Grazed from ComputerWorld. Author: Oleg Dulin.

On October 21st, HP officially announced what many of us anticipated for months. After months of denials and flip-flopping they will shut down their HP Helion Public Cloud service. How does their SLA stack up against other cloud providers now? The problem with HP’s cloud strategy was simple:

In April 2015, Hilf told the New York Times. "We thought people would rent or buy computing from us. It turns out that it makes no sense for us to go head-to-head." HP offered a small subset of features cloud adopters look for. Their compute service offered a fraction of what AWS EC2 service does, at prices starting at 3-times those of EC2…

Grazed from ITWorldCanada. Author: Gary Hilson.

Microsoft Corp. rolled into town Monday with its Cloud Roadshow aimed at providing an exclusive training session for IT staff. The educational tour comes on the heels of the Oracle’s OpenWorld conference where CEO Mark Hurd boldly stated Oracle Corp. was best positioned to deliver on the promise of cloud computing and that it and one other company would own the lion’s share of the market by 2025. Julia White, general manager, cloud platforms product management at Microsoft, addressed those claims in a roundtable with local journalists following a keynote where she outlined the key elements of the company’s strategy and portfolio.

White said Oracle is actually late to the cloud. “It has been building on-premise technologies and you have to fundamentally shift that at a deep level. I think they have a pretty long journey ahead.” She said Microsoft has adopted a DevOps model where the people who code the services are the ones operating those services as well, and was confident that the Microsoft technology stack does in fact stack up well against Oracle’s.

Read more from the source @ http://www.itworldcanada.com/article/microsoft-keeps-it-cloud-open-yet-secure-for-hybrid-enterprises/378334#ixzz3r75MNL2a

Grazed from CIO. Author: Kurt Rohloff.

At the end of September, President Obama announced that China and the United States had reached an agreement: neither country would support or participate in cyberespionage that results in the loss of intellectual property. While the effectiveness of the agreement between the U.S. and China is still in question (James Clapper, director of national intelligence, said he is “inherently skeptical”), it’s essential that the cybersecurity community continues to secure computer networks from the tactics that were successfully used by nation-state actors, such as spear phishing.

Research and advancements within technology are showing that fully homomorphic encryption can substantially limit the infiltration of secure networks, combat the offensive techniques used by nation-states and usher in a new generation of cloud computing technologies…

Grazed from InfoSecurity. Author: Mark Papermaster.

We’ve all heard the stories about being hacked – and perhaps even experienced it ourselves – whether by rogue individuals or organized criminal organizations. Cybersecurity anxiety appears to be the new normal for our times. It seems not a week goes by without news of another prominent computer security breach.

Like me, most of us have also received one or more notifications that our credit card or personal identity information may now be in the hands of these invaders. There’s nothing new in this, really. Willie Sutton enlightened us all a long time ago. He allegedly said he robbed banks, “Because that’s where the money is.”…

Grazed from BusinessWire. Author: Editorial Staff.

Teradici, developer of industry-leading PCoIP technology for secure virtual workspaces, today announced the release of the Teradici Pervasive Computing Platform Graphics Edition to enable solution providers to build high-performance, secure services and solutions in the cloud. The latest edition of the Teradici Pervasive Computing Platform features GPU support for graphics-intensive computing environments to ensure a high-fidelity user experience.

Announced in July, the Teradici Pervasive Computing Platform makes Teradici’s innovative PCoIP technology accessible to application software developers, systems integrators, and managed service providers allowing them to develop customized cloud-based services and vertical solutions. The platform overcomes traditional barriers to cloud adoption, notably security and performance concerns – PCoIP delivers content via pixels (not data) for comprehensive security with lossless delivery across all types of network conditions ensuring the best possible end-user experience…

Grazed from Fortune. Author: Stacey Higginbotham.

Cisco and Ericsson, two giants in the telecommunications gear sector, have teamed up to generate $1 billion in revenue for each company by 2018. The two companies will co-develop products, align customer service and share patents in a partnership that’s unprecedented in the industry.

The alliance, announced Monday, is a sign both of consolidation and competition in the market for telecommunications equipment as rival Alcatel-Lucent merges with Nokia, but also a symptom of the merging of both computing and communications as more business is conducted in the so-called cloud. Both companies are stuck in a mature industry providing equipment that underlies the backbone of both the wired and wireless Internet…

Grazed from SmartDataCollective. Author: Paul Barsch.

The rise of public cloud computing is awe-inspiring. Companies like Amazon, via Amazon Web Services, are “turning virtual iron into gold” with exponential growth in revenues and operating income. However, as more companies turn to cloud computing, and use the same applications available from a specific cloud provider, there could be danger of losing competitive advantage wrought by technological advances.

These days, if your company smells of cloud, you’re in an enviable position. That’s because according to the New York Times, in October 2015, companies such as Google, Amazon, and Microsoft added more than $100B to their market capitalization, in part fueled by cloud growth. And while some companies are moving to the cloud to take advantage of cloud benefits of elasticity, pay per use, scalability and more, there are downsides to going “all in the cloud” that are sometimes missed…

Read more from the source @ http://www.smartdatacollective.com/paulbarsch/356174/cloud-sameness-dangerous-competitive-advantage

Grazed from DigitalTrends. Author: Gabe Carey.

When Microsoft announced earlier this week that it would no longer be handing out unlimited cloud storage to Office 365 subscribers via its OneDrive service, those affected were obviously not enthused. Users who were previously unbounded by the all-you-can-eat buffet that was endless cloud storage will soon be limited to a less satisfying 1TB.

Those latching on to the 100 and 200GB plans will see reduction to a dismal 50GB at the same monthly cost. Even free users will be affected, by a reduction from 15GB to a meager 5GB of complimentary storage. And that all goes without mentioning the 15GB camera roll feature, which is to be axed altogether…

Grazed from WSJ. Author: Steven Russolillo.

The sky isn’t always the limit. Rackspace Hosting Inc. is finding that out the hard way. Shares in the cloud-services provider have lost nearly half their value over the past six months as revenue growth has slowed and competition has picked up. While it may be tempting to think the worst is over for Rackspace as it reports third-quarter results Monday, it probably isn’t.

Rackspace, a pioneer in the cloud market, has transitioned its business model in recent years to become more of a services provider, one that offers bundled computing and support. To combat rising competition and a price war from the likes of Microsoft Corp., Alphabet Inc.’s Google unit and International Business Machines Corp., Rackspace announced a partnership last month with Amazon.com Inc.’s cloud-computing platform, Amazon Web Services…

Read more from the source @ http://www.wsj.com/articles/dark-cloud-hovers-over-rackspace-1447008964

Grazed from TechRadar.  Author: Jamie Carter.

"Hey Curiosity, be a pal and move north 10 metres to look at that big red rock, would ya?"  If the revelation that engineers at NASA’s Jet Prolusion Laboratory (JPL) use Alexa to control its Mars rovers wasn’t enough, consider this – its latest missions are conducted entirely using the cloud. Since adopting AWS eight years ago, data scientists at JPL and NASA have been on their own journey into the unknown, pioneering the exploration of cloud computing in all-new ways.