Grazed from PC Quest.  Author:  Sufyan bin Uzayr.

Of late, cloud computing has taken the IT world by a storm. More and more businesses are migrating to the cloud instead of local storage. Not only is cloud-based storage cheaper and requires lesser maintenance, it also fosters greater collaboration and data sharing capabilities.

Both Google and Amazon are now offering attractive cloud services for businesses and organizations. The service is extremely reliable; your data is stored across multiple servers and can be seamlessly shared among all your employees and clients.

At this junction, with cloud computing on the rise, questions are being raised about security issues. For a start, any data stored on an intranet/internet, no matter how big or small, can be subject to malicious hackers. However, generally speaking, cloud based storage has often been under the attack of tech critics claiming it to be an insecure medium for storage of data. Thus, while more and more organizations are shifting to cloud-based storage for managing their data, there are talks about Google suffering outages (see http://goo.gl/O7YxX) thereby proving the inability of the cloud to be a reliable medium for business usage…

Author: Hoofer.

"Have you mooed today?"   This easter egg is embedded in the "apt-get" command in Debian Linux derivatives, such as Ubuntu.  Just append the word "moo" to the apt-get command and viola – see Hoofer in all his glory!   Enjoy.

Grazed from FierceBioTech.  Author: Ryan McBride.

The FDA sits some of the largest datasets in the world on drugs and other regulated products, and the agency’s recently appointed IT chief plans to push for more of those data to become available to outsiders via open source projects. During an appearance in Boston this morning, Eric Perakslis, the FDA’s chief information officer, presented part of his vision for transforming IT that supports regulation of products that comprise more than a fifth of U.S. commerce.

Perakslis, a former IT leader for R&D at healthcare giant Johnson & Johnson ($JNJ), began work as the agency’s CIO and chief scientist of informatics about 6 months ago, becoming the fifth person in the post since 2008. In a report last month, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) harped on the fact that unstable leadership in IT at the FDA over the years has jeopardized efforts to modernize the agency’s information technology and an overhaul with a $280 million price tag…

Grazed from Sys Con Media.  Author: Maureen O’Gara.

In the name of its Hadoop-based Big Data platform, IBM is buying Carnegie Mellon spin-off and enterprise search house Vivisimo on undisclosed terms.

The Pittsburgh ISV, which has its own search and navigation system, is supposed to be good at "capturing and delivering quality information across the broadest range of data sources, no matter what format it is, or where it resides," providing a "single view across the enterprise." It’s all automated and can be used standalone or embedded.

Vivisimo saw all of $5.66 million in funding from 2000 through 2008 according to CrunchBase, including a $4 million A round led by North Atlantic Capital…

Grazed from Sys Con Media.  Author: Maureen O’Gara.

SingleHop, an IaaS and cloud computing concern started in 2006, has gotten its first institutional financing, a $27.5 million round led by Battery Ventures. American Chartered Bank also participated in the round.

Battery’s general partner Dave Tabors along with Morad Elhafed will be joining the SingleHop board.

CEO Zak Boca claims SingleHop’s "business is unique in the hosting industry because all of our services are provided through our proprietary and fully automated platform. This gives us great operational advantages, and with the growing demand for hybrid solutions, it also positions us very well to offer a unified experience to our clients."…

Grazed from MarketWatch.  Author: PR Announcement.

MeriTalk Cloud Computing Exchange (CCX) ( www.meritalk.com/ccx ), a community of Federal cloud leaders focused on public-private collaboration and best practice exchange, today announced findings from a new study, "Cloudy with a Chance of Savings." The study, which identifies where the Federal government stands on cloud today and what the future holds for cloud adoption, reveals that Federal agencies are saving approximately $5.5 billion with cloud implementations today. This number pales next to the $12 billion annual savings estimates from the Cloud Computing Exchange Calculator, based on budget data input by Feds from real Information Technology (IT) programs.

MeriTalk CCX announced these findings at the inaugural Cloud Computing Brainstorm today, co-hosted by Senators Carper (D-Del.) and Brown (R-Mass.). The program brought together Federal and state chief information officers (CIOs) with industry executives to discuss cloud computing best practices, lessons learned, progress against FedRAMP, and fundamentally, to accelerate the government’s path to cloud computing…

Author: Hoofer.

While grazing around in Ubuntu pastures, Hoofer found out that he has Super Powers…  This easter egg is embedded in the "apt-get" command.   Enjoy…

Grazed from BusinessWire.  Author: PR Announcement.

Courion Corporation, the leader in identity and access management (IAM) for access risk, today announced the results of a survey that confirmed cloud computing’s rapidly growing popularity and also uncovered concerns about protecting vital IT data and applications in the cloud.

Courion’s survey of more than 400 companies worldwide found that 64 percent are using cloud-based applications to achieve cost and efficiency advantages. That number shows a growing acceptance of cloud computing as more open enterprises deliver critical IT resources to a broad range of users through a variety of premise-based and mobile devices.

The survey revealed a big opportunity for IAM vendors offering alternatives to traditional implementation methods. More than 50 percent of respondents handle IAM manually and 70 percent identified benefits of IAM in the cloud would include: improved speed of business operations; usability; cost; and access risk management; thus indicating that companies that provide alternatives to overcome the long implementation cycles and high costs associated with traditional IAM deployments are positioned to make inroads into a growing market…

Grazed from Sys Con Media.  Author: James Carlini.

Every cloud computing platform that is being sold today will be obsolete prematurely unless they can retrofit them with a single-source timing device. If cloud computing is going to be as pervasive tomorrow as some sales executives have hyped them, the need for a more sophisticated platform has to be fulfilled today.

It’s not enough to tweak some components or put some functions like I/O on the chip. That will definitely help performance, but we are not looking at just shaving off some latency when it comes to financial and other mission-critical applications. Clocking needs to be totally synchronous and that means getting it from one source…

Grazed from MarketWire.  Author: PR Announcement.

The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux, today announced the creation of CloudOpen, a technical conference that will bring together in a vendor-neutral environment the open source projects, products and companies that are driving cloud and big data ecosystems.

The inaugural CloudOpen event will take place in parallel with LinuxCon North America on August 29-31, 2012 in San Diego, Calif. Designed for software developers and IT managers responsible for deploying and developing cloud solutions, CloudOpen will feature technical content that includes, but is not limited to Chef, Gluster, Hadoop, KVM, Linux, oVirt, Puppet, and Xen, as well as big data strategies and open cloud platforms and tools. This conference will also cover open source best practices and how they relate to topics such as company data and APIs…