Grazed from FierceFinanceIT. AuthorL Jim Kim.

Back in July, the Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council (FFIEC) released a document to guide financial institutions in the tricky area of cloud-based solutions deployment. The guidance was topical obviously, as more banks are embracing cloud solutions at all levels. The economics increasingly make sense. The document laid out some guidance in the following areas: Due diligence, vendor management, information security, audits, legal and regulatory compliance, and business continuity planning.

Since the guidance was released, the idea that banks need even more guidance has become vogue, as some suggested that the released guidance was lacking a bit. Bank Technology News weighs in on this issue with a look at critical areas of cloud compliance. One expert was quoted said that the criticisms of the FFIEC reflect the view that the FFIEC guidance is "high level" and treats cloud computing like another kind of outsourcing…

Grazed from Bloomberg. Author: Aaron Ricadela.

Hewlett-Packard Co. (HPQ) Chief Executive Officer Meg Whitman is betting that refining the company’s existing strategy, rather than making radical shifts, will help reverse the fortunes of the struggling computer maker.

Whitman, a year into the CEO job, plans to sharpen the company’s focus on corporate clients with a new product lineup that includes software and tablets for businesses and a machine that combines storage, computing and networking, according to people familiar with the matter. She’ll explain her approach to analysts Oct. 3 in San Francisco, said the people, who requested anonymity because the plans are private…

Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Barb Darrow.

Oracle’s still fighting to recover, recoup and profit from its $7.4 billion buyout of Sun Microsystems three years ago. In its first quarter, Oracle’s overall hardware business was off 24 percent year over year despite “triple-digit growth” in engineered systems like Exadata.

Oracle’s plan to wring software-like profit from its hardware business still hasn’t panned out nearly three years after it bought Sun Microsystems’ server-and-storage business for $7.4 billion. And that’s got to bug CEO Larry Ellison who is a bear on execution and profitability…

Grazed from ExtremeTech. Author:  Joel Hruska.

In our first story, we discussed backup philosophy, common misconceptions of what constituted a backup, and the criteria we’d use for developing a comprehensive backup policy. This article focuses on online/cloud backup services and compares three of the top solutions on the market today — Backblaze, Mozy and Carbonite.

The explosion in “cloud computing” as a moniker has made it difficult to distinguish the difference between various types of services. We suggest three basic categories: File lockers, online backup services, and online archives. Archiving services are beyond the scope of this series and are currently marketed towards businesses, not consumers. Amazon Glacier attracted a great deal of attention when it launched a few weeks back, but it’s not intended for just anyone to use. There’s no management console of any kind, and data transfers are handled via Java or .NET scripts. This article uses the phrase “online backup service” and “cloud backup service” interchangeably…

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: Stephen Lawson.

Instagram can drive data to its computing systems on Amazon.com’s EC2 service 20 times as fast with solid-state drives, a co-founder of the photo-sharing service said on Thursday at the GigaOm Mobilize conference in San Francisco.

Rather than access data from networked hard disk drives, Instagram’s server instances on EC2 can use directly connected solid-state disks, said Mike Krieger, a co-founder of the company that Facebook agreed to acquire in April for about $1 billion. Instagram got trial access to solid-state drives on the EC2 cloud-computing platform before that option became generally available, one of the perks of being a large customer, Krieger said…

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Christina Torode.

I know what I’m about to propose goes against the mass appeal of the cloud computing model — low cost, on-demand standard configurations that meet the needs of a broad customer base. Customization does not, for the most part, enter into the equation, but there is an argument for a customization of sorts in the cloud.
Christina TorodeChristina Torode

Data security, including regulatory compliance, is a big factor in keeping enterprise companies out of the public cloud. But some cloud service providers are starting to see the value in catering to industry-specific data security needs. This past May, for example, Microsoft introduced Office 365 for Government, which segregates government agency customer data in a multi-tenancy public cloud. Microsoft also has Office 365 ITAR, a caged data center environment that supports FISMA (Federal Information Security Management Act)and ITAR (International Traffic in Arms Regulations) requirements. The Federal Aviation Administration marked its entrance into the public cloud with plans to give 80,000 employees access to Office 365 productivity tools…

Grazed from CloudTweaks. Author: John Roseblum.

Cloud Computing offers a large number of benefits which make an enterprise switch over to the cloud. From startups to medium and large enterprises all are keen to adopt it mainly due to the cost saving in cloud computing. However it is very important to realize that like any other new technologies there are some risks of failure. Some of the likely reasons for the failure of cloud computing projects are mentioned below.

1. Lack of managing and monitoring applications

It is a common belief that developers can start coding immediately after switching to the cloud. They no longer need to worry about the development environment. This is true to some extent but they still need to manage and monitor their application to avert failure. Lack of monitoring and managing of the application may lead to high cost of operation and eventually project failure…