Oracle Cloud Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) offers a comprehensive set of integrated, subscription-based infrastructure services that enable businesses to run any workload in an enterprise-grade cloud-managed, hosted, and supported by Oracle. Oracle IaaS offers a set of core capabilities, like elastic compute and storage to help customers quickly reach their IT goals.

"With the threat landscape still evolving, our latest edition of Technology Radar continues to focus on security and innovative approaches," said Dr. Rebecca Parsons, CTO of ThoughtWorks. "In addition, we are seeing exciting growth and investment around microservices, opening up new opportunities for developers to create more maneuverable architectures. And the explosion in container ecosystems is helping reduce the friction of reliably building and deploying applications to the cloud."

PSB is an open, software-enabled platform for delivering dedicated services based on NFV technology to CenturyLink’s enterprise and small and mid-sized business (SMB) customers at any time regardless of their location. It places applications and services close to the network edge so they can be deployed, modified and scaled rapidly as business demands change. CenturyLink was one of the first providers to use NFV to deploy firewalls and content distribution networks. The company recently announced that, in the coming months, it expects to begin deploying a range of virtualized data and voice infrastructure services, including customer premises endpoints.

Grazed from CIO. Author: Clint Boulton.

To make drilling more efficient during a commodities industry downturn, Laredo Petroleum is turning to cloud applications from a Silicon Valley startup to correlate production and operational costs. An offhand remark about hating spreadsheets led Laredo Petroleum CIO Lars Crotwell to deploy analytics software to help the company curb production costs.

Crotwell, during a phone call with a friend in 2013, complained that business managers were cross-referencing data from dozens of Excel files to understand why operating costs for some wells were higher than those producing twice as much oil. "We were using a lot of homegrown spreadsheets and it was like herding cats," says Crotwell, who manages IT for publicly traded Laredo, which produces 15 million barrels of oil annually from 1,000 wells situated in the Permian Basin of West Texas…

Read more from the source @ http://www.cio.com/article/3003498/cloud-computing/oil-company-hopes-to-strike-efficiency-with-cloud-analytics.html

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…