Cloud News, Resources and Information
Can cloud help predict the future? Okay, that’s a loaded question, but there are certainly voices out there making the case that cloud computing provides the processing and big data support needed for predictive analytics. Predictive analytics — matching current datasets against historical patterns to determine the probability of an event occurring in the future — requires a lot of compute power and draws on a lot of data. In other words, a perfect use case for cloud.
James Taylor, automated decision management proponent and author/co-author of two books on the topic, says cloud computing is elevating the art and science of predictive analytics to a whole new level. No longer do such efforts need to be be constrained by companies’ current server and storage capacity — with online, sharable resources, the sky’s the limit. Based on a survey Taylor conducted at the end of last year among 200 business intelligence professionals, 43% have already developed predictive analytics solutions within their companies,and 82% have predictive analytics in their plans going forward. “Separately, predictive analytics and cloud solutions are changing the way organizations do business,” he states. “Together, they open up a wealth of opportunities.”…
It must be getting competitive out there. Amazon Web Services has cut its support prices, expanded free support and added new support features like chat and proactive alerts.
Now all customers will automatically get free support and enterprise support will be based on usage rather than a flat fee, a potential cost saver.
Support levels have been renamed. Bronze, Silver, Gold and Platinum are now Basic, Developer, Business and Enterprise. All plans cover an unlimited number of cases and can be cancelled at any time. There are no long-term contracts. All plans are available worldwide…
Of all of the possible benefits of a private cloud infrastructure, one of the most valuable is flexibility. With a properly designed private cloud infrastructure, the data center environment can fluidly shift with the business. This allows new applications to be deployed to meet business demands as they’re identified, and legacy applications to be removed when the value is no longer recognized.
In order to have an environment capable of this rapid application deployment cycle, an infrastructure must be in place that can handle it. Hardware and software must be properly architected to provide both application and hardware scalability. This requires a rethinking of the design principles that have brought IT to where it is now…
Grazed from MarketWatch. Author: PR Announcement.
Active Power, manufacturer of continuous power and infrastructure solutions, will deploy its high efficiency CleanSource UPS (uninterruptible power supply) system at one of the largest collocation data center facilities in China later this year.
The new, state-of-the-art modular data center is owned by a Beijing based IT services provider and located in eastern China. The 1000 kVA UPS system shipped in May 2012 and will be installed later this year. Once deployed, the UPS will provide full power conditioning and protection to the facility’s mission critical server loads against all types of power disturbances…
Grazed from Sys Con Media. Author: Maureen O’Gara.
AMD, which has been suggestively flitting about ARM for months without committing, finally has – but not in the conventional way.
It’s going to license ARM’s one-core Cortex-A5 smartphone processor and develop an x86 security processor using the A5’s TrustZone technology, which cordons off secure zones where hackers can’t modify the software.
AMD said Wednesday that it will integrate that widgetry into some new APUs – AMD CPU chips with advanced graphics on the same die – using a system-on-a-chip (SoC) design. It expects to have those gismos on development platforms next year. Starting with chips for tablets and thin laptops, the portfolio will expand to all AMD’s chips in 2014 including, at some point, Opteron…
But Deutsche Bank (DB) and National Australia Bank are in the minority of banks actively strategizing about opportunities in the public cloud.
Though Deutsche Bank, of Frankfurt, said it began developing internal cloud computing capabilities in pieces starting about 2002, the external cloud represents its next frontier, and journeying there puts the bank face to face with the primary roadblocks all banks face when they think of moving computing beyond their own perimeters…
Western democracies, which are not typically associated with censorship, have demanded that Google take down certain political videos, blog posts, and other content, the company said Sunday.
The company as on previous occasions has been asked to take down political speech in many countries, Google said.
"It’s alarming not only because free expression is at risk, but because some of these requests come from countries you might not suspect — Western democracies not typically associated with censorship," said Dorothy Chou, Google’s senior policy analyst in a blog post…
Grazed from Backup Technology. Author: Editorial Staff.
Does your off-site data centre have to be within commuting distance? Perhaps not. Should it at least be in the same country? According to Megan Richards, a European Commission director and acting deputy director general of Information Society and Media, “it shouldn’t matter where data is held as long as our [EC] rules apply”.
Since 1995 there has been a directive, rather than a piece of legislature, for EU countries regarding off-site data storage. Currently, individual states can implement the directive as and how they wish, making off-shore data storage very risky for any company with sensitive data…
SUSE supports the notion that cloud computing and open source software are perfect companions for organizations that look to the use of cloud computing to lower their overall costs of IT infrastructure, offer freedom to deploy its workloads wherever appropriate, and avoid being locked into a single vendors hardware or software products.
Pete Chadwick and Doug Jarvis of SUSE stopped by quite a while ago to discuss cloud application stacks and why the company is so heavily involved with the OpenStack community. The story behind the story was that SUSE wanted to address the then-recent move by Citrix, another OpenStack member, to submit its own stack of technologies for a cloud computing environment…
The dangers of using consumer cloud storage systems became clearer earlier this month, when a hacker claimed that he accessed presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s Dropbox storage and email accounts using an easily cracked password.
The apparent hack of Romney’s accounts came on the heels of IBM’s rollout of a bring-your-own-device (BYOD) policy that bans the use of Dropbox due to concerns that hackers could easily access sensitive information stored there.
Such examples make it clear that it’s risky to keep corporate data on consumer-oriented cloud storage systems, say IT executives and analysts…