Grazed from CloudTech. Author: Ed Jones.

Every business has that one legacy system they can’t seem to let go of. You know you’ve got one – a relic hidden away in some dusty server room. But are you aware of the damage these outdated systems can, will and may already be having on your organisation? The damage inflicted by legacy technology can range from minor systems issues through to major events that could put your organisation out of business – and it’s important to know the hidden dangers.

Increased downtime

Outdated software runs on outdated hardware, all of which eventually leads to ever increasing downtime and continued system failures. Running systems past their operational lifespan is a recipe for disaster. These systems will increasingly overheat, crash and eventually cease to operate…

Read more from the source @ http://www.cloudcomputing-news.net/news/2016/oct/10/hidden-dangers-legacy-technology-and-how-resolve-them/

Grazed from Thrillist. Author: Joe McGauley.

"Just save it to the cloud!" You’ve heard this, probably in the same sentence with some other obnoxious tech buzzwords. Run out of space on your iPhone? Buy some more space in the cloud! Your mom can’t figure out how to email you photos from her dog’s birthday party? Upload them to the cloud! But, do you actually understand what exactly the cloud is, or how it works? There’s no shame — it’s confusing as hell. To clear things up, here’s what you should know.

The cloud is not a physical object

First things first: you cannot reach out and touch "the cloud." That’s because it’s not a physical object in space, not some gigantic hard drive in the sky, but rather an enormous network of remote servers all around the world that we are all constantly saving and retrieving data to and from via our high-speed internet connections…

Grazed from ITechPost. Author: Victor Thomson.

At an event in Dublin, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella announced that the company’s Azure Cloud will become the first artificial intelligence supercomputer. Microsoft explained on the company’s website how its Azure cloud computing offering will bring a new wave of apps based on AI technologies. Artificial intelligence and machine learning are defining the next generation applications powered by the cloud. Following this emerging trend, Microsoft is building the first AI supercomputer on its Azure cloud platform.

According to ZDNet, in order to achieve this goal, Microsoft is going beyond the traditional CPU architecture, building cloud processing power based on GPUs. GPUs can be scaled so that banks of GPUs can process tasks in parallel, so they best fitted for dealing with high workloads. The traditional approach of using individual machines with ever faster CPUs is reaching its limits…

Grazed from SysCon. Author: Kevin Jackson.

Since May 2010, “Cloud Musings” has demonstrated, educated and celebrated the use of advanced technology in business. Specific subjects are sometimes varied, but cloud computing and cybersecurity seem to have become our sweet-spot. Over this period, information technology has transformed from a business support arm to being the core of just about every business model.

Business transformation is also accelerating as social media and big data analytics take their place in the mix. We are also very proud to have had the opportunity to partner with industry leading companies like Dell, IBM, NASDAQ and Intel. A shortcoming, however, has been our failure to directly address non-native English speakers. Today we will start to address that issue by launching “Cloud Musings en español”…

Grazed from CIO. Author: Divina Paredes.

Imagine you are in charge of running a large manufacturing plant – let’s say an electric car production facility. After you have placed a large order for solid state batteries, Werner, one of your trusted component suppliers walks your factory floor with you and stops in front of a raft of different CNC machines – some that cut or mould pieces; others assemble these and other parts together.

He points at them and says: "Recently we installed these super machines in our warehouses that can do pretty much anything and we have come up with a really exciting new business model. Would you be interested in hearing more about this?" Of course, any analogy goes only so far and comparing this setup to cloud computing is no different. But bear with me for a moment and ignore the logistics of raw materials and finished goods…

Grazed from FierceCMO. Author: Patrick Gorman.

Google has rebranded its cloud computing business as Google Cloud and renamed its Google Apps for Work offering in a move aimed at boosting its standing in the cloud business ecosystem. Google Cloud will include all Google Cloud Platform offerings, machine learning tools and APIs, enterprise Maps APIs, as well as Android phones, tablets and Chromebooks that access the cloud. Google Cloud will also include Google Apps for Work, which will now go by the name G Suite and includes Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Sheets, Google Docs, Google Hangouts, Google Slides, Google+ and Google Forms.

“Google Cloud is more than products – it is also how we work alongside companies in an engineering-centric way,” Google Cloud SVP Diane Greene wrote in a blog post announcing the rebrand. “Because digital transformation and moving to the cloud are technical processes, we have customer engineers, customer reliability engineers, site reliability engineers and product engineers supporting our customers as they migrate, deploy and evolve…

Grazed from MSPMentor. Author: Charles Cooper.

When Target suffered a massive data breach in late 2013, hackers gained access to the company’s network and filched valuable credit and debit card information belonging to millions of the retailer’s customers. Intruders had burrowed their way into the corporate network by compromising the security of a third-party vendor working with Target – in this case an HVAC refrigeration contractor called Fazio Mechanical Services, which monitored the chain’s climate systems.

The spectacular circumstances surrounding the breach attracted obvious notoriety. But the incident also stoked wider concern among cloud administrators about data security, especially pertaining to situations in which third parties also have access to corporate networks. To be sure, companies can always adopt tactical approaches tailored to their individual situations…

Grazed from Electronics360. Author: Tom Kevan.

Something about the Internet of Things (IoT) is not quite right. The dynamics between data sources, such as sensors and the cloud, fall short in critical applications. The result: big data may just as well be no data. Seeing the discrepancy between concept and reality, many technology visionaries and systems providers now advocate a topology called “fog computing” that creates a layer between the two poles of the network. This layer will aggregate compute, storage, control and network resources closer to the sources of data.

Proponents of fog computing do not see this distributed approach replacing the cloud, but complementing it instead. Fog computing promises to move data to the best place for processing and, in doing so, mitigate or eliminate shortcomings that prevent the IoT from delivering the benefits its creators have promised…

Read more from the source @ http://electronics360.globalspec.com/article/7437/moving-intelligence-to-the-edge

Grazed from QZ. Author: Koon Ian Wong.

When it rains, it pours. The cloud is growing over Europe, to the tune of billions of dollars in investment from the world’s biggest tech companies. Microsoft revealed it has spent $3 billion on data centers for its Azure cloud-computing platform in Europe to date. Its next stop is France, where it will join rival Amazon Web Services in building cloud facilities next year.

Apple is reportedly preparing to plough close to $1 billion into a new data facility in Denmark, which is also where Facebook is said to be planning its own major data processing center. The reason for this flurry in activity can be gleaned from Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella’s tour of Europe, where he took the opportunity to announce something else, too: a book published by the Redmond giant titled “A Cloud For Global Good,” which includes dozens of detailed policy recommendations, with a sharp focus on privacy…

Read more from the source @ http://qz.com/799750/microsoft-msft-azure-europes-in-the-middle-of-a-cloud-boom-thanks-to-data-privacy-rules/

Grazed from ITechPost. Author: Victor Thomson.

The Amazon could computing division Amazon Web Services has just announced a new Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instance type. Dubbed P2, this new Amazon cloud service is taking advantage of Nvidia high-performance GPUs in order to offer massive computing performance.

According to Hot Hardware, Nvidia GPUs help Amazon avoid the inherent limitation and bottlenecks of the current CPUs and architecture. By adding Nvidia GPUs in its cloud architecture, Amazon is able to enhance the performance of its cloud computing services. Jeff Barr, Amazon’s Chief Evangelist at Amazon Web Services, explains in a blog post on the AWS website that the GPU scales out instead of up…