbees’ Jenkins-in-the-cloud tool. Google is promoting the use of the Jenkins continuous integration server with its Google AppEngine (GAE) platform.

Continuous integration of changes to software code becomes more critical as dev teams get bigger and more dispersed. Jenkins is an open-source tool that pulls in all those changes, centralizes them, and goes through changes continuously to verify code quality. The goal is to make both the development and quality assurance (QA) of code faster and more efficient — with fewer round trips. Towards that end, Google is pointing GAE developers to Cloudbee’s Jenkins implementation. (Cloudbees offers a Java-specific Platform as a Service (PaaS).)…

Grazed from UCS. Author: Editorial Staff.

As vendors compete for enterprise IT workloads, once-dwindling cloud computing prices are now beginning to streamline. Windows Azure cloud services of Microsoft is the latest vendor to update its pricing program, now allowing users to make a monthly commitment to receive large discounts regardless of what services they use.

It was reported in June of this year that Microsoft is watching the Windows developer community migrate to the cloud, but not however, to its very own Azure cloud. It is evident that Microsoft is continuing to seek out entry-level customers and developers, and streamlining its cloud pricing is one way of attracting these new users. Most cloud services are priced on services used, such as storage, RAM and CPU, but Microsoft Azure provides a price dependent on monthly commitment and the amount of money the user agrees to spend…

Grazed from ComputerWeek. Author: K.S.Abhiraj.

Speaking of current cloud security landscape, while security and privacy concerns gets ameliorated the way cloud gets procured yet, major concerns are amplified by re-permeterization and control over organizational assets and the potential for mismanagement of those assets. Transitioning towards public cloud involves a crisp transfer of responsibility and accountability to cloud provider over information, as well as core systems whereas the core pain area seen in today’s date in private cloud environment is the way Cloud gets procured in sync without proper security equation with an unknown security denominator.

Despite the inherent loss of control, the cloud service subscriber still requires to take the responsibility for their methodology on how to align the business operations vertically with the cloud providers architecture and near-to-perfect stratagem on how to procure and integrate with the provider, thus to avoid any security fluctuations which can exhibit an opportunity for external players to penetrate…