Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Roger Jennings.

Microsoft added another arrow to its cloud computing quiver last month with the announcement of the technical preview of Windows Azure Services for Windows Server. The move enables cloud hosting service providers to offer customers subscriptions to multi-tenant Windows Azure VMs and high-density websites with SQL Server or MySQL databases from a private cloud. Whether enterprise IT can pass down this or similar self-service provisioning features to end users is the question.

The Windows Azure Services for Windows Server (WAS4WS) technical preview (TP) for Hosting Service Providers (HSP) provides only Windows Azure Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) core services for a private cloud — stateful virtual machines (VMs) and websites with persistent storage and optional SQL Server or MySQL back ends…

Grazed from American Banker. Author: Editorial Staff.

Federal agencies are starting to catch up to the risks posed by cloud computing. This is sure to stimulate compliance IT projects at financial institutions. A premium will be placed on data that’s in flight, or traveling the vulnerable path between banks and third parties.

CipherCloud , whose clients include two of the five largest U.S. banks, late this week debuted a new product called CipherCloud Connect AnyApp. The product is designed to encrypt data in transit, in use or at rest for public and private cloud applications — including infrastructure-as-as-service (IaaS), software-as-a-service (SaaS) and platform-as-a-service (PaaS). IaaS refers to the outsourcing of equipment used to support operations, such as storage and servers. PaaS refers to the leasing of operating systems, storage and network capacity over the internet. SaaS is a software distribution method in which hosted applications are delivered to firms over the web. Each of these methods involves some form of data transfer to a host, which places it under FFIEC’s guidance…

Grazed from Business2Community. Author: Adam Greene.

In the world of enterprise IT, cloud computing is on everybody’s mind. Remote data hosting is helping many organizations streamline daily processes and lesson the burden of IT infrastructure maintenance. The cloud makes our information less expensive, more secure (usually), and more accessible. We hold these truths to be self-evident.

But can cloud computing solve all of our enterprise challenges? The answer, of course, is no. While the arrival of the cloud will help organizations remain competitive over the long term, there are several business challenges that, as much as we’d like to solve them, the cloud is unable to ameliorate on its own. Here are five of them:…

Demystifying the Virtual Black Hole: Effective Access, Management and Monitoring of the New Network

Grazed from Midsize Insider. Author: Prince B Alo.

Despite the growing success of cloud computing and big data service, they are relatively new factors in the enterprise technology market and thus come with their share of unfolding concerns. For businesses, security and privacy-protection concerns could be as big as return on investments and other cost-related factors.

The Cloud Security Alliance (CSA), a nonprofit partnership of about 100 major tech companies (including Google, Adobe, AT&T, and Fujitsu) appears to be the most active organization working to address these concerns. CSA’s latest cloud focus comes with the launching of its Big Data Working Group (BDWG), led by communications and IT specialist firm Fujitsu Laboratories of America…

Grazed from Computing. Author: Editorial Staff.

If cloud computing manages to evolve to where it should do, the end result for organisations is a mixed environment of internal and external IT platforms that stretch beyond their direct control into the value chain of suppliers and customers, and beyond to others providing services along a complex business-to-business (B2B) chain.

Historically, organisations have been able to exert a level of control through ownership of the IT stack from hardware through operating systems to applications, and have been able to ring-fence their systems through identifying where the responsibilities of their organisation ended, generally at a point defined by the use of a firewall…

Grazed from BioIT World. Author: Kevin Davies.

A variety of cloud computing and supercomputing resources and applications shone brightly at the Bio-IT World Cloud Summit* in San Francisco this week. Miron Livny (University of Wisconsin) opened the three-day conference discussing the Open Science Grid (OSG), which played a critical role in providing the compute power for the provisionally successful search for the Higgs boson earlier this year.

The OSG logged some 712 million CPU hours last year, almost 2 million CPU hours/day, on 1 Petabyte (PB) data. Other applications include analysis of structural variants on a genome-wide scale, and modeling the 3D conformation of DNA…

Grazed from Business2Community. Author: Carlo Pandian.

Working from home will introduce you to multiple problems that you will need to overcome. Over the past two years I have slowly developed my own company working my way up to a part time blogger to a full time copywriter working full time week to week. During those two years, I have had to learn multiple new skills in a variety of areas and not just relating to the services I provide. When you run your own business you will need to learn about marketing, accounting, advertising, communicating and your IT skills will develop hugely over time.

One of the problems I had that really had an effect on me was when my hard drive became corrupted. I had failed to back up my laptop over a six month period (I know, silly me), and I lost many important files, a lot of work and all sorts of bits and bobs ranging from Photoshop files, bookmarked links and my accounts. A complete and utter disaster. Since then I have looked into ways to protect myself and my data and I don’t only rely on back ups which I now do religiously one a week. Cloud computing may have scared me at first but now I see the benefits…

Grazed from Network World. Author: Jim Morin.

Back in 1998 when Google Search started to replace AltaVista, could you imagine the company would be laying fiber in Kansas City in 2012 to offer a 100 times faster Internet service? Or that the New York Stock Exchange would evolve from a trading floor in its 1903 building on Broad Street, to offering virtual and physical colocated computing infrastructure services in its New Jersey data center?

The explosion of these new cloud services is being delivered through a mix of providers — let’s call them "New Service Providers" — emerging from the ranks of established telecommunications companies, data center infrastructure providers and unexpected players like Google, Amazon and the NYSE. Business giants HP, Oracle and IBM are also making moves to migrate into cloud services by building on the full suite of technologies they have amassed over the decades…