Grazed from AFR. Author: Paul Smith.

Australian businesses have been warned they need to spread the risk in their cloud computing operations across different regions after the Sydney storms on Sunday knocked out the operations of numerous Amazon Web Services customers. The ferocious storms that hit NSW, left AWS clients including Domino’s Pizza, Foxtel, The Iconic, Stan and Domain without websites or key systems for hours.

It served as a warning that sending systems to the cloud, rather than hosting them on-premise did not remove the risk of costly failures. The failure represents a major embarrassment for the company, which generated $US2.57 billion revenue in the latest quarter, based largely on the fact that it is perceived as being hugely reliable…

Grazed from ARNNet. Author: Moheb Moses.

There’s a belief that sales people are coin-operated (i.e. they work purely on extrinsic rewards like their pay packet). While this may be true for some, my experience is that the best sales people are driven by intrinsic goals and rewards (achieving results, recognition, helping customers) with an understanding that the money will follow.

Good compensation plans reward success while enabling companies to weed out non-performers. But, equally, they should reward sales people for doing the right thing. There are countless stories of compensation plans that had unintended consequences from innovative sales teams finding shortcuts…

Grazed from Zacks. Author: Editorial Staff.

Shares of Oracle Corporation fell 3.97% in yesterday’s trading session, after the company was named in a lawsuit by a former employee. On Wednesday, Oracle’s former senior Finance Manager, Svetlana Blackburn filed a lawsuit against the company. Blackburn alleged that the company had terminated her service when she resisted some manipulative accounting practices in Oracle’s cloud-computing business.

Oracle in its defense stated that “We are confident that all our cloud accounting is proper and correct. This former employee worked at Oracle for less than a year and did not work in the accounting group. She was terminated for poor performance.” However, Blackburn, a certified financial analyst, claimed that she had received a positive performance review just a couple of months before she was fired in Oct 2015…

Grazed from Barrons. Author: Tierman Ray.

Shares of Oracle are down $1.57, or 4%, at $38.69, following reports late Wednesday that the company is being sued by a former accountant who claims the company tried to falsify its revenue from cloud computing. Reuters’s Jonathan Stempel, Yasmeen Abutaleb, and Sarah McBride report that a former senior Oracle accountant, Svetlana Blackburn, has filed a complain in U.S. District Court in San Francisco, the former executive, claiming she was fired on October 15th of last year after she took exception with the company’s request that she “make Oracle Cloud Services’ results look better” by “adding millions of dollars of accruals for expected business ‘with no concrete or foreseeable billing to support the numbers’,” adding that executives above her added accruals on their own." Oracle released a statement following the article, attributed to Oracle communications director Deborah Hellinger, stating it will sue her:

We are confident that all our cloud accounting is proper and correct. This former employee worked at Oracle for less than a year and did not work in the accounting group. She was terminated for poor performance and we intend to sue her for malicious prosecution. In a note to clients today, Citigroup’s Walter Pritchard, who has a Neutral rating on Oracle, writes that looking at the complaint, it will keep alive some concerns about the opaque nature of Oracle’s cloud results:..

Read more fromt the source @ http://blogs.barrons.com/techtraderdaily/2016/06/02/oracle-whistle-blower-complaint-highlights-opaque-cloud-bookings-says-citi/

Grazed from CloudTech. Author: Thomas Rectenwald.

Infrastructure as code has defined the last five years of systems engineering, and will likely define the next five. But as we became better and better at manipulating infrastructure with declarative languages, we started to look beyond JSON to find more full-fledged, dynamic programming languages to create and configure cloud resources. In many ways, this movement is mimicking the evolution of web development as web ‘sites’ became web ‘applications’; in a few years, systems engineers will be coding infrastructure applications, not hard-coding declarative templates.

What is CloudFormation?

Amazon Web Services’ infrastructure as code (IaC) offering, CloudFormation, enables engineers to manage infrastructure through the use of declarative templates, utilising the data format language, JSON. The value of this approach is tremendous. Templates can be checked into a source code management system, linted and validated using tools and IDEs…

Grazed from ZDNet. Author: Tina Amirtha.

Phone companies around the world are working to protect their customers’ data from a threat does not yet exist: large quantum computers. Although the arrival of these advanced machines could be as far off as 15 years, telecoms companies are already implementing new quantum encryption algorithms.

These firms are preparing for the possibility that quantum computers will one day scale sufficiently to break through even the most sophisticated of today’s encryption barriers. The most common quantum encryption method utilizes a technology called quantum key distribution, which can be implemented on existing fiber-optic connections…

Grazed from FedScoop. Author: Wyatt Kash.

Three out of four government IT professionals in a new poll say their agencies are now using cloud computing services. The new survey also found that a significant portion of the respondents have favorable perceptions about the cost, security and ease of deploying the popular open source software platform, OpenStack, for their on-premises cloud computing initiatives.

The findings indicate that open source technology, like OpenStack, is coming into wider use within government agencies, with about one-fourth of government respondents reporting that their agencies currently use open source technology for their on-premises cloud services. The technology manages large clusters of compute, storage, and networking resources throughout a datacenter as an alternative to using proprietary cloud software…

Grazed from Forbes. Author: Alex Konrad.

As Salesforce continues to branch out into new types of cloud computing customers, it’s willing to pay steep prices to buy what it can’t build. The latest proof is Salesforce’s announcement on Wednesday that it’s agreed to acquire Demandware, a digital commerce company that had gone public in 2012, for $2.8 billion.

Shares in Demandware had closed trading on Tuesday at $48, meaning Salesforce agreed to pay a 56% premium, or about $1 billion, to snag the company that includes Design WIthin Reach, L’Oreal and Marks & Spencer as customers. The acquisition will create a new product line for Salesforce’s cloud software called the Commerce Cloud…

Grazed from BusinessWorld. Author: Editorial Staff.

Although the idea of storing information in the cloud is far from new, many people still wonder about the wisdom of storing corporate data on something so ethereal. Ironically, many business people have a strong opinion about the dangers of using the cloud that is not based on fact or personal experience. In truth, using the cloud can free up your business from many of the limitations associated with on-premise infrastructures. Here are five things you should know about storing information on the cloud to give you a balanced perspective on cloud computing.

1. Cloud security

While a provider might provide cloud security measures like anti-malware, intrusion prevention, a host firewall, integrity monitoring, and log inspection, you still have to do your part to ensure that your data is secure. Unfortunately, many Don’t know what to make of technology and are often unaware that security measures require user participation. It’s up to you to define the level of privacy you consider important and you do have to follow through on security measures like using the two-step verification method that involves sending an SMS code to your mobile phone…

Grazed from eWeek. Author: Pedro Hernandez.

Microsoft is on the lookout for early-stage startups whose technologies complement its own cloud-first ambitions. The Redmond, Wash., technology giant on May 30 announced the formation of Microsoft Ventures, a formalized venture fund that will enable the company to finally address a gap in its corporate investment strategy.

"In Microsoft’s history of engaging with and supporting start-ups, we’ve done a lot of investing, but not a lot of early stage. Because we would often invest alongside commercial deals, we were not a part of the early industry conversations on disruptive technology trends," admitted Nagraj Kashyap, corporate vice president of Microsoft Ventures, in a May 30 announcement. The new group will provide Microsoft with "a seat at the table," he added…