Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: Peter Wayner.

If one company among all companies is synonymous with cloud-centered computing, it would be Google. From the very beginning, Google built a business located somewhere in the murky depths of the Internet, and its search engine continues to be one of the most formidable engineering marvels of the modern world. When was the last time there was an outage?

It’s only natural that anyone looking to build an information-based business that spans the Internet would turn to Google and leverage all of its experience. As pioneers, if Google needed a technology, Google engineers had to develop it themselves, then deploy it. Now everyone can profit from Google’s skills and build a Google-grade system with Google-grade reliability for pennies per hour or per click…

Read more from the source @ http://www.infoworld.com/article/3017978/cloud-computing/review-google-cloud-flexes-flexibility.html

Grazed from SiliconHills. Author: Editorial Staff.

Oracle Tuesday announced plans to build a 560,000-square-foot campus and parking development on 27 acres on the waterfront of Austin’s Lady Bird Lake. In addition, Oracle is buying an adjacent 295-unit apartment building for employees to live and “to support a work-life balance.” The campus will be focused on Oracle’s cloud expansion.

Oracle also announced plans to expand its local workforce by 50 percent during the next few years. The company declined to disclose how many employees it currently has in Austin. The Austin Chamber of Commerce reports Oracle has between 1,000 and 2,000 employees in Austin. The new jobs will be in Oracle Direct, its cloud sales organization. The company plans to hire a lot of recent university graduates and technical people early in their career…

Grazed from InformationManagement. Author: Ravi Shankar.

Enterprise executives are always facing new challenges when it comes to running their IT operations. Today, this is especially true as the number and demand for new cloud applications spurs a corresponding complexity of service delivery models. More and more, IT departments are choosing a hybrid model that incorporates several options: developing “born-in-cloud” applications, selecting certain external applications to be hosted in a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) environment, and modifying existing applications that then must be hosted either on premises or in the cloud.

In the end, IT executives must ensure that each application meets the business needs and computing architecture policies of the company. To do so, IT leaders must apply a set of high-level evaluation questions:..

Grazed from ZDNet. Author: Manek Dubash.

Security continues to top the list of concerns cited by cloud computing users, so you can be sure that cloud service providers also place a high priority on ensuring that your data is neither compromised nor corrupted. Below are some of the key points you should check that your provider has implemented.

The service provider should embed security into the fabric of the infrastructure, test for vulnerabilities and respond quickly to any that may be discovered. They need to operate a rigorous set of operational security controls, including tight control over authentication and high levels of monitoring, logging and reporting…

Grazed from CIO. Author: Matt Egan.

What CIOs, business technology executives, and thought leaders had to say in 2015 about cloud computing. PLUS: what you need to know about cloud computing for 2016

The CIO on… why cloud?

Vince Stobart, Eddie Stobart IT director, says "Cloud service provision [is important] for flexibility and rapid deployment." He says the logistics company is adding to its cloud arsenal: "The focus in on reducing time cycles to produce meaningful data and dashboards for both execs and operational management. Tactical BI solutions are deployed in finance via Cognos TM1 to improve information accuracy and speed of production using memory cube technology. The second focus is on near real time operational performance measures to enable better decision making."…

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: David Linthicum.

I’ve always thought dolls were creepy — not because I’m a guy, but because it seems that horror movies are chock-full of evil dolls trying to kill you. How many “Chucky” sequels do you have to watch before the stuff becomes real in your mind? Now, there is Hello Barbie, a network-enabled, cloud-powered, AI-driven doll that will hold a conversation with your kid.

According to Tech Republic, “Hello Barbie’s necklace is both a recorder and a microphone. Using Wi-Fi, the jewelry will pick up a child’s questions and conversations — and transmit them back to a control center for processing. Speech-recognition software, operated through ToyTalk, will detect the input. Then, Hello Barbie will reply, using one of 8,000 pre-programmed lines.”…

Read more from the source @ http://www.infoworld.com/article/3017524/cloud-computing/hello-barbie-welcome-to-the-cloud-and-internet-of-things.html

Grazed from TechRadar. Author: Jamie Carter.

What has the cloud ever done to you? General enthusiasm for moving huge tranches of private, sensitive company data onto the public cloud seems to wax and wane. It waxes as prices drop, new pay-as-you-go business plans emerge and new SaaS products go online, and it wanes when the media cover an Ashley Madison or a TalkTalk hack – and there have been plenty of those in 2015.

Security concerns remain the most common reason for businesses avoiding public cloud services, but providers like AWS, Microsoft, Google and IBM insist that their clouds are safe. That only leaves one weak link – the people who work for the businesses that use them. If the cloud isn’t as safe as it should be, it’s your fault…

Read more from the source @ http://www.techradar.com/us/news/internet/cloud-services/the-public-cloud-is-not-safe-and-it-s-your-fault-1311243

Grazed from WindowsITPro. Author: Bill Kleyman.

The modern business has become a distributed environment with many users accessing a number of different resources. IT engineers are no longer just concerned about users at that specific location—they must now focus their efforts and monitor thousands of users actively accessing the corporate environment 24/7/365.

These users are coming in from all places using a variety of devices – iPads, Android tablets, Macs, PCs and so on. Effective VDI workload monitoring can help catch performance issues before they happen. By knowing how a VDI environment is behaving, engineers are able to deliver a more powerful cloud-computing experience to the end user…

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Charles Babbcock.

Cloud Foundry, the open source project for application developers, says modern apps can be developed on its platform to run in multiple clouds. Furthermore, it will certify which cloud products and services are guaranteed to work with applications produced on Cloud Foundry. Cloud Foundry Certified is a kind of a Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval that says: Develop on Cloud Foundry and your application will work with the following tools and cloud environments. One publication, the UK’s The Register, even called it the "good cloud-keeping seal of approval."

The program is starting off with a list of seven cloud suppliers. Amazon isn’t on the list, but other partners include IBM Bluemix, HP Enterprise Helion on-premises cloud, CenturyLink’s AppFog development platform (based on Cloud Foundry open source), SAP HANA Cloud Platform, and Chinese giant Huawei’s FusionStage…

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: Christopher Tozzi.

Amazon (AMZN) has announced the general availability of its AWS Internet of Things (IoT) offering, which allows small devices to connect to the company’s cloud platform. Although AWS IoT was introduced as a beta offering back in October, Amazon said the full launch of the service is the company’s effort to make the cloud more IoT-friendly.

The new service was designed specifically for users with small devices running on limited system resources who still need to connect to the cloud, according to AWS Chief Evangelist Jeff Barr. Toward that end, AWS IoT features a SQL-like programming interface and lightweight communication protocols…