With more and more companies migrating to the cloud, it’s time to talk about the risks of doing this. Before you start to panic, just stop and listen for a minute. Cloud computing is still infinitely safer than what you were doing before, there is no doubt about that, however as with airplanes being the safest way to travel, they still occasionally encounter problems and have to land on the Hudson River.

I just want to make everyone aware of the potential risks so that they know how to combat them, because knowledge is the best defence and any reputable hosting company like Umbee Cloud Hosting will be able to combat and neutralise any threat better than Rambo and a horde of angry locals, anyway…

Grazed from Benzinga. Author: Editorial Staff.

The volume of information about cloud computing can be overwhelming for small and mid-size enterprises as owners, executives, and IT professionals look for the best solutions. To ease their burden, Cumulus Global launched a new online resource center to help SMEs learn and make better decisions.

"Much of the discussion about cloud computing focuses on the infrastructure and platform services used by larger enterprises," notes Cumulus Global CEO Allen Falcon. "Our Resource Center focuses on information most useful for small and mid-size businesses, nonprofits, and government entities."…

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: David Linthicum.

Do you have a cloud push underway? "Cloud push" is the term I use to describe enterprises that are quickly migrating to the cloud around an urgent need. Organizations engaged in a cloud push are moving hundreds of workloads to the cloud ASAP, not a few dozen over several years. Examples of cloud pushes include:

* Because you’re selling your datacenters, you need to get to the public cloud as fast as possible.
* Your current systems aren’t secure enough, so you’re moving to the cloud to fix your security at the same time.
* IT costs too much, and your investors are not happy. The choices are a new IT staff or a move to the cloud. You chose the cloud.

You can easily create a business case for moving workloads to the cloud. The board, the CEO, and the CIO all get the value. The challenge is to figure out the right pace…

Read more from the source @ http://www.infoworld.com/article/3110457/cloud-computing/what-goldilocks-can-teach-us-about-cloud-migration.html

Grazed from CCI. Author: Editorial Staff.

Stop me if this sounds familiar: the future of enterprise infrastructure is hybrid IT. While you may also be waiting for me to tell you that water is wet and the sun is hot, the obviousness of the above statement leads to a question:
why, if hybrid IT is so clearly the future, do so many IT pros lack the requisite skills to successfully drive its migration forward?

In a recent study on the evolution of hybrid IT, it was found that only 28 percent of IT pros are certain that their IT organisations currently have adequate resources to manage a hybrid IT environment, and just 48 percent feel they have the level of support from leadership and their companies to develop the skills needed to better manage hybrid IT environments…

Grazed from RTInsights. Author: Carlos Aragon.

As with many things in life, the key is finding the balance. Fog computing aims to resolve some of the challenges of cloud computing by reducing latency, optimizing WAN bandwidth consumption, strengthening security, and improving redundancy and availability. That being said, it isn’t a panacea—there are many scenarios where cloud computing remains the better solution and both cloud and fog architectures are needed to deliver the best solution.

Just as not all clouds are made equal, not all fogs are made equal. Abuse of the term “cloud” has led people to believe that there is only one cloud, when in reality there is a myriad of clouds, one per application, because the cloud is not only defined by the server or networking technologies, but also by the interfaces and APIs used by the applications…

Read more from the source @ https://www.rtinsights.com/fog-vs-cloud-computing-architectures/

Grazed from CIOReview. Author: Don Boulia.

Today when organizations discuss infrastructure strategies, invariably, the cloud becomes the topic of conversation. After a relatively slow ramp in the enterprise, cloud is now core to IT strategies, helping many organizations lower costs, improve scalability and resiliency, and foster greater business agility. According to a new report by KPMG Institute, 39 percent of IT leaders and CIO’s surveyed for the Harvey Nash/KPMG CIO Survey 2016, plan to invest in Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) services over the next three years, up from 25 percent just last year.

And the 2015 IDG Enterprise Cloud Computing Study, estimates that 25 percent of total IT budgets will be allocated to cloud computing this year. For many it is no longer a question of if, or even when to adopt the cloud, but rather, what type of cloud infrastructure to consider–private, public, hybrid, or all of the above…

Grazed from Computing. Author: Graeme Burton.

ARM has revealed more details about the Scalable Vector Extensions (SVE) technology it is developing for the ARMv8-A architecture that Fujitsu is planning to deploy in the Post-K supercomputer it is building for Japan’s RIKEN Advanced Institute for Computational Science. Detailed at the Hot Chips conference in Cupertino, California today, SVE is capable of handling vectors from 128 to 2,048 bits in length, and is intended for supercomputer makers like Fujitsu to help them adopt ARM products and deploy them in the world’s biggest and most powerful computers.

SVE is a flexible extension to the ARM instruction set that can shift vector calculations from software into hardware, with the scheduler arranging calculations depending on the hardware available. ARM engineers will, shortly, submit patches to the Gnu Compiler Collection (GCC) and LLVM compiler infrastructure project to support SVE auto-vectorisation…

Grazed from TechWeek Europe. Author: Ben Sullivan.

No shift to the cloud comes without a conversation about security, and for attendees of the annual Black Hat security conference, one of the main issues about moving companies to cloud computing is seen to be the increase of the attackable surface area. Almost all of the respondents to a survey conducted by CloudPassage at the conference noted that when moving from traditional data centres to a cloud infrastructure environment, they increased the number of server workloads by a factor of two to 100 times.

‘Attackable surface area’

This, in turn, greatly increases their attackable surface area, and enterprises are worried. In fact, over three quarters of respondents said that security team hiring in the enterprise has not kept pace with this rate at which new server workloads are created, changed or retired in the cloud…

Grazed from TechCrunch. Author: Ron Miller.

Cray has always been associated with speed and power and its latest computing beast called the Cray Urika-GX system has been designed specifically for big data workloads. What’s more, it runs on OpenStack, the open source cloud platform and supports open source big data processing tools like Hadoop and Spark.

Cray recognizes that the computing world had evolved since Seymour Cray launched the company back in the early 1970s. While the computers they are creating remain technology performance powerhouses, they are competing in an entirely different landscape that includes cloud computing where companies can get as many computing resources as they need and pay by the sip (or the gulp in the case of Cray-style processing)…

“As business-critical enterprise workloads move from DevOps into production-ready clouds in OpenStack, the requirements change slightly,” said David Safaii, CEO, Trilio Data. “We’ve partnered with ZeroStack to help deliver enterprise-ready solutions for long-term success not just in accelerating, accepting and growing OpenStack clouds, but maintaining and assuring the application and data integrity customers deserve.”